Digital privacy.
It was very recently revealed in unsealed court documents from I believe 2013 that the Facebook app pushed a certificate to mobile devices that funneled all of everyone’s decrypted traffic through their servers. That means every webpage visited, every file sent and received, every word typed passed through and was stored on a computer at Facebook HQ. One engineer was quoted as saying that Zuckerberg had a particular interest in looking at people’s Snapchats. It was also revealed that Facebook had a data exchange partnership with Netflix where Netflix had open ended access to user’s private messages.
Now you don’t have to be a Snapchat or Facebook user to see how wrong and downright creepy that is, but if you bring it up with the average person you can see their eyes immediately glaze over. It’s hard to blame them, it feels like a hopeless situation and it’s much more convenient to pretend it’s not happening. People have been completely indoctrinated into abandoning their right to privacy. It’s a real shame because if we were paid as individuals what our data is apparently worth I’m sure that perspective would quickly change.
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Couldn’t agree more. I was having this conversation with friends back in 08/09. No one took me seriously, but the red flags were all there for everyone to see. Facebook was caught using their platform to run sociological experiments on their users without consent, for example. That alone would get an academic or real researcher in serious trouble. But for an evil-corp like Facebook? Nothing but skepticism or disbelief from most people. It happened, people were harmed. Oh, and remember Myanmar?
The general publics’ overall sense of helplessness, apathy, and/or disbelief that the tech industry is doing anything untoward is their biggest victory. People are happily falling for it all over again with LLMs.
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My eyes don’t glaze over. I’m FURIOUS that they even exist, and have been since they killed myspace.
I knew back in 2008 something wasn’t right about facebook. I had no idea what, but I knew they were sketchy.
By 2010, I knew they were invading peoples privacy. I’ve never had a facebook. And yet, they have my phone number. My mom has facebook, and she stores my phone number in her contacts list.
Thing is, what can I do?
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Speaking of bulletins, when I first heard of the fediverse, I had the total wrong idea.
I thought it would be like you can post on Lemmy, as a bulletin, and Masodon users could see it on their end. (Assuming they were subscribed to the poster).
MY envisionment of how the fediverse worked, based on my misunderstanding would have made for a WAAAAAAAAAY cooler site/collection of sites.
And the fictional ideas I had to take it further would probably make the fediverse the dominant social media standard.
It can work like that, and in some ways it does (Mastodon and Lemmy have a small amount of federation compatibility), but we aren’t really there yet. I think the real next step would be entirely disconnecting the interface from the content. ActivityPub allows this but we haven’t taken full advantage of it yet.
I’m curious what steps we can take as individuals to further protect our privacy online.
Also, what do you think we can do as a society to change the status quo? How do we get more people to see that this is a significant problem?
Step one: Disconnect
How do we get more people to see that this is a significant problem?
This severely inhibits this part of their question. If the only platform you have to communicate with people are places like here, you’re preaching to the choir
I’m curious what steps we can take as individuals to further protect our privacy online.
A few to consider:
- Ditch Facebook and Whatsapp.
- Invest in a VPN
- Switch to Firefox for web browsing
- Install GrapheneOS on your phone
- Pay with cash where possible
- Switch to XMPP with OMEMO encryption for messaging with your favorite people
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Hope your pipe situation got resolved easily.
We had a pipe burst right at the entrance of our crawlspace a few weeks ago and it took a bit to realize. It was a nightmare and now we have to get some foundation work done.
Wow, ouch! That is my nightmare!
Thankfully, mine was not nearly as bad. We just bought the house a few months ago and a bad repair to a reservoir attached faucet led to my yard being completely flooded. Luckily a neighbor alerted us to the issue and we were able to circumvent the water before it got into our foundation.
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I pay attention to credit card readers.
I have gotten to know their makes and some models. I have developed preferences. When I go to a run down establishment and they have a nice reader, I am pleasantly surprised. I know that walmart uses ingenico isc250s, and they do not support tap. I know that dunkin has high quality readers, and sometimes tim hortons does too, but less frequently.
