alp on Nostr: We need to make ourselves and the average person out there understand what kind of ...

We need to make ourselves and the average person out there understand what kind of corrupt internet age we’re living in right now. It’s like the Wild West, with basically no regulation and no laws that can actually be enforced. Out there, 99% of internet companies are simply evil.

They steal users’ privacy data from them against their will. No, tiny print buried in 10 or 20 pages of terms of service does not count. Someone once calculated that if you read all the ToS for every software agreement you sign, you’d spend about 8 years doing nothing but reading them. So hiding things in the ToS isn’t practical. That’s exactly why nobody reads them. You can’t do that.

They sell the data to every “partner company” willing to pay for it. That includes everything from location data to audio recordings captured by Alexa and similar devices. It’s all done casually because, apparently, it says so somewhere in the fine print of those 20 pages of ToS.

They hand all of this data over to corrupt governments whenever they feel like it. They call it “law enforcement,” without any independent body checking whether that law enforcement is actually justified. On top of that, government agencies and courts lack the necessary competence. And I don’t just mean technical competence. I also mean the long term judgment needed to properly understand and evaluate themselves and the consequences of their own actions.

Like I said, it’s just like the Wild West of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Oh, and now you can locate enemies and blow them up using rigged cell phones. That’s nice too, especially when you consider that you’re the one paying for your own potential death trap.

And all of this is completely normal with 99% of the phones out there, whether they’re Android, iPhones, or whatever else they’re called. It's crazy if you think of that. Everyone is paying an insanely high price just to participate in the digital age. And nobody seems to realize it or even listen. I can’t even get my own mother to stop using WhatsApp. It’s the main way she communicates with me. Isn’t that just infuriating?

Why am I writing all of this here, even though a lot of people here are already aware of it? Well, we’ve built walls around our cozy, somewhat protected or fully protected corners. We’re no longer the weakest or slowest animals in the herd, so we’re less likely to be picked off. But there are still plenty of potential easy targets out there, people in our own circles who somehow, and I know this sounds cheesy, need to be rescued from the hands of these plundering, godless, wandering gangs on the internet.

And that’s exactly why we’re here. That’s why we’re doing all this in the first place. And we aren’t getting paid for it. The people who are being paid by someone somewhere are usually broken floodgates. They let more corruption from out there flow in than they help build a real safe harbor. No matter how much they act like 'freedom fighters', follow the money. If it comes from dirty industries, there’s a good chance I’m right.

So stay clean. Even if you don’t accomplish much, stay clean. And let's make internet history.