Snowden said it clearly at WebSummit 2019: The problem isn’t data protection; the problem is data collection.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezp16KD8dVw&t=953s

Asking companies to justify it is pointless. We need laws forbidding it.

Cat & Odin looks cute. Thanks for letting us know it’s written in Onion.

Linux, and libre software in general, is one of the few impactful tools available to maintain (or reclaim) the sovereignty of our communications, data, and access to the online world. Those things lie at the core of practically everything in our lives, from employment to education to laws to basic human necessities. Given how significantly freedom is being eroded lately, I can’t think of many things more important in the long run.

Organic Maps

Occasionally OsmAnd~, though I mostly avoid it because I found building it from source to be more annoying than it should have been, and didn’t care for a marketing campaign they ran a while back.

It’s not an English word. Its use here is most likely a misspelling of “shady”, which means disreputable, questionable, or possibly up to no good.

So to support a diminishing number of PC players

FYI:

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/new-report-says-pc-games-are-outselling-console-games-calling-pc-gaming-a-bright-spot-in-a-troubled-industry/

Throwing another example on the fire: The Last of Us Part I PC port. The people who released that code ought to be brought up on charges for climate destruction.

Was Elivis considered particularly versatile?

You’re right, I’m not really sure if I understand what the article is about. And how it translates to the title and us, the people.

Unfortunately, the headline is misleading. It’s possible that the author chose it because gathering an audience by criticising “tech” is easy. It’s also possible that she misunderstands the root of the issues she discusses. shrug

The only way I know of to solve the problem is to reclaim our governments, and reform them. Historically, that has been done through democracy and through revolution. The former approach is getting harder, and the way things are going, might disappear if we let it go for too long.

Did you read the article? It’s not really about spyware in the devices we “own”. That’s just a minor detail.

The problem being discussed comes from governments, laws, and capitalist motives being allowed to systematically exploit people who can easily be exploited. This takes place mostly outside of our devices, so although putting safer software on our devices is absolutely worthwhile, doing so cannot fix this problem.

Libre software is important, and relates to the article insofar as it can help keep our own devices from spying on us, but software is merely an incidental detail within a larger problem. This is about abusive power structures, bad actors with too much influence, and profit taking precedence over human rights. No software license will solve it.

I don’t find that argument convincing.

• lemmy.world has too much influence in the lemmyverse already, IMHO.
• If the privacyguides mods on lemmy are the same as those on reddit roughly a year ago, I wouldn’t recommend their forum. The quality of their guidance was hit & miss, and more than zero of those mods had a habit of using their position to control discourse and push notions that run against individuals’ privacy and safety. Once their subreddit was created, they seemed to gradually become more self-serving.
• lemmy.ml is already the dominant privacy community on lemmy, as you noted. Its existence doesn’t provide choice.

I would be interested in such a client, if and only if it showed the comments from all my subscribed communities that have the article.

The objective is to indeed make !privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com grow.

Sure, but couldn’t people be directed there just as well with a pinned message, and maybe a sidebar comment?

My concern is that locking this community would be a bit like tearing up the road behind us when heading off to an uncertain destination.

There are only so many people interested in the topic on Lemmy, and .ml is already the most active community by far.

And? If you think reducing lemmy.ml’s influence requires that a single competing community absorb the others, then I think you are mistaken. If you think that we must choose a single community for each topic that interests us, then I know you are mistaken.

What’s the rush?

!privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com is effectively new. I joined it when I saw the recent announcement, but it remains to be seen how the community and moderation there will take shape. If it ends up going in a direction that I find unhealthy (as I have seen happen in a few subreddits) it would be nice to have a place to return to.

[Citations needed] or it didn’t happen.

I think this mindset is naïve and unrealistic.

People were saying the same thing for decades in response to a small minority warning about government surveillance, often dismissing them with labels like “paranoid”. Eventually, Snowden came along and produced the citations, at extreme risk to himself and his loved ones. It’s an anomaly that they were ever revealed at all.

History is replete with examples of bad stuff going on for ages before irrefutable evidence of it became widely known. In general, if something can be abused to someone’s advantage, it will be, and likely already is.

There’s precious little extra information that a “nefarious” instance can harvest that any basic web scrapper can’t.

You have a point there, but consider also that effective web scraping uses significantly more resources than having the data you want handed to you. Monitoring Lemmy through federation would be much more efficient.

Also, people who freely share details about their personal lives are generally not as particular about social media platforms. They’re likely to use whichever one they have heard of the most, or the one on which they already have an account, like Reddit. Lemmy is far from mainstream, so they’re not likely to think of it first, if they have heard of it at all.

“Locked” implies no easy way of reopening.

Most counterproductive bug tracker feature ever.

To paint a more complete picture, PrivacyGuides.org comes from the subreddit of the same name. When I was last there (about a year ago) some of the people behind that subreddit had a habit of pushing misguided views as if they were facts, and did so with an air of authority that came from their control of the subreddit and the site.

My point is not to support either group, but just a warning: They are not “the privacy community”. Please take their advice with a grain of salt. Sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it is not so good.