Digital privacy is the ability of someone to hide "sensitive" [information](information.md) about himself; nowadays "privacy concerns" are a big part of [capitalist](capitalism.md) [bullshit](bullshit.md), [fear culture](fear_culture.md) and [fight culture](fight_culture.md), and fall under so called [computer security](security.md), yet a greater area of bullshit business. Of course, there are other forms of privacy than digital, for example the physical privacy [in real life](irl.md), however in this article we'll be implicitly dealing with digital privacy unless mentioned otherwise, i.e. privacy with respect to computers, e.g. on the [Internet](internet.md). For starters let's stress the whole business around privacy is [bullshit](bullshit.md) that's wasting energy which could better be spent on actually useful things such as feeding the hungry or curing the ill. Do not engage in privacy hysteria.
{ I have my personal data publicly online and under CC0 for anyone to download and do anything with, including my real name, date of birth, medical info and even nude photos. Literally nothing bad ever happened due to this. ~drummyfish }
Digital privacy can be further categorized. We can talk e.g. about **communication privacy** (emails, chat, ...), **data privacy** (cookies, tracking, medical data, ...), **personal privacy** (intimate photos, sexual orientation, ... ), **individual privacy** (identifying information, anonymity, [spam](spam.md), ...) etc. Privacy is also closely related to **[cryptography](cryptography.md)**, as [encryption](encryption.md) is how information can be "protected" against reaching unauthorized entities, and to [free software](free_software.md), as using safe tools with available source code is crucial to avoid malware. Still, to achieve high privacy additional appropriate behavior has to be adopted, e.g. protection against [spyware](spyware.md), using proxies and/or onion routing, turning off browser [cookies](cookie.md), avoiding fingerprinting, avoiding [social networks](social_network.md), avoiding revealing potentially identifying information etc.
**Society is becoming more and more obsessed with privacy and that is EXTREMELY BAD.** It leads to hardcore [censorship](censorship.md), people are hiding their email addresses so it's impossible to contact them, photos of child faces are wiped from the Internet, more and more videos on the internet now just blur everything in the video that's not the main focus of it, "just in case", people are even afraid to credit other people by name even if they are e.g. legally obliged to by a license such as CC-BY-SA ([lmao](lmao.md) https://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=19322). Everyone is like OH NOES they gonn steal my personal face pixelzzz, MY FACE IS LIKE MY HOUSE. Such [retardedness](retard.md) has probably never been seen yet.
**Accepting privacy inevitably comes with accepting pretense**, i.e. if privacy and anonymity is important, we are accepting the fact that people publicly pretend to be something they are not and only under the mask of anonymity will say what they truly think, i.e. we accept that pretense and public lying is normal. That's a completely fucked up mindset which a [good society](less_retarded_society.md) cannot accept. We have to make it so that people can be who they are publicly, that they can say and act publicly as they act in private.
If we [extrapolate](extrapolation.md) the situation into the [future](future.md), we can see where sustaining this will lead. If you go out, you'll always have to wear a full body protective cloak, face mask and, of course, you privacy high heels -- remember, your body proportions and body height are your private data, you don't want to give these away to the cameras lurking outside. You won't be able to talk freely to anyone, not even closest friends and family in complete privacy -- your information is not safe with anyone, anyone can slip or give it away unknowingly, so no, your friends mustn't know your favorite color, names of your pets, number of siblings, your gender, age, that's all too sensitive, a sufficiently smart AI will be able to deduce your password from it, or connect it with other information flying around, catching you into its net. Better minimize talking to your friend about anything at all, better not go outside unless you absolutely must, better stay in your cellar, be anonymous and safe, die happy in the darkness knowing no one knew anything about you, as if you never existed at all.
