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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

by 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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

by kredd 3y ago

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.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]