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JubilantJaguar

@JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world

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Coming to terms with no longer having privacy and control over my technology

I miss the days of VHS and DVD shelfs in homes, for example. If you bought the tapes and had them in your home, no corporate entity could alter those tapes without your consent, monitor how many times you watch them, sell your data to whomever they please without your knowledge, roll out new mandatory conditions to a 'user...

JubilantJaguar ,

IMO the "ownership" thing is a red herring. It has its roots in a specifically American obsession with private property.

If everybody "demands ownership of goods", that means we share nothing. Hardly a model of "sustainable consumption". There are loads of examples of redundant private ownership of goods. My favorite stat: the average electric drill is used for 7 minutes in its entire life. All because every household in every building on every street must have its own one, instead of us finding a way to share them.

In the context of digital "goods", "ownership" really just means control. I wish we would use that word instead.

JubilantJaguar ,

Even if it were encrypted and the backdoor was controlled by the Russian state, logically that would make it safer than Facebook for anyone living in Western jurisdictions. The Russian government cannot get them and is hardly going to exchanging intelligence with its enemies.

JubilantJaguar ,

You shouldn’t opine

To "opine" is to have an opinion. Are you suggesting I should refrain from having an opinion? Does this apply to your own opinions too? Odd place to make such an argument.

Otherwise: interesting point. To me, a state that can obtain personal data by leaning on its owns corporations is, by definition, more threatening than one that has to negotiate for it with a hostile power. But perhaps I underestimate the scale of that practice.

Anti-web discrimination by banks and online services - is this even legal?

Banks, email providers, booking sites, e-commerce, basically anything where money is involved, it's always the same experience. If you use the Android or iOS app, you stayed signed in indefinitely. If you use a web browser, you get signed out and asked to re-authenticate constantly - and often you have to do it painfully using a...

JubilantJaguar OP ,

The security hole here seems to be remote control of devices, more than the nature of the software used.

JubilantJaguar OP ,

Fair enough, but "regulatory requirements" can be a symptom as well as a cause. Bad rules are there for the changing.

So if you add up all that, then they’re more likely to allow long term login sessions on an application that they control than on a desktop/web browser that they don’t.

Again, all true. But this is all just probabilistic, as someone else said. A properly secured browser on a locked down machine can be much more secure than an outdated Android stack in the hands of the kind of person who falls victim to scams.

Here, the effect of "assumptions" is to undermine software freedom and privacy. That feels like a problem that needs a better fix.

JubilantJaguar OP ,

Exactly, the 2FA recourse usually affects browsers and not apps. And comes on top of the password or PIN, rather than replacing it. Which seems like discrimination. And it's not even secure, as you say.

This all feels very convenient. Like a subtle form of abuse, in the name of security, to push people away from the only platform where they have any serious chance of privacy.

The arguments about the insecurity of the browser context have some merit in the aggregate, but in the end all these considerations are relative to the individual user. Which makes the discrimination a form of collective punishment that might have a legal redress.

JubilantJaguar OP ,

Your points are of course valid but this is getting slightly offtopic.

If your bank really spies on you through its app, I would change bank

What would be nice would be not to have to use a proprietary app on a closed-source software stack in the first place, given that it clearly represents a privacy compromise. And that is possible: almost no bank makes it obligatory. But they would obviously love to. If only to fire their web team and save some money.

And this is not just about banks. Every online service is trying to force us onto the closed platforms of Google and Apple, when an open-standards software platform exists and is perfectly workable. Seems there might be a battle worth fighting here. Nobody much seems to agree. Fair enough.

Just let your password manager fill up the login everytime, it’s not hard.

IME that hardly works any more, as mentioned.

JubilantJaguar OP ,

Good points.

JubilantJaguar ,

So I will offer constructive pushback instead of inane downvotes like everyone else.

clowns

This word does literally nothing except trivialize your argument and so make it less convincing.

don't give a shit

Ditto. Makes you sound angry and irrational. Not much of an incentive to go on reading.

psychotic

psychopathy

These are medical terms. Presumably you will claim to mean them literally and not figuratively. But really, nobody is going to assume in good faith that you're a doctor or a psychologist. So, again, the result is to undermine your whole point and make it seem like empty bloviating.

Hope that helps.

JubilantJaguar ,

You're falling victim to the dumb-as-pigshit culture of downvoting good-faith opinions. Mindless downvoters: GO BACK TO REDDIT WHERE YOU BELONG.

This was a thoughtful, thought-provoking, well-expressed opinion. Thank you.

JubilantJaguar ,

All beautifully preached to the choir. Now: how to communicate all this to the unwashed masses who think the web and the internet and Chrome are all the same thing? Serious question.

JubilantJaguar ,

Good analysis, thanks.

regulation like that is only proposed to hide up other clauses and proposals that are equally bad or even worse - get the public distracted and thinking they made a difference

But IMO this bit was superfluous POV. An alternative theory is that nobody is secretly scheming to do anything, least of all the chaotic EU apparatus, and that most politicians are not experts and they are simply responding to various competing stimuli, as humans do. Notably elections and media hype and lobbyists. Personally I don't get why so many people attribute to malice what can easily be explained by incompetence, but whatever, I'm in the minority and that's fine.

Interesting detail about the eID certificates. You're right that Americans will find this crazy in the way that we Europeans might not. Perhaps Americans are right.

JubilantJaguar ,

Not bothered about the potential for keyloggers or even OS-level snooping on what is presumably your privacy-free Android device? Personally I would never type the master password into anything other than a computer running a FOSS stack that I control, but perhaps that is excessive caution.

JubilantJaguar ,

Completely agree in substance and spirit, but not on this framing of everything as about ownership. Personally I don't want to "own" data any more than I want to own a car. What I want is control, rights, privacy and personal freedom. The ownership obsession seems to me a red herring that just proves how much we've been taken in by consumer capitalism.

Forgive the rant. I agree with you on the substance.

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