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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by jsomae@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

(Please don't downvote just because I need some help.)

I was once a privacy nut. But it's getting so hard nowadays, and there are so many more important problems -- global warming, AI, the inevitable collapse of the current world order... how does privacy improve the world? Please help remind me.

I do approve of privacy, of course. All this protect-the-children flak is bullshit. I just can't remember why I thought it was something worth fighting for and preaching about.

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[-] mipadaitu@lemmy.world 84 points 11 months ago

I fight for privacy to protect myself.

Now, what am I protecting myself from? I don't think anyone is going to come arrest me for what I do. I don't think any big companies are going to leak my data and embarrass me. I don't think anyone is going to compromise my bank and drain my funds.

I am protecting myself from being influenced by advertising and targeted news.

I am protecting my thoughts and feelings, because in the end, that's all that really matters. I don't want to need the next toy, or jump on a bandwagon. I don't want to see advertising and I don't want a carefully crafted worldview pushed on me.

[-] c0smokram3r@midwest.social 20 points 11 months ago

Well said! I am in this camp 👩🏼‍💻 I also don’t want my data being sold off without my consent.

[-] JoeKrogan@lemmy.world 37 points 11 months ago

Do what you can and dont let perfect be the enemy of good. You're still ahead of the rest of the crowd who don't give a shit.

[-] badelf@lemmy.ml 14 points 11 months ago

As for the USA, let me put it this way: If Trump gets elected, with the tech tools the govt has, we will see, at the very best, another Hong Kong, with anyone that disfavors the Repubs disappearing, some permanently. At the worst, we will see another Nazi Germany. He himself proposed executing people.

If you practice privacy and can teach others, your skills will be valuable to the underground resistance.

[-] jsomae@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago

The sad thing is, given physical isolation these days, we'll all be executed alone.

[-] UniversalMonk@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

He himself proposed executing people.

Link?

[-] badelf@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 months ago

https://apnews.com/article/trump-executions-biden-death-penalty-brandon-bernard-c1b26807c5c40b337d14485c3d6df2de

When authoritarian governments have complete power they don't really checks and balances to the system, or juries. Take Putin - Navalny for example. You would know this if you aren't a Holocaust denier.

[-] Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 13 points 11 months ago

It's a lot of work, and at the end of the day you might just end up leaving a you-shaped hole in the data. Privacy is a great thing to be mindful of as part of a larger understanding of modern media literacy, but it's not all you should be about. Preach it when contextually appropriate, find a level you're able to live with, and keep growing

[-] ssm@lemmy.sdf.org 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Privacy doesn't need any justification to why it's important any more than why someone molesting you on the street doesn't need a detailed explanation as to why it's bad. Corporations and states are dirty abusers that want to know about and sell every part of your private life, and that should make you uncomfortable. Having to justify why you deserve privacy in the face of this form of abuse is simply victim blaming.

[-] jsomae@lemmy.ml 3 points 11 months ago

i appreciate this philosophically, but it's not really the pragmatic answer I was looking for.

[-] Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 11 points 11 months ago

Pretty much all your worries can be fought with activism. Efficient activism will make you a target for law enforcement.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

Efficient activism will make you a target for law enforcement.

...And privacy -- better known as OPSEC, in this context -- is a big part of how you defend yourself.

In other words, privacy is important because all those "more important problems" are dependent on it!

[-] OneRedFox@beehaw.org 9 points 11 months ago

But it’s getting so hard nowadays, and there are so many more important problems – global warming, AI, the inevitable collapse of the current world order… how does privacy improve the world? Please help remind me.

Privacy as a cause is something that helps support other forms of activism. We live in a world in which hostile state actors routinely surveil activists in order to more effectively divide, subvert, marginalize, and intimidate them; privacy is important counterplay against this. It's like saying that you're not going to eat healthy because exercising is more important; one facilitates the other.

[-] jsomae@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 months ago

Yeah, this is a very compelling take.

[-] freeman@sh.itjust.works 8 points 11 months ago

For people to try and effectively respond to those issues they must be able to communicate privately with no fear of retribution.

It also requires private and secure communications to be a normal thing and not an indicator that the parties involved are criminals, terrorists or pedos.

Ai by the way is going to be just a little fart compared to the other issues you described as well as the lack of privacy.

Also a problem related to privacy is our growing dependence on private corps to be a 'normal' person ("why you don't have a Facebook/Google/Amazon/etc account ?")

