What the article misses a bit, in my opinion, is that protection of privacy is also a protection of collective freedom - very similar to freedom of speech, or protection of one’s living space from search without a warrant. Like “Saying I don’t need privacy because I have nothing to hide is like saying we don’t need free speech, because I have nothing to say”.
This is an abstract concept, but the case of Cambridge Analytica and its interference in the UK’s Brexit referendum is a great example about the enormous real consequences. (More on this in Carole Cadwalladrs “The Great British Brexit Robbery”, which was for some time “de-published” (ahem) from The Guardian but you can find it in the web.)
They make it literally impossible, even if they give you settings to toggle off, they’ll just introduce a new feature that comes conveniently already selected yes.
Not if you control the updates.
But to do that you have to have an absolute zero-tolerance policy for proprietary tyrant devices. Only Linux (or other Free Software) PCs. Only Graphene, Lineage, or similar on your phone. No new TVs, no new cars. No “smart” devices unless they’ve been flashed with ESPHome or Tasmota and only connect to Home Assistant. OpenWRT or OpnSense on your router.
Basically, you need to be a skilled IT person and willing to devote time for it all. But it can be done, with difficulty.
It doesn’t need to be black & white either. For absolute privacy, sure, it is a PITA to get everything running, but you don’t need to go all in to reduce your footprint on the internet. Moving email out of gmail is a start. Signal on the side of whatsapp is a step forward. Bazzite instead of Windows on your old gaming rig is a pretty decent leap. And so on.
And self hosting is getting more and more feasible. Home Assistant is something you can just buy and plug in to start moving from Alexa to FOSS variant. Immich is fairly easy to get running to move from Google Photos / iCloud to your own devices (just remember backups).
And even if you want to just consume services, there’s other options than just Google/Microsoft/Apple around. Every small step counts and affects on what data “they” have on you to sell.
Sure, but you can probably get 80% of the way there a lot easier. Getting to 100% is hard AF though.
Changing settings in software provided by tech companies is not going to improve that.
You need software that you truly control youself. Like Linux. And by the way, Linux has become surprisingly easy to use.
I often feel a little ‘legislative paralysis’. On the one hand, I want as little government interference in the free web as possible. On the other hand we can see first hand that web anarchy collapses into web oligarchy. I guess the EU is demonstrating that targeted legislation, like one click unsubscribe or one click cookie denial, can improve the web experience and privacy even beyond their borders. Baby steps… When do we get one click delete all my data? And when does a single page start caring whether my browser sends a Do not track request or not? Until then, it’s back to private privacy measures… Even if that’s an uphill battle.
Yes. True. And also alternatives are nice.
