It saddens me that many people do not see far enough to understand well what we are losing while losing privacy rights and trivializing data protection. It is so much more than most think. This affects our intimacy, our safety, our social lives, our freedoms, and all our human rights.

It goes well beyond targeted advertising. Attacks on privacy lead to direct increases in authoritarianism and dictatorial governance.

We must care much more about it than we do now. It is critical to ourselves as individuals, but also to democracy and society as a whole.

#Privacy #Authoritarianism

@Em0nM4stodon

Ask anyone who lived in a ubiquitous surveillance state built around narcing on neighbors, friends, & family. It was terrible.

In East Germany, the Stasi had an intergenerational impact that crashed their economy & dropped the birth rate precipitously.

Peter Thiel & Elon Musk both spent some of their childhood in apartheid-era South Africa; ubiquitous surveillance state that used state police murder to maintain white supremacy

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/26/elon-musk-peter-thiel-apartheid-south-africa

https://newlinesmag.com/argument/the-worldview-of-the-afrikaner-diaspora-now-haunts-the-us/

How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa

Elon Musk grew up with the privileges of a stratified racial order and Peter Thiel lived in a city that venerated Hitler

The Guardian