Reclaiming it is how we win.
Back in the mid-2000s, I was working for a social network company here in San Francisco. The owner of this social networking company was a patent troll who co-owned the Six Degrees patent along with Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn. They kept up with any company that encroached on this patent, and because of this I found out about Facebook very early on.
Full disclosure: This is the California Pirate Party position on patents:
“Whatever marginal positive effects the patent system has had on technology have been overwhelmed by its negative effects. It has been captured by patent trolls, and by large corporations, who pervert the intended purpose of the patent system to protect individual innovators. As such, we call for the abolishment of the patent system.”
As an employee in the tech world here, I never really fit in because I was too honest. I was always quitting because of some red line I would refuse to cross, be it scraping another company’s data or ripping off some smaller artist’s artwork for their games. It was when Facebook rolled out an API to integrate games that I realized that this particular boss cared not one whit for any user’s privacy or email inbox or even their money. I was struggling to keep this social network afloat with the help of donations from the users and doing a good job of it too, I might add – the users were all Burning Man people who tend to support what they believe in – they raised $30k in a week or two. But after the money hit the bank I was told it was all gone to pay previous bills while the owner dropped $30k on the license to Texas Hold’Em Poker and took the email addresses of everyone on the social network so he could spam them with his new Facebook poker venture.
I’ve told this story more times than I care to, but I truly believe that this time period is when the complacency towards personal privacy began. I used to point out the massive privacy implications that have now come to light to this ex-boss, and he would wave it away with “privacy is dead anyway, these people signed away their rights”. This con-artist attitude that these CEOs show with the privacy and fundamental human rights of people of the entire world is why people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have so much power today.
Personal privacy is the essence of freedom. The freedom to say whatever you want to whomever you want without anyone else knowing what was said or even that you said anything at all is something that NONE of us have anymore unless we are talking to each other in person in a trusted place. The VCs that built upon the Internet that DARPA created did so with a mind to harvest data for sale from the very beginning. Is it any coincidence that the person who built the first web browser is now funneling money into homegrown authoritarian movements and pushing fascism? The tech CEOs and VCs are working hand-in-hand with authoritarian movements around the world to invade our privacy. Just last week it came out that Apple was asked by the UK to provide a backdoor into EVERY icloud user’s data. Where does it end?
It ends, dear reader, with you. You are the ultimate arbiter of how much privacy you receive. Every time one of us reclaims their privacy, Mark Zuckerberg loses a little bit of his vampyric power. It may seem hard, but there are things you can do on an individual level. Using end-to-end encryption on all your communications is one thing. I also recommend filling whatever Facebook profile you have with complete nonsense – my own says I graduated from Miskatonic University in 1894 (Go ‘Pods!) and that my name is pronounced “Throatwarbler Mangrove”. Cover your webcam lens with tape. Turn off location services on your phone. Hell, get yourself a Nokia flipphone instead of the mass surveilance platform that each of us carries around in our pockets.
If you are able, help other people reclaim their privacy. As great as Signal is, they still have centralized servers and can turn off service to specific countries. Join a development team buillding an unbreakable, unblockable upgraded version of Signal. Build a decentralized version of Facebook. Here at the California Pirate Party, we are building a decentalized voting system for internal use that we hope to open source so other Pirate Parties can use for their internal voting. And my own company is building a decentralized point-of-sale system so restaurants, private clubs, and cannabis dispensaries can keep their data in-house and not have their customer information living in the cloud via some service they subscribe to. These opportunities are what small private investors seem to be searching for now as well. It’s worth it to build something better now.
Finally, the ultimate privacy is in face-to-face interactions. Get involved in your local community and consider doing the Pirate thing – run for office! Let’s face it, you can’t be worse than what’s presented by either of the two major parties. Along the way, you can push for Pirate issues and get them into legislation. I’ve touched on two subjects that the Pirate Party has major platforms for, and implementing these as a nation could seriously get us back on the right privacy track.
From our platform:
“We stand for individual privacy. The amount of oppression in a society is inversely proportional to its privacy protections. Individuals must be free to make personal decisions that do not harm another person.”
