I’m following several privacy focused communities. Mostly as lurker but in few I’m more active. Every time I see a posts like “how to be more private”, I wonder about the reasons behind those questions. What’s the reason you want to remain private (don’t confuse it with being anonymous)? Could you elaborate on your reasons?
Let me start.
I worked (and still working) in a highly regulated industry as a software/devops engineer. I’ve been working with banks, insurance companies, global online payment companies, major credit card vendors, few global corporations. I have seen how data is gathered and (mis)used. Every time someone tells me “I’m sorry but the system…” I know it’s the data gathered by the “system” and my profile created based on that data was the reason for “but”. This is why I care about the privacy, to prevent companies from taking advantage of my current situation and charge me more.
I’m sorry, but that’s private.
Law enforcement used Facebook private messages to investigate and prosecute a woman for an “illegal abortion”. This is not a hypothetical, this happened.
I care about my privacy because I don’t want right-wing weirdos and perverts incarcerating me for controlling my own body.
There are more reasons. This is just the one most recently in the news as a glaring red flag real-life example.
Uhhh… if that’s the situation that blew up on lemmy shortly after the reddit API-pocalypse, that specific one probably isn’t something you want to rally behind.
That situation occurred in Nebraska, before the messy Roe v Wade repeal. At the time, abortions were 100% legal and available until the end of the 20th week (5th month) of pregnancy, far past the point that anyone shouldn’t be aware they are pregnant.
Beyond that, fetuses are considered viable outside the womb at 24 weeks (6 months). They show clear signs of conciousness before this point.
This woman waited until week 28. Two months past the point it could have been done legally and safely by a doctor. One month past the point of being viable to survive outside the womb. No US state has ever allowed abortions that late into the pregnancy.
The way she performed the abortion was to take medicine to kill the fetus. She still had to go through the normal process of labor and delivery (of the stillborn) afterwards, without any medical assistance. She and her mother then burned the stillbirth and buried it on a farm.
At that moment, if she had had labor induced, she could have went through the same process in a safer manner, and given the resultant baby up for adoption. She had roughly two months left until she would have given birth naturally. Going through labor in the manner that she did does not sidestep any of the postpartum medical and health stuff that happens after a normal pregnancy either.
This also ignores all of the many contraceptives available to help prevent pregnancy in the first place as well.
The only change was causing extra danger to herself, two months of time, and whether or not a living baby existed at the end.
She and her mother discussed their plans at length on Facebook messenger, before Facebook implemented end to end encryption. One of the last comments is of the woman stating she couldn’t wait to wear jeans again.
When questioned by police, they admitted to their actions, and admitted to discussing it on Facebook messenger. That is the reason the cops even got the subpeona for the chat logs. They told the cops where to look for evidence of their crime, and the cops followed normal investigative protocol.
Don’t talk to cops.
Privacy is important, but that was not the narrative of some downtrodden freedom seeker’s rights being infringed upon by regressive right wing policy, the surveillance state, or anything else that a lot of people took it to be.
Those details are unnecessary for this conversation. Cops used Facebook private messages to build a case to prosecute an illegal abortion.
They have established the process and the precedent, next time it will be a woman only 5 months pregnant. Or who has an ectopic pregnancy and is past six weeks. Or was raped. Or isn’t in a financial situation suitable for raising a child. Or simply doesn’t want a child. It doesn’t matter the details, cops have and will use private messages to prosecute women getting abortions.
The arguments that “because of her one comment about wanting to wear jeans again means she was just a careless, shallow woman who didn’t want to take responsibility for her actions and got what she deserved” is a load of crap. Not saying you are doing that solely, but that is not a good argument for not caring about privacy.
You’re welcome to your opinion, but I feel the bolded section is distinctly relevant.
If you want privacy, don’t admit to a crime and tell the cops where to find the evidence. Privacy starts at home with proper OPSEC.
That’s the story. It has very little to do with the specific crime committed.
The cops did as the cops do: if they are given a lead, particularly by the perp themselves, they investigate. To not do so would be to not do their job.
There was no new precedent here. This was not some brand new enforcement of a new law, and the chats were not the definitive evidence in the trial. Cops using Facebook chat transcripts were likewise not something newly established in this case.
The rest is me emphasizing that this lady was not a martyr, with the jeans comment being the least damning part of it all. Meant as a lead up to the bold.
She overwhelmingly had the ability to do what she needed to do, safely and legally. That has to mean something. And if it doesn’t mean shit to you, I know for a fact it means something to the people who want to take your reproductive rights away, or to ignore the very real dangers you’re worried about.
That said this is not the first step down that slope that you’re acting like it is, and it is not some datapoint on a downward trend towards what you are afraid of. This is a intersection of already existing problems that someone thought they could spin for clicks and emotion bait, and it overwhelmingly worked.
