19 Aug 2025
habit power, technical power, political power
Three ways to increase privacy: habits, technology, politics. The options available have changed, but in general it’s more effective to put some time into all three than to max out on one.
habit power: spend less time doing activities that can be surveilled. See you at the public library. This overlaps with the next one because one of the habits you can form is the habit of using a better-protected device like a properly set up laptop instead of a high-surveillance device like a mobile phone or smart TV. This one can only scale with the time put into it, and gets a multiplier effect when better technology and political options are available.
technical power: Choose tools and options to limit
surveillance. Although the specific tools have changed, the general goal
of breaking the
surveillance loop is still the same. Sustained protection depends
not just on stopping a particular act of surveillance, but on reducing
the effectiveness of surveillance for driving conversions
or
other likely
adverse outcomes. A lot of the effective privacy
tips are about this one. Privacy tech is worth using, but used on
its own is only going to get you into a protection vs. countermeasure
game with the surveillance industry. We still need the other two.
political power: This one is getting a lot more
interesting. Now that we have had one generation of state privacy laws,
we know a lot more about what doesn’t work. California built the privacy
equivalent of a Strowger switch
so that states that are late
to privacy legislation can build the
FTTH of privacy. We’re also seeing juries do some of what legislatures
can’t, so developing a better
understanding of how laws and the civil litigation process can best
support each other to protect people. (RtK FTW IMHO) Memo to
self: find better ways to let legislators in other states know about how
well CCPA/CPRA are working for us here.
Combinations
Habit+technical: ScrollGuard is a new Android app that blocks short, infinite-scrolling videos on Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and YouTube. (These are an ad inventory gold mine but a time suck.) You can still use the app to check a specific thing, but ScrollGuard should help you use it only for what you came to do. This doesn’t directly provide any extra protection, but helps limit the amount of surveillance data collected by helping build better habits.
Bonus links
Investing
in Ukraine’s Defense Edge: A Conversation with Perry Boyle The
biggest advantage you have as a Ukrainian startup is that you can have
direct and constant product feedback loops from multiple combat units.
Nothing like that exists anywhere else in the world. And your production
costs tend to be 40 percent or less than what they would be in the
European Union or the United States. You are both the low-cost producer
and the innovator at the same time—that’s really rare.
you do not have to use generative ai “art” in your blogs because there are websites where you can get real, nice images for free by Jenn Schiffer.
We
will survive Google Zero by Manton Reece. Google Zero is slightly
misunderstood. The problem is not that Google is nefarious in no longer
sending traffic to your website. (They probably don’t care very much one
way or the other.) The real problem is you’ve depended on Google for
your business. You’ve been obsessed with SEO and search ads for years,
all built around a single search company.
Ghost
makes it easier to publish to the social web by Neel Dhanesha.
Ghost now uses the ActivityPub protocol, and publications can be
natively distributed across social platforms like Bluesky, Threads,
Mastodon, WordPress, Flipboard, and so on. Publishers will also get
access to a built-in social feed — which looks a little bit like
Substack’s notes, except it shows posts across multiple platforms —
through which they can both read other publications and follow what
users are saying across the internet.
Curate
your own newspaper with RSS by Molly White. Instead of letting
platforms like Twitter or TikTok control what you see based on
engagement metrics meant to prolong your time on the platform and
subject you to endless ads, you can subscribe only to the sources and
writers you want to read.