Fediverse

I really wish there could be a law that says that if they want people to use their platform so they can use their data they have to pay people for their data. Data is money, but only to the companies that suck up my data and use it to make money. If my data is worth money I want money for my data. If companies had to pay me for my data I would consider using Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, et. al. if the price were right. This is no doubt a very impossible wish. They also say time is money and there is no law requiring people to pay me when they waste my time. But, I can dream. Imagine getting a nice check in exchange for signing up for Instagram.

I understand your frustration entirely. And for the most part, I agree with it. But for music producers, especially if they're indie, they have no choice. Content creators trying to make a living off of their art rely on putting themselves out there on the biggest platforms to maximize the amount of exposure they're going to get. The importance of social media with millions upon millions of users for an indie artist cannot be understated. It is the difference between them paying rent, and getting evicted.

As for the average user, as others have stated, they have friends, family, and content creators that they like to follow. Digital privacy comes at a cost. We cannot afford to create the misconception that acts protecting our digital privacy are free actions. And the level of cost and willingness to pay it varies from person to person. I don't need Facebook to keep up with my parents. But many people do. For their parents and the rest of their family and loved ones. I was willing to make the switch to Linux, but it cost me some simplicity in my gaming; some titles aren't just plug n play. Even ones that were on Windows. Switching to Lemmy was nothing for me, but for some people, they're giving up subreddits they loved, or they have to keep using Reddit to access them. And there are some valuable resources there.

Privacy isn't free. It's invaluable and sometimes the price tag reflects that.

@BraBraBra Convenience will always win out with the masses. There needs to be more tangible benefits for doing something more inconvenient than losing privacy for that to change.

Most people do not but over the past five years, privacy has become more of a concern in peoples lives I would say

I've been online for years and years. Enough to know that, we've been giving our data away before social media took off. Social Media and search engines like Google, have accelerated it and made it a farming thing as the basis of their foundations.

So what I'm referring to about giving our data away before the social media era, is that we have registered on to forums and we have registered to chat rooms and other services. We willingly gave them our names, even beneath the screen names we registered under. We willingly discussed a lot of ourselves within those forums and we can't preemptively assume that they aren't keeping some record of what we're doing and saying. We know all sites keep a stamp of our IP addresses, so it's a safe bet that they're also collecting everything we do within their site's boundaries.

I'm not trying to say that we should all just expose ourselves, en masse. But I will say that you are responsible and you've been responsible for what you decide to put there online. You are right to be questioning and working against things like Google needing your street address to recover a simple password when there had been other proven methods to recover your password by. However, it comes off a little ridiculous when you're griping about privacy while also being someone who dumps their life stories on that platform or this platform.

That’s your dumb average person. Personally I am fine with it cause it’s a choice they make.

I think that it's a little bit of don't care and a little bit of that it's a ton of work I think. It's a lot of work if you actually use online services because they all want your data. You have to be very aware of every app and site that you visit. Changing settings, browser extensions, complex opt out methods. It's more effort than a lot of people will make.

They don't care because they don't know the immediate consequences, if any.

My sister told me about a friend of hers who was about to get blackmailed by some random guy who claimed to have her child, he used a Facebook photo as proof. Aside from the bullshit extortion intent, after hearing the story, my sister became more cautious with the information she shared on social networks.

The extortionist thing can be extrapolated to the large companies that use our data for their own benefit, but the common citizen cannot see the danger in that because the companies are not "extorting" you, they just want to sell you their shit at any cost.

I guess I don't care about lots of data things normally. Honestly at this point I care more about the Elon V Zuck fight.

There is no semblance of privacy anymore. Most people need a bank account or a credit card. Boom someone has (some of) your data.

In the US, at that point, credit agencies also have (some of) your data.

Even in something like Lemmy, someone could easily scrape all the data about what you post/do/etc. At some level almost everything you do is public to some extent.

Edit since I thought of something else: Even if you drive in a big city: something is tracking your license plate. In NYC they do it for EZ-Pass, and in the Bay Area they do it for Fast-Trak.

I am not an average person having worked in IT for a couple of decades now and I can tell you no, the average person is either not aware or doesn't care.

Even I, and my peers who are very aware, don't care

I think where privacy minded people fail to understand is that for most people we are not committing crimes or shady shit online therefore why care? A lot of us understand that if you type anything in a computer it is assumed to be on the public record either easily found or through a few hoops to get it.

If you want privacy write it down on paper or talk about it in person with your peers. Those are the most secure things.

Online and privacy are oxymorons. People need to understand this.

At this point I think they have everything they would want from me. Even if I started to care now I feel like it's too late.

People obviously enjoy The Algorithm. They enjoy a feed that is constantly full. The fact that it is full of noxious shit is irrelevant. Those that come here from The Algorithm to mastodon or lemmy or anywhere else where The Algorithm is not present are immediately put off. Effort is required to fill your feed, it is an active rather than a passive experience. There is something entirely sexual about this dynamic. People enjoy being brain fucked by The Algorithm.

The average person definitely doesn't imo. Threads is easy to get into and has a fast growing user base. Those make it more appealing then privacy ever would for the average person.

To be fair, you basically have to give up on your privacy if you want to be a public figure these days. To make it most musicians have to constantly evangelize themselves, which means being omnipresent on social media platforms.

Ease of use comes first. Normies are very ignorant when you try to indulge them into technicalities. They do care about privacy, but then have a real life to worry about, than leaving a unique fingerprint while browsing the internet. Most of all of them, are unaware about this situation.

Someone(GAFAM) at some point have made a decision for the internet to fill it up with bloat shit to track what you're doing, else there wouldn't be a need for a privacy guide.

My brother in law is like this. He keeps a yearly journal on google drive and his logic is that since he keeps it on google drive he doesn't care if google know everything about him or not. The convenience of having it heavily outweighs any privacy that he might have. Though I wonder if him growing up in an authoritarian country has something to do with it.

I showed my friend all of the privacy problems with threads and his response was ‘I don’t care, they already have everything anyway’.

I told another friend and their response was ‘I don’t care if they have my data, it’s not much use to them and it doesn’t have any effect on me’

The world is hopeless.