There are many stakeholders with much to gain from the mass collection of data

Right but they need our permission because they want to hold on to power. This is what Snowden covers when he talks about cover for action w.r.t. surveillance programs. They need the anti-terror excuse. They rely on it. Where does that excuse come from? This article covers it well.

It’s not that long of a read. But I thought this was a gem worth quoting here:

One of the senators, Russ Feingold, said during the debate preceding the vote on this law [US Patriot Act]:

"There's no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country where the police were allowed to search your home at any time and for any reason, if we lived in a country where the government had the right to open your mail, listen to your phone conversations or intercept your e-mail communications... the government would probably discover and arrest more terrorists, or would-be terrorists, than in the past. But it would not be a country we would want to live in."

He was not listened to by his colleagues, and was the only senator not to vote for the PATRIOT Act

I should also mention he was a democrat (not relevant to the point, but noteworthy nonetheless).

This is not to dismiss what you’ve said. But the “unthinking masses uncritically accepting the convenience” will be under the influence of the idea that anti-terror justifies it. A forced-banking policy will acquire the 55-65% you mention under that premise. The convenience of electronic payment is just the lubrication that will demotivate resistance. In fact I suspect we already have a majority believing the anti-terror narrative both as justification and the effectiveness of it.

I was trying to recall where I read about that. Search is terrible. Took some digging but found it here:

https://mander.xyz/post/18090719

There is no public ledger for cash. There is no attack surface on the devices of yourself or the other party by which your cash transaction can be compromised. There are no electronic records to exfiltrate unless one party proactively deliberately records a transaction. And if they do, there is no non-repudiation. There is no risk that any cryptanalytic advances can later expose the whole history of all cash transactions or even a chain of cash transactions. Cash transactions leave no trace unless you do them under surveillance.

This is the thread covering it:

https://links.hackliberty.org/post/2983664

Apparently the hospital eventually agreed to the patient not using the app but demanded the patient agree to an indemnity that the hospital would not be liable if they fail to reach him quickly.

No issue there.. I cross-posted it today to the human rights community (which I did not know about at the time I wrote the post), since my question still stands.

I don’t quite recall the context I had in mind when I wrote that post 1 year ago, but Belgium (for example) has enacted a law that all suppliers must accept electronic payment. It’s not just shops or b2b situations. It all-encompassing including self-employed freelancers. Even someone who rents part of their home out must give the tenant the option to pay electronically.

Also in Belgium: employees and contractors can only accept cash payment if they happen to work in an industry where that is common. So if you’re not (e.g.) a domestic worker, receiving cash wages is generally banned. At the same time, no matter what the situation is, a cash transaction can never exceed €3k. Buying a house cannot involve 1 euro of cash, which is strictly banned from all real estate transactions.

Many water and utility companies refuse cash. So if you consider the right to housing to include a right to water and power, then those consumers are being forced to use a bank. But that’s not apparently government force.

Where is this? I think if he is in China or Europe he would already be excluded from society to some extent. But I don’t believe it would be a problem in the US (of course neglecting obscure cases like that of the Georgia attorney general).

There are so few of us without smartphones that are updated Google/Apple attached and subscribed that we should be collecting the stories of exclusion somewhere.

(edit) I take back what I said about the US. I just remembered a patient who was denied medical care in the US because he did not go to the Google Playstore to install the app of the hospital.

That link is unreachable from secure networks (tor). I can’t quite work out if you’re talking about a digital national passport, or a COVID “passport”. I suspect you mean the former.

I see no problem with border control forcing people to present a passport (or particular form thereof) if they have one. But a citizen is (or should be) absolutely entitled to enter their country, full stop. If they have no documentation at all, it would be an abuse of their rights to deny them entry on that basis. We might expect a citizen without docs to face a long inconvenient process to verify their citizenship, but it’d be a perverse injustice to deny them entry. IMO a passport should be a convenience, not a requirement.

I recall either Australia or NZ was refusing entry of their own well documented citizens if either they had COVID or were unvaccinated (I forgot which). Regardless of their COVID situation there is no good reason for denying a citizen entry. It dilutes the purpose and meaning of citizenship. Anyway, this is why I cannot be sure what passport you’re talking about.

I think the common term for “internet-izing” is #digitalTransformation. That’s the language used in the EU as they enact policy that ultimately cattle-herds people into a forced digital transformation. The quasi antithesis of that which wiser people support would be:

• right to be offline
• right to be analog
• right to unplug

I kind of favor right to be analog because it also somewhat implies a right to cash and to be unbanked.

