You also have a maximum price you’ll pay for various goods and services…
Man, this is such a trap. People see an ad for Tuta and think they have finally won the privacy game. They jump from Gmail to Tuta like it is some kind of digital nirvana but honestly it’s just trading one master for another. It’s an improvement, sure. Moving from a glass house into a bunker definitely shrinks your attack surface but you are still handing the keys over to a single company. They own the bunker so they actually control everything. If you want real sovereignty? You gotta go deeper than that. Go towards self hosting or actual decentralized protocols where YOU hold the keys and nothing else. Otherwise you are just a prisoner in a slightly more secure cell.
Okay, I’m sorry, but while I sorta agree with you
Go towards self hosting
Such a horrible idea for email. Here’s a nice talk outlining how horrible it is to host your own email these days.
or actual decentralized protocols where YOU hold the keys and nothing else.
Great for chat and many other things, but you can’t escape email in today’s world. You’ll still need it.
Not sure what a good solution is though, since Tuta and Proton aren’t exactly great either.
You are totally misjudging this! Honestly you are probably just thinking about the absolute nightmare of manually configuring every single little thing like SMTP and SPF back in the day which was a massive headache. But that is not how it works anymore. I have been self hosting my email for over ten years using mail in a box and it is basically zero maintenance once it is up and running. These modern stacks use abstraction layers to handle all the annoying stuff so you do not have to be a full time sysadmin just to get through the day. It is not some impossible task where you are stuck with Tuta or Proton because you can definitely escape those silos if you use the right stack instead of trying to build every single layer from scratch.
It still requires you to maintain the entire server infrastructure. Sure if you already have your server up and running either way then spinning up another docker container or whatever else you use is pretty fast to do. But building and, more importantly, properly securing a server stack just for mail is a lot of work for little benefit. And if it stops working for whatever reason you won’t even notice it since Emails just get send into the void and are forever lost there.
If you really want to go the extra mile to be more independent from big services, then buying a domain and using that with something like tuta is enough. You can still jump ship whenever you like without the workload of server maintenance.
I think this is a very priveleged take if we actually care about advocating for digital sovereignty.
In a perfect world, sure, build and manage a server with self hosted infrastructure. In reality people care about this stuff rarely actually have the money, time, skills or drive to manage a project like that confidently.
Its normal for people to want to allocate management of their services to a provider with trust to circumvent this.
For actualnconstructive advice to the people who can’t do this: Try looking up to see if their are any nonprofit email hosting services in your country - they exist but usually don’t do marketing and are often built on strong values. If not I really think using services like Tuta, proton, etc is leaps forward for your safety, privacy and ethics compared to Google, Microsoft, etc.
On social media, I see ragebaiting posts and it occurred to me that they are honeypots in disguise. If I say too much, it could be used against me, as I plan to join a union.
It is exactly what Instagram is, everyone is incriminating themselves with all kind of hateful baits. There will be a day when they will use that data accordingly.
I’m on Instagram mainly for photography, but i still keep being bombarded by posts that are shallow and vapid and ragebaiting.
Too many people are apathetic about privacy. It is like the voting problem but 100x worse.
I’m a lot more comfortable with people knowing what my genitals look like than most people are and yet even I draw the line well before insurers or law enforcement get a peek
Aye aye Cap’n! 🫡
Can I install a camera in your bedroom? One above your couch so I can read the things you type? One in the toilet? No? But you have nothing to hide you said…?
We all know what you’re doing in the bathroom, but that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve the privacy to do it.
Exactly! I may have nothing to hide, but I do have many things to keep private thatb are nobody’s business but my own.
Privacy, anonymity, and “secrets” may be related but aren’t always the same thing.
Tuta is a great company and their social media game is fire! I’m using their email and calendar app as a replacement for Gmail and Google Calendar.
That’s a bold statement from the company without any external security audit and which doesn’t allow you to use PGP.
Filing accident reports, my contact information is made public record, and lawyers and shady chiropractors line up to try to fleece me. Yes, I have something to hide, or rather, someone to hide from.
