MacStainlessMaking The Internet And Our Devices User Friendly Once Again
ArtisianThe topic is important, the timing is good (just in time for some new-years resolutions), and the writing is effective. Thank you for taking on the project.
I had hoped that the first suggestion in part 1 would be more accessible than ‘delete the accounts and create burner accounts’ - we’ve chosen the most effective but biggest ask, and I don’t think this post quite provides the infrastructure required for many people to make the change. FB is used by many folks as social media; the keeping track of friends, events, and family can’t really be done from a burner account (your messages alone will identify you entirely to meta).
And I have a personal pet peeve on this topic that’s triggered by the last section: I believe that mindfulness is a good way to improve internet use, but I think we’ve proven as a society that most people can’t implement this sort of self-reflection and intentionality without more structure. Where’s the tooling to remove dark patterns, automatically ask these questions after an app use, etc. ?
Thanks for reading and for the feedback!
My goal with the series is to start small and make it digestible for people to see they can make simple changes that make big results. I 100% agree there’s hurdles and more points to make, which is why I decided to write it as a series.
The goals I have is to show we don’t need to be dependent on the apps themselves, alternatives exist (fediverse, RSS, etc), and yes AdBlockers and recognizing dark patterns. To me, it’s a slow burn for people to see the way they hate the way things are can be changed, but IMO it has to be presented in pieces that don’t feel like a massive overhaul.
As you write up the alternatives (especially RSS and adblockers! These can be low barrier to entry), it would be great to link them from this part 1! I feel like the ask and text for part 1 is roughly the right size, but the action feels very big and scary to folks (and giving a reassurance early in the text that you can replace stuff and meet your needs might be helpful).
To create an effective burner account you need an effective burner device and a burner network to use it on. Otherwise it is trivial for companies that collect your data to figure out who that data belongs to.
This is more technologically difficult than the average person is willing to deal with. It’s too high of a bar to clear when your browser is being fingerprinted, your devices are being fingerprinted, every new device you buy has some app or subscription, and algorithms collect and anonymous your data with such recklessness that it’s basically trivial to unanonymize it.
Use the same network as your parents and you’ll get ads for the toothpaste they use, and maybe what they plan to buy you for Christmas.
Try to remove or block trackers? That just makes it easy to single you out as a specific individual. Try to firehouse those trackers with garbage data? Same problem.
If you think using a dummy Facebook account on the same device you use afor regular accounts means Facebook doesn’t track you or know who you are? That’s a pipe dream.
It’s the same with other apps too.
Especially Google and their app network.
Understand that it’s not that I don’t think this is a good idea (to remove certain services from your electronic life, and to curtail the use of others). But I think your strategy will give people a false sense of security.
I think this might partially be a case of different uses of the word ‘burner’ - what they describe is not strong opsec, but it is a way to reduce how much you provide for free (which is often more work for the company to get). By this, I mean not providing so many photos to track your every social visit and movement, not immediately providing life updates (ie, relationships, purchases).
Will meta find out most of this? yes. But I suspect it will be slower, more error prone, and sometimes more costly. Which don’t seem like a bad thing. Is there a good technical term for this? Hardening?
Also, I’ll note that the point of the suggestions is to reduce noise in a persons life, not to go off the grid. I think the blog is trying to be more about curtailing and removing sources of distraction.
I think the focus of the article is more on using services deliberately rather than pure privacy, and I think the all or nothing approach to thinking of online privacy as you mention detracts from any positive effects of the little things people just starting their journey may try.
Those big companies don’t care about you. Every small step taken toward privacy is beneficial, even if it’s just eliminating one data point at a time. If you make it harder to find your info, they aren’t going to hire a PI to track you down, there are plenty of easier marks to chase.
It’s bad when I watch pluribus and think about how great the Internet must be because all of the botnets are shut down and there’s only like 12 people that would bother to use it.