Stay safe, take steps to prevent ending up in that situation, only discuss dangerous shit using safe protocols, and for fuck’s sake don’t tell the cops where the evidence is.
Thanks for giving the details so i didnt have to. Totally misrepresnted situation. Politicized and details omitted for shock value. Super annoying to hear about this story in the context of privacu or abortion rights
Don’t want to be a devil’s advocate here but nowadays it’s left-wing weirdos that use publicly available data to cancel people they don’t agree with. Let’s keep personal political views out of this discussion.
As for the first paragraph, I vaguely remember reading about this. And this is a great example.
You asked, I answered. Thinking about what right wing weirdos and perverts might do when in power is absolutely part of why I care about my digital privacy.
You’re the one who brought in a personal political view, and basic history realize your claim, which is why you didn’t actually cite any.
I mean, what’s a good example of cancer culture? If some white guy says something horribly racist, and then he loses an election, he complains about cancel culture. But that’s a good thing, because we don’t want racist bastards in office. Of course he doesn’t see it that way. So he looks for some new term to describe the phenomenon, some way to make himself a victim.
The term itself was created by right wing people who decided to deploy it against those they didn’t favor, as an excuse to justify their own bigotry, but the idea of public shaming and goes back centuries if not millennia. Quite naturally, the establishment has a strong interest in public shaming if it will keep them around longer.
Example: Terry Crews speaking out about his own experiences with sexual assault. Also him calling for black men to step up and be father figures in communities lacking them.
You can argue that he wasn’t truly “cancelled”, but he drew a lot or fire for those. People claiming that he was somehow taking away from womens’ experiences by speaking about his own, and people saying that his statements about a lack of father figures in the African American community was racist.
It’s not just white people wanting excuses to be racist. Just mostly that.
So he wasn’t cancelled. Some people were critical of how he said some things. That’s the way people work.
I could post “the best spaghetti sauce recipe” and I would get people telling me I’m an idiot and wrong about Italian culture and blah blah blah. That’s not cancellation. Any opinion, no matter how benign, gets crap on the internet.
Yes, as I already addressed. But it’s important to understand the way the other side frames this shit, and they absolutely framed it as attempts to cancel him.
They asked for an example of “cancel culture” and I gave one of the few these people cite that isn’t absolutely batshit or racist.
So most people being allegedly cancelled are batshit or racist? … Why is cancelling bad then?
There’s few cases of non batshit, non racist ppl being cancelled. The best example you could think of, you acknowledge wasn’t actually cancelling.
I’m not getting it.
Lmfao bro did not just cry about “leftist cancel culture” as a whataboutism in response to a real story about the right wing government literally incarcerating someone for getting an abortion based on Facebook PMs?..
Then talk about keeping “personal political views out of this discussion”?..
- Feeling clean
- Not being exploited
- Minimalism
- Less power drain
- Less data sent
- Freedom
- Everything works better and faster
- I hate spying because they can
- To be honest also because most people don’t care
The only con is convenience.
I hate that most people don’t want to care for convient’s sake… “You’re only make your life harder for yourself”. I simply want to be in control, not the corpos.
It’s kinda like this. Say you lead the most boring, law abiding, square life, top 20% of the bell curve in that zone.
Would you want strangers in your house, even if they couldn’t technically touch or take anything? Would you want them in your spouse’s closet? Your kid’s room? Looking in your fridge?
Creepy and “hell no”, right?
That’s what privacy is about. The right to lock your door against strangers snooping.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
From Cardinal Richelieu
Combine this with the fact that entities which have access to our data rarely have our best interest in heart. Governments change, the political climate changes, and people change. What’s honest and just today may not be next decade.
Also, people change over time, and more and more of our lives are ending up online earlier and earlier.
Do you really want some stupid “hot take” you were passionate about as a teenager effecting how someone sees you a decade or more down the line?
Everyone deserves the right to change their mind and not have old beliefs hang around their neck forever.
Privacy should be a basic human right.
Data collection could be massively abused by oppressive governments.Not caring about it = Not caring about your rights.
It is a human right…
Ok, but why? And to be clear, I’m not against what you wrote, just wondering about people’s motives.
Imagine living in China,
where the government is able to request data of each company in their country.Imagine that China would setup an AI/LLM, to feed all private chat data into it,
and automatically flagging opposition of the government regime.Imagine a white van appearing in front of your house and disappearing into a concentration camp because you got flagged after expressing your opposition to the government to your mate in a private chat.
All collected data can be abused like that,
or by other means (E.g. a country at war gets hacked, which could lead to leaking critical private information on political/defensive decisions).To me the question is not if data collected on you will be abused, but rather when will it be abused?
Just having it stored somewhere imposes risks.
Well opressivs governments dont work by serving good policys to the people, they work by blaming a part of the people for all problems and then promsing to get rid of them/punish them. A scapegoat basically. The opressors don’t make it better for the people, but the people are happy because the ones they think causing their suffering get punished.
