this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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This is an open question on how to get the masses to care...

Unfortunately, if other people don't protect their privacy it affects those who do, because we're all connected (e.g. other family members, friends). So it presents a problem of how do you get people who don't care, to care?

I started the Rebel Tech Alliance nonprofit to try to help with this, but we're still really struggling to convert people who have never thought about this.

(BTW you might need to refresh our website a few times to get it to load - no idea why... It does have an SSL cert!)

So I hope we can have a useful discussion here - privacy is a team sport, how do we get more people to play?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 54 minutes ago* (last edited 53 minutes ago)

@[email protected]

Another wall of text no one will ever read does nothing. Do this: https://lemmy.world/post/21620691 https://lemmy.world/post/20950542

[–] [email protected] 3 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

As a thought experiment: what would have happened if instead of a public health regulation approach, we dealt with restaurant safety by providing a few safe places and advocating everyone go there if they don’t want salmonella or e-coli poisoning. We’d have people ignorant going to the dangerous places, others misinformed or in denial, and a flood of misinformation that food poisoning is either “fine” or there’s no avoiding it anyway so best not to worry.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

Interesting!

And then Fuckerberg would gaslight us by declaring that "public health is dead"

[–] Kobo 1 points 15 hours ago

Anyone want to join my privacy team? I'm trying out for the 2026 Olympics.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Great cause and one that reaches to the heart of what I see as impacting much of the governmental and societal disruption that's happening. It's a complex and nuanced issue that is likely to take multiple prongs and a long time to resolve.

Let me start by again generally agreeing with the point. Privacy is necessary for reasons beyond the obvious needs. Speaking to the choir here on a privacy community. I think it's worth listing the reasons that I understand why Americans are generally dismissive of the need for privacy protections. I cheated here, and used an LLM to help, but I think these points are indicative of things to overcome.

  • Convenience > confidentiality. Nearly half of U.S. adults (47 %) say it’s acceptable for retailers to track every purchase in exchange for loyalty-card discounts, illustrating a widespread “deal first, data later” mindset. Pew Research Center

  • “Nothing to hide.” A popular refrain equates privacy with secrecy; if you’re law-abiding, the thinking goes, surveillance is harmless. The slogan is so common that rights groups still publish rebuttals to it. Amnesty International

  • Resignation and powerlessness. About 73 % feel they have little or no control over what companies do with their data, and 79 % say the same about government use—attitudes that breed fatalism rather than action. Pew Research Center

  • Policy-fatigue & click-through consent. Because privacy policies are dense and technical, 56 % of Americans routinely click “agree” without reading, while 69 % treat the notice as a hurdle to get past, not a safeguard. Pew Research Center

  • The privacy paradox. Behavioral studies keep finding a gap between high stated concern and lax real-world practice, driven by cognitive biases and social desirability effects. SAGE Journals

  • Market ideology & the “free-service” bargain. The U.S. tech economy normalizes “free” platforms funded by targeted ads; many users see data sharing as the implicit cost of innovation and participation. LinkedIn

  • Security framing. Post-9/11 narratives cast surveillance as a safety tool; even today 42 % still approve of bulk data collection for anti-terrorism, muting opposition to broader privacy safeguards. Pew Research Center

  • Harms feel abstract. People worry about privacy in the abstract, yet most haven’t suffered visible damage, so the risk seems remote compared with daily conveniences. IAPP

  • Patchwork laws. With no single federal statute, Americans face a confusing mix of state and sector rules, making privacy protections feel inconsistent and easy to ignore. Practice Guides

  • Generational normalization. Digital natives are more comfortable with surveillance; a 2023 survey found that 29 % of Gen Z would even accept in-home government cameras to curb crime. cato.org

Having listed elements to overcome, it's easy to see why this feels sisyphean task in an American society. (It is similar, but different other Global North societies. The US desperately needs change as is evident with the current administration.) Getting to your question though, I feel like the real rational points to convey are not those above, but the reasons how a lack of privacy impacts individuals.

