For the past year, I’ve been immersed in the topic of Privacy. I switched to Linux, flashed my phone to LineageOS, changed all my software to one that respects privacy, switched my family and most* friends to Signal, started hating megacorporations and pretty much every government in the world, asked a lot of questions on tiddeR and here. Everything makes sense to me now. I’m a privacy guru🥹. How to move on? What’s the next step? 😁
P.S. if you’re just at the beginning of your journey, I don’t think you’ll find a better resource than PrivacyGuides. Highly recommend it!
Imagine privacy online was like these glass doors that turn opaque once you turn the lock, so Facebook stops tracking you everywhere when they detect that you are currently taking a shit (they probably already know when you do)
If they would stop tracking at least in this case, it would be already much better. Instead of a toilet there would be a request not to track. But unfortunately in our dystopia this is not foreseen at all, so we continue the resistance 🙂
Really, I would want a web 10.0 that enforces anonymity, privacy and good UX by design by restricting what features “web” developers can use to a minimum nescessary set. And ideally it would all be P2P or at least some form of decentralized. Like if Tor, I2P, Zeronet and the Fediverse had a baby.
You could do 99% of all the things you might want to do on it as a user on a daily basis. You could have a search engine, a wikipedia, a facebook, a reddit, a youtube, etc and whatever else people use the internet for 99% of the time, but the features of this Web 10.0 are restricted to only the minimum ones to enable those sites. And the only way to be tracked is if you intentionally or unintentionally reveal your own identity.
Then you might also have hardware that exclusively only connects to this Web 10.0, ideally on a hardware level.
That would be the dream.
This is pretty hand wavy. “Yeah so all we need to do is totally change everything about the Internet top to bottom, which to this point has only ever been successful specifically because it is a technology stack built to be iterated on slowly and additively.”
Even minor additions like requiring SSL (ironically a Google effort) basically caused millions of companies headaches for weeks. That was a technology that had been around for decades that just needed to be dropped into place and if developers had been a bit more forward thinking, things would’ve just worked. Guess what actually happened.
I’m saying that would be the optimum. I never said it would be easy or actually happen.
But without the goal to aspire towards, it will never happen.
The internet will be severely limited, don’t worry. Google recently confirmed it. BUT! It will have nothing to do with privacy/anonymity/ethics. Only advertising, only surveillance, only monopolies of large corporations. Joy, happiness and fun. woohoo 🎉