Over the past several months, I’ve been going down the privacy rabbit hole and started ditching centralized, non-E2EE services like Discord. I’ve been avoiding mainstream services and managed to coax a couple of my existing Discord friends (though not most of them) to use more private services like Matrix.
There’s only one problem: Nobody uses them. There is virtually no way to meet like-minded people who live near me because there just aren’t enough people or communities on there. Even on Lemmy (which I know isn’t totally private, but still beats Reddit) doesn’t have the volume needed to come across a lot of people who live near me. I want to meet people. I want to have friends in real life.
I don’t live in an urban planner’s utopia. I live in a car-dependent suburb on the outskirts of a city. You can’t just walk outside and meet a bunch of people, not with all of the “get off my lawn” types everywhere. You have to go somewhere else to meet people. There are cameras everywhere, so you will probably be seen in most normal meetup spots. Not to mention all of the phones.
I hate to say it, but I don’t see how it’s feasible to meet up with normal people without some corporation or the government finding out where you’re going and who you’re associated with, at least not in the U.S. where I live.
If we insist on living as hermits who only use obscure Internet services, aren’t we ceding influence to the exact forces that are ruining society in the first place? Aren’t we at our weakest when we’re isolated and alone, yelling into an echo chamber of scattered individuals instead of forming strong local communities in the real world and educating people who aren’t fully in the know?
I’m not saying that these services don’t have value; I’m just starting to doubt that you can make new irl friends and be totally private at the same time. Showing up to a meetup or event with a bunch of face-covering gear and telling people to follow you to a remote place where there aren’t any cameras is probably going to raise some major red flags.
But maybe I’m taking it too literally. Maybe private services are more for discussing sensitive stuff with people you already know. That’s why I wanted to ask Lemmy. What do you think? How do you approach this tradeoff between privacy and staying connected with everyday people?
At some point, you’ll have to decide what you’re doing all this for, and if it’s worth all the trouble.
Going by that logic, it would be safer to not go to these meetups, or any meetup at all. After all, every contact you have is a form of exposure.
If we’re to take this to the extreme, you could live in the woods, with no human contact at all.
However, is this really what you want? You do have a lifestyle to sustain. Odds are, you’ve lived in the society your whole life. You’d need a decent paying job, as even having this very post would cost you something more than just your time.
The next question: what’s at stake for you here? Would having your face caught at the security camera jeopardize you? Are you a world class criminal, or a retired one with your employer seeking your head to put on a pole? Are you running away from an abusive spouse? Are you running for office against certain tyrant? If you answer yes to any of these questions, then yes, you’d have to inspect every interaction you have and weight the risk against the potential gain.
Otherwise, odds are you’re doing this out of curiosity and, to some extent, pleasure. To which I would ask: would limitting your social interaction ‘please’ you?
Take a chance with Signal app. Most of the time people have it already or will be willing to, as it’s reaally close to what they’re used to. So far converted family and some friends, am working on remaining. Damn youngsters and their Snapchat, damn millenials with their meta
Could be a good question for !privacy@programming.dev
Meeting new people acquires a decided level of non-privacy.
You can go to church, find a volunteer group, find a leisure activity club, find a sports club. If you want relative privacy, social networking is not the way to meet people.
If you treat privacy as all-or-nothing, “total privacy” would imply no one has any kind of information at all about you. The only way for no one to know who you are is to completely disconnect yourself from society.
Rather than thinking in terms of “total privacy”, you should just aim to be as responsible as you can with what information you share with who, while recognizing that participating in society is itself a compromise you are already making. If your end goal isn’t to completely hide from the world, then don’t make yourself miserable trying to pursue that.
What’s the old saying, “Edison worked by gaslight while perfecting the lightbulb”?
I think that applies here. To a certain degree we still often have to participate in imperfect systems while we advocate for better ones. The people working on renewables or electric vehicles still used electricity from coal plants and gas guzzling vehicles. Many of us can see how extractive capitalism is hurting us and our communities, yet we’re forced to participate in it to eat.
I’d select one or maybe two services you can tolerate that are the tools best suited for building your tribe. Insulate them the best you can, be conscious of your own usage of those platforms, and talk… A LOT… about why privacy matters and what these platforms are doing.
A lot of people simply don’t know or don’t know there’s a community trying desperately to build alternatives. Perhaps a community also still flawed, but **progress is greater than perfection! **
As far as cameras go, understand your routes best you can. Be a blip instead of a constant feed. Same with online presence. OK. They know John Doe number 1.5 million and twenty-two exists- but you have some control over whether they know which direction you wipe your bunghole. Take the small victories!
