I am fucking scared of the mass surveilence nightmare direction that the internet and the world as a whole is going towards… C2PA, france hacking itself into citizen phones, the UK anti encryption law, EU’s chat control, etc. Im also sick of and hate the “you will own nothing and be happy” mentality that corpos try to push. I dont wanna know how the world will look like in 5-10 years.
It is an absolute nightmare, but you can gain some privacy back with ublock origin, an adblocking DNS on your phone, Firefox, a VPN, and ditching all things google/meta. As I type this out, I am reminded how much effort it takes to claw back your privacy…yeah OP, I’m with you, the modern internet is a profit-at-all-cost cesspool that can eat a moldy potato!
Ditching google is the most difficult part, especially when iPhone is so locked down :(
I’ve primarily been an iphone user over the years and was recently hand me downed an older pixel. Using grapheneOS and firefox, I was surprised to see there were only about a dozen extensions available, good ones, but not all of them like I’d assumed. Then I discovered chrome on android has zero, is that right? I cannot believe that there are so many people that use a mobile browser without an adblocker. On iOS safari, I have dozens of incredible extensions (basically countless through the app store) that make the internet useable again. I’m happy to see safari opening up.
You can get any extensions you want on Android with Firefox Beta (or Nightly) by creating a custom collection at addons.mozilla.org
Firefox on mobile has piles of apps generally now. No need for a list or nightly or beta.
There’s only a subset of addons available normally, this method lets you make any addons you want available on Android. This is what I’m referring to: https://www.androidpolice.com/install-add-on-extension-mozilla-firefox-android/
You can put Google-free Android forks on your phone or tablet. My phone is LinageOS with minimal Google footprint and my tablet has no gapps at all.
I use Gmail, Tasks, Drive and Calendar for the sake of convenience, since I could self-host all of these.
How so? You can just use an iPhone without running any Google apps on it, right?
For mobile adblockers I recommend AdAway: https://github.com/AdAway/AdAway
Firefox mobile now supports extensions like uBlock Origin, although that only works for the web and not the whole phone.
I’m down to using Facebook in Firefox again. And reddit very occasionally too. Gostery,AdBlock, privacy possum, so many addons available for Firefox.
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It’s sad, 10-15 years ago it was as simple as Adblock :/
Now it’s nearly unavoidable and/or requires quite a few changes to your native device to make it more secure
Yeah, for all of Jobs’ “vision” cell phones were really just a way to profit of of free information.
There’s actually a lot to look forward to. In fact you’re talking on one of those reasons right now.
e2ee is only a recent thing which is significantly more private. You can have an entirely private FOSS operating system that has parity with Windows for free.
The privacy and FOSS ecosystems are thriving more then ever. There are more VPN providers then ever before, and Tor gets better and better.
We have decentralized social media like the fedi which gives complete freedom against corporate control.
We have all sorts of amazing FOSS tools out there. We even have an AI that can be run completely locally and with custom unfiltered models that is very close to competitive with ChatGPT, and also free.
None of these things even existed like 10 years ago, or were in their infancy. They’re all competitive to modern corporate alternatives. Privacy alternatives are by far in the best state they’ve ever been, and they’ll just continue to improve as the community grows larger.
We can own all these tools and self host. In fact we’ve never been able to “own” anywhere near as much as we can today.
Thanks for providing a positive perspective! It’s really important we don’t lose sight of the good things.
What is this local ChatGPT alternative you are talking about?
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Be more optimistic friend.
Government will continue to do surveillance but they can be constrained by the legal system. Corpos will build ai to sell you bullshit off whatever data they can get on you but you can block their ads and leave their platforms. Encryption is math and can’t be stopped by a law. UK law makers won’t be able to enforce their law even if it’s passed.
It’s cheaper than ever to run your own server, and will continue to get cheaper. Manage your own digital footprint and work towards decentralizing the web. Don’t worry so much about other people, they’ll come around eventually.
UK law makers won’t be able to enforce their law even if it’s passed.
that said, we should also always remember that unenforceable law is law that can and will be selectively applied. Something they can whip out against people when they don’t have anything else.
