Amazon, Google Unwittingly Reveal the Severity of the U.S. Surveillance State
greenwald.substack.com620 points by mikece 10 hours ago
620 points by mikece 10 hours ago
I really like this passage:
>It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties: allowing infringements on free speech may reduce false claims and hateful ideas; allowing searches and seizures without warrants will likely help the police catch more criminals, and do so more quickly; giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security.
> But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile. Americans still all learn and are taught to admire the iconic (if not apocryphal) 1775 words of Patrick Henry, which came to define the core ethos of the Revolutionary War and American Founding: “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.
I think the security/liberty tradeoff is actually often a false promise. You can end up trading away liberty for nothing at all. I don't like buying into this, even to say "liberty is better, we should do that instead" because it implicitly concedes that you would really get the security on the other side of the bargain.
And if you don't get the security you were promised, it's too late to do anything about it.
> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" -- Benjamin Franklin
The key phrase is "a little temporary safety". 250 years ago people understood that the "security" gains were small and fleeting, but the loss of liberty was massive and permanent.
Aside, the original meaning of Franklin's words are less-inspiring but perhaps more-interesting.
He's saying the local democratic legislature must not give up its "freedom" to pass laws taxing the powerful Penn dynasty which almost owns Pennsylvania.
He wants to reject a deal offered by the Penns: A big lump of money for temporary military security now, in exchange for an agreement that they can never be taxed ever again.
That's not an aside. The quote is pernicious because of its attribution to Ben. People invoke it without ever asking themselves if its true because they think of it as the hard won wisdom of a great man.
> The quote is pernicious because of its attribution to Ben.
It's not pernicious for any reason because it's absolutely true in general, Franklin was simply using a general piece of wisdom to justify particular government actions.
Yes, using it that way was an improvisation and a bit of a stretch, but the real issue here is why he needed to resort to it - that's a rabbit hole that pretty much goes to the bottom of today's problems which we're handling in a much worse manner than him back then.
FWIW, the context of the Franklin quote is him defending the ability of the legislature to tax a family that was trying to bribe/lobby the governor to do otherwise.
The quote is in defense of the government: WITTES: It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means.
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
Well, quite. And in an American Revolution context it's not like the colonies were notably less secure places to live after they gained independence.
basically the patriot act was a big piece of temporary safety that never produced any.
If you assume that the security side of the equation is a false promise, then you are not making a decision at all: choosing between liberty with no security, or no liberty plus no security (because it's fake).
And for me, it seems somewhat disingenuous to imply that a decision is being made when your premise belies that.
We concurrently see failures on both the "attempts to preserve liberty" and "attempts to preserve security" front, so let's stop arguing about abstract principles.
Quotes are pointless, discussion should be limited to what's happening on the ground. For any given thing that happens, do we think that it, specifically, is helpful or harmful.
It's trivial to reverse that quote: we can, and have, pushed to keep the US population armed with increasingly-advanced personal weapons (in the name of liberty) without actually gaining any protection against authoritarian styles of government use of force or surveillance as a result. While just making civilian-on-civilian violence easier and more lethal.
> “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.
The thing is, that's a gross misrepresentation of what he said and meant. Patrick Henry was referring exclusively to political liberty from British colonial rule. There is no sense whatsoever in which he was referring to civil liberties against domestic rule. It didn't have a single thing to do with "security".
> But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile.
Again, totally false. This is the core premise of libertarians in the West, who are, and always have been, a minority. It is not, and has never been, the "core premise" of the West or the US. Or else, quite obviously, we wouldn't have the constant tension between these liberties and the need for security. The idea that "those trade-offs are never worthwhile" is not a core American idea. We make those tradeoffs every single day. And continue to argue about them, e.g. over what degree of gun control is proper after each school shooting that happens.
I would like it a lot better without the mention to the "West", which, as usual, is a code word for: "I want to pretend my point extend outside the USA but I have absolutely no knowledge of how true that is. I don't intend to do any research because that would demand efforts from me so bear with my casual imperialism". Queue the purely American historical lesson following.
Greek philosophy did not happen in the USA and actually predates it quite a bit.
If we're nitpicking, is it queue or cue?
I guess it's cue like on cue but it's late on a Sunday. You will have to excuse my brain.
It wasn't a nitpick by the way. I deeply resent American using "the West" like if my own country and culture was somehow fungible in their experience. They are not. We don't have that much in common. That doesn't include a legal tradition, or a conception of what freedom of speech should be, neither does it include values or history.
Edit: Enjoy downvoting me. It doesn't make what I said any less true. If you think the various European countries can be grouped with the US in a coherent whole, you are deeply deluding yourselves. They can't even be lumped together.
It would probably help if you made a more specific point rather than just ranting in very vague terms.
Grouping terms like "the west" can be broad enough to include over half of all living humans or so narrow that it applies to a small village.
It is, admittedly, not a particularly useful term, but it's not like americans are reaponsible for it.
Where have you seen it used outside of Americans pretending their culture is somehow a standard and NATO apologists? The world doesn't even exist as such in my own language. It's a staple on Hacker News and nearly always for the bad reasons. I'm supposed to politely nod and shut up when people are casually erasing my culture?
What even is a "nato apologist"???
