14 ms·

Escaping surveillance capitalism, at scale

pastacacioepepe 3y ago
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- rolobio 3y ago
  After a bit of searching, apparently there is www.find.coop. I see most of the communities are in New York City. I'm sure they will welcome you in, just be sure to bring some money.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - rolobio 3y ago
      Perhaps there is a tree bark scroll somewhere... using lampblack ink... written by candlelight from wild bees' wax? Erm, which language is the least capitalist?
    - ta1243 3y ago
      Yet you participate in society, curious
      - NoboruWataya 3y ago
        The question is literally about escaping capitalism so it seems a fair response. "How do I complain about capitalism" is a different question and much easier to do.
        orthecreedence 3y ago
        It's not a fair response. It's a consistently obnoxious response to people actively searching for a better world. Like, no shit your computer is produced under capitalism...that's the active and dominant mode of production. If you want to escape it, you don't escape the things produced by it, you actively work towards changing the way those things are produced. There is nothing meaningful or useful about the above response. "Oh, you don't like air pollution? Why do you keep breathing then??"
        theultdev 3y ago
        No, it's a facetious response to those who want to experiment with billions of people's lives to replace capitalism which has brought so many people out of poverty and hunger with an unstated system that will most likely resemble communism which will again starve hundreds of millions as it has countless of times. People can and do operate a commune within a capitalistic society. Go in with other people and buy some land to live off, make a contract to share all property. You can't do the inverse in a communistic society. But no, we all have to do it or it won't work, because apparently it's only possible at scale and it can't be explained until then. Convenient. So don't act like you can't go live life in a commune today, you can, just people don't, because capitalistic life is more comfortable. They'd rather complain online about other people's lives, using their iPhone, drinking Starbucks, thinking about how know best for all more than the great minds that created the society they take for granted.
        orthecreedence 3y ago
        > those who want to experiment with billions of people's lives Sorry, but you don't know that this is the method of anybody the response is targeted at. It's an ill-formed assumption, and many people are interested in counteracting the apparent and obvious detrimental aspects of capitalist society without violent revolution and totalitarian regimes. > People can and do operate a commune within a capitalistic society. Cool, good for them. Escapism isn't necessarily the goal, though. Obviously it depends on the person. > You can't do the inverse in a communistic society. Communism is the "free association of producers." If the producers wish to assign dictatorial control of their factory to one person and sell their labor to that person in exchange for a wage based on paper money, they are free to do so. But why would anybody willingly engage in this arrangement unless there is no alternative? > They'd rather complain online about other people's lives, using their iPhone, drinking Starbucks, thinking about how know best for all You have created a stereotype and are reinforcing it here. It's based in nothing. > more than the great minds that created the society they take for granted. Wait, capitalism was a constructed system? My impression is that it's a somewhat emergent system that started with feudalism and grew from there.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        > Yet you participate in society, curious Sorry - not following.
        r721 3y ago
        It's a quote from comic: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-somewhat https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        Oh, I see. Thanks. Sadly that comic doesn't have any logic behind it. It's just to get you to memorise "this is how you should feel about people who make this argument".
- martinbaun 3y ago
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- psychlops 3y ago
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  - miroljub 3y ago
    Why do you think all of these nations are not capitalistic in nature?
  - stonogo 3y ago
    Do you actually think e.g. Vietnam or China are not engaged in capitalism, or is this just some culture war leaking into HN?
  - polshaw 3y ago
    Wild that you try to include one of the most capitalist countries on earth, second in the number of billionaires only behind the USA, on the back of the fact that they have one-party rule with the word communist slapped onto it. The general (and often wilful) ignorance around the topic is astounding.
    - psychlops 3y ago
      Please share your ranking criteria. Is it billionaires per capita?
    - wry_discontent 3y ago
      I feel like this is really dependent on what you understand by "capitalism". Pretty sure the Marxists in the Communist Party of China would not consider what they do there capitalism.
  - AJ007 3y ago
    That's not a good list because 3-8 are highly dependent on capitalism for their economies to function. They might have various levels of state control, but they are very much capitalism. Cuba and North Korea are much purer examples, though they relay on foreign production to some limited extent.
    - 3y ago
- topaz0 3y ago
  Maybe "What is to be done" by VI Lenin would be a good place to start. Though of course there are many such guides that don't always agree.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  [flagged]
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Self-employed, business registered in another country where you don't live, your business bank accounts and personal bank accounts in countries where neither you nor the business live, declare no taxes or declare zero revenue. This means you and your business will have to be self-sufficient. You're not going to have access to loans or investors. But you'll be out of the claws of the system and as free as can be.
martinbaun 3y ago
This is so true and one of the reasons why (shameless plug coming in) I made our project management tool Goleko.com able to self-host without any connection to our main servers.
stcredzero 3y ago
It seems to me, that the Starlink 10GBit connection is almost designed for someone to put a server farm aboard a ship that only sails in international waters. Re: Escaping Capitalism I've encountered the communal experience which feels magical, like "everything is made out of love." Here's the thing about that. Scale matters. Alignment of incentives matter. The communal experience is going to start breaking down at around 450 members or so. The old Inca empire was an example of a large scale political organization which apparently worked. However, it also seems likely this also involved the killing of those who didn't cooperate. Perhaps superintelligent AI will enable an alternative to Capitalism, as envisioned in Ian M. Bank's Culture books?
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  As soon as we are post scarcity, we don't need capitalism any more, as capitalism is just a resource allocation mechanism. Til then, we probably do!
  - ta1243 3y ago
    We've been post scarcity for "IP" for decades. The cost of making 1 copy of Barbie the Movie is the same as 1 billion copies.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      Well, copying and pasting has been made easy. But making it is still hard - lots of resources to allocate there.
      - ta1243 3y ago
        Making the first requires resources. Making a billion copies doesn't. Same in a world with a star trek replicator. Making the first steak dinner requires resources, making the next billion doesn't
        robertlagrant 3y ago
CYR1X 3y ago
Wait, the paid tier of a service that has a free tier almost never means they're stopping data collection at the free tier of users. This article seems to confuse that with switch to a different service provider that is paid only. It then goes into self-hosted, but wait why don't you just pay someone to self-host for you? Bad article.
- dangus 3y ago
  Yeah, there’s a huge difference between (e.g.) ProtonMail and “the new” Outlook. Some companies sell their privacy policies as a feature. The issue is that a lot of customers don’t really care about that feature and there’s no strong regulation to protect them.
  - AJ007 3y ago
    The problem is avoiding "surveillance capitalism" or even generally "privacy" isn't a selling point for the mass market. Things which matter to people: - Do you like moderators in a foreign country being paid $2 an hour reviewing your personal photos? - Do you agree that your personal messages to a friend can be retroactively edited if you sent something that was "disinformation"? - Would you like files on your computer's personal hard drive copied in to a commercial cloud service and deleted locally because you accidentally mis-read or mis-read on a single pop-up message? - Would you like to read advertisements and news articles when launching your favorite application? - Would you like those ads and news articles to become more invasive over time based on which ones you looked at last time? - Would you like the owners of the app store you purchased your favorite app from make more net profit from the sale than the developer who built it? - Would you like your favorite app to run differently than it did yesterday, without choice or warning? - Would you like your favorite app to no longer be usable or downloadable because development ceased? Even someone who broadcasts their personal life publicly, with strong signals of their wealth and where they will be to rob or kidnap them, will have issues with things in this list.
    - pmontra 3y ago
