Tuta is a great company and their social media game is fire! I’m using their email and calendar app as a replacement for Gmail and Google Calendar.
Man, this is such a trap. People see an ad for Tuta and think they have finally won the privacy game. They jump from Gmail to Tuta like it is some kind of digital nirvana but honestly it’s just trading one master for another. It’s an improvement, sure. Moving from a glass house into a bunker definitely shrinks your attack surface but you are still handing the keys over to a single company. They own the bunker so they actually control everything. If you want real sovereignty? You gotta go deeper than that. Go towards self hosting or actual decentralized protocols where YOU hold the keys and nothing else. Otherwise you are just a prisoner in a slightly more secure cell.
I think this is a very priveleged take if we actually care about advocating for digital sovereignty.
In a perfect world, sure, build and manage a server with self hosted infrastructure. In reality people care about this stuff rarely actually have the money, time, skills or drive to manage a project like that confidently.
Its normal for people to want to allocate management of their services to a provider with trust to circumvent this.
For actualnconstructive advice to the people who can’t do this: Try looking up to see if their are any nonprofit email hosting services in your country - they exist but usually don’t do marketing and are often built on strong values. If not I really think using services like Tuta, proton, etc is leaps forward for your safety, privacy and ethics compared to Google, Microsoft, etc.
Okay, I’m sorry, but while I sorta agree with you
Go towards self hosting
Such a horrible idea for email. Here’s a nice talk outlining how horrible it is to host your own email these days.
or actual decentralized protocols where YOU hold the keys and nothing else.
Great for chat and many other things, but you can’t escape email in today’s world. You’ll still need it.
Not sure what a good solution is though, since Tuta and Proton aren’t exactly great either.
You are totally misjudging this! Honestly you are probably just thinking about the absolute nightmare of manually configuring every single little thing like SMTP and SPF back in the day which was a massive headache. But that is not how it works anymore. I have been self hosting my email for over ten years using mail in a box and it is basically zero maintenance once it is up and running. These modern stacks use abstraction layers to handle all the annoying stuff so you do not have to be a full time sysadmin just to get through the day. It is not some impossible task where you are stuck with Tuta or Proton because you can definitely escape those silos if you use the right stack instead of trying to build every single layer from scratch.
Can I install a camera in your bedroom? One above your couch so I can read the things you type? One in the toilet? No? But you have nothing to hide you said…?
How alternative medicine advocates target people right after diagnosed cancer
How people who just lost their loved ones gets menorial service ads
There’s legit moments you become emotionally vulnerable and if they knew they’ll definitely prey on you
“So when can we put cameras in your bedroom and bathroom?”
“why do you wear clothes?”
Depends on what time of year it is.
And if you are with someone special…
With IR and RF technology the way that it is, you might as well not be wearing anything in the eyes of the tech spooks behind the panopticon…
“why do you lock your phone?”
Tell me your card & bank account details
Also give me your mother’s phone number
And home address
I too want op’s mothers number
”We’ll install an extra door to your bedroom from the outside and write ’For police use only’ for YOUR PROTECTION”
Also it has a shoddy lock
People carry their phones to both.
My iphone really doesn’t like that I have aluminum tape on the cameras and a water resistant case that I have to essentially shove in my mouth and use speaker by my ear to use it.
Do you have a smart-tv in one of them? Or a rumbla? Maybe there are cameras already.
Dyson’s toothbrush camera was never for your mouth
Toothbrush cameras?
People have been murdered for wearing glasses, please believe your minor social associations and opinions and thoughts can get you killed
The big thing that people always seem to forget is that there also doesn’t need to be a reason. People are weird and do weird things. To others, these weird actions are often interpreted as having malicious intent.
Crimes will be manufactured. Enemies will be created. Just look at ICE.
Those still have reasons, theyre just not usually as direct.
There might be motivation or bias, but not reason.
Reason and a reason are different things.
Pol Pot.
That’s a bold statement from the company without any external security audit and which doesn’t allow you to use PGP.
Data fabrication is its own risk in this. Assuming we live in a society where a govt can argue it has all this information, they could make shit up & conjure the “evidence” to support their version. Because the apparatus is established as “we know everything & can uncover the ‘truth’”, they could falsify files, they could plant files on devices, and they could edit information at a grander scale than in the past. Flock’s financial backing is connected to a company that makes money from footage editing. If they establish, “Flock shows footage of reality,” while being able to manipulate it, then we’re all a deepfake away from being accused of shit we didn’t do. That’s like Black Mirror episode 1.
They do that anyway
On social media, I see ragebaiting posts and it occurred to me that they are honeypots in disguise. If I say too much, it could be used against me, as I plan to join a union.
I plan to join a union
talks into earpiece You hear that, boys? It’s oppression time! hoots with glee like Alex’s droogs in A Clockwork Orange
I’m a lot more comfortable with people knowing what my genitals look like than most people are and yet even I draw the line well before insurers or law enforcement get a peek
Aye aye Cap’n! 🫡
That, and even if you’re not considered part of whatever targeted group the current regime hates today, it doesn’t mean they won’t invent a new targeted group tomorrow that just so happens to include you.
This is before getting into all the false positive “identifications” of “criminal behavior” aimed at demonstrably innocent people e.g. as is already happening with the current Flock camera debacle.
No government has any legitimate reason to surveil its own citizens, and if any such excuse is generated to justify it in the beginning it is guaranteed to devolve into a tool of oppression afterwards. Once you give up rights there is no reality in which any government will voluntarily give them back.
You have social security and credit card numbers, and porn searches you sick fucking perverted freak.
I’m thankfully vanilla as hell. If my porn search history were to be leaked, they’d be like, “that’s it?”
You don’t have any kinks?! What a weirdo
Their kink is not having a kink. The whelming normality really gets them going. Sickening.
We all know what you’re doing in the bathroom, but that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve the privacy to do it.
Exactly! I may have nothing to hide, but I do have many things to keep private thatb are nobody’s business but my own.
Privacy, anonymity, and “secrets” may be related but aren’t always the same thing.
Protect yourself from the harmful manipulations of people who would know how you work better than you do.
I would argue that privacy, at least in the modern sense of controlling access to personal information, is a relatively new concept.
Before the internet and the widespread digitization of information, keeping something private was comparatively straightforward. Information was scattered across paper records, filing cabinets, and individual institutions. A person or company generally had to make a deliberate effort to obtain that information. Today, computers and interconnected databases have changed the equation completely. With enough dedication, technical knowledge, and time, a single person can potentially uncover an enormous amount of information about someone.
In fact, some organizations have gone in the opposite direction and deliberately moved their most sensitive information onto older, isolated computer systems because modern interconnected systems create so many avenues for unauthorized access.
That said, I don’t necessarily agree that everything listed in this meme should automatically be considered private information. I actually think there is a legitimate argument for greater transparency around things like wealth, relationship status, and political beliefs. If someone chooses to publicly announce their relationship on social media, for example, I’m not sure why that information should suddenly be considered inherently private. The same applies to political opinions: they only have political significance when people are willing to make them public.
The major exception, in my opinion, is information about a person’s physical movements and location. Where someone lives, where they’ve been, and where they are at any given moment can have very real safety implications. And ironically, this is also one of the areas where governments and corporations are increasingly capable of tracking people regardless of whether those people want to be tracked.
So I think the real issue isn’t that privacy itself is new. It’s that technology has fundamentally changed what it means to keep something private.
