I have always been curious about this. Did you get them to use other services or did they stubbornly refuse and you just accepted it? I am talking using Chrome, using Windows, using social media like Tiktok or Facebook or Instagram, etc. Bonus points if you have kids because that is even more work in the privacy realm
I don’t try and push my weird opinions on my wife lmao. She knows how I feel and understands and does what she wants and that’s okay. My advice is to communicate and respect each other even if you don’t agree and don’t be a controlling dork.
I got my SO to use a password manager.
She got sick of pihole and my firewall blocking her Facebook memes, so she has her own segregated WiFi network, then she’s less of an attack vector for me.
Aslong as she uses 2fa on her main accounts and has a password manager I’m happier than most.
bros the only sensible partner here
if one tries to push their techness onto their partner their partner is gonna get annoyed and leave. privacy hardly matters in the real world anyway
privacy hardly matters in the real world anyway
Agree with all of the above and especially this. It’s counterintuitive for me - I’ve spent a lot of time and money to set up privacy conscious services for myself and my family over the years. But practically speaking, our lives wouldn’t be any different if I hadn’t.
I still do it and invest in it because I think privacy is a fundamentally important human right, but I have to recognize that it’s my own passion and not someone else’s.
I mostly agree with you and frankly it is enough to have one friend who uploads their contacts to big tech firms with yours included and maybe tags you here and there and you are already uploading data without your consent.
Although what I see recently is that facebook fails to recommend anything interesting to me. I had to keep my account, but deleted everything from the day of my registration and haven’t uploaded a single thing for years.
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im using lemmy because the reddit app sucks not coz i think my data is safer lol
weird opinions?
on the contrary, I think it’s a weird opinion to think that uploading personal photos and videos on surveillance capitalisme hubs is no big deal. It’s a weird opinion to think that you’ve got nothing to hide from perverted companies and states.
I think you missed the point.
no, I see your point but you could have wrote: I don’t try and push my opinions
you wrote “weird opinions” and in the context of this thread (see the op 👆), what do you think “my weird opinions” means?
From the perspective of our partners, privacy is often a “weird opinion”. If you can’t accept that it is a fringe area of interest in society then you are almost certainly isolated or living in a bubble.
it’s weird to call something weird just because you think that “the society” thinks it’s weird
have a weird sunday
so u think that whenever u do anything suddenly the big surveillance has a profile of you and theyre gonna kill you or smth. what do you think thats gonna happen.
is this irrational fear of some phantom big government coming after you, not weird?
u also just proved ur weird by getting so defensive about this. the goverment doesnt want ur number bro nobody does
no, I don’t think that.
can you please show me where I wrote that
The straw-iest strawman argument that ever straw’d.
Part of relationships is accepting people. They behave the way they do because they have values and preferences and don’t always align with ours. Respect that. Make your case, but respect that they may not come to the same conclusions you do.
100% with you on this regarding relations with adults. But children is where it gets spicy. Like, for me, I genuinely believe I’m not doing my job as a father if I don’t protect my children from google, meta, etc… My wife genuinely thinks she needs to protect them from me so that I don’t ostrasize them from their peers. It’s a real issue…
neither gates nor zuck nor jobs let their kids anywhere near the tech they sold
do you have a source for that?
My wife and I negotiated that we don’t post kids photos, names, or specifics to open groups. Emailing them is okay. Posting to closed groups is okay.
It’s been a few years, and it’s working out so far.
We have a similar thing going. But my kids are getting to an age where they wanna use tiktok and post on insta. I think that beyond the privacy issues it’s actually a mental health risk. My wife thinks being excluded from what their peers are doing is an even bigger health hasard.
We haven’t quite gotten to that point.
My take is that kids can post non-identifying content as long as there’s no public comment section. I’m not sure how that’ll work out, but we’ll try it (or whatever we negotiate) when it comes time.
this guy relations.
I just added her MAC address to be assigned its own specific IP address, and she gets served a public DNS as opposed to my PiHole’s IP address.
She expressed actually wanting advertisements, and at this point in life, I’m too tired to argue about it.
She expressed actually wanting advertisements
We really do live in a society
can I… hear her argument? I just wanna know what fallacy has concocted here lol. not trying to be insulting to your wifi or anything, just bantering a little bit, I’ve come across some that believe adblocking is piracy though, and I’m curious.
Some people like targeted advertising because they enjoy being shown things that are potentially relevant to their interests.
