Broadcasting your government name, face, & location online. The fall of pen names & anonymity. This is all web2.0+ behavior. It's been extremely strange to see the rise & continued engagement in this behavior.
Being safe on the early web, you learned about 'threat actors', number one was protecting personal identity, not connecting to untrusted servers, watching out for bad / nosy systems administrators, & now? Google openly admits to reading your email & people just, don't care… what happened?
@rusty__shackleford I've been doing it for so long that it's just become second nature. That said, I tend to keep to self-hosted technologies, but federation limits the amount of mitigation that that provides.
It doesn't help that my domain is derived from my government name.
We all have the self agency to be public online. Self hosted also changes things a bit as there is sovereignty there, as I am moreso referring to threat actors like bad service providers reading your personal messages, building advertising profiles surrounding the clicks and actions you take on their site, and in general, predatory behavior (also see LinkedIn, facebook, Google, etc etc.)
We also have the right to be anonymous, which opens up the other half of this discussion.
Is it ok that Google builds device/ browser/ app/ network fingerprints to build profiles around anonymous users to serve them targeted content? Is it ok that anonymous users don't have control of this?
If this was not ok just a decade ago, why are we ok with it now?
Rusty Shackleford
Jonathan Lamothe