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Digital privacy.
It was very recently revealed in unsealed court documents from I believe 2013 that the Facebook app pushed a certificate to mobile devices that funneled all of everyone's decrypted traffic through their servers. That means every webpage visited, every file sent and received, every word typed passed through and was stored on a computer at Facebook HQ. One engineer was quoted as saying that Zuckerberg had a particular interest in looking at people's Snapchats. It was also revealed that Facebook had a data exchange partnership with Netflix where Netflix had open ended access to user's private messages.
Now you don't have to be a Snapchat or Facebook user to see how wrong and downright creepy that is, but if you bring it up with the average person you can see their eyes immediately glaze over. It's hard to blame them, it feels like a hopeless situation and it's much more convenient to pretend it's not happening. People have been completely indoctrinated into abandoning their right to privacy. It's a real shame because if we were paid as individuals what our data is apparently worth I'm sure that perspective would quickly change.
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My eyes don't glaze over. I'm FURIOUS that they even exist, and have been since they killed myspace.
I knew back in 2008 something wasn't right about facebook. I had no idea what, but I knew they were sketchy.
By 2010, I knew they were invading peoples privacy. I've never had a facebook. And yet, they have my phone number. My mom has facebook, and she stores my phone number in her contacts list.
Thing is, what can I do?
You mean Mark "They trust me. Dumb fucks" Zuckerberg didn't seem like a stand up guy to you?
I LOVED MySpace. It was a major part of my most formative years. But when it was sold to Rupert Murdoch it lost its soul and its Tom. If Facebook didn't come along something else would have. We were beginning to get the internet in our pockets, do you remember how eager we all were for something else? Sadly one never knows they're in the good old days until they're gone.
Sigh I wish I could visit my page, listen to my embedded playlist, scroll through my comments, fudge with the CSS, rearrange my top 8, post a bulletin, all just one last time.
Speaking of bulletins, when I first heard of the fediverse, I had the total wrong idea.
I thought it would be like you can post on Lemmy, as a bulletin, and Masodon users could see it on their end. (Assuming they were subscribed to the poster).
MY envisionment of how the fediverse worked, based on my misunderstanding would have made for a WAAAAAAAAAY cooler site/collection of sites.
And the fictional ideas I had to take it further would probably make the fediverse the dominant social media standard.
It can work like that, and in some ways it does (Mastodon and Lemmy have a small amount of federation compatibility), but we aren't really there yet. I think the real next step would be entirely disconnecting the interface from the content. ActivityPub allows this but we haven't taken full advantage of it yet.
Couldn’t agree more. I was having this conversation with friends back in 08/09. No one took me seriously, but the red flags were all there for everyone to see. Facebook was caught using their platform to run sociological experiments on their users without consent, for example. That alone would get an academic or real researcher in serious trouble. But for an evil-corp like Facebook? Nothing but skepticism or disbelief from most people. It happened, people were harmed. Oh, and remember Myanmar?
The general publics’ overall sense of helplessness, apathy, and/or disbelief that the tech industry is doing anything untoward is their biggest victory. People are happily falling for it all over again with LLMs.
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I’m curious what steps we can take as individuals to further protect our privacy online.
Also, what do you think we can do as a society to change the status quo? How do we get more people to see that this is a significant problem?
Step one: Disconnect
How do we get more people to see that this is a significant problem?
This severely inhibits this part of their question. If the only platform you have to communicate with people are places like here, you're preaching to the choir
I’m curious what steps we can take as individuals to further protect our privacy online.
A few to consider:
- Ditch Facebook and Whatsapp.
- Invest in a VPN
- Switch to Firefox for web browsing
- Install GrapheneOS on your phone
- Pay with cash where possible
- Switch to XMPP with OMEMO encryption for messaging with your favorite people
Ack! I wrote out a whole reply to you and then a pipe burst in my yard and the reply has been wiped! I do have to go deal with that but I'll be back.
Hope your pipe situation got resolved easily.
We had a pipe burst right at the entrance of our crawlspace a few weeks ago and it took a bit to realize. It was a nightmare and now we have to get some foundation work done.
Wow, ouch! That is my nightmare!
Thankfully, mine was not nearly as bad. We just bought the house a few months ago and a bad repair to a reservoir attached faucet led to my yard being completely flooded. Luckily a neighbor alerted us to the issue and we were able to circumvent the water before it got into our foundation.
You've gotten some good answers for your first question. VPNs have their pros and cons, but there's plenty of threads on that topic for you to do your research.
To address your second point, and let me tell you I am beating myself for losing my original response, regulatory bodies would need to step in. In the US I am not optimistic about this as legislation is written by "special interest groups" and that special interest is money and selling our data. Thankfully for Europe the EU is a bit better, and hopefully some of that will trickle down to the US. If the EU granted rights of ownership over your data and the rest of the world saw how much money Europeans were making selling their own data themselves rather than having it siphoned off of them then there's a chance the apathy could be breached, but that hasn't proven true with any other facet of a civilized society that the rest of the world gets to enjoy.
Personally I'm a big fan of federation. As it stands now the Internet is smaller than ever. There's a small handful of platforms owned by an even smaller handful of billionaires. You don't own the media you upload to this platform or best case the platform only has unlimited licensing rights. The ideal platform in my opinion is one of many, where a user can upload their content and then distribute it across other platforms concurrently with limited use licenses. The user retains all rights and ownership and content doesn't get locked onto a specific platform. It's not a simple issue and it's not a simple solution, and I'm certainly not the one who is going to solve it, but I certainly notice it.