I agree. Philosophically, politically and financially (in terms of groups I donate to).
But it's too late. The frame shift is too great for most people. Getting people to care about this let alone vote in a manner that would cause actual change is so far out I have a better chance of winning the lottery.
I don't know what to do other than to support and educate where I can.
I've seen first hand just how little the average person cares about privacy. The type of people who believe they have nothing to hide. My friends and family don't understand why I don't post everything to social media. No I'm not going to install this app and scan all my receipts. BuT wHy?!?!?!
I think many people here on hackernews live in a bubble and just don't understand what is an average human being. They surround themselves with like-minded tech savvy individuals and fail to comprehend how there isn't stronger support for privacy.
> I think many people here on hackernews live in a bubble and just don't understand what is an average human being.
Plenty of us understand, but it's depressing and usually trying to explain to others that have a rosier view of how people will react feels a lot like trying to get the people themselves to care, which is to say it's hard, thankless, and depressing, so few people bother.
You don’t want to be responsible for some random receipt 10 years ago that allegedly commits tax fraud, allow influencers to manipulate you into buying things or supporting campaigns that you immediately regret 1 minute later, receive lots of spams in your email and social accounts, etc, and the stakes get higher as you climb up the social ladder. Many of these don’t matter for people with little stakes as they have nothing to lose.
My experience is that people not only do not care about privacy but look at people who care about privacy as having something to hide or paranoid about something that simply doesn't matter.
Private mode has very little impact on what you share with the world/through the network. It's there to keep your browsing private from people you live with etc., not from anyone else.
Disagree with the latter part. You're also not going to have a large effect on those people, but that doesn't mean you should give up on what you believe just because other people can't even bother with it. I stick to my preferences of not using corporate stuff very much. If somebody wonders why and asks, I'll explain. Whether they then decide to do anything about the answer, I don't really care. If they do, then good for them.
What's the alternative anyway? Give up and suck Google's tit every day? It's "fine" if people who don't have the background to understand this issue do so. But if you, having the background and belief to object to such corporate control still choose to look away and do so, then you have willingly demoted yourself to a pathetic Google tit sucker.
I personally care very much about my privacy, but people are people, and most people only care about what directly and immediately affects them. That's the problem with privacy concerns, the negative effects aresubtle and gradual. It's very hard to make people care for that reason.
It's the same reason why it's taken decades to take serious action against climate change. It's only in recent years with extreme weather events and record breaking temperatures that people are finally starting to care because they're finally experiencing the negative effects of climate change. But only to a certain extent, you're still not going to see many people trading in their vehicles for ebikes anytime soon.
> I think many people here on hackernews live in a bubble
and create apps to scan all your receipts, your retinas and then track your movements and sell the data to the highest and the lowest bidder in exchange for a slightly newer Maserati.
But the Impossible Burger did more than talking ever did
Government tried antitrust for decades w telcos
But the costs of long distance calls dropped to practically zero when open VoIP protocols came out
The Web disrupted AOL, MSN, CompuServe, TV, Newspapers, Magazines etc.
Wikipedia disrupted Britannica and Encarta
The answer: open source must get good enough that people can switch from big tech corporation-controlled solutions and then they will be in control of their own software !! :)
And if you want to be noticed on the web, you have to go through Google. If you want to sell anything you either have to go through Facebook or Amazon.
The web is “open”. But Google and to a lesser extent Apple control the browsers to access it and they can control the platforms.
You do not have to. But, there is a considerable cost to shying away from the dominant actors. Adding on top of the existing difficulties... But it probably can be done. It would be very interesting, especially in HN community, to build some entrepreneurial practice around "succeeding without surveillance capitalists organizations". As a parallel to the "succeeding without venture capital" practices that already have been building up (bootstrapping, tiny teams) the last years. We can be the frontrunners.
And how will your alternative get users without advertising? Where are you going to advertise if not Google and Facebook?
Ben Thompson talks about “Aggregation theory” all of the time. The companies that have the power have that power because that’s where the users are.
How do you compete with “free with advertising”?
We talk about how the web killed TV networks. But streaming services are making deals with cable companies to bundle their ad supported tier with regular TV and with their internet only packages. Oh and the largest cable company owns NBC.
When “cord cutters” get rid of pay TV and use YouTube TV where most of the money still goes back to the same providers - how is this any different?
Possibly via organic, physical, viral and direct marketing techniques.