      All of those points are unknown unknowns or minor inconveniences to all of my non technical friends except these two: > - Would you like files on your computer's personal hard drive copied in to a commercial cloud service and deleted locally because you accidentally mis-read or mis-read on a single pop-up message? A friend of mine was bitten by this and One Drive (is that the subject, right?) is really difficult to understand and get right. I had to configure it on a server of a customer. We needed a remote share and it does not behaves like that. Nobody expects it to work in the way it works. There is something wrong in all of its design and UX. > Would you like your favorite app to no longer be usable or downloadable because development ceased? Another friend of mine is keeping her very old phone alive because it's the only way to operate I don't remember what (heating?) The app does not work with both new Android and new iOS (she has both) so she has that old phone at home in a drawer. I just refuse to buy anything that requires an app to work. I want physical switches, knobs and displays built into the device.
gumballindie 3y ago
> Self-hosting, but as a service This is the way. As more and more ai is adopted, company and private data becomes more exposed. Businesses' intelligence getting stolen and shared with others is a no go for many rational business people. Self hosting is the way if you wish to keep your secrets. People too - you don't want your personal pictures, emails, and messages leaking into someone's prompt.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  It's not the way for me. If I'm being hosted on someone else's machine, then I'm still at the mercy of some company somewhere. It's not "self-hosting" in any sense that has value to me.
hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
I wonder what if people start to send 10x garbage data.
- autoexec 3y ago
  Surveillance capitalism doesn't care at all about the accuracy of the data that they have. There is literally no such thing as "garbage data" to data brokers. It's all just data, and all of it is valuable. That's why projects that claim to "pollute" your browsing history like RuinMyHistory, noiszy, adnauseam, and TrackMeNot are not only pointless but also dangerous. The data being collected about you will always be used against you, no matter if it is accurate or not. If your browser randomly browses to webpages that gets "this person is a muslim" or "this person is gay" added to your dossier it doesn't matter if it's true or not, when your next would-be employer or would-be landlord who hates muslims or gay people uses a data broker for "background checking" and sees that, you're not getting the job/apartment. They won't tell you why, you'll just be rejected/ghosted. If you're a 40 year old man, but your browser add-on convinces a data broker that you're a 34 year old woman seeking an abortion, that data can still cause you end up the target of a lawsuit in Texas and it will take a non-zero amount of time and money to clear that up. If someone in your zip code kills someone using a certain type of plant, or household cleaner/chemical, or medication and your add-on has been browsing sites about that thing, you can end up on the police's suspect list. If you only make $30,000 a year but your add-on searches for yachts and expensive jewelry often enough to convince a data broker that you've got tons of money then it doesn't matter that the data is wrong, the next time you try to book a hotel or order something online you can still be charged a lot more than you would have been charged otherwise. Handing extra fake data to people whose only goal is to use data against you is just handing them more ammunition. It doesn't matter if it's "garbage" to you, it's still something they can and will eventually use against you. You cannot know what will prejudice someone against you. The more data is in your dossier, the more opportunity there is that you'll meet the right (or wrong) criteria. No data broker is going to look over your dossier and see that there's inconsistencies and go "Damn it! This genius has ruined my data! Now I have to throw all this data away as it is now worthless!" They aren't even going to look over your dossier. They're going to get paid to hand over a list of people flagged as being 'X' and your name/address/identity will show up along with everyone else flagged as being 'X' even if your name gets pulled up again when someone else pays that same data broker for 'Y' which is the opposite of 'X'. The data broker gets paid either way.
smeej 3y ago
I really thought this article was going to offer a solution, not just enumerate the problems. I'm already all too familiar with the problems. I like what Umbrel[0] is doing. They're essentially expecting that just like computing was able to move from centralized mainframes to homes, servers are poised to make the same migration. I think they really need to solve redundancy, though. If I'm to self-host anything important on a home server, I need to know I'll have some way to use it even if my home server fails, especially if I'm not at home when it happens. I'd love to see some kind of system where I could partner up with other Umbrel users for backups/the ability to restore connectivity. If I knew that in an emergency, I could call my friend in town or my brother out of state and there was some procedure that would allow me to connect to an encrypted backup of what I'm needing, I would feel a lot better about taking responsibility for my own system. [0] https://umbrel.com https://umbrel.com
- pcstl 3y ago
  Is Umbrel just actually usable Urbit? [0] [0] https://urbit.org/ https://urbit.org/
  - smeej 3y ago
    No, I don't think so. I think it's closer to "a plug-and-play computer for self-hostable apps, running locally, with most things configured so you're reasonably secure and you don't have to guess about everything."
    - pcstl 3y ago
      That's pretty much what Urbit wanted to be, to be fair, just with a strong networking component powered by a decentralized identity system. It's just too esoteric to have meaningful traction as that.
- cabalamat 3y ago
  > I think they really need to solve redundancy They could offer a service that backs up your local Umbrel server to their central servers. This would provide reassurance that your data is backed up, and give them a revenue stream.
SushiHippie 3y ago
My 2cts about Nextcloud and why *I* think it's not viable as an alternative for the average user: I host my own nextcloud since a few years. I mostly use it as an alternative for google photos/icloud photos, basically backing up all the images from my smartphone. Hosting the instance is one thing, but setting up the automatic upload on your phone is another thing. The automatic photo upload feature in the official nextcloud app is most of the time broken and slow. And on iOS you need to keep the nextcloud app open and the screen unlocked, otherwise it won't upload. That's why I use FolderSync on Android, but I don't think the average user wouldn't want to set this up and might even misconfigure it, which could just delete all images. And Nextcloud itself is just very slow. With google photos you can just scroll through thousands of images and easily find the image you took 3 years ago. If i do this in nextcloud, I already had the following stuff happen: - Your browser freezes - The Nextcloud server (php-fpm in my case) OOMs (it used around 15-20G of RAM) (The OOMs also often happen when syncing with FolderSync.) I definitely wouldn't recommend it as a google photos alternative. I'm not complaining as I didn't pay a penny for nextcloud itself (only the cost for the dedicated server I rent). And I still use it, as there is no better alternative. But for the "mass" there is no convenient and comparable alternative to the "surveillance capitalism" services. Nextcloud is good enough for me, as its the only viabke option, but IMO it doesn't cut it for leaving the other services at scale.
- pricechild 3y ago
  You're not wrong. Have you tried https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/memories https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/memories - it solves all of my issues with photo management in nextcloud. (Together with the recognise app) I don't see why they haven't replaced the default photos app with this already... I think improving the photos experience would have the biggest impact on home users, but nextcloud certainly seems to be chasing the enterprise/gov market in the EU? I'm not complaining!
  - SushiHippie 3y ago
    Yes, this makes it at least usable, without it it is even worse. But it is still worse compared to google photos/icloud photos/etc. The issues I described above also happened with memories. I think improving performance and memory usage in their webdav implementation would, by far, have the biggest impact. Nextcloud is a fork of Owncloud, and Owncloud did the right thing to move away from php for the webdav implementation, though they are now rewriting it once again, which I don't really like, as they store the files and all information in some binary format.
adolph 3y ago
I think anything done "at Scale" eventually resembles "Surveillance Capitalism" since most of the advantage of what is often referred to as "Capitalism" is people finding valuable uses for the refuse of others. An alternative more practical guide is Derek Siver's "Tech Independence" which as other's have noted has many dependencies. https://sive.rs/ti https://sive.rs/ti
tomxor 3y ago
> Data can become irrecoverable This seems to be becoming less and less of a drawback when compared to Google where exactly the same things can happen when people seem to get arbitrarily banned from their account with no recourse. Not to mention the recent push for passwordless keys that can be lost with the device. Sounds like it would be better if anything because at least you have to pay for the data hosting, and so being encrypted there's no way for them to block you for entirely opaque policies or decide one day that their abuse heuristics don't like you any more. In reality the primary friction to adoption with any of this entirely plausible tech is inertia. It's going to take something colossal fuck up to convince even a large minority to bother using non-free alternatives.