Indeed in Netherlands I already encountered an e-receipt-only fiasco at a cafe. They forced me to order and pay by app as a cloud order (no cash.. no paper menu either). I had a degoogled phone so I could not do Playstore and their captive portal did not work on my phone anyway. So a staff member had to lend me their phone just to be able to order. Then the order was trapped in their account. The receipt becomes more important when paying by card so I can check it against the bank statement later. They had no printer. Only e-receipts. And their app could not handle entering another email address than what the staff member already entered for their own account -- assuming I were even willing to give them a (disposable) address as I oppose feeding Google on general principle and their email provider was Google. They could not handle pulling out a notebook and writing out a receipt.

Throughout the whole fiasco the staff must have been wondering “what’s wrong with this person? How can someone be walking around in public without a recent smartphone and all the Google services?” Probably wondered if I was part of an organised crime gang.

I’m also excluded from my public library’s Wi-Fi for not carrying a subscribed SMS-capable phone to get past the captive portal. So WTF, to get wi-fi service (financed with public money) you must already be equipped with tools that are generally redundant with wi-fi to begin with. They seem to be excluding the people who would need wi-fi the most from wi-fi service.

Not sure what your point is. Monero is far more traceable than cash. Any self-respecting privacy advocate would fight against the war on cash first and foremost. Anything else is less important to fight for because it’s less private. When cash is gone, gold coins will probably be more private than Monero.

If you try bringing 100k in cash to buy a car/house, there is a good chance it’ll get seized by police.

In the US debtors are /entitled/ to pay their debts using legal tender, and mortgages are not excluded AFAIK. In the UK, you can legally pay your mortgage with legal tender.

if you use a cell phone they know what store you went into. That can be combined with other metadata to know exactly what you’re doing. Carrying cash does not fix this.

You need not carry a mobile phone. I don’t. Cash is part of that equation. If I walk into an unsurveilled shop with cash, no phone, and no loyalty card to buy liquor, how does that get pinned on me?

It could become criminal in the future to not carry a smartphone (with the direction things are going in), but that’s not yet the case in most of the world.

mander.xyz has this:

mandermybrewn3sll4kptj2ubeyuiujz6felbaanzj3ympcrlykfs2id.onion

but it’s a disaster. Data loss. Posts go into a black hole. Use it on a read-only basis.

It’s a decent approach but incomplete. Couple problems:

• Lemmy would not host youtube videos. YT transcripts could (and should) be part of the post, but then there is the same problem as the next bullet:
• w.r.t text content, some people (very few people) indeed copy the content. It’s failing because people are lazy. Too lazy to check whether the link is in a walled garden; too lazy to warn people of the walled garden; also too lazy to copy the text. Sometimes it’s more naivety than lazy, but same problem: you are relying on the masses to make individual decisions that are wise, inclusive, and higher effort.

A good system is designed with the assumption that users are lazy. As such, Lemmy is poorly designed.

1 lazy author can inconvenience thousands of readers. Lammy’s design fails to address that.

My point still stands.

Of course it doesn’t. Your point doesn’t even grasp the problem. You think the problem is that fedi users have (or have not) entitlement to content. It’s a red herring. You cannot begin to solve a problem you do not understand. It does not matter who is “entitled” to the content. The content is exclusive; locked inside a walled-garden with a gatekeeper. The problem is that exclusive access content is being linked on an open content platform and shoved in the face of readers who do not have access to the closed content.

The moment you are using someone else’s platform

Again, you still fail to grasp the problem. Using someone else’s platform is not a premise. You can either be on someone else’s node or you can be on your own self-hosted node. Either way, exclusive links are in the reader’s face.

How can you get so many things wrong.. then you claim using one platform inherently revokes rights outside that platform -- of course not. Irrelevant regardless, but rights granted on one platform do not diminish rights on another.

you loose the rights to the content outside of that platform.

It’s not about “rights”. That’s a legal matter. It’s about digital inclusion (a technical matter). People don’t want to see links that exclude them. It’s just pollution.

To reach the particular law office which has become a specialist in this particular case, yes you are trapped because they use MS Outlook. There is no way to exchange email with them without involving MS.

Victims can use any lawyer, but any other lawyer will need to research the case (at the victim’s cost).

You’ve misunderstood the problem. It’s not a fix to access content that’s needed. The question is how to fix the pollution: exclusive walled-garden links appearing outside of the walled garden (where not everyone has access or is part of the special club of Google/Facebook/Cloudflare patrons). How did you misunderstand when I mentioned a toggle? And the title... how could I make the title more clear?

