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I'm currently working as a cybersecurity engineer and I'm a former Google SRE. So, I request you do not kneejerk dismiss me as some kind of technical ignoramus if you think that's what my argument hinges on.
Whenever privacy warriors complain about privacy I find myself rolling my eyes and thinking okay boomer. Even though more people than boomers say this and I do believe privacy is important. To be clear I mean privacy in the abstract. "I don't use Facebook because [privacy]". "I am looking to adopt a GrapheneOS based phone with no Google apps because [privacy]".
Privacy is obviously important. I don't want some rando, or worse, some personal enemy to rifle through my all of my digital data looking for ways to harm me. But the abstract privacy concern takes the form of a Motte and Bailey between the two. Google, Facebook and friends mostly act on your private data in the aggregate, but the privacy advocates generate worry that your intimate conversations or pictures are being personally viewed.
I also find privacy warrior claims rather, lets say, Joker-level anarchistic about rule of law. Everyone should have end-to-end encrypted messaging and the government should be locked out of private spaces no matter what. In no other domain do we accept a claim like "this dungeon in my house is off limits even to detectives with a court order because it is my private property" but apparently yes this digital cache of self-produced child pornography or evidence of a ticking time bomb terrorist plot[1] is something we can take to our graves regardless of any legitimate pursuit of justice. The level of hostility towards government here surpasses any of government's responsibility to protect its citizenry.
I'm not arguing against having digital security. It's very important for both organizations and individuals to have basic opsec lined up, especially because of how many automated and directed attacks there are trying to steal money and secrets. But in this battle companies like Google, who privacy advocates possibly fear only less than Facebook, are far closer to friend than foe because they provide a level of sophisticated and free security and direct privacy guarantee that almost nobody can achieve on their own.
The level of fear and worry privacy warriors generate rises to the level of conspiracy-adjacence. The word "qanon" pops into my head. Someone, Out There, is collecting all of your private information and you need to disconnect from the grid right now. Abandon all petty conveniences like being able to share photos with grandma, your life depends on it.
Ironically, the self-hosted Trust No One approach appears to make people even more vulnerable to attack. Even very technically sophisticated friends of mine who have hosted their own email have been hacked and their identities stolen (and used against them for extortion) in ways that would not have happened if they had stuck to GMail and used their FIDO2 two factor key for second factor.
I have another friend who decided to take his family's photos and files out of iCloud and Google Drive. He set up a home RAID array and was cruising along fine but neglected to monitor the drives. One failed and he didn't know, so when the second failed all of his data was gone. He didn't have backups, because why would you if you have RAID and snapshotting. He's not some noob either. He is also a sophisticated technology professional.
My argument against individual actions you can take on privacy are something like: you can do a few basic things to radically improve your personal opsec, and anything else is rapidly diminishing returns at increasingly greater inconvenience and, worse, may be a net increase in your vulnerability to attack or data loss.
My argument against regulatory action on this is, well: Europe leads the way on this. Does anyone think, say, GDPR has made Europeans much safer than Americans? At what regulatory and compliance cost? Mostly GDPR seems like a joke.
The fact that privacy fretting appears to primarily afflict men (with notable exceptions like Naomi Brockwell) suggests that there must be something autistic about it.
(Mostly, I can't shake the strange feeling that inside of all of this is a The Last Psychiatrist style phenomena (made with impeccable erudition that I could never live up to) that privacy worries are a proxy for dealing with some... thing(?) that people would never allow themselves to acknowledge consciously)
In the end, excessively fretting about privacy mostly is costly (in time), increases inconvenience and annoyance, increases the nanny/regulatory state, puts you at greater risk, and just makes the ads being served to you dumber.
If by "privacy advocates" you mean Ursula von der Leyen and all the other assorted EU / WEF / World Bank goons who want to have all the aggregated data for themselves, in order to turn society into a panopticon while pretending they care about "privacy", then yes.
