I started writing this post on 2023-04-08

Do you ever close your blinds or lock your doors? Do you have things which are important to you which aren't everyone's business? If so, then you're probably exercising your right to privacy.

Privacy is essential to live our daily lives. Having privacy ensures that the things which are important to you are protected and that only the people you want get to know. Maybe that's just you, maybe that's a friend and you, or even a group of people. In most countries around the world, this privacy is protected by law and written down in fundamental law. Yet, it is not protected everywhere. Every day there is news coming out of privacy violations all around the world. Whether it be mass-surveillance in countries like China or companies invading user privacy, user data is becoming a resource worth harvesting, but not worth protecting.

Of course, people started to notice, so they slowly but surely started to fight back. Browser Extensions, alternative services, software modifications and much more are worked on day-by-day, usually as a passion project, because people want control over their privacy back. Some companies have even made it their business model to be private, like Proton AG, which is building an ecosystem of services which are privacy-first - kind of like Google does with added security & privacy. This all shows clear interest in user-privacy, yet some people seem to not care about that.

Though, this isn't the end of the story. With every tool and ability that users have gained, there was always another way to identify them to link them back to collected data. One instance of this is the supercookie exploit that was discovered a while back, which made use of favicons (website icons in the tabs list) to uniquely identify each and every browser which has no easy way to be cleared. Unlike normal tracking cookies, you can't just use an AdBlocker, clear the cache or restart the OS when supercookies are used. Whilst this exploit is only a demo and for educational purposes, it provides insight into how every single feature of - for instance - a browser can be abused to fingerprint, track, and advertise to users based on the tracking to turn a profit.

Seeing this is quite depressing, as many people are either unaware of this happening, or refuse to change their habits, which gives companies like these the ability to continue harvesting user data for their own profit.

Google, being one of the biggest offenders, has started to develop an alternative to third-party cookies for advertising, as they cannot let their main source of revenue slowly become ineffective as people start using other services or AdBlockers. Their proposed solution is "Topics", which lets Chrome scan what websites you visit, put them into different topics (depending on what the websites are about) and then tell advertisers which topics you interact with the most. This is something that many people, unsurprisingly, have spoken themselves out against. Nobody wants their entire browsing history analysed for advertisements. Once it gets too annoying or intrusive for users, people will begin to switch. We saw this back in 2021 when WhatsApp changed their privacy policy, at which point Telegram had quickly gained millions of users; or when Windows 11 released, and we saw a spike up in downloads of popular Linux Distributions (like Linux Mint, for instance).

People will continue fighting against surveillance capitalism, they will continue to fight for their privacy, and the movement is only growing.

If you're wondering, https://privacyguides.org is a great place to start learning about preserving your privacy, threat modelling, and other things which can be useful to protect yourself from surveillance capitalism.

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I took a bit more time on this one, as I've honestly forgot I had started writing this. But I've recently installed Obsidian again and am happy to report that I am back on occasionally writing up something longer!

Have a nice day, and I hope you had fun reading or learned something!