Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
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It's a long video with many points and better if you watch it. However, here's a break down of key points, made to be as simple as possible - there's a lot more technical stuff, but I'll try to keep it concise and less technical.
This is probably about a 10 minute read if these concepts are not familiar to you:
Why is this bad:
Can I use Firefox and stop using any Chromium browser
What can we do?
What will happen 20 years from now?
What happens 20+ years from now?
If I could save up my votes to upvote this 5 or 6 times, I would. Great write-up! I'm "stealing" it (with attribution).
This is a depressing reality but I think it's likely this will happen. It makes me so mad Google got as big as they did. Someone needs to tear the fuckers down.
We won’t be able to tear them down. We don’t have the resources to break apart these large corporations. They climbed to the top via the best strategy: find a pipe of money or flow of money in the economy, straddle it and start extracting bits of it like a parasite. In other words, “rent-seeking behavior”. Eventually you get enough money that you buy all the corporations and competitors around and above you so you get bigger. Then you buy the congressman at the top that oversees the laws and regulations, and you use them to make laws in your favor that make it difficult for your competitors to compete with you or keep up with regulation. The end result is that your competition gets buried, and you balloon to the top. Then it’s your goal to get as much money as possible.
Since we can’t tear down large corporations because they captured the regulators (or are financed by governments), the only thing we can do is opt out. You, reader, have already started opting out by using the Fediverse.
The danger of centralization becomes more apparent over time. Continue to use decentralized solutions. Don’t be an evangelist and try to convert people.
Instead, when people get burned (and they will), they will find us. The grassroots people, the anarchists, the ones that just want their freedom from their oppressors.
Give it time. Write your politicians, vote like a good citizen, and when your rights get taken away from you, don’t make letter bombs or rage against your fellows in the working class. Instead, opt out. Take back control by using decentralized systems that can’t be controlled.
You wrote all this but you failed to mention that Google's using it's monopoly market position to force web "standards" unilaterally (without an independent/conglomerate web specification standards where Google is only one of many voices) that will disadvantage its competitors and force people to leave its competitors. The competitors need to sue.
Fair point you raise. Competitors can certainly sue where warranted.
And we can certainly start public outcry. It will be a difficult, uphill battle for those that understand the implications of this motive.
Those complaint websites are tailored to the customers who suffer from the decline in competition. We are suffering from Google using its market position to kill our user experience and options. As I understand, it's classic monopoly abuse.
In the 20th century, the US broke up the Hollywood model where companies owned both the studios and the theaters (how you have 20th century Fox (or just 20th century now) and Fox theaters). Google owning 75% online advertising and 75% of web browser share is a clear conflict of interest and you can see it from how they're pushing things like Manifest V3 via their browser (especially when you consider how Chrome is the default browser on their phones), now that it's the only browser that developers are increasingly starting to support.
If you follow that model, one thing that's going to have to be done is to have Chrome/Chromium browser development be broken away from Google proper. Google can't fund the developers any longer.
Sorry. I keep failing at tracking where each conversation's happening. Here are the complaint websites
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation (Lina Khan's the most vigorous fighter I've seen on these grounds in my lifetime).
https://www.justice.gov/atr/citizen-complaint-center
https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/procedures/complaints_en
We're having a discussion about it here: https://old.lemmy.world/post/2060683
So basically, we're going to have to build a separate internet that rejects this new protocol and allows for alternate browsers. That tactic, combined with piracy and offering everything the big guys charge money for for free, might be enough to draw at least a chunk of the people away from it.
You’ve got it right. the thing is that corporations will have to adopt to these standards, but that doesn’t stop us from opting out via decentralized methods and, if you favor it, piracy.
You can spin up your own media server like Jellyfin and serve content to users in your own enclave. Open it to the public and it’s ripe for DMCA takedown.
We can spin up our own social media places and collaborate together. There’s lots of options out there to meet every need. Maybe over time as storage gets cheaper, we’ll figure out how to decentralize large media like movies and tv shows over some kind of distributed service like an open blockchain, and then we can say goodbye to YouTube. Or the YouTube alternatives (not the front ends) will become easier with less friction, and user-supported server costs.
The one thing we couldn’t spin up though are core services that I mentioned - banking, healthcare, government sites, etc.
🤔 Actually, if we banded together and had enough people with the know-how and willpower, we could in principle open up our own credit union. Credit unions are alternatives to banks and are specifically designed for shit like this. Just as there are teachers' and firefighters' credit unions, so too could there be one for, say, us Lemmonades.
Thank you for the informative comment
Happy to help. As I sat here and reflected on my post I figured out a good way I can satisfy the “Explain Like I’m Five” better. So I’ll share this for posterity:
Wow, awesome ELI5 thanks!
I thought Brave doesn't have to implement manifest v3 because they're a fork. They can just rip it out.
We can create a community of people that care about those things & shun people that don't care
Why shun them? Shouldn’t we welcome them when they decide to join us?
No one likes an evangelist, so I think it’s best to not try to recruit people; Rather, we can make others aware of this problem by making announcements that state facts about what’s going on. Then we leave the 99% to figure it out and decide for themselves.
I never heard of Lemmy, but I’ve been disenfranchised by other social medias and simply walked away. After the Reddit API scandal, I discovered the Fediverse (after hearing vaguely about Mastodon years ago). Let them come on their own. We should welcome all refugees.
If they want to join it's ok, but if they leave or they don't want to join we shun them, because making average people aware doesn't work, they simply don't care