In sharing this video here I’m preaching to the choir, but I do think it indirectly raised a valuable point which probably doesn’t get spoken about enough in privacy communities. That is, in choosing to use even a single product or service that is more privacy-respecting than the equivalent big tech alternative, you are showing that there is a demand for privacy and helping to keep these alternative projects alive so they can continue to improve. Digital privacy is slowly becoming more mainstream and viable because people like you are choosing to fight back instead of giving up.
The example I often think about in my life is email. I used to be a big Google fan back in the early 2010s and the concept of digital privacy wasn’t even on my radar. I loved my Gmail account and thought it was incredible that Google offered me this amazing service completely free of charge. However, as I became increasingly concerned about my digital privacy throughout the 2010s, I started looking for alternatives. In 2020 I opened an account with Proton Mail, which had launched all the way back in 2014. A big part of the reason it was available to me 6 years later as a mature service is because people who were clued into digital privacy way before me chose to support it instead of giving up and going back to Gmail. This is my attitude now towards a lot of privacy-respecting and FOSS projects: I choose to support them so that they have the best chance of surviving and improving to the point that the next wave of new privacy-minded people can consider them a viable alternative and make the switch.
Short answer, yes, its impossible, even using TOR network ith VPN and other security measures. We can only minimize our digital footprint, but certainly no one should have any illusions about being able to avoid, with a shitty Laptop or PC, large companies and governments with large data centers, IT specialist squads and even Quantumcomputers can profile us. Absolute privacy on the Internet does not exist, if you want privacy, turn off your PC and read a book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government_mass_surveillance_projects
I think you haven’t understood the difference between privacy, and total anonymity, do you?
I know very well the difference, when I say that privacy is an illusion in the network. In the same moment when you go online, conecting to sites which are not your owns, they know what you are doing and from which site you came. More people are confused what means browsing in anonymity mode in their browser, they think that with this they are Anonym online, but it’s wrong, because this mode only delete the local storage, for webs which want to profile and track you it’s irrelevant if you are in normal or anonymity mode. All what you post online is públic visible, your mail direction is an unique identification which can be tracked easily in the whole web. Even in this moment a Google Bot is reading your posts in Lemmy and in every other SN and blog, very possible that it even know who you are if you had in the past an account. You are not invisible in the network and because of this there also isn’t a real privacy nor anonymity. Fact.
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Quantum computers eh? Yeah that’s not even remotely true. Currently they are a scientific curiosity with very very little practical use.
It does not even matter, namely if tomorrow quantum computers were to become a commodity then we would at the same time switch to quantum resistant encryption, e.g https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/post-quantum-cryptography
The name “post quantum encryption” sounds super complicated, and to be fair the math behind it is beyond my understanding (and I won’t even claim I would have enough time in my life time to study it and assume I can formally prove all of it to be correct) yet switching is actually relatively trivial, namely your software, say a browser like Firefox or Chrome, and the server it communicates with, e.g lemmy.ml relying on e.g nginx or Apache, “just” have to have at least 1 matching encryption scheme, one way to exchange data that is post-quantum resistant. In practice that means configuration files on both sides that you, as a user, do not even know exist and that can be done through basic updates.
TL;DR: most users will switch to post-quantum encryption without even realizing, and then even if say the NSA were to buy a $1T quantum computer, even your $1K computer and the $10K server it communicates with would be able to handle it no problem, even a $30 Raspberry Pi computer will.
Yes, this is what they say. Maybe true, but how long? Do you think that surveillance companies like Google, once this technology is implemented, and financed by secret services and the military, will use it exclusively for the good of humanity? We will see
https://blog.google/technology/research/google-gesda-and-xprize-launch-new-competition-in-quantum-applications/