That headline misses the big problem. It’s not that Google was forced to give up search history data. If Google gets a warrant, they will comply. The real problem is that the justices acknowledged that the warrant was unconstitutional and permitted the evidence anyway. They claim the police “acted in good faith” while violating the constitution, which is a horrifying precedent.
If you’re thinking “alls well that ends well,” because they caught the arsonists who murdered a family of five, I can sympathize with that feeling, but consider that the murderer may have his conviction overturned on subsequent appeals.
The police obtained a warrant for everyone who searched for a thing from Google, and the search information was used against the accused in court. 14 states currently outlaw abortion, and there’s some cousin-fucking conservative prosecutor in Dipshit, Alabama, just salivating over the prospect of obtaining the IP addresses of every person looking up directions to clinics.
Not long after Dobbs, someone posted a guide on r/WitchesVsPatriarchy on how to securely find* this information without opening yourself up to potential harm. Terrifying that that’s even a thing that needs to exist.
I wonder how many companies like Cambridge analytica or TPUSA just have access to these. It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s some social engineering dark arts underground of pretending to be police and getting this data to study
I get the impression that many Gen Zers like to know where everyone is all the time. It's totally normal for them to have each other's GPS locations. Snapchat has a built-in map feature where you can watch your friends move around in real time, and there are other apps that offer this, too. I was blown away when I learned this was so commonly used and people just leave it on, so their social group just knows precisely where they are all the time.
They’ll learn the hard way. Hopefully the hard way is something serious to them but ultimately inconsequential like finding out a partner is cheating, and not like… being murdered.
Hey now, don’t assume we all do that. I don’t need the people I talk to knowing that the only places I go are work, my house, and the Chinese food place every other Tuesday. They might think I don’t have anything to do with my life. They would be right, but I don’t want them thinking it!
Yeah. I’m Gen Z. I was really taken aback when my high school friends had apps on their phones that showed their real time locations to each other. I was like “WHY?” and they responded along the lines of “Well why not?”… I have no words…
I never really understood the “I have nothing to hide” mindset. I’ve always been for privacy. I self host everything I use, and when I don’t (e-mail) I PAY someone to do it for me. No Google services in my life, no apple, etc, etc.
However, more and more I’m wondering if what I’m doing is worth it. Really, the people who “have nothing to hide” seem fine, nothing bad has happened, and it seems far more likely my information was leaked from a hack (credit carma I’m looking at you). Credit cards know where I am, what I buy… Its endless. Plus now I have stress about my self hosted services going down.
So these guys who share their location and just live in blissful ignorance, are they on to something? I think life would be ‘easier’ for me on their side…
The reason I close the toilet door is mainly because I know others don’t want to witness me peeing. If they didn’t care, I wouldn’t care tbh. Everyone’s priorities regarding privacy are different, but I think for every person at least something feels private.
That’s such a… foreign mindset to me. I can’t fathom being okay with having the door open and having other people just walking by. Hell, I close it when I’m the only one home.
I don’t know, it’s not like it’s a secret what I’m doing in there. Going to the toilet looks very similar for most people I assume, so it’s not like someone with decent imagination couldn’t know what it looks like anyway. I don’t see the huge difference in whether the door is open or not other than politeness.
I think you need to find a happy medium. I’ve accepted that I can’t control ALL the data I generate, so I instead aggressively block ads and any other marketing attempts towards me.
Yeah, it all boils down to your threat model. Not everyone has the time, resources, or know-how to self-host everything, so it’s about balancing convenience with privacy, which unfortunately is almost one or the other now.
This is kind of my point. I don’t feel there’s a happy middle right now and unless you go tinfoil hat information is going to get out.
My threat model is basically “do my best to be as private as possible”. But there is limits. I can spend $100 cash on gas or I can spend $100 on my credit card and get 2% back. Obviously I’m going to use my credit card. I still email people who use Gmail, People who have the facebook, instagram, X, etc on their phone has me as a contact, likely with my full name, email address, physical mailing address.
