Quick politics primer. The EU Parliament is not all-powerful. It cannot even propose legislation (yet). The EU is still mostly a confederation so it’s the governments that hold the reins. But the EP has to say yes for anything to pass. And since it is essentially a consultative body, the EP also tends to contain at least a handful of earnest idealists and specialists (usually Germans) who know when to say no, and how to amend legislation. They are often from the Greens-EFA parliamentary group and sometimes from the liberal Renew group. That is likely what happened here, yet again. It is very important for EU citizens to vote for these parties and candidates in EU elections. The next election is coming up in 6 months.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be too confident in Facebook’s implementation, and I certainly don’t believe that their interests are aligned with their users’.
That said, it seems like we’re reaching a turning point for big tech, where having access to private user data becomes more of a liability than an asset. Having access to the data means that they will be required by law to provide that data to governments in various circumstances. They might have other legal obligations in how they handle, store, and process that data. All of this comes with costs in terms of person-hours and infrastructure. Google specifically cited this is a reason they are moving Android location history on-device; they don’t want to deal with law enforcement constantly asking them to spy on people. It’s not because they give a shit about user privacy; it’s because they’re tired of providing law enforcement with free labor.
I suspect it also helps them comply with some of the recent privacy protection laws in the EU, though I’m not 100% sure on that. Again, this is a liability issue for them, not a user-privacy issue.
Also, how much valuable information were they getting from private messages in the first place? Considering how much people willingly put out in the open, and how much can be inferred simply by the metadata they still have access to (e.g. the social graph), it seems likely that the actual message data was largely redundant or superfluous. Facebook is certainly in position to measure this objectively.
The social graph is powerful, and if you really care about privacy, you need to worry about it. If you’re a journalist, whistleblower, or political dissident, you absolutely do not want Facebook (and by extension governments) to know who you talk you or when. It doesn’t matter if they don’t know what you’re saying; the association alone is enough to blow your cover.
The metadata problem is common to a lot of platforms. Even Signal cannot use E2EE for metadata; they need to know who you’re communicating with in order to deliver your messages to them. Signal doesn’t retain that metadata, but ultimately you need to take their word on that.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be too confident in Facebook’s implementation, and I certainly don’t believe that their interests are aligned with their users’.
I’m quite sure, they arn’t. This statement doesn’t mean that I think they have bad intention or something. It’s just, at least for me, obivious that the interest of the users and these of the companies are highly different. This is also the case with other companies and their customers.
Having access to the data means that they will be required by law to provide that data to governments in various circumstances.
A more paranoid person than myself would suspect that any big enough gouverment world simply force the companies to collect and share data.
The metadata problem is common to a lot of platforms.
From the viewpoint of the cooperations, this is a good deal. Enough privacy to keep people on the plattform and still enough data for advertisment.
Zip uses very bad encryption that is vulnerable to a known plaintext attack. Do not ever use PKZIP encryption for any purpose github.com/kimci86/bkcrack
The way I see it, community-based social media is a public forum, where every post / comment is public (Obviously less applicable on an individualized platform like Instagram). Everyone has an inherent right to privacy, but not when they’re using a platform like Lemmy. Twitter and Facebook are fundamentally different platforms. You can’t expect privacy while using lemmy, so use a different platform to post private content.
These people should be looking into spinning up Matrix servers if they want a private club with real privacy so bad.
It’s definitely a weird thing to constantly be upset about: “People can see what I posted in public when I post them publicly!”
It’s like complaining about people being able to take photos with you in the background in public. It’s a public space, there is no expectation of privacy.
If you want a private internet experience, you have to put some work in.
I’m sure the “millions lost” is their theoretical earnings they are “losing” by not being able to monetize the data they collect, spy on users to determine their habits so that they can introduce features that charge for things that are standard today, loss of ad revenue, etc.
