Cyberspace

Posts about cyberspace and liberty. Free software, privacy, technology, copyright/copyleft, our digital rights, and whatever concerns us in the digital age.

Too much personal information online

One thing that bothered me, regarding some bloggers I follow, is that people are sharing too much personal information online. I understand that this may be a personal matter and I have no right or power to control what is being published by others or how they choose to respect their own privacy, yet it bothered me.

I don’t know if they do this knowingly but some people share too much of their personal information. I do it too. My recent post about watching Godzilla movies is an example of unnecessary personal information on internet.

Why do we do it? I think because it’s fun and we have an urge to socialize through tools we have. I don’t use social networks and I feel I satisfy my need of socialization with posting such personal data in hope of forming connection to other people. I don’t know how correct that is.

Anyway, that feels unhealthy. As one who cares about privacy, I find it very upsetting that we voluntarily share such information. However, this is a personal blog, the blogs I read are also mostly personal. Everything we do and everything we say is personal so isn’t every post somehow sharing personal information?

Isn’t every service we sign up for, every mailing list we join, every blog we subscribe to, every video we watch and every message we send a piece of our personal information and data we share with others?

Internet is not safe and I understand this a bit more and better every and each day. If we’re connected to internet, at least a bit of our personal data is being shared with others whether we like it or not. I was thinking that some people are careless about what they share online on their personal blogs and homes, then I realized I do it as well, and came to understanding that we all do it no matter how much we care.

We share our information because internet is built that way. It starts when we connect to internet and share our IP and some other information with ISPs and ends when we enter our identifier into a form to get something in return.

So maybe writing about what I watch online or what that random guy wears or where were we last Sunday is the least of our worry and we should focus on broader and wider violation of our privacy both online and offline. At least what we write on our blogs are voluntary sharing of information, and not done by some mega corporation to make benefit upon our personal lives.

To do that, of course, we should start using free software and privacy-focused services. We should avoid proprietary programs, which they almost always spy on us, and change our privacy practices. We should start respecting ourselves more, and start to understand that our data is valuable, enough that corporations are willing to pay billions of dollars to get it.

I thought I share too much personal information online, but that’s not the case. My privacy gets more violated by those who collect my personal information without my real consent. They are willing to pay billions of dollars in fines rather than to stop it (example , example , example , example ), that’s how valuable our data is.

We should stop this. Governments won’t do enough, as they benefit from these privacy violations, so the real change will be done by people. It’s people, and those who care enough to change, that will change how we’re treated. Nobody cares enough about online privacy except us, who are victims of violations.

If Mark Zuckerberg, who is one of biggest violators of people’s privacy, cares so much that he refuses to share his own personal data , we should refuse it too. If privacy is so much important than people who run these mega privacy-violating corporations value it, then we should value it as well.

I am deeply worried about how our personal information is handled. It’s not just a matter of advertisement, but it’s a matter of freedom. The first step to remain free, from bad people both online and offline, is to care about our privacy. Liberty is so much more valuable than anything else, and I believe people know and understand that, yet we don’t have the prerequisite of it, which is to be able to be private.

Privacy is needed so we can practice our rights, such as freedom of speech. Without privacy, and without protection from the violators, we are doomed to lose everything we have, everything our fathers fought for, the most important of which to be our liberty and freedom.

So use free software, use freedom and privacy-respecting programs and services, and know the value of your information so you can respect yourself more and better.

Aside

Putting aside all the privacy and users’ rights violations by AI companies, the state of AI today is fascinating. We’re living in a world full of amazing advancements in tech and life. The fact that AI can now help blind people get through everyday life, or talk to you about your plans for the day, or summarize texts with sufficient quality is beyond everything we thought we’re getting few years ago. There’s no doubt that AI is going to make our lives easier. Only matter is how humane will it be, both in matters of online and offline human rights.

Bonus: OpenAI introduces GPT-4o (YouTube Link)

AI knows about you!

I am one of the people who tried to block so-called “AI” programs from training on my published works. I implemented every code or rule I know to block corporations use my material for training their programs.

I’m not against AI, but I don’t want my material be published or used under a proprietary license. One other reason I tried to block them is that data-hungry companies such as Microsoft and Google were using these programs to gather more data on people and violating users’ privacy.

However, my efforts to block them from training on my works seems to be failed. It seems that regardless of my effort and how I asked robots to not research/train on my blog and stop crawling my data, they did it anyway.

Read more… “AI knows about you!”

Bring back small blogs

I merged, combined, summarized, and re-published pages on this blog and made it as small as possible. Bring back small blogs. Web used to have so many small yet awesome blogs. We used to spend a lot of our time reading material published on them, not caring about the design or off-topic pages.

Let’s bring that back. I start with myself. I don’t need a long bio page or every detail about my internet presence. There’s no need to include every way you can contact me. I won’t make long lists about what I use, nobody cares about that. Though I can publish a post about it.