I would never try to compete with free. Probably not anything B2C at all, if I were to have avoid the surveillance capitalists as a constraint.
But the products we're talking about "paying" for here are continually dropping in price - email, media sharing, social networking, etc.
A basic cloud host that can take care of a whole family can be had for $5/mo. Perhaps that's still too much for your exemplar poor to spend on a hope. But the amount extracted by the surveillance industry is always increasing, and eventually that levee will break.
I'd say there are much bigger impediments - needing to invest time for setup, needing trust a given solution won't turn out to be a lemon or even backfire, and lack of straightforward packageable solutions to many of the technical problems.
It's not the cloud cost that is stopping people from doing this. It is the installation and administration cost. That requires time and expertise that most either don't have or are not willing to spend.
"Poor" on its own generally refers to monetary cost, which is what I responding to.
I agree with you. Time poor is a definite problem, even (or especially) among people that aren't money poor, and it comes with its own Vimes's Boots analogy. For example, the many articles we read here about the centralized service of the week creating some kind of problem for their users, which could have been dodged with a little outlay of time to make better tech choices in the first place.
Poor, as I intended it, was meant to encompass many things. Working poor people have less money, but they also often have less free time because they have less money. If you have plenty of money you can shop around for jobs that fit your schedule better, or if your job allows for it take time off, or outsource some work you would have to do yourselves (housecleaning, maintenance, landscaping, child care when you're unavailable, cooking, etc). Additionally, if you're in a family, there's a higher chance that both parents will need to work full time, meaning there's less free time for all those things mentioned above, which if one parent worked part time or not at all could allow for a lot of those things to be done while one is working, leading to more free time in the evening for both.
Given that, who's more likely to look into free alternatives to apparently free services online? The middle-class person with a spouse that works part time and takes care of many of the chores and that pays for a handyman or contractor or repair man to fix appliances and household problems or the poor person that works full time, their spouse works full time, and when they're done working they're busy doing the chores that life requires because paying someone else is not feasible for them?
It feels like you're stretching to fit this into some memetic narrative of "poor" when most people are time poor until you get to the upper class. While middle class people are more likely to pay for things that need skilled repair (due to knowing fewer people who can do such work informally), they're not paying for things they can do themselves like housecleaning, landscaping, etc - paying someone else for ongoing large chunks of time is an indicator of being an upper class.
The point isn't to discount anyone's struggle, but rather to look at the actual mechanisms that hinder adoption of libre software. And apart from some relatively affordable table stakes, I don't think the financial cost is really one of those. The attention cost of self-actualizing and the ambiguity of using a non-advertised solution are though.
> While middle class people are more likely to pay for things that need skilled repair (due to knowing fewer people who can do such work informally), they're not paying for things they can do themselves like housecleaning, landscaping, etc
It's not that they're paying for all of them, but that they have the option of paying for them and I would hazard that a good portion of middle class families with both parents fully employed opt for offloading at least some of that some of the time if they live in a portion of the country where middle class means you actually have disposable income. E.g. many people pay for larger landscaping projects, or hire a handyman to do cleanup around the outside of the house or even might have a maid come in once a month. This might be less common now that the middle class has eroded to some degree, but I think that's a problem of a shrinking middle class, not of those being things the middle class doesn't do.
> And apart from some relatively affordable table stakes, I don't think the financial cost is really one of those.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Having spare hardware to run something, a stable place to put it, and paying the power for it (a minor but increasing cost) all play a part.
> The attention cost of self-actualizing and the ambiguity of using a non-advertised solution are though.
I agree, and I think the working poor have less attention to spare because of less free time, but also that they generally have more and larger worries that make this problem seem insignificant by comparison. If your major worried are making rent, having enough money for food, repairing your car so you can effectively get to work and take kids to school, spend quality time with your family, and set up a solution so that your privacy is protected from companies that want to monetize you, which one will get the least attention? Middle class families probably have at least one less of those concerns, and every major concern that's more important than using free software to avoid a small but persistent exploitation is something that competes for attention.
I still don't understand why you're trying to shoehorn this into a narrative about being poor. To me it just comes across as a dismissal of the overall concern.
Sure, all of those dynamics may be slightly harsher if you're financially poor. But it's not like once someone reaches "not poor", time for self-actualization abounds. And from the other perspective, it's not like libre software is not taking off merely because the lack of adoption by poorer people. So what is your actual point from tying the topics together?
