dayon

One benefit is not having all of your online purchases tracked by your credit card company, which can produce further benefit for you down the road when insurance companies and whoever else is unable to purchase meaningful data about you to exploit you.

I was about to post this. My project received a DDOS, and I could not access my droplet for over 12 hours.

How does Craigslist handle reputation? And yet, I'm sure you'd rather use Craigslist for certain purchases than eBay.

Just to clarify, if you use Signal, there is no meta-data. Who you called, who called you, the call times, and so on are hidden. It's like with Tor and how your browsing history isn't saved. All the WIFI network operator can know is that you accessed Signal to make a call / text.

Regarding #3, what about putting the phone into airplane mode and keeping WIFI on? Wouldn't airplane mode disable the baseband?

I forget the term for this, but you've poisoned the discussion by leading it to a dead end with an impossible goal: ridding humanity of prejudice and assumption. Since that isn't remotely possible, we might as well throw our hands up in the air. And forget about data, it's not at fault here.

Like you, Snowden's freedom of speech line never impacted me... until I read this article. It suddenly hit me. The reason I was missing his point is because I was framing it in terms of what's in it for me rather than looking at it as what's in it for us. Someone who doesn't care about freedom of speech doesn't care because he doesn't see what's in it for him. But I doubt you'd argue the benefits of the first amendment.

Similarly, privacy is very important. You might not care (even though you really do), but defending privacy is about ensuring security. Privacy is important for all of us, just like freedom of speech is.

As for what the actual problem is, the problem for the most part is ignorance and a failure to quench it. We need more privacy / cyber-security advocates who can educate people on why they ought to care. It's like teaching people why it's important to lock their doors at night or why they should put their letters into envelopes instead of just using post cards. It's why my mom had to drill into my brain the importance of not giving out my social security number willy nilly. Are you so liberal with your SSN? You don't care about privacy, so would it bother you if Facebook or Google asked for it. After all, they just want to make sure you are who you say you are.

Things aren't obvious to us until they're obvious, and then it feels like common sense. DUH, lock your door! DUH, encrypt your messages!

This is very conspiratorial, but it'd be interesting if Facebook intentionally shut this down to show its new user base how vital it is to their lives. By giving new users a service and then taking it away, it could drum up support for reinstatement. Wouldn't put it past Mark to pull something like that.

Would be awesome to see a mass exodus from Facebook. It's already passed its peak anyway, with many US teenagers using different, non-Facebook-owned networks and apps.