My wife sends me products she finds interesting and they all contain the facebook tracker at the end. It is a scientific fact that women are better consumers, hence ads are mostly created for them. My wife hates ads while watching videos, but taps on them during scrolling all the time. Fortunately I haven’t been asked to get her off pi-hole. It is tricky with ads, as you think that they are offering a solution for something, but in many cases they are establishing a desire you did not have before.
that’s crazy to me idk. merely seeing an ad annoys me enough to stop whatever I was doing. my inner contrarian avoids any product I’ve seen advertised.
It annoys me as well and I rather not visit any website that refuses my visit because of my adblocker. However, ads work with your unconscious and unfortunately, they work on everyone, that’s why the best is to avoid them.
She clicks on instagram ads. I know my wife does.
Instagram hosts their own ads so she can still have an adblocker and… shudders click the Instagram ads.
My spouse is almost the opposite of me in the privacy/FOSS realm.
They use TikTok and other social media, don’t mind ads, use Windows, love Chrome and their Macbook, etc.
We’ve talked about privacy and FOSS a lot. They have the “I don’t care if China/corpos/NSA mine my data, I have nothing to hide.” Plus they like targeted ads and algorithmic content suggestions.
We have a lot of mutual respect for each other and I don’t force my views on them, and they know I won’t use certain apps. I gently suggest FOSS apps to them and sometimes they use them, sometimes not.
They also don’t object to watching shows and movies with me that I “aquire totally legally” because I don’t use streaming services.
I have told them that any children we have, I want to raise with a “FOSS first” philosophy, and they are cool with that.
Ultimately, I want my kids to have the choice of what software they use, FOSS or not. But for my part, they will know that I will only support the FOSS stuff, if they want to go proprietary, that’s on them.
I’ve also discussed with my partner that they’re welcome to use Facebook but I strongly object to putting photos of children on there until they’re old enough to make their own decisions.
I’ve pointed out that posting publicly is purely for vanity reasons unless they’ve made a conscious decision to have exclusively friends and family. In other words, you don’t need to please people who don’t matter.
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This transphobic mf’er doesn’t even get that saying “they” is protecting both their and their spouse’s privacy — on the damn privacy community! Smh
You are lucky to have multiple wives.😉
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When a lot of us went to school, “they” “them” was only used to talk about a plural of people
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the singular use is so old, when it was first introduced, “they” was still spelled with a fucking thorn!
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You can but there’s a point where the SO’s actions actively invade your privacy too against your will.
Real example: My SO uploads all her photos to Google Photos. Because I also appear on those Photos, I am now being tracked/used for training ML models/instrumentalised/whatever other evil things Google does nowadays against my will.
Google doesn’t care whether I consented to that or not.
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True. And you can talk to your wife about that. But unless you provide a better alternative it’s going to harm her personal workflow. And this goes for your friends, strangers in public, anytime of photos taken that you happen to be around for.
I think the reasonable measure is to concede this point. Your friends are going to be social media users
Security and privacy are much like hygiene and responsibility. If someone close to you doesn’t have any, it will put you in risk as well.
This. Your wife is another adult that can disagree with you. You can explain, you can present ideas but if you disagree at the point of you considering intervening in her private life you should just break up.
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This is where I’m at. If I push it any more, she will turn off wifi on her phone and complain.
I’ve tried getting her to move to my hosted email instead of gmail, but she refused. She’s been wanting an Alexa speaker and even has the kids on board. That’s where most of my energy goes for picking my battles at this stage.
You should become vegan if you care about the future.
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if your hair was “falling out” just because you tried to have a vegan diet, either you were doing something really wrong or something’s wrong with your body. Did you see a doctor or a nutritionist?
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i’m sorry to read that.
I had a friend who had to go back to eating meat after +20 years of vegetarianism because of health problems like yours. It wasn’t a joy for him as it was an ethical choice.
good luck
Lmao, always pop up uninvited
I’ll keep eating my steaks, thank you very much 🥩
I make the private option easier than the locked in version.
Homeassistant will let us see our locations, run lights, run media centers, control AC, etc. So why do you need Google Home or Google Maps Location Sharing?
Signal will let us chat over WIFI unlike texts, and I will answer it unlike a Google chat account. Before the SMS death it was easier since it did SMS and signal in one app, easier to convince someone if it can replace the old one and add new features.