So why do I bother keeping my contacts in a selfhosted NextCloud? Why do I avoid the Google Maps app, or anything google when the wife uses all this stuff and I’m with her 90% of the time? I’m starting to think they have my information already anyway so why not welcome google into my life? I have to keep talking myself into the fact that self hosting is worth the extra work I’m causing myself.
Unfortunately it depends on the individual, so no one can really answer your question but yourself. For me, I draw the line when it personally becomes burdensome to maintain something. For example, I use Bitwarden to manage all my passwords, but I don’t trust myself enough to host and maintain a server and keep it online/secure, so I use their hosted service. I use google drive to store some miscellaneous stuff because of the free 15GB storage, but I don’t store any private files (personal photos, documents, etc.). I use ProtonDrive for more important stuff, and for very confidential files, I encrypt them first. I use google maps for navigation because of reliability and accuracy, but I use a separate google account for it. I know that doesn’t do much, but it keeps some level of separation for me personally. I still maintain a facebook account (although I barely use it) because of family, but I still use a facebook container on firefox and don’t use the mobile app. That plus all the privacy extensions.
The main thing is that it doesn’t have to be black or white. You don’t have to go full hermit, and at the same time you don’t need to fully embed yourself into the google ecosystem. Just do what you can and what you are comfortable with. As they say, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Yeah I think the bigger problem here is that it’s this hard to have reasonable privacy and governments like it that way. They don’t need a warrant to buy info, just to force release. I don’t like google knowing everything about me. I hate the cops being a check away from it.
For me it boils down to principles. You’re totally right and many companies I hate will have alot of my info due to others, but I’ll be damned if I cooperate with them.
Yeah maybe it’s growing up in the closet, but yeah. My wife knows where I am in general all the time, but only because I give her heads up. Nobody else knows more than they need.
It’s not even that I have anything to hide. Aside from not letting my in laws know we’re poly or other such things I’m not really hiding anything. I just don’t see why anyone should know. If someone insists on knowing for no reason then that’s weird and not cool.
When you says “resonate”, do you mean you don’t understand the sentence? Or do you mean you don’t see why you should care?
Re meaning, the sentence seems blindingly obvious to me. But maybe it isn’t… It means you don’t want privacy because you have something illegal to hide in your house, but because you don’t want to invite anybody in. I really don’t know how to explain it anymore clearly without repeating it verbatim.
If you don’t see why this is important or you think it doesn’t concern you, send me your address and I’ll come around tonite to take pictures of your furniture without your permission.
I’m a bit off-put by your tone, but no, I was being genuine. Saying it doesn’t resonate means whatever was said doesn’t seem as profound or meaningful as it does to the person who said it. So the phrase really means that you want to shut everyone out? I guess that makes sense, given the hostility in your response.
You read me wrong my friend. It was nothing more than an honest-to-goodness reply to you. No hostility. Be careful with written discussions, because you don’t see the face of whoever is writing and you tend to slap the state of mind you yourself are in when you read it. Imagine I’m writing this with a smile and that’s pretty much how I wrote it.
You don’t find the quote profound and that’s fair enough. To each his own opinion. Me, I think it’s a perfect description of the core issue of privacy: having the choice not to expose what I don’t want to expose for no other reason that I don’t want to. I don’t want to shut everybody out, I want to freedom to do it if I so choose and not have to justify myself or suffer consequences.
Gen Z here. I have Apple’s Find My location setup with my closest friends only (and my mom). I don’t have a reason to hide my locations to my friends, it helps with casually meeting up actually. “Oh XY is nearby, let’s meet and hang for a bit” And my mom has my location for emergencies and vice versa.
I disabled the snap map though as I have people on there that don’t need to know my location.
I agree it is people looking for reasons to criticize. However, I do think VPN or anything that modifies your route tables should be subjected to more scrutiny than other app features due to potential for abuse. I wish browsers wouldn't bundle them at all, or install them as part of their base.
