this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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Privacy
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I'd sure hope so! Many of the things that privacy nuts like us do are not efficient uses of one's time.
They might require constant vigilance. They might need recurring work for continued effectiveness. They might necessitate exposure to intrusive negative emotions ("what is Google doing this week?!").
If you're not having fun, focus on measures that you implement once and then never have to think about again.
For example, I wouldn't recommend GrapheneOS to a journalist in an authoritarian regime. It might be "more secure", but they have a job to do and can't keep dicking around with obscure pointer authentication settings or whatnot. They should just get a current iPhone, enable Lockdown Mode if its tradeoffs are acceptable to them, and continue doing their best job, which isn't "phone administration".
LARPing as Jason Bourne, or prepping for the Rokobasiliskocalypse, is a hobby. It's okay, I do it too. However, it's not approachable or understandable to people who don't share that hobby, or are not as alarmed at the general state of things as we are.
people are literally targeted by this system today. and i live in the third world, i'm ripe for the taking.
i'm glad this can be a hobby for some of you guys though.
It kind of has to be, if you're trying to be persistent about the whole thing. It's easy to feel overwhelmed and burn out over all of the different threats we're trying to defend against. I don't see how you can keep at it for months or years if you feel no joy over it. But maybe being deathly, relentlessly afraid of the dangers around us is enough after all.
If you don't even like doing this stuff, wouldn't it be better to focus on measures that require little upkeep? This is what my example suggestion was getting at, something that's as close to set-and-forget as possible, while getting you 90% of the way there. (Depending on your threat model, sure. If yours says that the sky is falling if Tim Apple gets your iCloud data, it certainly doesn't apply.)