this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
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Firstly, I'm not against privacy or anything, just ignorant. I do try to stay pretty private despite that.

I wanted to know what type of info (Corporations? Governments? Websites??) Typically get from you and how they use it and how that affects me.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago

The contrapositive of the statement "I don't need privacy if I have nothing to hide" is "I have something to hide, if I need privacy".

I said neither. I said that the marginalized have relevant threat models and, at least in the state they are currently in, cis white techbros generally do not and treat privacy as a hobby, failing to develop realistic threat models. This doesn't translate into either of those sentiments.

This puts those marginalized groups you mentioned in a position where simply by using a privacy tool or technique, they draw suspicion to themselves.

That really depends on the specifics of the technique and if your threat model is the entities that could draw those conclusions, namely a government, they will tend to do that regardless. For those threat models you should really be shedding digital communication entirely and making a plan to leave.

But sure, something like having a ton of boring and diverse traffic in a VPN is useful for making them a privacy tool at all.

It might immediately raise subconscious alarms in internet communities like facebook, where the expectation is that you use your real name.

Alarms among who and what are the threats? This means nothing without a threat model.

The only way privacy measures work for anyone, is if they're implemented for everyone.

This is simply false. For example, not everyone needs to meet in-person just for that to be an option for staying private. So long as you have a means to avoid leaking certain information to certain people, you can meet the needs of a threat model.

Further, I'd like to challenge the concept that a cis white tech bro has nothing to hide.

Not what I said.

I think a good way to be considerate of privacy is to think in terms of identities, what those identities are for, and what links those identities.

The only meaningful way to think about it is in terms of threat models. Identities are an aspect of engaging in certain online activities, they only have meaning relative to a threat model. I agree that it is a good idea to keep employers out of your political activity by not tying them together but that is because we live under capitalism where your employer can remove your means to provide for itself whenever it wants. The threat model is ubiquitous, just differing slightly in its form (delays, the need for lawyers, etc). There are of course more threat models re: political activity.

The risk of not considering threat models and instead adopting broad brush practices is that you can fail to adequately weigh threats or get a false sense of security.