Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

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Should we gatekeep adblockers? (programming.dev)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

38 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Genuine question as I'm having a dilemma.

I've seen many of my friends using Chrome without any ad blockers. Most of them don't even know that there are things called extensions that can be installed. Whenever I use their laptops, I want to throw them away. I want to tell them about extensions and ad blockers.

But as much as we hate ads, they fuel the internet. Without them, the internet wouldn't be what it is today. If ad blocker users increase, there would be a massive change in the web, and everything may be paywalled.

So should we gatekeep ad blockers and enjoy an ad-free internet as a minority? It's not like they know what they're missing.

I advocate for FOSS, though. I will tell my friends to try Linux and dual-boot it, and suggest alternatives.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I believe my digital person is a part of me. Anyone collecting and owning any part of my person with intent to manipulate me in any way, is stealing a part of my person. I call that digital slavery.

The third pillar of democracy, as we all learned in early primary school, is freedom of information through a free press. The Press, does not mean corporate media owned by a few shitty billionaires. It means freedom of information. There are only 2 relevant web crawlers, Google's and Microsoft's. It doesn't matter where you search the web, the query is going through one of these two crawlers directly or through the third party API. This is like if a hundred years ago, all newspapers were sold by one of two companies. The worst part is that, at the present, search results are not deterministic. If we both search for the exact same thing, the results will be different. This is a soft coup on the third pillar of democracy.