>I simply stopped worrying and began to love the bomb

This may apply to the consequences of ones data being subject to so many breaches and leaks and thefts, but it should not be the attitude one adopts towards the idea of ones data being taken and used by so many parties. At some level, my data is my personhood - it is my evidence of myself, and my record of myself, and my proof of myself. It encodes who I talk to, what I'm interested in, where I go, and what I do. My health, my finances, my habits, vices, schedule, family, friends, coworkers, beliefs. People more clever than myself use this data to advertise to me; people more powerful use this data to surveil me. When will people more malevolent use this data to persecute me?

I should not have to love the bomb because the bomb will kill me.

It’s not the current use of the data that’s concerning, it’s its future use. Who’s to say that some facet of your life that is ordinary now will not one day paint you as the target of some future regime? It happened in Europe a few decades ago, and in many other countries around the world.

To be zen about one's privacy is easier for some people than others.

There are situations in many a person's life that if revealed to the public would have life-altering consequences.

Rather than the world give up, we should have better tools and laws to flood the internet with spurious personal data.

Similarly. My browser was carefully containerized, with a ton of anti fingerprinting measures, VPN, Linux, Librewolf, everything. Even on my phone, I restricted whatever possible. Then one day I went to the YouTube main page, and I saw that Google somehow got to know that I played Minecraft again after a decade. I gave up right there. I suffered to avoid this, and it was pointless. I knew at that point already that probably all my PI is public information anyway, but I wanted to restrict whatever possible, and no, everybody sells my data anyway, and it seems that avoiding fingerprinting is impossible without turning off the internet completely, and ditching smart phones.

These swings can be avoided by not doing stuff so hard but instead more effectively.

For example, matrix sucks ass. It's terrible. Everything about it is a bad experience. Of course you'd want to eventually stop using it and go back to the previous life.

But that is not the correct take-away.

The correct take away is to include UX (and honesty to yourself about it) in the calculation and to not go all in on an unsustainable compromise, just to then snap back to doing the opposite ca 3 months later.

Same as with loosing weight, really. If you replace 100% of the pleasure of eating with the "right" but unpleasant solutions, you will not be able to keep that diet going indefinitely.

This makes me think: how would someone like Mark Zuckerberg handle this for his own internet presence? Or does he sidestep this issue completely by having assistants for nearly everything? I can imagine he doesn't do much more than look at .ppts and fire off emails. Do data brokers have any information at all on this guy?

The next frontier is to maintain 'limited privacy'.

That's denying most culprits the opportunity to use the collected data against you.

Like always on VPN, turning off personalization, ad guards and using open source products where possible.

I agree.

And most people on the behavioral side do too, but not at the cognitive level. EU is the best example with EU AI Act, strict data regulation as well as privacy rights, on the other hand demanding that Apple does serve the EU with AI.

I have mainly one distinction: the state is the worst protector of your data and the most ruthless gatherer of all your details.

Opposite to the open sourcing of your data in the end by the state are private companies who live by your data but do this for 20+ years - battle tested protection and hardening against malicious hackers.

Security is their business while security for the state is a cost factor.

Being at the mercy of some ignorant politician is not the best way to talk about data security.

Berlin, Denmark - those are the known one. And there are many more to come.

And regarding cognitive dissonance: politicians demanding high standards and punishing data loss ruthlessly on the one hand, giving oneself a pass on a hack is nothing to increase trust into the system.

X got fined for a missing blue mark. Berlin? Denmark? Others?

A second aspect is that the average guy doesn’t get that part of the whole spectrum must be the degooglers, the home server guys.

So it is relatively easy to get data on them as well just by filtering out the other data.

In other words: 95% not doing degoogling makes for a great small sample of 5%. Negating and interpolating other demographic and psychographic factors and you get a great way of gaining insights.

And remember: being the one who is not using google when being around other guys who do - magic.

So my idea is simple: what’s in it for me, and the state offers way lower value than Google and co.

Pick your fate.

I think both are possible. To have a goal and to accept reality. I would not draw the conclusion that all privacy measures are meaningless. It is hard, but I think it is still worth working towards a goal of better privacy for citizens.

> wasted effort

That depends. One thing is following precautions, another the Principles. Precautions may have a limit ("due diligence done, I'll stop there"), Principles do not.

Remember also that many phenomena occur because the individuals in the masses have not said "no". Acceptance enabled them. So the acceptance of some ill conceived systems is criminal - it is what lets them exist.

Two problems with that:

1. I don't want to love it. I hate it. You can learn to live with things you hate though, and not have it impact your day to day life or mental health though.

2. Its still a bomb. Until we find out how we can de-value the data, it will have an incentive to be stolen.

One thought here that I don't personally agree with, but might be important regardless:

Imagine a society without secrets or privacy at all for example.

I don't personally like the sounds of it, but it is sort of where we're headed at the moment, and if the fundamental reality is that obtaining data is much more easy than defending it, then perhaps we need to come to terms with a world without privacy, and how to create the best version of that unconstrained world.