Especially considering they were injecting affiliate links/replacing affiliate links with their own, everything they do should be seen through that lens. They literally thought it was either OK to do which means that behavior like this is going to happen and keep happening with them, OR they thought they could get away with it which ends up with the same result.
Article reads as propaganda. No way that zoomers are into this. This just sounds like justification for abusive parents to spy on their children. As a GenZ, I don’t recall having a single friend with this kind of arrangement with their parents, but then again I mostly hung around the more questionable crowd where you actually needed privacy. Would really hope we stop bickering among generations and actually fight for privacy together
While more on the parent side of the age gap of things now, I know at least five offspring personally who do this willingly. It is a nightmare to me, moreso the fact that it’s basically impossible or was the last time I looked to find ways to do it that are foss.
But the point is, probably more people do it than you expect. This place is a selection bias, most people genuinely give no rats ass about their privacy, and, to the shock of many, trust their parents and like the safety net.
There are certainly secure privacy focused approaches they retain the agency of both parties which could exist. It’s a very real niche.
For real, how are Millennials falling for the same headlines that were used to spread stupid assumptions about their own generation a decade ago, but this time about Gen Z?
Contrast to you, I hang out with a pretty straight laced crowd, and we also don’t “track each other on Snapchat” like the article or the top comment here is saying because that’s fucking weird.
What’s gonna be the Gen Z avocado toast headline, I wonder…
Media literacy classes should be compulsory and deal with all this crap. Its pretty irresponsible as a society that we leave so much to people to figure it all out or be so vulnerable to exploitation and scams. So damn preventable and beneficial when people can help self-curate out the bullshit but echo chambers are also always gonna echo chamber, so there’s that too
So I live with a member of Gen Z, and it must vary from group to group, but the kids I come into contact with are always able to see exactly where their friends are, including randoms they briefly interacted with on Snapchat once.
I agree that It’s fucking weird. Location sharing on an adhoc basis to coordinate meetups makes sense, but they seem to have this open and broadcasting literally all of the time.
I also get a lot of chuffing and “You’re being ridiculous” when I try to point out how fucking insane, unsafe and dystopian that is.
I dunno, I still have location sharing on 24/7 with my millennial buddies from 10-15 years ago when we were partying hard and it was annoying to keep texting or calling to find out which bar or club you were at or moved on to. Especially when you black out and stop responding.
Just because a headline was published doesn’t mean people agree with it. You can literally publish whatever the fuck you want as long as you don’t cross a threshold that your core reader base stops trusting the publication. Fluff pieces like this are primetime space for just going off on bullshit with minimal repurcussions.
Beyond that clickbait/ragebait are absolutely a thing, and so is manufactured consent style propaganda.
Life360 just needs to have this article published in enough places that it seems like a ton of people are saying it. Gets the ball rolling for the appearance of people sharing this opinion when the reality is that they just got a dozen news sites to reword their press packet.
Sorry, I should have specified “in this comment section”. You’re absolutely right about everything you said regarding the online news circlejerk when it comes to “perceptions”.
There’s just a lot of anti-gen Z comments in this thread that make it seem like we don’t care about privacy issues or tech literacy, when a lot of us do, or we’re JUST learning about the importance of this stuff because the first of our generation are finally gaining independence and footing in society.
Gen-Xers are also guilty of letting corporate surveillance happen, thereby letting their children grow under the watchful eye of big data.
I never said my generation was virtuous. In fact, I blame people my age for not affording the next generation what they themselves got to enjoy. Just like we blamed our boomer parents for enjoying the good life after the war and leaving us the crumbs. Little did we know the ones after us would have it even harder.
this gen x'er isn't keen on the idea, either. before the days of cell phones, the street lights coming on was the cue it was time to go home--and we could go pretty much anywhere in our (small) town. and later as a teen when we lived close to a city, all mom wanted to know was whether i'd be home for supper. there was no worry because every 'horrible' thing to happen to a kid wasn't published or broadcast for the world to see.
