I know this has been discussed a lot across the fediverse already, but I recently learned about the Fogg Behaviour Model (FBM), and thought it would be interesting use it as a frame.
Basically, the model says that people change behaviour when they are motivated, have the ability, and are given the right prompt or nudge in the right direction.
How do we nudge people who are…
- In the top left, i.e. are motivated, but lack the ability to use privacy-friendly alternatives?
- Are in the bottom right, i.e. have the ability, but don’t care or have the motivation?
Unfortunately, my impression is that most people are in the bottom left, and think of the invasive surveillance of Big Tech like the weather; “I just have to deal with it”. How do we give these people the ability and motivation to escape the data vampires?
One thing I’ve noticed is that people often think it’ll be a lot harder than it actually is. I see it all the time, people talking about how they put off switching to firefox or linux or whatever more private thing because they thought it would be super difficult and then they did it and it was really easy
Yeah that makes sense, after all non-tech-savvy people do actually adopt new digital solutions all the time. For example interfaces in cars, smart home solutions, new apps for this and that, moving menus around in Windows, etc. I think familiarity is a key factor here. The Cinnamon desktop seems familiar to windows, but the terminal gives them spooky hackerman-vibes.
Motivation is high when asked, but no action is taken because of convenience, so the upper left corner is my guess. This phenomenon is called privacy paradox.
It’s the difficulty, Plain and simple.
I knew in the late 90’s what was coming, and have tried to minimize my own exposure, but family and friends just want the convenience.
I have a friend who specializes in network and data security and he uses all the privacy-invading garbage like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc, because “it’s convenient”. 🤦🏼
We need a simple, seamless solution to provide the features people want.
We have some of these things in Freedombox, CasaOS, and some OSS solutions, etc, but these are all beyond the skills of the average user. They’re even a big challenge for me, because I’m busy.
Though I’m working on a single-box solution for my family, and which provides backup to each other, media server, phone backup (mostly photos and videos), etc.
It’s pretty hard to do when phones are resistant to third party solutions.
You can lead a horse to water
Right, so that’d be part of moving us to the “easy to do” end of the spectrum.
I don’t feel the community does a great job of “leading the horses to water” though. I know I avoided VPNs for the longest time after learning half a thing about logging and such, and largely only jumped on the band wagon when it got wrapped up into my existing proton mail subscription.
How can we do a better job of leading the uninformed to water is the real question, I think.
Sadly I think we’ll have to take the water to them.
My current approach is building a media center for me, as a model for one I’ll send to my siblings/friends.
Besides being a media center, it’ll enable replication between them, with some backup services for laptops and phones. And some replacements for things like facebook/photo sharing, etc (and have a chat mechanism, most likely via XMPP).
And…it’ll have something like PiHole that I’ll manage centrally.
Similar (though VERY slow moving) effort to do the same on my end.
My big hesitance is that I would need to centralize management (cause gods is it hard to get anyone to understand ssh), which says to me I’d need to have something public facing on my friends and family’s networks. That pu lic facing bit just makes me squeamish.
The only way to drive the people on the bottom left is FUD. It will force them to the upper left.
The top left gets fixed through education and software improvements.
The bottom right happens through them being compromised in an uncomfortable way.
I’m not familiar with the term FUD, do you refer to this? Do you mean making people aware of the manipulative tactics of big tech, or are you suggesting we use manipulative tactics ourselves? The latter seems totally backwards to me, people deserve honesty