When leaving a place, I might say something like “damn, you don’t see that model of verifone very often”, and my friends will look at me funny.
Semi-related, did you know that most receipt printers have embedded telnet servers in them?
When some but not all bullets end with a period in a PPT. Drives me nuts! Either have none ending with a period, or all need to have a period, but please don’t mix.
Oh fuck you.
Not because you suddenly made me aware of this, but because I catch myself doing this with slides sometimes and figured I was getting away with it!
What if one bullet is two sentences… Then should ask bullets end with a period?
Yes.
The way I do it is if a list only has single sentences or sentence fragments, I omit the period.
If there is at least one point with two sentences, everyone gets a period.
If a list has sentence fragments and double sentences, I cry. Then I rewrite the fragments into complete sentences, complaining about it the whole time.
Any second sentence in a bulleted list gets it’s own sub-bullet.
No periods.
I was into Geocaching for a while and was always amazed at the things out in plain sight that people casually walked by and never noticed every day
Very true! And once you’ve done it for a while, you start to notice other cachers by the way they are awkwardly standing in unusual places trying to look inconspicuous.
Heh, that’s why we refer to other people who don’t geocache as “muggles”.
What’s on random screens in the background of movies / TV shows. People hate watching stuff with me because I’m always pausing it to look at that stuff.
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My favorite is the Beetlejuice bit in Community
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Haha what are the odds! On the odd chance that you haven’t already, you should definitely watch arrested development it is full of background jokes like that. MDMA optional but probably works too
Civil asset forfeiture in the U.S.
We’re supposed to be “innocent until proven guilty” but they get around this by saying that they’re essentially accusing the money (or car/home or whatever) of being used for crime. Then they confiscate it and the only way to get it back is to go to court and prove that your money is innocent.
The fact that cash/possessions can be taken away from you at anytime by federal agents (or by police in almost every State) without having to follow it up with any sort of case to prove that a crime occurred is ridiculous. And on top of that you can’t get the money back that you spent on attorney fees, so it’s pointless to spend money on an attorney if what was taken was less than a few thousand dollars.
Most people don’t know that this can happen or don’t seem to care enough because, “it would never happen to me, right?”
The count of cars with single occupant on the highway. It’s crazy how inefficient our car transportation is.
Agree in general, the problem is it’s the only method those folks have to complete whatever their daily mission is.
So really, cars are great, they comfortably take you where you need to go, many miles away, pretty fast, relatively comfortably. But a robust public transit network is even better.
Birds. Even in urban areas you wouldn’t believe how many birds there are. Not just pigeons and sparrows, but hawks and falcons will readily live in many urban areas too. Herons and egrets are particularly adaptable to urban areas and easy to find along rivers and ponds. In the spring and fall warblers will pass through as well, and I even see them on busy urban streets sometimes if there’s a few bushes or trees along the path. I’ve even had a few lucky owl sightings while walking in the suburbs at night.
Delightfully since I live in the southwest and grew up on the east coast, where they’re incredibly shy of people, we also have tons of bold urban ravens. In the late spring and early summer sometimes I see big flocks (recently independent juveniles?) just soaring and diving for the fun of it.
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I put up a bird feeder and few months ago and now we constantly have at least 20 birds all around our yard. My son likes to throw bird seed all around now so its really cool to see them just walking around and pecking.
I absolutely fell in love with morning doves
Hell yeah, birds. When you get to know the songs of birds it opens up a deeper way of hearing too. And you get a lot better at spotting them. Birds are amazing.
Fucking time zones and daylight saving/summertime. I live in a place that doesn’t change my clocks twice a year, but constantly deal with people that do. The number of times I have people say EST when they mean EDT is too damn high. Worse when they say MST, cause then I have to ask “are you in Arizona?” to which they look at me confused and say no. Then I about blow a gasket cause “then you’re not in MST!” If you’re going to live in a place that always changes your clocks, get your own terminology right dammit.
