Comment by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
Comment by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2 months ago
And I'd bet over 99% of those people have never once considered that said camera could even be capable of saving any data without them operating it.
Comment by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2 months ago
And I'd bet over 99% of those people have never once considered that said camera could even be capable of saving any data without them operating it.
But do you think they're taking a measured inventory of the possible consequences, both personal and societal, and saying, "No, I don't value that" ?
Extremely few decisions that people make are deeply calculated with cold logic. Most decisions are primarily unconscious, automatic, and emotional.
Example: A persons hears it's good to have a webcam cover, so they get one. Nobody mentions doing it for their phone, so they never even think about it. Then someday a friend does mention it, but that would be an inconvenient change, so the person's gut puts up resistance against considering it too strongly. They give in to their emotional response, instead of doing the hard work of changing their emotions based on the knowledge they have.
At no point in the above scenario would the person state "I don't think mass surveillance is a bad thing." For me, that's why I mean when I say people "aren't ok with it."
If one's definition of people being "ok with mass surveillance" just means they tolerate it, that they don't sufficiently resist it (and what level of resistance is sufficient? For a person with a webcam cover but no phone cam cover? Does adding a phone cam cover mean they've declared their opposition to mass surveillance?), then how can you say people aren't okay with literally everything evil or wrong? Most people just won't summon enough activation energy to fight any given injustice around them, no matter how egregious it is. That's not a reflection of their morals and values, it's a reflection of how fucking tired we all are.
I would challenge you to offer up in detail how strongly you have worked to resist mass surveillance in your life. You're logged in and posting on HN, so my guess is, you haven't worked hard enough at it according to someone's metric. Do you have a cover on your phone camera? Just the front one or both? Do you have a cover on the microphones? Do you let others add your number in their contacts or do you refuse to ever give out your real phone number?
I don't even have a cell phone! I have a Libreboot-ed X200 running a 100%-libre distribution of GNU/Linux. My MAC address is randomized every hour. I pulled the OnStar fuse from my car 10 years ago. I run my own email server, and use E2E encryption when my recipient knows how. I use Tor and VPNs. My home phone number is public and posted to my website, and I can't control who has it anyway.
If people had a better work/life balance, perhaps more would have the mental bandwidth to jump through an Olympic gold winning amount of hoops like you did.
The rest would probably use the extra free time to raise their kids/be with family.
It might seem like the Olympics when it's all put together like that, but it's really just one thing at a time, and none of them required any kind of real effort. They were just choices. When it was time to buy a new laptop, I picked the one that had my interests. When it was time to upgrade my OS, I chose the one that respected me. When my cell phone contract was due to be renewed, I said, "no thank you," and bought a VoIP base station instead. I understood how my car, and reportage of my driving habits, were connected to the outside world and I severed that connection by pulling a simple fuse.
If people only did one change per year, even that would be enough to change the winds pushing our mass surveillance.
The cover over the webcam might not be for security per se. It could be they don't want anyone at work - or home? - to accidentally see where they are. If you cover the camera you don't have to worry any such accidents.
My gut says that for most people is the reason.
Very doubtful they've not considered it. When I go to coffee shops, I see maybe a quarter-to-half the laptops have a shade over the webcam. But when I see people using their phones, I've never once seen them use a shade, piece of tape, or post-it note.
They use the front-facing camera of their phone so often that the temporary inconvenience of removing a shade outweighs the long-term inconvenience of malware snapping an exposing photo.