Yeah, another factor I didn’t even mention. The voluntary surveillance.

Well, we already experience that psychological torture. After 2002/2003, and then especially after 2012, this concept has already burdened our everyday behavior. Browsing behavior, phone calls, texts, emails…every single way we communicate, even face to face meetings with phones in our pockets are open to surveillance. And it’s been shown that it’s been used. Over a decade ago, thanks to Snowden. Now? Things have surely gotten worse and I would bet the farm on behavior very much having changed due these facts.

They called me paranoid. They called me a conspiracy theorist. They called me “Mr can’t get an erection anymore.”

Look who was right and could get erections all along now.

Or my data

I…responded to your comment.

While i agree with the sentiment thats a ridiculous comparison. Thinking you have nothing to hide from the government is not the same as thinking you have nothing to hide from random entities on the internet. You already give the government all of that stuff when you literally just exist. Go get a social security card or a drivers license. Absolutely asinine to try to compare the two.

And I said “increasingly the entities are the problem.” And you challenged that. And continued to. Hence where this conversation ended up.

In the privacy community, you’re confused as to how big tech is violating your privacy?

Fuckin Forbes knows it. Establishment democrats know it. But you don’t?

Your cars are spying on you. How is this news?

lol this is literally the next article linked after I submitted this comment. https://www.texastribune.org/2024/07/30/texas-meta-facebook-biometric-data-settlement/

…google, Microsoft, Facebook…need I go on?

In the early 2000s, the issue was primarily the government. Patriot act made sure of that. And yeah, it’s still an issue with regards to the amount and types of data they’re storing and who the government is currently comprised of, but in 2024, the much larger privacy issue is from private data holdings. All those random fuckin apps you have, every cell phone carrier, every goddamn car now. Your data is the product now. And capitalism is the problem.

But increasingly, the data you need to care about not being private isn’t from the govt. airs from those random entities. And their security is godawful.

I use aura, but mostly for credit safety and ease of access to freeze/unfreeze my credit report. Got it after the experian hack ordeal. They have a ton of other services, including a data mining record deletion service and a call monitoring service. I would recommend it for pretty much everything I’ve listed. It’s made my life a lot easier, put my mind at ease. I also work a job where my personal info gets put in a lot of hands I basically have no choice but to trust. So this was kind of a necessity for me. Look into aura’s cheapest plan, see if it includes the data mining removal stuff. The extra layer of security for me is worth it, no question, but the added benefits of this, for example, and the spam call blocking just seals the deal in my opinion.

Exactly. It shouldn’t be “what is privacy worth,” but more like what should you get in return for consenting to volunteer your privacy? Because right now the system is backwards. We are expected to give up privacy, are expected to have none. And we spend money and time to try to get it back with almost no guarantees.

But the point is there’s always been a way to avoid ads, even while browsing sites with ads and browsing YT. Personally, if that ability entirely disappears, i hate ads, ad-voice, and the concept of advertising so much that I will stop and close a whole tab if an ad plays. I’m in the minority though. Because, I think you’re right, a lot of people just don’t even think about it and mindlessly consume. I can’t. When Reddit fucked us and showed us our opinions and feelings didn’t matter, I left. I will do the same to YT.

Apple has been trying to be the next advertising giant. They’ve been growing their advertising revenue and plan on doubling it this year. They went from $4b ad revenue to $7.5 2022/2023. And if you remember correctly, that was right when you started seeing all their “apple cares about your privacy!” ads and got into it with Facebook. They’re not out here to protect our privacy. They’re trying to take the advertising revenue from the other ad giants and corner that market for themselves.

Think about it. They have gotten people locked into their OS/ecosystem. They basically hold the advertising golden ticket. They’re not here to make your digital life more private. They’re here to get your data for themselves, locking out the competition. They aim to bring more people into the gate and shut it behind them while extracting all of our advertising milk with their more advanced data udder sucking machine. The pasture looks nice, but when those gates close, the skies darken and the farmer corners you with that look in his eye.

I don’t know where that metaphor came from. But that’s how I see it in my head. The moo cow with the pretty eyelashes and the shiny bell around her neck is pulled into a false sense of security by the smiling farmer at the gate, but that shit turns dark real quick when she’s locked in.

Oh, good. I misread it, my b. I was wondering how I hadn’t heard this devastating news earlier.

His article mentions that the Supreme Court ruled the CFPB is unconstitutional, but I hadn’t even seen that. I couldn’t read about google after reading that. What in the fuck

I feel like Firefox is better. Or onion is probably even better. Set your privacy settings to strict. I use iOS and my results were strong.

Also go into your iOS settings and mess around. Disable all their bullshit. I’m not a super tech savvy person. My brother is in IT, but privacy is super important to me, so I go around, read stuff, turn off a bunch of their “share with” stuff, and their Siri bullshit and everything I can tinker with. There are a lot of iOS settings buried pretty deep in subpages. I’m not sure if the eff is checking those, but I’ve had to go down my list of apps and disable some Siri bullshit.

Sorry I can’t be more specific, like I said, I’m not the tech savvy one. I just use bare bones stuff, disable things that sound fishy. It’s all worked out for me so far lol

I gotta say, I’ve been anti-social media since its inception. People used to bug me about not being on instagram or Facebook. But…when I was traveling I just kept in contact via email or via text with the people I actually wanted to stay in contact with. I don’t think I’ve ever really noticed a huge hassle.

What is the cost of lies

Um. I dunno what to tell you. I went through two android phones when I started the job. This was back when the screens were only really big. So maybe that was contributing more. But I couldn’t make it though half of the day before both android phones were dying. I can tell you as a person who exclusively used android phones since I had a smart phone (with one, maybe two exceptions I got as hand-me-downs), I’ve never felt any sort of “social pressure” to switch to an iPhone. This is an entirely new concept, because smart phones came out the year I graduated high school, pretty much. And I had never experienced it. Ever.

So are you sure this is a real thing? Not just one of those internet things that people swear they heard someone else say they knew someone who experienced it? Because I’ve been there for pretty much the whole thing. But maybe I aged out of that kind of stupid status shit and this only happens to kids in high school. Because I truly can’t imagine it happening anywhere else. Though I’ve never worked in an office setting, adults acting like clique-y it’s schoolers seem to flock to office spaces, so maybe that’s another reason why I’ve never had this happen to me.

Either way, don’t tell me why I got an iPhone. Who tf are you

I’m no fan of apple as a company, but I used android phones for a long time. Mostly because I didn’t want to jump on the apple train. But once I changed jobs and needed to be on my phone a lot more often, I switched to apple for the battery life. I was stuck carrying around an external battery with my android phones. Also, the longevity of the hardware. I’m still on an old iPhone and it still mostly looks and still operates as if it were a more current gen. I always buy used, and I would go through an android phone every year to two years or so. I changed to an apple phone about four years ago and I still have the same one.

I get it, the weird thing I only recently learned about iMessage being some status symbol for teenagers or whatever? That’s fuckin dumb. But there are reasons beyond stupid ones to use apple stuff. Fuck the company, though. I mean…fuck Samsung. And google. Fuck pretty much all companies. But brand loyalty for anything other than fitting your requirements in the product is weird.

Oh I misunderstood your comment. I thought you said in your American high school or some such…maybe I just skimmed your comment lol