this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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And even though I'm not OP I'm genuinely grateful for that.
No! That's the whole point of this Privacy community! If someone is using, using home automation as an example, Apple HomeKit or Roomba or Google Home they will eventually get compromised BUT if they are using something local, e.g Zigbee with HomeAssistant they WILL never get compromised because by the very local only architecture of that solution no data is leaving the home and thus can NOT be compromised.
The ENTIRE reason d'etre of this community is not to say "Oh well... the default solutions are imperfect, we have to shrug and accept the statu quo" but rather provide genuinely alternative.
I understand a lot of people can enter into a learned helplessness mindset imagining that only poor solutions exist and thus, better pick the least worst one, but by doing that we are giving power to Big Tech, surveillance capitalism, etc.
Please do NOT say that "everybody gets compromised" when you actually mean that "the vast majority of people who accept to use a popular solution with trade offs that are not good for privacy". It sounds like a finicky difference but it's actually totally different because it shows that it's not inevitable.
By taking shortcut in your language you limit what's conceived as possible by others who are asking for help, again, in a Privacy focused community.
I know you mean well here but you're off base and it's coming across as lecturing me about something you aren't fully informed about. I am not saying people shouldn't care about privacy. I'm saying if you want this type of product, all the concerns you're mentioning here are literally impossible to avoid. The best you could do is find the company with the least number of breaches and then pray they remain that way. But that doesn't really get you very far.
I must express myself quite poorly. It is not a point about technical knowledge, in fact if you were to know more about the topic than I do, I would expect you to even more be upheld to higher standards and thus not promote a bad solution, even more so assume it's the only one. I can't imagine that even a PhD student who is supposedly at the frontier of knowledge in their very narrow field would assume no alternative is possible, or will ever be. This even more the case without having both a complete understand of the landscape but also about OP's actual needs, which is probably hard to express clearly and thus leading to a lot of assumption. Here maybe a simple loud alarm from a BT speaker going out of range might be enough.
My whole point is that abandoning hope, and leading others to do so, is worst than actively finding for a barely OK compromise.
Anyway I don't want to invest more energy on this discussion unfortunately so simply wishing you the best, thanks for the clarifications.
Wow. No one is abandoning hope by simply recognizing what options exist