
How to fight the surveillance economy - burnaway
https://medium.com/@vvecsei/fighting-the-surveillance-economy-a-practical-guide-for-individuals-and-companies-cb9719fe1098
======
AndrewKemendo
The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the
default business model for Internet companies.

At its root, advertising is attempting to predict an individual's preferences
and subtlety nudge their preferences toward specific buying behaviors.

With more granular and pervasive data inputs, you can arguably do better
predictions and thus better targeting.

The only counter to this is either:

1: proof that more individual data /= better ad targeting as DDG is attempting
to do

Or

2\. Changing the default business model for internet companies

Surveillance capitalism is a natural result of our form of consumption driven
economy.

The most interesting thing here actually is that there's an argument to be
made that this is also a good approach to building very complex artificial
intelligence, effectively aggregating how people respond to input.

~~~
amelius
> The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the
> default business model for Internet companies.

This is sad because advertising is a poor monetization scheme. For instance,
let's say you make $0.10 per user through ads. Now let's say you want to
increase the price to $2.00 per user. Then oops, you can't, because ads don't
allow you to make that much for any given user. So depending on your preferred
price-point, which may be variable, you may have to switch monetization
schemes, which is terrible.

~~~
est31
Facebook seem to have been able to constantly grow their per user revenue:
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-
average...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average-
advertising-revenue-per-user/)

~~~
amelius
But Facebook has an enormous user base. Also, this is a different kind of
scaling, as the value they provide is the same as before. And they had to work
hard to change their price point.

------
nerdponx
Addendum to the solution 1: "Don't assume that, because you paid for
something, they aren't harvesting your data anyway".

Example:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19113960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19113960)

------
pmlnr
> How to fight the surveillance economy (medium.com)

Step 0: publish on your own platform without trackers, not on medium.

~~~
exhilaration
From TFA:

 _Install Privacy Badger by EFF that uncovers and blocks scripts on websites
that track you; this Medium page has 2 active trackers that would have been
blocked if you did - Google Analytics and Parse.ly_

~~~
pmlnr
That is the wrong attitude. Yes, I know how to shield myself; nobody else in
my family does.

There's nothing wrong pushing links to the article to platforms like HN,
Reddit, etc, but the source shouldn't be medium. If you write a piece like
this, it deserves to go on a platform without trackers; otherwise it's a bit
hard to take it seriously.

I'm aware that medium.com might bring in a broader audience and that it's
simple to "publish without starting a blog", but so is doing an HTML export
from a text editor these days. It's also similar to adding "why quit Facebook"
on Facebook itself - it doesn't work.

The article itself is decent though.

~~~
avmich
> Yes, I know how to shield myself; nobody else in my family does.

Another thing is that we should both educate those who don't know how to
shield themselves - and make it easier to be protected. The latter is related
to network protocols and processes and to client (and server) software.

Can we simplify Internet?

~~~
xiphias2
I think think in the future the lightning network will be great for
subsidising cost for hosting open source, non profit internet infrastructure.
We already have projects like Tor and FreeNet, but without micropayments they
are not scalable solutions. Lightning network still needs about 10 years to
become practical for every day use though.

------
sorokod
Poison the well - generate noise. By generating false signals you will devalue
the harvested data hopefully to a point it is not worth harvesting.

~~~
ilikehurdles
Speaking of which, AdNauseum is a useful extension for Firefox for devaluing
the ad economy. Google of course banned it from the chrome store.

------
ajaxaddicted
Some valid points. At the end of the day, until the governments around the
world reign in the offenders with regulations and potential jail time (GDRP
and such), nothing is going to change for the masses.

Just like every other cycle in the human history - abuse until a breaking
point is reached, regulations come in, find some other niche ripe for
"disruption", repeat the cycle.

Unrelated to the main topic - writing about the surveillance economy in a
Medium post, which itself is a textbook example of the surveillance economy
devaluates the core message a little bit for me.

~~~
avmich
Judging by how fast advertisers left some political outlets, it could be
possible to discourage cooperation with aforementioned corporations. For
software engineers to work in those may become career-limiting.

------
tannhaeuser
How about F/OSS communities, programming blogs, and forums like HN stop
allowing Google, Fb et al to index and link to their pages? Soon Google and co
will find out there's not much content of value left in their garden. I for
one can get along well with a couple sites such as github, stackoverflow,
arstechnica, some EU quality journalism sites, etc. Most other stuff turns out
to be self-promotion or ad-ladden feedbuzz for the digital precariat anyway
(the kind of which you see on the subway and who can't stop fumbling with
their smartphone for a even a second).

------
3pt14159
If you're a software developer the way to fight this is financial. Make a ton
of money then pay journalists to write about it and pay other software
developers to build the tools to evade it.[0]

Regarding VPNs:

What I want is a very small, open source program that I can give my credit
card. It will light up little DigitalOcean droplets (and other VPSes to stop
potential monitoring from them) and create VPNs here and there. I also want to
build my own browser that will be capable of making the rendering happen on
these rented-for-a-minute servers then pipe back just the PNG. I also would
make certain things local. I can use machine learning to predict which areas
of Wikipedia I will probably want to read in the future. This should just be
local and occasionally synced. Same with Stack Overflow.

Fingerprint me now bitches. (They still probably can, at least partially. It
just raises me up to the top of the trees in the jungle.)

[0] Though I will say I see the downsides. Surveillance is how we stop malice
and per-individual power is going up.

