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.
I think it’s much deeper than stop mainstream tech companies from gathering data. I couldn’t say it better than Edward Snowden though “Privacy isn’t about something to hide. Privacy is about something to protect. And that’s who you are. That’s what you believe in. That’s who you want to become. Privacy is the right to the self. Privacy is what gives you the ability to share with the world who you are on your own terms.”
With respect that still doesn’t really answer the question because it doesn’t really say why privacy is “the right to the self”. Let be play devils advocate and say that what if nobody had malicious intent with others data. Why would there be any need to be private online?
I think this is not about malicious intent at all. What I think Snowden and @ericbujis is getting at is that privacy should be treated like a basic human right and as such, should be respected without question. So you should have the freedom to divulge whatever information you want about yourself (whether online or irl), but only you should have the right to decide what others know about you. From this view, collecting information about someone essentially means you learn information about that someone without their consent, thus infringing upon their right to privacy.
This might be too black and white, since something like looking at another person in a shop and seeing what’s in their kart also constitutes learning information about them without their consent. But when this is done systematically, and with an intent (that’s not necessarily malicious) to learn as much information as possible, it seems quite problematic.
I don’t know man… It kinda sounds like you are doing something suspicious if “only you should have the right to decide what others know about you” because if you are not doing anything malicious and the other person has no malicious intent. Then I don’t quite see what the problem is?
Why would it be suspicious? I think this is a question concerning boundaries. If privacy is the right to self, privacy is something that defines the boundary between a person and the outside world. To excercise the right to decide what others know about you means to define time and time again what is inside (or part of) your private life and what is outside it. (of course, this is a fuzzy boundary) And for someone else to learn information about you without your permission is at most a forceful destruction or at least a complete disregard of that boundary. A house is like this “self”, or private life: Would you like for someone to stand at you window at all times, looking at everything you do, even if you have nothing to hide?
My view on the mattar is the person standing at my windows at all times would likely not have good motives for him watching me. Equally people form their own opinions about you regardless of what you hide. You can’t control the view they hold of you, so don’t bother trying. I feel we’ve gone a little off topic. But my point is this; its all a question of motives, the reason I would be unconfortable with someone standing at my windows at all times is because I would question his motives for doing so.
I feel like this discussion isn’t really going anywhere and we still haven’t really answered what your motives of privacy really are, have you even asked that question yourself? Why do you want to be so private? Why is what you are hiding so important to you that you go through so much effort to actually stop people from knowing of it?
Don’t get me wrong I used to be really into privacy until I realised that its mostly just a waste of time and an illusion at best, because who and what are you trying to hide? Its just undue paranoia most of the time. Although a really good book on the mattar is Future crimes https://futurecrimesbook.com/ if you want to read.
Let me play devils advocate and say that what if nobody had malicious intent with others data. Why would there be any need to respect the privacy of your home? If you don’t want that surely you are doing something suspicious… What are your real motives for not wanting me to look through your window every day?
I WANT TO BE MYSELF WITHOUT FEELING PRESSURED BY OTHERS - Not by my family, neighbors, coworkers/clients, peers, government, or by anyone in the future who looks at those of us who grew up in the past with strong judgment. So often, we are NOT given the opportunity to explain ourselves before we are condemned/judged by others.
that’s an interesting point.
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).
If you have kids, then people know you and your partner had sex, but would you want a video camera or audience to watch you two have sex each time? People might easily see you are over-weight, but would you want those fat-pics of you posted in your office or for all of your neighbors to see - or do you feel better that your sags and bags are somewhat concealed under clothes? I eat junk food sometimes, but if there are too many containers of junk food in the trash can, i take it out before roommates see what a pig I’ve been. Many people admit to family and friends to sometimes watching porn, but few of us want people to see the exact content we watch.
I really like what @ericbuijs@lemmy.ml said. Privacy as an expression of your self is a neat perspective I haven’t considered before. In a way, your “self” is the only thing in your life you really can control. I think it’s even more complicated than that, since I don’t think we really have a single self to begin with (or rather a single expression of your self). I have my (semi) professional self at work, the (very) professional self when I deal with customers, a different self when I’m with my family, and even different selves among different friends. It’s not that I’m afraid to “be myself”, but each context is a different social framework that requires different interactions. It’s a fun thought experiment to think about what would happen if everyone knew everything about everyone, but humans and emotions are complex and and imperfect and wonderful! Living in the real world of right now requires that I have control over the expressions of my selves. I don’t think it comes down necessarily to any malicious intent (though that may be part of it), but rather the social framework for a given interaction. This is something I’ll need to think about more though since it’s an interesting perspective on privacy.
First that would be a wonderful world. But even without malicious intent. If privacy doesn’t exists as a consequence everything would be public. Whether that’s online or not is not relevant. Let’s assume I’ve fallen in love with someone. And let’s say I’m not ready to share it with everyone but just a couple of friends maybe even online. It’s obvious that I want to have control both online or offline who to share it with.