Use and hack the systems that exist today to build better ones for tomorrow.
And whatever you do be careful you don’t become like my great uncle— he thought the Soviet’s had microphones under his plates and spies were hiding in his closet (he was a farmer from podunk nowhere.) but he also fed his tractor hay so— that might have just been schizophrenia…
But, seek balance today so you don’t go mad tomorrow! And if you start feeding your tractor hay, seek help.
Unfortunately yes. And even then, just having friends is still a privacy liability. Early on the Facebook app for Android would straight up just upload your contacts without asking, so they knew about me well before I caved in and made an account. Or, I’d give my number to someone and suddenly Facebook knows and asks me to friend them.
Not that it’s a new threat: even pre-industrialization, you’d tell a friend a secret and before you knew it the whole village knew.
People are mostly incapable of caring for anyone’s privacy but themselves.
Yes, and you came to the conclusion yourself at the end. Why do you need to stop using discord? Yes lots of people have complaints about it (valid) complaints, but you can prevent discord from tracking your location and why would you be discussing private stuff in there in the first place.
It’s going to be an incredibly difficult life to go full privacy. You can beat 99% of people with just Adblock and pi.hole. Every step further really just gets you slightly more invisible. Getting an iPhone and using their mode for protecting against state hackers is as far as I’d ever go and even that’s just not necessary.
Why do you need to stop using discord?
I’m worried about the current U.S. political climate. Discord is an American company with data about what millions of people are talking about, including their political opinions, minority status, and what groups they associate with. It seems like a goldmine for the government to compile a list of targets to go after in future purges. I don’t know how easy it is to tie users with real-world identities (certainly payment info would be one way), but I don’t want to find out.
And, well, I guess I’m a coward. I saw privacy as necessary for survival because it might spare me from ending up on the list, at least temporarily. But now I’m starting to realize that hiding might just be a really crappy solution. I’m not doing anything to prevent these purges from happening, and even if I succeeded at flying under the radar, the vast majority of people who believe the same way I do will be dead, hiding, or rotting in gulags. Is that the world I want to live in?
It seems like this short-sighted instinct to save myself is only isolating me and helping the enemy. I just find it hard to accept that I might not get to live much longer after everything I’ve done. I still have hopes and dreams, and it’s difficult to let them go, especially because everyone around me had so much hope for me. I don’t want to believe that my life could be cut short in what may become the largest genocide in history. But if I don’t come to terms with the truth, I will continue hiding in cold, lonely isolation, foolishly believing that the life I seek can still materialize as long as I stay quiet amidst the encroaching horrors.
Define “total privacy”. Please, really, do so. I think once you know what you’re talking about, the answer will be clear enough.
Another way of looking at things is to ask what threats you are worried about, and focus on stopping those. That will give you clarity, which right now you’re lacking.
This is important because no matter what you do, there is always so much more you could be doing. I’d argue that for most people, having those connections is also important for fulfilling whatever reasons you have for pursuing privacy (safety, financial security, political reasons).
It’s also possible to use a service while severely cutting down how much information they can gather:
- use a relay email address
- use the web browser instead of the app
- set up recommended settings on your browser
Another point is that there is a benefit from blending into a crowd. You don’t want to stick out as the one user that’s doing much more than necessary
Strong agree, identify your threats/risks first, then figure it out. Mitigating 100% of them will never be an option. Choose your battles.
Just…do both, and keep some parts of your life separate. Have a public face, talk to regular folks etc, and then have your hidden community of privacy enthusiasts that you manage accordingly.
There is virtually no way to meet like-minded people who live near me because there just aren’t enough people or communities on there. Even on Lemmy (which I know isn’t totally private, but still beats Reddit) doesn’t have the volume needed to come across a lot of people who live near me. I want to meet people. I want to have friends in real life.
I don’t live in an urban planner’s utopia. I live in a car-dependent suburb on the outskirts of a city. You can’t just walk outside and meet a bunch of people, not with all of the “get off my lawn” types everywhere. You have to go somewhere else to meet people.
I hate to say it, but I don’t see how it’s feasible to meet up with normal people without some corporation or the government finding out where you’re going and who you’re associated with, at least not in the U.S. where I live.
Meeting people IRL (normal or not normal people, whatever that means) is how it is done. Without depending on any app, corporation or government. As a matter of fact, it is how those two started being a thing: people met and started doing things together and realized things would be even simpler if they formalized things and established some common rules.
Also, the first smartphone dates back from around 2007. That was 18 years ago. And there was no ‘app’ to speak of with that 1st smartphone, there was not even an app store to install apps from (this would take a few more releases before it was introduced). Do you think, not living in big crowded cities, people could not meet before 2007? ;)
Meeting people IRL is simple, and it is still free and legal to do it privately (for the time being at least). But it can also be frightening when all you’re used to is ‘apps’.
