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> I can't be the only one who gets depressed reading the news on here. ..... This sounds like some conspiracy tinfoil hat old man rant (I swear I'm non of those), but I hear regular "non-tech" people airing the same complaints more and more. It's just disappointing that there isn't an option to not participate I guess. Sorry for the long (mostly off topic) rant

Rant on my friend. Rant on. You're not the only one getting depressed about all this lunacy. How about that yahoo article about white male depression or something. I'm sure shit like this is just another heavy rock on the pile of life we're carrying on our backs, white, male or not. It's a problem for everyone. Nineteen Eighty-Four is coming to life before our eyes. It's a damn prophecy.

I have friends who fully understand whats going on and chose to have alexas and rings in their home because they're lazy in the sense that they want to maximize their recreational and leisure time. They don't want to fiddle with the complexity of setting up their own cctv cameras, running wires and then figuring out how to remotely access it without leaving your home open to a hack. They don't want bulky PC's. They have careers, kids and a babysitter so easy peasy iot cameras with mobile phone apps are a godsend for them. They don't believe they are special enough to warrant surveillance. They say they'll just bore some eavesdropping spook. Ain't got nothing to hide.

I recently spoke with a musician who randomly complained about: operating systems that they couldn't control, phones tracking everything, ads tracking them, microphones and cameras everywhere which could be hack or backdoored, email spying by the provider, etc. They had a pretty good grasp of the situation as well. They even became proactive and opened a paid protonmail account. Then they asked about purism laptops and if they could live with using Linux.

Was even more crazy, and to your point, even tech that you wouldn't expect to be watching you is now. Google's new wifi router has microphones and speakers in it! This is insanity to me. I've converted my entire tech environment to mostly apple devices, but apple doesn't make everything, and honestly with their new business model I truly believe its only a matter of time until they too start aggregating data like Google and Amazon do.

Be careful with putting all your eggs into one basket. I'm weathering my Windows 7 desktop but I'm going to move to Linux. I have no desire to move to windows 10 and no interest in Apple products.

As for a router, have a look at the PC Engines apu2 then run pfsense on it.

That does sound awful. Here's what I do: block all ads.

I can't stop the data collection, but I can stop ads. If I ever see an ad, I stop what I'm doing and figure out how to remove that ad from my life forever.

So yeah, I'm fully tracked, and I have no privacy, but at least I'm not being influenced by the ads that come from processing all my data.

I also try to block as much data collection as possible, but I realize that's not fully in my control.

>This sounds like some conspiracy tinfoil hat old man rant (I swear I'm non of those), but I hear regular "non-tech" people airing the same complaints more and more.

Nah, people here are savvy enough to recognize it.

The term conspiracy theory was created as a way to disenfranchise reports when the government actually does something harmful. But you, like most people here, can tell the difference between something manufactured like flat earthers and NSA's machine learning projects.

I worked at a CDN and did analytics over a lot of the worlds http traffic. So yah.. sadly, it's a real problem.

What's depressing as well is that it seems every major company or government has decided to reset passwords for every user for undisclosed or precautionary reasons.

I'm not talking some worthless accounts either - I'm talking major airlines, national postal services, government business accounts, etc.

What are you referencing?

This is what it means to live in a community. The parts of life that happen outside the home are conducted in view of other people, who are constantly updating their profiles of you based on their observations and broadcasting any detected anomalies on the original gossip protocol. For a time, food and urban planning tech advances let us scale settlements past what our built-in organic surveillance networks could handle, and the gap gave us some privacy for once. But it seems inevitable that surveillance tech would eventually catch up.

It may not be all bad. Technological surveillance could at least be subject to oversight and regulation, where old school family- and community-based social norms monitoring could not.

For the record, I don't have a doorbell camera because I'm paranoid - I have it because I'm lazy AF.