What about smartphones? Increasingly, an up-to-date and unmodified Android or Apple smartphone is required to interface with the modern world. Want to use a Linux phone? Sorry no banking app for you. No check-in for flights. So you either need to accept massive day-to-day inconvenience or subject yourself to surveillance and control. This era of computing is a disaster from the perspective or user-control. You know what, Stallman was right.

> Increasingly, an up-to-date and unmodified Android or Apple smartphone is required to interface with the modern world. Want to use a Linux phone? Sorry no banking app for you. No check-in for flights. So you either need to accept massive day-to-day inconvenience or subject yourself to surveillance and control.

On my desk right now there are five Android phones (two of them don't even have SIM cards). I use them for different things. I wouldn't dream of signing in to all of them with the same Google account.

If you want to retain some degree of privacy and use Instagram on your phone, you need to get another phone for that.

They're cheap.

First, having a Free computer doesn't prevent you from also having a corporate terminal. Devices are inexpensive these days, especially used devices that can have Free software installed onto them.

Second, phones are a terrible platform for privacy preserving technologies, both currently (mobile OS dumpster fire) and intrinsically (lower resources, poor input, well-known network identity). Anybody who cares about digital privacy should have a real computer laptop/desktop that they use for the bulk of their activities.

And that is why having an open web is important.

Not being locked-in into apps is critical nowadays.

How does open web make it better? Then your data is swimming on a server outside your device on an unknown operating system with god knows who looking at it.

Someone earlier astutely stated the metaphor “the thin edge of the wedge”; the movement to the “cloud” via the open web over the last decade was the thinnest part of the wedge.

Without one we would be forced to use apps on a locked down OS and unable to switch to any up-and-coming alternatives at all.

Even to the extent web is open today, I’m able to run Linux on all my PCs/laptops and not to have an extra one to run proprietary OS in order to participate in modern life.

My bank has a customer portal website. My airline has a check-in website. Using a website instead of an app is a minor inconvenience, certainly not a "massive" one.

That's not a realistic "solution" for any more than a minuscule fraction of users.

If we don't want to live in a surveillance-based dystopia, we need to push back against it politically as a society, not play cat-and-mouse as individuals.

> we need to push back against it politically as a society, not play cat-and-mouse as individuals.

And for that to work, we have to counter the usual "but think of the children!!!" narrative with one of our own - prevent CSAM creation at the source. I have written about how to get started previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28114076

I’ve been a loyal VPN user for a decade plus. The problem is the web’s becoming increasingly unusable for anyone who comes from a VPN IP. Every single search and website click results in 90 seconds of barely decipherable captcha challenges.

Presumably the widespread proliferation of (ironically!) iCloud Private Relay and the like will help alleviate this.

One is better off suffering that and letting it inform your behavior (avoiding sites that implement that trash, to the extent you can), than continuing to buy into the surveillance web and making it ever harder to separate yourself.

How do you know if the VON you're using is trustworthy though?

I've recently tried Express, Proton and Nord. They all seem to have the same issue. Don't know if anyone has any suggestions of VPNs that don't lead to captcha hell, but I'd appreciate any pointers if there's one out there.

What you say is agreeable and true. But privacy is a collective problem for society! If I have privacy for myself, and can express myself freely, but essentially nobody else can, what kind of society do I get to live my so-called free and private life in? A cyberpunk dystopia, that’s what.