  • Political micro-targeting & democratic drift
    Platforms mine psychographic data to serve bespoke campaign messages that exploit confirmation bias, social-proof heuristics, and loss-aversion—leaving voters receptive to turnout-suppression or “vote-against-self-interest” nudges. A 2025 study found personality-tailored ads stayed significantly more persuasive than generic ones even when users were warned they were being targeted. Nature

  • Surveillance pricing & impulsive consumption
    Retailers and service-providers now run “surveillance pricing” engines that fine-tune what you see—and what it costs—based on location, device, credit profile, and browsing history. By pairing granular data with scarcity cues and anchoring, these systems push consumers toward higher-priced or unnecessary purchases while dulling price-comparison instincts. Federal Trade Commission

  • Dark-pattern commerce & hidden fees
    Interface tricks (pre-ticked boxes, countdown timers, labyrinthine unsubscribe flows) leverage present-bias and choice overload, trapping users in subscriptions or coaxing them to reveal more data than intended. Federal Trade Commission

  • Youth mental-health spiral
    Algorithmic feeds intensify social-comparison and negativity biases; among U.S. teen girls, 57 % felt “persistently sad or hopeless” and nearly 1 in 3 considered suicide in 2021—a decade-high that public-health experts link in part to round-the-clock, data-driven social media exposure. CDC

  • Chilling effects on knowledge, speech, and creativity
    After the Snowden leaks, measurable drops in searches and Wikipedia visits for sensitive topics illustrated how surveillance primes availability and fear biases, nudging citizens away from inquiry or dissent. Common Dreams

  • Algorithmic discrimination & structural inequity
    Predictive-policing models recycle historically biased crime data (representativeness bias), steering patrols back to the same neighborhoods; credit-scoring and lending algorithms charge Black and Latinx borrowers higher interest (statistical discrimination), entrenching wealth gaps. American Bar AssociationRobert F. Kennedy Human Rights

  • Personal-safety threats from data brokerage
    Brokers sell address histories, phone numbers, and real-time location snapshots; abusers can buy dossiers on domestic-violence survivors within minutes, exploiting the “search costs” gap between seeker and subject. EPIC

  • Identity theft & downstream financial harm
    With 1.35 billion breach notices issued in 2024 alone, stolen data fuels phishing, tax-refund fraud, bogus credit-card openings, and years of credit-score damage—costs that disproportionately hit low-information or low-income households. ITRC

  • Public-health manipulation & misinformation loops
    Health conspiracies spread via engagement-optimized feeds that exploit negativity and emotional-salience biases; a 2023 analysis of Facebook found antivaccine content became more politically polarized and visible after the platform’s cleanup efforts, undercutting risk-perception and vaccination decisions. PMC

  • Erosion of autonomy through behavioral “nudging”
    Recommendation engines continuously A/B-test content against your micro-profile, capitalizing on novelty-seeking and variable-reward loops (think endless scroll or autoplay). Over time, the platform—rather than the user—decides how hours and attention are spent, narrowing genuine choice. Nature

  • National-security & geopolitical leverage
    Bulk personal and geolocation data flowing to data-hungry foreign adversaries opens doors to espionage, blackmail, and influence operations—risks so acute that the DOJ’s 2025 Data Security Program now restricts many cross-border “covered data transactions.” Department of Justice

  • Social trust & civic cohesion
    When 77 % of Americans say they lack faith in social-media CEOs to handle data responsibly, the result is widespread mistrust—not just of tech firms but of institutions and one another—fueling polarization and disengagement. Pew Research Center

[–] [email protected] 2 points 23 hours ago

And one last point here, is that these all stem from the way we as humans are built. Although we are capable of rational though, we often do not make rational decisions. Indeed those decisions are based on cognitive biases which we all have and are effected by context, environment, input, etc. It's possible to overcome this lack of rational judgement, through processes and synthesis such as the scientific method. So we as citizens and humans can build institutions that help us account for the individual biases we have and overcome these biological challenges, while also enjoying the benefits and remaining human.

