Convincing people to use apps such as Signal is hard work and most can’t be convinced. But with those you manage to convince, do you feel happy to talk to them on Signal?
The problem is these people use Signal on Android/IOS which can’t be trusted and IOS has recently been in the news for having a backdoor. And it has also been revealed that american feds are able to read everyone’s push notifications and they do this as mass surveillance.
So not only do you have to convince people to use Signal which is an incredibly difficult challenge. You also have to convince them to go into settings to disable message and sender being included in the push notifications. And then there’s the big question is the Android and IOS operating systems are doing mass surveillance anyway. And many people find it taking a lot of effort to type on the phone so they install Signal on the computer which is a mac or Windows OS.
So I don’t think I feel comfortable sending messages in Signal but it’s better than Whatsapp.
These were some thoughts to get the discussion started and set the context.
I figure it’s best to assume that there is no privacy on the internet.
I’ve been in IT to close to 40 years and I don’t say anything online that I wouldn’t say in public.
Will people read this and stop using the internet or stop caring about privacy?
I’m not saying don’t use the Internet. I’m saying be aware, be careful. Don’t let companies sell your information. Use two factor authentication. Encrypt everything you can. Scan your system for malware. Don’t open suspicious emails. Be proactive, but realize at some point someone could compromise your security.
That is not “no privacy” though. Absolute privacy is probably unachievable indeed, but you can be pretty high on its spectrum.
We’ve had meetings spelling out to users what they should look for in a suspicious email. Then, once a week we would send out an email that was either legitimate or suspicious. We would ask them to look closely at the email and mark down on the questionnaire whether the email was suspicious or legitimate. A not insignificant number of people failed the test every week. Your average user just isn’t equipped with the mindset they need to be safe on the internet.
I think a big part of it comes down to what threats are there in theory and what threats are there actually. The problem is that the theoretical threats are possible, they’re not unrealistic and that’s why it doesn’t feel good to not be protected against the theoretical threats but we maybe need to try and accept they are too unlikely to be active threats. Trying to protect from theoretical threats is kind of like trying to protect your house from having an airplane fall down from the sky into your house. Or maybe this is just my trying to cope.
And how do we know what threats are theoretical vs active threats? Just have to keep learning and learning, it takes a long time. Talking in privacy and security communities can help speed up the learning.
Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophesy. If everything’s bad then there’s no reason to care, and if nobody cares then everything will be bad.
For things to get better, or not get worse, cynics depend on others to care about those things. To me that feels terribly like freeloading.
Just because someone chooses not to be a privacy advocate, I don’t think that means it is universally accepted that they are “freeloading”.
Usually the people who I see make these kinds of arguments are the ones that don’t participate in normal society and live in a bubble, and pretend capitalism isn’t necessary for most people to live their lives.
Be paranoid in your estimation of how much privacy you have, but diligent in your efforts to get more of it for everyone.