Agree. Also it creates a false dichotomy in peoples minds. If you fight the orwellian creep into every kind of tech, you must not care about the children! What kind of sociopath is against protecting children!!

Really, I do believe there are many parts of the world children should be protected from. But NOT by giving away our freedom. NOT by turning the world into one huge mass survielance device. NOT by going full 1984. I can be in favor of protecting children even if I object to dragnet surveilance.

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100% mobile app based public transport, meaning that there is no way of buying or showing a ticket unless it’s the app

Wow. That’s awful. How does it work for poor people who can’t afford a phone to run the app?

Where I live the city buses still accept cash. But I don’t know for how much longer.

I try to get everyone of my friends to pay for everythng with cash. Food, buses, restaurants. Just to support the privacy option, so we don’t lose it. But they think payment apps are more convenient so they don’t listen, lol.

Without that, a lot of apps just don’t behave right,

Agree with what you said. And if I may add a little? Apps not behaving right extends to things average people see as essential in thier life. Like banking apps refusing to run on “untrusted devices”.

Techies can get around most of it. At least today, maybe not in the future. For example use the bank’s web site directly not their app. But my nontechie friends have no idea. From their perspective, something like an alternative to Android simply doesn’t work for what they are used to.

Vendor lock-in.

Can you imagine a company like dell decided tomorrow to only allow installation from their specific vendor locked market?

TBH this possibility does scare me. That we could lose this freedom too on PC.

Today already, most PC come with Microsoft’s secure boot keys in firmware. Microsoft signs the install keys for many Linux distros. It isn’t totally locked down, b/c you can turn this off in UEFI. But most of the pieces exist. Frog and pot…

The PC platform is “open”, oh yes… but when Microsoft says jump, PC mfgs ask how high. We could somday see pressure to lock down all computing, not just mobile. To protect the children, you know…

Yah, there might be something to that. For protection against style + vocab matching.

It sucks though. I recently read where the more people use LLM assisters when they write, the more the whole virtual commons grows bland. It feeds back upon itself.

Sigh. I just want a world where we can have nice things. And assholes don’t try to ruin the nice things we could have.

new circle of Hell for backers of mass surveillance

A perpetual itch between the thumb toe and the next one, and they must wear shoes 18 hours each day so they can’t reach the itch.

Well, sure, but it isn’t JUST an American thing, even today. Like Buelldozer said, it’s starting all over the globe. Some further than others ofc.

Some are starting to ban VPNs to prevent people from bypassing the ID laws. Not sure where it stands rn but some UK MEPs or w/e they’re called in the UK were pushing for that.

Agree. Another benefit is, it’s much less productive to use info-warfare bots against a small forum of let’s say 500 users, than against a global site with 1B users.

Agree, hard indeed. Any solution will have problems. False positives. False negatves. Violating privacy.

So far, maybe Lemmy flew under the radar and it’s a nice enough place. But I don’t see how that can continue longterm.

It is sad to me. Anything nice eventually gets ruined.

Friends and family will be so excited for you and optimistically update your address in there phone book.

Oh yes! I have experienced this already! They put it in their contacts and then every sketch weather app and recipe app scrapes it. My friends are kind and well meaning, but hey have no idea how the information economy works. They do not understand how much data they are giving away about themselves but abotu me too!

have an attorney list his name for all utilities

That is what Michel Bazzel talks about too in his book, but it seems like this is difficult to find someone to do that. And it makes other kinds of things difficult too, if the residence is not tied to your name. I have had cases where I had to supply a “utility bill” tying my real name to my residence, in order to get some other kind of service I needed, or part of KYC.

I fear you are right about the difficulty of this. I don’t think it is exactly impossible. But very difficult, for sure!

Thank you for this. I am glad to hear you had success!

I do most of those, but not so far number 4.

I don’t know about utilities though. I believe that my current power company sells their customer lists, because I get junk mail at a misspelling of my name on file with them.

Did you have any trouble with moving companies? I didn’t move since the “surveillance economy”. It is hard for me to imagine moving companies wouldn’t capitalize on selling your new address where they had to deliver.