siliconc0w 3y ago
As a possible solution we can decouple data storage from data services. For data that doesn't need expensive computation, we can further decouple key owners from data storage. Users always own their data, they can choose which data services, storage, or key manager to use and they should all interoperate. This is already a pretty common pattern in the cloud, just the same business entity owns all three. You basically need legislation that says business entities must interoperate with different data storage or key providers. So you can subscribe to gmail from google and they store your data in Amazon or maybe EFF's data storage provider. You can then get fine-grained audit trail of how and when your data is accessed. We can then come up with standard rules like maybe your data is only accessible without your end-user credential (i.e your computer+password) for law enforcement or limited operational activities described by the provider and approved by you(or your delegate).
caseysoftware 3y ago
I've used https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ for years. It's great. First, it hides (most of) the ads making the internet more tolerable. Then it "opens" them in memory and clicks on ALL of them making your profile worthless. The last time I pulled up my Google profile, it said I was a 18-99yo, both male and female, and was interested in EVERY topic they listed. It works in both Brave and Chrome but isn't available in the Chrome Extension Store for some reason.. ;)
- blahyawnblah 3y ago
  Isn't this kind of unethical? There are plenty of people/companies running ads that are just trying to get some traffic and you're costing them money.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
    Ads are unethical. Loud annoyances plastered across the screen in a frail attempt to part me of my money after already stealing my time. Also Google is the one footing the bill, so if anything it’s unethical to not be running this.
- guilamu 3y ago
  More importantly it's available for Firefox.
- gear54rus 3y ago
  Can you share the link where you've seen your profile. I wanna see if AdNauseam is as effective on my side.
  - caseysoftware 3y ago
    https://myadcenter.google.com/ https://myadcenter.google.com/ and https://myaccount.google.com/data-and-privacy https://myaccount.google.com/data-and-privacy will show the stuff they share
bradford 3y ago
I'm of the opinion that 'surveillance capitalism', as described in this article, is a problem of policy/legality, not technology. Technology minded individuals keep looking for a technical solution to this problem. I'm hesitant that a technical solution exists. Unfortunately, I also don't expect Congress to promptly pass new legislation that competently addresses the problem. (I am more optimistic about the efforts by the EU and individual US states.)
- closeparen 3y ago
  Probably the most material privacy issue for most people is that very basic operations like establishing your identity, providing a contact method, and making a payment all involve giving your counterparty a long-lived identifier which they must keep secret and which anyone they leak it to (intentionally or not) can harm you by abusing. These identifiers are necessarily given out to hundreds of unsophisticated and often trashy operations like supermarkets, car dealers, e-commerce retailers, and soon (sadly) app developers. Unlike the FAANGs of the world, these people have never heard of cryptography and don’t blink twice about selling Excel spreadsheets for a few extra pennies. But the need to share secrets with them is a technological problem — public key cryptography could serve these used cases without giving the counterparty something to leak.
  - bradford 3y ago
    I may have interpreted the problems addressed in the article differently. Certainly, privacy incidents can occur due to mishandling of sensitive information (i.e., secrets, identifiers). Addressing these are a no-brainer and something that technology can and should address. I interpret the article as addressing a second kind of privacy issue that isn't due to mishandling. Instead, it's part of the profit model for many major tech companies: advertising. In this case, the privacy issue isn't a mishandling, it's by design and explicitly disclosed in the Terms of Service. (I can't say which one is a bigger issue at large, but I believe policy is needed to address the second issue).
loughnane 3y ago
I think for self-hosting as a service to take off you need to persuade people that it's 10x better for non-privacy reasons. That's hard to do because the biggest value prop for most folks would be media, but unless you already have a collection it's hard to legally get your hands on DRM-free digital media. When I look at the things I self-host it's mostly media (beets/navidrome/jellyfin/etc) and privacy/longevity-focused alternatives (photoprism/miniflux) Only a few (huginn/archivebox/rmfakecloud/llamacpp) are for general usefulness, but the applications are pretty tech-heavy and not for the average person. I wonder what applications would knock the socks off a non-technical person.
- rglullis 3y ago
  > unless you already have a collection it's hard to legally get your hands on DRM-free digital media. Sneakernet meets the fediverse: https://funkwhale.audio https://funkwhale.audio
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- MeltedVoltage 3y ago
  I think self-hosting could be viable for more people if two things would happen: - ISP's need to give a permanent IP's and more upload bandwidth in "regular", low-cost internet plans or at least a "self-hoster" addition - There needs to be a protocol standard to communicate with home routers for auto-configuring the network in a safe way to be able to access services and applications on certain devices outside of the local network. I don't think it currently is possible in a robust enough way With those two things I can imagine dedicated appliances that are accessible enough for non-technical users. But the experience has to be as seamless as video game consoles in order to reach "the masses"
  - loughnane 3y ago
    That's a good point. Last I checked I pay $15 for a static IP. For access, i feel something UX-friendly powered by wireguard could do the trick. My own use is to just flip the "connect to my home server" button in wireguard and then I have access to everything. I leave it on most of the time but still have to toggle it if things get weird. Seems like that ought to be able to be wrapped in something prettier. I def think a "box you set up" is the right way to do it.
dukeofdoom 3y ago
The problem is government. Even Trumps private twitter messages had been seized. If a former president can't protect his privacy...who can? Should you expect to have your personal communications just taken by a government bureaucrat any time they want. I think the problem id deeper than technical, it's a political and moral problem. Companies will cave and do what government tells them to comply.
familiaisall 3y ago
[flagged]
kredd 3y ago
Might be a tangential question, but does trying to escape surveillance matter? I somehow made myself believe that even if I self-host everything, avoid all the tracking, yada yada, unless everyone I hang out with does the same, the data brokers technically will get some information about me. Realistically, you have to be very tech-savvy to properly avoid tracking, and pretty much avoid any modern social life. That already excludes most of the people in this world. And I, for sure, don't want to live a bunker-basement family life, with no outside fun. In the end, I'm not sure how to solve it, and probably making it worse with my pessimism. But is this actually a winnable battle?
- l33t7332273 3y ago
  The amount that you “win” is inversely proportional to your participation in modern life. Personally I don’t consider privacy important enough to worry if the McDonald’s app harvests my data in exchange for the free coffee.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > The amount that you “win” is inversely proportional to your participation in modern life This is true, but I think that reducing participation in a dystopia isn't necessarily a bad thing.
- AJ007 3y ago
  You don't need to/probably can't avoid the data brokers, you just have to inject enough noise in to their data to make it worthless. The data brokers are probably the most benign of all of the parties that expose you to security risks. If you live in a high risk area (like Mexico), and are middle class or above, then you need to do some advanced stuff because cartels have access to things such as your live phone location data. Ultimately you can't escape surveillance in the general sense. You have a face (probably) and face tracking is ubiquitous and continuous. Google, Bing, and so on crippled their reverse image search for faces, but that misrepresents how good it is.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > does trying to escape surveillance matter? It certainly does to me. I can't plug all of the data leaks to these companies, of course, but this isn't an all-or-nothing sort of thing. Reducing the amount of leaking is still valuable.
pphysch 3y ago
> As Molly White said, “there are never purely technological solutions to societal problems”. I agree. It's Conway's Law on a national scale. In our advanced capitalist society, most governance is done by corporate hegemons (finance, insurance, real estate, marketing, etc), sometimes using the de jure government as a proxy. Our digital organization reflects exactly that! It is revealing that the best form of digital identification for each person are (secret) profiles created+sold by digital surveillance companies, rather than a robust + transparent digital citizenship that is managed strictly by a public entity and the subject themself. Some people react to the status quo by "running into the wilderness", either literally, or metaphorically by self-hosting everything. Either way, they often become digitally isolated and maintaining their personal kingdom becomes a lifelong task. It's not fixing the underlying societal dysfunction, just avoiding it.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > It's not fixing the underlying societal dysfunction, just avoiding it. Absolutely true. But as one of the people who do this, my response is: self-protection first. Then continue doing whatever you can do to make things better in the larger picture.