“We stand for individuals over institutions. Universal human rights apply only to human beings, and not to corporations, limited liability organizations, or other group entities.”
Do your part for privacy, whether it be your own or somebody else’s! And if you want to learn more about running for office, contact us here at the California Pirate Party or come to one of our Bay Area meetups – Los Angeles meetups coming soon!
Reclaiming it is how we win.
Back in the mid-2000s, I was working for a social network company here in San Francisco. The owner of this social networking company was a patent troll who co-owned the Six Degrees patent along with Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn. They kept up with any company that encroached on this patent, and because of this I found out about Facebook very early on.
As an employee in the tech world here, I never really fit in because I was too honest. I was always quitting because of some red line I would refuse to cross, be it scraping another company’s data or ripping off some smaller artist’s artwork for their games. It was when Facebook rolled out an API to integrate games that I realized that this particular boss cared not one whit for any user’s privacy or email inbox or even their money. I was struggling to keep this social network afloat with the help of donations from the users and doing a good job of it too, I might add – the users were all Burning Man people who tend to support what they believe in – they raised $30k in a week or two. But after the money hit the bank I was told it was all gone to pay previous bills while the owner dropped $30k on the license to Texas Hold’Em Poker and took the email addresses of everyone on the social network so he could spam them with his new Facebook poker venture.
I’ve told this story more times than I care to, but I truly believe that this time period is when the complacency towards personal privacy began. I used to point out the massive privacy implications that have now come to light to this ex-boss, and he would wave it away with “privacy is dead anyway, these people signed away their rights”. This con-artist attitude that these CEOs show with the privacy and fundamental human rights of people of the entire world is why people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have so much power today.
Personal privacy is the essence of freedom. The freedom to say whatever you want to whomever you want without anyone else knowing what was said or even that you said anything at all is something that NONE of us have anymore unless we are talking to each other in person in a trusted place. The VCs that built upon the Internet that DARPA created did so with a mind to harvest data for sale from the very beginning. Is it any coincidence that the person who built the first web browser is now funneling money into homegrown authoritarian movements and pushing fascism? The tech CEOs and VCs are working hand-in-hand with authoritarian movements around the world to invade our privacy. Just last week it came out that Apple was asked by the UK to provide a backdoor into EVERY icloud user’s data. Where does it end?
It ends, dear reader, with you. You are the ultimate arbiter of how much privacy you receive. Every time one of us reclaims their privacy, Mark Zuckerberg loses a little bit of his vampyric power. It may seem hard, but there are things you can do on an individual level. Using end-to-end encryption on all your communications is one thing. I also recommend filling whatever Facebook profile you have with complete nonsense – my own says I graduated from Miskatonic University in 1894 (Go ‘Pods!) and that my name is pronounced “Throatwarbler Mangrove”. Cover your webcam lens with tape. Turn off location services on your phone. Hell, get yourself a Nokia flipphone instead of the mass surveilance platform that each of us carries around in our pockets.
If you are able, help other people reclaim their privacy. As great as Signal is, they still have centralized servers and can turn off service to specific countries. Join a development team buillding an unbreakable, unblockable upgraded version of Signal. Build a decentralized version of Facebook. Here at the California Pirate Party, we are building a decentalized voting system for internal use that we hope to open source so other Pirate Parties can use for their internal voting. And my own company is building a decentralized point-of-sale system so restaurants, private clubs, and cannabis dispensaries can keep their data in-house and not have their customer information living in the cloud via some service they subscribe to. These opportunities are what small private investors seem to be searching for now as well. It’s worth it to build something better now.
Finally, the ultimate privacy is in face-to-face interactions. Get involved in your local community and consider doing the Pirate thing – run for office! Let’s face it, you can’t be worse than what’s presented by either of the two major parties. Along the way, you can push for Pirate issues and get them into legislation. I’ve touched on two subjects that the Pirate Party has major platforms for, and implementing these as a nation could seriously get us back on the right privacy track.
Do your part for privacy, whether it be your own or somebody else’s! And if you want to learn more about running for office, contact us here at the California Pirate Party or come to one of our Bay Area meetups – Los Angeles meetups coming soon!