This is being made increasingly difficult every day, with huge corporations openly discussing the advantages of killing the open internet as it is today: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/README.md
The endgame seems to be to turn you into a mindless, agency-less zombie slave to these corps with your input being ads delivered to your (sub)conscious, and your output being you mindlessly doing whatever the ad wanted you to do. This is as much psychological – and social – divide-and-rule as it is technologically damaging, so even if you don’t know (or want) to run your own server, you will end up being affected, fractured and sharded against your own community all the same.
A sample case in point: It is getting more and more difficult to run your own servers when you are forbidden to spend your own money from your own electronic devices to pay for goods and services without being surveilled (and pounded by ads).
Most payment apps rely on device attestation “security”, that requires your mobile device be “compliant” to someone else’s rules, standards and endgames, to the effect that if you want to change your own bought-and-owned device in a way your ad-masters disapprove, you will be prevented from making payments from your device – and more significantly thereby, from participating in your community, economy and society unless you bend over to one of many private corporations that want you just as bent and broken as the rest of the people they already have.
This is pure, unadulterated evil at your doorstep, ringing your doorbell.
I know I probably sound far more pessimistic and hopeless than things actually are, but that is better than being asleep at the wheel. I do not wish to rob you of your optimism (I am actually happy that we still have it), but unless we see our world for what it really is today, it will be far more difficult to know and drive what it may become in the future.
Here is another example of how hard some people have worked to turn your own devices against you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo
Thanks for the video link. Very interesting. This is how all computers will be built eventually. So seize the means of computation until we can…
What happened to the ethos of the original internet cultures that were so dominant. It’s like large swaths of that generation grew up and sold out to become the oppressors. And the other portion are being crushed by that system.
Money happened.
I think the end of net neutrality hastened there older internet’s demise. now corps are free to monetize as much as they like.
Yup. When net neutrality died it let a few corporate overlords rise up and kill off much of the old free web. What much of us grew up on was a much fewer, wilder web. One you could still dream on and where you could still think damned near any new thing could come from anyone. Now, you pretty much have to already have $.
Wait, what do you mean Net Neutrality died? I thought they lost signing the bill to end it?
When was the last time you accessed a http website (not https)? Basically any schmuck in his basement could cobble one up. Nowadays you have to rent a server from some cloud service which goes against the whole net neutrality concept.
People just stopped bothering when their browser screams at them for accessing an unsafe website. That’s where net neutrality died IMO.
Wait, I don’t get this. Https certs are trivial to acquire and keep up-to-date with Let’s Encrypt. You can deploy a server like Caddy that will handle most of it for you. I’m a schmuck whose own website is self-hosted and I put an nginx rule to redirect http to https, because I don’t think anyone along the path between your computer and my website deserves to eavesdrop on the conversation.
The path of least resistance isn’t self-hosting anymore. No matter how easy it is, a twitter/facebook/youtube account will give you much more credibility and reach for a smaller cost and less setup time. I suppose I didn’t include that in the original message because I didn’t want to treat self-hosted websites and user accounts on large websites as similar, but it seems like they fulfill the same purpose nowadays.
I also recently noticed that everything get’s more and more hostile towards the user. I observed so many apps and Websites that have hidden some big features behind a paywall recently - as if they don’t already make enough money with data collection and selling. First they make you comfortable with these QoL Stuff and then they steal it away, holding it in front of your face and want you to pay for it now, something that was free for years. It’s filthy…
I bought a lifetime license for the Spark email app. I even sent them some extra money when I learned their engineers are in the UK. Then they pushed out an update that removed the feature that caused me to buy their app in the first place, locked half of the other features behind a subscription, and said that since it’s an “update”, the previous lifetime subscriptions don’t count. Mother fuckers! Fuck the Spark team. I uninstalled it, gave them a 1 star review, and installed Fair Email. It’s a better app in most ways, is completely free, and is privacy focused. The only thing is that it’s missing the one feature I paid for, which was to be able to long press an email, tap “search for all emails by sender”, and then bulk action them. It was really useful for bulk deleting all Amazon confirmations and stuff like that.
The EU is very much hit and miss. I do appreciate them putting Google, Meta, and Apple in their place, and some on the legislation regarding smart phones they have passed. But ultimately they want to have all your data for “security”.
