2017: People are forced to swallow spy devices in order to continue to interact with their work/life communities
2024: People are forced to swallow keyloggers in order to continue to use their desktop PCs.
Most don't know what they're agreeing to, because most people don't have the time to be experts in tech despite it affecting every factor of their lives, much in the same way that tech people don't have the time to be be farming and agriculture experts in their free time despite it affecting every factor of their lives.
>Most don't know what they're agreeing to, because most people don't have the time to be experts in tech
I used to think this maybe 20 years ago, but I think it's about time we shift gears to the realization that the reality is people don't care about tech privacy and security.
We have to remember: The internet as most people know it (the World Wide Web) is 33 years old, personal computing is even older. The 30- and 40-years olds literally grew up with all this. The 10- and 20-years olds are living all this from the moment they were born. Even legislation like GDPR came into force. The result is still nobody cares.
Lack of awareness isn't a problem anymore. Everyone knows, nobody cares.
<Insert "Am I out of touch? No, it's the people who are wrong." The Simpsons meme here.>
That's a vast oversimplification. Try flipping it to anything outside your personal scope of skills and knowledge to see how wrong this position is.
Example: tap water quality (assuming you live where tap water is safe to drink). Do you know how it works? What steps are being taken? Could you fix that yourself for your house if things break down? And yet, you probably care.
Another example: car safety features. Could you add a crumple zone to an 80s car? A cage construction? Yet you probably care that any car you're in has those properly engineered and no part of your body will be crumpled in case of a collision.
> Lack of awareness isn't a problem anymore. Everyone knows, nobody cares.
I strongly doubt that based on what I've seen. People install random apps on their phone just because they wanted to crop a picture and frame it or trim a video and compress it is because they ultimately think that nothing will happen to them. Like you don't expect your fridge to blow just because you open the door.
Another issue is that people are trustful. They trust their government to have laws for that. And even if a few accidents happen, they shrug because for them, the system generally works. And they don't care, just like you don't care a business having security cameras while you're shopping. Because you trust they will be sensible with the recording.
Tech privacy and security is nebulous for people and we have hordes of companies marketing that it does not really matter and the government not doing anything. And most people don't feel the impact. Getting them to understand is hard. Because they think that when they click delete, it's gone. Or if they've not posted, only they have the only copy.
I question the usage of the word "willingly". People aren't really aware of the consequences of their actions.
The people of Troy didn't "willingly" bring in a huge wooden horse full of enemy soldiers. They "unknowingly" brought in a horse full of enemy soldiers.
I actually think that was 2023 with Rewind. At least with Rewind you’ve gotta download the app yourself and run it. The in-progress OOBE setup for Recall does not even have an opt-out. Instead, it offers to open the settings panel after you’re done with setup, rather than just giving you an off switch: https://x.com/tomwarren/status/1796681578984182066
Right, and having your own kinda stopped being a thing right then and there. We had Ted Kaczynski I suppose but we didn't quite understand what he was on about.
2024: People are willingly activating a key logger.