About how Windows 10 (and Ubuntu) send all your search queries to be examined by Microsoft and the NSA, I’m surprised by how few people have a problem with this.
In a thread on Ars Technica about Windows 10 a comment criticizing this repugnant privacy violation was heavily downvoted. That’ s not unusual, and I don’t think there are enough MS and other shills out there to explain the downvoting.
It appears people actually want their privacy invaded and for large corporations to know more about them than their family probably does.
I can’t understand this. No matter how hard I try, I just can’t make sense of it.
My guess is that this permissive approach to privacy is more true of the Millennials and younger as they have been helicopter-
parented and allowed little privacy their entire lives. Having a Big Brother (aka Big Father/Big Mother) looking over their shoulder every instant is just natural to them.
Of course there are generational differences, despite scientists trying to “prove” there are not. I bet that approach to and concern with privacy is one of them.
Agreed that some younger folks are better at protecting and encoding (in the linguistic sense, not the cryptographic sense) what they don’t want seen.
I bet the majority just don’t care, however.
That’s a real difference between people of roughly my generation and older, and one that is unexamined mostly.
The Millennials’ fixation with transparency (especially extreme transparency) is something I find not just adorable, but downright admirable. They do seem to have a gaping blind spot when it comes to asymmetric transparency, or information asymmetry problems in general. I like to use “mirror shades” as a metaphor for this. For example, why are mirror shades so popular with cops? Because asymmetric transparency and authority are made for each other. Don’t even get me started on the subject of tactical advantage.
Another phenomenon applies to users of all age groups (and it does seem users of all age groups are largely going along with the “Proprietary Big Data” model of personal computing). Basically, I have come up with a theory that we are all “scabs” to some degree, if for no other reason than scabbiness being a path of less resistance than solidarity. What do I have to do to avoid playing into the hand of the PBD mode? Use Tor? (reputedly and plausibly developed by the CIA) Use DuckDuckGo? (and starve the only (nominally) open source (major) browser of its main revenue stream?). Working not within the system is uphill sledding. I do it to some extent because for whatever reason my life path so far has infused a certain amount of hacker ethic into my veins, but I’m hardly a model citizen of the hacker movement or the pirate movement or what have you.
Even in the present blog I read that “Microsoft is benign now,” and three posts down, Microsoft has designs on your rectal thermometer. Perhaps Microsoft can do for gastrointestinal research what (full-on fucking evil) Google has done for influenza research…
Also, I read how sold out and part of the problem Mozilla is, and then a list of your open processes that includes Firefox and Thunderbird. And doesn’t include Qupzilla, which I’m really starting to enjoy, BTW. Thanks very much for the pointer. Basically the (nice, clean) look and feel of Midori, minus the frequent crashes. (Is it a fork thereof?) But I still use mainly Firefox mainly because it’s oh-so-customizable.
I’m not calling anyone out on anything, just pointing out that people make compromises. The Millennials seem to be making some inappropriately huge ones by not demanding bilateral transparency.
Ha, Lori, you’re perfectly right about the compromises everyone makes. I certainly complain and kvetch more than I actually change my behavior, often because avoiding informational dragnets is so much more difficult and inconvenient than just going along with whatever is available. The path of less resistance, indeed.
I’ve not yet read enough of your blog to get a sense of it, but I noticed in the post to which you linked you said that you are “an agitator for radical social change.” What sort of social change do you envision?
I like your “scab” ideas.
It’s jut too hard — and you become a target — if you live a life like Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State. Or a “terrorist” as anyone who doesn’t conform now is likely to be called.
The best camouflage is pretending to fit in. Or is that something we just tell ourselves to avoid doing anything meaningful?