I configure two SSIDs, one for things I trust and one for those I don’t. I can run firewall rules and add security on the backend where they can’t see it.
Tiktok you can run a campaign against it by saying it damages cognition, is harmful to youth, supports the CCP.
You can run a pi hole style filter list,ehich might break some stuff so you have to be willing to play tech support.
I don’t know anything about kids but it couldn’t hurt to teach them some simple skills like html so they get a taste for what’s happening behind the scenes.
Signal removing SMS support was the final straw that made me stop recommending it to friends. I had 100% of my contacts on Signal before that, and very few have left, but my new friends all use Instagram/Kakao/whatever.
I know that wasn’t very related to your comment, but UGGHHH
The worst part is how confusing it was for older people, who were worried the whole app was going to not work.
Signal was upset that “oh well some people can’t figure out what’s SMS and what’s encrypted”, but that was kind of… good? You could give parents, grandparents, etc an SMS app that was easy as the old one, and secure with the right people.
Don’t get me started on the chat color fiasco. No signal, I SHOULD NOT CHANGE COLOR. I assign colors to people to distinguish them, I don’t change who I am based on who I talk to.
Home assistant really is a game changer. Not having ten different apps is great, finally got our roomba fully offlined with rest980 and it works better than the official app and doesn’t take forever to load or abrupty stop when there’s an aws outage
Robot vacuums are something non-tech people love, then they use the app and they don’t love it anymore haha.
Shout out to Valetudo, which saved the day on our chinese roombas.
I am not quite happy with how the current iteration of the documentation no longer supports DIYing the firmware, it is actually still possible and you don’t have to use dustbuilder.
Exactly this!
I have different VLANs at home, I have a guest Wi-Fi, and my significant other simply uses the guest Wi-Fi.
I’ve been able to convince them to use signal, but that’s about it. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. On their own isolated network
“I will answer it unlike…”
That’s not making things easier, that’s just forcing people to adapt to your niche choices or not be able to communicate with you.
At the time I was changing to signal, I only had google messages on my desktop, so I would answer accumulated messages at home.
There was no cell service at work so SMS didn’t work, but I could use wifi.
In modern times, we have RCS so it’s kind of not really a problem anymore, but everyone I know uses signal now anyways.
I didn’t make it hard, I got Telegram and Matrix and met people halfway where I could. But naturally everyone I know just settled on signal since it also did SMS so it replaced an app rather than added one. Plus id didn’t feel like a “sign up” since it just worked. Those days are gone but the network effect is already chugging along.
And that’s materially different from having to join Discord/Teams/Facebook because that’s where someone you need to speak with communicates with how?
SMS doesn’t require you to join any specific service except the phone service you’re already paying for.
And OP was talking about not answering ‘google chat’. Calling that SMS is comparing apples to potatoes.
Yes, this is correct.
I could not have used SMS for most of the day since I worked on the top floor of a multi-level basement. I had wifi and a VPN though.
At the time I moved to signal, Google Message, or chat or whatever was being replaced with Allo and Duo and everyone was pretty un-jazzed about the whole thing.
Sure, but OP and the people they want to connect with don’t have to force their choice of proprietary app into others when there’s a universal solution that works for all phones.
Yeah I’m not super happy with Signal’s level of openness, but I also wouldn’t call it proprietary. It is open source and I could run my own server if I really wanted to, but that would just make it harder.
At the time we were moving from a walled garden to one of 3 encrypted OSS solutions, and I had all of them until we naturally coalesced on one.
SMS at the time didn’t work due to not having cell service, and while we “have” RCS now to solve that issue, I don’t know anyone who uses it.
I’d they’re compassionate, have them watch The Social Dilemma
I’ve been surprised by the number of people who dont care about privacy but deleted their Facebook accounts after seeing that film
I highly doubt that this will work in my case, as my wife only watches romcoms, but I’ll give it a try.
I wouldn’t say that my partner “doesn’t care”, but they take a much more pragmatic view than I which results in more exposure. In general, we do the following:
- To a first approximation, they decide what apps and services they use. It’s not a monarchy. They’ll ask for feedback when comparison shopping, but often the answer is “every dominant ecosystem in this space is terrible, the privacy respecting options don’t meet your requirements, this option is 5% worse and this one is 5% better… glhf”.
