Hey there, this is not mine, but someone else's post that I found incredibly insightful. I'm kinda saving my smerits because I'm planning to do something similar to what you're doing... but if you could step in, I'd appreciate it.
Even worse, I think this kind of censorship could seep over into everyday life, for average Americans as well as for anyone else. Would you criticize, say the US government if you had reason to believe that any political comment online could somehow affect your personal life or your career? I dont know about you, but this sounds like the beginnings of a surveillance state to me.
What do you think? Am I overreacting? Do you share my concerns?
Hi MJK_Anfaenger,
With all due respect, I believe that the "Subject" that you chose for this thread was in error. I've corrected it for you in my reply.
Everything we do is capable of being tracked. Twenty years ago, people talked about being forced to be implanted with a "microchip" and tracked. There's really no need for that since we've voluntarily submitted to tracking. We all carry tracking devices, mostly made by Apple and/or Samsung, that can do more than any form of microchipping with today's technology could. We have Alexa, Siri, Google, and Cortana listening to us, to assist us in our daily tasks. Our Fitbit's track our every move. Our watches record our pulse. Our televisions can listen to and in some cases see us. Many of us cover our laptop cameras for a reason. There is no reason to believe that this tracking power has not been used extensively. In fact, there is much evidence that it already has.
Facebook is just one of many actors that abuse the information that we provide to them. Google, YouTube, Twitter are others. There are MANY others as well, consider cloud services such as a Google or Microsoft account. Also consider cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute, etc.
I assume that anything I do online is being profiled by someone for some reason. There is every incentive for these businesses to cooperate with the three letter agencies. They often do so without requiring a warrant, usually the "Terms of Service" we agree to give them the right to basically do whatever they want with our data.
Consider the scenario that occurred in Austin, TX last month. The person that was distributing bombs, how did they locate him? They filtered through Google searches in the Texas area looking for keywords matching components in the bombs. That gave them a pool of suspects. Then they cross-referenced that with payment records showing that the suspect purchased a specific kind of battery from Alibaba that was used in the bombs. Following that, they began surveillance on the suspect (which I believe was assisted by his phone geolocation records) which led to a confrontation in which he was killed (unclear if it was from one of his bombs detonating, a self-inflicted suicide, or a police kill).
While it is, of course, good that the person that was bombing innocents is no longer doing so, the privacy implications of this are very serious. Think of how many innocent people had their search histories gone through to hone on in that one suspect.
Is it worth it? That's a tough call. I do not want to trade liberty for security. I also don't want innocent people killed.
What I do know is that centralized 'gatekeeper' platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, etc., etc., are dangerous. Just as centralized money is dangerous. Just as centralized 'gatekeeper' news sources are dangerous.
I support next-generation decentralized platforms for social media that cannot be censored. There are several out there, and several more in development. My organization is crowdfunding one approach that aims to resolve a number of problems in the space. What emerges from these will hopefully be services that cannot be censored due to their design. Obscene and illegal content can be moderated without limiting free speech. Privacy should be up to each user, with the defaults set on full lockdown. A way to monetize it without ads that profile you, such as ethical ads, distributed computing, and/or subscription models, need to be developed so that people that produce great content can move off of platforms such as YouTube that can make them penniless by demonetizing their videos. There's a lot of ideas to improve this. They all start with decentralized networks, strong encryption, and build from there. Not everything is ideal to store on a blockchain, but there is certain parts of such a solution that would be best done with a blockchain approach. When our project begins incubation, it's going to reach out to several different other projects that are working on some of the problems (identity, advertising, distributed computing, and distributed storage projects). These are the building blocks of next-generation microblogging (obsoleting Twitter/Gab), social networking (obsoleting Facebook/LinkedIn), image/video sharing (obsoleting Instagram and YouTube), messaging (obsoleting Messenger and Telegram), distributed search (obsoleting Google and Bing), and live streaming (obsoleting Periscope).
I am not a fan of social media. I have it because of my business dealings and now BTRIC. I would trust it more if I had more control over my own information, and I knew it couldn't be used to track and profile me. I'll be much happier when these better platforms are the norm.
Best regards,
Ben