Like you said you have to go somewhere, anywhere you fancy, on feet or by car, public transit, whatever. The idea being to go where other ‘like-minded’ people are.
What will help (a lot) is to have some common interest, hobby or activity that you can use as a motivation. Say, participate in the town meetings, go to the church (no matter what one thinks about religion it’s still a a way to meet people from your community), go pick a book at the local library.
And repeat it. Regularly. So, other people will start noticing you. So you will start noticing other people and a conversation can start. Just people together.
Hobbies are another great way to meet people IRL.
I like playing chess and watercolors (and books), DIY. But it could be anything.
Games? Find a local place where people meet to play board games. There is none? Go the public library and see with the librarian if they know anyone that would be interested to start such a club with you. Librarians will often a lot of people. The smae with, say, knitting, or photography, reading, writing, running,…
It’s only very recently people decided they needed an app and, could it really be a coincidence, it is around the same time it has become so hard for younger people to meet people irl.
So I don’t disagree that this is the best way to do it, and I find your suggestions helpful, but… what about the phones in people’s pockets that could be recording and the security cameras inside buildings?
Doesn’t that data end up in the hands of a corporation that aggregates data about everything you do, or am I being way too paranoid/conspiratorial about this? I assumed that machine learning algorithms would make it trivial to automatically parse and aggregate all of that data for every individual, but maybe I’m overestimating the scope and accuracy of these systems.
what about the phones in people’s pockets that could be recording and the security cameras inside buildings?
People are not supposed to be recording every thing all the time. But that’s a valid point you’re making as that trend is changing: cc cameras are everywhere and, well, people seem obsessed with the idea of recording (and sharing) every single thing they do (I’m surprised there is not pooping social networks… as it’s one thing all people have in common ;). So, I would say, it depends people, the place they’re in, and its policy.
Say, our personal place has no camera and no recording at all (no smart shit either, not even smart light bulbs or smart doorbell). And when we invite people they can be assured there will be no recording as we would not allow anyone to record anything without asking our (and anyone else present) explicit permission. And if anyone would not agree with that choice, well you know: our home, our rules—they would get kicked out of our home as quickly as needed which may already have happened maybe.
It also depends the laws in your country. here in Europe (I live in France), with the GDRP we can count on a relative level of privacy: people are not supposed to be sharing any picture of a person without their consent. But in reality that is very relative and very… subject to not persist much longer, as surveillance of every move and of every word of their citizens, sorry, I meant to say ’ the protection of the children’ is our representatives latest excuse to screw us a little more and to deprive everyone of a little more of their rights. I imagine they have not asked for thought control (to make sure some hidden pervert has no dirty thought when seeing a little children in the street or on the TV) just because the technology is not here, not yet.
Imho, what matters the most is to keep reminding (or teaching) people around us that there is no need to record absolutely everything they do or every place they go to. And that there is such a thing as intimacy and privacy.
This is part of why I’ve given up on most privacy measures aside from basic ones. The cost is too great, the government will most likely never look into my shit anyway, and if they did decide to look into my shit, they have the tools to find whatever they want no matter how careful I am. Also, being excessively privacy-conscious is itself suspicious and tends to attracted unwanted attention.
It’s a tradeoff, as you say. Use the platforms and services you are comfortable with. Sacrifice privacy/security for convenience where you must. Your needs; your choice. It’s really individual.
Consider running both untrusted and trusted applications concurrently, where the untrusted one cound run in a sandbox, for peace of mind. Drop it once you feel you don’t need it any more.
Self-censor in forums you don’t feel safe in.
Consider hanging out more in places with less surveilance, if you are not comfortable.
It’s kind of a question of reducing your foot print, not completely eliminating it. Unless you wanna be a hermit.
Your first mistake was switching to the dumpster fire that is matrix.
You can use XMPP with e2ee with more adventurous or likeminded peers. You can install some bridges to the services your friends want to keep using. Most competent xmpp servers can get you chatting (with XMPP) within 5-20 minutes (if you have no issues wrangling DNS and certs) and it’ll likely do p2p voice/video calling with e2ee right out of the box. These are incredibly light programs you can run on small VPSes. Try all the client programs you can trust, use whatever you like.
Use movim and Libervia with your server. Libervia can bring the ActivityPub to your XMPP clients. You can do anything you want to, as privately as you can. Enjoy content syndication with pubsub and atom. Interact with the wider fediverse on your own terms.
