You may be right, I thought that the feeling of unease is growing, but my view is biased because I know more people who are very concerned about their privacy than people who do not care. The views of politicians about privacy is different, they find it normal to spy their own population (there were regular scandals about phone tapping in France) but the day Angela Merkel learned her phone was tapped, it was suddenly a diplomatic incident.
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We are not mature enough for total information awareness - the collective behavior of the crowd is far too volatile and impulsive - but we will soon have it and it would be a fatal mistake to entrust corporations and governments to be the watchmen of our privacy, the illusion of which will be sold to us at the price of what freedom we have left.
Donât misunderstand me: I know for a fact that a lot of people in Europe care about their privacy. However, âcaringâ doesnât mean that they act like it. They donât even comprehend what they are doing. Seriously, I know so many people who are worried about, e.g., Google. But use Gmail for basically everything, they stay logged in both to Google and Facebook, they donât use adblockers, they donât use scriptblockers. Some of them use Signal, Threema or Telegram. Most of them use WhatsApp as well.
I had about five (5) contacts who used GPG. They stopped using it. I had one (1) contact who used a X.509 cert. Not any more. Those are the people who are technically capable, and what is more important intellectualy capable to understand what they are doing.
They upload a lot of their stuff into the cloud. They use GooglePhotos, they use iCloud - you name it. Some use it more or less selectively. Some are really making an effort - in some parts. One of them e.g. of them installed XPrivacy on their phone to check very fine grained app rights on their Android device, conciencously snaps some pics only from Threema (so they donât leave the encrypted messenger DB) and is generally very capable of using their technical abilities to keep some parts of their digital life a bit more private. However, still use the Google Assistant.
Another one actually works at a facility which has their own cert authority, and works on stuff I personally would think are security relevant (including firing rockets) - but is forbidden by contract to use any kind of encryption which would make it impossible for the employer to read their e-mails. Gave up, doesnât encrypt.
In short, lip service is paid when talking about privacy, and even those who did care donât give much of a fuck any longer. We lost the war. A long time ago.
Personally, I worked myself through nightmares learning how to control my smartphone - which data stays on it, which data leaks, what communication and information is encrypted, how to control the softwareâs access to other information, what offline world information should never touch itâs flash memory, etc.
Currently, I think of just buying a Pixel 2 and be done with most of that. I can still pretend to be conscientious about privacy, but FFS, I certainly have lost the warâŠ
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If you cite that CCC talk, maybe we should also cite the follow up: « 10 years after we lost the war ».
https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7501-ten_years_after_we_lost_the_war
10 years after, the same people pounder how much of their predictions realized. In some respect, they were wrong (they thought that the price of oil would increase, it did not). In other respects, they under-predicted the speed of the development. Smartphones and social networks belong to these last aspects.
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True. Interestingly enough, I recently re-read some Enzensberger on technology (in particular, bio-tech, but that doesnât matter). He quoted Kurzweil, from The Age of the Spiritual Machine, who predicted that AI will pass the Turing test in 2019. Given that some people apparently argue with Dieu already, that seems an interesting prediction to watch. At the time, smartphones were still just a possibilityâŠ
I found an article about privacy problems today:
One sentence which I found particularly worrying:
âWeâre living in an age where you can weaponize personal information against peopleâ
(What adds insult to injury is that, to repost that link, I had to edit out the hash tag indicating where I had first read the article, who I am, etcâŠ)
Review sites for dinner are much more active in the USA than in Europe. In many European cities, quite a few popular restaurants do not even have reviews at all.
I think that part of that explanation is that US patrons reach their dinner by car, whereas in Europe, people usually walk to the restaurant. If you walk, you can see the restaurant from outside, even have a look at the menu or what other customers have in their plate before entering the restaurant. You walk to the next if you donât like it. If you drive, you canât see much before having your car parked and then few people look at the restaurant, decide against it and get back to their car.
I think this created a situation where restaurants in the US needed to be immediately recognizable from the road. That implied large signs and a relatively simple choice of foods. You may get the choice of âpizzaâ, âsteakâ, âburgerâ, âmexicanâ. You do not have a choice like âFrench cuisine in bistro style, but today we had a deal on fresh fish and wild mushroomsâ. I mean: you may have a restaurant offering that (although I did not meet any), but it could not advertise it on a sign that can be read from a car. Probably this is also the reason why the US market is dominated by franchise chains.
Itâs an interesting theory, and definitely applies to roadside restaurants in more suburban or rural areas; a lot of Yelp reviews will take stars off of a restaurant if they have a poor parking area.
But many Americans live in big cities where the top restaurants are in walkable areas with little to no parking â New York City, Boston, Chicago â and they get around European-style, looking at menus outside and walking away if the place is too busy or isnât what they want.
There certainly are exceptions. You cited Chicago, it so happens that I was there during my last visit. I donât think many people walk to their restaurant in Chicago, far less than in Paris or Amsterdam for example. Distances are much bigger in Chicago so it seems that people rather take a taxi (or Uber, LyftâŠ). I have not found an area similar to Europe with a concentration of restaurants and animation and our hotel was within the loop, so quite central. The closest was the area just north of the Chicago river, there you could walk from one restaurant to the other. Even then, the distances and low density of public transport made it quite different to what I know.
smartphone change the world
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