Poor JRR did not realize we would eventually have them for real.

And poor George did not realize we’d take 1984 as a blueprint rather than a warning.

Maybe it’s for the best, that they both died before they had to see.

whilst considering on abolishing cash altogether

No personal exp with this, but I have a vague idea that the Nordic countries, or maybe Singapore etc are further down the cashless road than we North American peeps are. Though they may also have better protections in some ways.

I do want to preserve cash as an option. I try to use it for everything I can, just to safeguard the option. I try to get my friends to do it, but they find contactless too convenient.

Same in the UK, but its more a case of protecting people

That happened to me in the US once. I deposited a paper check (cheque) for a large sum, and Bank Lady started asking questions. She was trying to protect me against scammers. There are scams where the perp gives the mark a bad check. Mark deposits bad check, withdraws funds immediately which banks let you do if you’re a customer in good standing. Mark gives funds to perp. A few days later, bank discovers the check is bad, unwinds the transaction. Now the mark is out the money. The perp has gone to ground and cannot be located.

I assured Bank Lady that I knew about that risk, and I trusted of the origin of the check. That satisfied her.

Even if I migrate to a privacy-respecting FOSS solution, my friends, family, acquaintances and random people around me will not (well, some may). I will still be featured in their photos out of my control.

Ayup. That is the infurating thing. I can be careful. But ppl around me are not. Of course you u/l your pictures to big-tech! Everybody does!

TBH, I wanted to volunteer on a local crew that maintains hiking trails. I didn’t… because they were all about taking endless pics and u/l it to their FB and maybe IG. So I avoided sth I wanted to do make my city better. But no way could I avoid their need to share everything with big tech.

if the current trend continues, you’ll effectively become a prisoner to your own home

Same feeling for me. It’s oppressive AF. It feels inescapable, relentlessly expanding. I don’t want to be a hermit! If it’s not a store, it’s a rando who takes a selfie in a restaurant and you’re at the next table. Or at any kind of public event. Photo u/l’ed to their IG or FB. Then machine learning models spool up to wring out every possible inference. Those inferences can reveal so much more than most ppl understand.

Your categorization is on the money, “unnoticeable change”. It is the same on the tip top surface between their parents film camera photos, and their IG. But below that is a whole new world of capability.

Culture changes. Laws change. Tech possibilities change. But data is forever! We can never know how today’s data may be abused tomorrow, by who, and against who. We’re seeing data of people’s past lives weaponized against ppl, more and more often.

It also has psychologic effects. People are less willing to change their personal views, when their whole past is discoverable. That leads to more polarized societies over time.

Wow, the article is long. Long but good so far, I’m 20% in.

Smartphones are just a clusterfuck in every last way. Maybe very technical people can avoid the worst of it. Most people can’t.

Well said.

I once heard someone sum it up like,

“Everyone has something to hide. You just don’t know what that is, until it’s too late.”

And what makes you think the VPN is not doing exactly the same thing?

Several reasons. First, they have been hit with gov lawsuits and a police raid before. They were unable to provide any data about customer behavior on the VPN. Police left empty handed. They don’t log it. Also I pay with cash. They don’t know who I am.

Second, they are audited by independent 3rd parties.

Third, it has also a good reputation. That rep would be destroyed overneight if it was discovered.

Nothing in life is 100% certain. But not all things are equal either, just because something “could” happen. I know for a fact my ISP does it. I have good reasons to believe my VPN is not. Thus, I will pick the safer option. My best guess is <1% chance my VPN does this. But even if 50%, that’s STILL better than 100%.

That was my little rant, please feel free to leave yours below in the comments; I’m somewhat desperate to hear it.

I’m in the US. Lots here is commercial. Cameras are all over in most stores. Everything bigger than mom & pop tier and even some of those. Long ago, that was kind of okay. They were closed circuit. The video went to a literal video tape to be overwritten in 1-3 days. Now? It’s unavoidable mass surveilance coupled to AI and cloud based analytics. The bigger chains run sophisticated facial recognition and AI behavior analysis.

Is that just for anti-theft? Oh no! These systems are used to analyze customer behavior. “Modern vision technologies are turning store video footage into powerful marketing insights”. Are you staring at a product, or looking away? Did you stop and pause near a display? Do you appear interested, or distracted? Did you pick up a product and return it to the shelf? Or place it in your cart? Did you read the label first? What route did you take through the store? These are all literally what modern video customer analytics do.

“This is where modern video analytics shines: it allows stores to map the entire in-store customer journey, from the moment someone enters to the moment they make a purchase (or leave without one). More advanced models add pose estimation, which looks at body posture and hand movement.”

It’s like somebody told Orwell 1984 was MUCH too mild.

Oh, did you want to opt out? Sure! You can. All you got to do is stop eating food!

but it eats at me on a daily basis.

Totally with you, sir, ma’am or other. I try to be an upstanding person. I try to help those around me. To be kind to others. To support my community and my neighbors. I just don’t want to live in a fucking constantly monitored world without a lick of privacy left. Where every action I have ever taken is recorded, analyzed, used against me. I believe this erodes democratic societies. These data streams are inevitably abused by tyranical ones. It’s a cancer on our societies. It harms all of us.

