I’ve had people tell me that this is (their words, not mine): “mental illness”
Like most things on the internet it’s a game of one-upsmanship. User X uses Firefox with Incognito. User Y say’s that isn’t good enough for his own inconsistent definition of “good enough.”
So User-Y suggests Firefox with 14 different add-ons and only browse through an immutable VM. But then user-z comes along and says that if you are using windows at all, you don’t really care about privacy, so you should be using Icefox on some obscure fork of ubuntu through an immutable VM, with a pi-hole.
Then user-w says well if you aren’t using a VPN none of this matters, so Obviously you need to rent an Alibaba cloud server hosted in China, that you only connect to through a privacy respecting VPN, and then you only browse through TOR.And so on. By the time a user is asking about how to stop google ads, the only “serious” answer by the community involves using Packet over Ham-radio -> and spending thousands of dollars a month on 4 different cloud providers, rented through several shell companies set up in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and China, while only typing in Esperanto using an ASCII-only font.
A year ago: yes.
Today: nope.
Yeah. I think people can become obsessive over it. I also think there is a large group of users who gamify privacy and act as if its an mmo quest where they just need to collect the best tools to win instead of being responsible and understanding threat modelling.
There is a point of diminishing returns. Like most things, you have to evaluate what you are willing to live with and let go.
I know someone who only browses incognito because they don’t want cookies tracking them. They log into everything every day. Which, imo, is worse because those cookies are still tracking you but you now have to log in everyday.
But for them they like the control.
I’ve moved most of my incidental link on my phone clicking to Firefox Focus (thanks to URL Checker) which has upped my privacy. I wouldn’t have made that change without the prompt that URL Checker provides though.
I use a VPN outside of my house and I use pihole at home. I am tempted to switch my DNS to unbound but the juice doesn’t seem to be worth the squeeze. We’ll see the next time I need to rebuild my pi.
I used to run unbound on my laptop just so I could configure stuff like forwarding zones with more precision than what a stub resolver normally gives you.
It can also be your validating DNSSEC resolver, which also satisfied that sort of morbid curiosity in me.
In the age of DoT and DoH, with endpoints hardcoded in browser binaries, that sort of thing has a lot less punch than it used to. Even back then Go binaries would start ignoring your
nsswitch.conf…
Yes, paranoia is not healthy. When people can’t formulate a realistic threat model then usually to be “safe” they assume everyone is out there to get them … while failing the most basic steps, e.g. not relying on surveillance capitalist fueled tools voluntarily.
Yeh my family treat me like I am a nut job. I only swapped away from google and ask them to think about the orgs they spend their money on for example Amazon.
It’s amazing how many people got on board with Covid conspiracies but questioning where you data goes, who’s using it, what for, no that’s a bit far lol.
As long as everyone is having fun, I see no problem.
If you’re not having fun switching mail providers, researching Gecko forks, or being a part-time sysadmin for your Fairphone, you should probably stop doing those things.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Familiarity
Relevant XKCD;
I feel that it is closer to the fact that the communities forgot most beginners are completely new to this in general. They might not even know what exactly a ‘browser’ is, much less cookies and stuff.
Hence when we try to spoonfeed them information, it comes off as overwhelming and forced.
Agree that there are some extremist, but they mostly act in good faith tbh.
Another thing I noticed is there are more preachers of ‘how’ than ‘why’. Having a beginner go down the route of privacy without giving them a purpose to do so is quite off-putting.
There are probably some people that go too far, but that is true in any community. There are also people with a very legitimate threat model, for example if they are from insert your favourite dictatorship here and they have insert opinion against said regime
Yep, and then there’s probably a good number of people who have no idea of threat modelling who just copy those actions to say they have “good privacy”.
Tbh, I’m closer to the latter.
I think that “mental illness” kind of comments would come from people whose attitude for safety in many aspects of life is “that’s never going to happen (to me)”. Those people exist, so sooner or later you’ll see comments like that.
On the other hand everybody is trying to find a balance in convenience and safety and the situations and environments and life on general for one person can be quite different from that of some others’. So what’s adequate for one won’t be for another.
It’s like PPE or personal finance or many other things. There’s no one size that fits all and finding the right fit isn’t easy. For a lot of us it’s work in progress. Sometimes you know what’s definitely needed and tweak the details. Sometimes you know something is not going well and needs to change.
Maybe it’s enough to say that it’s complicated and have some compassion and support for people that think it isn’t. Or people that think it’s all too much to handle.
Yes and I see two reasonable reasons for that.
One is that, like in most communities, those that feel more compelled to post and comment are those that are more passionate about the topic and/or have more extreme views.
The other reason is that given the sensitive nature of the topic, without knowing the threat level of the reader I can see how one would be reluctant to go for the “good enough”.
We have people telling us the earth is flat. Them saying so doesn’t make our good old planet any flatter ;)
I mean one can find excess absolutely anywhere, that doesn’t demonstrate much imho.
It’s just a conscious approach to tech.
I dunno, considering that Facebook data has been used to go after people, we’ve got fascists using every method possible to target their current hated group, and police everywhere ignoring or bypassing due process by just buying data, I don’t think it all paranoid to think that privacy concerns are already huge, and could get worse
Definitely yeah! If you’re just a regular person living in a fairly democratic country and you’re thinking about physically clogging your usb ports to avoid someone breaking in your room and tampering your device while you’re exploring Barcelona, or if you consider removing camera and microphone from your pixel phone that you use every day, you’re probably taking it too far.
OTOH I’m still having trouble getting people away from Meta apps and I think it’s absolutely crazy how little thought people put into the amount of data that Meta collects.
TBH even in many dictatorships you’re mostly fine just using a VPN and fake accounts if you have government critical opinions. But that’s just my personal experience. Goes without saying if you have a decent follower count or are some kind of journalist you should be very paranoid.
Anyway, the point is, it’s probably good to feel slightly paranoid because most people aren’t paranoid enough, but most of us are also not Edward Snowden or Saudi journalists, so there should be a balance between practicality and privacy.
Yes, some people absolutely take things way too far, and often unproductively.
Like the person who was trying to disable websockets. Or the people who will shun signal, but jump directly on the flavour of the month signal clone, which might be completely backdoored.
If you dont know what you are doing, randomly turning things on and off at best does nothing, at worst makes you even more signaturable/trackable.
Its good to educate yourself on various protections, but unfortunately, it requires a lot of careful research and understanding.
