This is my experience as well. While my family are enjoying their Amazon Dots and "Hey Siri" and everything else, I'm constantly reminding them of how evil these companies are, and how they're constantly consuming and eating information, while Uncle Sam syphons every drip of internet off the pipeline.

Convenience, in my mind, has never been worth the price of losing anonymity.

I'm honestly pretty baffled by the whole "techies hate privacy and undermine consumers" genre.

I mean, sure, engineers built Echo/Alexa and the Equifax website. But engineers also built Signal and HIBP. Programmers vary in their concern for privacy, just like any other group, but my general experience is that they skew more privacy-conscious than the general consumer.

The writers who admit that often frame it as hypocrisy, but that's the usual sloppiness of conflating individuals with group averages. I doubt the people who wrote VTech's godawful software are particularly privacy-focused in their personal lives, while the engineers using encrypted messaging and password managers also tend to have scruples in the office.

At a certain point the whole thing feels like blaming mechanical engineers for the military-industrial complex. Sure, someone found a team that would build Predator drones, but that tells us less about mechanical engineers than it does about the government.

Right; it's suits that hate privacy and undermine consumers, but they only do it because they think it's the best way to wring money out of you, and it's their job to figure that out without any sense of empathy, remorse, or morals.

Techies generally like privacy in my experience, but most of them also value a steady paycheck more than they value your privacy.

Sort of like how many factory workers like fishing, but they value a steady paycheck more than they value the health of your river. And again, the suits just see the river as a free way to get rid of otherwise expensive waste.

It was always this way the people who actual wrote softwate were always more privacy minded. The products geeks who get excited over new products were the ones who never cared about privacy. There is a price to pay to be an early adopter and most are willing to trade in intangable things like time or stability or privacy. They set the norm for the average customer group that follows through feedback in the alpha/beta stages.

You know it was geeks who invented all the insecure technologies that still plague us today: DNS and SMTP to name a few.

I do not think anonymity == privacy. They are two different things. It is one thing to maintain privacy and want to keep your actions and preferences private from the outside, but anonymity is more about making public statements and maintaining an anonymous persona. I would say anonymity in making public statements has greatly increased with the rise of the internet, while privacy has diminished. In fact, a lot of the data which these companies collect is anonymized.

>" I would say anonymity in making public statements has greatly increased with the rise of the internet, while privacy has diminished."

The trend has been for companies such as FB, Google, LinkedIn, etc to enforce "real name policies." And most commenter systems on large media sites want you you to login using a Google+ or Facebook account. I would say anonymity has seen a fast and steady decline.

I think with the start of having inference at the edge on the device of a network instead of uploading to some cloud service there will be an opportunity to take back our data. We could create a system similar to an Amazon Echo where it performs inference on the device. Then if it needs to connect to an external data source for something like did the Cubs win yesterday it would only get that service. For things like setting reminders it would be able to do that completely on device.

You sound like a lot of fun to be around ;)

How do you maintain your anonymity?

Not tweeting (much), not instagramming (much), not posting on Facebook (much), etc. I don't see anonymity as a binary; more of a spectrum (think something that stretches between a hermit and a celebrity).

Obviously as a human existing into some manner of time with family and friends and coworkers, I'm _known_ by those who could/should, but I don't need Amazon parsing conversations in my kitchen.

>Not tweeting (much), not instagramming (much), not posting on Facebook (much)

It's not a spectrum. You are a user and you are rationalizing your cognitive dissonance. Just delete it, those things are completely useless/pointless and you're being tracked regardless of whatever precautions you take. You are on it, or you are not.

This is naive, at best. I have a network of people in my life that I must maintain contact with, and their platforms of choice are these platforms. We don't always get to choose our battles, and this is one I won't win. And trying, in earnest, to avoid putting yourself on a stage is a far cry from publishing posts incessantly, looking to be a social media celebrity of some kind.

>This is naive, at best. I have a network of people in my life that I must maintain contact with, and their platforms of choice are these platforms.

Must maintain? With who? Do you use FB to exclusively chat to your wife and boss or something? Will the stasi knock at your door for not checking in with Lord Zuckerberg every 5 minutes?