Yah, I believe you are right. Everyone will exit on the same IP. So maybe it’s not totally necessary.

Part of my reason was, I wanted a VPN inside my country for my identity tied use. To avoid possible geo-blocks. But for non-identity use, I wanted to use a VPN in Europe.

Also I hoed, maybe it makes life slightly harder for identity brokers? Like, they can track that I use a certain IP for my ID-tied uses. Even if there are also 100 others on that IP, it’s still data which can form part of a fingerprint. For my non-identity use, I wanted to minimize anything to tie the two worlds together. I use a different browser and different device, even.

I’m not doing anything wrong, or illegal, or unethical. I’m just a normal ass person, but I fucking hate identity brokers and mass surveilance.

Hopefully. At the mo, it’s totally bypassable.

But what concerns me is, it could so easily slippery slope into being unavoidable. Most sites forced into requiring some PKI signed token. Token only obtained by giving your gov ID to Big Surveillance.

The requirements of modern life could end locked behind a mass surveillance gate.

For w/e reason, isn’t for me. I’ll put some clips from it here. Not the whole thing tho, it’s long.

Sam Altman’s iris-scanning, humanity-verifying World project announced at an event in San Francisco on Friday that Tinder users around the globe can now put a digital badge on their profiles signaling to potential suitors that they’re a real human, provided they’ve already stared into one of World’s glossy white Orbs and allowed their eyes to be scanned. The announcement follows a pilot project for Tinder verification that World previously conducted in Japan.

The global Tinder expansion is one of the biggest tests yet for World, and the company’s bet that everyday consumers will be willing to sign up for biometric verification services to use internet applications. Founded in 2019 by Altman and Alex Blania, the World project was designed for a future where the internet is overrun with highly capable AI agents that make it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to tell who is really human. As companies like OpenAI—where Altman is CEO—and Anthropic push AI agents into the mainstream, the problem World was built to solve feels increasingly urgent.

The startup says Tinder users who verify with their World ID will receive five free “boosts,” typically a paid feature that increases the number of users who see a profile by up to 10 times for 30 minutes. The videoconferencing platform Zoom also says that users can now require other participants to verify their identity with World before joining a call.

“We’re just not used to this kind of technology. Many people used to tape their [iPhone’s sensor used to enable] Face ID when it came out, then we got used to it.”

I would never use a VPN for sites that require me to log in with my real name,

I think your point is valid and good. If you log in with your real name, you have given out your ID and have no privacy.

But there can still be reasons to use VPNs for sites you will log into. I use a dedicated VPN for all such sites. My banking, utilities, insurance etc. I use that VPN for nothng else but sites tied to my real identity. Why? Because it bypasses the data harvesting my ISP does. My ISP collects everything I connect to, the domains I mean not the contents, and sells to data brokers. The fuckers. So here, I do not use a VPN for privacy from the sites, who must know me. I use it to stop my ISP from seeing certain things.

But, I am also very careful! I do not cross the streams! My ID-tied VPN is only used for sites that have to know who I am IRL. I never mix it up with sites that have no business knowing my IRL ID. Which is most sites! Those use a totally different VPN, who I also did not give my identity to.

Ayup. This quote is from a techdirt article linked a few posts down. I like how they put it.

As the researchers put it to The Rage: “The state wants to see everything. The corporations want to see everything. And they’ve learned to work together.”

I’m in the US. It varies widely.

I think what happens sometimes, is we get caught up in anti-abuse lists. Sites see legit abuse coming from VPN IPs. After that happens enough, those IPs end up on anti-abuse filters. Then those blocklists are used by some sites, and not othrs, so some sites won’t work.

There are also whole countries who block VPN now for social control. And others who talk about blocking them soon. That’s not the case where I live. But there are still many individual sites that use blocklists.

There are also more sites using identity resolution services now. If the identity service can’t pin you to a human real life person, it increases your block score. If your block score is high enough, you get , um, blocked.

He’s an international treasure just for coining enshittification.

He’d still be awsome if that was all he ever did.

If you break them and report the bug you can be prosecuted under some hacking paragraph.

The old shoot the messenger approach!

We’ve had some high profile examples in the US too. Like this one, from 2021. A professor was investigated by governor Mike Parson of Missouri, for literally using View Page Source in a browser. And reporting a major vulnerability in good faith. I linked Parson’s wikipedia page, because he deserves his ridicule. Not for his ignorance! Many are ignorant of how the web works. That’s OK. He deserves ridicule for how he handled the episode. For dragging the professor’s name through the mud, who had only tried to help.

In the end, the governor received much ridicule. The investgation was dropped.

and a pinky promise is not enough.

Yah that’s my sticking point too!

I believe that under good faith, Zero Knowledge Proof could work and guard privacy from both the gov and the sites.

But “good faith” is doing heavy lifting. The desire to corrupt the system in some way that turns ZKP into secretly non-ZKP is going to be huge. Even if it begins OK, we will all become locked into it. And if it gets corrupted years later, too bad so sad, because we’re locked into it!

We’ve already seen intelligence agencies trying to corrupt encryption standards, to look secure when they have a secret flaw. That’s the kind of corruption I worry about with ZKP age gates.