Rebel Tech Alliance
www.rebeltechalliance.org

This is an open question on how to get the masses to care…

Unfortunately, if other people don’t protect their privacy it affects those who do, because we’re all connected (e.g. other family members, friends). So it presents a problem of how do you get people who don’t care, to care?

I started the Rebel Tech Alliance nonprofit to try to help with this, but we’re still really struggling to convert people who have never thought about this.

(BTW you might need to refresh our website a few times to get it to load - no idea why… It does have an SSL cert!)

So I hope we can have a useful discussion here - privacy is a team sport, how do we get more people to play?

  • Noodles@lemmy.ml
    1·
    2 days ago

    I’ve noticed many people tend to look for alternatives when their mainstream apps are either temporarily down or become greedy.

    I remember a few years ago Meta servers were down which resulted in my whole family and some friends at least partially moving over to Signal. Now it’s important that the alternative has at least the basic features people want. Most people are not ubernerds like us willing to sacrafice GIFs, emoji’s or whatever and would switch back once they realize it’s missing features.

    For instance, I’ve noticed people becoming increasingly frustrated with Windows but won’t switch to Linux due to missing program or game support.

    So ultimately I think the focus should be for privacy-respecting apps to be feature-complete. It’s much easier to convince someone to switch if there’s a reason to stay.

    This probably means sacrificing on security features but I don’t think the goal should be for everyone to be on Qubes OS and SimpleX. Rather having at least basic online privacy and the ability to remove data on demand.

  • MoonlightFox@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 days ago

    I think certain arguments work, and certain don’t.

    I live in a very high trust society, Norway. This has a lot of advantages, but also some downsides.

    We trust eachother, our neighbours, our government and our media. Which is fantastic, and well deserved. The government deserves the trust.

    This makes it hard for me to make people realize how important privacy is, because they trust organizations with their data.

    During COVID, Norway made their own app for tracking who met to prevent the spread. Of all the apps in the world, Norway wanted to push about the least privacy friendly app in the world. This from a country with the highest press freedom and rankings for democracy. Most people though it was fine, because why not? We trust our government.

    https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/06/norway-covid19-contact-tracing-app-privacy-win/

    Luckily someone protested enough, and it got scrapped for something better.

    When I try to convince someone I have a couple of angles:

    1. You trust the government and organizations with your data today. But do you trust the government in 30 years? Because data is forever. The US has changed a lot in a very short time, this can happen here as well

    2. You have a responsibility for other peoples privacy as well. When you use an app that gets access to all your SMSes and contacts you spy on behalf of companies on people that might need protection. Asylum seekers from other countries for instance.