even if they did someone will fork and remove them

Ayup, hopefully. But there’s a cultural aspect to that IMO. For that to work, we need enough people invested in doing that. Which can be hard and ongoing work! Say I fork an app. Unless I want to “hostile take over” the whole devel, now I’ve got to keep rolling in updates. Sometimes those can interact with the changes I made in my fork and automated merges don’t handle it. It can be thankless work.

We’re lucky at the mo, with OSS. It’s a tech heavy crowd. That helps a LOT to keep the culture from enshittifying. There’s a lot of good faith volunteering around. But that’s a fragile thing.

The lying the app did in their priv policy is shitty behavior. But not unusual behavior.

The phone app ecosystem is a hot mess of treachery.

Europe won’t save us.

I agree. But that wasn’t what I meant. I meant it in the other direction. That we may slowly get forced into more and more requirements to give a real world identity, to use the internet. Some nations are moving that way. Even if they aren’t all the way there yet, they would love to.

Maybe it’ll never get that far, I don’t know. I agree big tech companies are more powerful now than ever. It’s a huge damn problem.

I worry that if we get lots of diff jurisdictions with diff laws, it may be easiest for an OS to comply iwth the most strict of them.

Lax ones don’t require age verification, but also don’t forbid it. Strict ones require it. You can comply with both at once.

Maybe doesn’t matter if you can easily bypass the age check. Which is true at the present time. But things like this, they often slip-slope into more KYC style of hard to get around. All it takes is a horrible event all over the headlines. If it “could have been stopped” with stricter measures, they’ll come. Once you have a hammer, all problems are nails.

I pay for Proton because I’m not tryin to protect myself from Proton.

I think I could pay with a masked CC if I want. But I don’t bother. That isn’t part of my threat model. It might be for others, tho.

I’ve heard of parents being successful at it before. But it took a little group of them. They got together and approach their kids school. They used a positive approach. Not confrontational. More like we have these privacy concerns. But we want to work together with the school on them.

I lost the link now, it was years ago. But they were successful in getting alternatives for the worst “ed-tech” spywares.

is absolutely dystopian

Esp because they could already use, you know… a spike strip!

It feels kinda like targeted v dragnet surviilance debate. Targeted feels OK if you get a warrant from a judge, use the legal procedures. But dragnet makes for a dystopia. Similar here. I don’t want a global ability for some centralized db to flip a bit and stop any body’s car across the world. Or, worst case, hacked and stops EVERYBODYs car at once.

That’s my exp too. Esp with the endless pop-overs like “We share your data with our 5 million partners! Unless you dig through 45 pages of opt out checkmarks, b/c fuck you”. 95% of the time, disallow JS bypasses those.

Also tho, some important sites flat don’t work with js disabled. I hate that. I get it. There are some things where js is necessary. But it’s like 2% good things plus 98% fuckery.

Wow. I wonder how many vulns like this are unknown outside of identity broker co’s and gov intel orgs. Seems like new ones discovered hella lot.

Turning the WWW into an app platform was a mistake. JS allows so much fuckery.

it’s really no wonder society is as polarized: it seems to be by design.

For sure. And not in a conspiracy-theory kind of way! Facebook ex-employees testified to the US Congress, said exactly that. FB amplify the most divisive content on purpose. That is the most powerful emotion, to make people engage. Other employee whistleblowers talked to the WSJ about “The Outrage Algorithm”. And there’s a whole book, “The Chaos Machine” about that.

Polarization drives maximum engagement. Right up until society rips itself apart. And then it’s too late.

they had to resort to taking a tractor to work.

I feel bad for the situation but TBH that’s kind of badass.

That made me curious! Muppet Wiki says 70 languages and some dialects on top.

Poor JRR did not realize we would eventually have them for real.

And poor George did not realize we’d take 1984 as a blueprint rather than a warning.

Maybe it’s for the best, that they both died before they had to see.

whilst considering on abolishing cash altogether

No personal exp with this, but I have a vague idea that the Nordic countries, or maybe Singapore etc are further down the cashless road than we North American peeps are. Though they may also have better protections in some ways.

I do want to preserve cash as an option. I try to use it for everything I can, just to safeguard the option. I try to get my friends to do it, but they find contactless too convenient.

Same in the UK, but its more a case of protecting people

That happened to me in the US once. I deposited a paper check (cheque) for a large sum, and Bank Lady started asking questions. She was trying to protect me against scammers. There are scams where the perp gives the mark a bad check. Mark deposits bad check, withdraws funds immediately which banks let you do if you’re a customer in good standing. Mark gives funds to perp. A few days later, bank discovers the check is bad, unwinds the transaction. Now the mark is out the money. The perp has gone to ground and cannot be located.

I assured Bank Lady that I knew about that risk, and I trusted of the origin of the check. That satisfied her.

Even if I migrate to a privacy-respecting FOSS solution, my friends, family, acquaintances and random people around me will not (well, some may). I will still be featured in their photos out of my control.

Ayup. That is the infurating thing. I can be careful. But ppl around me are not. Of course you u/l your pictures to big-tech! Everybody does!

TBH, I wanted to volunteer on a local crew that maintains hiking trails. I didn’t… because they were all about taking endless pics and u/l it to their FB and maybe IG. So I avoided sth I wanted to do make my city better. But no way could I avoid their need to share everything with big tech.

if the current trend continues, you’ll effectively become a prisoner to your own home

Same feeling for me. It’s oppressive AF. It feels inescapable, relentlessly expanding. I don’t want to be a hermit! If it’s not a store, it’s a rando who takes a selfie in a restaurant and you’re at the next table. Or at any kind of public event. Photo u/l’ed to their IG or FB. Then machine learning models spool up to wring out every possible inference. Those inferences can reveal so much more than most ppl understand.

Your categorization is on the money, “unnoticeable change”. It is the same on the tip top surface between their parents film camera photos, and their IG. But below that is a whole new world of capability.

Culture changes. Laws change. Tech possibilities change. But data is forever! We can never know how today’s data may be abused tomorrow, by who, and against who. We’re seeing data of people’s past lives weaponized against ppl, more and more often.

It also has psychologic effects. People are less willing to change their personal views, when their whole past is discoverable. That leads to more polarized societies over time.

Wow, the article is long. Long but good so far, I’m 20% in.

Smartphones are just a clusterfuck in every last way. Maybe very technical people can avoid the worst of it. Most people can’t.

Well said.

I once heard someone sum it up like,

“Everyone has something to hide. You just don’t know what that is, until it’s too late.”

And what makes you think the VPN is not doing exactly the same thing?

Several reasons. First, they have been hit with gov lawsuits and a police raid before. They were unable to provide any data about customer behavior on the VPN. Police left empty handed. They don’t log it. Also I pay with cash. They don’t know who I am.

Second, they are audited by independent 3rd parties.

Third, it has also a good reputation. That rep would be destroyed overneight if it was discovered.

Nothing in life is 100% certain. But not all things are equal either, just because something “could” happen. I know for a fact my ISP does it. I have good reasons to believe my VPN is not. Thus, I will pick the safer option. My best guess is <1% chance my VPN does this. But even if 50%, that’s STILL better than 100%.