Living in a society where everyone is constantly trying to scam you if exhausting.
Sure, there's the regular scammers we think of. The ones who call or email you and pretend to be your bank, your telco, your long lost family with an inheritance for you.
But then there's all the legal scamming. Phones that come with built-in advertising IDs. Pop-ups with tiny close buttons. Anything where you have to "opt-out". Wherever bullshit Adobe has thought up this week.
It's exhausting.
🧵
And because being constantly scammed is exhausting, it wears us down. We compromise, just because we're so sick of how much effort it is otherwise.
Whether it's disabling your adblocker, supplying your email address, not spending hours sorting out a new device to remove all the crap. Clicking through the EULA that Disney will later use to argue they're not responsible for killing your loved ones.
Tired people will compromise, and we all have stuff to do.
With that in mind, I have two requests for you all. They're hard requests, and I struggle with them both.
One is don't shame people for compromising. Nobody wanted to supply their email address, or click the giant "accept all". They're tired and just wanted to get on with their day.
The other is don't take pride in your complicity. "*I* never have those problems because *I* don't block ads." Great, good for you, but that doesn't help the people who want to preserve their privacy.
Both of these are dangerous.
If we shame others for compromising then they're never going to ask for help. They're going to associate the people pushing back against the culture of scamming as being insufferable jerks.
If we proudly declare we always use the defaults and accept all, then that sends a strong signal that our culture of constant scamming is acceptable. It works even more to ostracise those who may push back against it.
Mixed in with all this is an enormous human tendency to blame victims. Often this comes because it makes us feel safe.
"I'm sorry your personal details got leaked. This would have never happened if you used PrivacyFosser."
"I'm sorry that website doesn't work for you. It works fine if you use the CorporateSurveilium browser."
"It's your own fault for using that OS."
None of these help, but they make *us* feel safe because we use or don't use the thing we're blaming the victim for.
sharing own post on the topic
@pjf I wrote this post a while ago in response to exactly that kind of behaviour, around privacy: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/6a5f50b27965c711436f5b566f97960d
(Linking it because I've found it useful to stop that kind of behaviour without having to explain the whole thing every time, and perhaps it will be useful to you too)