  - pphysch 3y ago
    I concur that individuality / individual sovereignty is a prerequisite a healthy society, but some people think its the ultimate goal rather than a first, limited step.
acd 3y ago
You cant escape data fusion and browser finger printing via canavas, fonts, plugins.
- wmf 3y ago
  You can escape fingerprinting if you use open source software that doesn't fingerprint you.
- isomorphic- 3y ago
  Take a look at LibreWolf. It "standardizes" all fingerprintable variables (canvas size, fonts, etc) so that you look like anybody else with a default config.
  - juunpp 3y ago
    You look like the other 2 dudes in the hood using LibreWolf among the other several hundred thousand people using Chrome.
say_it_as_it_is 3y ago
My current understanding is that the cost of "surveillance capitalism" has been more personalized advertising, but maybe I was under a rock for the last 20 years and missed this sensational story. Have people been discriminated against based on surveillance data? Are vehicle insurance companies going to be allowed to adjust insurance policies based on smart car surveillance, or health insurance companies adjusting policies based on consumption and behaviors? Are employers discriminating against people based on surveillance data describing their political ideologies? What's the big picture for 2023 in terms of what surveillance data is being used and how it's being used?
from-nibly 3y ago
Anyone ever thought of creating a drop in "cloud" machine that could host self hosted services with minimal technical knowhow? The biggest technical achievement that would make this intriguing for me would be family distributed backups. If I could buy like 3 or 4 of these and have it magically do multi site clustering and backups and have some sort of app store it might solve most of the issues. The provider of such a machine could also provide technical assistance in the form of: - DNS / domain registration - Host OS Updates - Encrypted cloud backups - Specialized router/firewalls to make it even easier to expose on the internet safely - Accessories like media archival equipment - Hardware upgrade kits I mean really just https://oxide.computer/ https://oxide.computer/ but for consumers.
- wmf 3y ago
  It was called Helm (no relation to the devops tool of the same name): http://web.archive.org/web/20220924051052/https://www.thehelm.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20220924051052/https://www.thehel...
  - from-nibly 3y ago
    Bummer that they weren't able to make it work.
- Geisterde 3y ago
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- steveklabnik 3y ago
  I know it's been a couple of days since you posted (I just saw this now), but we (Oxide) regularly get asked when we're gonna make a consumer-oriented product. It's not just you. Though I think most requests are more like "I want a workstation" rather than thinking about it a bit more deeply, as you are. I'm going to ruminate on this :) In our case it's not something we're pursuing near-term because well, part of the whole thesis is based on scale, so doing what we're doing but only for that doesn't make sense right now and we need to focus on the product we do have rather than developing additional products.
spaced-out 3y ago
I've yet to read a clear explanation of how "surveillance capitalism" is any different than regular capitalism with computers. As long as people are trying to make money they're going to try and crunch data to do it better. The only way I see to effect a real change in how companies collect and use data is with regulation.
cherryteastain 3y ago
I agree with the author's assessment that we have a societal problem first and foremost. However, a key component of that societal problem is that most (99%+) do not care about surveillance to the degree that they would change their behavior. Almost all my friends who use social media are aware the apps spy on them. They all have an anecdote like they were talking about X with their friend and when they scrolled Instagram/Tiktok an ad for X showed up, and they all say (unprompted) that it's creepy. When I suggest to them that maybe they should stop using Instagram etc, or at the very least use it on the website, to prevent this, the reaction invariably an excuse to keep using it. You can't tell these people to use Nextcloud or whatever over iCloud. They would never do it. The only thing that'd get them to switch is to offer more convenience/greater network events. Benjamin Franklin's famous quote goes "Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.". With tech, the same maxim applies, if you replace safety with convenience.
- splaca 3y ago
  Ben Franklin's phrase seems to be quoted often in this kind of discussion but I haven't seen anyone explain (1) why one thinks he's right; and (2) why that would translate to tech and surveillance. Or, to be more upfront: I simply don't think blaming individual people (and deciding whether they "deserve" whatever) is very fair or productive.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - whichfawkes 3y ago
    The fact is it doesn't matter what people "deserve". People who are willing to forsake some degree of convenience can be granted greater privacy by simply informing them. People who are seeking convenience will always be giving up something else. In this domain, they're often giving up privacy. A lot of people these days are essentially forced to seek convenience. They don't have the time or money to spare to do otherwise.
- fritzo 3y ago
WhackyIdeas 3y ago
A slight change of subject but not too much. An hour ago I walked into a Post Office somewhere in Scotland. I was immediately greeted with a screen hanging down from the ceiling. Onn the left 75% portion of the screen a bunch of different camera feeds and on the right portion, running vertically - still photos of my face and other customers faces who were currently in the shop. …And next to these still photos were things like: Age: Middle aged male Emotion: … Glasses: No Etc. I asked the shop keeper why they were showing this, and I was met with arguments like ‘these are everywhere’, ‘airports have them too’. I replied that an airport is understandably doing this, due to being a terrorism threat. But this was a small Post Office in a tiny village town in the countryside. So like comparing apples to toilet paper. I asked why the camera was trying to guess my emotion. To which I was replied to ‘if you are doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about’. Society has been so conditioned into the assumption that what we have today we will have tomorrow. Except in a world of potential Trumps, Xi Jinping, Putin and more… we are setting ourselves up for the complete unknown of tomorrow. This 1984 Scotland is now a place I feel like the reason to live has been dwindled down to just pure existence. I don’t think I had ever felt quite like this before this trip to the Post Office today. Life doesn’t feel like ours anymore. It’s someone else’s. The people behind the surveillance and the conditioned people who normalise it. Just because the technology exists, shouldn’t mean it needs to be used. When will people ever start respecting other’s privacy? And when will people ever give a damn about it. If this is already where we’re at in 2024, where are we all going to be by 2030? Is life as full of the same point today than what it was 10 years ago. And will it be less full of point by 2030. Edit: typos
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"We used to rely on software installed locally on our computers, and are now shifting towards a model based on services and companion apps, sometimes with free tiers and subscriptions." Everything I rely on is local. No reliance on remote services or companion apps. It is not like I haven't tried. I tried apps. But I failed to become addicted. I always end up accessing the endpoints from a laptop instead of a phone because it's easier and more flexible. I find a UNIX-like OS I can modify, compile and control paired with full-size keyboard and display to be more versatile. I still use offline storage. When it comes to the prognostication of so-called "tech" bloggers/journalists, "we" is not me. There was a story yesterday on HN about a school that does not allow smartphones. It described a multi-day school trip where no phones could be brought. After a short time, the article suggested none of the students missed their phones. This is how I see "services" and "companion apps". After a relatively short time without, people would forget about them. Whereas I am not going to forget about a UNIX-like OS that I can control and jump on to some new trend where I cede control to someone else. I rely on being able to control the computers I own. Giving away control is not an appealing proposition. The people marketing these "solutions" are certainly not ceding away any control. Instead they are gaining it over other peoples' computers in spades.
LikeBeans 3y ago
Honestly I'm not so much worried about using Google Photos. However I'm worried that I now can't easily leave due to the amount of photos we have. So here's my wish: I wish there is a service that can copy my photos in Google Photos to Amazon Prime Photos or iCloud. But without consuming my bandwidth or time. So like here's $20 or $50 and you duplicate my photos between the two and let me know when it is done. Perhaps I would do that once a year so needs to be incremental obviously.
pfannkuchen 3y ago
Not to be confused with “Surveilling escapist capitalism” (e.g. browsing the Netflix catalog).

