On 05/08/2014 09:31 PM, Anthony Papillion wrote:
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On 05/08/2014 08:23 PM, Doug Schuler wrote:
Realistically we need to develop an entire suite of publicly owned
tools. Could the development and implementation be massively
distributed?
Or is it over? We lost all the other media....
"In just a few short years, starting in 1998, this company has
grown to employ almost 50,000 people worldwide, generated sixty
billion dollars in revenue last year, and has a current market
capitalization of more than 350 billion dollars. Google is not only
the biggest search engine in the world, but along with Youtube (the
second biggest search engine in the world) it also has the largest
video platform, with Chrome the biggest browser, with Gmail the
most widely used e-mail provider, and with Android the biggest
operating system for mobile devices." From: An open letter to
Eric Schmidt: Why we fear Google
I fear we've already lost. I used to think that it would just take
some sort of major scandal to wake people up to the fact that
relinquishing their privacy wasn't such a good idea. Then, I thought,
they'd stand up in outrage and take their privacy back with
pitchforks.
You could only say such a thing if you completely ignore entire
categories of software development like documentation and
usability-improvements to the same extent that companies like Google and
Apple embrace them.
Then Snowden showed up and nothing really happened. Most
people didn't actually change the things they do because, well, it's
not convenient.
Not only is it not convenient, it is dangerous. How is the
non-technical user supposed to judge whether the implementation of a
piece of privacy-preserving software lives up to its claims? Especially
if technical users like yourself have given up? [if I weren't lazy, I'd
have links here to stories about that silly app that claimed to erase
the pictures "permanently" after the recipient viewed them for a couple
of seconds].
Anyway, convenience vs. privacy is a false dichotomy. For certain
designs like Tor, that dichotomy would be self-defeating: the more
convenient it is to run the Tor Browser Bundle, the larger and more
diverse the potential userbase can be. That's a good thing for both
convenience and privacy. User-facing tools _must_ possess both to be
at all effective.
So if you aren't truly self-defeated yet, please do find a non-technical
user that fits your apparent bias and use your expertise to teach them
to use Tor to read the web. Perhaps like me you'll find you've revealed
a coping strategy and replaced it in the user's repertoire with a
privacy-preserving tool.
I see a future where the world, not just the digital world, is divided
into two camps: those who are technically literate and willing to take
the sometimes inconvenient steps to protect their privacy and those
who aren't. The first group will be in the minority but will enjoy
privacy and anonymity while the second group will be pretty much at
the mercy of whoever can figure out how to access their data.
If you think of yourself in the former camp then you _really_ ought to
be out there teaching people to use Tor. In a surveillance state a tiny
minority of anonymous literati are anything but anonymous (and,
therefore, probably not literate either).
-Jonathan
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