Argument against "I have nothing to hide"
Argument against "I have nothing to hide"
I've seen this being discussed around here in the past but it wasn't on a day I could engage, and today I was talking to friend of mine who is developing an alternative to chattable and he was going to link fonts from Google, so I told him to use Bunny Fonts instead because it wouldn't be using the call to log IPs and track activity, he just had to change the domain name because the path was the same, and he joked about me being paranoid... I edited a bit of my message to put on a post on my microblog https://pxhc.neocities.org/
"... hey man, there are people who worry about Google tracking them, maybe they don't need to worry today, but the government of tomorrow might give them a reason to, since all those companies are already so proactively handing people's data to ICE and shit, and with modern tools it won't be hard to translate ad targeting data into footsteps... there are a lot of people saying the AI bubble will burst because there is no demand for all the crap they're inserting AI into, but I think it's stupid to think that we're the ones supposed to consume AI, the real consumers are the big companies, it's their demand, not ours, we're just the commodity... anyway, what should bother everyone immediately, even if they don't mind being tracked and profiled, is dynamic pricing, something that will become all the more common when all those fucking datacenters are operational. They will be selling that service, they already do that for transportation and accommodation just by knowing where you visited and what you looked at, and with those billions they are investing in infrastructure they will track you through their absurd amount of data and just tell the store how much more they can charge you because the AI read your digital footprint and discovered you just got a raise, that you're in high spirits, or that you're in dire need of that item, so they can use it to surge prices everywhere you're identifiable...
... maybe it won't make a practical difference, but every tiny bit of data you don't hand them is good, and those practices can raise awareness for more widespread usage, in every front, to a point where it can make a practical difference, and we can have a web they can't simply connect your IP that was fingerprinted elsewhere and link your identity through timestamps. Let their confidence in their information fall."
It was just an argument about using a Google alternative for fonts, but I believe the argument can be used for the "I have nothing to hide" crowd as well, because they believe it's an issue for "criminals" and "political extremists" only... but it's also their pockets.
And yeah, I also believe that changing the font will have no impact in tracking and shit, but as rule of thumb if you don't need to give them evil motherfuckers data, then don't give them evil motherfuckers data.