[everdrive]

There's a general trend right now against privacy and in a more general sense against freedom. More and more companies are on board with it. I'm not sure if anyone in HN has any useful advice in this regard. I feel like I don't know what to do about the internet for the next 5-10 years. Does this particular measure matter very much? No, but it's another brick in the wall.

[Spooky23]

The US is building out the infrastructure for a police state. The people who control the consolidated tech platforms are either spearheading or collaborating with that process. Privacy as a concept isn't even in the cards.

You need to be prepared to avoid saying naughty things on the internet. Otherwise, perhaps someone will figure out that you great-great grandfather didn't sign in the right spot in 1897 and you're presence in the United States is void, retroactive to your birth. Off to El Salvador with you, enemy of the people.

[rurp]

Just want to clarify that "naughty" doesn't at all mean "bad" or "immoral". It means "Anything any current ot future regime will dislike"

[wolttam]

Pretty safe to say that you pointing that out counts as naughty.

And so does my response to your comment.

But I do wonder if self-censure is really the best strategy.

[query_demotion]

>The US is building out the infrastructure for a police state.

Take the Utah Data Center (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center), combine it with the Disposition Matrix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix), informally known as a kill list for even US citizens, and it does seem like you're getting a Police State!

[hypeatei]

A lot of our current privacy and liberty woes were exacerbated by 9/11. Can you imagine a Church Committee in 2026? Me neither.

Three letter agencies have way too much power and they've shaped our culture+laws for the worse. Osama Bin Laden has done way more damage to American citizens' lives than he could've ever dreamed of.

[Spooky23]

By design.

Just like the KGB and Putin's minions, Bin Laden correctly saw fault lines and weaknesses in the US an exploited them. He did what he did with a long-range context in mind. The "three letter agencies" were neutered in the 90s as part of the peace dividend which is why he was successful. The Russians used "active measures" with intelligence in the US 2016 among other times and Bin Laden chose terrorist violence. The Russian misinformation strategy is tried and true and corporate actors now use it successfully as well.

The whole thing sucks. This Iran adventure lays the vulnerability of the US military machine pretty bare. More, escalated conflict is probably in the world's future for decades to come.

[query_demotion]

This wasn't by design. Obama had options. He campaigned against mass surveillance but flip-flopped once in office, installing the very surveillance levers he criticized. “No more secrecy,” he said. “That is a commitment that I make to you.”[1] If his only option was to install these surveillance levers, then I guess American democracy is just a lost cause.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/obama-on-mass-gov...

[mc32]

It feels to me Europe and the UK, in the western world, are further ahead on the legal road to surveillance than the US.

[Sohcahtoa82]

Someone pointed out something to me and it's really struck a chord with me.

In the USA, we hate the government collecting information on us, but shrug our shoulders when corporations do it.

In Europe, it's the exact opposite. They created GDPR to restrict how corporations collect and share data about you, but they shrug their shoulders at government doing it.

Obviously, this is incredibly reductive and over-simplified, but the general idea of it feels pretty true.

[toxik]

Sorry, this is just not true. Stasi was a government agency, and it was from this kind of thing that European privacy advocacy sprung up.

[caconym_]

> I'm not sure if anyone in HN has any useful advice in this regard.

Self host. It's still possible to buy computer hardware and install FOSS replacements for most/all of the services you need, and plumb it all through to your mobile devices using wireguard/tailscale. If you're behind a CGNAT you can proxy it through a cheap VPS that won't fuck you on bandwidth costs. Thanks to Proxmox, I probably have better uptime on my services than e.g. Github these days.

When it becomes impossible to get open PC hardware, I don't know. I like to think I will just stop using the internet for anything besides the bare minimum NPC type activities that are required to engage with the institutions of society.

[abnercoimbre]

If you don't know where to start check out the Linux Prepper [0] podcast. (I'm not affiliated, just a listener who enjoys the show.)

[0] https://podcast.james.network/@linuxprepper/episodes

[aavci]

I wonder if promoting open-source tooling and best practices could make it easier for new apps to adopt security features like E2E encryption. For example, someone building a chat app might not add E2E encryption unless they have access to user-friendly tools and are encouraged to do so.