> Where have you seen it used outside of Americans
Well, there was this minor thing called "the western roman empire" for a few years, so that might be a starting point.
I am fascinated to learn how a claim that westerners "prefer liberty over security" is somehow erasing your culture though.
What are you talking about? Nobody is erasing your culture except for maybe you because you aren’t even talking about your culture. You’re just ranting about Americans.
Universal human rights is a very widespread belief and concept, extending to all continents and many, many cultures. It's not hard to understand why.
If you'd said "isn't just a western thing" I would have definitely agreed, but this claim seems a bit unlikely.
Just look around the world; they are the norm: East Asia (Japan, South Korea, China - Taiwan, Hong Kong, June 4 on the mainland); North America; South America, almost all of the region; Europe; Australia, NZ, Indonesia, the Phillipines; South Asia (India, and I think they are enshrined if not enforced in Pakistan and some others).
What's mostly missing is the Middle East, Central Asia, parts of SE Asia, and large parts of Africa - though there are Benin, Botswana, Kenya, and many others iirc.
No it's not. There are no human rights for the lowest castes in Hinduism, there are no human rights for polytheists in Islam, there were nothing like the modern idea of human rights in Japan or China before they westernized. That's why the west was able to leapfrog other nations economically (and hence militarily), because it was the first place where people had enough rights for something resembling a modern economy to develop.
> That's why the west was able to leapfrog other nations economically
I tend to agree, though it's of course hard to prove. However, I'm talking about the present, not the past.
> There are no human rights for the lowest castes in Hinduism
I said it is "very widespread", not everywhere. Perhaps the confusion is the word Universal: that doesn't mean everyone believes it (false for any belief), but that everyone has the rights, whether or not they know or can exercise them. It's the concept that starts the Declaration of Independence: All are created equal, and all have inalienable rights.
> there were nothing like the modern idea of human rights in Japan or China before they westernized
I am talking about the present, where it's adopted in East Asia (including in China - Taiwan, Hong Kong (though suppressed now), June 4 on the mainland), throughout Latin America, Europe of course, parts of Africa, the Anglo world, etc.
> there are no human rights for polytheists in Islam,
There is no country called 'Islam'; if we go by scripture, nobody has human rights. The idea that all practicioners of Islam have the same beliefs is as true as saying all practicioners of Christianity do - and look at HN.
In Indonesia, the largest majority Muslim country, there are human rights, also in India, with the largest Muslim population (but not the majority). I think Pakistan and some South Asian countries probably have them enshrined.
I mean, nobody knows why "the west" (whatever that is) leapfrogged anyone, and this is a fairly small period in terms of total human history.
If you don't give someone a reason to live they ain't gonna slave away very hard for you
We have a branch of government called Congress, here are some things they used to do that made it a crime to read your mail or listen to your phone calls.
1. Postal Service Act of 1792
2. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986
Anyway, Facebook can read your DMs, Google can read your email, Ring can take photos from your camera.
We can very easily make those things a crime, but we don't seem to want to do it.
3. Video Rental Protection Act (1988)
>we don't seem to want to
Congress protects only itself and its actual constituents — wealthy corporate persons.
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Citizens United (2012) and the surveillances themselves make this monitoring self-capturing: the only way to prevent it is to convince most people to not install, but most people want the installed benefits.
Even getting your neighbors to re-position their Ring cameras (which they have every right to install) can become very difficult.
After city councils individually ban Flock-like CCTV traffic monitoring within their jurisdictions, their police can (and often do) still access neighboring jurisdictions' to monitor border crossings. You can't escape This System, even without license plates nor cell phones.
----
Term Limits now? end Citizens United. release The Files!
The Video Rental Protection Act was passed when a video rental employee blackmailed a congressman and there was no law against it. So it's clear how to make congress write new privacy laws.
Psst anyone at Covenant Eyes[0] want to sign up for the obvious assignment here??
[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mike-joh...
That doesn't appear to be accurate, at least from the Wikipedia article.
Robert Bork (sorry to add my personal commentary but an absolute shit stain of a human being) was nominated for the Supreme Court (which, thankfully, he always not confirmed), and a reporter went to a video rental store and asked for his rental history, which there was no law against. The published article didn't include much, as Bork hadn't rented any particularly salacious material, but there was bipartisan outrage that this had occurred.
Just goes to show how far we've fallen when there was once bipartisan outrage over accessing your Blockbuster rental history, when tech giants now have 10 times as much surveillance on you - your 1 am "shower thoughts" in your search history, all the websites you've visited, all your social media posts, and even social media posts about/including you posted by someone else, everything you've ever commented on a blog forum, your location history, etc.
> Even getting your neighbors to re-position their Ring cameras (which they have every right to install) can become very difficult.
In Germany it's prohibited by law to point your private surveillance camera to public spaces like the boardwalk, no recording of these areas is allowed. I think thats the way it should be. Unfortunately in some areas (e.g. train stations) it is allowed.
How would term limits help? Without term limits, congressmen can be judged by their voting history. With them, we get always new batches of congressmen, while lobbyists stay the same and consolidate their power.
It's so easy to get rid of a congressman you don't like with term limits. But why do you think, on average, his replacement would be better? The replacement would only be more unknown.
