I haven’t been around these communities in a while, so I can’t really speak for /c/privacy as much as /r/privacy and other communities, but I’ve noticed far far far far too many posts which are blindly perfectionist, with no consideration of threat capabilities or their motivations. Privacy is futile without a realistic threat model, that’s how you get burned out solving non-problems and neglecting actual problems.
My threat model is largely just minimizing surveillance capitalism and avoiding basement-dweller neo-nazi stalkers from connecting any dots between my online personas and real life identity. Even for that, my measures are a bit excessive, but not to the point where I’m wasting much time or effort.
Daily reminder: “more private” and “more secure” are red flags. If you see or say these, without a very specific context, it’s the wrong attitude towards privacy and security. They’re not linear scales, they’re complex concepts. That’s why Tor Browser is excellent for my anonymity situation but atrociously insecure to anyone who is being personally targeted by malware (tl;dr monoculture ESR Firefox[1]). That’s why Graphene is not automatically anti-privacy simply because it runs on a Google Pixel and Android-based OS. (Google is one of my main adversaries.) And I think this simplistic ‘broscience’ style of “[x] is better than [y], [z] is bad” discourse is harmful and leads people into ineffective approaches.
I haven’t been around these communities in a while, so I can’t really speak for /c/privacy as much as /r/privacy and other communities, but I’ve noticed far far far far too many posts which are blindly perfectionist, with no consideration of threat capabilities or their motivations. Privacy is futile without a realistic threat model, that’s how you get burned out solving non-problems and neglecting actual problems.
My threat model is largely just minimizing surveillance capitalism and avoiding basement-dweller neo-nazi stalkers from connecting any dots between my online personas and real life identity. Even for that, my measures are a bit excessive, but not to the point where I’m wasting much time or effort.
Daily reminder: “more private” and “more secure” are red flags. If you see or say these, without a very specific context, it’s the wrong attitude towards privacy and security. They’re not linear scales, they’re complex concepts. That’s why Tor Browser is excellent for my anonymity situation but atrociously insecure to anyone who is being personally targeted by malware (tl;dr monoculture ESR Firefox[1]). That’s why Graphene is not automatically anti-privacy simply because it runs on a Google Pixel and Android-based OS. (Google is one of my main adversaries.) And I think this simplistic ‘broscience’ style of “[x] is better than [y], [z] is bad” discourse is harmful and leads people into ineffective approaches.