Startups that initially choose the more private implementation version often face a disadvantage. They may not see immediate benefits and instead experience drawbacks, such as caring a bit more than their competitors. For example, an AI plugin using local large language models for privacy might not be rewarded as much as a competitor who fully embraces cloud-based solutions.

[starkparker]

That's all fine and good but this is Meta removing an existing implementation. How would you stop decisions like that?

[reactordev]

If you’re a good boy then you have nothing to hide right? Not even your passwords…

[wslh]

I sometimes feel a bit weird about this. In the 90s it felt like "we" won the crypto wars: PGP, the fight over export controls, the Clipper Chip, etc. There was a strong sense that privacy and strong crypto had become settled questions.

[peyton]

As a California resident I request to download my personal data from every service I can, and I’m constantly surprised. We each have scores for all kinds of things. The local power company keeps a “Green Ideology” score on me.

[dheera]

How do they know your ideology? Are they scraping your social media or running sentiment analysis on your customer service chats?

[_djo_]

It’s likely some customer segmentation label generated through PCA or some other clustering approach.

The qualifying criteria is probably just having picked an offer for renewable-sourced energy in the past, indicating that it has some importance to you. So you will be given more green energy offers in future.

Every company segments its customer base this way for marketing. Sometimes it’s even useful.

[dheera]

I see... so maybe I should use PCA to give them the most uncorrelated response to all of their clusters as possible just to mess with them.

[cucumber3732842]

They probably don't care. It's probably a mostly BS number. But they probably have to have it and have it at least look like they're trying to be serious about generating it in order to qualify for preferential treatment on some sort of permitting or write off some class of investment in a slightly better way at tax time or something.

I'm not sure if this is better or worse than them doing it because they believe in it.

[newsoftheday]

When I see the word "score", it reminds me of the CCP social scoring system.

[scarecrowbob]

Weird... when I see something done by US-Based capitalist and attributed to communists half a world away, it makes me think of the Powell Memo.

[newsoftheday]

That is weird, the US didn't ask the CCP to invent social scoring.

[scarecrowbob]

I mean -also- weird to claim that the CCP invented scoring folks, but even if they did, it'd be hella weird to think that somehow they helped a US local power company implement it...

Look, I get that "CCP Bad". It's just always wild to see folks try and make that case when something has literally nothing to do with it, especially while there are plenty of pretty horrific and material mechanisms in play without pretending that the big-O Other is to blame.

[johnisgood]

It makes me curious what other scores (I would call them labels) there are.

[wiether]

How is that even legal?

[natch]

This is in the US. It’s a free country. Things are legal by default (that’s a good thing) until the system notices them and makes a law.

Having seen how things work where freedom is not the default, I much prefer freedom.

[stackskipton]

Because it's not illegal. Most data privacy laws just require that user can see data collected about them and prevent sale of said data in optout fashion.

There are rarely laws around preventing collection of said data or using said data for some new service.

[wiether]

But it's not any data, it's political orientation data!

Sometimes people talk about GDPR being only the cookie banner, but thanks to it, its forbidden to collect that kind of data.

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-9-gdpr/

[fsflover]

> I feel like I don't know what to do about the internet for the next 5-10 years.

Switch to decentralized, e2ee alternatives, support https://eff.org

[trinsic2]

I feel like e2ee on phones with OSes from the big two is a lost cause. I'll bet this is the year where open hardware/bios starts getting more popular, hopefully. So we can have open hardware/software.

[sisve]

Even with e/os/ or another u De-googled version of android?

Not directly to you but in general: I do not think (most) of Europe is going the same direction as US. I actually see a lot of hope in response to EU leaders about digital infrastructure, communication & security. we have started to stop realing on America, but it will take 10-20 years before you see the entire crash trump made

[trinsic2]

Yea sorry I was speaking from the U.S. perspective. But still Europe is still involved in certain things like age gating. That is a clear sign that there are some entrenched interests that want to erode privacy on that front. I hope that moving away from U.S. corps for communication services happens. We (U.S.) really need a kick in the pants. I feel like there is authoritarian agendas everywhere now though.

