3w ago

Privacy is Power

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48 comments

Meh. Pseudo-wisdom.
The wealthy rule with or without your information. They did just fine before the advent of scraping every data point about you off the internet, your phone, or card swipe. Your info today is just another datapoint in some company’s portfolio to be bought and sold.
Authoritarian governments get that way to protect wealth and power. It’s not your personal information that matters as much as what you say that matters. If you cannot be safe in expressing dissent and keep that private, then you’ve lost.
- Information is an obscenely valuable resource and information asymmetry decides wars.
  
  Yeah, tactical information. Locations of troops, resources, roads, bridges, opposition location, etc etc.
  Not what I bought at the store.
  Let’s not conflate the two.
  
  All information is tactical information. Every bit of additional information strengthens control.
  Knowing what every citizen buys from the store is an authoritarian government's wet dream.
  
  Stop changing the subject to make yourself right.
  You said “war” first, then you changed to “authoritarian governments.”
  Pick one.
  Don’t double down on your absolutist answer.
  
  War is simply the most direct example. All information is power.
  It's all identical. You're trying to distinguish between the exact same thing. Corporations aren't spending billions of dollars to spy on you because that information is worthless. It's incredibly effective as part of the process of changing behavior.
  
  Spare me your histrionics. Just stop.
  War is a blunt instrument. No Russian general is checking Ukrainian’s shopping lists. No Israeli official is checking what tiktoks the Palestinians are watching.
  No, it is NOT all identical. You’re manufacturing scenarios that don’t exist. You've jumped from war to authoritarians to corporations just throwing as many darts at the board as you can while pounding the table and making huge leaps to conflate everything. There’s zero logic to your rant. Whatever.
  
  Did you even read the OP? It's not just about war. It's about the power of privacy across the board.
  The literal only thing splitting information into "tactical information" tells anyone is that the person doing so is clueless and absurdly unimaginative. Again, ignoring that totalitarian governments are completely within scope, "basic" spying has expose sensitive military installations, among many, many other things.
  
  Did you even read my disagreement with the OP or did you just skip to my disagreements out of context?
  
  Unfortunately, I did.
  There is no context where your "disagreements" have a shred of merit. They're pure idiocy.

48 comments