I hate to break it to you man, but you should tell your feelings to this person. Don’t live with the regret of knowing that you could have told her but didn’t. Who knows maybe she loves you back ;)
lol
throughout history, people have been persecuted for their ideas if they differed from that of others - or, if taken out of context to make it seems as though their opinions differed. I grew up in the Deep South and was an atheist. I had a hard time because of it. Some people knew about my being an atheist and some didn’t. What if EVERYONE had known? My life would’ve been hell back then. Even today without internet, I like to sometimes say that I want people to stay out of my head - because people like to bait me into conversations so that they can either argue, get me to behave rudely, or get me to say something so they can take it out of context to get me in trouble. Society has never wanted people to be themselves. they always try to mold us or put us in a box (labeling). That goes farrrrr beyond BigTech or internet. These days, BigBrother works hand-in-hand with BigTech in a fascist manner and that makes things potentially much worse. Your job, home, ability to travel can all be affected - even how much you are charged for products or services online.
+1
All the usual privacy reasons still apply, but I’ve found that for me, it’s also just an unending appreciation for anonymity.
There was a time on the internet when I felt comfortable talking to complete strangers on topics that I wouldn’t talk about with anyone that actually knows me.
From light-hearted fun, like the people we had crushes on, to the real deep shit, like sexual abuse, anorexia, depression.Those were the closest connections I ever had. To people on the other side of the planet.
I don’t feel comfortable talking to strangers on the internet anymore. Because I have to assume that people are listening in, which know fully who I am. And could probably use that information against me in some way.
I would like that anonymity back.
On the other hand there are people who claim anonymity is a bad thing because people use it to do bad things (to post racist, sexist, homophobic shit, for example). I agree with you though. I used to post to Usenet somewhat anonymously, could send emails through open servers, etc. and it was way preferable to the current situation of having to be registered to do every little thing. Oddly I never felt the need to be abusive to anyone. Almost as though anonymity didn’t make me a bad person… Nah, that can’t be right, surely.
I just find it creepy when companies know everything about me. Also, the more people who follow a private life, the more people who actually need it, like gay people in anti LGBT countries, are allowed to live their lives in private easier.
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How is privacy freedom?
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For me it’s mostly about weaning off reliance on big tech.
All those crimes what I done
A lot of it is about control. You’d want to stay in control of yourself, of what concerns your own life. Lose that and you’ll never get it back again. Better safe than sorry so to speak.
It’s my vain attempt to screw (surveillance) capitalism on my level
I want to be able to speak freely without getting fired or kicked out of a rental (home). Also, I’d like to help those braver than me hide. If 5,000 of us use privacy tools, yet only 100 of those are of interest to authorities (I am hoping not for sick sh+t), then the rest of us help those persons hide. They get lost in a sea of people, lost in the crowd. So often, throughout history, people who go against what authorities want are the ones who help save humanity (they are freedom-fighters), so I want to help them do so.
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To me that’s like asking: Why do you close the bathroom door when doing your business? We like and want privacy. It’s just that for most, the concept of privacy online is too abstract, to alien. They cannot see its the same concept, comparable exposure, with worst consequences in real life. We can be manipulated easily with or without awareness of it happening. Information/knowledge is power. What can happen when they know everything about us? I’m not talking about some conspiracy theory, just learn about marketing, implanting memories. In a free country that power over people may be more limited. But look at China, Russia, etc. They found out about government dissidence, you are incarcerated or dead by the week.
I believe that a lack of privacy will eventually lead to a totalitarian state, doesn’t matter whether that state will be run by a private, totalitarian corporation or a totalitarian government
It really depends on how they use the data that they are given. They could use this to create a totalitarian government. But how look around you, it seems like we are coming close to that with all the censorship online surrounding any covid related information. I know of this one person who uploaded a video discussing his thoughts surrounding it and got a strike on his channel that has 26k subs and the video deleted and a message from youtube that if he talks about covid again he will be banned from youtube. That is just one example and I’m sure there are thousands more like it.
Let’s say 10,000 facts are known about each individual in 98% of the population (thanks to surveillance capitalism) and only 20 facts are known about the other 2%.
Maybe in the future the 2% people can choose to sell facts about themselves for $200 each that would be; 9,800 facts * $200= $1,960,000
For me it’s a combination of not having big corporates suck this info up for free as well as just simply we don’t know how this data will be used against us in the future, and I don’t want to give it up until at least I know more about what its worth.
Edit:spelling
if 98% of the population is known… then the remaining 2% are easy to predict based on similar profiles.
Its more than juat avoiding targeted ads. These companies sell your data to 3rd party brokers. From there your data can be collected and collated in various ways. Recently, there’s the case of the priest who was outted because he was using grindr and some investigative journalists were able to de-anon his information using not only grindr data but data from other sources.
Additionally, the police will buy information from.these data brokers for the same reason and my understanding is those requests are not really under the same rules and laws as monitoring people directly.
My motivation is if you give some one data this means knowledge and knowledge = power. If you than have a Stalin or a Hitler than you know what is happening, so we shouldn’t do the same mistakes like in the past
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