~~~
blotter_paper
>I also want to build my own browser that will be capable of making the
rendering happen on these rented-for-a-minute servers then pipe back just the
PNG.

I think you want a browser running on a servet you access over a VNC, which
will pipe back just the parts of the screen that have updated.

~~~
pnutjam
x2go is perfect for this. I used to run an instance on AWS, but I just keep
one at home now. It pipes everything through a PIA vpn.

~~~
darpa_escapee
How does x2go compare with xpra?

~~~
pnutjam
As far as I can tell, xpra uses the X protocol, which is laggy over links
under 10 Mb/s.

X2go uses the NX protocol, which is designed for slower links, so it works
better across the internet.

------
nabnob
>Searching for and writing about topics online deemed inappropriate are known
to authorities within a second thanks to cooperating companies.

This is already happening. I used to mock conservatives and free-speech
advocates who claimed that Twitter, Reddit, Facebook etc. were censoring
speech unecessarily. I'm pretty far to the left, and obviously I think racist
and sexist harassment are bad things...however, these platforms have automated
any features that allow users to report "problematic" posts or comments, which
makes it VERY easy for people to abuse and mass-report anything they disagree
with.

Why would I trust a corporation to correctly determine whether a comment is
abusive, or just an opposing point of view?

What does it mean when corporations are in charge of determining what speech
is offensive, and effectively control the "acceptable" range of discourse? In
the UK a man was investigated by the police for retweeting an offensive
limerick - [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man-
investigated...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man-investigated-
police-retweeting-transgender-limerick/)

I don't really agree with what he retweeted, but it still seems kind of
ridiculous to investigate someone for a tweet that isn't threatening or
violent.

------
matz1
Or instead make the information public/transparent as possible. To level the
playing field. Yes there are going to be many issue arise from this, so it's
these issue that need to be fixed instead of trying to fight to make
information private.

>They know more about us than we know about ourselves or than we know about
them

Right so we need to fight for knowing more information about them as much as
they know about us

Governments want surveillance the citizen, fine, the citizen should fight for
ability to surveillance the government as well.

~~~
JohnFen
> Right so we need to fight for knowing more information about them as much as
> they know about us

I don't see how that actually solves the problem.

------
rootusrootus
I suspect this is an inseparable part of the wide open Internet we love to
talk about. Changing revenue to something more direct and less invasive is an
extremely difficult task. I wonder if we will see the return of big walled
gardens (e.g. Prodigy, Compuserve, etc from the old days) with all-you-can eat
subscriptions to content within.

------
bogle
> Look for businesses that accept anonymous payment options and don’t force
> everyone to share personal information with a third-party payment provider.

What anonymous payment options are there (other than many cryptocurrencies)? I
do remember the days of sending cash through the post but I don't think that's
what the author is suggesting.

~~~
the_jpg
On my country at least there is a trend that only registered costumers have
promotions and discounts, but what really happens is that the price of the
things go up and the registered costumers pay the 'normal' price.

I'm not buying anymore on theses type of stores (markets and restaurants
mostly), but this is keeping growing difficult because every other week more
and more business are starting to ask for my 'credentials'.

~~~
myself248
Use fakes. In the US there's a famous song called Jenny with the phone number
867-5309 in the lyrics. Everyone over age 30 knows that number by heart, and a
fair number younger too.

Simply give (your local area-code)-867-5309 and there's a very good chance
that someone's already signed up with that number. If not, I'll complete the
signup with that number and whatever bogus name comes to mind. Jacob Blues,
1060 W Addison 60613 works well.

Just like AdNauseam, simply chaff the system until it's futile.

I'm sure there are similar characters in the public consciousness of every
country.

~~~
29083011397778
Shouldn't the first name always be Jenny for 857-5309? Otherwise the next
person is screwed when the cashier (potentially) asks for a name.

------
paulpauper
I understand the concern but it does not bother me much. You are much more
likely to have you data logged and used against you by visiting a small
website than twitter or Facebook. CIA/FBI agents are known to hack websites
and install trackers. The Firefox tor JavaScript exploit comes to mind.

------
kwoff
How do you reconcile the novel "1984" (published 1949) with the comments about
the internet and millenials?

------
lucas_membrane
Oppression is always structural. Organize.

------
AngryData
Step 1: Don't use a smart phone.

The problem is it seems to increasingly become a necessity for participating
in modern society.

------
KaiserPro
VPNs do literally nothing to protect your privacy.

if anything they make it _more_ obvious who is using your internet connection.
Yes, your ISP will be less able to snoop, but you are now exchanging your
ISP's complete oversight, with a VPN provider's.

Now, if you VPN is based in the EU, then you have GDPR to help you. However
the burden of proof is still on you.

So what can you practically do?

1) container tabs

Each service you _have_ to sign into has its own container. This stops each
service like google, facebook, ebay et al form a complete picture of you.

2) check your unique browser ID,
[https://panopticlick.eff.org/](https://panopticlick.eff.org/)

3) trash your browser's profile every month.

4) on your phone, keep in private mode

