@engravecavedave

Me being grown up in Russia, living there most of the life and seeing how they destroyed internet and freedoms brick by brick, starting with "child information safety law" in 2010.

@XEJKnol @fsfe @eff @fdroidorg
Exactly. While cybercrime malware gangs will buy or steal identities without any issues.

I guess it's more about censorship and removing the apps they don't want to allow (like alternative streaming clients, VPNs, overlay networks, and so on) or from "unwanted" countries rather than a security fix.

@sarahjamielewis and each state has mass espionage machines with cheap memory which can actually store sensitive parts of data (like personal correspondence) almost indefinitely. They had to send real agents 100 years ago to do that kind of stuff, for any suspect, which is not scalable.

So it's kind of questionable, who is better loaded with opportunities.

@fight VPNs are half-measures and gonna fail at a not very long distance.

E.g. Russia and China block OpenVPN and wireguard efficiently, leaving the room to solutions like VLESS which are not that fast and require self-host to avoid IP bans.

That would be great if public orgs would promote overlay networks, like TOR hidden services and i2p usage to the general public. Giving momentum, with network effects those would be far more resilient.

@aspenrapid @GrapheneOS @AudraTran

Exactly. If criminals use human rights, that doesn't mean that human rights are wrong. GOS helps people all over the world to ensure that their privacy and secrecy of correspondence is enforced. If some of the users are criminals - why would anybody care? State must not have mass espionage on citizens in the first place.

Police has had agents and per-person surveillance for decades, they don't need to spy on everyone's phone or put a camera in everyone's flat for that. If the case isn't worth putting a human agent in the loop - maybe it's not worth solving.

@coolandnormal @aj @liamvhogan @jedsetter ofc I don't receive money anonymously. But I withdraw them to cash and spend mostly in cash instead of spending from bank accounts. The state will know your income in most cases anyway. Hiding income is a completely different topic.

Here I'm mostly talking about the spending habits/privacy so other people can't say what you enjoy, spend money on, when and in which amounts.

@aj @coolandnormal @liamvhogan It's not that bad if you put a little effort. Just use cash money. I am very confused why everybody pretends that it doesn't exist. That solves the financial surveillance issues at scale. Things like email trackers are pretty trivial to avoid with thunderbird, phone trackers with grafeneos and foss software, PC trackers with Linux desktop.

Last time I literally donated to the animal shelter as in your example with cash money, they don't even know my name.