I find it incredibly difficult to believe that there are people who's ONLY platform of communication in a digital age is Facebook. I don't mean 'primary', I mean 'only'.

If your 'friends' much less family won't keep in contact with you because of choice of platform, can you really say they are your friends/family? If we didn't live in an age of cellphones, if calling is too much effort, would they have ever come to visit me in person?

I deleted all that crap way back and only a few people came out of the wood work, the rest I forgot about and couldn't remember if I tried.

In reality the only effect social media has is lowering barriers to communication, letting in all the shit connections. Much like a dam. Lower it, and the crap water comes in. Same with this, just makes it easier to be connected, which is built on the illusion that these connections are now somehow important.

I have yet to encounter a plausible real life scenario that requires facebook. At best, it might add a tiny bit of convenience to your life wrt events/comm. But it's nothing that can't be easily replaced.

Not op but there are people who I like to communicate with on Facebook and Snapchat and the like who if I got off that platform I would never see again because that is their primary platform for communication.

I have tried to lose these applications for a week or month at a time and I do miss out on the latest happenings with them. I have tried to switch them to different services but for one reason or another they don't like it and want to go back.

Commonly this is the switching cost of learning how a new app works but to lose those friendships are not worth the anonymity that I gain from not using the services.

I just drop those people. Why should my mental health suffer just to leech off someone? They should be willing to reciprocate.

I don't see it as a switching cost. Well I do, but only in the beginning. You switch the thing on and you are exposed to X more people. Then it seems like switching it off you're losing those people, but you're probably just going back to your original state.

>Commonly this is the switching cost of learning how a new app works but to lose those friendships are not worth the anonymity that I gain from not using the services.

It is to me. I would definitely make a switch for a friend if all it was was changing an app. If they can't do the same, like they literally couldn't download or use a different fucking app then they can fuck off. Like our friendship is worth so little they can't EVEN be bothered to download an app. Fuck those people.

You realise that it is symmetric? That it can be said that YOU value the friendship so little that YOU can't be bothered to use an app (facebook)?

> Commonly this is the switching cost of learning how a new app works but to lose those friendships are not worth the anonymity that I gain from not using the services.

Do you seriously call such people "friends"?

> I find it incredibly difficult to believe that there are people who's ONLY platform of communication in a digital age is Facebook. I don't mean 'primary', I mean 'only'.

When I told my family I was getting off of those types of platforms and only using email/phone/text, there was absolutely no issues on their end keeping up with communication. If anything, I was able to cut down on the chatter and only keep up comms with two really close friends, the rest were just acquaintances that I don't mind not getting updates on.

I suppose I can get real with you to make my point. My daughter lives in another state, and her mother's platform of choice is Facebook. I don't get to see her but once every couple weeks, so, if I want to regularly see what my daughter is up to (in a day-to-day sense vs. in a formal sense, like when I Facetime her daily), I _have_ to be on Facebook.

I realize such a situation is an outlier, but you must realize that if you could not conceive of this, there's probably many more situations you could not conceive of. For better or worse, things like Facebook are now a staple in our lives. If it means being able to follow along with my daughter's growing up, I'll subscribe to whatever the hell social network she's on.

I tend to think that it is not as much about how much you use it. You either do use it or don't. If you do, you are already being tracked.

Right, but do you hang out with people around you that tweet, Instagram, and post on Facebook? Have you ever had dinner with friends and they have an Echo/Dot/Home/"Smart" TV? They can infer where you are based on being around others that use these services.

I understand about being tagged in a photo and a social media site inferring where I am but can you explain how this happens with a friend's "Echo/Dot/Home/"Smart" TV"?

Ultrasonic? GPS? geolocation using WAN IP of those devices and your device's GPS coordinates. You are in the same vicinity.

In a word, regulation.

Tech has been mostly hands-off politically, an oasis of limited targeted regulation, over the post WW2 era. While the rest of the US economy has practically been regulated to death.