Yeah but if you were a parent or if you are one. Would you do it? I could see doing it and just trying not to use it but man with some of the crazy kidnappings nowadays I would like to be able to find out where they are or at least have a last time and location for the police to work off of.
My 21yo soon wants to build out a van and take a chunk of time (6 months?) in between jobs and drive around the States. We’re talking over a year from now, but as the idea has come up in discussion I told him that I’d like to have some form of tracker set up. He’s good with it.
Garmin sell these beacon devices, which can be used to either check in with relatives, or to summon help to their location.
They’re expensive, and intended more for people heading into remote areas, but might give you both some peace of mind, without tracking his every move.
Yeah but if you were a parent or if you are one. Would you do it?
I am and I did not. Kids need to grow up without feeling they are being watched all the time. Or rather more accurately: kids need to grow up without being watched so they can sense when they are and take measures. Kids who grow up without any personal space don’t even realize they’re not free, and that’s a perfect recipe to create adults that accept tyrannical governments without question.
My kids grew up doing stuff they didn’t tell me about, and I didn’t know where they were half of the time. And yes, at times, I worried. But it was important to let them be.
the crazy kidnappings nowadays
I’ve heard people of all ages say that all my life. This is a well-know cognitive bias (i.e. “things were better in the past”) and it’s simply not true. I’m fairly certain our society is much safer today than it was in the past.
Yeah I should really have not used the term nowadays. Thing is that folks in the past could not do anything like this to mitigate it. They did not have the option. If you where in the position to need it you might find your decision to not utilize it to be endlessly horrible.
If you where in the position to need it you might find your decision to not utilize it to be endlessly horrible.
It was a choice. I chose to let them risk life and limb doing whatever stupid shit kids do behind their parents’ backs, risk being run over by a car or kidnapped as they walked to school. The risk was very small, and the benefits of letting them grow up with a normal, non-Orwellian childhood far outweighed them. Hell, my generation and those before me grew up like that and survived just fine.
But I agree: if something really bad had happened, I don’t know how I could have lived with myself. And this always weighed heavily on my mind whenever they were late to come home.
Yeah. The other thing is though that if you have a cell phone you are allowing all sorts of companies and maybe governments track you all over the place, but there is an issue with family? Sure they don't really care so maybe thats a thing but they don't care till they do which is really wierd. It feels sorta adult to recognize the tracking that is happening and not seeing it as a big deal for the right reasons family wise. Take the opposite. Elderly parents being tracked by adult children. It would be interesting if parents started allowing their children to track them at some age.
Nowadays the risk really is compounded, though: not by any of the actual dangers being worse, but instead by adding the new risk of busybodies calling CPS to report you for “neglect” for anything short of extreme helicopter-parenting.
You’re trading your own feelings for your kid’s long-term well-being and learning. Many people would take the easy approach because your way is “scary”. Bravery is doing what needs to be done even if you’re afraid.
I’d call that right and proper. It’s what we adults are supposed to do. The number of times I’ve carried a crying infant to get them settled down while I could barely walk from excruciating back pain… It’s our job to take that on.
It’s funny, many of those parents who are tracking their kids would probably say “I sacrifice every day by working long hours so my kids have a warm, safe home” without realizing that giving them a long leash is also a sacrifice of parent’s (willingly take on worry) so kids grow up well.
My sister had trackers in the trunk of all of her kids cars. She told them it was there, they never had a problem with it. The clear signal wasn’t mom and dad are watching you… it was “don’t get into mischief in your own car” lol
Not even Microsoft in its monolith days was able to spend enough money to stop a legion of angry nerds with a severe case of "fuck you, you can't tell me what to do".
So, they’ve already won. They just haven’t turned on the nuclear option yet.
