My brother seems to not care about his online privacy. He registers to services too easily without pondering, he’s not outraged we need a fucking account to use a vacuum cleaner, it seems he doesn’t care about all the potential risks of having videos of our indoors saved in a cloud. I don’t have strong arguments to convince him that privacy matters other than “if someone gets that, you could be in trouble” and “it’s like having someone watching you h24” and so on. How can i persuade him?
You can’t. As more generations are born into a world where 24 hour a day surveillance, constant data tracking, and a monthly subscription for literally everything are the norms the expectation of any kind of privacy will sound like something from a history book.
Soon it will seem odd to people that anyone wouldn’t want every thought and action to be tracked and recorded by our corporate overlords. People who try to maintain any type of real privacy will be seen as misanthropic at best or highly suspicious at worst.
If they agree that Trump/Republicans are fascist, ask them why they think it’s an acceptable risk to allow the government to construct the most pervasive and advanced surveillance state that has ever existed for fascism — a system so advanced it would make Himmler cream his pants — why build big brother so all they have to do is simply take over, turn a key, and use it against the world?
If they’re insane and think Trump/Republicans are the good guys, repeat the above but swap out the perpetrator for liberals/trans/immigrants, or whatever “other” is the flavor of the week.
If they’re not American, ask them what they think will happen if the world’s strongest ever superpower — a kleptocratic failed state, straddling the knifes edge of fascism — with a secret police who have backdoor access to the tracking device in their pocket, all their data, and all their historic communications — became a fascist dictatorship? … Point out how “woke” they are (sex before marriage, gay marriage, whatever) … and ask them how comfortable they would be if the tens of thousands of people working at the NSA/CIA were converted into fascist “troll farms”, and started using AI and analytics of all their personal data, to unilaterally wage a cyber war on everyone they deem “woke”? Do they think their government or military could defend them from a bad actor that has the ability to hack anyone on Earth… A bad actor who, if they want you out of the picture, just has to remote into your machine, download some child porn, and tip off the local police… Good luck trying to prove your innocence. You don’t even know what most of those words mean! You weren’t even aware that this was a possibility 30 seconds ago!
Find his information in a data breach and log into one of his accounts. Post something to prove it and show him how important it is to care about privacy/security
Holy shit dude! His email has been recently involved in a data breach but i’ve made him change it. I should’ve asked this question before 😄
I actually did something similar to this before. After a breach I torrented the data to query my own creds (old passwords were leaked, from my pre random gen password manager days). I then searched my friend’s emails and messaged them asking them if their password was still “xyz”. I got a lot of “bro, wtf!?!” that day!
Don’t do this. It’s illegal in most countries and could result in criminal charges.
Instead, DM them and ask “Hey, is your password for x still y”? That’s usually enough for people to feel vulnerable and start to take this shit seriously.
This will be something of a unhelpful and unpopular answer, by you probably can’t.
What would convince you to stop eating meat from factory farms? What would convince you to only buy electronics from completely ethically sourced companies? What would convince you to only eat healthy nutritional food? To exercise regularly? So on and so forth?
There are many good and important, but inconvenient, things to do. But for most folks, the first step is wanting to. If he doesn’t, it will be an uphill battle.
Kind of unfair considering there isn’t ethical consumption under capitalism.
Your not wrong, though that kinda re-enforces my point. What would it take to convince a society to abandon an inherently unethical economic system?
I still can’t roll my head across the reason as to why a vaccum cleaner needs an account? What is next, account for using the faucet or toaster?
It seems the question now isn’t whether an appliance will get smart features, it’s a question of when.
This is something I struggle with constantly. I feel like everybody around me does not care about their privacy. All of them say the typical “Why go through all the effort, sacrificing a lot of functionality and convenience for the sake of privacy? I have nothing to hide!”. It drives me crazy, and I feel kind of powerless without a convincing argument that makes them at least understand that installing stuff like Instagram on your phone is basically willingly installing a virus. They don’t even get surprised anymore when the ads they see are about stuff they were talking about with someone else in real life, and never mentioned or searched in their phones. I’m afraid that this will only get worse with time, and new generations that are being born under these circumstances are going to see it as normal. This means that making them understand the implications of not taking their privacy seriously is going to be harder and harder. I won’t give up, though. I’m still searching for my “irrefutable argument”.