I have also heard that it is better not to file a change of address form with the post office. Instead to change the address on file with your charge card companies or banks directly.

Link for the event f4 is talking about:

https://www.popsci.com/technology/robot-vacuum-army/

He also gave his famous opinion about Facebook users. Deep down, he agrees with privacy advocates. The diff is that he’s a shitty enough person to take advantage of the less techy people out there even if his society will be damaged badly in the process. Most of us are not that shitty.

they trust me

dumb fucks

I think we can move beyond Facebook here. Trusting big tech with your data never works out well.

Theoretically if you never hook a smart TV to the net it shouldn’t be able to spy.

I think you are right (today!), but look what happens with cars… the car connects to a wireless network without asking you, to send back telemetry. The cost of doing that is coming down all the time, and there is a big juicy profit stream just waiting to be harvested. I will not be surprised if we see TVs do this eventually, like cars do already.

They could also be designed to simply refuse to function if they can’t connect. I didn’t hear about any like this so far, but it feels like a matter of time. Enshittification comes for everything.

I don’t get the idea that after all the shit they pulled someone’s like “well maybe this new thing’s nice”.

I look at my friends who do this even though I advize them not to. For them, data is invisible and out of sight, out of mind. Their TV is a consumer device like IDK a toaster or washing machien. They put it online with no real thought to data or privacy. From their perspective this is normal. Their neighbors all do it with their TVs. Their friends all do it! I am the only one who makes a warning to them. Everyone else they know does it. Who wouldn’t want a “smart” TV???

They don’t understand tech very well and they feel like what they see most people doing must be good. They are not thinking about the eroding effect on their whole society from normalizing dragnet surveillance and total privacy loss. It’s too abstract, and the allure of the shiny is too much.

Funny to see twenty-odd years later we are stuck in the same throttling ecperience us dial-up users had to experience organically.

Moore’s law. “Every 18 months, the number of transistors on a chip doubles.”

Gates’ Law. “Every 18 months, the speed of software is cut in half.”

It is backed up alongwith everything else, all my data, under a normal 3-2-1 idea, but 5-3-1.

Each of the copies on separate media inc my main PC is also versioned. I keep 12 hourly versions, 7 daily versions, 4 weekly versions, 12 monthly versions, and then per-year versions going way back. This helps protect against corruption, like I accidentally deleted an keepassxc entry without noticing right away or w/e.

Granted I didn’t use it to create my account

I bet that’s like 90% of what they care about tho. They really want to ID you when you first sign up, but they might care not as much about day to day use.

It’s fuzzier with reddit tho. Used to be you could sign up with a VPN with success. Some still have accts made like that. They are much sticklier now. It maybe possible but just rarely, and nobody seems to know what makes the diff. It also used to be posible to sign up with Tor, but today that’s instant shadowban.

My side rant is that shadowbans are MF-ing evil. I got caught in one because I used a VPN to sign up. I only ever tried to answer people on a tech help sub. I was posting in good faith. Tried to be helpful and contribute to the community. But none of my posts were ever being engaged with. No upvotes, no downvotes, no replies. Finally I looked without being signed in (“open in private window”) and sure enough… nobody but me could see my posts.

It felt bad, man. I put my time and effort into trying to help other people, for nothing.

It’s very difficult to not be truly unique if someone out there is purposefully tracking you as an individual.

And the neat part about that is… it used to be very expensive to do it. Now it blew right on through free, and into highly profitable. So it can be done to everyone everywhere at every moment.

No one knows how many people the Nazis employed to spy on the rest. Some estimates are like 1/4 of the population spied on the others! Today? We can put that to shame using only 0.01% or w/e of our population to spies on the rest. B/c that 0.01% has surveilance tools unimaginably powerful compared to anything the Nazis dreamed about.

There is a place in the world for targeted surveilance of bad people, mass murders, drug kingpins, w/e. You get a judge to sign off, and go to town. But dragnet surveilance of everyone at all times erodes the foundation of free societies.