so i love poetry and got into this scene/genre in 2010ish called alt lit. i was also a huge google fan at the time.
well the news comes out that this well established author gets his entire life’s work taken, or rather, frozen, because google said the project he was working on had too much graphic content and locked him out of his google account.
there was enough outcry from fans that google did eventually let the guy back into his drive. and he probably had an external drive ready, i hope at least lol
anyway, having dreams of being a writer, and also being an idiot that saved everything in google drive, i realized i couldn’t actually trust them. and then i learned about the tracking and everything else and was like, oh heck naw can’t trust these fools for crap. so i started looking at the alternatives. and backing up to thumb drives.
Mine is really boring. I don’t even remember how, but I stumbled onto a subreddit with one of Henry’s videos on it. I fell into the rabbit hole and pulled an all-nighter searching stuff up and watching privacy videos.
Getting into privacy because of convenience is a first for me
it is indeed spooky how deeply trackers are embedded into our everyday things
congrats on your journey, I am slowly but surely getting away from social medias one account at a time.
that’s amazing, the young gen really needs to have more awareness about this!
wow talk about threat modeling
trying to buy and sell crypto underage without my parents knowing. So i couldn’t do any KYC and after watching few videos about that i fell in to privacy rabbit hole.
When I was young my father told me about Snowden and he often questions everything related to data collection etc., so I sort of “copied” it from him when I was young.
Then some day when traveling to my grandmother there was an article about Snowden recommending GrapheneOS in the newspaper (first time I head of GrapheneOS) and luckily my device was an Google Pixel, so I tried it and then I really got deep into Privacy & Security.
Also as @alexxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx mentioned, I also wanted to get crypto when I was underage and that got me into a lot of KYC-free services and so on…
I started cleaning up my digital life almost 3 years ago after an unauthorized person had gained access to my Spotify and Netflix account. And not only that, my credit card was also misused.
When I also saw that advertising was directed at me on my social media accounts after I had done extensive searches for a product, I realized quite clearly that I need to sit down and start changing my digital life, and start to “safeguard” my privacy in a different way than I had done previously.
I also care about freedom, democracy and freedom of speech, and what we do online or on our mobile is a private matter, but unfortunately, the reality is not like that sadly.
The Social Dilemma is great, more people need to watch it, even if it is a little gloomy.
For me, I’ve always strived for digital minimalism, I don’t like overusing technology (especially when it comes to making my home more “smart”) or running anything I don’t need.
Privacy has always tied really well with digital minimalism, which is great. It’s convenient to learn both.
Now I don’t really know what got me started on privacy. It was probably when I switched to linux (due wind*ws giving me a lot of problems) and then I started to look at the FOSS comunity.
I started to go against companies and propietary glow in the dark stuff. I was a bit cultist then.
Almost a year ago I got initialized on security by a random on a matrix room.
And now I’m here trying to run QubesOS with 8GB of RAM.
I don’t remember exactly, but it started a lot in 2019/2020, now I’m almost using mic removed phones x)
I think it changed a lot when I tried different emails providers probably after some videos, same for password after Bitwarden video I guess (I known Dashlane months or years before, but never used)
How’s Qubes working for you with 8GB of RAM.
Just curious because I was thinking of trying it out on an old computer that only has 8GB also but thought it might be too annoying to bother.
Please don’t. It’s really laggy when you open anything past ~2 AppVMs.(8 Gigs)
I agree! best way to not share data is not to have data in the first place.
that’s cool
How?
Well you can adjust RAM assignations, change the template VMs, use WM instead of a full DE…
Heck, even installing OpenBSD as a net-vm.
But it takes a lot of effort and even with that you have a terrible UX (wich is to be expected). Also, forget about gaming, this one hurt me a little.
I do not recommend trying to daily drive it with those specs. But if you really want to try to see what it is and how it works go and do so.
I used to work at one of the big tech companies that collect massive amounts of data. One day, I got access to a tool that could show you the profile they had built on you. It was honestly scary accurate, I could not believe it. From there on I started to implement privacy aware habits.
Richard Stallman talks about privacy and freedom. Luke Smith Videos also helped me gain clarity on the world situation. Mental Outlaw Techlore and other privacy youtubers helped me here.
Very cool you found your way into privacy world. But would you mind finding a substitute for Luke Smith as he is a bit of well…see the below post-
Here we go again…
You guys are going to make Henry have to take a break from not combing his hair again to break this up!
(I love you Henry!)
On you yourself or somebody else?
What kind of details was there?
The information I saw was mine because I didn’t have a business purpose to lookup other people. But coworkers that developed new features for the tool could easily justify randomly cherry picking people for the purpose of testing or improving the tool.
9/11 and the crap against the people were the last straw for me. It was increasingly obvious the government would get more and more authoritarian and that technology would empower massive surveillance and thus control. Unless we push back hard and especially by using technology in new ways that are much more private and under our control. Don’t know if we can win but I know it is important to try. Plus I knew a bunch of the cypher-punk crowd back in the day. 9/11 brought home how right they were.