[flagged]

rolobio 3y ago
After a bit of searching, apparently there is www.find.coop. I see most of the communities are in New York City. I'm sure they will welcome you in, just be sure to bring some money.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - rolobio 3y ago
    Perhaps there is a tree bark scroll somewhere... using lampblack ink... written by candlelight from wild bees' wax? Erm, which language is the least capitalist?
  - ta1243 3y ago
    Yet you participate in society, curious
    - NoboruWataya 3y ago
      The question is literally about escaping capitalism so it seems a fair response. "How do I complain about capitalism" is a different question and much easier to do.
      - orthecreedence 3y ago
        It's not a fair response. It's a consistently obnoxious response to people actively searching for a better world. Like, no shit your computer is produced under capitalism...that's the active and dominant mode of production. If you want to escape it, you don't escape the things produced by it, you actively work towards changing the way those things are produced. There is nothing meaningful or useful about the above response. "Oh, you don't like air pollution? Why do you keep breathing then??"
        theultdev 3y ago
        No, it's a facetious response to those who want to experiment with billions of people's lives to replace capitalism which has brought so many people out of poverty and hunger with an unstated system that will most likely resemble communism which will again starve hundreds of millions as it has countless of times. People can and do operate a commune within a capitalistic society. Go in with other people and buy some land to live off, make a contract to share all property. You can't do the inverse in a communistic society. But no, we all have to do it or it won't work, because apparently it's only possible at scale and it can't be explained until then. Convenient. So don't act like you can't go live life in a commune today, you can, just people don't, because capitalistic life is more comfortable. They'd rather complain online about other people's lives, using their iPhone, drinking Starbucks, thinking about how know best for all more than the great minds that created the society they take for granted.
        orthecreedence 3y ago
        > those who want to experiment with billions of people's lives Sorry, but you don't know that this is the method of anybody the response is targeted at. It's an ill-formed assumption, and many people are interested in counteracting the apparent and obvious detrimental aspects of capitalist society without violent revolution and totalitarian regimes. > People can and do operate a commune within a capitalistic society. Cool, good for them. Escapism isn't necessarily the goal, though. Obviously it depends on the person. > You can't do the inverse in a communistic society. Communism is the "free association of producers." If the producers wish to assign dictatorial control of their factory to one person and sell their labor to that person in exchange for a wage based on paper money, they are free to do so. But why would anybody willingly engage in this arrangement unless there is no alternative? > They'd rather complain online about other people's lives, using their iPhone, drinking Starbucks, thinking about how know best for all You have created a stereotype and are reinforcing it here. It's based in nothing. > more than the great minds that created the society they take for granted. Wait, capitalism was a constructed system? My impression is that it's a somewhat emergent system that started with feudalism and grew from there.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      > Yet you participate in society, curious Sorry - not following.
      - r721 3y ago
        It's a quote from comic: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-somewhat https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        Oh, I see. Thanks. Sadly that comic doesn't have any logic behind it. It's just to get you to memorise "this is how you should feel about people who make this argument".
martinbaun 3y ago
[flagged]
psychlops 3y ago
[flagged]
- miroljub 3y ago
  Why do you think all of these nations are not capitalistic in nature?
- stonogo 3y ago
  Do you actually think e.g. Vietnam or China are not engaged in capitalism, or is this just some culture war leaking into HN?
- polshaw 3y ago
  Wild that you try to include one of the most capitalist countries on earth, second in the number of billionaires only behind the USA, on the back of the fact that they have one-party rule with the word communist slapped onto it. The general (and often wilful) ignorance around the topic is astounding.
  - psychlops 3y ago
    Please share your ranking criteria. Is it billionaires per capita?
  - wry_discontent 3y ago
    I feel like this is really dependent on what you understand by "capitalism". Pretty sure the Marxists in the Communist Party of China would not consider what they do there capitalism.
- AJ007 3y ago
  That's not a good list because 3-8 are highly dependent on capitalism for their economies to function. They might have various levels of state control, but they are very much capitalism. Cuba and North Korea are much purer examples, though they relay on foreign production to some limited extent.
  - 3y ago
topaz0 3y ago
Maybe "What is to be done" by VI Lenin would be a good place to start. Though of course there are many such guides that don't always agree.
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
[flagged]
carlosjobim 3y ago
Self-employed, business registered in another country where you don't live, your business bank accounts and personal bank accounts in countries where neither you nor the business live, declare no taxes or declare zero revenue. This means you and your business will have to be self-sufficient. You're not going to have access to loans or investors. But you'll be out of the claws of the system and as free as can be.

This is so true and one of the reasons why (shameless plug coming in) I made our project management tool Goleko.com able to self-host without any connection to our main servers.

stcredzero 3y ago

It seems to me, that the Starlink 10GBit connection is almost designed for someone to put a server farm aboard a ship that only sails in international waters. Re: Escaping Capitalism I've encountered the communal experience which feels magical, like "everything is made out of love." Here's the thing about that. Scale matters. Alignment of incentives matter. The communal experience is going to start breaking down at around 450 members or so. The old Inca empire was an example of a large scale political organization which apparently worked. However, it also seems likely this also involved the killing of those who didn't cooperate. Perhaps superintelligent AI will enable an alternative to Capitalism, as envisioned in Ian M. Bank's Culture books?

robertlagrant 3y ago
As soon as we are post scarcity, we don't need capitalism any more, as capitalism is just a resource allocation mechanism. Til then, we probably do!
- ta1243 3y ago
  We've been post scarcity for "IP" for decades. The cost of making 1 copy of Barbie the Movie is the same as 1 billion copies.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Well, copying and pasting has been made easy. But making it is still hard - lots of resources to allocate there.
    - ta1243 3y ago
      Making the first requires resources. Making a billion copies doesn't. Same in a world with a star trek replicator. Making the first steak dinner requires resources, making the next billion doesn't
      - robertlagrant 3y ago

CYR1X 3y ago

Wait, the paid tier of a service that has a free tier almost never means they're stopping data collection at the free tier of users. This article seems to confuse that with switch to a different service provider that is paid only. It then goes into self-hosted, but wait why don't you just pay someone to self-host for you? Bad article.

dangus 3y ago
Yeah, there’s a huge difference between (e.g.) ProtonMail and “the new” Outlook. Some companies sell their privacy policies as a feature. The issue is that a lot of customers don’t really care about that feature and there’s no strong regulation to protect them.
- AJ007 3y ago
  The problem is avoiding "surveillance capitalism" or even generally "privacy" isn't a selling point for the mass market. Things which matter to people: - Do you like moderators in a foreign country being paid $2 an hour reviewing your personal photos? - Do you agree that your personal messages to a friend can be retroactively edited if you sent something that was "disinformation"? - Would you like files on your computer's personal hard drive copied in to a commercial cloud service and deleted locally because you accidentally mis-read or mis-read on a single pop-up message? - Would you like to read advertisements and news articles when launching your favorite application? - Would you like those ads and news articles to become more invasive over time based on which ones you looked at last time? - Would you like the owners of the app store you purchased your favorite app from make more net profit from the sale than the developer who built it? - Would you like your favorite app to run differently than it did yesterday, without choice or warning? - Would you like your favorite app to no longer be usable or downloadable because development ceased? Even someone who broadcasts their personal life publicly, with strong signals of their wealth and where they will be to rob or kidnap them, will have issues with things in this list.
  - pmontra 3y ago
    All of those points are unknown unknowns or minor inconveniences to all of my non technical friends except these two: > - Would you like files on your computer's personal hard drive copied in to a commercial cloud service and deleted locally because you accidentally mis-read or mis-read on a single pop-up message? A friend of mine was bitten by this and One Drive (is that the subject, right?) is really difficult to understand and get right. I had to configure it on a server of a customer. We needed a remote share and it does not behaves like that. Nobody expects it to work in the way it works. There is something wrong in all of its design and UX. > Would you like your favorite app to no longer be usable or downloadable because development ceased? Another friend of mine is keeping her very old phone alive because it's the only way to operate I don't remember what (heating?) The app does not work with both new Android and new iOS (she has both) so she has that old phone at home in a drawer. I just refuse to buy anything that requires an app to work. I want physical switches, knobs and displays built into the device.

gumballindie 3y ago

> Self-hosting, but as a service This is the way. As more and more ai is adopted, company and private data becomes more exposed. Businesses' intelligence getting stolen and shared with others is a no go for many rational business people. Self hosting is the way if you wish to keep your secrets. People too - you don't want your personal pictures, emails, and messages leaking into someone's prompt.

