(Please don’t downvote just because I need some help.)
I was once a privacy nut. But it’s getting so hard nowadays, and there are so many more important problems – global warming, AI, the inevitable collapse of the current world order… how does privacy improve the world? Please help remind me.
I do approve of privacy, of course. All this protect-the-children flak is bullshit. I just can’t remember why I thought it was something worth fighting for and preaching about.
Being private actually helps with global warming, AI and human rights because it gives the beast less to feed on. Less data or “good data” means fewer computers processing data and wasting energy.
Keep it up, you’ll find yourself in more interesting circles than the mindless consumers
I don’t know about this. How much energy is really spent processing this kind of consumer data? how much of that comes from dirty energy sources?
Massive amounts. In the US, see Texas and how their energy grid has been under massive strain since new data centers are popping up there. It also uses a massive amount of water and natural resources. Global this happens, it’s one of the more obvious ways of direct impact our resources and energy
For an example: Watching a DVD locally has an immediate energy use, and that use is monitored and then sold to data brokers by the energy companies (at least in the US). Pretty much end of story.
Now the same movie being watched on a big streaming service, they use AI to process and suggest the movie, catalog and analyze every other user data to build their algorithm and AI better, and then usually sell that data to data brokers who then sell to other data brokers… Not to mention the servers needed to route the traffic to the correct computers and all of the computers in between. And that’s just considering a private use of a streaming service directly without a smartTV and an ISP that isn’t also selling their browsing habits…
Which all require energy, water and precious metals, few if any are “green” or cleanly extracted
At a very basic level I’ll boil it down to this:
90% of all the companies you have or will deal with (especially your employers), your (and enemy) governments, the police, and even society (you can get away with a lot of BS in a fancy suit unless people discover you’re broke AF for example) all find your personal information extremely valuable. So much so that there are obvious dollar signs attached to this meaning. Do you in general really want to give this away for free or very underpriced?
That is just the universal concern over personal privacy. Now, consider the situation of anyone that wants or needs to keep things private for any reason (legitimate or otherwise). Reveal anything of this sort and their life could be in danger (ie: being gay or trans in some Radical Islamic country, pro-Ukraine in russia, etc…). In a world where data collecting is so pervasive and invasive that companies know your daughter is pregnant before you do, and the information obtained is available to ANYONE able to pay, this is terrifying.
Exactly because it is so pervasive and invasive is why I get your frustration. This really needs to be a much greater political issue but this is discouraged because the government wants your data too.
@jsomae
I empathize with you here.For many, it makes them feel more comfortable to have a reasonable amount of privacy. Feeling like there’s always someone looking over your shoulder can bring a level of anxiety.
This is doubly true if the people watching you are pushing AI as hard as they can while you are trying to fight it.
Traditional data centers use huge amounts of power and they’re unwilling to turn them off when supply is low and demand is high.
These problems are tightly connected
As for the USA, let me put it this way: If Trump gets elected, with the tech tools the govt has, we will see, at the very best, another Hong Kong, with anyone that disfavors the Repubs disappearing, some permanently. At the worst, we will see another Nazi Germany. He himself proposed executing people.
If you practice privacy and can teach others, your skills will be valuable to the underground resistance.
He himself proposed executing people.
Link?
The sad thing is, given physical isolation these days, we’ll all be executed alone.
It sounds like you have isolated yourself. That is a choice you made, that you can change in the future.
Also, words matter. Meaning matters. You might die alone many decades from now, but almost certainly you won’t be executed. When you’re feeling down and you intentionally choose words that are false, you’re feeling your own state of mind.
Do you leave your windows open at night? Do you walk around town naked?
If not, then you still value privacy. Just find the right balance of convenience vs utility that works for you.
Do what you can and dont let perfect be the enemy of good. You’re still ahead of the rest of the crowd who don’t give a shit.
Privacy doesn’t need any justification to why it’s important any more than why someone molesting you on the street doesn’t need a detailed explanation as to why it’s bad. Corporations and states are dirty abusers that want to know about and sell every part of your private life, and that should make you uncomfortable. This makes the constant discourse around you, the victim, having to justify withholding your data from the predatory corporations and states that are violating you, victim blaming.
i appreciate this philosophically, but it’s not really the pragmatic answer I was looking for.
Removed by mod
AI, the inevitable collapse of the current world order…
To me these problems are giving motivation to fight for my privacy, because I think that if I don’t, these problems will bite me harder in one way or another, or multiple.
But it’s getting so hard nowadays
What obstacles have you found? Maybe we can give some guidance. In my experience there are plenty of privacy tools that are easy to use. For youtube there’s piped and invidious, for always selecting a working instance farside (I think that’s the name) can help.
