I have always been fascinated by computers and passionate about programming. I never taught I would ever feel ashamed of my passion ... that maybe I have been part of the decline of freedom and privacy, the same things I've always believed in and fought for . I've finished reading again 1984 a short time ago, and I felt sick reading this article and realizing we're making a monster.
I stopped using Facebook a few months ago and it was not so easy as I thought. Since then, whenever I people ask me I give them my views about keeping privacy and such ... they always have the same reply: Why would you want to hide something ? or We can do nothing about it, everyone does it ... it makes me even sicker when it comes from Tech friends who understand the consequences but just don't care about it.
I agree that privacy is important, but whenever I hear people talk about how hard it is to abandon Facebook or similar services, it seems to me that there's a missing middle ground.
Posting to Facebook, even messaging, is publishing. People just need to remember that. There's nothing wrong with publishing. It's something that people used to work hard to achieve and only a few could afford. Now anyone can publish. This is great progress. Publishing has never been private and doesn't need to be. There's a place in society for public tools and a place for private ones as well. The problem occurs when people try to use publishing platforms as private communication. Of course that causes problems. It's a matter of using the wrong tool for the job. I think what we need is to continue to develop private communication technologies side-by-side with the public ones.
I am fine with living with tools like Facebook outside my control when they serve a purpose. We control what information we give them. There's a big problem with relying on them for all of our communication.
There's a distinct (I'd say moral or intentional) difference between publishing/performing in public and sharing with friends/family. Even Friendster or Diaspora* conflate the two. What I would like to see is the P2P equivalent of something like Snapchat, completely decentralized and fully under control of the person sharing a datum (text, picture, video, like, etc.) Unfortunately, that's not something easily engineered (likely impossible given our experience with software-only DRM systems), let alone sold or monetized.
This is the expectation I think people need to get over. If you are sending your data to a third party unencrypted, even if that third party is Facebook, you have just published your data, no matter what expectation they might have set. Even encrypted data will likely become public at some point if it is stored indefinitely as computing power increases and quantum computing and further advances become common. As long as we use the Internet with the expectation that everything we send is only temporarily private at best, we will be fine. The idea that we can share privately with a select group on a public network is really something like a delusion, even if you are the NSA!
We still can and should develop private and secure communication protocols like DIME, but nobody should ever expect a hosted communication service out of their control to be private.
Messaging between friends is not publishing and it's normal to want and expect conversations between friends to be private. With Facebook, there's always a middle man, listening in on and recording the conversation.
You feel awful now, but what you've written is very encouraging. You're doing the right thing.
Coding can be put to good use too. Perhaps there's an open-source project you can contribute to that has a positive benefit to offer society? What social injustices are you most passionate about?
I also intend to leave Facebook (again) very soon. The only reason I haven't in the past is that I didn't want to lose contact with some people, but I figure if I share my email address as I leave anyone that wants to contact me can do. We don't have to employ a scorched earth policy every time we want to change, losing everything we got from something, we often have better alternatives.
I should move away from Gmail for similar reasons, does anyone have suggestions of a secure email service with webmail and Android app access?
You're right, we should use our skills in open source projects. I think decentralized technologies are the way to fix the problems with Internet.
Speaking of Gmail, I also want to stop using Google services. I went back the good old times, just setup a mail server on a linux dedicated box and started sharing my new email address. It's going to be painful but there's no way around it. You can then setup POP or IMAP on Android like we always did before.
I remember a discussion with a friend of mine about the source of these problems, we came up to the conclusion that Internet was an amazing technology when poeple could speak up their minds freely, this is how Internet itself was built and the same for good Open Source projects like Linux. But now we let the greedy guys run businesses with internet and they are trying to replicate the physical world. We are basically transforming what was a door to creativity and freedom to a mirror of our daily lives. And the common factor to all these problems is "identity". Most internet technologies and new startups are obsessed with identity. We are linking authentication to more social networks. Linking our phones to online services and always giving our identity in the process. I wonder what would be the Internet if there was no way to have "identity" at all supported in the protocol level. Maybe it's too late.
I can reassure you it's not too late. If you wish to get involved in the decentralised web as a coder, could always participate in the technologies surrounding the Darknet Plan... http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/
Personally I believe the Darknet Plan is doomed to fail on a large scale unless they tackle the downsides of decentralisation, but that's just my personal opinion. There's plenty of work to do, I'm sure you could find some tasks that interested you.
With email, you're right that POP/IMAP on a dedicated box is preferable from a security standpoint. Food for thought, thank you.
> With email, you're right that POP/IMAP on a dedicated box is preferable from a security standpoint.
This depends on your threat model, and I'd argue that this statement is untrue for the vast majority of people, even people who have the technical know-how required to run their own email server. Running an email server, keeping it up to date with the latest security patches, managing SSL certificates, blocking spam, blocking malware, and blocking phishing attempts are all things that Google is better at than you. Part of the reason for this is their access to incredible volumes of data, which lets them analyze trends and emerging threats across an relatively large subset of the email-using population.