[–] DrunkAnRoot 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

for the site see if you can reissue the cert or try certbot if u already used certbot try manyally downloading the cert an pointibng to it

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

The site is hosting by a hosting company - and they assure me that the cert is fine.

If I was self hosting I'd expect these problems, but not with a hosting company.

The only difference with this company is that they do not use any big tech infrastructure - they have their own servers. I wonder if big tech has something they don't.....?

[–] merde 90 points 2 days ago (4 children)

you should stop calling people "normies", if you want them to care about what you have to say

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

noted, and you're right.

I actually mis-applied that term in my post. I've been trying to learn about tech, and self hosting in particular, along this journey. I found that 'normies' is the term that tech-savvy people apply to people who don't know about tech - i.e. me! - and I started using it. In the sense of "these install instructions will never work with normies".

In this context I shouldn't have used it to refer to people who do not care about data privacy. I'll edit my post.

Thank you for pointing that out!

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago (5 children)

I call them normies not because I look down upon them or I hate them I do that because whenever I educate them to use privacy oriented services they mock me saying "you are crazy" "you aren't president" "nobody cares about your data" yada yada yada...

It makes me frustrated :(

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The problem is their arguments are not wrong. Nobody does care about your data. Which makes it so hard to convince people about the dangerous.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

I have learned that the best game is simply not to play. You risk annoying the hell out of people. Let them get curious, maybe mention it but they have to come to you. Pushing it onto people who do not care is simply not worth it. You are wasting your time, this is real life. Some people will simply not want to care. It is their choice and sometimes that choice will not match yours.

The people I have so-called converted where people who actually were interest to know more. If you push it on people who are not interested then you risk being that annoying person who comes off as an activist or ideologue.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 days ago (5 children)

I think certain arguments work, and certain don't.

I live in a very high trust society, Norway. This has a lot of advantages, but also some downsides.

We trust eachother, our neighbours, our government and our media. Which is fantastic, and well deserved. The government deserves the trust.

This makes it hard for me to make people realize how important privacy is, because they trust organizations with their data.

During COVID, Norway made their own app for tracking who met to prevent the spread. Of all the apps in the world, Norway wanted to push about the least privacy friendly app in the world. This from a country with the highest press freedom and rankings for democracy. Most people though it was fine, because why not? We trust our government.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/06/norway-covid19-contact-tracing-app-privacy-win/

Luckily someone protested enough, and it got scrapped for something better.

When I try to convince someone I have a couple of angles:

  1. You trust the government and organizations with your data today. But do you trust the government in 30 years? Because data is forever. The US has changed a lot in a very short time, this can happen here as well

  2. You have a responsibility for other peoples privacy as well. When you use an app that gets access to all your SMSes and contacts you spy on behalf of companies on people that might need protection. Asylum seekers from other countries for instance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

This is a VERY interesting perspective - thank you for sharing!

You are lucky in Norway to have that level of trust, but I'd never considered the flip side: that it would create a dangerous apathy about privacy.

Your two angles are great:

  1. This is so true but for some it is so nebulous, and it countries like the UK (and especially if you are white and not struggling financially) then there is an exceptionalism that creeps into the thinking. Probably because we've never been invaded and occupied. I was in Norway last year, and Denmark this year, and no one wants that to happen again. It seems to have shaped thinking a lot - correct me if i'm wrong 😊

  2. This is a big one - privacy is a collective problem. It's a team sport. I have had some success with this argument.

What's very hard is to convey to people just how amazingly powerful and efficient big tech's profiling models really are. Trillions of computations a minute to keep your creepy digital twin up to date. Most people cannot get their head round the scale of it, and I'm struggling to visualise it for them!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Something similar happened in Denmark with the new Sundhedsloven, which had provisions allowing the government to forcefully isolate people in concentration camps, along with forcefully vaccinating them.

This was of course alarming for those who were in the know, but very few people protested (and the law was subsequently amended), but the general attitude from the public was "it's not a problem because something like THAT would ever happen in Denmark." 🤡

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

We had some emergency law that was almost passed recently. As in it passed the first of two rounds. The second voting round is just a formality, all laws are just passed after the first in practice. Luckily some law professor raised the alarms and it did not pass the second time. So within a couple of hours margin it was stopped.

