Techlore Talks Ideas Thread

Techlore
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Making a thread to collect any ideas we have on what Techlore can talk about for Techlore Talks. Figued this would help to gather those while keeping them out of the threads for the individual episodes.

Here are some ideas from me:

  1. How evil do you think big tech actually is? Put another way, what are the incentives that can guide a company to on one end be privacy invasive and in other ways be very good for privacy and security?
  2. How do friends and family members feel about your interest in digital privacy?
  3. The difference between something being insecure and something being secure enough, though maybe not the best. Comes up often for Firefox and Linux
  4. Talk about the state of Linux security and what can be improved (this is the scariest one, I know lol)
  5. What are some privacy products you’re excited about from a feature perspective?
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Uhh…Money maybe?

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Have they talked about the stare of private mobile hardware as a whole? With Henry not getting his phone and everything

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It’s not just companies being privacy invasive, but those same companies also doing things that help or enable good privacy and security. For example, Google offers Gmail, and it’s privacy invasive because they would scan your email in order to advertise to you. But they also have a good reputation for security so you can be pretty sure that no one except you and Google have access to your account. Android and Chromium are other examples. I don’t think that neither had to be based on open source projects in order to see the success that they do, and yet Google voluntarily chose to make those start as open source projects, and that has enabled GrapheneOS and Brave respectively.

If you couldn’t tell already, I’m trying to hint at the idea that these big tech companies are not inherently evil and run by demons. I’m asking for a conversation about imagining these companies more complexly.

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Big tech would provide security and privacy if and only they could continue making money providing the feature.

For example Google added optional encryption in Email because they can do the advertising without reading your messages. Same goes for enhanced security in Android and Chrome. At the same time Google doesn’t push Hardware Attestation API for Banking apps and instead pushes their own propietary Play Services SafetyNet even if that extra dependence on Play Service isn’t needed and would mean more security for end users if they used Hardware Attestation, because that would be bad for buisness. There are many other examples where Google compromises security for making money.