Thread by @wydna00

Privacy and security related features in web related applications and services come across increasingly mostly as marketing hype. Many major ones seem like tools developed by the US government to promote geopolitical instability in its rivals. Apps like Signal are not trustworthy

I think many consumers are vague on the details of what many security features do and what kind of information and data is involved on a technical level. I’m not really sure a VPN really does a whole lot for most people with the prevalence of https and encrypted dns for example

People think in terms of themselves, and worry about having their passwords stolen and “viruses,” but today it seems more like a larger scale meta-war between corporations and governments over the mass collection and use of kinds of data largely trivial to the individual

Take @vivaldi, many or their marketed privacy and security features are targeted specifically at fracturing Google’s mass data collection, like their new idle api blocking and oath mail account handling. There’s a strategy of attacking google’s data, less protecting the consumer

Privacy obsessed search engine’s like Duck Duck Go are just Google. Google today is basically the *only* search engine with a few exceptions. Privacy search engines don’t save you from google’s algorithms, they just fracture Google’s aggregate web data modeling

I’m not saying privacy and security features are irrelevant or bad, but consumers have been conditioned to myopically focus on this dimension, when I feel like the more important battle is over intellectual property rights, accessibility of information, and content rentierism

If I do an image search on Duck Duck Go, I still just get Google’s highly restricted image results, which cede ownership without any contest to content cartels like Getty, Alma, etc. without those cartels having to offer even the slightest actual proof they even own the images

A lot of content is being stolen from the public: books, images, music. Getty Images simply claims images they fundamentally do not own and uses legal threats against use of public domain photos to establish virtual de facto ownership. But Ed Snowden never talks about this

And at the end of the day, if your data is actually yours, why dont you own it? Why has no one pushed legislation to guarantee your copyright over your own data? Because its not yours, the copyright doesnt belong to whomever the data is about, but the one who took the measurement

This is the operative principle of copyright. If you scan a public domain book, that scan is not in the public domain. The scan itself is its own “work” owned by whoever did the scanning. You ever notice how many centuries old paintings are hard to find high quality images of?

We constantly hear platitudes how the internet gives us access to the “wealth of all human knowledge”? But does it really when 100 year old ethnographic field recordings of Appalachian folk musicians playing traditional ballads have to be licensed from the Smithsonian?

Increasingly I feel this is the site of the more important battle,not over scraps of data chronicling your Amazon search history for the perfect flatware organizer. They care about that data, when collected across millions of consumers, but should you? Probably not so much imo