Freedom and security of information

[Lego]

What are your views on infosec?


I have pretty much given up. After a decade as a hardcore linux guy, doing everything I possibly could to secure my info and data, I've had enough of it. Having a cellphone pretty much guarantees a huge personal data loss. Mitigated with iPhone but even then not completely secure.  With programs like Raptor, Prism, etc... they are in the backbone. Every major player on the 'net is in Prism, giving your personal data to Five Eyes nations. Even if they weren't, the gov't literally has a line into the backbone. No matter what you do, or what you use, they have your info.


So, I've given up. I'm now using Gmail instead of protonmail. And other google services. I'm using Windows 10. It does everything I need an OS to do, has free updates for life, and doesn't get in my way. I don't have to configure the fuck out of it and spend energy and time keeping it up like Linux. It has games and doesn't start at $1,799 unlike Mac. So I've made an acceptable (to me) trade. I know I'm being monitored, like everyone else. I accept it as a business cost and move on with my life.


There really is no point in trying to be safe anymore, it seems, outside of the basics of common sense (I wouldn't post my credit card here, etc...) The money to be made is in mass collection of large data sets, which means we're all getting mined everywhere. Cellphone, websites, even our OS.


So I've made my peace and I don't worry about it anymore, after decades of near tinfoil-hat data paranoia.


What are your views?

[maxbeedo]

There are certainly reasons to be worried, though I try to tell myself that 99.9% of the data collection is for market research purposes, because traditional surveys are a hassle and companies have no idea what "most people" really want, as they only hear from the people who were so angry they put forth the effort to complain.  You could probably have a conversation with any random person in charge of collecting this information from the tech companies and they'd be perfectly nice, humble, actually want to do good, etc...   but then what about the next guy in charge of that info?  And the next?  You either have to hope that every person with access also has the integrity to not abuse it, or hope that the data is so ridiculously large that no one really has time to parse through it all to find anything of exploitable worth.  Working in computer repair we had all sorts of people paranoid that we'd go looking through their pictures or files or whatever, and the genuine answer was "Ummm, we really don't have time to be looking through your stuff", so I use that experience to lessen the worry a bit.

[Sssith]

Everyone is after your data.



It is rather upsetting.

It usually comes down to greed, I'm looking at you Facebook.  But there is no shortage of guilty parties in this area.  More and more we, and the government is giving into corporations and I find that very troubling.

On the government side of things it is also pretty ugly.  Tough to say which is worse.  I think we will see the growth of more groups like anonymous. 

On the personal front, I am similar to you in that I try not to do anything too stupid.  Try to limit my exposure, but ultimately I realize that there is a limited amount of things I can do.  I have long debated getting a VPN for my personal use.  Honestly, that is the best that we can do.  At that point, you are basically stating that you trust the VPN provider which I don't.  A side point to VPN is that corporations are getting good at blocking their use.