Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 11 2019, @01:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the had-to-step-outside dept.

In a series of articles at Gizmodo, Gizmodo Writer / editor Kashmir Hill blocks Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon for a week each, then she blocks all five simultaneously. The last article was just published on Feburary 8th.

This wasn't a casual experiment. She literally had an expert block every known IP address by said companies and banned technology from these different groups for that particular week. In the last week, she couldn't even use DuckDuckGo because it was run on AWS (found in the conclusion).

Selected paragraphs from the introduction:

The common retort to these concerns is that you should "just stop using their services." So I decided to try.

This is a story of how, over six weeks, I cut them out of my own life and tried to prevent them from knowing about me or monetizing me in any way—not just by putting my iPhone in a drawer for a week or only buying local, but by really, truly blocking these companies from accessing me and vice versa. I wanted to find out how hard it would be—or if I could even do it—given that these tech giants dominate the internet in so many invisible ways that it's hard to even know them all.

It's not just logging off of Facebook; it's logging off the countless websites that use Facebook to log in. It's not just using DuckDuckGo instead of Google search; it's abandoning my email, switching browsers, giving up a smartphone, and living life without mapping apps. It's not just refusing to buy toilet paper on Amazon.com; it's being blocked from reading giant swaths of the internet that are hosted on Amazon servers, giving up websites and apps that I didn't previously know were connected to the biggest internet giant of them all.

...

To keep my devices from talking to the big five's servers, and vice versa, Dhruv built a virtual private network, or VPN, for me, through which I sent all my internet traffic. He then used the VPN to block my devices from being able to use the IP addresses owned by Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and/or Apple, depending on the week.

On a normal day, as measured by the VPN, I tend to send two million data packets out onto the internet and more than half of them (60 percent) go to the tech giants. That meant that over half of my normal internet usage was going to grind to a halt—including virtually every way I communicate with my friends, family, and colleagues.

...

You have no idea how hard it is to find a phone that's not touched by Apple or Google.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 12 2019, @01:15AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 12 2019, @01:15AM (#799859) Journal

    which means I know enough to know that there's a HUGE amount of stuff I don't.

    I think you overestimate the difficulty, for the reasons below

    To really do this right, I'd probably have to quit my day job and spend the next year studying but even then, without extensive real world experience and a lack of a security background, the chance I'd screw it up would be high.

    1. define "right" in the "do this right".
    2. look at the price of failure to do it "really right"

    For the first point, the starting assumption on the thread is " how to avoid the big data-sucking blackholes on the internet" - doesn't take THAT huge amount to do it if you are willing to drop some convenience. Yes, there will be others to leak data about you, so it won't ever be perfect... but do you really need perfect?

    For the second point, even if you utterly fail in stopping the deluge of private info about your private life, you'll be no worse than before (except some time invested in the process - put it on the account of "life-long learning") - which means not only you will survive just fine but live your life like before.

    Me thinks is just a "perfect is the enemy of the good" post-factum justification on the line of "I'm not gaining enough for the HUGE effort".

     

    Note that I'm not arguing your choice is wrong, the "I really can't be bothered to do it" is an OK choice to my mind.
    I only have minor issues with the reason you avoid to admit your choice and rationalize it blaming circumstances outside your control.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2