Historically this has been the communists in Nazi Germany, or faschist italy, modern faschists try to make gay people and people from the far east this scapegoat atm.
The problem is: the scapegoat is never the real cause of the problem. After taking them all to the kz, and life for people still not getting better you need a new one. For Nazi Germany those where Jewish people, just because of their religion, has Hitler proposed the “kommunistisch-jüdische-weltverschwörung” (world conspiracy of Jews and communists) When after the pogromes stuff still would get better, they would blame everyone not arian. (Not blonde, blue eyed, northern heritage)
If a fascist government tries to exclude you or not is just a matter of time, at some point they will rum out of scapegoats and come for you.
You never know which aspect someone picks to exclude you (gender, political view, haircolor, Parents, lastname, sexual preferences, religion, mental health, physical health etcpp.) So it’s better to not have someone gather all that info about you in the first place.
The right extremists are on the rise in my country. I would rather not have them knocking on my door in a few years to detain me for calling their leader a cunt on the internet.
Judging by your username: same country, same reason here! I‘d have been put in the chamber back then and I dont want people to do it once the swastika is back on our flag.
Why do so many external entities care so much about constantly trying to reduce my privacy?
If they would not have started it, I wouldn’t have started to care.
Similar to you, but I also hate the advertising industry with a burning passion and want to deprive them of any and all data possible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates’ cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched motivates them to act as though they are all being watched at all times.
that’s not a world i want to live in…
Too late. If you’re in the US, it is officially known that the feds already can record roughly half of all national internet traffic. AT&T room something or other.
The current saving grace is that the amount of data generated over time is outpacing increases in the ability to store and analyze it all. God forbid that ever changes.
Let’s flip this question. Why do you think an organisation should get my data?
Are they reputable? Are they secure? Are they domiciled in my country and follow the laws of my country?
In a perfect world, data collected by companies would be used to improve user experience. But we don’t live a perfect world and nowadays if a company doesn’t provide yearly income from investment it goes under. And to keep the numbers up, companies screw its users.
Improve user experience?
I don’t give a flying fuck if a web page loads .5 seconds faster.
What u care about is an interface that works, has labels instead of symbols, that doesn’t change every month trying to be more minimalist.
A bank website doesn’t need my browser history or my charges to Amex or what pets I have or what car I drive or the color of my bedroom. But they want all that and a mobile phone number to tie it all up with a common index. VoIP numbers are refused because they change too often.
That’s what pisses me off
Same reason I shit with the door closed; I’ve got nothing to hide, but it’s none of your business regardless.
There’s no file system in existence that can handle a text file large enough to include all reasons why people care about privacy.
To me it’s much more of an ethical concern than a practical concern. Digital privacy is a human right (privacy is listed under Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). The only immediate ways in which I can uphold this right and contribute to a fairer society is through exercising my right to vote and making ethically superior choices as a consumer. So for me, it’s less about avoiding the government or big tech for practical reasons like surveillance and scams driven by data breaches (though of course these are still valid concerns for many) and more about supporting those who I believe are doing the right thing (or are at least an improvement).
If we don’t support the better alternatives then they will never grow enough to achieve mainstream success and challenge the current establishment. I know some people here hate Proton, but that is a great example of a privacy-focused tech company which has grown significantly because of consumer support - to the point where it has a full suite of products that do a much better job of competing with heavyweights like Google than a tiny, unsupported startup would have had. A company like that might not even have survived without its early adopters, and then the next one to come along would be even less likely to receive investment in the early stages due to the history of failure within the sector. To me, being privacy conscious is all about being part of a positive movement; supporting people and companies that are doing the right thing and refusing to accept problematic behaviours and practices I see in the world.
I know for some people, particularly minorities, privacy is a real world concern and I fully acknowledge that but I think sometimes we do ourselves a disservice by trying to sell it to everyone in such a scary way. Humans are not very good at perceiving or responding to threat until there is actual undisputable evidence of it in their immediate surroundings. So when you tell these people that they’ll lose all their money to scammers or that their government is going to unjustly target them they don’t actually believe you or take you seriously. They think you are insane. The better sell, I think, is to show people that this is a positive movement and worldwide community that they can be a part of.
EDIT: I was going to add this yesterday but forgot. I don’t know if anyone here has seen The Social Dilemma - the big reason that documentary went viral was not just because it gave a very detailed and scary overview of all the problems with surveillance capitalism and the attention economy, but also because it finished on quite an optimistic note. They told viewers “we know this is all really scary for you but we have smart people working tirelessly to change things and build a movement that we want you to be a part of”. It left people feeling engaged, like they still had some level of agency over the situation instead of paralysed with fear and just totally abandoning all hope.
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having a stalker, makes privacy very important
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Having identity theft, makes privacy even more important
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Being pigeonholed, makes privacy important
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