Bloomberg had an opinion piece a few days ago, noting how several of the tech giants (eg Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Oracle, Cisco) had higher profit margins than the S&P 500 average and argued that it was due to lack of regulation (something akin to saying we must regulate tech to make everything fair with the rest of the over-regulated economy). Such arguments in the main-stream media are increasingly becoming a daily occurrence.

"regulated to death"? Hyperbole much? You make it sound as if regulations have no goal other than to limit the growth of industries. As if the wellbeing of the people and the planet have nothing to do with it. The main reason other industries are regulated more than tech is because other industries usually have a lot more physical repercussions to their actions (affecting health, finances, etc. in a very tangible way). Most tech companies offer free products in exchange for data or advertising space, and the dissemination of personal data is not viewed at the same level as destroying someone's finances or health.

This is not a good diagnosis of why Tech companies have such high profit margins IMO. Software is incredibly scalable: once you build a software, you sell it to millions of people, or build a platform that's used by millions of people. Tech is building off the shift of the economy to more automation and less dependence on labor. There's also the thing where entire new markets are being created and Tech companies are the only participants (e.g. rideshare, search etc.).

In most instances reasonable regulations allow for more innovation in the economy by making it easier for smaller companies to compete with big businesses, and to make sure that businesses don't hurt the societies and economies they operate in.

While there are good instances of over regulations, much like the myth of the welfare queen, I think its much overblown, and not an accurate diagnosis for the problems businesses are facing today in America.

I wish they took it as an example of reducing regulation in the others, instead of adding regulation to these ones..

There is a reason regulations exist. While I don't think regulations should be so onerous as to destroy businesses, they are definitely a good way to ensure that our economy is working for the benefit of everyone, including the environment.

There are many reasons for regulations to exist, most of them are pretty terrible. There is a typical reaction that if people are bound by some limitation, and some other, then we should create artificial limitations on the latter.

Regulatory capture, increasing costs, increasing tax revenue, all things that are not aligned with the general public. Just by the opportunists on the other side of the table.

You also grew up reading Snow Crash wink

Some things just don't make sense to me. Why are the default settings for something like Facebook public? Why not friends by default?

I am inordinately proud of the fact that I discovered neal stephenson all by myself -- and I read Cryptonomicon at one of those formative ages where it bakes itself into your head at a pretty deep level.

Judging by their business decisions, I have come to believe that a bunch of other would-be Secret Admirers work at some but not all tech companies, and this does inform my choice of services. I bet you $5 there were Tombstone jokes at Apple during the san bernadino fiasco.

edit: and people like Moxie are doing their very best John Cantrell impersonations and I am extremely grateful for this.

> Some things just don't make sense to me. Why are the default settings for something like Facebook public? Why not friends by default?

They are not, AFAIK. I mean, Facebook keeps nagging me to make my posts private every other week, even though I explicitly want to post publicly.

Facebook was a much nicer place back when they actually were public-by-default. It felt more social. Now it's just a crossover between Twitter and a rolodex.

Why are people using there real names. Facebook requires a valid looking name not your real name.

They require verification if enough people report you. The people most harmed by "real name" policies are most likely to be harassed with reports.

Were you a BBS guy?

That is how I learned to never give your real identity in an electronic world.

Depends on the BBS. On the one I was on for a long time, many people used their real identities and even got together IRL.

This was true on freenode for me. I’ve never told anyone exactly who I am, but I’ve got some actual friends there I would feel comfortable meeting in real life.

Unfortunately we're being ignored and it will take something much worse than the Equifax disaster to make the message land. Highly frustrating.

We knew from the day one that over-reliance on cloud giants like Facebook or Google in holding all your life worth of data is a bad idea.

We told everybody that it is a bad idea.

Everybody promptly ignored our warnings. Some laughed.

I guess they don't laugh anymore, do they? Now, who was right?

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/743/

Unfortunately, I think they still mostly laugh.

They've not even started to feel the pain. They mostly read about it in media. That would be the next step.

To be more accurate, the last two panes of that comic would would be set as a FB feed with the first character posting the FB is evil and the second character replying “told you so”.

Man I dunno about giving weird Rorschach monologues in general, but if you're really compelled to.. at least don't punctuate it with an XKCD.