Do you think sometimes privacy practices of people at c/privacy or r/privacy communities are overparanoid or take things too far?
Do you think sometimes privacy practices of people at c/privacy or r/privacy communities are overparanoid or take things too far?
I've had people tell me that this is (their words, not mine): "mental illness"
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Yes, some people absolutely take things way too far, and often unproductively.
Like the person who was trying to disable websockets. Or the people who will shun signal, but jump directly on the flavour of the month signal clone, which might be completely backdoored.
If you dont know what you are doing, randomly turning things on and off at best does nothing, at worst makes you even more signaturable/trackable.
Its good to educate yourself on various protections, but unfortunately, it requires a lot of careful research and understanding.
There's certainly also the aspect of simply "nerds who want to experiment." I know I've tried out weirdo encrypted messengers and such in the past, just to never actually use it for anything and delete it. If you are smart, you know the difference between an experiment and sage advice. Boring stuff like the EFF's Surveillance Self Defense suggest the reasonable tools for a spectrum of people's threat models, but those things were all once experiments too.
I have no issue with tinkering, my issue is more when tinkering gets turned around into advice.
I think I would be happier if these communities/subreddits were a bit more explicit about "We are amateurs, for actual advice, go to X, Y, Z".
Couldn’t agree more.