• 0 Posts
  • 6 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle
  • I’ve come to realize most of the privacy hawk arguments are based on imagined risks, and the average privacy enthusiast is an ideologically driven idealist. What is the end goal beyond pumping one’s ego?

    Especially internet privacy hawks are the worst. It just doesn’t really matter at all. Unless you are all cash, off the grid, no phone or bank account etc, you will leave a huge trail. Instagram figuring out I like basketball is the least of my worries.




  • I’ve kind of come full circle on all this to where I no longer care. The slippery slope arguments are largely hypothetical imo…Google knows some stuff about me and attempts to show me ads, the vast majority of which I block, so what?

    I pay taxes, have a social security number, my bank and credit card companies know my purchase history, the credit bureaus know my mortgage payment and lender, etc…

    The myth of an off the grid life is exactly that, a myth. And what does it achieve for you other than some vague sense of idealistic pride?

    Google provides tremendous utility to the world essentially for free; its search engine, maps, mail client apps, browser, etc. are tools billions of people use every day. How do they maintain a global network of data centers and localize their products to hundreds of languages…none of that is free. If big companies want to give them money in an attempt at to get me to pay attention to them then so be it, let them finance it. Imagine if only those who could afford to pay could use these tools.


  • Not specific to work but this is a topic I’m interested in. It’s not a great solution, but iCloud has a legacy contact feature, and I back up all my important stuff there for availability to my heirs should something happen unexpectedly. Almost my entire family is Mac (or at least iOS / iPhone) so this works for us.

    Longer term I’d like something more comprehensive. For example I don’t have records or media to share in terms of music or reading habits to pass down…I’d be open to having my Spotify likes passed down for example.

    Anyway, for apps I imagine a similar thing could work, if you had a local environment snapshot you could pass on. But it’s tough as in 30yrs for example you might not even have hardware that could run the software of today. My buddy does digital archival stuff and this is a big part of his work, preserving the associated systems beyond just the code.