It's incoherent to scoff at privacy advocates because actually all the data is aggregated, and at the same time laugh at their efforts to not be a part of the aggregated dataset. There are valid criticism, like you can say it doesn't add up to a spit in the bucket, or that the only people using these alternatives are privacy freaks, so using one automatically marks you as the odd one out, but "it's still better than
laying down and dyingletting Big Tech have an absolute monopoly without a single alternative" seems like a valid counter-argument.Based. Bad faith actors are an absolute minority in society, and as you pointed out yourself most of the cyber-surveillance is aggregate level. If the cost of blinding the elites to society-wide trends is letting a few pedos get away with it, it seems worth it. Sure, you could posit some theoretically-existing good-guy elites, who only bypass encryption to catch the bad guys, and would never use Big Data to manipulate society, but that's not the elites we have, and not ones we are about to get any time soon.
Your photo-album could perish in a fire if you house burns down, that's not an argument for leaving it in some centralized repository where every bureaucrat working there can skim through it, access to it can be denied at their whim, etc.
Mostly no. GDPR has some good provisions, like giving you the option to force companies to delete all your personal data, or to send to you everything that they collected on you, but for the most part it's not even a joke. It's a measure to centralize data in the hands of a few big companies that are easier to pressure politically. I agree the solution is not regulatory but technological (like the aforementioned E2E encryption that nobody gets to bypass, or in the case of GDPR more trivial measures like blocking third party cookies).
Don't we live in the world where the maximum amount of information about you is widely available? Haven't we for 10+ years or so? The absolute worst that has happened from this is newspaper headline related freak events rather than stuff that happens to everyone. In terms of my personal life, it's telling that the only person I know who has suffered a catastrophic privacy breach is someone that was hell-bent on never trusting Google or Facebook and self-hosted the whole way.
This is a type of person.
I do scoff at them, independent of the avoiding aggregation claim, because in their efforts to protect their privacy because they're so paranoid about the ThE bIG tEcH ComPaniEs they leave themselves far more vulnerable. And effectively island themselves from social activities like, oh, sharing photos with friends.
I'm just here to say when someone tries to share a photo with me from their home nextcloud server and I wait 5 minutes for the account confirmation email to show up, and it never arrives, and I have to help them diagnose whether or not they fucked up their self-hosted mail configuration, it's hard not to judge them as being so conceited that they think a state bureaucrat gives a shit about their private life.
I suppose they could print their photos out and mail them to me. That would be a nice change of pace even. But could I convince them to put a printer inside of their home nowadays? Think of how much closed source firmware those things have which could be reporting every single thing you print to The Powers that Be.
Are you familiar with the existence of the nation of China? The actual "absolute worst" that has happened from a complete lack of digital privacy is government dissidents and people who report the official who sexually harassed them getting disappeared and their organs harvested. You're talking about how all these silly paranoid privacy people have concerns that could never be realistic, and all the while we can just go look at one of the largest nations on Earth and see what happens when you get your way.
I did not say lets also become an authoritarian dictatorship at the same time. I am specifically criticizing privacy warriors in the US.
See also the bottom of this other comment: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183628?context=8#context
This is makes about as much sense as "come on, baby, just the tip", for all the derision you lob at privacy advocates this is insanely naive given what has already happened in the west, let alone their open drooling at China's social credit system.
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Do you think authoritarian dictatorships announce themselves as authoritarian dictatorships and democratically ask the people to vote on their takeover? The privacy warriors in the US are looking over at places like China, Russia and the UK and seeing almost exactly the things they were warning about being implemented, and you're calling them paranoid when they take umbrage at US politicians talking about how great those things are and wanting to bring them here! One of the major arguments made by the privacy warriors is that even if you give the government this power now because you trust it not to become an authoritarian dictatorship, it is impossible to tell when one of those is coming down the pipe. Yes, it sucks that the one pedophile who was capable of using encryption perfectly to hide his crimes got away, but that's utterly insignificant when compared to the danger posed by our current panopticon if it were to fall into the wrong hands, and there is no way of making sure that it does not fall into the wrong hands. Both sides of politics believe that their opposition will use this power corruptly, and I'm honestly not sure either of them are wrong.
Your argument is essentially saying that it is fine to not have seatbelts because you personally haven't crashed your car and don't think you're going to crash it in the near future (yeah sure other people get into car crashes but you're built different), and the people saying "hey you should wear a seatbelt" are just paranoid, low-status losers who shouldn't be listened to.
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