3d ago

Privacy — why should I care

Hi 👋 just shared the site with one of my buddies and he told me he doesn’t care much about it because there’s no way you’ll be 100% privacy enforced since you’re using an iPhone and sharing your location, name, birthdate , personal files, photos.

I’ve to say this gets to me but on the other side I’m also respectful of everyone‘s opinion because after all, this is what makes us special

How are you handling these circumstances usually, do you say something?

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Look into the Stasi and how information was used.

One thing i don't usually see people mentioning is that personal data is money. Money is power. Do you want to give that company more power?
I absolutely do not want to make apple more powerful. With Android i can at least choose a company i dislike less, or even like, and give the power to then. Then i can even remove Google from the phone and not give them power. It may not be easy but it's in the license of Android, while not so with Apple.
And that applies to every thing related to privacy to me. Do i want to make this company powerful? No? Is there an alternative? Then I'll try that if i can.
If it's too difficult to find an alternative i try to live with it. It depends on how much i hate the company and how hard is it to change.
My own privacy, funny enough, is not really that important to me.
- On the point of Android, I also noticed somewhat of a trend: some banking apps cannot run on LineageOS for instance, probably because it’s rooted or idk the true reasoning behind the company’s policy.
  How to manage this situation?
  
  You are not going to like the answer, but... I just don't do banking on a phone. I never did. Never trusted something that important on a device I'm carry around all the time. I do it on the desktop, which has an operating system I trust (Linux), that can't get on anyone else's hand.
  I'm sorry. I wish I could give a solution. This has never been a problem to me but I understand it's a massive thing for a lot of people.
  On a more complicated option, the answer is: it depends. If you have a pixel with grapheneOS and you relocked the phone, I think a lot of bank apps will work. Or maybe a different bank doesn't require that, or allows you to do it on the browser. I usually ask the bank before signing in if they will require me to use an app. If they do, I don't chose them.
  The reasons to require the user to use the app are almost always evil, anti-user, and shows it's an organization that will fuck you up down the line, so it's a good filter for me. A red flag.
  But yeah, sorry. I'm just the wrong person to ask. Maybe someone else who looked into the subject can suggest something. I never even bothered finding a solution because I never saw a problem.

aside from the usual counterpoints (it's not hiding it's deciding what to share), the main thing I see too often overlooked in such diatribes is that the decision you're making now is coming to bite you in the ass five or 10 years down the road.
our chicken brains can't comprehend that, we need a feedback loop; i.e. hot stove, touch it once - ouch, you ain't touching it no more. that works.
but, light a cig and 20 years later you might get emphysema, wear a mask or you might catch COVID and get the long kind, don't let the app with its kompromats firehose away your data or you might get pigbutchered or whatever - we don't innately understand those things, not really.
so we have to make an odyssey's pact - in our (rare) moments of lucidity we need to ensure that we're not in any position to make any of those slip-ups.
it's a forever moving target and you'll never achieve full security. but you're better off with it than without.

This sort of "all or nothing" nonsense is a fairly common counterargument. The answer is "do what you can".
Don't use an iPhone
If you do use an iPhone, you can absolutely limit the amount and type of information Apple has about you.
Apple is not exactly notorious for actually giving anyone your information. Unlike most tech giants, they're not an advertising service, so don't have much motive. They're not the best but much better than, say, Google.
- 2 is almost as bad as the all or nothing approach. I argue that while Apple is not trustworthy, they are not incentivized to collect every piece of information about you that they can. Conversely, android is an operating system created by an advertising company specifically to ensure an ongoing corner on their market. Asking the average person to use a DeGoogled OS is akin to telling them to switch to OpenBSD on their desktop.
  
  Completely disagree. You can't use iPhones with anything but iOS. And you can't install any apps Apple hasn't put their fucking rubber stamp and collected taxes on. For that reason, it is not and never will be viable. Not to mention being overpriced and disposable.
  Android may be created by an advertising company but they also give you the ability to run whatever OS you want and strip it of Google's proprietary software completely. These days you can install OS like Graphene by simply plugging in your phone and clicking buttons in your browser.
- I would argue that, out of the two smartphone OSes available, iOS is the better choice for most people. They’ve done far more than Google at making sure nobody (even them), can access your data without your permission by putting encryption into a lot of their services.
  In contrast, Google wants, and gets, access to everything about your life. And they’re more than willing to share that data with the government, or anyone that will pay them. And while the best option would be deGoogled Android, that’s something that most people aren’t going to be willing to use, even if they’re wising up to the need to take privacy seriously.
  Privacy isn’t an all-or-nothing. Usually it’s better for each person to consider if they really need fully secure, or if a iPhone that does far more than the bare minimum at protecting their privacy is enough for them
  
  See my other reply.