JohnFen 3y ago
It's not the way for me. If I'm being hosted on someone else's machine, then I'm still at the mercy of some company somewhere. It's not "self-hosting" in any sense that has value to me.

hnthrowaway0328 3y ago

I wonder what if people start to send 10x garbage data.

autoexec 3y ago
Surveillance capitalism doesn't care at all about the accuracy of the data that they have. There is literally no such thing as "garbage data" to data brokers. It's all just data, and all of it is valuable. That's why projects that claim to "pollute" your browsing history like RuinMyHistory, noiszy, adnauseam, and TrackMeNot are not only pointless but also dangerous. The data being collected about you will always be used against you, no matter if it is accurate or not. If your browser randomly browses to webpages that gets "this person is a muslim" or "this person is gay" added to your dossier it doesn't matter if it's true or not, when your next would-be employer or would-be landlord who hates muslims or gay people uses a data broker for "background checking" and sees that, you're not getting the job/apartment. They won't tell you why, you'll just be rejected/ghosted. If you're a 40 year old man, but your browser add-on convinces a data broker that you're a 34 year old woman seeking an abortion, that data can still cause you end up the target of a lawsuit in Texas and it will take a non-zero amount of time and money to clear that up. If someone in your zip code kills someone using a certain type of plant, or household cleaner/chemical, or medication and your add-on has been browsing sites about that thing, you can end up on the police's suspect list. If you only make $30,000 a year but your add-on searches for yachts and expensive jewelry often enough to convince a data broker that you've got tons of money then it doesn't matter that the data is wrong, the next time you try to book a hotel or order something online you can still be charged a lot more than you would have been charged otherwise. Handing extra fake data to people whose only goal is to use data against you is just handing them more ammunition. It doesn't matter if it's "garbage" to you, it's still something they can and will eventually use against you. You cannot know what will prejudice someone against you. The more data is in your dossier, the more opportunity there is that you'll meet the right (or wrong) criteria. No data broker is going to look over your dossier and see that there's inconsistencies and go "Damn it! This genius has ruined my data! Now I have to throw all this data away as it is now worthless!" They aren't even going to look over your dossier. They're going to get paid to hand over a list of people flagged as being 'X' and your name/address/identity will show up along with everyone else flagged as being 'X' even if your name gets pulled up again when someone else pays that same data broker for 'Y' which is the opposite of 'X'. The data broker gets paid either way.

smeej 3y ago

I really thought this article was going to offer a solution, not just enumerate the problems. I'm already all too familiar with the problems. I like what Umbrel[0] is doing. They're essentially expecting that just like computing was able to move from centralized mainframes to homes, servers are poised to make the same migration. I think they really need to solve redundancy, though. If I'm to self-host anything important on a home server, I need to know I'll have some way to use it even if my home server fails, especially if I'm not at home when it happens. I'd love to see some kind of system where I could partner up with other Umbrel users for backups/the ability to restore connectivity. If I knew that in an emergency, I could call my friend in town or my brother out of state and there was some procedure that would allow me to connect to an encrypted backup of what I'm needing, I would feel a lot better about taking responsibility for my own system. [0] https://umbrel.com https://umbrel.com

pcstl 3y ago
Is Umbrel just actually usable Urbit? [0] [0] https://urbit.org/ https://urbit.org/
- smeej 3y ago
  No, I don't think so. I think it's closer to "a plug-and-play computer for self-hostable apps, running locally, with most things configured so you're reasonably secure and you don't have to guess about everything."
  - pcstl 3y ago
    That's pretty much what Urbit wanted to be, to be fair, just with a strong networking component powered by a decentralized identity system. It's just too esoteric to have meaningful traction as that.
cabalamat 3y ago
> I think they really need to solve redundancy They could offer a service that backs up your local Umbrel server to their central servers. This would provide reassurance that your data is backed up, and give them a revenue stream.

SushiHippie 3y ago

My 2cts about Nextcloud and why *I* think it's not viable as an alternative for the average user: I host my own nextcloud since a few years. I mostly use it as an alternative for google photos/icloud photos, basically backing up all the images from my smartphone. Hosting the instance is one thing, but setting up the automatic upload on your phone is another thing. The automatic photo upload feature in the official nextcloud app is most of the time broken and slow. And on iOS you need to keep the nextcloud app open and the screen unlocked, otherwise it won't upload. That's why I use FolderSync on Android, but I don't think the average user wouldn't want to set this up and might even misconfigure it, which could just delete all images. And Nextcloud itself is just very slow. With google photos you can just scroll through thousands of images and easily find the image you took 3 years ago. If i do this in nextcloud, I already had the following stuff happen: - Your browser freezes - The Nextcloud server (php-fpm in my case) OOMs (it used around 15-20G of RAM) (The OOMs also often happen when syncing with FolderSync.) I definitely wouldn't recommend it as a google photos alternative. I'm not complaining as I didn't pay a penny for nextcloud itself (only the cost for the dedicated server I rent). And I still use it, as there is no better alternative. But for the "mass" there is no convenient and comparable alternative to the "surveillance capitalism" services. Nextcloud is good enough for me, as its the only viabke option, but IMO it doesn't cut it for leaving the other services at scale.

pricechild 3y ago
You're not wrong. Have you tried https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/memories https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/memories - it solves all of my issues with photo management in nextcloud. (Together with the recognise app) I don't see why they haven't replaced the default photos app with this already... I think improving the photos experience would have the biggest impact on home users, but nextcloud certainly seems to be chasing the enterprise/gov market in the EU? I'm not complaining!
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  Yes, this makes it at least usable, without it it is even worse. But it is still worse compared to google photos/icloud photos/etc. The issues I described above also happened with memories. I think improving performance and memory usage in their webdav implementation would, by far, have the biggest impact. Nextcloud is a fork of Owncloud, and Owncloud did the right thing to move away from php for the webdav implementation, though they are now rewriting it once again, which I don't really like, as they store the files and all information in some binary format.

adolph 3y ago

I think anything done "at Scale" eventually resembles "Surveillance Capitalism" since most of the advantage of what is often referred to as "Capitalism" is people finding valuable uses for the refuse of others. An alternative more practical guide is Derek Siver's "Tech Independence" which as other's have noted has many dependencies. https://sive.rs/ti https://sive.rs/ti

tomxor 3y ago

> Data can become irrecoverable This seems to be becoming less and less of a drawback when compared to Google where exactly the same things can happen when people seem to get arbitrarily banned from their account with no recourse. Not to mention the recent push for passwordless keys that can be lost with the device. Sounds like it would be better if anything because at least you have to pay for the data hosting, and so being encrypted there's no way for them to block you for entirely opaque policies or decide one day that their abuse heuristics don't like you any more. In reality the primary friction to adoption with any of this entirely plausible tech is inertia. It's going to take something colossal fuck up to convince even a large minority to bother using non-free alternatives.