Still, I think the situation in the US is a bit worse.
EU policy is so hit and miss because the EU Parliament mostly has our backs, and is introducing good legislation protecting consumers of corpo overreach (like the roaming directive). The EU Commission on the other hand has only the interest of the EU countries’ governments in mind, which makes many of its proposals rather shitty of the common citizen. Also tells you a lot about what the actual national governments stand for, when somebody else is doing more for the citizens than they are.
thank you for that brief explanation, didn’t really know the difference between the two branches(is that what they call em?)
That explanation doesn’t really go into any detail.
The EU Parliament is made up of elected MEPs from each member state (EU countries). They vote on EU citizens’ behalf for the regulations that the EU imposes. Typically, these regulations are basically the EU saying “member states need to make a law about this within these confines” and then it’s up to each member state to flesh out their own version of the law internally.
The European Commission is made up of lawyers. They are not elected, instead they are selected by the government of each member state. The EC lawyers write the rules that the EU Parliement MEPs vote on. The idea being, you want talented professionals in this role, rather than someone who is merely popular - they need to write robust rules that can withstand challenge and suit the entire EU. However it depends on member state governments correctly selecting for this position.
People knowledgeable in law write the laws, then democratically elected representatives vote on them.
So I don’t think /u/[email protected] really had it right in their statement of how it functions. The EU Parliament doesn’t introduce any laws, the EC writes directives that the EU Parliament vote into force, then member states write laws within the bounds of the directives.
However they may be right that members of the EC can be more politically motivated, given that they are appointed to their position by the government of their home country, rather than by the people of their home country.
That’s a more detailed explanation thanks. The OP explanation was helpful for someone who hasn’t really looked into how it functions.
Is there some sort of judiciary at the EU level or is the robustness of laws tested in national contexts?
There are definitely EU courts, one of the reasons the UK left was to get out from under the EU courts. All member states have to implement laws that fit within the EU directives, if these laws don’t match or aren’t enforced then a citizen may end up escalating their claim to the EU courts, after exhausting their national courts. The nation then has to follow the EU court’s ruling.
Saying that I can’t think of any example where the EU court didn’t bring forward a fair ruling that the UK had to adhere to. There certainly was plenty of shit stirred up by the government about it, but when you looked into the claims they fell flat.
It’s like governments and corporations are competing at control over information flows. In EU bureaucracy wins more often, and in US corpo lobbyists win more often.
Can’t say I find this competition healthy…
It’s pretty much the story of Arsenal Gear in Metal Gear Solid 2 lol
Kojima always had a way of seeing into the not so distant future and pretty much nailing it.
Just a little little bit
Yes, they are unfortunately not as opposed to surveillance by governments as they are by that of megacorporations. While I appreciate that they are trying to keep the likes of Google and Meta in check, I also very much dislike the several attempts to enforce data retention and essentially encryption bans.
That the Data Retention Directive was eventually annulled by the Court of Justice of the European Union gives me some hope that the legal system within EU can withstand these attempts, but maybe I am being too naive? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
I’m concerned about when governments get ahold of usable quantum computers.
We’ll always be one step ahead of the bad guys. Fortunately we have places like this where like-minded people can gather who understand the dangers.
It truly sucks. but seeing decentralized/open-source projects - Lemmy, I2P/TOR, Linux, etc. warms my heart. It helps me see there’s truth out there and pushes me forward down this path.
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Combine this with laboratories learning how to literally control pathogens and we could have the distophia of the future
There’s a reason why I’m structuring a home server build right now, I’m so tired of this internet, I just want to enjoy my things and not feel like an asshole supporting these companies. I don’t want to live in a dystopian net, even though we’re slowly approaching it. What will I do about private messaging? Who knows, I might have to make my own app to encrypt my messages before sending them through another app.
it’ll look either
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more like where the vikings live
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more like where Americans die
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I genuinely believe that this is nothing new. Governments have just learned in the last few years that most of their citizenry don’t give a shit about privacy. They’re just making it official, so it can be penalized if you openly try to do something about it. I think…
AI has entered the chat
Honestly it’s one of my personal reasons for disliking AI. I (let alone most of our kids) don’t want or need a reason to think less, let alone own less of my content. FFS.