They recently added what amounts to drm for the entire Internet to chrome, it is a way for them to disallow access to YouTube and other services via anything but an approved browser. This would include approved extensions.
So I’ll use something that isn’t chrome? Well, they will just block Firefox from YouTube. Making chrome and chrome derivatives via its Internet drm the only option.
Eh, probably. But it’s for fighting those darned internet pirates, and the only body that seems to protect us anymore, the eu, seems to be all for that. So I’m.not expecting anything good
They are all for copyright protection, the current copyright reform act proposes automatic scanners installed to prevent copywritten content from being displayed without authorization
That would be easy to challenge under the same reasoning as what's in the article, not to mention various anti-trust laws and ones covering anti-competitive business practices.
Doesn't mean it's guaranteed to stop them, but it's definitely not going to be as easy as them flipping a few switches and saying "watch ads on our browser with no addons or GTFO".
They killed Netscape and had to put in a toggle with the option of other browsers like 10 years later. They paid next to nothing in fines and legal battles, basically putting a stranglehold on the internet itself that took another 10 to kinda of undo.
Even in the US, a corporate monopoly trying to force people to use their browser will trigger an antitrust lawsuit from the government. Microsoft has already faced one for what they did with Edge, and they didn’t even do DRM.
Besides, it’s YouTube. If you can’t use it anymore, it’s not gonna be the end of the world.
It’s not that simple, it’s not forcing everyone to use chrome, it’s denying access to copyrighted material to drmed browsers only. This is something that already happens and no one seems to want to break things up around that. Infaft they seem to legislate more for that.
And sure today it’s youtube, but this is actually a form of drm for everything. Today youtube tomorrow everything else.
I stopped using Chrome about 3 weeks ago. Used Edge for a while but finding out that is Chromium, I landed back on Firefox after 10 years of not using it. Just moved all my bookmarks and plugins.
Why? Principles the moment people force me to use their software is the moment I leave.
I don’t think that the issue is that people don’t know; people don’t care. They don’t understand how horrible the loss of privacy is, and think that the marginal convenience of being able to control your thermostat from your workplace, or have your refrigerator add milk to your shopping list outweighs the negatives of them being turned into botnets, or monetizing all of your data to squeeze every last penny out of you.
I agree. There are far too many people with the “if I’m not doing anything wrong, then what have I to hide?” mindset. I’ve seen people unironically say that all Tor users must be engaging in illegal activity, and I don’t think it occurs to them that in many parts of the world, freely accessing information is an illegal activity, and by adopting this mindset we’re empowering that type of state.
I like the way a coworker put it to me, it’s the same reason we have locks on our doors and curtains on our windows, it’s not because we have something to hide, but a right to privacy that tech giants have widely ignored.
The difference is the part immediately after you stopped quoting:
They don’t understand how horrible the loss of privacy is…
What OP is saying here is that people know abstractly that smart devices are not privacy friendly, but they don’t understand how big a deal that actually can be.
We also shouldn’t be conditioned to just accept terms of services with no recourse, by this point I think most people just press accept and know by now whatever it is there, isn’t worth the trouble of fighting to have it changed. So companies get to legally have a free for all with your privacy, cause you consented to things you’ll later find out you didn’t even know you consented for.
It helps once, but does it push notifications when the TOS changes from the last time you read it?
The TOS could switch from protecting your data to sharing it for money at any point in time and that would apply to any existing data. Unless you know you can get them to delete it, the fact that the TOS used to say something does not matter once they change it.
@snooggums@throws_lemy@HelixDab2@Jessvj93 ofc that’s always the risk you take when using any service. Sadly a lot of the time the ToS is so long it’d take forever to read but this is the closest I’ve been able to find to quick overviews on the the ToS of a specified service.
Note that it does not have every service critiqued as I think ppl with TOSDR manually read the ToS and evaluate.
The TOS are the legal equivalent of a locked car door. It’s the bare minimum prevention against a lawsuit, but really doesn’t protect anything. It’s because they are so long and opaque that they are often unenforceable.