Everyone has known Google reads your email since day one. In the early days they would spin it as a good thing: "that's why the spam filtering is great!"
Why is everyone suddenly outraged Ring has access to your footage? These cloud-connected cameras...hosted on someone else's servers. It's literally how they work. "But I didn't think they would use the video in a way I didn't personally approve after giving it to them!"
So instead, people are rage-returning Ring cameras and posting their receipts and exchanging them for...Chinese cameras. Which do the same thing, except this time the servers are overseas and completely uncontrolled.
It's hard to have any empathy when the warning label was already on the box for all these products.
> But I didn't think they would use the video in a way I didn't personally approve after giving it to them!
This is exactly the sort of thing there should be legislation for. To a somewhat weaker extent than I’d like this is what GDPR and friends covers, the law says that companies must state what data they’re gathering and what purposes they’re gathering it for. If they overreach then they can be fined into oblivion.
In practice this is not as strong as it should be, broadly companies can and do basically go “we’re collecting all your data for whatever purpose we like” and get away with it, but they do at least think carefully about doing so.
There’s no reason we can’t force providers of cloud backed devices to treat your data with respect, rather than thinking of it as residual income they’re leaving on the table if they don’t also sell it to third parties for data mining.
'then they can be fined into oblivion' with capital CAN. Give me an example where this actually happened. (not just a statement that it will be done, but an actual example of a company going under because of the fine)
We have known all of this for over a decade now, ever since the Snowden leaks revealed some very damning things. The public has unfortunately decided they do no care it seems...
Yes, that is what many people thought because people assume that a state with a reasonable commitment to individual liberty would have safeguards in place to force merchants to not spy on them.
The fault is not with the idea of expecting that you own the data that you made and the equipment that you purchased. The fault here is the regulatory structure that makes you by default not the owner of your data or your things.
People are waking up too late, so don't support them, rather ridicule them and tell them their newfound awareness is futile?
Don't confuse the public's want with the current situation controlled by the power and money being used to prevent these things from being a crime
Its a nice outrage wave, but I have very hard time believing this will be a major topic in 2 weeks. People simply don't give a fuck en masse.
Accept that many folks are built differently than you and me and stuff like actual freedom you may be willing to lay your life for may be meaningless fart for others, especially when its not hurting them now. For example US folks voted current admin willingly second time and even after a full year of daily FUBARs the support is still largely there. If even pedophilia won't move some 'patriots' then reading some communication doesn't even register as a topic.
Also, anybody actually concerned about even slightest privacy would never, ever buy such products, not now not a decade earlier. Ie for my family I don't even see any added value of such devices, just stupid fragile something I have no control over, but it sees everything. Why?
These comments appear everywhere, as if people never made changes. Look at the enormous changes prior generations have made. Look at the changes from the conservative/MAGA movement, #metoo, and the George Floyd protests. The claim doesn't stand up to any examination.
Comments like these are a distraction. All we need to do is get to work. If people took action every time they felt like posting these comments, we'd get a lot done.
"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"
Well, except that you have debts like mortgages and car loans to pay off. And your kids need to participate in extra-curriculars so they can get into a good school, and those cost money. And theaters are out of fashion now, so you'll need to buy that 80" TV with the surround sound so you can have a theater at home. And your shows are now on 6 different streaming services so that'll cost a little extra each month. And life really is easier with AI, but they all have strengths and weaknesses so you'll probably want to pay for 2, if not 3 of them. And your fast fashion gets threadbare after 20 or 30 washes so you'll need to regularly order 3 or 4 replacement shirts so you can send back the 2 that don't fit quite right.
Anyways back to the gears and whee.... oh look a squirrel!
> Look at the changes from the conservative/MAGA movement, #metoo, and the George Floyd protests.
Which changes? metoo certainly didn't change much, the George Floyd protests also led to nothing, just look at how ICE has been executing US citizens in the last months. In 2025 alone, before Renee Good and Alex Pretti, ICE murdered 32 people with zero accountability [1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/...
<< ICE has been executing US citizens
Shot. Killed. Executing is a ridiculously inaccurate framing bordering on rage baiting. And that is before we get to whether Pretti or Good were committing felonies, when they were willfully obstructing federal agents from doing the job they were assigned.
Regarding conservatives/MAGA, if you're saying the US hasn't changed dramatically since 2016 then I don't know what to say to you.
And I think you're misremembering the world before #metoo and George Floyd. Regarding the latter, police used to widely behave like ICE; now it's anathema - at least in cities. None of them help ICE afaik.
The conservatives like to preach hopelessness to their enemies - for obvious reasons, an age-old tactic - saying things like protests accomplish nothing (obviously false), these movements did nothing. The wierd part is, their enemies have picked up that argument and make it themselves. They simply and bizarrely have disarmed themselves, but they had and have the power the entire time.
The Epstein stuff is a distraction. The previous admin had 4 years to do literally anything about it and they did nothing.
A distraction from what?
If anyone with power picks and chooses who gets justice then there is no justice, those people are corrupt, and they need to be removed from power and charged.
Whatabout whatabout whatabout. Charge, try, and imprison the guilty regardless of how much money they have, which political party they are part of, or how they vote. Anything else is madness.
