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I got key-logged by an abusive parent when I was 14. If that doesn’t make you take digital privacy and security seriously, nothing else will.
Sorry that happened to you :(
Thanks for the kind thoughts. <3
I would like you to know it’s heartbreaking you had your trust violated like that by an adult you are supposed to be supported by at one of the most vulnerable age stages of your life, and I admire you as a strong, resilient person for having survived and overcome that.
PRISM, the American empire mass espionage program
I hate ads.
Initally Facebook, but then also Google and Microsoft.
Piracy
I’ve been online since the early 90s, when it was just understood that there were risks, so you had to protect yourself. So it’s not so much that I got into internet privacy as that I’ve never done things any other way.
The only thing that’s really changed is that I’ve had to shift more from passively protecting myself to actively protecting myself, since corporate and government shitstains are constantly scheming to destroy our privacy in order to expand and protect their own wealth, power and privilege.
It’s insane how abruptly things went from “Don’t share any information, online, especially anything personal” to “You must be a suspicious person or a criminal if you’re not on the net with your real name, face and everything about your life” in the advent of Facebook et al.
Snowden
Data breaches and just in general, what every company seemingly knows about me even if I never used their products, and how much reach those companies have on you that’s just plain inescapable like health insurance and banks?
Do I really care that Banana Co knows I like bananas? No. Do I care that my health insurance could deny a claim based on what I purchase at the grocery store? Absolutely. Companies use that data to serve their interests first. Especially when it comes to endangered rights like LGBTQ+, people of color and abortion rights, it makes it easy to feed all that data in an opaque AI black box and discriminate against you, with no way to prove it and no legal recourse.
Especially true with for example, Jews during Nazi germany, or right now anti-war russians in Russia. Lack of privacy can be plain dangerous.
Tech -> Raspberry Pi -> Linux -> New PC -> Mining Crypto -> Monero -> Privacy
Holy shit whats up with all these guys hating here on cryptos? As if all of them would be the same. Sure better go to daddy bank…
NFTs and (x)coin speculation really made a lot of people sour on cryptocurrency, fairly or unfairly.
There are legitimate uses for crypto, I don’t think Mastercard, Visa, or your bank need to know what size dildos you’re buying online. But people treating it like a high value stock instead of actual currency really hampered it’s wide adoption imo.
I use monero for this reason. It has actual usage as a currency and maintains a fairly stable value. Sure, it fluctuates, but it does so rather slowly compared to others. It doesnt drop 15+% overnight.
To be clear: I also hate crypto EXCEPT MONERO.
When I got a new PC it had (and still has) quite powerfull cpu, so I googled if I could make some money from my PC. The answer was crypto mining. Only nice looking crypto miner for Linux was Cudo miner and it only supported Monero for cpu mining. I was mining for a year and got 50€, because of free electricity (parents). In that time I discovered that Monero is private and anonymous crypto and then I got interested in privacy. I was also a localmonero trader but paypal close both of my accounts without a reason :(.
Nice story. There are a lot more cryptos and blockchains that aim to disrupt the current centralized systems. It is rather easy to distinguish between real cypherpunk rooted projects and other useless shitcoins.
Crypto lol
If I’m being honest the switch from Reddit to Lemmy and this instance…
Advertisements and how media tends to treats people like they’re stupid
Data breaches where my information was leaked and used against me. I didn’t know any better unfortunately at the time.
Common sense.
I was actually praising Google for some reason when I was still in elementary school. I discovered Firefox, uBlock Origin and other stuff then got into privacy at the age of 14.
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