Everyone should care
If you didn’t realize the importance of privacy after the patriot act and seeing the continuation of right wing authoritarianism, it’s definitely time to get on board asap. Get yourself and your community on signal instead of texts and tuta or proton instead of regular email, use a vpn (mullvad or proton are solid), and depending on what kinds of actions you may or may not be interested in, learn how to use tails os and tor (try to find a copy of the darknetmarket bible for a good intro)
Edit: simplex is a good alternative to signal too, and if you have a google pixel, grapheneos is solid. Next time you’re getting a new phone, get a used pixel and install it. On your computer, there’s a lot of telemetry and sketchy stuff windows does, either research and disable that or switch to linux if you can
patriot act and seeing the continuation of right wing authoritarianism
The Patriot Act was an overwhelmingly bipartisan bill.
@iiGxC@slrpnk.net don’t forget the CL:OUD Act either - that has serious privacy implications for countries outside the USA
I don’t want Authoritarianism period I don’t care if it is left or right. Specific political beliefs are a distraction
Fair, but at least in the US right wing auth is a much more direct and realistic threat to people and their privacy, although left auth is bad too
Please don’t use Signal, the US government has all the keys. Self host XMPP, Matrix and SimpleX servers and make sure encryption is properly configured. If you’re not generating your encryption keys, why should you use them?
Agreed. That’s a really bold claim to make without citing (credible) sources
Source? And fyi, if you use Signal you are generating your own encryption keys. Your private keys are generated on your phone and stay on it. So what gives you the idea that
the US government has all the keys
?? Sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory
I don’t think Signal is unsafe, but agree that it is a weird middle ground. Depends on threat model, of course, but overall I would prefer something selfhostable - for the sake of independence, easier anonymity and censorship resistance. Plus, Signal by default doesn’t allow desktop registration (and desktops are much easier to make private than phones), so you’d need either a VM or a command-line application for it, which is a big pet peeve of mine.
Everyone should care
Declarations of an intent to reimagine social media are all well and good, but joining the actually existing Fediverse is probably a more effective place to start.
It may not be precisely what you would’ve designed, not the People’s Democratic Social Media of your dreams, not exactly like whatever Tarnoff imagined, but it is what we’ve got and as it continues to evolve it has considerable potential for new kinds of Internet-based social organization.
Organizing a boycott of Twitter is beside the point. All we need is for more people to join us in building up the better alternatives we already have. How is it even possible to put so much thought into the subject and not mention this?
Playing devil’s advocate here: bringing awareness to the problem (and explaining why it is a problem in the first place) to more people is a pretty important step into carrying out this ‘social media reform’. Ultimately though I do agree that at least some mention of viable alternatives like the Fediverse would’ve been nice.
If you truly believe you have nothing to hide, please post your full name and address, telephone number, email, bank balance, an assessment of your relationship to your parents and a link to your complete photo folder as a response to this comment.
While i agree with the sentiment thats a ridiculous comparison. Thinking you have nothing to hide from the government is not the same as thinking you have nothing to hide from random entities on the internet. You already give the government all of that stuff when you literally just exist. Go get a social security card or a drivers license. Absolutely asinine to try to compare the two.
But increasingly, the data you need to care about not being private isn’t from the govt. airs from those random entities. And their security is godawful.