My personal take is that everything is a distraction, nothing is real ( except conspiracy theories -- naturally ). Also, please subscribe to my totally organic podcast.
Get money out of politics (reverse citizens united) and enact term/age limits for all public offices.
These problems will be solved. Most Americans agree on most things. Don't let the politicians who benefit off of dividing us fool you. An agenda that focuses on reform outside of the usual finger pointing game of partisan politics and promises to enact these reforms without fear or favor will win.
Any such agenda must also be willing to purge itself of any old guard that stands in the way, and treat them as a virus attached to their political movement. There is no benefit from trying to say, make a wedge between a Clinton and a Trump. If you can't get over that you're part of the problem, and this cycle will just continue.
Stop defending an old guard halfway in the grave. Being right doesn't matter in electoral politics, winning does. It is likely the only way to achieve such a broad reform is to be willing to entertain as many incriminations as possible.
Given recent relevations re Epstein this is our best chance to reform corruption in generations. Let's not squander it by defending anyone simply because they fall on one side of a dubious partisan line, or seem "less bad" than another.
The broader the castigation, the more likely to achieve momentum that can actually enact said reforms, given the disadvantages of taking on these vast incumbent interests and a government that is easily susceptible to gridlock driven by a minority.
And we can get there with ranked-choice voting. We really need to press hard until we get it.
Approval, not ranked-choice.
Ranked-choice reduces transparency and understanding of the vote-counting process, disenfranchises an alarming percentage of lower-income voters, obstructs risk-limiting audits (which are essential for security), and is non-monotonic (increasing voter support for a candidate can make them lose). Further, ranked-choice doesn't actually fix the spoiler problem and won't eliminate two-party dominance.
Approval voting is cheap and easy to implement, dead simple to explain, count, and audit. Not only does it eliminate the spoiler problem, it is easy to see why it does so: your ability to vote for any candidate is independent of your ability to vote for any other.
> Approval voting is cheap and easy to implement, dead simple to explain, count, and audit.
Not so dead simple to vote, though. If you're a sincere voter and you prefer Alice to Bob and Bob to Charlie, do you approve of Alice, or both Alice and Bob?
That choice has to be either strategic or very noisy.
There seems to be some unavoidable complexity to voting methods: letting the voter deal with the complexity leads to a method with a very simple algorithm but that's tricky to use. Letting the method itself deal with it leads to more complex algorithms, but makes it easier to vote.
That said, the alternative vote is a bad ranked voting method; with that I do agree. Just beware of the complexity hidden in the system, whether that's Approval or Ranked Pairs.
I agree with this. Ranked choice is easy to explain to a naive voter: everyone understands how a preference order works, and the result is "the candidate more people like the most". Counting the votes is (a bit) complicated, but I think the (minority of) people who get excited by implementation details out-smart themselves, by worrying that most people won't understand the details. Of course most people won't understand the details, because they don't care about the details. They don't know how votes are tallied now!
My position admittedly breaks down when people lie to low-information voters about the fairness of the process - but, in my defence, people will lie about any system that doesn't produce the results they want. I'd prefer they lodge their objections to a better system than first-past-the-post.
Yes. Without it, we'll keep getting dysfunctional ultra-partisan elected bodies.
> Get money out of politics
If you also mean make it so Congress doesn't have a $4T slush fund to buy favors and influence every year, then I'm on board. If you think reducing the paltry sums spent on campaign contributions is going to take the money out of politics, you're bad at math.
Weird way to agree with someone, end with an insult just because you're not sure whether or not you should take the least charitable interpretation. You would think the rest of my post would have been a clue.
Moving past that, yes we are in agreement. In fact you bring up an excellent point, which is that political parties themselves make corrupt use of campaign finance lawlessness to get in the way of their own voters and rig their own primary systems. None of these entities, whether the DNC or a right wing corporate interest group should be able to buy and sell American elections.
Individual campaign contributions are a non issue, also because regular people are capped at relatively low and long established FEC limits these various slush funds/pacs are designed to circumvent. As you said, the math is clear. I'm confident if this issue were ever put straightly to the American people, the result would be overwhelmingly in favor of campaign finance reform. The real issue isn't anyone's ability to do math, but what you hinted at earlier. The political parties themselves enjoy and benefit from this corruption. Therefore they are incentivized to ensure such a vote never takes place.
The current moment offers an opportunity to overpower such entrenched powers that be, if we can collectively move beyond partisan finger pointing that will only alienate those fellow Americans we need to agree with us to make such a broad based reform possible.
Does the next coalition have any money?
What point are you attempting to make? Or are you one of a minority of people that refuses to see the difference between (say among other things) the unrealized gains of someone like a Musk vs someone's working class parents saving up for retirement?
Citizens United litigated a very specific issue. It was only an issue because Congress had actually passed some meaningful campaign finance reform after many painful years (really decades) of effort. The court essentially kneecapped it overnight on a 5 to 4 basis. Get money out of politics commonly means get dark/pac/corporate money out of politics, not individual donors well within long established FEC limits that these pacs are designed to circumvent.
Again, billionaires live by different rules. This doesn't just apply to taxes, criminal justice, etc it applies to the foundation of our democracy - free and fair elections. What could be more in keeping with the best of American traditions than ensuring our elections are as egalitarian as possible?