Privacy obsessed [NPCs](npc.md) also do it completely wrong, they are usually nothing more than 105 [IQ](iq.md) victims of the bullshit business, they consume privacy YouTube videos like a grandma consumes ads on [Facebook](facebook.md). They think that [updating](update_culture.md) to the latest (i.e. yet more bloated and fucked up) version of web browser, paying for 7 proxies and VPNs and installing a password manager on their iPhone will allow them to use all the glorious "[modern](modern.md)" tech safely. If one REALLY wants to minimize giving away data, the way it simply through minimizing use of technology and using old, extremely simple computers where one can't avoid it. If you want real privacy (which you shouldn't, but still if you really really want), just throw away your phone, cancel Internet connection, cancel bank accounts, pay cash only, go live in a forest and if you need a computer, buy a 30 years old laptop that is PHYSICALLY incapable of running modern spyware and which didn't yet have hardware built-in spyware in its [CPU](cpu.md), use only good, [minimalist](minimalism.md) software that, again, isn't even capable of running malware -- if you use text only web browser that can't run JavaScript, you can't get abused by JavaScript, if you don't have any online accounts, you can never get "hacked" etc. If you want to have real time connection to Internet in your pocket, watch YouTube influencers, buy newest games over Internet, play Roblox with trannies and stuff like that, just accept you will never have any kind privacy whatsoever, you are already a slave of the system, you are in their chains, you have zero power over anything -- thinking otherwise is just illusion by which they sustain you in their system. They keep you dumb by making you think you're smart. Real smartness is in doing what they don't want -- abandoning their system, stopping paying for their shit, moving to the forest, using old stuff.
Do you have **"nothing to hide?"** Tinfoil privacy maximalists absolutely love this sentence, it almost makes them orgasm; don't misunderstand them though, they are psychopaths, they are obsessed people who above everything love to waste their whole lives on playing the hide and seek game, but most importantly they want to drag everyone into the game. Yes -- sadly you've probably been forced to have at least something to hide, for example your [password](password.md) -- it's not that the claim is false, the great mistake and fucked up nature of our world shows in how people interpret such truth and how they react to it. The fact that you have something to hide doesn't mean you should accept it and start focusing on hiding, and, just in case, "hide absolutely everything". This leads to hell, you accept the dystopia AND start supporting it, you buy into endless [fear](fear.md) and bullshit, just like when you dedicate your whole like for example to hoarding [money](money.md) -- there will be no such a thing as "moderate privacy", no, privacy maximalists will tell you you must hide absolutely EVERYTHING, even such things as your favorite color or style of speech, because these things might lead to someone guessing your password, fingerprinting you etc. No, this is all absolute insanity, the fact you have to hide something at all shows something is extremely [wrong](capitalism.md) with the society -- if anything, you should try to **fix the society so that you no longer have anything to hide**.
Therefore here is **how to 100% solve privacy**: make it moral to make ALL information public, always, without any censorship, "protection", laws and other bullshit. { NO, it's fucking NOT a joke or "satire", I am 100% serious. More like 3000% actually. It's extremely smart, that's why people don't do it. ~drummyfish } This way passwords will become obsolete, which has a nice side effect of also ending a lot of capitalist bullshit such as banking and [intellectual property](intellectual_property.md), people will have to start sharing. Governments and corporations will also start taking extreme advantage of the situation, so people will stop using online technology as much and maybe they'll even finally decide to ditch governments and corporations, another great leap in development of society. People will also stop being concerned about their "private data" -- at first they will be freaking out that everyone can see their dick pics and what porn they jerk off to but since EVERYONE's data will be visible, they will find out that everyone watches weird porn, that everyone has a dick (well, about half of population), and they'll just stop acting like chimps in a while. This literally only has advantages and it solves many of our greatest issues all at once. At this point privacy has been solved. { Leave the Nobel Prize at my door, thanks. ~drummyfish }
{ I'm thinking of a life experiment: start living without a password. In it I would literally make my password public on my website and start to somehow live like that, i.e. I would stop using a bank account, I would stop using social media accounts, would just host my own git repository and email. That doesn't even sound so difficult, I'll probably give it a try one day. ~drummyfish }
**As of 2023 privacy is impossible to achieve** unless you live in wilderness completely independently of the main "civilization". If you use any kind of computer (laptop, TV, phone, car, camera etc.), you are already being watched: basically all [CPU](cpu.md)s have proven hardware spyware in them capable of bypassing encryption, see [Intel ME](intel_me.md) etc., no matter what operating system you use, and even if you use some obscure CPU without it, you are watched through your Internet activity (even if you use a "secure" browser, which you most likely don't even if you think you do), your browsing habits are watched and analyzed by highly advanced [AI](ai.md) that can track you even without cookies etc., e.g. just from your writing style, patterns of repeated daily activity, mouse movement signature etc. -- all small fragments of information about your activity such as those mentioned above and your locations over time (known from your phone connecting to towers, someone else's phone detecting your voice, street or car camera detecting your face, credit card payments etc.) are connected with other fragments of information (even those of other people) and AI makes a complete picture of your life available to those who need it. You may think you're doing everything right and that they can't find you, but it's enough if e.g. someone from your family posted a picture with you on facebook 10 years ago or if you as a child played online games -- this is enough to know which people you are related to and them being tracked then leads to you also being tracked to a big degree despite you using 7 proxies and living underground. If the government furthermore decides to watch you more (which may happen just because you e.g. try to "protect" your privacy more and start using [Tor](tor.md), which is suspicious), they can just watch you in real time through satellites (even inside buildings) and so on. So you just have to accept you are being watched, and unless we end [capitalism](capitalism.md), it will only be getting worse (mind reading technology is already emerging).