[fsflover]

GNU/Linux phones already exist. See: Librem 5 and Pinephone.

[vova_hn2]

I find it really off putting, how weak is their hardware, compared to a normal Android phone in a similar price range.

[fsflover]

Weak hardware can work quite well with optimized and non-bloated software (which doesn't constantly phone home). For example, maps and Youtube work smoothly on Pinephone with SXMo. See also: https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/.

[vova_hn2]

I hope so, but I just don't understand what exactly causes such massive price difference.

Is it because this kind of phones are a very niche product so they can't benefit from the economy of scale?

Maybe android phone manufacturers can get better deals from chip manufacturers because they buy chips in large quantities?

[subscribed]

If you like privacy without security then yeah .

[fsflover]

There is no security in a vacuum. Security depends on your threat model. I use Firefox with NoScript and never run untrusted apps on my Librem 5.

[gzread]

Is Google snooping your SimpleX chats?

[fsflover]

We don't know. They seem to have this capability though.

[john_strinlai]

unfortunately, since the messaging/trend isnt "we are against privacy" (it is "we are protecting children, which reluctantly means we all have to sacrifice a wee bit of privacy"), it is really hard to fight back without being labelled as someone who is against protecting children.

but the advice is basically the same as it always has been:

- talk to your friends and family about it. do it with passion, but without hyperbole or conspiracy or aggression. any person you can convince to care is a win. organize with like-minded people.

- talk to your representatives in government. vote for representatives that are pro-privacy (when possible). convince your like-minded friends and family to do the same.

- to the greatest extent possible, dont purchase/use products/services which are facilitating the trend. (but, you also need to be realistic or you will burn out! and that is a bigger loss overall).

- if you are a decision-maker at work, or have any sort of input, leverage it as best as you can to make pro-privacy business decisions. however, similar to the above point, recognize that you still need to be realistic and dont get yourself fired arguing some decision. it is better to make 1,000 nudges in the right direction than it is to be fired/burn out trying to make 1 big nudge.

- support organizations that align with your beliefs. this can be monetarily, or by volunteering, or by spreading awareness of the organization itself. for example, many people have never heard of the electronic frontier foundation and have no idea what they do. lots of people dont know of the ACLU either (or, maybe they have heard the name, but dont know what they do or why it matters).

[trinsic2]

>unfortunately, since the messaging/trend isnt "we are against privacy" (it is "we are protecting children, which reluctantly means we all have to sacrifice a wee bit of privacy"), it is really hard to fight back without being labelled as someone who is against protecting children.

That's not what I am seeing on the ground. Many discord users I have seen talk about this issue frame this as an attack on freedom and privacy by hiding it behind the same narrative that has been used so many times before of protecting children. You can only push fake narratives so far until people start getting the message that people are hiding nefarious attacks on society behind fake movements.

[john_strinlai]

>Many discord users I have seen talk about this issue frame this as an attack on freedom

good! ideally, someone is helping them organize and action those thoughts and feelings outside of whatever discord channel you are in.

i am referring to how it is being framed by the people pushing the agenda. age verification laws (as an easy example) arent being advertised as "we want to spy on you", they are being advertised as "this will protect children from harms".

talk to debbie in accounting instead of babmorley420 in discord, and ask her opinion. she is not likely to frame it as an attack on privacy/freedom. she is likely to frame it as a necessary sacrifice for the greater good. and her opinion also matters, she also votes. we need to convince the debbies of the world -- they outnumber the babmorley420s

[trinsic2]

Agreed. What I meant to say is at least the younger generation are starting to see past this smoke screen more so now than maybe 20 years ago.

[int_19h]

Now if only they actually went out and voted...

[john_strinlai]

that is very refreshing to hear.

i teach tech in college and just earlier today made a post about how i am not seeing the same when i compare my current students to students 5, 10, or 15 years ago. i hope that i am the one in the bubble.

[trinsic2]

I'm part of a community around the stop killing games initiative. So maybe it's a bit slanted because most might be pc gamers (technically inclined). But it's a pretty big movement on this front and most of them see right through this. A lot of them don't like what discord is doing. Whether or not they'll put there money where there mouth is is another matter.

