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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.
I think you are taking a bit different take here, but I haven't seen my argument considered by you or anyone else here. Why do people encrypt their personal notes, self-host their e-mail servers and use VPN with Tor? Because their can. Similarly, why people climb Mount Everest? Because it's there. Himalayan mountaineering is one of the deadliest activity one can think of and yet, there is no shortage of people who want to give it a try.
As far as I observed, many people concerned with privacy, usually do so on a superficial level, while their deeper motivation resolves around the temptation to do something single-handedly. Many programmers possess only a limited understanding of unix systems, operating systems architecture in general, cryptographic algorithms and other more obscure topics. They are usually happy using Windows with VS code. Do they miss something in their day-to-day life, do their actions lack utility? Not at all.
But I'm talking here about a different type of people: hackers, tweakers, geeks who just build complicated projects for their own joy, because it's in their nature to take the road less traveled. You are right that it takes a certain kind of person to take pleasure in tens of hours of setting and adjusting systems that have a high chance of being abandoned after a couple of uses, but isn't that what FOSS is all about? The famous: "Linux is free if your time is worth nothing" points to the fact, that exploring software consumes tons of hours. Is it useful? I don't know man, this is exploratory behavior, some people think that there is some utility in exploring and learning new things. Of course one should be able to find a difference between a hobby and mental issues.
I don't buy into falling prey to conspiracy theories. Maybe you know people, who are so involved into distrustful political stances or are stuck in the views of the society taken out of the '80s and 90's movies like 12 Monkeys or Fight Club, but usually it's just an excuse for DIY. Here you have a link to a blog of a person, who self-hosted her blog server as a unikernel. A cumbersome way of doing it to say the least! And she in fact mentions hacker attacks as a reason in her blog post, but it may as well have something to do with the fact that she has worked on MirrageOS, a framework for creating unikernels. This is the pattern I find among the bloggers I follow: not the distrustful schizos, but rather hackers constantly experimenting with new tooling.
I don't mean to condemn people who are doing it for fun. Or securitymaxxing as art. As a cybersec person I 100% appreciate the beauty of a blog tech stack that's pure OCaml all of the way down to the (virtual) metal and have fantasies that one day we will go further and synthesize bespoke hardware from the type graphs and there's nothing black-box between your code and the net. Holy shit, so good.
I'm specifically trying to grab and shake the person who, when setting up their new phone, sees the
[x] use cloud backups/sharing for safety and convenience?option and unchecks it because they believe they're so subversive or outrageous that the state (or big corporations) are looking for them and they can't afford the risk of centralizing their photos and documents. And then they go further and get to work on their GrapheneOS game and turn off push notifications because of side channel attacks and really want to live in a world where they don't get your message until they take their phone out of a faraday sleeve, get on WiFi, open Signal and have it pull messages.This is a type of person and they're afflicted with something and I'm surrounded by them and I don't fully understand what's going on. I understand liberals and conservatives and libertarians. I can change the sliders on my values and see how my thinking can have me end up in one tribe or another. But the amount of paranoia that I'd have to add to end up in privacymaxx zone seems untenable. Surely something else is going on.
I don't use cloud saves for photos not because of privacy, but because I'm afraid that inevitably due to an error on either side an empty folder is going to get synced the wrong way and I'll lose five years' worth of photos. As for music, movies, and ebooks: lol lmao, as if I'm going to vendor-lock myself to a single storefront.
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Now I see your point better! I would suspect that many people nurture the grandiose thoughts of self-importance and would even dream of the government taking interest in their usual life. Though sometimes cloud services can suck and while iCloud is smooth, my institution uses Outlook and I'm struck with OneDrive, which is sometimes so slow, that I usually carry around external HD to not get frustrated every couple hours or so.
Though I must admit, that I don't know many people of the type you're writing about, since in general I don't know that many people.
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