Again, I don't like the sounds of this, but I'm curious to read more about it. Can someone give a philosophical pitch of why GDPR style regs on personal and company data are so important?

LoL. We are all dancing naked on the table and hoping our clothes and wallet or purse and some of our pride will be where we left them.

All of the popular surveillance apps correlate your email address and phone numbers mostly, but if you used 1@gmail.com to sign up for 2@gmail.com google knows and marks it as your altnerate account, it could give them all your 30 rando gmails, you're then linked by phone activations through those emails to everything else, whatsapp, telegram, credit card purchase, etc. the biggest link in the chain is always the phone number though. They also have a big "Alternate Emails" button. Everything fans out from those.

I don't know how deep palantir can build profiles on someone, like digging into comment histories and extrapolating you are x y or z sort of stuff. I'm sure they've learned a lot about people via public irc logs and discord servers. But the only screenshots I've seen have been way more simple than that, basically a facebook UI that gives them buttons for all the apps with the phone # that has been identified as you the user, so it would be your list of social media apps accounts and they just click in and read messages. These screenshots have popped up in court cases recently.

We need to stop using the same phone numbers and rotate them constantly. Ideally back to something like fi that masks your "real" isp account phone number. They need to stop being a 2fa and especially stop being able to identify a person. Carry a dumb 2fa. I've always been on the "dont ask for my phone number to use your service" bandwagon but absolutely now.

And now some banks are doing instant voice recognition. I don't pick up my phone for any number I don't know anymore.

Evidence is pretty clear after decades of this: big data breaches are inconsequential for an average person.

They happen all the time, nobody cares, criminals who want to target you will target you anyway, criminals who don't target don't care about you specifically, legitimate entities cannot use this data anyway, and legitimate scammers (marketing) will find different ways to get you to give them the data you need.

At this point I thing privacy obsession is modern copium, a way for people to deal with the fact that we're all individually a speck of dust on the face of human civilization. It's about asserting, "I am not an NPC, I have this richness of experience", and then trying to hide it all in case the world wants to check.

>I just don't want to stop living - flying abroad, going to doctor

Good, you're not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I don't get why you think throwing out the bathwater itself was wasted effort though.

The point is to get rid of things you can live without. If you're going to get rid of something but then spend every day thinking of its absence, then yes, that may be bridge too far. Otherwise, getting rid of it has some value.

I don't see the harm of asking, "Do I need this entity's services enough to justify forking over this data" for every entity that you interact with. Everyone draws their line in the sand at a different place. Data hygiene is a good phrase for that reason, everybody's acceptable level of hygiene (or lack thereof) is different.

I gave up when i realised Firefox had google analytics and noone even knew or cared. That was about 10 years ago now.

It is definitely worth asking for a copy of those notes, verbatim, as-is from the automatic transcription, to check for errors while the session is fresh in your mind.

If your doctor is worth seeing at all, they will be glad for the corrections.

I use my password manager to maintain unique answers to all of the useless verification questions about pets, movies, teachers, etc. Only way to scale it.

Why? I would assume encrypting and sending the key via a different channel would be sufficient. Or are lawyers still not technically apt to do so?

What punishment does the country of Denmark get here, if you had to guess?

Pretty ironic to be extolling the virtues of the EU's privacy approach on this story in particular...

It is a basic police requirements on most countries. Hotels must collect visitor id's and keep it for several weeks.

I just tell them they can look at it but not copy it and that's satisfied them, for now. Sometimes had to get a manager in, but never had them deny me fully. I'm sure sooner or later I'll run into a stubborn one and have to scramble for a day-of replacement hotel, and that just adds to my list of reasons to avoid travel.

And why are politicians immune to all of this shit??

Why can’t WE spy on them 24/7?

> As much as I don't like the cryptocurrency ecosystem, I don't think facilitating and encouraging kidnapping and torture is the way to go.

The cryptocurrency ecosystem is used to not only avoid taxation but to enable criminal activity. How many people are being held hostage and the ransom will be payed thanks to cryptocurrencies?

I do not like the cryptocurrency ecosystem either. And I totally agree that it should be abolished. It is just a way to finance crime and terrorism.

>previously they could be on paper - a secret between you, the pen, the paper, the pharmacist and the gods

Excuse me?

If you weren't paying with cash whoever paid for the prescription (govt, insurance) has a record of it. The pharmacy that filled the prescription has a record of it as well as the doctor who wrote it.

Too much is stored in computers. In the EU, you own the data about yourself. In the US, whoever owns the computer owns all the data on that computer - you own nothing and you will love it. We need to make PII radioactive and fine everyone who had that data stored on their computer when it leaked.

It looks like you punish yourself unnecessarily, for things that are out of your control.

There’s nothing lucrative in abusing privacy, and yes the government is busy but it has nothing to do with a "corporate agenda", any government or any country with more than a few millions of people is busy, agenda or not.