Everyone moans about privacy? Of course
Everyone moans about privacy, but…
Everyone moans about privacy, but (someone asked), would you prefer a world without Google maps, Google Search and Facebook?
“If yes you live in a miserable world and trade convenience for anonymity… I want autonomy more than anyone. But I don’t want to opt out of living”.
Another twitter user agreed, by saying “Reality is both Facebook and Google anno 2019 is more secure and Privacy safe than any alternative else before they came along. That only happened because they succeeded in building business around their products.”
Not even wrong?
Where to start?
To begin with, I find it really counterproductive to put “social networking” as it is done today in the same league as internet searches, online maps and navigation services. Maps and searches are intrinsically, extremely useful. Social networking, instead… The current generation of social networking is so toxic that lack of anonymity may be the last of its problems.
But even without those problems, I dare argue that we could have a pretty rich life, if not richer, even without continuous notifications about birthdays and pictures we couldn’t care less about. Maybe “opting out of living” is what happens when you rely too much on social networks.
More “secure and privacy safe”? Sure, with Facebook and Google, people are “more secure and privacy-safe than with everything that came before”. Except being safe from Facebook, Google, etc.
I’ve explained this so many times lately, that I’ll just stop with links to the relevant posts:
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
I do it because YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you.
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