Often times, I tell people to what extend big tech is willing to hurt people, to collect more and more money, as in data! And the reaction is… disappointing. They either don’t care, sometimes even making jokes, or don’t get over the inconvenience of switching.
If I tell them that that some of those privacy apps, like brave compared to chrome, is more convenient, they don’t care. If I tell them that they hurt themselves by using big tech, like TikTok, they don’t care. If I tell them that their use of those apps hurt others, they don’t care.
I don’t think I am convincing enough. So what can I tell them?
I find a lot of people don’t feel confident enough with computers to mess with their PCs or phones to secure their tech, and I kind of get it. Like people act every impressed with my linux PC or Graphene Pixel. Ive seen old ladies give remote access to their machines to random smooth talkers, so I do understand its something many normies cannot even comprehend.
It’s too late to matter imo. People are addicted to dopamine rewarded by the algorithms, it takes work and will power to get over that. By the time you whittle them down, they’ll be on their way to be black bagged.
Depends on the audience but I’ve found adding “it’s just common sense” to the end of my argument tends to be more effective than citing sources.
“brave” is joke?
it’s not the best but basically anything is an upgrade over chrome
Corporations put a premium on your data, why shouldnt you?
I talked to a guy like you a while back, and then he also mentioned he used “Brave” and he was surprised when I mentioned the awful things behind it. So perhaps re-evaluating your suggestions and own choices is the first step?
Ask to any normy.
Would you give you home key to some random in the street ? I Guess not. Even if it say he’s working for the gov ? I guess not.
Can i see what you are doing when no one is looking ? When you are in your home, not knowing that i’m watching behind your back ?
Now let it cook a year, and come back. You will see a shift.
Here’s the thing: You don’t. You can’t. There are no magic words to make someone see things your way. You can give them ideas to mull over, but you can’t convince someone who doesn’t want to be convinced. You can be open, express your views and give your reasons to anyone willing to listen, but that is the extent of what you can do. Some people may eventually come to you for advice; welcome them and guide them as you can. Most people may take some bits from you but never start actually caring. That’s ok, that’s their way.
You can’t force people to do things your way, nor should you try. Just be honest.
Telling someone to improve their privacy is like telling them to eat healthier. They probably know on some level that they should do better, but it’s breaking habits. Changing their…everything is a daunting task on top of everything they actually want to do.
It’s a sales pitch, so I’d say sell them on one small lift at a time (Firefox, uBlock, DuckDuckGo) and build on them as they get comfortable with privacy control. Don’t shame them, don’t look down on them, don’t be overly pushy.
Show them that it’s actually more convenient to protect your privacy than not doing it. It gets real easy to get people interested in privacy when you show them that just by installing a simple adblocker you can view youtube videos without ad interruptions and you can visit sites without annoying screenlocking pop-ups.
Also, don’t use Brave if you are into privacy. Brave is doing a lot of awful things with your privacy. It just blocks others sometimes from doing these things as well. There’s so many browser alternatives out there now, that there’s 0 reason to pick Brave.
My family had a mix of android and iPhone. Whenever the iPhone people sent videos to our SMS group chats they would get compressed into near oblivion because of imessage (I’m pretty sure).
Convinced them to switch to signal so we could all share videos. Anecdotal, but sometimes an indirect route works best.
I convinced my Family and some friends of the importance of privacy, other, well, the Darwin award. It’s not possible to do more than advice the importance online on social networks, each person must be responsible for their own actions.
Be subtle about it, free of judgement. Don’t lecture them on something they likely know already, and (semi)consciously ignore to maintain an unhealthy, yet comforting pattern. It’s rather about planting seeds, than doing the thinking for them: let them come to their own conclusions next time they use it.
It’s all about predatory dark patterns, that deliberately exploit human psychology; so gear them up to recognize these abusive mechanisms. Not in a direct way, but just by casual conversation about content on their timeline, with some observation woven into it, like: quite some advertisements, huh? What does that little text say? Oh, “sponsored content”. Do your friends still post things? Because I haven’t seen any on your timeline. Shouldn’t that be the entire purpose of this platform? They give you notifications about friends liking other’s posts now? That seems a little excessive.
My mom has been using the platform a lot less since I did, and she even has opened up to the concept of disabling Facebook push-notifications. The latter needing some more time, because she’s struggling with a fear of missing out. I once disabled push-notifications for news applications too without asking, so perhaps I should do the same for Facebook (Messenger being a different application anyways).
The main problem seems to be that users have, successfully, been conditioned into wanting anti-features. My mom actually clicks personalized advertisements, and I have no clue how to cure her from that; other than to joke about a particular shoe brand always being featured. I already substituted her ad-ridden weather app for a Firefox (with uBlock) shortcut, which she has really come to appreciate. So there’s progress to be made: it just requires the right approach, and a lot of patience; which is worthwhile for loved ones.
I’m going to come at this from a totally different direction. What you need to understand is there are 2 types of normies. The normies who are generally extremely boring and just apathetic about things and the normies who will, with no exception, only listen to conspiracy theory. I’m talking their brain runs on that shit. It’s what gives them a reason to live. You know how I got my mom to care about her privacy? I told her the government was going to use Amazon data to profile her for her political beliefs and black bag her. To her that was a much more convincing argument than anything reasonable. So yeah just meet them where they are. Bring up some common conspiracy theorys and see which ones they perk up about and then just work the privacy angle into that. They’ll be on board.
If you asked me the same stuff even just 5 years ago I would have responded the same. I am a tech enthusiast and work in tech. It took some time for me to understand the risks of not taking privacy seriously. I needed to discover how companies like Meta, Google or Microsoft collect and abuse our deeply personal information.
So, I recommend doing the same to people around you. Inform them of particular examples (e.g. Google flagging a photo of a baby taken for doctor’s analysis as CSAM), not just the risks. You may change the opinion of a few people, but it is unreasonable and unlikely for you to affect everyone around you the same way.
Some can’t be convinced. The privacy (or lack of) tradeoff is worth it for them for the convince of the platform.