> I still don't understand why you're trying to shoehorn this into a narrative about being poor
Well, part of it was that a sibling reply[1] was already present, and the idea that "oh, we can all just run our own AI models at home" seemed ludicrously costly in both money, and time to me. It's not that I was trying to shoehorn it in as much as juxtapose it against what was already being stated.
> But it's not like once someone reaches "not poor", time for self-actualization abounds.
I have no idea why you you are interpreting the inverse of my statement that being poor makes this harder to mean that not being poor makes it easy or trivial, which is how it appears to me you're interpreting my statements.
Privacy is hard in the current climate. It takes time and effort or money to alleviate some of the privacy concerns, to different degrees depending on the specific concern. Those are all things the working poor have less of than other economic groups, so solutions that require them will likely be less used by them. That doesn't mean don't offer them, but we should keep that in mind when advocating for people switching to open source solutions, so we make sure the solutions actually solve the needs of the people intended to use them, and not just the needs of a subset of those people.
It would be a real shame if what I think is one of if not the best option for solving this problem in an egalitarian way failed to take into account the needs of that economic group and we actaully ended up with a solution that many are protected by, but disproportionally not the poor for multiple reasons. A world where 90% of people out of poverty are protected in some manner but only 50% of people in poverty are isn't necessarily better IMO, and may actually be much worse, since I'm not sure there will be much incentive to fix it at that point.
No, I wasn't very clear in my initial comment (and wasn't really going this deep), I just wanted people to consider that running your own LLM for your own needs isn't really feasible for most people and in a more general way than a reply to that person specifically might have communicated, and I was slightly inebriated when I wrote it, so didn't think it warranted much explanation.
The only reason that privacy issues exist online in the first place is the advertising business. The advertising business increases the costs of everything. So, enjoy your "free youtube videos" that contain advertisements for which you pay through the products you buy and are advertised. Privacy being "rich people's game" is BS because essentially everybody pays for the advertising costs in a rather horizontal fashion.
If it were just about targeted advertising offsetting the platform costs, I’d be fine with it. What torques me off is that my digital footprint is being sold to anyone and everyone with two nickels to rub together.
tracking for advertising can also be seen as a stop-gap measure against surveillance because the financial incentive for quantity corrupts the quality of the data
Having to choose between those things and privacy is definitely a money issue! It is not surprising that privacy looses in that case - it is opening up another huge can of worries. Entertainment is a source of relaxation, de-stressing as well as social connection (notice how much people talk about and group around the topics you mention).
Having to choose between what is actually good for you and what is “relaxing” and then deciding to divert all available funds to “relaxation” is not a money issue.
I think privacy is very important. But a social network is definitely more so! And many have that via sports, for example. And if someone thinks it best to spend money on Netflix over Fastmail, I definitely am not gonna shame them and say "that is not good for you"! Especially not if they are poor.
> But the Impossible Burger did more than talking ever did
TBH, nah, I don't believe the impossible burger has really done anything truly notable, as far as vegan causes go.
Now, if you were to end beef subsidies leading to something like 25% of beef farms changing over to a more vegan friendly or environmentally friendly alternative uses, or developed protein alternatives that reduced food costs for the average person, then yeah.
Impossible Burger isn't a bad product, but as far as the big picture goes, it's a slightly tastier virtue signal than black bean burgers.
> it's too late. The frame shift is too great for most people
The capacity for the current crop of privacy advocates to make a cogent case it lacking. Peoples’ capacity to recognise and rearrange themselves in defence of a novel threat is not. If anything, our present malaise is one of allergic reactions to phantom threats.
is it such a problem if people dont care? its not like they arent aware.
i mean its not too complicated to get to a desired privacy standard for the most part so it seems like the privacy conscious in general get angry for other people, who dont even care.
its because of those people that we can even use these products for free. i mean they arent making ad revenue off of us....
I think people do care, but are either not empowered or really know how/why it happens .
Many times, I’ll discuss the issue with less tech literate people and when they learn all the spying that’s going on, they feel really bothered by it, but not empowered enough to do anything about.
IMO it’s a bit like organic, unprocessed and local food. My personal experience is that I only started caring about it after really learning about agriculture.
But it's too late. The frame shift is too great for most people. Getting people to care about this let alone vote in a manner that would cause actual change is so far out I have a better chance of winning the lottery.
I don't know what to do other than to support and educate where I can.
I do hope I'm wrong.