[-] jsomae@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago

AI could kill everyone, though it most likely won't IMO. 10% chance I think. That's still very bad though. Despite the fact that Ilya Sutskever, Geoff Hinton, MIRI, heck even Elon Musk have expressed varying degrees of concern about this, it seems the risk here is largely dismissed because it sounds too much like science fiction. If only science fiction writers had avoided the topic!

[-] freeman@sh.itjust.works 2 points 11 months ago

This is bullshit. AI will be hunting down survivors? Thus more lethal than nuclear war? ChatGTP4 will be better at it?

Most of these concern seem to be about AGI which we are nowhere close to having and have no clear path to. Our "AI"s not only do not understand causality but don't have the ability to perform arithmetic. Nor do they run stuff that could kill humans. Except if you consider Tesla's FSD an AI system, but Musk assured us back in 2017 it would be safe..

[-] jsomae@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

where did you get the idea that gpt4 is capable of this? this is concerns for 10+ years from now, assuming AI makes the same strides is has in the past 10 years, which is not guaranteed at all.

I think there are probably 3-5 big leaps still required, on the order of the invention of transformer models, deep learning, etc., before we have superintelligence.

Btw humans are also bad at arithmetic. That's why we have calculators. if you don't understand that LLMs use RAG, langchain (or similar), and so on, you clearly don't understand the scope of the problem. Superintelligence doesn't need access to anything in particular except, say, email or chat to destroy the world.

[-] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 7 points 11 months ago

Privacy is a shield. It is useful to protect against a threat. It doesn't have to perfectly protect against the threat. But the important thing is to have a threat model and construct your privacy concerns around it.

Ask yourself what you believe will be a threat to you and then criticize those beliefs. Use this self-critical process to decide on your first idea of a threat model.

[-] foremanguy92_@lemmy.ml 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

In this world the companies are willing always more money and the govs more power. Since the beginning of the Humans we speak and we discuss physically, and the capitalism couldn't ever remove that to people. But now there is a new way of communication that everyone can use, the usage of internet. And the companies really understand that so they went fast to go before the people and catch this new technology to deceive the people on the real use case and way of using it. Today the way of distance communicating is mostly in the hands of big techs, so as I seen here, privacy is a shield and it shouldn't be perfect but is to protect you from big techs. The privacy is not going to resolve some of the most important problems in the world, but in the world we leave if we do nothing to counter these acts it would be even worst. So privacy is a shield to protect the population from the future consequences of capitalism.

[-] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 2 points 11 months ago

AI, the inevitable collapse of the current world order...

To me these problems are giving motivation to fight for my privacy, because I think that if I don't, these problems will bite me harder in one way or another, or multiple.

But it's getting so hard nowadays

What obstacles have you found? Maybe we can give some guidance. In my experience there are plenty of privacy tools that are easy to use. For youtube there's piped and invidious, for always selecting a working instance farside (I think that's the name) can help.
For email and cloud storage there's proton, bitwarden for passwords. uBlock Origin against online threats and annoyances. If you want to use an AI chatbot, DuckDuckGo has a privacy proxy frontend for chatgpt, claude and 2 others. And plenty more.

[-] OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago

Matrix and Llama are the other two and their open source! Claude is by meta. Gpt4o mini and Claude

[-] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 1 points 11 months ago

Wait. Isn't llama by meta, and claude by antrophic?

And its not Matrix, but Mixtral.

Btw I did not realize until now that the llama there is that llama. Knowing that, I probably won't use that one anymore. Even though it's proxied.

[-] OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah my phone autocorrected mixtral. I use it daily. I'm not sure which of these are the safest really. But the two non open source ones are off putting and the meta llama seems well Meta. So I use mixtral.

[-] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 1 points 11 months ago

So far I was using Claude. It has a level of quality, and the company was known as using ethical ways to source the training material. Note the past tense.

[-] OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago

I hate the was part. It seems everyone is squeezing out ethics and just doing whatever it takes to make money. Its sickening.

[-] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 11 months ago

Privacy means personal agency and freedom from people, whether individuals, companies, or the government, controlling you with direct or implied threats, or more subtle manipulation, which they can do because they have your dox and because information is power.

A lack of privacy adds fuel to the polycrisis because if we can't act in relative secrecy that basically means we can't act freely at all, and nothing can challenge whoever runs the panopticon.

[-] Donjuanme@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

You don't have to be the most private, just don't draw the most attention....

Big data is an unfortunate cost of society.

this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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