Most of the time the reason that people want to be private is to stop mainstream tech companies from gathering their data to use for targeted ads. But I’m kind of cuirous to see what are others motives for wanting to be private online.
Most of the time the reason that people want to be private is to stop mainstream tech companies from gathering their data to use for targeted ads. But I’m kind of cuirous to see what are others motives for wanting to be private online.
Thanks for the book recommendation, I’ll look into it. And you raise some good points.
But, if we’re talking about motives, why would you question the motives of someone standing at your window, and not someone(or something) that’s trying to learn as much as possible about you online? (I was wrong before, I guess: the motives are questionable as well) Also, someone standing at your window is apparent. Using Google or Facebook, you don’t really see how much they learn about you, I think that’s what’s makes me the most unconfortable.
About my motives: First, I am not really a privacy nut, I just like to think about this stuff. I try to use alternative services, but still use Messenger because all my friends do. And I don’t want to be so private, I just want to be private. I think privacy is important to think about because it’s useful to understand the services and platforms millions of people use, and how they can maybe misuse the power they wield. So no, I don’t really put much effort into it, and I don’t think I should, I think regulators should hold the services that essentially spy on people accountable. I don’t want to always hop on the next, most secure platform or app, I just want to be able to use programs which treat their users with respect.
Yeah you raise some good points. Its the misuse of data that is quite significant, because a pen can be used to write stuff or be used to stab someone, its how its used that mattars, but that doesn’t make the pen a bad thing. Equally giving data to a company isn’t bad, but the company can misuse that data to manipulate you in very suttle ways that you are not aware of.
Generally I think that this is the number 1 reason people want to be private because of ‘big tech’ etc. But I made this post because I felt like there were people following privacy and becoming as private as possible to what end?
However devils advocate here, tech companies like Microsoft and Google do bring an amazing service. To this day there is no other search engine as good as google period. Microsoft and Google both offer amazing email services that just work.
I feel that the long term solution is to decentralise a lot of this stuff out and have it so that we don’t need central services like Facebook and google, but have a decentralised internet as it was originally intended to be. That is the reason I enjoy Lemmy so much because its federated and decentralised and open source so we can verify if there are backdoors or if lemmy place hidden trackers in their website we would know, we can also see the bans that lemmy makes on the platform and see if we agree with them or not (i’m sure there are other good things about it, but I haven’t spent the time to research all of them). If we can have a decentralised internet with all the services and things like that we would be able to take away power from the elite that don’t have our best interests at heart and give power back to the people (democracy) which is also why I enjoy crypto so much because that really is decentralised (alhtough a lot of bitcoin miners are owned by microsoft in USA, so i was told).
Yes, giving your data to someone is not necessarily bad. Consent plays a huge role here, and is why privacy online is a concern: people don’t really know how and to what extent they are being tracked, and service providers are not eager to educate them. The cookie popup for example, rather than being informative, is an annoyance at best. So I think educating people about security and privacy concerns online is a crucial component in being able to change malicious practices.
And yes, a decentralized internet would be great, but unfortunately to me seems like an utopia rather than a possible reality. You are also right about the services – in many cases the service is actually really good. It really is a complex question which does not have black and white answers.