• noodlejetski@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    ITT: omg how other people don’t see what I, a very smart and superior person who browses technology communities, have known for years

    we should be celebrating that privacy issues are gaining more and more mainstream coverage.

    • laverabe@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      No one cares about this stuff but techies/Lemmy. Regular people don’t care, like at all. They know tech companies do this stuff but if convenience>privacy, most people take the former every time to make life easier. Data privacy is not a tangeable thing in most people’s minds.

      There would have to be some sort of cataslismic event to wake people up enough for people to do anything meaningful. I don’t know what that would be, but I hope someone figures that out sooner rather than later.

      • noodlejetski@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        I don’t think some mass “waking up” event is going to occur, but every time another headline about it shows up, it gets more difficult to ignore or not care about it. and every time someone who’s on the fence about the issue will pay more attention to it, and perhaps use the offending platform less. baby steps.

        besides, I wouldn’t say people don’t care, they do when they get offered a choice: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-in-ios-14-5-analytics-find/

      • zbyte64@awful.systems
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        1 month ago

        I read this and ask “What is your intention with this post?” What is gained if everyone is this jaded?

        • laverabe@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          everytime I tell someone there are alternatives to using Google/Apple/etc their response is, “but it’s just so easy”. I guess you can call my view of that jaded, but people really don’t care? I mean I’m not trying to be defeatest at all, it’s just trying to accurately appraise people’s apathy to apply a proper resolution to the problem.

          The solution has to make it “easy” for people because that is what they expect of technology now.

          • zbyte64@awful.systems
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            1 month ago

            Honestly I’m too apathetic to care if what you’re saying is accurate or not. I am asking what are you trying to accomplish by convincing apathetic people they’re apathetic?

            • laverabe@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              Oh you can’t change apathy really. I was just suggesting if privacy friendly tech (ie: Linux) is to go mainstream, that it would have to be “easier” than what is currently out there to gain mainstream popularity.

              Desktop linux is almost there, but the general population mostly uses mobile devices now, and phone Linux seems to be a dying prospect.

              • zbyte64@awful.systems
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                1 month ago

                Ahh, so by making Linux “easier” we’re preparing for that eventual opportunity (from a disaster) where the public goes looking for something better.

      • sentientity@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        I don’t think this is true. Most people do care, in my anecdotal experience. I am not in tech circles. It is not a niche thing to be concerned about these days.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          Eh, most do care, they just don’t do anything about it. My siblings and brothers don’t like that companies like Google and Facebook harvest so much data, yet they continue using them.

          So whether people care isn’t a particularly interesting question, I’m more interested in what people are willing to do about it. Will they change what services they use? Would they change who they vote for (if a party actually prioritized privacy)? How much are they willing to pay to not have data harvested? And so on. Those are interesting questions.

          • sentientity@lemm.ee
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            1 month ago

            Disagree. I think everyone deserves a reasonable degree of privacy and interoperability and choice as a protected right, within the markets and services we already have.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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              1 month ago

              I agree with that as well, I just don’t think the average person puts that at the top of their voting priorities, and as such, the major candidates don’t say anything about privacy when running for office.

              • sentientity@lemm.ee
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                1 month ago

                I feel like positioning the ‘average person’ as always disengaged or never doing enough reads more like an attempt to define in/out groups than a genuine effort to actually do anything about the problem.

                • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 month ago

                  Understanding the average person (or rather, the mode of the population on a given topic) helps to craft a strategy. If the average person doesn’t prioritize privacy, the solution probably isn’t to run a big campaign around a privacy bill, but to attack the issue of privacy at the fringes on things the average person does care about (e.g. right to repair for farmers, cars, and consumer devices; even abortion). You can point to privacy as being the main, underlying theme here, but focus the energy on things that actually have a chance of success.

  • Prox@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    That’s literally the sales pitch to investors, and has been for decades.

  • z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    We need you Lina Khan. We need you, but stronger, faster, better. Let’s fucking go.

    • 2pt_perversion@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      People in this thread don’t seem to understand how anti big business the FTC has been since Lina Khan was appointed. These reports are meant to be used by congress to help guide real policy. It’s one thing to just assume social media is violating privacy, it’s another thing to have a facts-based report on exactly what is currently happening.

      Of course the FTC needs new laws to do any enforcement and there’s probably not enough anti corporation politicians to pass laws that give them real teeth on data privacy issues.

  • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    FTC says water is wet.

    Edit: in all seriousness, it’s good that the FTC is talking about this, and it’ll be even better if it does something to combat it.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      Well, the Fediverse isn’t any more private, but at least it doesn’t care much about your data. That said, any company could come and harvest all of that data if it wanted since it’s open.

      The Fediverse isn’t the final step here.

  • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    It is fine to have casual knowledge of or a hunch about something, but far better to have the research and analysis to prove it.