[add-sub-mul-div]

You're on a site with a surprisingly high amount of support among commenters for trading privacy and freedom for convenience and comfort where it aligns with their religion/other biases or desired consumer experiences. I don't know if this the best place to ask for advice.

[pjc50]

I'm not sure people realize that HN is already at the most libertarian end, and all the discourse spaces which are much closer to actual power and legislation are much less pro-privacy.

[davorak]

Historically, like 10-20 years ago, libertarian would be staunchly pro privacy. Is this no longer the case? If libertarians have dropped this stance, since it is so close to what was the core beliefs, I really have no mental model of the philosophy/politics for libertarians any more.

Any primer/link on what current libertarians believe is welcome.

[natch]

It’s possible to want something without wanting to live in a system where there is a nanny to enforce that thing. Other means of enforcement exist, such as free markets.

[pjc50]

Yes, but there's really not very many libertarians left who haven't cast their lot in for Republican support, resulting in the present situation. Not that there were many to begin with.

[scarecrowbob]

You might find it useful to distinguish between right and left libertarians.

All my anarchist (left libertarian) friends are pretty consistently opposed to state and corporate surveillance. There is plenty of theory in a canon of literature that goes back to the mid 19th century, even as there are many subgroups and spurs off that general line of thought all with their own sets of (usually somewhat) consistent lines.

If you want something short and brutal, I am a fan of "Desert" by anonymous, but "A Utopia of Rules" by David Graeber is not a bad thing to read and probably closer to a popular line. Or the CIA-Coded Yale academic James Scott has a lot to say, "Two Cheers for Anarchism" and "Seeing Like a State" both seem to have influenced a lot of people.

Historically "right libertarians" (the US Libertarian political party, for instance) have been, uh, "less consistent" in their thinking, so you might have a hard time finding anything that looks like a "philosophy" in that branch of "thought". Plenty of goofy-ass ideas, but little consistency except a strange ability to begrudgingly conform to GOP politics at the end of the day.

[iamnothere]

Reddit seems to have drifted back to more libertarian than HN on privacy issues. At least in technical subreddits. Not sure why that is, perhaps there are more users here whose salaries are tied to surveillance.

[Cider9986]

You could try becoming a privacy advocate. https://www.privacyguides.org/en/activism/

[dheera]

E2EE on Instagram was never real, trustable E2EE. No open-source client, no way to verify that private key is never sent to server, and encryption of a key with a low-entropy PIN is effectively plaintext.

[j_bizzle]

I’m truly on the fence about all of this.

On one hand, I think a lot of the larger issues and divisions we’ve seen in society over the last 20 years are a direct result of our primary means of communication, entertainment and information being one that allows such ease of impersonation. While most of us here understand just how much Internet content is created with influence as a goal, and the posted by accounts with false identities, a majority of people still don’t. (And many who do don’t understand just how prevalent it is). I also think that sadly we’ve demonstrated that when people feel they are anonymous and beyond consequence, they’re willing to say and advocate for some terrible things which they might otherwise not have, and seeing others say those things reinforces their willingness to say and do them. If social media and internet norms of today had held the original Facebook model of requiring verification of your actual identity (back in the day .edu email days), I truly think we would live in a much different and in many ways better world.

On the other hand, I fully acknowledge that many of the people pushing for the removal of privacy and encryption are not doing so for altruistic reasons, but so that they have a more data to mine and monetize, or have the ability to monitor to a frightening degree, and that these tools once available will be available to any regime or government, so even if the ones currently pushing do have naively good intentions, the next ones very well may not.

But, I also struggle with the knowledge that for sophisticated parties, the privacy that most people think they have is a sham to begin with. There are already many tools available to piece together information sources and build a horrifyingly complex and accurate picture of individuals activities and identities. So I wonder if the illusion of privacy isn’t worse than the public at least being forced to confront the fact that they have none in the first place, and therefore being able to truly see and address the issue, while the security minded and technical individuals will always find a way obfuscate their identity and activity, just as they always have.

