[RndTbl] On forcing people to get Google accounts

[Trevor Cordes]

On 2022-11-04 Adam Thompson wrote:
> 
> My personal opinion is that privacy is an illusion and the faster you
> get over that, the easier your life will be.  *Should* that be the
> case?  Hell, no!  But what options do I have other than how I vote,
> and how I communicate with my various elected representatives?

I don't like to be completely defeatist in a "throw up your hands and
give up" sense when it comes to your statement: "privacy is an
illusion".  When we do that we are, in effect, saying to everyone "don't
even try".

Privacy isn't a binary thing.  It's a matter of degrees.  Yes, you are
100% correct that we can't be completely "private".  But there a ton of
little things we can do to regain control of various aspects of our
privacy and/or make "the borg's" life more difficult.

For people who care about privacy (say Brian and myself) we should
learn about and do things that help us improve along the privacy scale.
And we should encourage that.  There are some people (hehe you know who
you are) who have completely given up or even welcomed every tracking /
privacy-invading thing known to man.  I don't think that's the correct
thing to encourage in those who are showing concern.

We're a bit of a special case here in MUUG because we're basically the
at the pinnacle of all this technology stuff and if anyone should "know
better", it should be us.  (Some of us even program stuff that uses all
this anti-privacy ecosystem stuff and are well aware of how egregious
the info leaks are.)  If we can't offer hints and solutions, who can? I
agree, it's all rather depressing.

If I had to make a top-3 list of privacy things you should do today, it
would be:

1. Your browsers should have a NoScript (or similar) plugin and at
the very least perma-block google-analytics and doubleclick (et al),
and FB if you don't use it.  That garbage is embedded in like 80% of
pages out there.

2. Disable location services on your phone, basically always (ya they
can triangulate, blah blah, but this makes it harder).

3. Use Linux, not Windbloze.