Ask Lemmy
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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.
*Formatting
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?
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.
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
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
A few to consider:
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.