[nemomarx]

Facebook accounts today still have identity verification (they often ask for scans of IDs, etc) and yet it doesn't seem to result in a noticeably improved discourse there compared to say, Twitter before Musks takeover. I don't think anonymity actually changes discourse that much.

[everdrive]

In my opinion anonymity is a great red herring. The worst offenders on the internet have verified accounts and are public figures. The problem is algorithmic content, prioritizing for engagement and outrage, and then connecting _everyone_. We had what was effectively anonymity in the 90s, but really had NONE of the crazy society-breaking extremism we see now. Getting rid of anonymity will really do NOTHING to halt the march of internet-fueled extremism.

[salawat]

This. People don't recognize that a tech company with an algorithmic feed is indistinguishable from a public awareness filter. It allows a couple hundred to 1000's of people to set the Overton window of millions/billions. When we actually didn't go algorithmic and went off more natural filtering (geographic, chronological, scope/impact based), it was a modality that one would be hard pressed to even find a schoolchild that couldn't end up being able to meaningfully navigate the space with due training. This is, of course, exactly why monied individuals foam at owning any of the few consolidated media outlets/tech companies. Societal scale leverage on the machine of public awareness.

[abnercoimbre]

Everything is a sliding scale. There would be improvement from verified identities (and doing so through a zero-trust network is feasible.) I agree the worst actors wouldn't care at all, and in that case we address the algorithmic amplification problem.

[dfxm12]

In this specific case you can avoid Meta. In general, if you're in the US, you probably have a primary election coming up soon and certainly have a general election in November. Ask your politicians what their thoughts are on these topics and make an informed vote. Continue to pressure the incumbents as well.

[krystalgamer]

i don't understand this doomer mentality regarding the internet.

internet is a service that you choose what to engage and how. don't like a platform? find another, build it or stop using it altogether.

personally, i find these things really great has it helps nudge people into the more decentralized web. a few years ago those who were pushing for privacy respecting apps and platforms were deemed too paranoid.

[ultratalk]

Network effects will keep a person on a platform until a critical mass of their social circle decide to leave all at once. I'm no expert, but I suspect that that critical mass is pretty high, maybe more than 50% of a person's circle. So it's not exactly vanilla free-market competition. Entrenched players have a pretty big advantage.

[krystalgamer]

what does your social circle being on Instagram bring to you? seriously, this picture-sharing app has evolved into this content spread machine that brings very little value.

[ultratalk]

When most of your social circle exists on one platform, you tend to use that platform less for its specific features, and more because of the fact that all your friends are there. I don't personally use Instagram, and this is anecdotal information, but I know a lot of people who only use Instagram to see what their friends and family are up to, and to watch the occasional reel.

But you're absolutely right about Instagram's evolution. It's crazy.

[krystalgamer]

this is a very 21st century thing, the ability to know what everyone is doing at any time. extremely voyeuristic too.

the only social circle that truly matters is the geographically close one. no amount of E2EE or fancy chat app will replace being physically present.

[tredre3]

First you said that people should use decentralized platforms. Now you acknowledge that there's nobody of value on those platforms so now you say people should stop wanting to connect in the first place.

I mean, okay? Next time just say social media is a cancer, and don't waste our time moving goal posts.

[happosai]

Ah Network effect, That's why we all are still using Skype, microsoft messenger and ICQ.

You don't have to wait for everyone to switch, in fact it's pretty normal to reach different people on different chats.

https://xkcd.com/1810/

[ultratalk]

Well, maybe it was normal ~10 years ago, when that comic was published, but is now getting rarer and rarer, as each new generation consolidates itself on a single platform.

[Schlagbohrer]

Many people make their livings from these platforms. They cant leave without abandoning most of their income stream.

[krystalgamer]

find a different employer? what kind of argument is that.

[ls612]

It's depressing to think that after the abuses people suffered during the lockdowns the response has been to embrace authoritarianism even more. It makes me fear how far this could go before people realize how bad it is.

Fundamentally I think that liberal democracy won't be able to survive compute, communication, and storage being cheap, combined with asymmetric encryption. I really think there should be an article illustrating just how much that last one is fundamental to making the apparatus of control cheap and effective in a way that 20th century regimes could only dream of.

[Larrikin]

What abuses?