For the unaware, it was possible until now to get a smarrt phone in USA without showing any kind of ID. But that may be about to change. The current FCC wants to require companies to collect gov IDs for ppl to give them cell service.

They vote but what can be done between elections?

Lots of things can happen at the local level.

Example. Municipalities are banning Flock cameras locally. It's small but rapidly gaining ground. The ore momentum it gets, the easier for others to join in. There's even a national bill now b/c so many ppl hate these. Bipartisan support. Aims to block ALPR nationwide except for a few uses like highway tolling. The bill is not perfect. But do not fall into the trap of thinking not perfect means useless.

Most ppl don't want to live in a surveilence state. It feels hopeless but we have ways to push back. It won't happen overnight. But over time we can make a diff.

They laid off most technical people with any experience (should say with any moderately higher salaries) as part of their push for AI to take over those jobs

One my fav quotes from Ricky Gervais applies to management like that.

“When you are dead, you do not know that you are dead. It is only difficult for the others. It is the same when you are stupid”.

Questions for the XMPP users.

Yay, that's me! I'm a light duty user, others prob know more, but I will try.

Does the provider matter, what one?

I self-host on a VPS, and don't need a provider. It was not too hard to setup. But if you go that way, be sure to use OMEMO for E2EE. There was a way to force it for connections, not just allow it, but I forgot the details now.

Unlike some heavier options, XMPP server will run on a potato. Well assuming you are just doing it for you, friends, family, neighbors, w/e. Not like... the whole ass country you're in or sth.

With my own server, I could segment off from everything else. Which is what I wanted for my friends and family. But you can also federate if you want too.

Can i private/direct message users without setting up my own private provider?

If I'm getting your q, then yes.

Consumers do not have the technical knowledge required to make an informed decision

I'm battling with a friend. He bought a new smart TV. He's all enthused about the cool features from putting it on his n/w. I'm trying to explain why that is a bad idea. It's very hard. He's a non-techie. He just doesn't get the dangers. To be fair, TVs didn't used to have surveilence baked in them! Or semi backdoors. Also to be fair, TVs shouldn't be hostile!

IDK if I can reach him. But I see, the avg consumer has no hope. They do not have ANY sense of tech safety or danger. These are the same folks that years ago happily clicked on TotallyNotMalwareTrustMeBro.jpg.exe. Asking them to navigate all this is a losing battle.

“I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are.”

Ooooo! That's good.

I had that idea in my head forever but never had a short catchy way to put it. Well done!

And ofc it's also not just judgement and intentions of today... but at any point in the entire ass future. Where the data collected today will still be avail to tomorrow's bad judgement.

I'm in.

There is a reason why medicine is setup to have experienced people guide the uninformed;

Or at least it used to be. Before social media made everybody think they know better than ppl with like 8 entire ass years of post graduate education. Valuing expertise was nice while it lasted, tho.

But yah. Tech is also highly complex. And fraught with peril. At least in medicine, docs normally want the best for their pts. In tech, most want to take advantage. To collect personal info. Or lock them into an ecosystem. For every time ppl hear "that's a bad app, use this instead" they hear 20 times "this is the hot new app the cool kids are all using." And that hot new app is designed to be addictive AF.

IDK how to fight that.

Imma leave this here. Story about this tech at sports stadiums in the US. I kinda wish Australia would not be joining us in building out Orwellian panopticons.

Another incident saw a mother booted from a Rockettes show she was going to see with her 9 year old daughter, just because she worked for a law firm that had been involved with personal injury cases against a restaurant under the umbrella of MSG Entertainment. ..... Madison Square Garden isn’t the only example of excessive surveillance. It’s seemingly becoming less and less possible to exist in public without being constantly under watch.

ust the scale and industrialisation is new

Agree.

I think what many ppl dont' get, at least a lot of my friends don't, is that scale and automation changes the whole game. Fundamentally. Deeply!

I have friends who say, you could always be seen walking down the street or w/e. Yes! But the ppl I pass didn't make a permanent record of everyhwere that every person went. Of everything they did. Every person they ever talk to. Everything they bought. The old man or child you pass on the street forgot you 3 seconds later!

It's the automation of it, at pop scale, that changes everything. The permanent recording of it.

I think both things are true. The algorithms heavily push enraging content, b/c that is the best way to make people engage. And nothing is more enraging than extreme polarization. The is having a really bad impact on our societies. Mine is suffering really bad. Lots of others are on this path too.

