It is a valid approach and good idea. But also ppl who do it should know… it ties all the accounts together through a domain no one else uses. With a privacy mail provider there could be millions of others on the domain. With a prvate domain, not so much. It’s one more piece of data that helps identity brokers deduce that account A on site A is the same person as account B on site B.

Some might not care about it. Or, they might. Threat models etc.

Very well said. Everything you said I agree about 100%.

We need to get better at convincing non-nerds.

I’m doing my best. It’s hard tho. They just… don’t care. They don’t understand why it is important. Important for their future, and for all of our future. They don’t seem to grasp why it matters so much, and what price we have to pay when we get it wrong.

I try to find concrete examples for them. But when people are invested already in some big tech ecosytem, it’s easy to discount the examples. “That wouldn’t apply to me”.

I’m trying so hard, but it is an up hill fight :(.

visually blocks ads but under the hood clicks on them

I get where they’re coming from on the idea. But the problem I have… it would still run all the fingerprnting scripts and other shit. Sure it makes some bad data added to the good… but still plugs me into huge adware ecosystems. It leaves such a bad taste in my mouth, if any of their shit hits my comp.

I really mostly want to not be part of any of that shit. 🤮 Just leave me alone, surveilance companies, thank you.

Agree. Also it creates a false dichotomy in peoples minds. If you fight the orwellian creep into every kind of tech, you must not care about the children! What kind of sociopath is against protecting children!!

Really, I do believe there are many parts of the world children should be protected from. But NOT by giving away our freedom. NOT by turning the world into one huge mass survielance device. NOT by going full 1984. I can be in favor of protecting children even if I object to dragnet surveilance.

deleted by creator

100% mobile app based public transport, meaning that there is no way of buying or showing a ticket unless it’s the app

Wow. That’s awful. How does it work for poor people who can’t afford a phone to run the app?

Where I live the city buses still accept cash. But I don’t know for how much longer.

I try to get everyone of my friends to pay for everythng with cash. Food, buses, restaurants. Just to support the privacy option, so we don’t lose it. But they think payment apps are more convenient so they don’t listen, lol.

Without that, a lot of apps just don’t behave right,

Agree with what you said. And if I may add a little? Apps not behaving right extends to things average people see as essential in thier life. Like banking apps refusing to run on “untrusted devices”.

Techies can get around most of it. At least today, maybe not in the future. For example use the bank’s web site directly not their app. But my nontechie friends have no idea. From their perspective, something like an alternative to Android simply doesn’t work for what they are used to.

Vendor lock-in.

Can you imagine a company like dell decided tomorrow to only allow installation from their specific vendor locked market?

TBH this possibility does scare me. That we could lose this freedom too on PC.

Today already, most PC come with Microsoft’s secure boot keys in firmware. Microsoft signs the install keys for many Linux distros. It isn’t totally locked down, b/c you can turn this off in UEFI. But most of the pieces exist. Frog and pot…

The PC platform is “open”, oh yes… but when Microsoft says jump, PC mfgs ask how high. We could somday see pressure to lock down all computing, not just mobile. To protect the children, you know…

Yah, there might be something to that. For protection against style + vocab matching.

It sucks though. I recently read where the more people use LLM assisters when they write, the more the whole virtual commons grows bland. It feeds back upon itself.

Sigh. I just want a world where we can have nice things. And assholes don’t try to ruin the nice things we could have.

new circle of Hell for backers of mass surveillance

A perpetual itch between the thumb toe and the next one, and they must wear shoes 18 hours each day so they can’t reach the itch.

Well, sure, but it isn’t JUST an American thing, even today. Like Buelldozer said, it’s starting all over the globe. Some further than others ofc.

Some are starting to ban VPNs to prevent people from bypassing the ID laws. Not sure where it stands rn but some UK MEPs or w/e they’re called in the UK were pushing for that.

Agree. Another benefit is, it’s much less productive to use info-warfare bots against a small forum of let’s say 500 users, than against a global site with 1B users.

Agree, hard indeed. Any solution will have problems. False positives. False negatves. Violating privacy.

