>People have been raising flags about this for literally decades now and the other shoe has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way.
The threat model I work off is "fascist government seizes power in the United States and sequesters all data for all citizens from the top 15 large corporations". Then they get to work weeding out undesirables. This would happen, I'd estimate, in the space of about a month although if history is anything to go by, the signs will have been flashing for a while.
You could just switch at that point, I suppose, and hope that something in the last 15 years of emails, chats, your entire contact network and your location history doesn't incriminate you along with the fact that you just switched.
Sure, but if that happens... I think we're fucked either way?
I think any providers would be just as susceptible (maybe more so; Google ostensibly has the means to protect data, legally and technologically), and your data would already be on Google's servers unless you only emailed or chatted with other non-Google users.
There are providers (not free, though), like ProtonMail, who store your data encrypted, in a fashion that would prevent this threat model.
I bet that Google would sooner gladily erase itself all of its data rather than give them to a fascist gov (seems that they cooperated mildly in the past, but not with a fascist government, with a normal one). They already took tough decisions like to ditch Chinese market, under pressure of the employees. Yes Google is clearly leftist, ecolo, all you want, as they are just the sum of their engineers. Great minds.
No, you're not fucked either way. In fact, if you're white, middle class, etc. you're probably better off than most and will be given the most leeway.
If your data on google/facebook/microsoft/amazon servers is kept to the bare minimum (& kept innocuous), if you self host and if you keep your data on smaller services your chances of getting caught up in a dragnet operation are minimized. Your chances of having an elevated "risk" score because of some stray data point (e.g. some people you emailed once, or some guy's house you visited) is minimized.
They're not going to keep track of everybody personally, but they will be running machine learning models all up and down every data point you left to pick out anything suspicious.
I totally agree with you because things just don't work like that.
When Nazis came my grand father was a teenager. A lot of local chads believed in them and joined SS and did all the dirty work. Then when soviets came these chads were afraid that they will be prosecuted for murdering Jews so they did the only logical thing - joined soviet milicija. What basically made them untouchable.
My grand father's brother ran away to US. These local chads then could "prosecute" all the family for "joining partisan movement". It was not soviets from Moscow that were counting every head. It was local supporters who knew each other from the high school. If there was some brother missing in family, they could send all the family to gulags, take over the land, take over houses by accusing family joining partisans. So my grand father spent his teenage years hiding in neighboring villages.
It is not Google who will give you out. They will have upper hand if anything because they are big and etc.
It will be your employer who will comply. It will be your local mailman (what was all these packages you were receiving from China?). It will be your neighbor who likes to shoot guns and doesn't like you for one reason or another.
What people should understand that this "fascist government" will be sitting in DC. They will not be sending somebody from DC to Minnesota because "someguy at gmail dot com" wrote something against them. How inefficient that would be. It will be local people who will be supporting "the new great government". And they have much more compromising information about you than your emails.
When the doomsday comes you will not be hiding your baked beans in your bunker from zombies. It will be your neighbor whose three kids are starving. Or just your other neighbor who likes guns and to eat. And he is hungry, pretty hungry right now.
>What people should understand that this "fascist government" will be sitting in DC. They will not be sending somebody from DC to Minnesota because "someguy at gmail dot com" wrote something against them. How inefficient that would be.
It'll be easy as pie. The data is there in an easily consumable format. The tools exist to categorize and find undesirables. Tools exist which can be used to rank you in terms of desirability.
DC won't sent somebody to Minnesota because of what you wrote in a gmail alone. However, what you wrote in gmails would likely contribute to a "social scoring system" which would be used against you.
I both agree and disagree with you at the same time.
Yes, social scoring would be easy to implement. However for it to work you would need critical mass of people believing in it.
If you live in Minnesota and somebody in DC says that your score is low you can kinda just ignore it.
When you local milkman stops selling you milk because of it, then things get dark.
However your local milkman can already have "a score" for you which is even worse than that one from DC. E.g. not selling you milk because you are gay or have a green mohawk.
HN attracts specific technical audience who tends to see things from very technical (hard, logical) point of view. However what I want to stress here are "softer" things - how society works, how people interact, how they sell out, what they want to achieve with this etc. It is much harder to define and is much scarier TBH.
It might be a good idea to be nice to your neighbors, demonstrate only mild opinions, basically just "hide in a gray mass of people" before you start setting up your own email servers, degoogle yourself and etc if you are thinking about fascist government taking over.
For technology or corporations to betray you, you most probably be betrayed by society before that.
My thought is that if fascist government takes over, Minnesota at first would be something like Hong Kong. It is not like social scoring could/would happen overnight. At first you would need a lot of people to believe in it, a lot of people to support it and etc.
I understand that things would not so simple of course.
My main message is that technology is only a tool, it is still people, society doing the act.
That's why individial self-hosting isn't a good defense - it only works if it's widespread. If half the population uses GenericPrivateITservice then the government can't crack down on those users.
People "opting in" to privacy systems can't work, that's why it needs to be solved politically.
Risk is not only an estimate of the extent of harm if something happens but the likelihood of it happening, hence they're not prepping for Doomsday - which would be fairly pointless - but worse case scenario, of which there are several vying for the title of worst case, each with varying chance.
I'd rather liken it to fastening my seatbelt than prepping for Doomsday.
I've never understood people who stock up on baked beans and hide in bunkers either.
You're right though. Maybe between the people who have facebook accounts they used to say bad stuff about dictator du jour and those who don't have facebook accounts at all they'll definitely go after the latter ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And, maybe there won't ever be a fascist dictatorship in the United States. After all, right wing populism is getting more and more unfashionable these days.
When people are saying they legally kill other people for their political views, that's often a fake. What often happens, no one cares about political views, people just using the tool for profit, revenge, career, or lulz.
Nothing stops me from registering a free e-mail address garbagetime @ somedomain.com, writing any e-mails I want there, then letting your government know about your secret e-mail address you use to discuss politics.
I thought the point of the internet is that it removes, to an extent, the friction of distance, meaning that the circles you move in may not be local to you. In the past, if I wanted to chat about politics I would have to do it with someone local or someone face to face. The postal service removed some of that friction, and now there is far less friction than that.
I doubt your neighbours will know much about your politics unless they're your Facebook friends too, and why would you add your neighbours to Facebook when you can speak to them face to face? (and do you?)
> The threat model I work off is "fascist government seizes power in the United States and sequesters all data for all citizens from the top 15 large corporations".
Dragnet surveillance of telcos, along with network/traffic analysis, which we've known about for a while, means avoiding any particular tech company is going to be irrelevant to concealing that you are an “undesirable” in any case unless you've taken pains to have your basic telecommunication somehow untraceable.
Do you think a fascist government could actually come to power if they had to exploit the 15 largest tech companies? We're in an oligopoly, the 15 tech companies have far more power than any president.
IMO: I'm not sure I want the 15 largest tech companies having as much policy influence across the globe as they do. For that reason, it may be reasonable to 1) resist them, 2) encourage others to resist them.
The threat model I work off is "fascist government seizes power in the United States and sequesters all data for all citizens from the top 15 large corporations". Then they get to work weeding out undesirables. This would happen, I'd estimate, in the space of about a month although if history is anything to go by, the signs will have been flashing for a while.
You could just switch at that point, I suppose, and hope that something in the last 15 years of emails, chats, your entire contact network and your location history doesn't incriminate you along with the fact that you just switched.