For email and cloud storage there’s proton, bitwarden for passwords. uBlock Origin against online threats and annoyances. If you want to use an AI chatbot, DuckDuckGo has a privacy proxy frontend for chatgpt, claude and 2 others. And plenty more.Matrix and Llama are the other two and their open source! Claude is by meta. Gpt4o mini and Claude
Wait. Isn’t llama by meta, and claude by antrophic?
And its not Matrix, but Mixtral.
Btw I did not realize until now that the llama there is that llama. Knowing that, I probably won’t use that one anymore. Even though it’s proxied.
Yeah my phone autocorrected mixtral. I use it daily. I’m not sure which of these are the safest really. But the two non open source ones are off putting and the meta llama seems well Meta. So I use mixtral.
So far I was using Claude. It has a level of quality, and the company was known as using ethical ways to source the training material. Note the past tense.
Privacy means personal agency and freedom from people, whether individuals, companies, or the government, controlling you with direct or implied threats, or more subtle manipulation, which they can do because they have your dox and because information is power.
A lack of privacy adds fuel to the polycrisis because if we can’t act in relative secrecy that basically means we can’t act freely at all, and nothing can challenge whoever runs the panopticon.
But it’s getting so hard nowadays, and there are so many more important problems – global warming, AI, the inevitable collapse of the current world order… how does privacy improve the world? Please help remind me.
Privacy as a cause is something that helps support other forms of activism. We live in a world in which hostile state actors routinely surveil activists in order to more effectively divide, subvert, marginalize, and intimidate them; privacy is important counterplay against this. It’s like saying that you’re not going to eat healthy because exercising is more important; one facilitates the other.
Yeah, this is a very compelling take.
In this world the companies are willing always more money and the govs want more power. Since the beginning of the Humans we speak and we discuss physically, and the capitalism couldn’t ever remove that to people. But now there is a new way of communication that everyone can use, the usage of internet. And the companies really understand that so they went fast to go before the people and catch this new technology to deceive the people on the real use case and way of using it. Today the way of distance communicating is mostly in the hands of big techs, so as I seen here, privacy is a shield and it shouldn’t be perfect but is to protect you from big techs. The privacy is not going to resolve some of the most important problems in the world, but in the world we leave if we do nothing to counter these acts it would be even worst. So privacy is a shield to protect the population from the future consequences of capitalism.
For people to try and effectively respond to those issues they must be able to communicate privately with no fear of retribution.
It also requires private and secure communications to be a normal thing and not an indicator that the parties involved are criminals, terrorists or pedos.
Ai by the way is going to be just a little fart compared to the other issues you described as well as the lack of privacy.
Also a problem related to privacy is our growing dependence on private corps to be a ‘normal’ person (“why you don’t have a Facebook/Google/Amazon/etc account ?”)
AI could kill everyone, though it most likely won’t IMO. 10% chance I think. That’s still very bad though. Despite the fact that Ilya Sutskever, Geoff Hinton, MIRI, heck even Elon Musk have expressed varying degrees of concern about this, it seems the risk here is largely dismissed because it sounds too much like science fiction. If only science fiction writers had avoided the topic!
This is bullshit. AI will be hunting down survivors? Thus more lethal than nuclear war? ChatGTP4 will be better at it?
Most of these concern seem to be about AGI which we are nowhere close to having and have no clear path to. Our "AI"s not only do not understand causality but don’t have the ability to perform arithmetic. Nor do they run stuff that could kill humans. Except if you consider Tesla’s FSD an AI system, but Musk assured us back in 2017 it would be safe…
where did you get the idea that gpt4 is capable of this? this is concerns for 10+ years from now, assuming AI makes the same strides is has in the past 10 years, which is not guaranteed at all.
I think there are probably 3-5 big leaps still required, on the order of the invention of transformer models, before we have superintelligence.
You don’t have to be 100% dedicated to privacy.
I implement measures to protect my privacy when I can, but sometimes I forego it for convenience or access to something I need.
For example, I refused to give OpenAI my phone number to use ChatGPT. But I have a WhatsApp account. Better Meta having my phone number than both Meta and OpenAI.
Well said. Privacy shouldn’t be thought of as “all or nothing” but instead as a spectrum, because being completely private is practically impossible for most people and that mentality can lead you to not trying at all.
Pretty much all your worries can be fought with activism. Efficient activism will make you a target for law enforcement.
Efficient activism will make you a target for law enforcement.
…And privacy – better known as OPSEC, in this context – is a big part of how you defend yourself.
In other words, privacy is important because all those “more important problems” are dependent on it!