The law gave the government the ability to force people to do a lot of stuff, work any job at any place in Norway. If you do not comply you could get up to three years in prison. It would not be a problem with the current or any government in the near future, but it is a law. And we can't have laws that rely on trusting politicians. Because we might have politicians with anti democratic tendencies in the future

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

This is the same argument against trusting opaque algorithms from proprietary systems (usually billionaire owned). You just don't know when they're going to tweak it for their purposes.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Starting by not calling people that don't know/care about privacy "normies", and educating them I guess.

Also I'd say start with the "easier" ones, for instance anti-capitalist people are more open to find ways to avoid surveillance capitalism. If enough of these people care and educate their respective circles, eventually all people will care.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

In my experience all the good arguments in governments that change, big companies making money etc are still too abstract to people.

But i have found one argument that at least made women and older men with daughters think about it. Stalking. With reverse image search and stupid people finder apps and ai that can estimate how you look now based on an old picture and vice versa, stalking got soooo easy. Anyone can just secretely take a picture of a girl they find interesting in public and find her social media profile and see where she usually hangs out etc. (Of course also all other genders get stalked - this is just the most known example).

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Maybe start by not calling them "normies".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You're right. I replied to someone else about this - I'll change the post.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

I think it's a good idea. People are more likely to cooperate and take advice from people who don't call them names. Although i understand that "normie" was not meant as an insult. But it might be perceived that way.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago (6 children)

I have a feeling a whole bunch of people are about to start caring, when they see normal things being used as excuses to arrest friends, family, colleagues.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm in the UK and there's a feeling amongst some that "we're next" if we don't curb the rise of the far right.

The Reform party's victories here this week are another alarm bell.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I'd say those some are spot on. Governments love the "look what that country is doing!” while doing the same or worse, surreptitiously. Prestidigitation, really.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This depends on your country though. America sure.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

One method is to put a $ on privacy. Consider this: if you were offered $5 for every piece of information you shared about yourself, would you still share it? Probably not. But the true cost is far less obvious, spread out over time, and often masked by the convenience of "free" services.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 23 hours ago

I like this concept and I feel like that a step along the way as it is essentially what's happening. The EULA's, TOS's, SLA's, etc are all contracts, which should be negotiable by both parties and allow the individuals or groups to define value, be that monetary value (the $5) or something in trade. Some how we the masses skipped over the negotiation, and are left with an almost binary choice either accept and use it or not. (You could sue, or protest, or etc, but without standing or a large following this is not effective for an individual.)

So whilst' I agree, I also think it might be more useful to focus on the reason the information is valuable.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (7 children)

People want convinience. You'll never get people to do it, unless it personally affects them. Realisticly, you can convert a few.

But most importantly. It shouldnt be that hard to have privacy. THATS the problem. People shouldnt need to do alot of things to get it.

Do something about the problem (political, legally change privacy laws) instead of every single person.

But I know that can be near impossible depending of where you live.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (3 children)

There's several overlapping problems:

First, that the problem is complex. It's not just "Microsoft bad." There's a turducken lasagna of layered problems that make it hard for the average person to wrap their heads around the issue.

Next, there's no direct monetary incentive. You can't say "you lose $500 a year because data brokers know your address." Most people also have relied their whole lives on free email, so the average person in already in "debt" in terms of trade offs already.

You're also starting from a point of blaming the victim in a way. It's the same problem companies have with cybersecurity, blaming everyone except the executive that didn't know the risks of skimping on cyber budgets. Hiding the problem to avoid public shame is the natural human response.

Finally, that resolving the problem is fucking hard. I know, we all know, it's a constantly moving target that requires at the very least moderate technical skill. My partner wants to have more privacy online, but would rather have conveniences in many cases. And has zero patience for keeping up with changes, so I have to be a CISO for a household. So the average person, and the average household, does not have the skillset to care "effectively" if they wanted to.

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