> We have a branch of government called Congress
... that has been virtually useless as it has been rendered ineffective by Republican obstructionism and the unwillingness of the Democrats to counteract it, leading to the current state of Trump being able to do what he wants completely unchecked.
So, what's currently going on to fight back against all this? Here's what I found. Does signing a petition actually doing something? It's hard to tell but if you are inclined, at least take a look at some current efforts.
-Active Petitions and Campaigns to Limit Surveillance: End the Surveillance State (Action Network): Petitions call on Congress to permanently end the PATRIOT Act, stop warrantless surveillance, and oppose the expansion of surveillance technology.
-Ban Facial Recognition (Amnesty International & ACLU): Amnesty International is running the "Ban the Scan" campaign, while the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) targets the use of face surveillance, arguing it poses risks to civil liberties and disproportionately impacts marginalized communities.
-Stop Surveillance Data Brokers (Mozilla): Mozilla Foundation is targeting major websites to stop sharing data with surveillance technology firms that track user movement and interactions.
-Protect User Data from Subpoenas (EFF): The Electronic Frontier Foundation is pressuring tech companies to resist lawless DHS subpoenas for user data.
-Oppose Localized Surveillance (ACLU/Action Network): Local petitions aim to limit technologies like Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) that create massive databases of personal movement.
-Federal Legislative Reform: Advocates are pushing for the "The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act," which aims to restrict intelligence agencies from purchasing data from brokers without a warrant.
I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products. Tell everyone you know to stop using their products. They have all been acquiring and amassing surveillance for years through their products and now they're just double dipping with AI training to sell you more of it. The more you can get people to realize and disconnect the better.
I wish more people would use AI to build alternatives with a clear, binding mission not to exploit the data, not to sell or be funded by investors who expect it to, etc. We have the power to build more than ever. We should use it.
>I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products.
I noticed your own app's website [0] hosts videos on YouTube [1] and uses Stripe as a payment processor [2], which is hosted on AWS. You also mentioned that your app is vibe coded [3]; the AI labs that facilitated your vibecoding likely built and run their models using Meta's PyTorch or Google's TensorFlow.
"Just stop using" makes for a catchy manifesto in HackerNews comments, but the reality is a lot more complicated than that.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbCM99cz9W8
Someone commented on a HN threads on just de-googling and he couldn't even pick up his kids without a gmail or apple account.
Just not using it is really unrealistic for the average person at this moment
I know it is probably not the American way but the only way to address this problem is to make laws that prevent a duopoly, penalize anti-competitive behavior and push open-source standards for software/hardware.
Unfortunately, the status quo also means the US (and its tech giants) has real power and control over other countries' technology sector. So, no party in America will make or enforce laws that will change the status quo within the country or overseas.
Even in the EU we can't use a lot of "society important" smartphone apps without Google Play or the Apple Store. I can get a physical key thing for my national digital ID, but I can't get anything for my bank, my healthcare (which is a public service in Denmark) or any of our national digital post services. You can apply to get exempt from the digital post services, and they do have a website sollution, but still.
Don't get me wrong. I appreachiate all the work being done to get Europe out of the claws of US tech companies, but I think having an official EU app store alternative would be a good start.
> Even in the EU we can't use a lot of "society important" smartphone apps without Google Play or the Apple Store.
Install GrapheneOS on a Pixel. Most Android apps just work, and unlike the stock OS, it does not spy on you.
This doesn't help. Your contact number is shared by 50 parents' phone..are you sure of their security measures.
Even if I keep everything safe many govts are using Microsoft cloudfor day2day operations. Recently my employer lost tons of data. Every CV you send to a company or recruitment is kept often unencrypted. Every other country is fingerprinting/face ID upon arrival. Are you sure about their security?
Things that I have dumped into my email are far less consequential compared to those.
The game is lost. Very few people can have privacy.
A Pixel is depending on Google.
Parent mentioned not using the Play Store or the Apple Store. The hardware Graphene runs on is kind of irrelevant for that. I don't see a problem with paying Google for hardware that I am free to use as I like; unlike other manufacturers the bootloader is unlockable, which means the stock OS can be replaced.
I have little hope, since the EU is lobbyist-infested like the US, but there is a chance the EU will fund FOSS platforms over centralized solutions. There are already several EU wide or national funds for that and it would help immensly when that money would go to burning out solo devs and maybe even to orgs like mozilla.
In my opinion there is a too strong connection now between these private corporations and "politicians". Everyone can be bribed.
The only way I see a change possibility is for people to think about how to change this collectively. Pushing for open source everywhere would be one partial strategy that could work in certain areas.
How do we accomplish such abstract goals when 54% of U.S. adults aged 16–74 read below a sixth-grade level?
> it is probably not the American way but the only way to address this problem is to make laws
Regulation and liberty mongering are very American. We do it constantly at multiple levels of government.
What kills privacy regulation is this weird strain of political nihilism that seems to strongly intersect with those who care about the issue. I've personally worked on a few bills in my time. The worst, by far, were anything to do with privacy. If you assume you're defeated by forces that be, you're never going to probe that hypothesis.
