Wombat sent me the above picture: A physical ad by Apple on a big canvas. Pictured is a person hiding their face with their iPhone, but therefore actually pointing the camera at the people seeing the ad. It says: “Safari. A browser that’s actually private.” and “Privacy. That’s iPhone.“
It’s accidentally perfectly demonstrating the limitations in current popular privacy discourse and movement: The fact that devices or software may claim to keep the users private, but not people in general, especially not the people the users point these devices at.
Privacy, as it is commonly practiced and advertised, is for the person inflicting the damage onto their surroundings, not their surroundings.
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A wonderful take on big tech privacy culture that’s better-expressed than I could have ever put it. That Apple poster shows a particularly ironic lack of self-awareness!
Techbros seem to want to sell individual privacy while simultaneously undermining society‘s privacy: you get “privacy settings”, but we’re still tracking-by-default everybody else. They deliberately turn a blind eye to the fact that the latter – in our age of big data processing – undermines the former: there are countless examples now of people finding new ways to interpret leaked corporate datasets in order to extract personally-identifiable information, and it’s a problem that only seems to get worse.
“Privacy settings” are important, but wouldn’t it be nicer if privacy was the default?
And yeah: smart glasses can get fucked. I don’t want a world in which having a conversation with somebody in specs requires that I allow Facebook to watch and listen-in as well. Just wear some Normal Fucking Sunglasses, ‘k?
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