The average user's threat model is much more along the lines of phishing, malware, or spam-related fraud. Google is incredibly good at protecting people from these threats (as is obvious when I compare the volume of spam, which often contains malware or phishing links, that I receive on my Gmail account against my other, non-Gmail accounts).
Of course, if your threat model is that you require protection from law enforcement or government surveillance, then Google may be a poor choice as they are legally obligated to turn over information about you that is requested by such entities. If that is your adversary, however, than you should have a lot more work to do to protect yourself than just quitting Gmail and setting up your own mail server.
I famously left Facebook over 4 years ago. Yes, a bunch of friends from high school thought I 'unfriended' them, but they all eventually figured it out. I got involved with Digital Detox and try to unplug regularly. Like meditation, almost.
I've moved completely away from Google. DuckDuckGo for search, here.com for maps, fastmail.com for mail (using my domain, so I'm not locked in), Firefox as browser.
It was not as hard as I expected.
I guess the email was the hardest one do to. I needed to change quite a few addresses for different accounts. I've also put a permanent vacation responder stating that I use new email. It was definitely worth it. And the best: even from usability perspective, I like fastmail.com better than Google.
Thank you for the suggestion throwawayaway, but I don't think Yandex is quite what I'm looking for. They might state that they don't share data with the NSA, but I wouldn't trust any company that relies on data mining for their profits with my email.
I don't mind paying a small monthly fee for a secure email service. Does that expand my options?
That's because Yandex is a Russian company - they share their info with the FSB. Ditto for QQ mentioned in the sibling comment and the Chinese MSS. Like throwawayaway said, pick your poison.
We just don't have all the answers yet. We are at a strange era in human history. We have had privacy for eons, and now we may not. We can't even answer the question "do we need privacy?"
If you were raised with no privacy, you wouldn't know the difference. Imagine living your whole life with cameras on you. You know if something bad happens, you have video evidence. Now imagine all those cameras are taken away. You would probably feel very scared to the point of mania.
We don't have the answers yet. We are lucky the internet is still open, so we can try out all these new things and share ideas.
If you were raised with no privacy, you may not be aware that it could get better, but you would still suffer from the power dynamic that the total lack of privacy creates. Information is power, and even if that power is distributed evenly (which it isn't now, and likely will never be), it changes things.
Privacy, as it exists today, is entirely a modern invention. For most of human history people lived in small groups where everyone knew everyone else very well. It was not until industrialisation that we had mega cities where no one knows anyone.
You are selecting facts that are convenient for you.
You are correct that small groups were often tightly knit. But you are ignoring the persistence of modern surveillance: Your neighbor or clan-mate never followed you everywhere. Since the invention of shelter you always had privacy in your home with your family. You could always have a confidential conversation with a friend.
All of those things are more difficult now than they were ten years ago, or hundreds of years ago, or thousands of years ago.
Furthermore, you never had a statistical profile built on your behavior, where members of your society could predict your movements and desires.
> For most of human history people lived in small groups where everyone knew everyone else very well.
Someone already mentioned issues with your statement, but I will add on another issue. Even when living in small, tight-knit communities, if you screwed up your social standing (for whatever reason), you had the option to leave the group, possibly to another group, without your entire life-history following you.
I don't think everyone knew everyone else very well in ancient cities like Rome, Athens and many others. Certainly more people historically lived in villages, but cities have been around for millenia and even in villages people were more intimate with their family than everyone else.
I'm not sure privacy in the sense of computers knowing what you're up to and freedom correlate positively. The societies with a lot of tech, eg the US, UK, EU etc are fairly free, the societies where you get killed for saying the wrong thing or having the wrong belief such as N Korea or the Islamic state are pretty low tech. I'm optimistic that computer tech will work against 1984 like systems of which I guess N Korea would be closest to in the real world.
Join us in #scuttlebutt on freenode. We're a pro-privacy group that came together through the oakland communities. We're developing a device-hosted replicated database capable of end-to-end encryption and distributed authority. Privacy is solveable, join us there.
This is a fairly naive and negative statement no offensive, the context of history is important, the planet is in a much better place to communicate ideas and consensus, and it gets better every year.
The fact you're even reading about Ai Weiwei is a case in point. Sure it's not perfect , there are growing pains with anything new, but I'm tired of the one sided stories about privacy when the definition if what that means is hazy at best and often misses the point.
the old microphone/webcam in the bedroom retort usually illustrates to people that they have got something to hide, then in their own time they will discover they have more they don't want to share.
make stuff that doesn't leak privacy, then you should feel no shame.
I stopped using Facebook a few months ago and it was not so easy as I thought. Since then, whenever I people ask me I give them my views about keeping privacy and such ... they always have the same reply: Why would you want to hide something ? or We can do nothing about it, everyone does it ... it makes me even sicker when it comes from Tech friends who understand the consequences but just don't care about it.