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tl;dr: your money does not go to Google and the ppl you get it from would have purchased it anyway. The device just ends up in your hands instead of the land fill or being recycled
It all depends on how you look at it. You choose to see it as your money saving an object from the landfill, and I choose to follow the trail of my money going all the way to Google’s pocket ultimately.
But those two outlooks are not incompatible: they both hold true. You just choose to disregard the latter while I can’t get past it.
Really?
Say I buy a pack of gum at the supermarket. The supermarket got my $2. Then I resell the pack of gum to my neighbor for $1.50. Who do you think has my neighbor’s $1.50 in his pocket? Me or the supermarket?
Hint: it’s not me. I’m still down $0.50 from the moment before I bought the pack of gum. And even if I had sold it to my neighbor full price because it’s new and unopened, it’d like I never bought it in the first place and my neighbor did.
if you wanted to avoid anything primarily made by Google you’d have a Linux phone
That’s true.
Unfortunately that’s not possible: I live in a country that delegates secure authentication to banks, and banks only supply 2FA apps that work in Android or iOS. If I had a Linux phone, I’d still need another phone with Android just for the purpose of banking, interacting with social services, logging in my work hours, getting notifications from the post office…
That’s the misery of Android: Google is such a pervasive monopoly that even if you want a fully deGoogled OS, the basis of it has to be 95% made by Google anyway because the rest of society goes along and reinforces their monopoly. And at some point, even someone like me has to make compromises to simply live normally.
I would gladly buy a Linux phone and I’d even put up with their quirks (I tried one once so I know they’re not as polished an experience as Android). But I am also a practocal man and it’s just not an option.
I think GrapheneOS should come with a no-compromise-security branch that only supports Google Pixel phones and an “ordinary security” branch that supports a wide variety of less-secure but non-Google hardware for people who can’t stomach the idea of buying a Google phone.
GrapheneOS would reach a much wider audience, and not everybody needs perfect security. I for instance am a low-value target and I have no need for GrapheneOS-level security.
If you buy second-hand, you give money to Google.
Someone bought the phone the first time and gave their money to Google, and you reimbursed part of that money to that buyer. In the end, Google gets your money. Maybe not full brand-new retail price, but what you paid for your second-hand phone goes indirectly into Google’s coffers.
Buying anything Google, second-hand or not, supports Google’s business. Given the choice, I refuse to support Google in any way, shape or form.
And it still doesn’t support anything that isn’t a Pixel phone.
I respect GrapheneOS very much. But the fact that you need a Google phone to install a deGoogled Android ROM is one contradiction I just can’t get past. I hate Google and I’m never going to buy their hardware and give them money for the privilege of escaping the Google corporate surveillance.
I’m aware of the technical reason why GrapheneOS only supports Pixel phones, but that irony is just too rich for me. So I use CalyxOS on a very much non-Google FairPhone4, and while it’s formally slightly less secure than GrapheneOS, at least Google got none of my money and that’s a lot more important than security to me.
This is all rather meaningless because we don’t know the demographics of those who answered: 5,101 US adults of what generations?
I’m pretty sure younger generations aren’t nearly as concerned about privacy as older folks who grew up before Big Data became the dystopian thing it is today (statistically that is, that’s not to say there aren’t privacy-conscious youngsters or recklless data-sharing old folks).
This survey looks like it was mostly answered by gen-Xers.
open source wasn’t really a thing in the 90s and early 2000s
Truly written as someone who wasn’t alive back then and just makes stuff up.
Open-source - which was called free software back then - was very much alive and totally a thing since forever, and especially in the 70s, 80s and 90s. I learned all I know with free software in the 80s. Linux came out in 91 and was a pure product of open source: Minix - the forerunner of Linux - was a fully open-source OS created in 87, and GNU had been around since 83.
Please read up on things you don’t know before posting nonsense.
The problem isn’t suddenly allowing third party browsers.
The problem here - the ONLY problem - is using a fucking browser to do everything, instead of… you know, browsing.
An app store app should be installed as an app. It has no business being specially handled by a browser.
That’s what you get when you turn browsers into mini operating systems: the thing’s attack surface increases by orders of magnitude.
Even simpler: don’t do Discord.
I was invited to some Discord chatroom once: when I hit the website, the list of blocked scripts in uBlock Origin was longer than my arm. That was all I needed to close the tab immediately. I don’t need to run 500 trackers from sketchy advertisement companies to join a glorified IRC chatroom with enough emojis and color to put an epilepsy sufferer in danger.
Yeah but…
Facebook achieved their MITM attack by selling a VPN with spyware in it.
And so you have to wonder: who in his right mind would buy a VPN service from effing Facebook of all companies? It’s like asking the KKK to do the catering at your bar mitzvah: if you have a problem with the service, you kind of asked for it.
The scary thing isn’t that this sort of thing is technically possible. It’s that the cops try this lazy-ass investigative method because they know full well the information oligopolies readily play ball and provide the data more often than not.
And that my friends is the very definition of Fascism: when big business is in cahoots with the authorities. Don’t take my word for it: Benito Mussolini, the very dude who invented Fascism, said it himself in 1932:
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
I’ve known Big Data would eventually lead us to full-blown fascism since Scott McNealy inadvertently spilled the beans about the future of privacy in 1999. Everybody dismissed McNealy back then and said nobody would stand for this. But I instantly realized he was telling the naked truth as it would happen that day. And I’ve been called a nutcase and a conspiracy theorist ever since, for a full quarter of a century.
And now here we are: everybody is finally coming to the same realization - too late to do any goddamn thing about it.
This is sad…
You’re never going to get any sort of privacy with any device that runs WearOS because Google, and it can’t be rooted.
