| "No matter what Apple and ProtoMail and similar companies tell you, you cannot buy privacy off-the-shelf." The cost is personal time and effort, not money. The software needed is generally free of charge. The goal being not a physical product or a service, but a level of knowledge and proficiency. To put it another way, "tech-savviness" cannot be purchased, it has to be achieved. The cultural problem we face is that the so-called "0.1%" are leveraging their "tech-savviness" against the rest of the population, working for so-called "tech" companies, websites that make money by exploiting the privacy of the "99.9%" in the service of online advertising. If we take HN comments as true, in some cases, these employees do not even believe in the bottom line they are working to support.1 They are not adopting the behaviour of the "99.9%", i.e., the "expected" behaviour required to sustain their employer's bottom line. Not sure about you, but that would not give me much confidence they are going to work very hard to protect other users' privacy. The term "dogfooding" is sometimes used amongst tech companies to describe the situation where employees themselves partake in what they offer to non-employees, i.e., "users".2 To persons outside the tech bubble this can be quite amusing. Does this suggest they view their relationship to users as more like "human-to-dog" than "human-to-human". There is nothing inherently wrong with someone peddling something she does not believe in, however we might consider what is/are the reason(s) for her lack of faith. To be clear, I am not suggesting the cultural problem can be solved. I am attempting to provide further reasons that digital privacy is, like the parent suggested, generally not something you can "buy". 1 Evidence appears periodically in HN comments. For example, yesterday:
"Disclaimer: I work at Google. In cloud, not on Android.
I am privacy conscious so I though I would give a try at Graphene OS, it was brutal." 2 The term is alleged to have first appeared one the joelonsoftware.com website and to have originated at Microsoft. |