> Being that this is Drew, I wouldn't be shocked to know that this provider choice has more to do with a anti-establishment manifesto than any practicality
Not wanting your traffic MITM'd is anti-establishment. That's where we're at LOL.
Time for people to look into Session (https://getsession.org). You get automatic native onion routing via decentralised infrastructure - currently 1800~ community-run servers (service nodes).
Session is based on a crypto scam though, that makes me hesitant to support it. And I otherwise have supported tor onion routing for many years so I'm definitely an idealist.
Anything that asks for thousands of dollars to the early adopters, for nothing in return, is a scam imho.
Now the founders could of course have idealistic goals in mind but we might never know that. Realistically there is no market giving that currency a value and they're asking for literally thousands of dollars just to support the onion routed network.
>If we really care about our privacy, though, why do we share so much?
In my experience, for many it has nothing to do with choice of sharing - it's about lack of education and understanding of the internet and/or technology in general. People aren't aware of just how much data is being collected by companies (especially tech companies), who it's shared with, for what purpose it's used or that they really have no control over removing or 'deleting' it.
So I don't believe it's entirely correct to blame consumers. It's more the tech industry exploiting the lack of knowledge of consumers while hiding behind opaque policies.
> the panoptic gaze of CCTV captures our movements; social media companies scan masses of our public and private messages; and smart speakers record clips of our speech
If privacy was important to recent generations of people the NSA revelations from Snowden leaks would have caused an uprising. Whether good or bad, there seems to be a certain level of apathy or acceptance around the loss of privacy of personal data.
> Sometimes we have little choice
The bottom line. Tech companies already know everything about everyone who uses their platforms. In fact, building AI and serving advertisements relies on them collecting it.
I think this is why the Chinese social pact works so well. The majority of people are perfectly fine giving up their private sphere to the government, if the return is prosperity and economic growth, which so fare the Chinese Govt. has been able to provide. Nobody knows what would happen if that prosperity slows down, or ceases. In that case I suspect that “freedom of expression” could become a viable social currency again.
In the end it’s not that different from the social networks pact we’ve silently accepted in the west: our private sphere for shots of dopamine. The difference is what we have in return is much more fleeting, and the only ones benefiting are the social network companies getting richer and richer by trafficking our data.
I think that could be part of the reason for the growing unrest and anger in America. The prosperity side of the agreement has disappeared for many people (e.g. home ownership, ability to live off of a single spouse working a single job, opportunity to raise kids).
> That pact only looks like working working well from the outside. Travel into the mainland, get hammered with some local colleagues, they will tell you what they really think about there "benevolent leading party". Don't trust the crap the party shouts about itself in its outlets to the west.
> If we really care about our privacy, though, why do we share so much?
It could be the same principle as with small offences, such as speeding. People don't care if the punishment is severe. People only care if the chance of being caught is high.
Same with privacy. People don't care about severe consequences of a data leak. They only care if the probability of being confronted with consequences is sufficiently high.
This leads to the somewhat sad conclusion that we can educate people by confronting them with (small) data leaks.
Not wanting your traffic MITM'd is anti-establishment. That's where we're at LOL.