800+ IT
News
als RSS Feed abonnieren📚 Your Privacy Matters. Reclaim It!
💡 Newskategorie: Linux Tipps
🔗 Quelle: reddit.com
Your Privacy Matters
You [care about your privacy]. Everyone has some expectation of privacy. We don't want to indiscriminately share every single aspect of our lives with everyone else. But as we move more of activities online, there is an ever increasing portion of our lives which is being recorded by corporations and governments, and these records can be used to our disadvantage, at any time, now or any-time in the future. Essentially, we're now in an information arms race. But unlike other historical analogies that might be cited, the scale of our storage and processing capabilities are immense and extremely powerful, and that changes the game.
Privacy is a fundamental human right and key to any democratic society (See: Reclaim Our Privacy by La Quadrature du Net).
Your privacy matters, even if you think you have "nothing to hide" (See: Why privacy matters even if you have nothing to hide by TheHatedOne).
Companies such as Google and Facebook, who make money off of tracking you, want you to believe that “if you have something to hide, you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” (quoting the former Google CEO). It draws a connection between criminal activities and protecting your natural privacy where there is none (See: Does Privacy & Security Matter? YES! by Techlore).
We lock our doors. We seal our envelopes. We use strong passwords. We put up curtains covering our windows. We don’t do this because we’re secretly plotting a terrorist attack, but because we consider our personal activities, online conversations and interactions as private. Whether that be having dinner at the table, playing video games, chatting about that new movie and so on. None of these things are illegal by any means but knowing this, we still keep those curtains on our windows. We still lock our doors. We still don’t allow others to read our messages (See the Ted talk Why privacy matters by Glenn Greenwald).
Computers have enabled us to scale our storage and processing capabilities to historically unmatched levels, but it also enables unethical monopolies to abuse their power and record everything about you at historically unmatched levels, and these records can be used to your disadvantage at any time, now or in the future (See the Ted talk "I have nothing to hide")
Your Privacy is under attack
Privacy on the internet is experiencing a greater attack than ever before, and the big five – Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon – are everywhere. Over 90% of all apps share data with at least one third party such as Facebook or Google. Because users expect services to be gratis, programs embed Facebook and Google trackers to squeeze out as much revenue as they can. In the meantime, big brother can link those trackers and save your internet activity more detailed than you yourself could remember (See How to protect your online privacy in 2020 by TheHatedOne).
The NSA has become a global superpower, surveilling the moves of everyone, only exposed by whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, who has courageously risked his life leaking confidential documents - yet, they have not prevented a single terrorism case with this bulk data collection (See Safe and Sorry – Terrorism & Mass Surveillance by Kurzgesagt).
The NSA's over-reaching surveillance efforts combined with developments in big data dramatically shift the playing field in favor of those who can access information, which is unavailable to the rest of us. These mass-surveillance system are the perfect dictatorship tool, being used to censor criticism, tocurtail activism and opposition, to stop whistle-blowers, journalists and lawyers from free expression, etc. It has been shown countless times that only the perception of being surveilled alters our behavior, we become more complicit and less critical, we don’t speak freely anymore. Consequently, if people lose their right to privacy, if they live under constant surveillance, or just a perceived threat of surveillance, then they have lost every other right they have (See the r/privacy wiki).
Your Privacy can be protected!
Our privacy depends on programs we can understand, audit and review. Programs that are not only open, but also respect the user and are aware of these issues. Proprietary software is an injustice to the user, and it shows in how they value your privacy:
- Facebook goes through at least one privacy scandal every year, but still keeps records on your name, email, birthdate, location, search history, listening habits, applications, files, messages, calls, photos, face and more, even if you don’t have a Fecebook account
- Google collects massive amounts of user data by tracking you on over 90% of the top 50,000 websites on the internet, saving almost everything you do online, and a Google Account is an easy way for them to read through all your Gmails and track where you go with Google Maps
- Apple, although not an ad company like Google or Facebook, has access to most of your personal information stored on iDevices through iCloud, which they can access and have used in the past to give data to law enforcement
- Microsoft isn’t only keeping the massive amounts of user data it gets from Windows, Bing and Cortana for itself, but is also sharing it with Facebook
- Amazon controls the largest cloud in the world (called AWS) and can use it to track your activity across all of the websites that use their services
- Windows contains a backdoor for the NSA (Source)
Privacy isn't an all-or-nothing, and there surely are times where you need to use proprietary software because there's no alternative. But if you're currently running software such as Google Chrome, Vivaldi, Opera, Visual Studio Code (-> VSCodium!), Microsoft Windows, Google Android etc., there are better options!
Something as simple as changing your default search engine, or switching your browser, can already dramatically improve your everyday privacy at the cost of little convenience. How far you want to go from there is up to you, but by individually adopting privacy technologies, we help to protect everyone's privacy! See the following websites for more information:
- PrivacyTools showcases alternatives to popular proprietary Spyware
- prism-break also showcases alternatives to popular proprietary Software
- The FSF website showcases issues with proprietary software, and maintains a directory of Free Software alternatives
- The New Oil showcases privacy abuses by governments and private firms, and has guides on how to protect yours
- r/privacy is a community for privacy advice
- TheHatedOne publishes videos about privacy
- Techlore publishes videos about privacy
- Mental Outlaw publishes videos about privacy, Free Software and GNU/Linux
- Luke Smith publishes videos about digital minimalism
- DistroTube publishes videos about GNU/Linux distributions and Free Software
Thanks for reading, and I hope this helped!
[link] [comments] ...