There are many enemies of privacy. There are politicians claiming the (at best) misguided pretense of “protecting the children,” intellig…
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I’m really confused. The article points out why Brave is a bad choice right after saying it’s a good choice, says that logical fallacies are a problem, moves immediately into why false equivalence is something to look out for in general, and ends. Why is does this mean Brave isn’t going to steal our info? Because Mozilla might too? How does that address any of the valid privacy concerns with Brave (eg forced affiliate links, a privacy violation) rather than social ones (eg Brandon Eich being a piece of shit)? Empathy is a tool to have a conversation with others who might have different values, not a lens to evaluate privacy or user experience.
It kind of ties into their argument that it’s more complex than that. And I’d agree. People always want simple answers to complex truths. Could very well be the case that you can’t say if Brave is “the best” without analyzing the threat scenario. Or even after doing that you end up with a list of both pros and cons.
Privacy is a thing of the past with modern cars, phones, cameras everywhere/facial recognition, NSA, evidence laundering, credit cards, TPMS censors, etc… we need new laws to restore privacy.
This defeatist attitude, as well as “all-or-nothing” one, is one of the major privacy enemies by itself.
modern cars
You can not own a car at all, have an older one (which, granted, is not quite a universal longterm option), or from what I’ve seen in discussions - depending on the model, a lot of them can have the telematics units disconnected.
phones
Not using a smartphone, leaving it at home or using a Faraday cage (same goes for a dumbphone), using Lineage/Graphene/whatever on it.
credit cards
Cash. Even in a lot of online stores (the smaller ones, not large universal Amazon-like) I’ve shopped at you can order delivery to the store’s office (which is usually at no extra cost) and pay with cash.
Yes, there are a lot of areas where you have lost. But that doesn’t mean you should give up on everything at once then. Privacy is not binary, it is a spectrum.
I’d argue it’s not a defeatist attitude, since they included the proper solution. To “need new laws”. And that’s how we generally do it. We disallow companies ripping off people, despite that maybe providing a better profit margin. We force water parks to implement some minimum standards to prevent accidents, despite not caring about safety would cost them less. I’d argue it’s the same here. Just blaming it on the user isn’t the proper thing to do. It just doesn’t work for the general audience. Yes, you could do the water park inspection yourself, everyone could do some research which one is safe… And following that analogy everyone could get educated and use cash and GrapheneOS. But it’s not the correct approach to the issue as a whole. And it doesn’t really work.
I was referring to him saying “privacy is a thing of the past”. And yes, while laws would be the best course of action, they’re unlikely (and in case of facial recognition - kind of impossible because at least here, the main facial recognition system is operated by the government). My point was that with what he mentioned, there is far from nothing a regular person can do for themselves and their loved ones.
I don’t understand, if so many people care about privacy how come no one in the phone/car etc market are able to make good product which cater to these needs?
There’s no money in privacy.
Harvesting and selling personal information is practically a continual source of funds with little to no cost. Why spend time and money developing a product with all the data harvesting elements stripped out to appeals to maybe 5-10% of the market?