siliconc0w 3y ago

As a possible solution we can decouple data storage from data services. For data that doesn't need expensive computation, we can further decouple key owners from data storage. Users always own their data, they can choose which data services, storage, or key manager to use and they should all interoperate. This is already a pretty common pattern in the cloud, just the same business entity owns all three. You basically need legislation that says business entities must interoperate with different data storage or key providers. So you can subscribe to gmail from google and they store your data in Amazon or maybe EFF's data storage provider. You can then get fine-grained audit trail of how and when your data is accessed. We can then come up with standard rules like maybe your data is only accessible without your end-user credential (i.e your computer+password) for law enforcement or limited operational activities described by the provider and approved by you(or your delegate).

caseysoftware 3y ago

I've used https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ for years. It's great. First, it hides (most of) the ads making the internet more tolerable. Then it "opens" them in memory and clicks on ALL of them making your profile worthless. The last time I pulled up my Google profile, it said I was a 18-99yo, both male and female, and was interested in EVERY topic they listed. It works in both Brave and Chrome but isn't available in the Chrome Extension Store for some reason.. ;)

blahyawnblah 3y ago
Isn't this kind of unethical? There are plenty of people/companies running ads that are just trying to get some traffic and you're costing them money.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tourmalinetaco 3y ago
  Ads are unethical. Loud annoyances plastered across the screen in a frail attempt to part me of my money after already stealing my time. Also Google is the one footing the bill, so if anything it’s unethical to not be running this.
guilamu 3y ago
More importantly it's available for Firefox.
gear54rus 3y ago
Can you share the link where you've seen your profile. I wanna see if AdNauseam is as effective on my side.
- caseysoftware 3y ago
  https://myadcenter.google.com/ https://myadcenter.google.com/ and https://myaccount.google.com/data-and-privacy https://myaccount.google.com/data-and-privacy will show the stuff they share

bradford 3y ago

I'm of the opinion that 'surveillance capitalism', as described in this article, is a problem of policy/legality, not technology. Technology minded individuals keep looking for a technical solution to this problem. I'm hesitant that a technical solution exists. Unfortunately, I also don't expect Congress to promptly pass new legislation that competently addresses the problem. (I am more optimistic about the efforts by the EU and individual US states.)

closeparen 3y ago
Probably the most material privacy issue for most people is that very basic operations like establishing your identity, providing a contact method, and making a payment all involve giving your counterparty a long-lived identifier which they must keep secret and which anyone they leak it to (intentionally or not) can harm you by abusing. These identifiers are necessarily given out to hundreds of unsophisticated and often trashy operations like supermarkets, car dealers, e-commerce retailers, and soon (sadly) app developers. Unlike the FAANGs of the world, these people have never heard of cryptography and don’t blink twice about selling Excel spreadsheets for a few extra pennies. But the need to share secrets with them is a technological problem — public key cryptography could serve these used cases without giving the counterparty something to leak.
- bradford 3y ago
  I may have interpreted the problems addressed in the article differently. Certainly, privacy incidents can occur due to mishandling of sensitive information (i.e., secrets, identifiers). Addressing these are a no-brainer and something that technology can and should address. I interpret the article as addressing a second kind of privacy issue that isn't due to mishandling. Instead, it's part of the profit model for many major tech companies: advertising. In this case, the privacy issue isn't a mishandling, it's by design and explicitly disclosed in the Terms of Service. (I can't say which one is a bigger issue at large, but I believe policy is needed to address the second issue).

loughnane 3y ago

I think for self-hosting as a service to take off you need to persuade people that it's 10x better for non-privacy reasons. That's hard to do because the biggest value prop for most folks would be media, but unless you already have a collection it's hard to legally get your hands on DRM-free digital media. When I look at the things I self-host it's mostly media (beets/navidrome/jellyfin/etc) and privacy/longevity-focused alternatives (photoprism/miniflux) Only a few (huginn/archivebox/rmfakecloud/llamacpp) are for general usefulness, but the applications are pretty tech-heavy and not for the average person. I wonder what applications would knock the socks off a non-technical person.

rglullis 3y ago
> unless you already have a collection it's hard to legally get your hands on DRM-free digital media. Sneakernet meets the fediverse: https://funkwhale.audio https://funkwhale.audio
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
MeltedVoltage 3y ago
I think self-hosting could be viable for more people if two things would happen: - ISP's need to give a permanent IP's and more upload bandwidth in "regular", low-cost internet plans or at least a "self-hoster" addition - There needs to be a protocol standard to communicate with home routers for auto-configuring the network in a safe way to be able to access services and applications on certain devices outside of the local network. I don't think it currently is possible in a robust enough way With those two things I can imagine dedicated appliances that are accessible enough for non-technical users. But the experience has to be as seamless as video game consoles in order to reach "the masses"
- loughnane 3y ago
  That's a good point. Last I checked I pay $15 for a static IP. For access, i feel something UX-friendly powered by wireguard could do the trick. My own use is to just flip the "connect to my home server" button in wireguard and then I have access to everything. I leave it on most of the time but still have to toggle it if things get weird. Seems like that ought to be able to be wrapped in something prettier. I def think a "box you set up" is the right way to do it.

dukeofdoom 3y ago

The problem is government. Even Trumps private twitter messages had been seized. If a former president can't protect his privacy...who can? Should you expect to have your personal communications just taken by a government bureaucrat any time they want. I think the problem id deeper than technical, it's a political and moral problem. Companies will cave and do what government tells them to comply.

familiaisall 3y ago

[flagged]

kredd 3y ago

Might be a tangential question, but does trying to escape surveillance matter? I somehow made myself believe that even if I self-host everything, avoid all the tracking, yada yada, unless everyone I hang out with does the same, the data brokers technically will get some information about me. Realistically, you have to be very tech-savvy to properly avoid tracking, and pretty much avoid any modern social life. That already excludes most of the people in this world. And I, for sure, don't want to live a bunker-basement family life, with no outside fun. In the end, I'm not sure how to solve it, and probably making it worse with my pessimism. But is this actually a winnable battle?

l33t7332273 3y ago
The amount that you “win” is inversely proportional to your participation in modern life. Personally I don’t consider privacy important enough to worry if the McDonald’s app harvests my data in exchange for the free coffee.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > The amount that you “win” is inversely proportional to your participation in modern life This is true, but I think that reducing participation in a dystopia isn't necessarily a bad thing.
AJ007 3y ago
You don't need to/probably can't avoid the data brokers, you just have to inject enough noise in to their data to make it worthless. The data brokers are probably the most benign of all of the parties that expose you to security risks. If you live in a high risk area (like Mexico), and are middle class or above, then you need to do some advanced stuff because cartels have access to things such as your live phone location data. Ultimately you can't escape surveillance in the general sense. You have a face (probably) and face tracking is ubiquitous and continuous. Google, Bing, and so on crippled their reverse image search for faces, but that misrepresents how good it is.
JohnFen 3y ago
> does trying to escape surveillance matter? It certainly does to me. I can't plug all of the data leaks to these companies, of course, but this isn't an all-or-nothing sort of thing. Reducing the amount of leaking is still valuable.

pphysch 3y ago

> As Molly White said, “there are never purely technological solutions to societal problems”. I agree. It's Conway's Law on a national scale. In our advanced capitalist society, most governance is done by corporate hegemons (finance, insurance, real estate, marketing, etc), sometimes using the de jure government as a proxy. Our digital organization reflects exactly that! It is revealing that the best form of digital identification for each person are (secret) profiles created+sold by digital surveillance companies, rather than a robust + transparent digital citizenship that is managed strictly by a public entity and the subject themself. Some people react to the status quo by "running into the wilderness", either literally, or metaphorically by self-hosting everything. Either way, they often become digitally isolated and maintaining their personal kingdom becomes a lifelong task. It's not fixing the underlying societal dysfunction, just avoiding it.