You are incorrect. There is another way to address this problem and I suspect it will come to this: average people will begin attempting to destroy data centers and their interconnection points.
Your trillion dollar investment to control the populace ain't worth shit when its on fire and the monkeys are hurling flaming shit at you.
What law would you propose, and have you thought through unintended consequences?
> make laws that prevent a duopoly, penalize anti-competitive behavior and push open-source standards for software/hardware.
None of this is legally easy to implement or enforce, and any attempt of doing it is virtually guaranteed to create an unbelievable amount of unintended consequences as people figure out ways to game this new set of rules.
We need something similar to FIPS for interoperable software and standards. Organizations will fall in line when money is at stake.
Say for example your local/state/federal agency publishes (or accepts) documents exclusively in ods/odf instead of proprietary formats, that will automatically drive adoption of software and prevent lock-in.
Agressive interoperability at the protpcol and exchange format - its why email mostly works even forcing Google to back off when they tried to change email to be rendered by their cdn (i forget the name of the offering - but was similar to what news pages were being pushed for speedup). Bad actors will always abound - like Microsoft spiking the documnt standards by pushing through ooxml when odt/odf was gaining traction. Or basically just coercing the decision makers like in Berlin(?) where they moved their offices into hte city to get them to drop Linux/Openoffice.
Re: ooxml vs odt/odf
I've heard that both have parts of the spec that are hard to implement if you don't have the software to verify.
How is it a bad thing that both major office software are now documented?
While that may be true, people need to start somewhere. Otherwise the future will just be even more sniffing done by private entities. Do we want a sneaky Skynet that looks more like 1984?
The guy who is obsessed with using Lord of the Rings to name his companies certainly does want that.
Everything counts, this attitude is very defeatist. Stop using it the easy ways at first, and then make conscious steps to get off these services going forward.
It's probably at the same scale as gas/oil companies and recycling at this point. I'd like to believe my individual efforts will make a dent in the surveillance state, but at this volume legislation is truly the only meaningful effort to defang these multi-billion dollar companies.
Yea I noticed many of these sevices won't allow an email address not hosted with a provider that wasn't Google,Microsoft, or apple where they can collect other details. I think i tried to sign up for VanceAI, it would only accept gmail or discord connected account as a sign in.
"... tried to sign up for VanceAI, it would only accept gmail or discord connected account as a sign in ..."
I don't know what "VanceAI" is but I am confused ... why would they not want corporate (as in, Fortune 500) users to sign up ?
> [...] and he couldn't even pick up his kids without a gmail or apple account.
How so?
A lot of schools use apps like 'ParentSquare' to interact and manage the student/teacher/parent relationship, and do not offer the same level of communication through traditional channels anymore.
This is because social media has trained today's young parents to be completely entitled assholes and teachers can only take so much of their abuse. What teacher is going to want to sit down for a conference with a parent who whips out a phone to record the meeting and then posts selectively edited excerpts online in order to get a few upvotes on a social platform.
And these apps require a google account?
They require a phone that can log into an App store, so unless parents can work around that, then yes?
Nonsense. My kid just started kindergarten this past year - I've never been required to log into ParentSquare through a GMail address and I have only ever accessed it through a browser on a laptop.
(Damn, I failed at my attempt to stop posting.)
The web is no better than phone apps when it comes to data gathering. Maybe the data is a little fuzzier, but you can be assured it's being gathered all the same as it is in phone apps.
In our part of the world that's Meta/WhatsApp.
All school and class related information is shared exclusively via WhatsApp communities.
He needed to verify his identity via an app at pick up time, and needed an gmail/apple account as part of the process. I don't remember which app.
bring my kids now or i will call the police and you will be charged with abduction.
and how are you going to prove your ID? you might as well be the one abducting them, and especially if you refuse to use an app to identify yourself... (playing devils advocate here)
most immediate, would be my children would identify me, next one is under the assumption this suddenly crops up as a policy change, such a policy from the start would be a non starter, however familiarity of face would overide the need for what would be plutobeaurocratic requirement.
the really tight one is how to proceed when there is a change of lawful custody or guardianship, because, unfortunately, divorce, and domestic violence happens, and the lag between court order and, notification of custodial reassignment should be close to zero.
You must have a complexion on the lighter side if you think calling the police is the best solution to something like this.
thats about as calm as it gets, if my kids were abducted because im not using an app.
Oh well, I guess there is nothing to be done. Pack it up everyone. It is over. You can't do anything. No one can learn anything. No. You heard the guy above. It is over. Go home. Do nothing.
I don't mean to say that nothing can be done, I was just agreeing that it's often more complicated than it looks.
Apple isn't on the evil list, aside from the kowtowing every powerful leader must do not to have their business attacked.
> Apple isn't on the evil list
Yeah, Tim Apple handing over a 24-karat gold plaque to the sitting president is completely normal behavior for CEOs to engage in, and not at all about just making as much money as possible. He had to do that, otherwise Apple as a company would disappear tomorrow. They're just trying to survive.
Unless you're going to demonstrate that handing over a golden plaque implies handing over privacy data to government agencies, I'm going to prefer the former over the latter.
