> Masks don’t help for privacy

alrighty then. glad that's cleared up.

seriously, what's up with this binary thinking where there's just no room for nuance whatsoever? "no, patching systems isn't effective, because unknown 0 days exist, so it doesn't help."

how about - bear with me - wearing a mask is merely /one/ component of not being mass surveilled, and is part of several layers, each one of which is clearly helpful although each one independently may not solve the problem entirely?

The problem is that modern surveillance tech has imposed so many layers that observing them all isn’t realistic for even the most privacy-conscious people: you not only have to wear a mask, you have to change your gait, you can’t carry around a mobile phone, you have to somehow elude cameras being able to track you from wherever you started off that morning (i.e. likely your home) etc. So what is the point of being happy that you can now wear a mask in public?

Public surveillance isn’t like, say, private communications where a person still has the option to install Signal and keep their conversations relatively private. Preventing the authorities from recognizing you in public is already a lost battle.