JohnFen 3y ago
> It's not fixing the underlying societal dysfunction, just avoiding it. Absolutely true. But as one of the people who do this, my response is: self-protection first. Then continue doing whatever you can do to make things better in the larger picture.
- pphysch 3y ago
  I concur that individuality / individual sovereignty is a prerequisite a healthy society, but some people think its the ultimate goal rather than a first, limited step.

acd 3y ago

You cant escape data fusion and browser finger printing via canavas, fonts, plugins.

wmf 3y ago
You can escape fingerprinting if you use open source software that doesn't fingerprint you.
isomorphic- 3y ago
Take a look at LibreWolf. It "standardizes" all fingerprintable variables (canvas size, fonts, etc) so that you look like anybody else with a default config.
- juunpp 3y ago
  You look like the other 2 dudes in the hood using LibreWolf among the other several hundred thousand people using Chrome.

say_it_as_it_is 3y ago

My current understanding is that the cost of "surveillance capitalism" has been more personalized advertising, but maybe I was under a rock for the last 20 years and missed this sensational story. Have people been discriminated against based on surveillance data? Are vehicle insurance companies going to be allowed to adjust insurance policies based on smart car surveillance, or health insurance companies adjusting policies based on consumption and behaviors? Are employers discriminating against people based on surveillance data describing their political ideologies? What's the big picture for 2023 in terms of what surveillance data is being used and how it's being used?

from-nibly 3y ago

Anyone ever thought of creating a drop in "cloud" machine that could host self hosted services with minimal technical knowhow? The biggest technical achievement that would make this intriguing for me would be family distributed backups. If I could buy like 3 or 4 of these and have it magically do multi site clustering and backups and have some sort of app store it might solve most of the issues. The provider of such a machine could also provide technical assistance in the form of: - DNS / domain registration - Host OS Updates - Encrypted cloud backups - Specialized router/firewalls to make it even easier to expose on the internet safely - Accessories like media archival equipment - Hardware upgrade kits I mean really just https://oxide.computer/ https://oxide.computer/ but for consumers.

wmf 3y ago
It was called Helm (no relation to the devops tool of the same name): http://web.archive.org/web/20220924051052/https://www.thehelm.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20220924051052/https://www.thehel...
- from-nibly 3y ago
  Bummer that they weren't able to make it work.
Geisterde 3y ago
[dead]
steveklabnik 3y ago
I know it's been a couple of days since you posted (I just saw this now), but we (Oxide) regularly get asked when we're gonna make a consumer-oriented product. It's not just you. Though I think most requests are more like "I want a workstation" rather than thinking about it a bit more deeply, as you are. I'm going to ruminate on this :) In our case it's not something we're pursuing near-term because well, part of the whole thesis is based on scale, so doing what we're doing but only for that doesn't make sense right now and we need to focus on the product we do have rather than developing additional products.

spaced-out 3y ago

I've yet to read a clear explanation of how "surveillance capitalism" is any different than regular capitalism with computers. As long as people are trying to make money they're going to try and crunch data to do it better. The only way I see to effect a real change in how companies collect and use data is with regulation.

cherryteastain 3y ago

I agree with the author's assessment that we have a societal problem first and foremost. However, a key component of that societal problem is that most (99%+) do not care about surveillance to the degree that they would change their behavior. Almost all my friends who use social media are aware the apps spy on them. They all have an anecdote like they were talking about X with their friend and when they scrolled Instagram/Tiktok an ad for X showed up, and they all say (unprompted) that it's creepy. When I suggest to them that maybe they should stop using Instagram etc, or at the very least use it on the website, to prevent this, the reaction invariably an excuse to keep using it. You can't tell these people to use Nextcloud or whatever over iCloud. They would never do it. The only thing that'd get them to switch is to offer more convenience/greater network events. Benjamin Franklin's famous quote goes "Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.". With tech, the same maxim applies, if you replace safety with convenience.

splaca 3y ago
Ben Franklin's phrase seems to be quoted often in this kind of discussion but I haven't seen anyone explain (1) why one thinks he's right; and (2) why that would translate to tech and surveillance. Or, to be more upfront: I simply don't think blaming individual people (and deciding whether they "deserve" whatever) is very fair or productive.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- whichfawkes 3y ago
  The fact is it doesn't matter what people "deserve". People who are willing to forsake some degree of convenience can be granted greater privacy by simply informing them. People who are seeking convenience will always be giving up something else. In this domain, they're often giving up privacy. A lot of people these days are essentially forced to seek convenience. They don't have the time or money to spare to do otherwise.
fritzo 3y ago

WhackyIdeas 3y ago

A slight change of subject but not too much. An hour ago I walked into a Post Office somewhere in Scotland. I was immediately greeted with a screen hanging down from the ceiling. Onn the left 75% portion of the screen a bunch of different camera feeds and on the right portion, running vertically - still photos of my face and other customers faces who were currently in the shop. …And next to these still photos were things like: Age: Middle aged male Emotion: … Glasses: No Etc. I asked the shop keeper why they were showing this, and I was met with arguments like ‘these are everywhere’, ‘airports have them too’. I replied that an airport is understandably doing this, due to being a terrorism threat. But this was a small Post Office in a tiny village town in the countryside. So like comparing apples to toilet paper. I asked why the camera was trying to guess my emotion. To which I was replied to ‘if you are doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about’. Society has been so conditioned into the assumption that what we have today we will have tomorrow. Except in a world of potential Trumps, Xi Jinping, Putin and more… we are setting ourselves up for the complete unknown of tomorrow. This 1984 Scotland is now a place I feel like the reason to live has been dwindled down to just pure existence. I don’t think I had ever felt quite like this before this trip to the Post Office today. Life doesn’t feel like ours anymore. It’s someone else’s. The people behind the surveillance and the conditioned people who normalise it. Just because the technology exists, shouldn’t mean it needs to be used. When will people ever start respecting other’s privacy? And when will people ever give a damn about it. If this is already where we’re at in 2024, where are we all going to be by 2030? Is life as full of the same point today than what it was 10 years ago. And will it be less full of point by 2030. Edit: typos

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

"We used to rely on software installed locally on our computers, and are now shifting towards a model based on services and companion apps, sometimes with free tiers and subscriptions." Everything I rely on is local. No reliance on remote services or companion apps. It is not like I haven't tried. I tried apps. But I failed to become addicted. I always end up accessing the endpoints from a laptop instead of a phone because it's easier and more flexible. I find a UNIX-like OS I can modify, compile and control paired with full-size keyboard and display to be more versatile. I still use offline storage. When it comes to the prognostication of so-called "tech" bloggers/journalists, "we" is not me. There was a story yesterday on HN about a school that does not allow smartphones. It described a multi-day school trip where no phones could be brought. After a short time, the article suggested none of the students missed their phones. This is how I see "services" and "companion apps". After a relatively short time without, people would forget about them. Whereas I am not going to forget about a UNIX-like OS that I can control and jump on to some new trend where I cede control to someone else. I rely on being able to control the computers I own. Giving away control is not an appealing proposition. The people marketing these "solutions" are certainly not ceding away any control. Instead they are gaining it over other peoples' computers in spades.

LikeBeans 3y ago

Honestly I'm not so much worried about using Google Photos. However I'm worried that I now can't easily leave due to the amount of photos we have. So here's my wish: I wish there is a service that can copy my photos in Google Photos to Amazon Prime Photos or iCloud. But without consuming my bandwidth or time. So like here's $20 or $50 and you duplicate my photos between the two and let me know when it is done. Perhaps I would do that once a year so needs to be incremental obviously.

pfannkuchen 3y ago

Not to be confused with “Surveilling escapist capitalism” (e.g. browsing the Netflix catalog).