- For social media accounts that share posts about our nuclear family, we come to broad consensus on the privacy settings and practices. There’s give and take here, but I make space to use dominant sharing apps and they make space to limit our collective exposure within reason. If I have a desire to “harden” the privacy settings on a service, it’s on me to put in the effort to craft the proposed settings changes and get their buy in on the implications.
- I have many fewer privacy raiding accounts than they do. I both benefit from transitive access to the junk they sign up for, and pay a cost in my own privacy by association. This just is what it is. The market for partners that align with my own views perfectly is basically zero though, and honestly I probably wouldn’t put up with my shit even if I could find one.
- If I can self-host a competitive option for a use-case that I’m happier with… they’ll give it the old college try. But it has to actually be competitive or they’ll fail out of the system and fall back to whatever works for them. If we can figure out what’s not working we’ll sometimes iterate together, but sometimes it’s just not good enough and we go back to something I like worse.
It’s basically like navigating any other conflict in values. You each have to articulate what your goals are, and make meaningful compromise on how to achieve something that preserves the essentials on both sides. As a privacy outlier, sometimes one also needs to be able to hear “I want to do normal shit and not feel bad about it” and accept it. But if we do want to reach for outlier privacy practices in some specific area, it’s on us to break that desire down into actionable steps in realistic directions at a sustainable pace and to not ignore the impacts to our partners of the various tradeoffs we’re proposing. Privacy is often uncomfortable and we need to acknowledge the totality of what we’re asking for when we ask our partners to accommodate our goals there.
This is so helpful in a general way, thanks very much for your response and have a great day!
It’s a bigger sacrifice for her to come to my side on these issues, or even just meet me in the middle, then it is for me to do the opposite. Also, at the beginning of our relationship I was nowhere near as privacy-conscious as I am now, so I feel it is very unfair for me to turn around years into a relationship and start making demands of the other person. At the same time, she is respectful of my individual choices and doesn’t mock them even though she doesn’t see the value in them herself (which is the same for many aspects of our lives). We come from significantly different backgrounds and have very different perspectives on a whole range of things (politics, religion, lifestyle, etc), but we both see beyond those superficial differences to the person at the core. That’s what we fell in love with, not all the other stuff which we are repeatedly told is so very important in our increasingly polarised society.
Please detail the arcane wizardry which allowed you to achieve the respectful of your choices part you described, because it is the only way your story differs from my own situation.
It’s hard to say why we are like that with each other. Sometimes I think the fact that we faced so many unusual and difficult challenges early on in our relationship has made us less susceptible to these relatively normal problems that every couple experiences. Even the first few months (which are carefree for most couples) were filled with big commitments and sacrifices for us, so compared to that stuff everything else is so minor that it barely registers as an issue. Also, I think she is an unusually kind person and I am an unusually laid-back person and that is a combination that rarely leads to conflict.
I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful, but it’s not really something we actively worked at. Are you saying that you and your partner are also from opposite worlds but haven’t found a way to reconcile some of your differences?
Yes, I think that’s fairly accurate.
It’s really that, while I’ve respected her choice to not participate in any of the practices/protocols I’ve recommended, she doesn’t see my own involvement in them as anything more than a waste of time. Even more so, she’s said she worries about the way it might change me into a paranoid person (conspiracy theorist).
Which feels a little disrespectful of the beliefs I’ve chosen. Like being told you’re worshipping the wrong god, by your partner.
@starlord Why does she think you could become a conspiracy theorist? I have had random non-tech people tell me that they felt like their devices are watching them or listening in.
I really can’t say, we simply don’t agree. I say “I’d just rather my data belongs to me and curate who I share it with” and she hears “GIANT SPACE LIZARDS ARE TRYING TO MELT THE AMAZON” and just pictures me wearing a tin-foil hat.
I once asked her “If someone was standing outside our window, watching and taking notes, would you draw the curtains?” and she spent more time arguing that the metaphor was ridiculous and irrelevant than actually rationalizing the point I was trying to make. Literally no argument I’ve seen works on her. She just doesn’t agree.
Is it a problem that she disagrees? I said my partner respects my individual privacy choices insofar as she doesn’t mock or inhibit them, but I’m certain she doesn’t actually agree. She probably thinks I’m crazy too. I guess for me the important bit is that she doesn’t outwardly project any of that. And in turn, I don’t try to argue the merits of my beliefs with her because I think the arguing itself is often the problematic aspect as opposed to the belief.