When I hear that sort of thing from Google CEOs or the like, I wish I could be there to ask them if that means they’d be cool with me sitting in on their therapy sessions or at least having access to their therapist’s notes after the fact. If they don’t want me or the world at large reading that stuff, I’d have to assume it’s because they’re a violent paedophile or something? Why else would they want to keep it private? Paedophilic tax dodgers and terrorists are the only ones who want privacy after all.
Also, lol that this is posted to Lemmy, the least-private social media platform I can think of.
Why you say that Lemmy is least private social platform?
I would argue that privacy, at least in the modern sense of controlling access to personal information, is a relatively new concept.
Before the internet and the widespread digitization of information, keeping something private was comparatively straightforward. Information was scattered across paper records, filing cabinets, and individual institutions. A person or company generally had to make a deliberate effort to obtain that information. Today, computers and interconnected databases have changed the equation completely. With enough dedication, technical knowledge, and time, a single person can potentially uncover an enormous amount of information about someone.
In fact, some organizations have gone in the opposite direction and deliberately moved their most sensitive information onto older, isolated computer systems because modern interconnected systems create so many avenues for unauthorized access.
That said, I don’t necessarily agree that everything listed in this meme should automatically be considered private information. I actually think there is a legitimate argument for greater transparency around things like wealth, relationship status, and political beliefs. If someone chooses to publicly announce their relationship on social media, for example, I’m not sure why that information should suddenly be considered inherently private. The same applies to political opinions: they only have political significance when people are willing to make them public.
The major exception, in my opinion, is information about a person’s physical movements and location. Where someone lives, where they’ve been, and where they are at any given moment can have very real safety implications. And ironically, this is also one of the areas where governments and corporations are increasingly capable of tracking people regardless of whether those people want to be tracked.
So I think the real issue isn’t that privacy itself is new. It’s that technology has fundamentally changed what it means to keep something private.
I have something to add about this meme. I got set a USCensus. It’s a special Census, not the mass mailer they do to all Citizens i feel so special. And it asks your name. It already knows your address…. It asks, if you sold your home TODAY, how much would you put it on the market for. How much are my property taxes, oh… ARE YOU GAY? Well… they ask, what kind of person are you and if you are in a relationship with what sex is that person… and they have EVERYKIND of person there is to list…. They ask, what time do I leave for work, and how long is that commute. What is the address of my job… and WHAT IS MY TITLE … How much I make, i can’t remember if it was before or after taxes… and then what is my commute home… what time do i typically leave… what type of router do i have in my home. how many computers do I own. How many bathrooms does my home have. I’m surprised it didn’t ask me when I took a shit…. I think some of those things are private. I don’t want to answer them. I felt, if i don’t answer the census and throw it away, They will send an enumerator and we will have todo it in person, in my home, which they state they do on all of the warning letters they sent to my home if I didn’t comply and i would be fined. I felt if i lied, they would do the same, and I would still be fined. And if they have on META glasses, or some sort of recorder, now I’m being taped. I’d despise that. Answering these questions made me feel very uneasy. They know my patterns… I hate that. I filled this thing out a few months ago, and I’m still a wreck about it. Some background… I live in Minneapolis, This Special Census went out to a few cities in southern states….not here. I’m gay. I’m an essential worker… a very unique one, very unique. I’m a civilian. I’m not MAGA. I have a passport and I travel enough to have had my picture taken enough times at the airport when DINGBAT what in charge of Homeland security. None of my neighbors got the USCensus… I called and asked them and none of my co-workers that have my title got it either. Privacy is KING. There’s diff types of privacy… you can purposely exploit yourself by being online, and get mad about your privacy rights, or you can be forced into or tricked into self exploiting, therefore your privacy has been taken.
Protect yourself from the harmful manipulations of people who would know how you work better than you do.
Sure but I think since the cultural sensation that was The Office you basically can’t start sentences with “false” anymore if you want to be taken seriously and the association with Dwight is really not going to do the privacy discussions any favours.