But at some point to interact with any kind of large company .. You could also consider not interacting with large companies at all

Actually the large corps are more likely to hold the data in-house. Small companies cling to outsourcing. E.g. credit unions are the worst.. outsource every service they offer to the same giant suppliers. Everyone thinks only a small company has the data (and consequently that the small dataset does not appeal to cyber criminals) but it’s actually worse because they outsource jobs even as small as printing bank statements to the same few giants most other credit unions use. Then they do the same for bill pay with another company. It’s getting hard to find a credit union that does not put Cloudflare in the loop. So in the end a dozen or so big corps have your data and it’s not even disclosed in the privacy statement.

Of course it depends on the nature of the business. A large grocery chain is more likely to make sure your offline store purchase history reaches Amazon and Google than a mom & pop grocer who doesn’t even have a loyalty program.

Whether businesses get copies of information is usually included in a site’s privacy policy,

I have never seen a privacy policy that lists partners and recipients apart from Paypal, who lists the 600+ corps they share data with for some reason. Apart from bizarre exceptions privacy policies are always too vague to be useful. Even in the GDPR region. If you read them you can often find text that does not even make sense for their business because they just copied someone else’s sufficiently vague policy to use as a template.

If you really want to limit your information exposure, you either have to audit everyone you do business with this way (because most large companies do this) or hire someone (or a service) to do it.

The breach happened in a country where companies are not required to respond to audits. No company wants any avg joe’s business badly enough to answer questions about data practices. In the EU, sure, data controllers are obligated to disclose the list of parties they share with (on request, not automatically). And even then, some still refuse. Then you file an article 77 complaint with the DPA where it just sits for years with no enforcement action.

My approach is a combination of avoiding business entirely, or supplying fake info, or less sensitive info (mailing address instead of residential, mission-specific email, phone number that just goes to a v/m or fax). This is where the battle needs to be fought -- at data collection time. Countless banks needlessly demand residential address. That should be rejected by consumers. Data minimization is key.

In the case at hand, I’m leaning toward opting out of the class action lawsuit and suing them directly in small claims court. I can usually get better compensation that way.

Self hosting would mean I could control account creation and make many burner accounts. But there are issues with that:

• If there are several burner accounts then the admin would have to make it easy for others to create burner accounts or else it would be evident that all the burner accounts are just the admin’s, which does not solve the aggregation problem. It introduces complexities because the DNS provider and ISP would have the identity of the self-hoster. One could onion host but that greatly narrows the audience.
• It does not solve the problem for others. Everyone who has the same need would then be needlessly forced to independently solve all these same problems.
• I do not have high-speed unlimited internet, so I would have to spend more on subscription costs.

I think it complicates the problem and then each author has to deal with the same. If it’s solved at the fedi API level, then the existing infrastructure is ready to work.

(edit) I recall hearing about a fedi client application that operates in a serverless way. I don’t recall the name of it and know little about how it works, but it is claimed to not depend on account creation on a server and it somehow has some immunity to federation politics. Maybe that thing could work but I would have to find it again. It’s never talked about and I wonder why that is.. maybe it does not work as advertised.

Those do not obviate the use cases I have in mind. Secure drops are useful tools for specific whistle blowing scenarios. But they are not a one-size-fits-all tool.

I routinely use framadrop and then transmit the links to regulators or whoever I am targeting to act on a report. But what if the target audience is not a specific journalist or regulator but rather the entire general public? The general public does not have access to reports submitted to the Guardian’s dropbox or NYTimes’ dropbox. Those are exclusive channels of communication just for their own journalists. The report then only gets acted on or exposed if the story can compete with the sensationalisation level of other stories they are handling. If I’m exposing privacy abuses, the general public does not give a shit about privacy for the most part. So only highly scandelous privacy offenses can meet the profitable publication standards of Guardian and nytimes. The reports also cannot be so intense as to be on par with Wikileaks. There is a limited intensity range.

The fedi offers some unique reach to special interest groups like this one without the intensity range limitation.

NYtimes is also a paywall. So even if the story gets published it still ends up a place of reduced access.

They are great tools for some specific jobs but cannot wholly replace direct anonymous publication. Though I must admit I often overlook going to journalists. I should use those drop boxes more often.

(edit) from the guardian page:

Once you launch the Tor browser, copy and paste the URL xp44cagis447k3lpb4wwhcqukix6cgqokbuys24vmxmbzmaq2gjvc2yd.onion or theguardian.securedrop.tor.onion into the Tor address bar.

That theguardian.securedrop.tor.onion URL caught my attention. I did not know about onion names until now. Shame it’s only for secure drops.