Why The Left Should Care About Privacy
Why The Left Should Care About Privacy
The surveillance state always hurts dissidents most of all. We shouldn't neglect the importance of constraining its power.
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
I've gotten nearly my entire circle on Signal and it's incredibly satisfying. No more worrying about seeing ads based on my text conversations.
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?
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.
@iiGxC@slrpnk.net don't forget the CL:OUD Act either - that has serious privacy implications for countries outside the USA
I think people outside the US are fair game
If you don't like it then don't send your data to the US
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.
Why are Americans so focused on left vs right? Both parties are fascists they're just trying to take away different rights for the time being.
Bear in mind that the US' main parties do not define the extent of Left and Right.
I am well aware of that.
Found the tankie
You are so far off base it's not even funny.
The Left think they're morally superior... Prepare to be downvoted to oblivion kek
Meanwhile, me a Libertarian Socialist laughs at both sides for being totalitarian in their own way.
One of them lies about it while virtue signalling empty promises and the other says "what are you gonna do about it, huh? Yeah, that's what I thought"
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.
In an ideal (post-scarcity communist) society, we should be able to be completely libertine without judgement from society or from government systems (so long as we're not causing harm). But as with the rest of this ideal we don't know if we can actually get there.
I have an ancient (2016) paper about potential joys of full disclosure (on Wordpress, if you're interested) that portends the enshittification of Google. But it points out Google's original business model, which was to have an enormous body of data that no human being got to look at directly (except their proper owners), and in the meantime the computers would report on observable trends and correlations.
In the end, it got messed up by the usual suspects: Advertising interests pressured Google to reveal more and more. Technicians abused their positions of power to stalk. The police state forced Google to fulfill reverse warrants and list all people near the scene of a crime, making them all suspects. Or to completely reveal all the data of a given suspect, which poisoned the whole idea of your own safe private place to track contacts, dates, travel, etc.
As it is, we need privacy specifically because of all those interests that would want to link our data to us. All the reasons for commercial or state interests to have our data are causes for them to not have our data.
I'm pretty sure Communism is definitely not an option. I don't want to starve or die today.
I don't want to starve or die today.
Yep, that's why we need Communism and not Capitalism.
Its funny that people dying of starvation, in the USSR, is seen as a crime of communism but the exact same people will refuse to accept, by their own "logic", that would make the rest of ALL the starvation in the world a crime of capitalism.
How do you even start to deconstruct that kind of indoctrination?
Communism is a far-off ideal, and we don't yet fully know how it would work, or how we'd get there, but people starving or dying would be a sign that it wasn't working.
You might be thinking of USSR, which sought to create a communist state, but was subject to internal corruption and outside threats (not to mention, Wilson sought a pact with the European states -- some of which were still monarchist -- to sanction trade with USSR, so it was at a considerable disadvantage from the get go.
But while USSR was going through its growing pains, the rest of us were going through the great depression, and those of us living in cardboard boxes and stacks of paint cans were wondering if Lenin had a point, the industrialists boozing and gambling with Hoover were admiring the Austrian fellow. Eventually those industrialists decided they need to create a propaganda package and teach it in our schools.
Huh. I can't post images anymore. I wonder if it's a browser problem or a Lemmy problem.
A big part of communism is about who owns the means of production. One way to alter this aspect of society is through cooperative economics. A state-less form of socialism (edit: democratically controlled) that's already proven effective in small pockets of our own country (assuming US here) and around the world. One common example is Mondragon in Spain, a cooperative business and the seventh largest company in the country, that has proven its even possible for the cooperative model to reach levels of scale capable of competing in a private capitalist world.
God damn this is a beautiful fucking website
the left is/will suffer more of the consequences
I thought the left was the ones who cared, and the right was all like "If you dont have anything to hide you shouldnt be worried" bootlickers.
Are people are using WhatsApp, Discord and Instagram because it's left or right, and not because that's what they see everyone else is doing?
Great article actually. Thanks for sharing.
I know my name will be on future lists when fascist purges start. Not because I'm some great though leader or anything. Just because they hate people with my beliefs.
Nice username