There's many reasons not to get an iPhone, but privacy worries, in contrast to Android, is not one of them.
Rather than take an all or nothing attitude on the matter, I certainly think your friend would be better off trying make smart choices with his data whenever possible. Ultimately though, it's something that he has to be motivated to do himself. Perhaps informing him of potential privacy risks would be helpful in that regard.
- How does getting an iPhone not worry someone about privacy? Do you believe that Apple doesn't collect as much data as Google?
  
  Apple charges unreasonably high profit margins on its products as its primary business model, along with locking down their ecosystem to push overpriced subscriptions to the detriment of competitors, to not need the same level of invasive data collection that powers Google's advertising business.
  
  Assuming for arguments sake that they do, which corporation do you think should get a better grade when privacy is the concern?
  Apple, which has gone to court time and again to protect the privacy and security of their product, and leaked that a western government ordered them to backdoor their product when they were ordered not to reveal that, or Google, an advertising giant that uses every tool that having one of the largest mobile OSes on the planet gives them to not only invade that privacy, but to sell it to everyone with money, and give access away to the US government before they even demand it?
- With the exception to GrapheneOS, compared to stock Android and Apple its much more secure and private since it removes everything connected to Google on it.
  Then by using Free/Libre Open Source Software apps on F-Droid, as the replacement for Google Play, you can effectively eliminate trackers from your device using apps like Exodus that provides detailed breakdowns on app trackers and permissions.
  As well as TrackerControl where you are given granular control over trackers on apps and even on websites you visit. It blocks analytic, fingerprinting, advertising, and other uncategorized trackers.
  Then using Privacy Browser you can browse the web using TOR further enhancing your privacy. Whilst having built in tracker, cookie, javascript, and DOM storage controls.
  Communicate through Molly (hardened version of Signal only available on android) or Threema and you can keep your communications secure and private.
  Couple that with using a VPN like Mullvad or Proton and you can be very private on Android, that of which you cannot achieve on iOS where Apple has built in telemetry harvesting.
  So I would say that compared to Apple, Android CAN be far more private and secure, I personally don't trust that Apple users are private at all considering Apple harvests telemetry and most users use iCloud which, whilst having Advanced Data Protection for most users, they literally took this away from UK residents more recently effectively exposing all of their content.
  
  Apple disabled the feature in the UK because the alternative, per the British government, was to add a backdoor to it.

Well it's not about 100% privacy, because that's pretty much impossible, it's about MINIMIZING the amount of information they have about us, that information they can use in a variety of detrimental ways against us, to manipulate public opinion and keep us herded in and controlled, apart from money they make from selling it of course.
It's not a collective effort towards changing the general people or anything idealistic like that, since big tech is not gonna disappear no matter how big privacy-focused stuff gets (and it's certainly powerful enough to crush all alternative projects if they start growing too much, they'll never let themselves get overpowered), I view it rather as an individual measure to resist them ultimately thinking for me and guiding my life or my criteria or how I see myself and others.

I take the stance that I'm privacy minded and while I think everybody should be I don't force my opinion on them. I do express myself and usually my "odd" behavior makes people I know question me, which I then give an answer for.
Most people don't understand why they should strive for privacy. I usually start soft with ads because it's a universal that nobody likes ads and they've experienced all the listening and tracking stuff but not connected the dots.
If they are responsive then in later conversations I can go more into deeper thoughts regarding it all. If I rake them down the rabbit hole right away their head will explode and run away.
- it's not only about privacy.
  why is anybody ok with zuckerberg or another dipshit getting even richer by selling the information collected on them? Why?
  Why would any of my friends or members of my family be ok with our relationship getting used to make money?
  fuck surveillance capitalism and anybody who willingly participates in it
  
  ...and this is how you keep people using mainstream services instead of FOSS / privacy respecting ones.
  The actual answer is convenience and not wanting to make their life more difficult, which brings ignorance into it.
  Not everyone is ready to flip their whole digital life upside down based on the privacy principles you and I care about - that's why I too use the approach the parent commenter mentioned, and I'm also okay with people who just won't make any switches, because while I don't support it, I understand it.
  The long and short of it is don't think of this as "us vs them" - we're all people together and understanding and gently making people aware of these privacy principles and giving them realistic private solutions is, in my opinion, way more effective than saying "fuck 'em"

“So, you leave your door open because locking it is useless because someone can break in?“
- The problem with this sort of analogy is that the physical risk of leaving your unlocked is difficult for people to translate into digital risk. If that makes sense. Your average person is generally not going to see any noticeable negative effect of 100 different companies having all their personal info. But they'd feel constantly paranoid about leaving their doors unlocked.
  For me that's the hardest part of explaining why people should care about digital privacy. It doesn't really affect their day to day life very much if at all.
  I'm a big advocate of digital privacy, but I find it to be more ideological than practical which makes it much harder to convince apathetic people. For example, take privacy out of the equation and Facebook can't be topped for its utility to non privacy conscious people.
  
  Ask them if they can give you their phone so you can check on what they’re doing online and on their phone right now. Because, why would they trust a large company more than a good friend?

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