When you persist with attempts to convince someone of something that you know they disagree with you completely on, you risk coming off as a lunatic. My partner believes in an afterlife and a God, but since she never attempts to convince me of these beliefs I am happy to just accept them. However, when other people who are religious subtly (or blatantly) try to convert me I feel annoyed and see them as nutjobs.
For most people in my life, I don’t actually know if they share my beliefs. But I also don’t care if they do, because many of those issues aren’t relevant to our relationship. The other day I was in a thread about climate change where Poster A mentioned they had a friend who was a sceptic, and Poster B replied “why are you friends with a fuckwit?”. But the way I see it, climate change is a) something I don’t discuss in detail with many people I know and b) isn’t relevant to what I enjoy about those relationships. So even if I were to discover that a friend from work is a climate sceptic, I wouldn’t actually care. I think that’s one of the keys to maintaining healthy relationships with people. Work out what is actually relevant, so even when other disagreements arise or people inevitably change, you can still appreciate the key aspects of the relationship that are still there and the real reason why you have a connection with this person.
I suppose we’ve reached a “agree to disagree and don’t talk about it as a result” status, which I’m willing to accept, sorta choosing which hill I wanna die on, ya know?
It’s just that I wish there was more support, whereas I feel instead that there’s ridicule or disrespect because her standpoint comes across more as “I’m right and you are wrong so I think less of you for it.”
But, focusing on the privacy topic rather than relationship advice, I really just wish there were a way for me to present her with a case that allowed her to validate my arguments and respect them, even if she doesn’t agree. I think that’s just asking too much because there isn’t a single justification I’ve ever put forth with which she could understand my opinion.
No privacy supporting suggestion works with her because she simply doesn’t value it. I guess I could be projecting expectations, but I think I’m valid in wanting my views respected, even if they aren’t conceded.
What good is your privacy of those closest to you can be used to track you.
In short. I won’t force them, my spouse, to use privacy apps if she does not want it. I’ve accepted that absolute privacy in my case is impossible. So I use privacy apps because I like them not because I don’t want to be tracked. Heck, even my credit card tracks me, a service i cannot continue living without.
Got the wife a grapheneOS pixel, she likes it and the adblock as well. But can’t let go of Facebook , Spotify ,WhatsApp etc. Small steps
That is still a huge improvement over using a regular iPhone
I’m annoying my girlfriend by installing a dns ad blocker that sometimes interferes with her work, and I have to whitelist things when her work links doesn’t work (Microsoft stuff).
It’s a bit of an annoyance but I feel strongly about not letting these companies get data about what we are doing.
Just yesterday I installed a kodi plugin (called “up next” ), and turns out it’s reporting back what shows I’m watching! The only reason I became aware of this is because it was blocked by the dns ad blocker.
I care about my apps not calling home and reporting what im doing. It should be illegal.
@1984 @MagneticFusion i think the ultimate privacy move is not having a girlfriend or any friends
Obviously but human nature does not enjoy being alone 💀
aren’t hermits human?
Difference is we don’t just wake up one day and say “yeah, I’mma go isolate myself from society”
yes, that’s what hermits do (may not be a “woke up one day” decision though :)
hermit was just an example to remind that we can’t comfortably write about “human nature” because humans are naturally versatile. We, humans, take so many different forms, not having a nature must be our nature
excuse me, please do excuse me
🤣
Im in that situation but instead of stubbornly refusing she just does not want to invest the times or effort into privacy. But she was cool with me doing a few things like changing her to different mail providers, changing her browser to firefox and installing a few add-ons that help without being intrusive. But other than that she doesn’t really care enough. She uses Instagram and all those apps and I won’t try convince her. It is her life and her decision.
However the topic has a different tone when it comes to our kids. We discussed this before having kids and agreed on rules we both are okay with. Things like no pics on social media or WhatsApp of any of them. Or which apps they get to use at what age etc. Luckily when it comes to them my wife is more willing to invest time and effort into privacy.
even if you are someone who subscribes to the mindset “nothing to hire, nothing to fear”, kids can’t make that decision yet, themselves so I’ve always found it nice when people don’t include their kids on socials until they’re at least a teenager or so, granted I don’t have kids, this is just from a bystanders pov.
family vlog channels back in the day always left a bad taste in my mouth.
Yeah that’s how I feel about ads targeting children (even when the products are intended for children): they are not yet equipped to look at the ads critically and recognize when they’re being manipulated.
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