GrapheneOS is doing fairly well right now for my needs. And I’ve been getting and supporting as many open source, privacy respecting apps as possible.
Honestly, it’s been kind of fun and heartening to learn about all of these projects that people are building because they’re passionate, driven, and want to help people. All without a stupid profit motive.
Yet with NSPM-7 they’re allowed to investigate you if you appear to hold anti-american, anti-capitalist, anti-family, anti-traditional values or extreme ideas om race, gender, etc…
So, effectively, they can investigate you for thought crimes now.
Case in point this was 2 posts down in my feed lol
I so wasn’t sold I’m not an android user anymore.
This is why my glasses now have an IR blocking coating to interrupt facial recognition somewhat.
Not that they don’t have gait tracking or other methods 🙃
Time to start a new fashion trend. Algorithm scrambling cloaks and trench coats lol. Welcome to the bladerunner/cyberpunk era.
Absolutely we would, we’re paying attention. Most people aren’t.
What I worry about is the longterm effects. Look at children who have grown up with iphones. Most of them don’t know that other apps exist outside of their locked down appstore.
What scares me is the normalization through the generations of the surveillance state. Remember what we used to call spyware? I’d hazard a guess that basically every corporate application could be classified as spyware given the amount of data they collect on a user. But we’ve largely stopped using the term.
Chrome is spyware, but if you called it that you’d be met with “bro, what? It’s a browser” or even worse “so? I need it to access the internet”
Yet.
But it doesn’t need to be once the data exists, corporations can build their websites however they like once the data is mandated to exist. Think about how your browser, if not chrome, will often break/slow down on YouTube because google wants you to use chrome/have ads play on YouTube. Or how captcha will just sometimes break and force you to use a chrome browser (which exposes a bunch of data)…cause google again. None of that is mandated by law.
Don’t forget the legislation is funded by Meta. They want that delicious, scrumptious data that will help them legally avoid COPPA and target/collect data on child accounts and get them addicted while young.
And I know we will. We’re cool like that.
I imagine that, while good on the surface, the apps that will then require the age information called from the OS will just reject any platform that doesn’t provide it, essentially segregating the internet.
Which, adding more and more friction makes it more likely that users will just give up and submit to giving up their privacy.
I would still say no.
You should have a right to privacy. And there are still ways in which law enforcement could investigate and track perpetrators of crimes and implement “justice,” though as is obvious in America now, justice isn’t ethical either, and what can be labelled as crime, or even terrorism (take a look at NSPM-7.
Even if 100% ethical, I still have my right to privacy. Should I commit a crime, then I would forfeit that right. It would be up to law enforcement to enforce that law. By penalizing a VPN service, which is a leg service, it removes the right of privacy from everyone, not just myself whom they supposedly had evidence of a crime in this hypothetical. Otherwise, they targeted a VPN for their claims alone.
Regardless of that, taking down said VPN will not stop crimes from occurring. Users will simply use other VPN services as more exist.
Given the recent legislation to try an ban VPNs, this could mean that VPNs could be forced to track the traffic of users, which kind of defeats the point of them. Even in this 100% ethical government scenario.
Basically, law enforcement has the tools to individually track perpetrators already, if they were interested. In real life, they’re interested in protecting capital. Individual investigations are expensive. But working with corporations and governments to collect data and track all users? Well then it becomes much cheaper to press a button and arrest someone for whatever “crime” you define.
I think the real questions at hand are:
Is it ethical to remove the right of privacy of everyone in the name of “justice?” (No)
Are the laws by which certain actions are labelled as crime ethical? (Also, no.)
We believe that justice should be ethical. When capital and authiritarians rule, justice has no ethics.
And Jellyfin downloads start spiking.
Huh, coincidence I guess.
It’s never an option to tax the megacorporations that force us to use public roads that they don’t pay for to get to work is it?
Good ol corporate socialism. Privatize the gains and socialize the losses.
Tax the megacorps more and use that to maintain roads and expand public transit providing an actual choice for people rather than forcing the individual to buy a car, pay for maintenance, for registration, for fuel, for a license, for tolls, all just to get to work.
Nah, copper has better conductivity. Gold is better with corrosion resistance and it doesn’t char when making contact. That’s why it’s used to plate terminal contacts, like the ends of hdmi plugs, and switch contacts. Silver is the best.
Well, according to billionaires that are crying literal crocodile tears on the news, “tax the rich” is a racial slur.
They’re so deluded that they don’t even know what comes after tax the rich. That’s the moderate position.
If there’s no point in voting, what’s the point in following the law at this point? That’s the only thing holding up this system of governance, the will of the people. Should the people feel the government has become tyrannical (aka consistently ignoring the direct democratic will of the people through their votes) then it is the duty of the people to alter or abolish it. The Declaration of Independence says as much.
Accountability from parents being the elephant standing next to the mass surveillance elephant in the room.
I’d keep an eye out. They also “backed off” including AI in Notepad and “other places it didn’t make sense.”
Turns out that just meant removing the Copilot branding and calling the AI features “Writing Tools.”
Or are they just going to rename it “advanced features” like they did with notepad and others?
I fewl like it’s a national security risk to not have energy independence from fossil fuels as a consumable. My gas price says so. And the coming food and plastics shortages that are on the way as well.
If it gets us to kick fossil fuels, that’d be great imo. Remove the oil subsidies! Ya’ll wanted to cut government spending, right?
That’s one of the scary things about all this “age verification” bs. Not only is it just mass surveillance, but in “protecting minors” from “adult content” those of us who identify as LGBTQ are labelled as adult content just for existing by these fundamentalists. Entire swaths of people will be banned just for existing, especially once Palantir gets as much data as possible and flags IDs and faces as LGBTQ dissidents.
Not that they would ever get punished, but if they did, it should be based on a percentage of their net worth. None of this “oh, 200 billion annually? Please pay your $100 fine”
Ive just used them by logging in on my pc on a privacy focused browser. Haven’t even tried on the phone.