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.

  • RachelRodent
    1•1 year ago

    I don’t mind being slightly behind other android ROMs in terms of updates, I get updates every once in a few months on e/OS. One of the main freatures is that there is a feature caled advanced privacy you can block all trackers, spoof your GPS location and Tunnel your IP Adress through Tor from the settings or from its Widget at a per App basis without root out of the box. It also comes completly degoogled and with microg all default apps replaced with a foss alternatives. Its fork of Aurora store “app lounge” has privacy ratings for all the apps calculated using the permissions they require and trackers they have, it includes FOSS and pwa apps too.(also must admit I mostly just use fdroid). There is a lot to love about it and it is compatible with a lot more phones than grapheneOS. I know that you can achieve most of it, if not all of it on graphene too but /e/OS makes privacy “convenient”.