Apple has already been outed as one of the participating companies in PRISM. [1] So that privacy boat has long since sailed. The public legal wrangling is likely just a mutually beneficial facade. PRISM is almost certainly illegal, but nobody can legally challenge it because the data provided from it is never directly used. Law enforcement engage in parallel construction [2] where they obtain the same evidence in a different way. So nobody can prove they were harmed by PRISM, and thus all challenges against it get tossed for lack of standing. It's very dumb.
But in any case the legal battles work as nice PR for Apple (see how much we care about privacy) and also as a great scenario for the government because any battles they win are domains where they can now legally use information directly to the courts and sidestep the parallel construction. That also takes the burden off of Apple PR in giving that information up because it can be framed as the courts and government forcing them, rather than them collaborating in mass data collection.
I don’t like that we’ve gotten to a place where presumably serious people think that giving a token prize to a narcissist is the same thing as engaging in massive surveillance of the entire population.
If you or I had complete knowledge of all of apple's activities, this would be a more relevant point.
Instead we have to make judgements based on what limited information we possess and sucking up to trump is a real bad sign for things like caring about privacy/liberty/safety
> presumably serious people think that giving a token prize to a narcissist
Unfortunately, I think reality is much worse than you seem to be under the impression of. Voter suppression and military violence against your own population isn't "narcissism", it's the introduction of authoritarianism. The flagrant narcissism is a symptom of that, not the actual issue.
Apple was a PRISM partner. They share just as much with the NSA as Microsoft and Google.
>They share just as much with the NSA as Microsoft and Google.
For something like icloud vs gmail/gdrive, they're approximately the same, but that doesn't mean "they share just as much [...] as Microsoft and Google. If they never collected data in the first place, they don't have to share with NSA. The most obvious would be for location data, which apple keeps on-device and google did not (although they did switch to on device a few years ago).
Remember when Apple PR spent a bunch of time putting Tim Cook alongside images of RFK? Civil rights hero! That campaign wouldn’t land these days.
It doesn't have to be a binary choice between "don't use it ever" and "continue using it as much as you are now". If people stopped using these services 50% of the time, it would have a huge impact.
In concept what you say is correct but reality is complex. There are very few providers that implement friction free login/password and importantly security. A large number of email providers didn't implement 2FA until very recently. Even those that have terrible apps, ad infested, no app password or oAuth etc. so many governments use MS hosted services.
It is akin to Visa/MasterCard duopoly. It is hard to escape but even if one does it then it resulted only inconvenience. I still don't have my cards in phone - neither will google change path nor will govts force a change.
I don't see any contradiction here with what I said. If you feel that using Google for email is unavoidable, that can be the part that you keep using. You can still easily ditch a lot of other things. E.g. Pixel phone, Google Docs, Google Drive, AWS. Each of those has plenty of, arguably better, alternatives.
But you can still reduce your exposure. Giving in to hopelessness seems suboptimal.
The comments are fair. My post was quick and lacked details as I was frustrated in the ever increasing enshitification of the web.
What I meant to convey, from my personal experience, is that it seemed hard to get off of platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon Prime, Alexa, Ring, Google Photos, etc. but then I did it and didn’t miss them. These small moves by a lot of people, I believe, can still make a difference. It’s not perfect, but it’s something. Do I still use some services? Of course, I have Gmail and WhatsApp, and use a lot of Apple products. When I can, I choose intentionally what I use since there’s no perfect companies out there, but there are “better” ones (whatever that may be in one’s opinion). I chose cloudflare for hosting and Anthropic for vibe coding. Allowing people to use existing login info versus exposing them to more risk with self managed auth was a choice I made. There are tons of choices we make every day so trying to be more intentional is a good start.
Nobody is perfect, but we can try to improve each day in these choices we make.
his app has also Google, Apple logins and for first time I have seen, login with meta button.
Talking about anti-tech-monopolies and using Stripe-paypal is extra ironic.
I can understand aws, youtube, being on google index, and other things as they sometimes are the most cost efficient or vendors don't offer alternatives... but stripe-paypal is more expensive and worse than the less-bad alternatives. jeez.
> I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products
It's not just hard for some though, literally their livelihood depends on it. Want to run a restaurant today? You basically must have Facebook, Instagram and Google Maps entry for enough people to discover you, probably more than half of the people we got to our restaurant who we ask, cite Google Maps as the reason they found the place, and without half our income, the restaurant wouldn't have survived.
It really depends where the restaurant is located.
That is going to work as the same as telling people to stop buying gas from Standard Oil or stop using Bell Telephone. Without government intervention you cannot break up their control.
I agree that government restrictions usually help if they're implemented well, but part of the issue is the government is benefiting from this kind of thing.
Also, most people don't actually need something like Amazon. Not to minimize the level of investment in it, but I don't see Amazon or Google as being quite the same as Bell or Standard Oil. Maybe between Google and Apple there's some kind of duopoly like that?
My impression is people don't value — either because they don't understand or minimize — things that protect privacy and anonymity. This is a standard refrain on these kinds of forums and elsewhere — "your typical person doesn't know or care about [feature X that preserves privacy, choice, and autonomy], they just want something that works and is fun". It's been belittled as unfashionable or paranoid or performative or something, when it's really something that's had short term costs that pale in comparison to the long-term costs.
