Does mass surveillance make you feel isolated?
3 comments
I hope you are not struggling with depression. And if you are, please seek professional help. Random people online won't be able to properly help you.
In terms of avoiding mass surveillance, it's sad but we have to accept it will always be there. People with power will abuse their power. It's always been like that, it will always be like that.
With that taken into account, I think the best course of action is to come up with a personalised, realistic and pragmatic threat model. What do you want to protect? From whom? What are the most probable ways they will get them? How can you avoid it?
Battery technology isn't good enough to power smartphones to be constantly transmitting everything they capture from their microphones to the cloud, or even less to run a constant speech recognition model that can also identify who's talking. So I'd say that unless you are a high priority target, you don't need to worry about meeting someone with a stock Android or iOS phone. Worry about what's on your devices, your network, what you do with them, and about what tools you use to communicate with others.
In terms of avoiding mass surveillance, it's sad but we have to accept it will always be there. People with power will abuse their power. It's always been like that, it will always be like that.
With that taken into account, I think the best course of action is to come up with a personalised, realistic and pragmatic threat model. What do you want to protect? From whom? What are the most probable ways they will get them? How can you avoid it?
Battery technology isn't good enough to power smartphones to be constantly transmitting everything they capture from their microphones to the cloud, or even less to run a constant speech recognition model that can also identify who's talking. So I'd say that unless you are a high priority target, you don't need to worry about meeting someone with a stock Android or iOS phone. Worry about what's on your devices, your network, what you do with them, and about what tools you use to communicate with others.
Even if they have GrapheneOS, the lead developer of GrapheneOS publicly admitted struggling with mental health issues. People with mental health issues and severe personality disorders are very easy for nation state actors to manipulate and compromise. GrapheneOS is very strong on the technology specifics, but there's more to safe computing than just the technical part.
Yeah it's driving me nuts
its impossible to talk on a personal level with anyone. Even if you can convince them to get signal, they have to pretty much get grapheneos as well because Android and IOS spy on you and NSA builds backdoors into them. They can't use signal on their computer because they probably use windows/mac and even if they use linux i dont thiink they know enough about hardening and security. You also can't just talk to them in person because they will have their phone with them.
You have to go to such great lengths just to be able to have a nice conversation with someone in private without anyone recording or logging our conversation. It's basically impossible.
This means we can't ever be ourselves. How can we ever actually get to know someone else? Not just superficially. Maybe some coworker wants to hang out after work but you have to say no because you know it will be boring knowing everything is being recorded and logged. Or maybe you want to go on a date with someone you met but you know it will never work out because you can't really get to know each other when you have to keep everything superficial.
And this is also exactly what our corrupt and unconstitutional governments want. They want us to become isolated and their plan is working. Their path towards totalitarianism is working out and we're getting constantly closer to pure hell.
These secure communication apps are great for criminals though, they can go to these lengths and make sure their partners in crime do as well. But for normal innocent citizens, it helps but it doesnt help enough. Mass surveillance doesn't stop criminals, it only causes innocent citizens to become isolated.
And what does isolation cause? depression. What does depression cause? Suicide. So in a way, our governments are murdering innocent citizens in masses with their unconstitutional mass surveillance.
If you try to use freedom of speech to vent your complaints about our corrupt governemnts and their mass surveillance you just end up on even more of their lists of suspects, persons of interest, extremists, dissidents and become a target for even more surveillance and censorship.