ToS are the worst thing ever. They are “contracts” that you are required to sign to do literally anything in the world but are not allowed to negotiate and can be modified at any time without your consent and your original signing is propagated to the new contract and it is still considered binding. Also, they are allowed to put clauses in which hand over rights to your property, intellectual or otherwise, which is irrevocable and perpetual. Additionally, you have many “software” providers putting clauses in which state that you only lease the license, you do not own it. Even if you have a physical media with the software, you only purchased a lease and it is therefore illegal for you to resell it. They are also allowed to revoke your lease at anytime, without recompense of any sort. That is the real power of SaaS, not the subscription, but the fact that nobody is ever allowed to own something, no matter how much money you have paid.
Yes, as others have said, they are virtually unenforceable, but it does happen often enough to make sure you are afraid of it.
I also feel many don’t understand the full extent, either. They’re used to using fairly secure devices in their everyday life (often not realizing how much the software they install is also spying on them), so why wouldn’t these IoT things also be secure?
In my experience, it’s all very vague and ethereal until the risks are highlighted for them. “So what if Google can read all of my emails? What could they possibly do with that information, anyway; why should I care?” is an example of a portion of a real conversation I’ve had.
The twisted reasoning is probably so that the users can access the emails anywhere with their live account (and so that MS can scrape those mails for all sorts of creepy shit)
The same company that was modifying the content of the pages as an opt-out feature deeply hidden in the setting? (e.g. bitcoin stuff on every Reddit link)
Surely you trust them with all of your traffic, though? They sound like good stewards and of course you’d want their VPN installed without your consent and you can definitely trust it’s not doing anything bad, right?
Oh I’m sure pedos are just sending CSAMs via Whatsapp willy-nilly. Not using already very much accessible numerous e2e encrypted methods that can be self-hosted and harder to find/track. We can definitely catch them for sure if this comes to be a thing!
This is just the laziest excuse for a surveillance. Fuck them.
There is a 0% chance that AI can accurately determine if someone is 18 or not, even with hypothetical futuristic AI technology. Some 20-year-olds look very young. Some 16-year-olds look shockingly old. And nobody changes very significantly between the day of their 18th birthday and the day they were 17 years, 364 days.
Hell, even 13-15 year olds are looking much older. I genuinely saw one in normal clothes, took a guess based on her being around maybe 20. Saw her a day later in school uniform. And only under 16’s wear them.
Really did make me realise I am shit at age guessing.
To quote the Simpsons: “0% is a percentage as well!” And that will be more than enough for politicians who know nothing about the topic and are blinded by the hot tech-buzzword of the minute (especially if it turns out they or some of their friends can make a shitload of money with it. I love capitalism and democracy.)
As an outside observer, UK politicians (even Conservatives) seem to tend to be a bit better at this sort of thing than American or Australian (“the laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia”) politicians. There’s a much stronger tendency for their back benchers to vote against the party line than we have, too, which is great for deliberative democracy.
To be fair, that at least is hypothetically possible. Working out someone’s age exactly purely based on their face is not even possible, so you can argue against it very easily from a purely technical standpoint.
Facial recognition with a database is quite good today, and will only get better. To argue against that you need to start getting into the privacy and ethical arguments.
Exactly, this is something that even humans would have a hard time doing. Even though AI can do many things better than humans, humans are better at vision at the moment.
Eh, humans are better at certain kinds of vision—particularly on tasks that deal with non-white people where the AI was trained mostly on white people.
But things where the vision is looking at very fine detail, AI is very good at. Like determining if a patient has a disease based on a retinal scan or other medical imagery.
And I think it’s fair to say that, at least superficially, the problem in this thread seems like it might be more similar to those medical cases where an AI could do a really good job. The problem is that actually, no. There’s no known marker that could determine age with the level of accuracy that would be required for this task.
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