The US and the UK trying to one-up each other for the worst tech laws and regs. We will not let you out-dumb us, Brits! You merely adopted the dumb. We were born in it. Molded by it.

It was widely predicted that age or geography restrictions lead to VPNs, and VPNs lead to banning VPNs, and banning VPNs lead to circumventions, and circumventions lead to better detections, and better detections leads to better circumventions, until everyone is dizzy and wants off the bloody ride.

It’s easy to think, this is ok, I can get around the surveillance. I’ll just tunnel over this and bounce through that and triple-rot13 it all. Take that, bureaucrats! Yet the difficulty goes up and up. More and more people are unable to do it. More and more do not want to deal with the hassle. More and more do not want the legal exposure, or are not even aware.

In countries that already ban VPNs, some people can get around that. It is never iron clad. But it is still effective again most people. It is risky for the others.

I do not believe this problem has a technical solution. Only a cultural and political one.

if it has cameras, microphones, gps, data mapping capabilities and speaks to a server outside of your home

It has also happened with baby monitors. Well, almost endless other IoT devices too. But baby monitors are a particular issue. They have speakers in them too. Attackers were exploiting it and playing very disturbing sounds to cause extreme distress to babies.

I always felt this was the paradox of privacy. Those of us who want privacy but try to contribute in a positive way to a community get caught in the crossfire when the same privacy tools are used by bad faith actors, sometimes individuals, sometimes even nation state influence ops.

I second this. Local is the way to go for medical information.

I always recommend remaining highly skeptical about apps promising to help with anything like this. There were period tracking apps sending women’s period information to data broker companies, who would then sell it onward. That’s creepy as hell! Doing everything locally avoids intrusive data collection.

Zero knowledge systems

I like this idea, it’s very interesting. Yet I always end up wondering how it could go sideways.

A one time token (as in per message) seems onerous. A multi use token attesting “this is a human” could be sold to a bad actor using it to allow non-humans to masquerade as humans. We already see something like that on big social media where human accounts are sold to troll farms.

The only identifable information you should have to provide is the information you signed up with.

There was a bill in the US that would’ve required sites let you delete your info without providing anything extra besides what you provided to sign up.

Last I knew, it failed to become law. I’m sure every tech company in the galaxy was lobbying against it.

True enough… but I wonder how this would play out. For example, linked images could also be ads, or hold ads embedded in the same image content you wanted to see, and you don’t know that until you click on the image.

Leaving aside ad-blockers for one moment, non-inline images move the unit of atomicity from a whole page with all its embedded images, to a single image you wanted to see. Clicking gets you an image which can be anywhere between 0-100% ads. Bringing ad-blockers back into the picture, if the unit of atomicity is a whole page and most images are either 0 or 100% ads, it seems far easier to block ads on a link by link basis. If ads end up embedded into the same images you want to see in a more 80/20% mixture in the image, it’s more difficult to block sub-regions, and the advertiser could vary the subregion randomly.

Ah man. It feels like there is nothing advertisers cannot ruin if it becomes popular.

I have heard that called “sludge”. As a generic term for that tactic.

If you are over 18 click yes

Years ago, I heard of a guy who failed one of the voluntary “enter your age” checks because it thought he was 7 years old. He was actually 107, but the system only considered the last two digits.

A Gemini reference in the wild!

I looked a couple years ago. Briefly toyed with it, made a page or two. I like the ethos, and am about 99% on board. I only wish it had inline images. I feel like that omission alone would greatly hurt its adoption and relegate it to not just niche, but super-ultra-niche.

Oh, nice. Canada & USA have cooperated closely for a long time on regulations for cars, so manufacturers only need minor tweaks to sell into both markets. Hopefully that’ll help.

Oh, I see. I thought maybe I did it by accident somehow!

I bike everywhere when I can. I’ll join the fuckcars group, now that I know about it.

I’m pretty new to Lemmy and noticed that my post was crossposted to fuckcars and privacy@programming.dev. I have no problem with that, but I didn’t do it on purpose!

I mostly agree. But sometimes if a single jurisdiction gets regulation in place, it can be cheaper for companies to produce a single model to comply with all of them, rather than make multiple models. Even if they do make multiple models, it still means there is a supply of privacy-spec cars.

California in the USA has been more privacy friendly than most states. If California would crank up some car privacy regs, maybe work with the Europeans and Canada on a common legal standard, that is a huge foot in the door! It means people in other US states could buy a California-spec car. If the momentum builds enough, maybe companies would say screw it and sell the privacy-spec cars everywhere. That happened in the past with car safety regs. It went from auto companies whining about it, to the same companies featuring it as a selling point. Look how well our cars do in crash tests!

I agree car privacy is going to be a hard fight. Auto companies will fight dirty to avoid privacy regs. But we can push on this. A groundswell of public support can’t hurt.

They could have made it a lot cheaper as a coupe.

Maybe if it sees market success, they’ll branch out into other body styles. I want a car too, not a truck.

have joked … that if I have to buy a new vehicle I am ripping the whole dashboard out.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Slate seems to be the only brand currently that intends to deliver vehicles with zero connectivity required.

Do you mean these guys? That’s the first I heard of them so thank you for that! I thought it would turn out to be a European make, but they’re on my side of the pond. A zero-connectivity electric car would be the dream. I like the idea of electric cars but so far they have all been even more wrapped up in telematics than internal combustion cars.

And if you reconnect to get them, there’s no guarantee your car doesn’t suddenly dump all your personal data obtained in the meantime onto company servers.

It’s a good point. Also I wonder if OBD-II can do that. A person could disable the port, but that may make it hard / impossible to get the vehicle serviced.

For sure. We’re in a difficult place. Arguably the ultimate solution has to be regulatory, but we don’t have that yet. All we have is whatever the community can figure out on its own. The more surveillance gets integrated into complex automotive systems, the less approch-able it is for average people to yank a fuse or unscrew an antenna coupler.

is the realization that sooner than later, we won’t have the choice of not using spyware riddled device anymore, as there will not be any alternative left.

I too worry about this. Right now surveillance is so profitable that it gets built into even the lowest end models of devices. It can be difficult or impossible to disable.

What gives me a little hope is the 10% principle. If privacy minded people hold just 1% market share, we can be ignored. We are not a market force. If we can get 10% of our population to prioritize privacy and security when buying tech products, we become a market segment too big to ignore. Thereby it is important for all of us to reach out to our friends, family and neighbors, to help them understand why privacy matters. And what we all lose when we give it up.

or light bulbs

So that no one thinks you are engaging in hyperbole -> https://www.pandasecurity.com/en/mediacenter/smart-lightbulbs-spy/