I never remember whether we’re currently in daylight savings or not since it’s so stupid. I just started saying ‘eastern time’ instead of the abbreviation to avoid getting it wrong
Fall back, spring ahead is how i was taught to remember.
But now that my phone updates time automatically i occasionally notice a couple clocks arent correct and dont know how long they have been wrong for lol
I didn’t even know there’s another name for timezones in daylight savings time. Good to know I guess
I base everything on GMT + X. When I’m inviting people to meetings. You work out your own Timezone. Also tell me when you want to meet in terms of GMT. It helps stop the summer / winter crap for both northern and southern hemisphere.
License plates.
I memorised most of my friends’ and coworkers’ plates, and sometimes recognise plates of random people if I see them often enough.
I do this too! Love seeing plates from other countries all over Europe and trying to guess what info they have. Places like France and Switzerland you can tell the area the person is from, UK plates you can tell the age of the car to within six months etc etc
Looking for things on the ground or the side of the road. Some notable items I have found:
- Unmarked envelope with ~$400 in it.
- Change purse filled with random international coins
- Pair of knipex channel lock pliers that have dog bite marks on the handles
- Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket i727
- Ticket for a festival which I then attended
- Many sunglasses
- Many cool rocks and sticks
I take the time to find the original owner whenever I find something but it’s pretty rare. These are only the things that I have kept because the original owner couldn’t be found.
Original owner of the envelope probably can’t be found because you jacked the money he left for his drug guy! Man’s at the bottom of a river!
They need to upgrade their dead drop locations then. 🤣
The fact that “September” by Earth, Wind and Fire has someone playing the bongos in the background. Once you hear it, you cannot unhear it.
So you’re just sending me a link to the song?
Thanks. This will be pretty useful for those who don’t feel like having to deal with YouTube’s terrible search function. But please, indicate what the link links to next time.
I have to listen to the song now
Fun fact, I learned this from DankPods.
You know when people are in a group and they are all chattering all joyously and stuff and you see a person of the group trying to say something and raise a bit their voice and then they recoil and then don’t say anything?
Or when you are walking around in a Group and everyone is talking about stuff and one of them just sort of swaddles a bit out and little by little tries as if running away from the group?
Yeah I witnessed you
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No way, I am the Noticer, not the Ignorer haha
Camerawork in film and tv. I have been volunteering doing camerawork for a small broadcast tv station, so whenever I watch stuff I’m always teeing to see how all of the shots are taken, and also the color grading and stuff like that.
I notice lefties. Im right-handed and when I was little and much dumber I wanted to be left-handed. So I did a bunch of weird shit to force it. Stuff like wrapping my right hand up for whole day, trying reverse controls for video games, wearing my watch on my right hand, etc. Some stuff did take, like the watch on my right hand, which ironically made my right hand more dominant. Being a lefty is the club that I was never able to join but think about subconsciously all the time I guess.
It’s funny you reversed your game controls since, as a lefty, I have adapted to default controls pretty easily. Never even crossed my mind to change them. Definitely lateral thinking on your part.
I used to write with my left hand for many things thinking that I would make the right side of my brain be more active and have more creative thoughts. It was an experiment that went on for several years when i was a messenger and I had a manifest that I had to fill out, it was real messy.
Yeah when I’d “disable” my right hand I’d have to wait for the weekends or homework that involved writing wouldn’t be able to get done. You did this as an adult? That’s dedication. I think in time anyone could adapt if they had to or could afford to be low-functioning for a while but I always wonder if there’s shortcut steps to start rewiring your brain to not automatically assign tasks to your dominant hand.
Yeah I was into a lot of biofeedback ideas and trying to hack my brain by changing your normal behavior. Most of the things you change go back when you stop doing those things, but sometimes things stay with you. I am much more empathetic now than I used to be.