We have to state that **privacy concerns are a symptom of [bad society](capitalism.md). We shouldn't ultimately try to protect privacy more (cure symptoms) but rather make a [society where need for privacy isn't an issue](less_retarded_society.md) (cure the root cause).** This sentiment is shared by many hackers, even [Richard Stallman](rms.md) himself used to revolt against passwords when he was at MIT AI Labs; he intentionally used just the password "rms" to allow other people to use his account (this is mentioned in the book *Free As In Freedom*). Efforts towards increasing and protecting privacy is in its essence an unnecessary [bullshit](bullshit.md) effort wasting human work, similarly to [law](law.md), [marketing](marketing.md) etc. It is all about censorship and secrecy. Besides this, **all effort towards protecting digital privacy will eventually fail**, thanks to e.g. advanced [AI](ai.md) that will identify individuals by pattern in their behavior, even if their explicit identity information is hidden perfectly. Things such as browser [fingerprinting](fingerprint.md) are already a standard and simple practice allowing highly successful uncovering of identity of anonymous people online, and research AI is taking this to the next level (e.g. the paper *Detecting Individual Decision-Making Style: Exploring Behavioral Stylometry in Chess* shows revealing [chess](chess.md) players by their play style). With [internet of stinks](iot.md), cameras, microphones and smartphones everywhere, advanced AI will be able to identify and track an individual basically anywhere no matter the privacy precautions taken. Curing the root cause is the only option to prevent a catastrophic scenario.
By this viewpoint, [LRS](lrs.md)'s stance towards privacy differs from that of many (if not most) [free software](free_software.md), [hacker](hacker.md) and [suckless](suckless.md) communities: to us **privacy is a form of [censorship](censorhip.md)** and as such is seen as inherently bad. We dream of a world without abuse where (digital) privacy is not needed because society has adopted our philosophy of information freedom, non-violence and non-competition and there is no threat of sensitive information abuse. Unlike some other people (so called pragmatics), not only do we dream of it, we actively try to make it a reality. Even though we know the ideally working society is unreachable, we try to at least get close to it by restricting ourselves to bare minimum privacy (so we are very open but won't e.g. publish our passwords). We believe that abuse of sensitive information is an issue of the basic principles of our society (e.g. [capitalism](capitalism.md)) and should be addressed by fixing these issues rather than by harmful methods such as censorship.
"[Right](rights_culture.md) to be forgotten" is the stupidest crap someone has ever come up with.
**So what to do now?** Should we just literally post our passwords, home address, phone number and credit card info online? Of course nowadays this would almost equate [suicide](suicide.md), for most it's not possible or advised to make such a huge leap immediately. Remember, LRS advocates slow evolution towards a better state of affairs, i.e. we should firstly realize that the status quo and current mindset are harmful, secondly we should educate others about it and along the way we should start relaxing our fear of losing privacy slowly. Great philosophers of ancient Greece spoke of an ideal stance towards death and told us to not fear it -- do not seek it but don't fear it either; you may not desire death but at the same time you may also not let it enslave you by making you avoid it at any cost. It's similar with our cause: you don't have to commit suicide, just don't let privacy enslave you anymore. Your goal doesn't have to be to achieve perfection in giving away 100% of your secrets; rather make it a goal to become more free from secrecy, even if perfection can't be achieved. You can probably let your real name, face photo and country of origin be known publicly, there is zero danger in this, and by doing so you free yourself a bit more, cure a bit of that phobia. Later on you will perhaps be able to make further steps such as sharing your autobiography and nude photos -- this is very doable. And perhaps you'll find this freedom so good that you will cancel all your bank accounts and social media and then you can comfortably share even your password to achieve absolute freedom from secrecy.