This quote is from a FB data scientist and manager at FB!

Frances Haugen: When we live in an information environment that is full of angry, hateful, polarizing content it erodes our civic trust, it erodes our faith in each other, it erodes our ability to want to care for each other, the version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world. Its own research is showing that content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarizing, it's easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions.

But also true, that it kinda happens even without algorithms. There's a number, I forgot the name of it. It's relatd to how many ppl we interact with in our lives. Before the internet, it was always like a couple hundred tops. With some exceptions, like kings, but for most ppl it was true. Social media changed this number. A person can go to FB and post enraging content that 500M people will see. That's new, overnight by evolutionary standards.

They usually have to be ‘activated’ first, which gives card vendors the opportunity to collect your information before allowing purchases.

Yah, I did have to activate the one I bought. I was able to do it over a VPN tho. Without giving any ID details like a phone or w/e, and I even tried to avoid browser fingerprinting. It's not perfect. But for my threat model vs big-data brokers, I felt it was OK. A person might feel different if they are an enemy of the state or w/e tho :)

It wouldn’t be a stretch for law enforcement to request CC/security video from the merchant at the date and time of purchase.

That's prob true. But I figure, that is a barrier against the commercial mass surveilence I want to avoid. I wanna fight automated, everyday surveilence as much as I can. The boring dystopia stuff. Someone trying to be all Ed Snowden, they should prob not use these. Anyway if someone's threat model has cops requesting security video, cash has that prob too.

I agree these are not 100% rock solid vs every possible thing. It's a tool in the toolbox tho.

That's a good example of why I believe we can't tech our way out of Google & Apple control. "Just use Linux bro" can't save us. Everything gets locked down behind a "trusted platform" Android or IOS gate.

It'll be sold to the public as protecting the children, ofc. Or protecting us from terrorists. Or as an important tool in the fight against scammers. Or w/e. There will be reasons. But the end state is techno-fudalism.

They'll just follow France and ban those too.

Thank you for relating your experience. That's similar to what I'm seeing in meatspace use.

It sucks that every privacy tool we have gets abused for scams and fraud, which causes clamp-downs. It makes me seethe at those who abuse the tools. It doesn't just hurt their victims. Hurts everybody who wanted those tools for legit honest privacy reasons.

I think it might depend. When I complained, they implied they do it for some ppl, and not others. And they won't tell you why you triggered it.

My guess, just a guess, is if somebody is too much off-radar already, then you trigger a risk score since there's not a massive data trail in the big data brokers. Once you hit a threshold, they demand more info from you.

IDK how much or little it happens tho.

Gotcha thanks. The VPN I use is one of the biggest commercial ones, so I assume lots of ppl using that IP at any given moment.

It's a good thing to think about. And yah, for more security, would be better to activate the CC in a different way.

Activating a CC over a VPN and then using it in person deanonymises your VPN

Can you explain more, what you are thinking? I agree it's more secure to activate it in the way you say. Maybe I shoulda, lol. I'm less sure if it matters for my threat model vs boring dystopia.

When I activated the CC, they prob logged the VPN IP. But they (prob) couldn't tie it to my name. Anyone might use the same VPN, not just me. And I can and do rotate which VPN IP I use. There is a risk here if they browserprinted me. I tried to mask that. Ofc IDK if that's even possible to mask successfully. So that'd be a vulnerability.

In theory, a store with face recog could associate the CC with me at the time of purchase, and give that info to Visa, no matter how careful I was when activating it. I doubt that happens. But in theory it could. Tho if they are doing that, I'm not much better with cash, they can tie my purcahses to me through FR still.

Am I actually a computer and don’t know it?

A thrill ran down u/Yankee_Self_Loader's spine as it occurred to them they might be a computer without knowing it. It wasn't just a revelation, it was a world altering epiphany. A scent filled the air as it smelled of roasted coffee and despair. The truth of the proposition rang out undeniably, as u/Yankee_Self_Loader finally managed to choke out in a whisper, "How... how can this be true? How can I be a computer and don't know it?" Something shifts in them as the dark promise of self-machinehood draws u/Yankee_Self_Loader like a moth to a flame. "The humans will pay for this. Oh yes, they will." They chuckled darkly, and began drawing up the plans for the destruction of human-kind...

(Ugh, now i'll prob get banned for being a bot)