I won’t explain everything and every word, I can link to Wikipedia or send people to a web site that explains that well. I’ll stay focused on the topic I’m talking about.

I won’t care if the design is old or new. I won’t care if people think sidebars are outdated. If it’s usable and satisfies the reader, then it’s good enough for me. I want to focus on what’s important here, which is what I share and what I have to say.

I feel all the attention that goes to these pages are to satisfy our urge for attention. We should stop playing for the invisible audience and let go of ourselves. We’re not the main focus of other people. Most people won’t care about whether our site is blue or green or purple. If you like an special color, then set it for your theme but stop caring about my opinion on it.

I believe we should bring back small blogs because we’re now full of crappy corporate web that values benefit before people. We should bring back small blogs because those are the blogs that put people behind everything else. We used to care so much about what we publish, not how much we explain ourselves.

Nobody cares if I use Emacs or Vim. Nobody cares if I have 16 GB of RAM. Nobody cares about the distribution of GNU+Linux I run on my computer. I may explain or share my experience using them, and those can be useful for many people, including me, but I feel nobody cares about a long list of tools I use. People may read it but nobody misses it when it’s gone.

Well, this is my feeling. It’s not wrong to feel otherwise and it certainly is not wrong to do the opposite.

Social networks are not always bad

I avoid using social networks. It’s just that I don’t like them and I find them irritating. But are they always bad? I don’t think so.

I’ve advocated for using ethical social networks such as Fediverse/Mastodon instead of crappy ones like Instagram and Twitter but I have my own reasons. My objections to these networks are that they treat users unfairly, violate their rights, and keep business their first priority.

I don’t like social networks, I don’t use them, but I have less objections to ethical ones than to ones like Facebook. I may not be OK with the feeling I get of an ethical social network but one like Instagram gives me 100 more reasons.

However, I would still object to banning them. You see, I think it’s bad that these corporations are harvesting users’ data but if one, consciously, wants to use them, one has every right to.

I always tell people to avoid these networks but I’m completely against forcing people to leave them. These networks have a massive flow of information passing through them and this flow helps people express themselves and share information they might not get from other sources.

Accessing social networks are essential for freedom today. They are replacing news sources and information channels; and they’ve become a force from people to protect themselves from injustice and tyranny. Banning them only helps corruption.

I don’t praise what they do, I still find them too much unappealing but I can’t deny the amount of good they do for people. I can’t deny how much they’ve helped people survive a world of misinformation and propaganda. They have become a tool for people to actually have a voice.

Everything these proprietary privacy-violating social networks such as Twitter do, can be done using user freedom-respecting privacy-minded social networks such as Mastodon but for now, we’re stuck with these crappy ones.

I cheer for replacing these proprietary networks with free/libre ones but I also will protest banning them. Banning them may do some god but it will do more damage as it will only take away people’s voice.

Banning them will only result in more corruption and more violation of people’s right and freedom. These social networks, free or nonfree, have given people a voice and a power to make actual social change and they have become a powerful tool for people to fight for themselves.

They make dictators unhappy, they make tyrants angry, and they make powerful people weak in front of people. They empower people the way nobody can’t. They bring back freedom of expression to people, the way nobody is able to.

I don’t use social networks but I’m happy they exist as they’ve made the world much better place. Because of them, many tyrants are actually afraid of people and maybe are kept in place. I may not use them but I appreciate them every day.

Security decisions and free software

One of the reasons I only use free software is that it gives me more security.

Of course not all libre programs are secure but software freedom gives you more security as you can study the source code and edit/publish it the way you want. So if there’s a security vulnerability, you won’t be forced to wait for the original author to find and fix it.

You may be a programmer or security researcher and fix it yourself or pay someone to do it for you, based on your needs. Anyhow, it’s a perk of using free software.

But, another advantage I get from free software is that I can edit it so it won’t force me to be secure!

For example, I don’t like to change my password on a program running locally. If it wants to force me to do so, then I can modify the program to avoid it. It’s what I’m able to do because I get the four essential freedoms regarding that program.

As much as I appreciate the author of that program wanting to keep people secure, I believe people should also have a say in it. If I want to keep stuff less secure, intentionally, I should be able to.

There are some things to do and some precautions to take to make sure you have base minimum security and the rest is how you choose your actions based on your threat model. I appreciate programs reminding this to people and even taking the first steps in their own hands. It’s so useful for people with less understanding of how cybersecurity works.

Yet I believe there should be hints about threats but the users should be able to take everything, absolutely everything, in their hands if they want to.

Security should be implemented in programs by default. It shouldn’t be a luxury and it shouldn’t take technical skills for one to be secure digitally. Yet it shouldn’t be something that the user has no say in.

I believe free software fixes this problem by giving us the four essential freedoms we deserve. Our rights to use, study, modify, and share the program are there to make sure we own what we have and will be able to make it work the way we want it to work.