Why does online privacy matter? Who cares that ad companies track you and buy and sell that behavioral data?

I don’t like that model. I find it gross it also has made all the wrong people very powerful.

Surveillance Capitalism is the engine that drives this. The

Consider small acts of privacy to be resistance against this. There is a constant battle that these companies fight very very hard to have the right to take, store, sell, and analyze every piece of information about you.

Not all companies are bad and not all tech is bad either

Importantly there are companies fighting these trends.

1. Signal
2. Proton
3. DeleteMe
4. Linux
5. Apple?

Common advice in the privacy world

There is a lot of stuff around defining your threat model, which is helpful, but I think

Just find some alternatives you want to support

Also the more people adopt federated tools the easier adoption becomes for others. I think just having these accounts, being semi active goes a long way. Most of us are online in some capacity anyway, just what happens if we do it here instead of there.

Future Posts

• Free low effort things you can do to fight surveillance capitalism and why friction matters
  • Use a privacy focused browser (or at least swap out your default search engine and use a cookie blocker add-on)
  • Do an audit of the data sharing rules on your phone
• The power of the network effect. The more people populating alternative media the easier it becomes to switch.
• maybe it is time to start blaming the users