There is this common narrative I see all the time, implying that we as individuals are empowered to choose and manifest our own destiny, and this comes up often in privacy discussions.

Don’t like Facebook’s privacy nightmares? Just don’t use Facebook!

Don’t like personalized ads? I remember a popular post on reddit saying “if your ad interrupts my YouTube video, I will hate your product”.

Don’t like Google chrome hegemony? Just use Firefox!

And while I agree that we should strive to do that, the battle doesn’t end here. Facebook has shadow accounts for people who never signed up. Google chrome keeps it’s hegemony despite people on the Internet advocating Firefox day and night. And ads continue to be extremely profitable despite you “hating the product” because it interrupted your YouTube video.

Even worse: even if you “hate the product”, you now already know it. You now know they product exists, and possibly whatever they wanted you to know about it. The reality is that these companies own your eyes. They control what shows up on your screen. And even if you hate it, they control what you end up learning.

the reality is that our individual resistance is very far from enough

I am not saying it is completely futile. It is a step in the right direction. But the only effective solution is organized action. We, alone, cannot achieve much. Unless we organize our resistance against privacy violations, we will continue to live through this privacy nightmare.

  • alufers
    19•1 year ago

    I want to add to this: In my country (Poland, but probably many others) you are sometimes almost forced to be tracked by FAANG companies. For example our mObywatel app, which can be uses as driver’s license replacement requires you to download it via Google Play and have Google Services installed. Of course it uses firebase to send notifications.

        • @[email protected]
          2•1 year ago

          It’s yet another service in the hands of Google and a proprietary library, far too many apps depend on it to send push notifications, which isn’t unexpected when Google, which owns Android, has made it the only standard push service by leveraging their position of power and in turn Unified Push and all its free implementations had to come from the community, but almost no app uses it, because everyone is used to Firebase by this point.
          That’s the open platform aspect, it is also a privacy concern because it means that most apps will have your notifications pass through Google’s servers, I don’t think they can necessarily read the content, but the time of reception and sending and where it comes from is metadata that they certainty see