I have lots of old friends who I only maintained sparse contact with. When I let my personal email address die (the address they would all have records of), I did not bother to update them with a new address.

They are all on the platform of some surveillance capitalist (e.g. Google or Microsoft). Google & Microsoft both refuse connections from self-hosted residential servers. And even if they didn’t, I am not willing to feed those surveillance advertisers who obviously don’t limit their surveillance to their users but also inherently everyone who makes contract with their users. I cannot support that or partake in pawning myself to subsidize someone else’s service.

I just wonder if anyone else has taken this step.

  • soloActivist@links.hackliberty.orgOP
    1·
    11 months ago

    That’s not the trade-off. Google has no opportunity to show me ads anyway. If alice@privacyrequired.com emails bob@gmail.com about a Taylor Swift concert, Google profits from information about both people. Even if Alice does not use Google services, Google’s file on bob shows he knows Alice and Alice is a TS fan. Then when bob searches for gifts, Google shows him TS t-shirts and profits from that. Conversations are two-ways, so when Bob responds to Alice Google learns directly about Bob, such as whether he’s a Swift fan. Alice’s msg therefore generated profitable data about Bob for Google, which potentially works against Alice’s boycott against Google.

    That’s just the tip of the iceberg—

    human rights

    Human rights are important. Embodied therein (among other principles) the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, Article 8 states:

    1. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.
    2. Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned or some other legitimate basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.
    3. Compliance with these rules shall be subject to control by an independent authority.

    As you can see from reading this thread, most people irrationally believe these human rights constitute paranoia and tinfoil hattery. My opposition to mass surveillance is not borne out of fear that my data will be used against me personally, but rather an objection to arbitrary systemic collection that comes at the detriment of some people (e.g. abortion seekers) and ultimately disempowers people.

    privacy is about control

    To have privacy is to have control over information about you. Security from harmful disclosure is only a small component of the utility of privacy. There is a tendency for normies to fixate on that and think that is the sum total purpose of privacy. Having control is also about choosing who gets to profit from your data. It’s about having a right to boycott harmful entities.

    digital exclusion and diminished open standards

    Google and Microsoft sabotaged the email infrastructure by imposing rules outside of RFC 5321. Up until the 2000s you could send an email to anyone so long as you comply with the open standards expressed in RFCs. The monopolistic tech giants saw an opportunity to take more market share and reduce their costs by introducing restrictions on email that exclude people who are self-serving. They leveraged spam fatigue to coerce people to conform to non-RFC proprietary reqs in addition to already already having a dominant market share (corp greed has no limits).

    I reject Google and Microsoft dictating terms that breaks the purpose of open standards (interoperability). Every time you send an email to or from Google or MS servers, you give your support for corporate dictatorship.

    So when you say this is about “the ability to show you ads that are more relevant to your interests”, you and at least 5 others have wholly misunderstood the problem.