We’ve hit a point where since everything collects as much data as they can to be mined, anything that interrupts that stream is now a felony corruption of business model.
it’s like when they compute losses for pirated content, just assuming every download would be equivalent to a Golden Edition Purchase at the highest price charged in their history, when in reality they’d be lucky to convert 1% of those downloads into sales.
20 years ago there would have been an outrage. Today, people are fine with it. I don’t understand that shit. Yet those same people were quick to jump on byte dance, because china.
There should be rules and regulations across the board, un- influenced by bribes lobbying.
I like that too and I don’t understand why people are so very fundamentally against having stuff recommended to them based on what they’re already following.
I’m not keen on it, prefer to find things organically so I usually ignore or (if possible) hide recommendations. But I don’t understand getting mad about it and judging people who find it useful. People gonna people, I suppose.
I may accept an algorithm IF I can know what and why things have beem filtered. A private algorithm which could be observed and manipulated would have my vote.
I want to know what are the bubbles I am in snd and be able to remove them so see something perhaps less biased.
I used to like it, now I avoid it at all cost. The problem is that the algorithm is never neutral, even if it's made with good intentions it can be gamed and manipulated, and it traps you in a spiral where what you interact with is what it shows you is what you interact with is what it shows you...
I never really used Twitter or any similar service, so I never had this happen to information shaping my opinions. I did, however, feel that the music I was listening to became shaped by the Spotify algorithm, and that I ended up listening to less rather than more diverse music than when I was sticking to vinyl. That's absurd - you have all the music in the world at your fingertips, and you end up limiting yourself more. That was my experience of course, other people probably have different ones. Anyway, I cancelled my subscription.
If there's a risk for music streaming services narrowing your field of vision, platforms shaping your opinions are downright scary. Algorithms can be tricked into showing you content, which is what russian troll farms excelled at. Tech bros tend to believe the solution is in adding more and more complexity to the point where nobody understands how it works - this is the opposite of how I want the content that helps informing me about the world to be curated.
I'm obviously not diagonally opposed to algorithms. The choose your own algorithm approach might have some merit, and I look forward to seeing more experimentation with this in the fediverse. But I do not trust corporate interests with any of this - nor do I trust a bunch of tech-optimistic rich man's sons.
I used YouTube with the algorithm, mostly for educational stuff, like vsauce, kurgsat and tech stuff. I started showing some interest in politics and news, start watching tldr news, then it pulls me into Vox, as I showed some anti trump sentiment. To put it quickly, it didnt take too long for me to realise that I was being drawn to ever more left leaning content (obviously a lot further than merely Vox, second thought and deeper)
Which is why I left algorithmic YouTube by using alternative frontends
If privacy and security are your top priorities, which it sounds like they are, and you want a performance similar to OnePlus 8, go with the Google Pixel 8 with GrapheneOS. It’s more aligned with your need for strong app sandboxing and convenient Google services integration, etc.
Though beware that although good in terms of performance, features and sturdiness (as long as you encase that glass back) or camera, Pixels are not flawless in terms of plain quality. Their battery life could be better and mine loses signal from time to time. Some features like 5G might not be available at every carrier in your country as well if Google has no official distribution there.
I personally only run pihole and ublock origin. Pihole takes care of the most stuff, ublock picks up the leftovers where domain blocking is not good enough. I’d like to believe this saves some juice on battery powered devices, but I’ve never actually measured it nor noticed it.
I got sick of some of the various Invidious instances taking 5+ refreshes to load a video, so ended up installing my own instance and its been a much nicer experience
I suspect one of the ways that Google detects the invidious instances is with the instance’s behavior: if a lot of different clients use a given instance, it makes it stand out.
Therefore using your own instance is a good way to get around that problem. I think I’ll try that as well.
Seriously worth a go, takes minutes to setup if you’re already ready for docker containers. Restart it often (dailiy is the official guidance, i find it doesnt need that with only me as user, i just do it when it starts to feel sluggish) - and I’ve put it behind a reverse proxy with auth to keep it to myself
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