Your best bet is an open-source smartwatch. I looked at true privacy-friendly, offline, open-source smartwatch options a few weeks ago, and my conclusion is that the only two viable alternatives are a PineTime or an older smartwatch running AsteroidOS, and none of the watches supported by the latter are sold anymore. So that leaves the PineTime.
Also, I wasn’t looking for a fitness tracker myself, but the one thing that stands out with applications for non-wearOS smartwatches is that they’re lackluster, to put it mildly. Fitness tracking with the PineTime is basically step counting and heartbeat monitoring. That might not be enough for you.
The first step to stop worrying is to know what you’re up against and define the problem exactly. Once you know, you can do something about it, which gives you control. Once you have control, you stop fretting.
First, know you threat model.
Then figure out what your requirements are in terms of security and privacy (not the same things) according to your threat model: what you absolutely cannot accept, what you can compromise with, what you can do to hurt the adversary if you can’t fully avoid them.
Then research countermeasures you’re happy to live with that meet your requirements.
Then implement the countermeasures.
Then simply make it a habit to regularly assess the effectiveness of your countermeasures, learn about new threats and assess how they might affect you. Rinse, repeat.
If you do all that, you’ll be on top of the problem and you’ll stop worrying.
Indeed. And all that goodness is on purpose: Chromebooks are Google’s trojan horse into your private data.
All Google products are designed to be as attractive and popular as possible so people are drawn to them like flies to a turd and give Google their data. That’s why Google axes so many projects that aren’t quite attractive and popular enough.
Practical consequence to comply: throw away all them Chromebooks. Because one thing a Chromebook will not do is refrain from sending personal data to Google.
Or better: convert them into Linux machines. But I doubt whoever went with Chromebooks in the first place has the resources or the knowledge to do this: why would they have chosen to buy Chromebooks otherwise?
If you’re in Linux, you can use eCryptfs to setup a private encrypted directory, move the ~/.thunderbird directory into it and just leave a symlink to it in your unencrypted home directory. Then you can store your emails in plain text in the encrypted private directory.
It’s not even complicated to set up: most Linux distributions are setup so that the private directory is automounted upon login: when you’re not logged in, your data at rest is encrypted. It only becomes readable when you’re logged in.
Both my Thunderbird and Firefox directories are stored in my private directory.
From TFA:
lawsuit that claims the company has a misleading menu that promises privacy but fails to provide it.
Really? What a shocker…
Google gave users a placebo button that doesn’t work to make them feel in control. But rest assured Google has no intention of giving anybody control of their privacy if they’re not legally obliged to do so - or if they can get the law rewritten to their advantage.
Fake buttons are a very common psychological trick. You can read more about it here.
You read me wrong my friend. It was nothing more than an honest-to-goodness reply to you. No hostility. Be careful with written discussions, because you don’t see the face of whoever is writing and you tend to slap the state of mind you yourself are in when you read it. Imagine I’m writing this with a smile and that’s pretty much how I wrote it.
You don’t find the quote profound and that’s fair enough. To each his own opinion. Me, I think it’s a perfect description of the core issue of privacy: having the choice not to expose what I don’t want to expose for no other reason that I don’t want to. I don’t want to shut everybody out, I want to freedom to do it if I so choose and not have to justify myself or suffer consequences.
Maybe I’m easily impressed :)
When you says “resonate”, do you mean you don’t understand the sentence? Or do you mean you don’t see why you should care?
Re meaning, the sentence seems blindingly obvious to me. But maybe it isn’t… It means you don’t want privacy because you have something illegal to hide in your house, but because you don’t want to invite anybody in. I really don’t know how to explain it anymore clearly without repeating it verbatim.
If you don’t see why this is important or you think it doesn’t concern you, send me your address and I’ll come around tonite to take pictures of your furniture without your permission.
Yes. Strange isn’t it?
Gen-Xers are also guilty of letting corporate surveillance happen, thereby letting their children grow under the watchful eye of big data.
I never said my generation was virtuous. In fact, I blame people my age for not affording the next generation what they themselves got to enjoy. Just like we blamed our boomer parents for enjoying the good life after the war and leaving us the crumbs. Little did we know the ones after us would have it even harder.
If you where in the position to need it you might find your decision to not utilize it to be endlessly horrible.
It was a choice. I chose to let them risk life and limb doing whatever stupid shit kids do behind their parents’ backs, risk being run over by a car or kidnapped as they walked to school. The risk was very small, and the benefits of letting them grow up with a normal, non-Orwellian childhood far outweighed them. Hell, my generation and those before me grew up like that and survived just fine.
But I agree: if something really bad had happened, I don’t know how I could have lived with myself. And this always weighed heavily on my mind whenever they were late to come home.
Yeah but if you were a parent or if you are one. Would you do it?
I am and I did not. Kids need to grow up without feeling they are being watched all the time. Or rather more accurately: kids need to grow up without being watched so they can sense when they are and take measures. Kids who grow up without any personal space don’t even realize they’re not free, and that’s a perfect recipe to create adults that accept tyrannical governments without question.
My kids grew up doing stuff they didn’t tell me about, and I didn’t know where they were half of the time. And yes, at times, I worried. But it was important to let them be.
the crazy kidnappings nowadays
I’ve heard people of all ages say that all my life. This is a well-know cognitive bias (i.e. “things were better in the past”) and it’s simply not true. I’m fairly certain our society is much safer today than it was in the past.
I never really understood the “I have nothing to hide” mindset.
This subject is best summed up by the Girl in Andrew Niccol’s vastly underrated movie Anon:
“It’s not that I have something to hide, I have nothing I want you to see”
This is the most intelligent, best articulated commentary on privacy I’ve ever seen and it fits in 17 words.
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Someone is making money off of the surveillance and that someone knows someone else in the board of education. That’s why it exists. It has nothing to do with sudent safety.