Privacy is almost dead.

Slugmax wrote a thought provoking phlog entry declaring,
"Privacy is dead."[1]. The point was made that due to social
pressures from friends, relatives and work, it is not feasible
to avoid the big tech companies. He listed a myriad of ways
that our information is collected through users of these
'free' services just by virtue of our sending or receiving an
email text, IM, phone call or even a birthday present
(thanks, Amazon). In the U.S., your ISP and dns provider will
happily collected your browsing history, bundle it and sell
it. 

Slugmax could have written much longer about how the
credit card companies mine your purchase history and sell it
to the giants, and given many other examples like streaming
services catalog your viewing habits, but it wasn't necessary.
Nobody will disagree with Slugmax' core thesis. We get the
point.

We who can read and care about such things already know that
terrabytes of information is collected every day by javascript
residing on virtually every website in the world and funneled
back to Google. We know the NSA vacuums up every damn byte
that flows over the internet backbones and saves it to the
world's largest hard drive somewhere in a Utah desert.  Sadly,
that would include gopher space.

And I agree with the spirit of Europe's GDPR, even if it has
proven to be a bungled morass of bureaucracy that has made the
www even less useable with those absolutely inane and
ridiculous privacy-popups that hassle me to opt in to their
cookies, as if I really have a choice.
All GDPR has done is accelerate my apathy toward all the
legal bullshit, which I now click through at an even more rapid pace.  
From my vantage point, GDPR was an over reach I really
don't see that it has made any difference. It seems more a
tool of the state to extract big fines from companies that
easily afford to pay them, than an effective law for
protecting privacy.

Privacy is much more 'dead' for some people than for others.
Truly there are those in the USA that just don't care.
In the U.S. there is no political will to protect privacy that
cannot be brought to heel by the gargantuan cash piles at the
internet giants. It seems there is no argument to be made for
privacy that can't be dismantled by the disingenuous claims of
'going dark,' a 'ticking nuclear bomb,' or the war on child
pron.

All the while, one of the worst purveyors of our personal
information is the government itself.
If you own a home with a mortgage, if you register to vote, if
make a political contribution, or sign in at a public meeting,
if you hold any kind of 'license,' own a car, you'll find it
on White Pages or Radaris and that ilk. 

The government came for your privacy long ago. It has already
leaked your personal information[2]. There are endless
examples of this, and you can expect more.  Even while the FBI
wants to deprive U.S. taxpayers of encryption, the U.S.
government and states are busy leaking and selling your
personal info.

It seems the best we can do at this point is be aware, manage
what we share, and opt out where ever possible.

Do you REALLY need facebook?  Would your life just be so, so
empty without it?
Would you really be lost if you changed your phone number?
When was the last time you got a real phone call that wasn't
from some bill collector or the IRS willing to settle your
debt if you just give them your credit card number on the
spot.

What if we went back to sending letters (forget that the
postal service images the front/back of ever letter and keeps
records about who sends messages to whom).

How much has that LinkedIn profile REALLY earned you.  Is that
really where you need to be?
Would you REALLY lose all your friends if you weren't on Snap
or Messenger?

I mean... how the fuck many messenger apps do we really need? 
 Maybe they connect you to your 500 besties, but seriously --
if thats you, then you are an aberation. It's emotionally
impossible to have a meaningful relationship with 500 people. 

If I haven't had lunch with you in the past 18 months, you're
dead to me. I can do fine with about a dozen real friends. 
Most of my relatives haven't anything interesting to say for
decades.  Most of my old work cohorts just don't matter to me
any more, and I get hit up much more than I hit.  It's
annoying. 

Relationships were meant to come into your life, offer you
something, and then eventually fade away.  Facebook has made
that impossible.  Last year I went though Facebook and threw
out about 200 people I had no idea who they were, or I just
didn't like them.  I made my account private because, truly,
the world doesn't care what I think. Only a few people and
Russian hackers who want to harvest my public information to
profile me care.  

And the net impact of this Facebook rage on my life was
positive.  I just check in once a month now to wish people
belated birthdays.

I know I'm getting cranky in my elder age. And yes, you may be
just starting to build your professional career while I am
busy dismantling mine. I get it if your needs to be 'out
there' are different than mine.  But let me offer one valuable
piece of free unsolicited advice --

Just because you know 500 people doesn't mean you have 500
friends.  

Choose your friends wisely.  Time really is money (thats why
advertisers want your time), and you shouldn't waste a minute
of it on anyone who isn't truly a friend or important to your
career, or somehow connected to something you enjoy. Time is
all any of us has that has any value. Time is what is
constantly being stolen from us. Doctors don't sell medical
treatment or cures.... they sell more time!   Money is only
good for letting you acquire things that will improve or save
you time.

You need 500 (or 50,000, or 5 million) 'friends' or followers
much less than you think you do.  The more you play to that
crowd following you, the more at risk you are of losing your
true self.

So the point is (if there is any possibility of laying claim
to having a point), I want to disagree smally with Slugmax. 
Privacy is >practically< dead, but that doesn't mean you can't
hold somet things back. That doesn't mean you shouldn't demand
it, expect it. You should resist by all means necessary. Don't
be the low hanging fruit for hackers and marketers.  Refuse to
live in a fish bowl. Don't opt in. Don't continue to feed this
beast with all of the details of your life. Post privately,
not publicly.  Use the fucking tools that are at your
displosal, like Signal Messenger.  

In 2003, the US government promised 'Total Information 
Awareness.' [3]   TIA was going to make us all safe.
Well, those days are here, thanks to their unholy alliance
with Big Internet, Big Telco, Big Advertising, States
and Big business.
Well??    Are we all safe now?

You will never have complete privacy ever again. Those days
are gone forever. But you may be able to steal a little bit of
privacy for yourself, sometimes, in some places, for short
periods of time.  And that might just have to be good enough
for Slugmax and all of us, for now.


If privacy is not already dead, it's close to dead. I picture it
bleeding out on the street, cut and bruised, punctured, dizzy,
vomiting; wondering if anyone standing around watching this has
bothered to dial 911 (or 999).


[1]
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~slugmax/phlog/2019-08-14-privacy-is-dead
[2]
https://digitalguardian.com/blog/top-10-biggest-us-government-data-breaches-all-time
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness