ode
joined 1 year ago
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who takes things that are yours and mine.
The poor and wretched donβt escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.
https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/%e2%80%9cstealing-common-goose%e2%80%9d/
~~Hi Shelley! How are you? I really hope you're doing well.~~ Shelley, we didn't go to school together and you're not my kris kringle, I'm at work and I need x. Ping me if you need anything. Also donuts in the kitchen.
but the argument I have nothing to hide except bank account passwords etc is hard to argue with
It's simple to argue against: any and all data points are either potential threat vectors, or will in aggregate paint a better picture of the individual they pertain to, for the data's possessor to use as they wish. A default-deny policy for data creation/access makes as much sense for individuals as it does workplaces.
'No one's spying on me, I'm not interesting' is more pernicious than Nothing to Hide. Most adults can kind of sense the idiocy of the latter refrain. But ask the utterer why advertising is a trillion-dollar industry if their attitudes and behaviours aren't interesting, or why a data broking industry even exists, and you'll typically be asked 'why care?'
What's harder to work out is whether the utterance is a genuine failure to comprehend the nature of surveillance capitalism, or a grasping denial of its impact, as though they're only 80 per cent convinced of their footprint's worthlessness. It's difficult to convince someone to turn down their data faucet when they barely acknowledge the faucet's existence to start with.
One of the great traditions of FOSS is its refusal to adopt that corporate visual design ethos which turns every logo into an abstract solid-colour silhouette optimised for mobile rendering. I like GIMP's plucky rodent, for example. A counter-example would be the sad [d]evolution of the Firefox.