So far, maybe Lemmy flew under the radar and it’s a nice enough place. But I don’t see how that can continue longterm.

It is sad to me. Anything nice eventually gets ruined.

It is backed up alongwith everything else, all my data, under a normal 3-2-1 idea, but 5-3-1.

Each of the copies on separate media inc my main PC is also versioned. I keep 12 hourly versions, 7 daily versions, 4 weekly versions, 12 monthly versions, and then per-year versions going way back. This helps protect against corruption, like I accidentally deleted an keepassxc entry without noticing right away or w/e.

Granted I didn’t use it to create my account

I bet that’s like 90% of what they care about tho. They really want to ID you when you first sign up, but they might care not as much about day to day use.

It’s fuzzier with reddit tho. Used to be you could sign up with a VPN with success. Some still have accts made like that. They are much sticklier now. It maybe possible but just rarely, and nobody seems to know what makes the diff. It also used to be posible to sign up with Tor, but today that’s instant shadowban.

My side rant is that shadowbans are MF-ing evil. I got caught in one because I used a VPN to sign up. I only ever tried to answer people on a tech help sub. I was posting in good faith. Tried to be helpful and contribute to the community. But none of my posts were ever being engaged with. No upvotes, no downvotes, no replies. Finally I looked without being signed in (“open in private window”) and sure enough… nobody but me could see my posts.

It felt bad, man. I put my time and effort into trying to help other people, for nothing.

It’s very difficult to not be truly unique if someone out there is purposefully tracking you as an individual.

And the neat part about that is… it used to be very expensive to do it. Now it blew right on through free, and into highly profitable. So it can be done to everyone everywhere at every moment.

No one knows how many people the Nazis employed to spy on the rest. Some estimates are like 1/4 of the population spied on the others! Today? We can put that to shame using only 0.01% or w/e of our population to spies on the rest. B/c that 0.01% has surveilance tools unimaginably powerful compared to anything the Nazis dreamed about.

There is a place in the world for targeted surveilance of bad people, mass murders, drug kingpins, w/e. You get a judge to sign off, and go to town. But dragnet surveilance of everyone at all times erodes the foundation of free societies.

Frankly humanity does not need this invention one bit.

Yah. Unfortunately, we’ve got it though. :( :( :(

People I know, some friends, they are completely oblivious to how much it will surveillance them. Or how much Meta already does, in other ways. “I don’t care, I’m not doing anything wrong”.

Constant surveillance erodes a society. It erodes democracy.

I think that’s what it is.

What it is today. But these things tend to slip-slope their way to worse privacy violations over time. Oh, children are getting around the setting? Well, we better tie it to a government ID.

I’m more afraid of what it becomes than what it starts as.

sounds to me like you’d have to have some stuff posted online under your real name for it to find and match to

They probably only need a reliable IRL ID for one of them. That’s a weaker requirement than posting under your name. Your name can be discovered other ways. For example browser fingerprinting, where that fingerprint is also associated with a “KYC” login elsewhere. There is a whole industry for using non-name signals to ID people. Big data is powerful.

Ofc there are ways to frustrate that. Yet the attacker only has to win once. The defender has to win every time.

But it will be statistical in nature. They’ll have some confidence attached to it. That could be very low, or quite high. Depends on how much you have disclosed online.

Excellent point.

For very long, I have thought vocabulary alone would be enough footprint to ID someone. If you had enough sample of their writing ofc. It’s like browser fingerprints. The words you use, and how often you use them, is a fingerprint. As UnknowableNight points out, some patterns are very unique, nearly enough alone. Yet even without those, you have enough signals. Sentence length. Whether you spell colour or color. Regional expressions. Word use frequency. Whether you bring in vocabulary used mostly in a certain profession, like medicine or law. Whether you use more paragraphs or more single liners. None alone are enough. All together, with the 100 other ones smart people can figure out? Probably enough.

Long ago it would be too much effort, only good for targeted cases. Today? Maybe you can do it dragnet, seeking to ID every person who writes online.

I do not know if that happens today. Yet I do not see anything to stop it.