I'm not saying governments don't need to be on the "right side" but I think people need to see security as involving not just encryption and so forth, but also decentralization, anonymity, demonopolization, and censorship resistance. It needs to be seen as part of the product or service benefits.
A lot of this reminds me of stuff from the 90s, when network security was ignored for awhile for customer convenience's sake. It seems really similar now, only the thing that's been ignored is like user control and privacy or something like that.
I think the thing that's surprising to me, for example, is that it takes a Super Bowl ad for people to realize that maybe there are downsides to letting a monopoly have access to video throughout the neighborhood everywhere.
You can start by creating a email at tuta or proton. It does not have to be 100% overnight
but then you send a mail to $person, and this $person uses gmail, and now your mail is still indexed by google.
The only way to get around this is to use encryption. dont send plain text email.
Tuta is just horrible, often rejecting account creation altogether. AtomicMail.io is a nice free alternative to Proton.
Thanks for your perspective. I've been using tuta since a year now. Nothing to report
Tuta is pathetic because it asked for my real name, ID verification, and real phone number, altogether defeating the point of anonymity. When I refused to provide identification, it disabled and deleted the new registration. This makes it as bad as Discord.
Perhaps you have a grandfathered account, but times have changed for the worse with Tuta alone.
Its an intractable problem because people now have a general expectation that everything is "free".
Look at Kagi's success and compare it to Google. It doesn't even register.
People need to start paying for things, because if you're not paying for it, you're not in control of it.
I see what you're saying but I don't think that's the answer for everything, because people also pay for conveniences, like a Ring subscription so that Amazon stores footage in their cloud for you.
The problem is centralization is more convenient for consumers. You can easily control your doorbell, your garage door, your security cameras with 1 app, and everything just works.
Open source and decentralized solutions need to be just as convenient and cheaper than centralized ones for consumers to choose them.
Alternatively, basic stuff like e-mail and payment processing should be provided by the state. After all, the state provides a road network, which is similarly essential and rather more expensive.
> basic stuff like e-mail and payment processing should be provided by the state
You're looking at America in 2026 and concluding we want to give the state more control over private lives?
Yes, you can give control to the House of Representatives. The House should have way more control over government agencies, it's the people's house. The people deserve to have control.
> it's the people's house
You dropped an adjective: wealthy
No, the Senate, Presidency, and Legislative branches are for the wealthy. The constitution was literally written so a minority of rich people would have the most control over the government. Having state legislatures (who also happened to decide who can vote + how) choose senators, requiring the senate to pass bills written by the house, judges that are chosen by senators. House of reps only serve for 2 years compared to 6 or 4 or lifetime appointments.
The 17th amendment is a little over 100 years old.
People need to stop treating the US constitution as this "mythical" thing rather than the reality of it being a very undemocratic document that is highly resistant to change.
Luckily the house can be expanded with a simple majority IN the house, one way to truly combat this.
The more you ask around the more you will find the real divide in the US is the same as it always has been. There are those that believe a more powerful government will solve all the problems and those that just want the government to leave them alone to solve their own problems.
Thomas Sowell's Conflict of Visions describes the difference well.
You make a really good point I think, if the government just leaves us alone then we can solve all of our own problems with the friendly assistance of ma bell/standard oil/google/facebook.
E-mail used to be provided by your isp and there were enough different ISPs ( at least in my country ) to not have a duopoly.
Yes, but they didn't develop it. ISP email required you to configure IMAP or more likely POP in an email application and did nothing to combat spam. Google came along and offered gmail, easy sign up, no configuration, used your web browser so no other applications to install, spam largely filtered out, just worked.
The app to install wasn't really an issue given any OS with a default desktop came with an email app.
What brought the popularity of gmail was the huge space provided which at the time felt infinite. I still remember the counter that was showing the size increasing seemingly indefinitely.
Yes, that too. I think the initial sell was a 1GB mailbox. Which was an enormous limit at the time. And another thing the ISPs missed. Most had small limits, "mailbox full" was a common thing and you had to download/delete mail all the time which was annoying.
> used your web browser so no other applications to install
I see this as a downside. Native email clients are much faster and a far better UX than a Web inbox. It's also pretty much required if you juggle multiple accounts.
The problem with ISP based email is once you're a customer with their email you can never switch.
Giving the state control of things to prevent the state from easily spying on people...
The neat thing about the state is that it can act directly off the incentives of the people. The state can supply such service in a private manner, given enough support from the populace.
The “incentives of the people” are famously steadfast and resolute in favor of the rights of others.
Not only that, but were it State-implemented, it would be an AWFUL implementation all the way through.
This is the likely direction things are going. The US government can decide that EU officials are out of favor, and then those officials are locked out of Office/Gsuite.
Getting away from American tech has become an actual national security issue.
Ideally you would still have private enterprise create alternatives, but it’s easy to imagine that email, social media will simply be built for citizens by their government.
I'm curious the caliber of engineer that will turn down a $175k/yr Microsoft job to take a $45k/yr Government Office of Software job...
There seem to be many layoffs, and the hype say that AI has made coders redundant. Who knows? Perhaps you won’t have to depend on the many people who would happily take lower pay for the chance to contribute to their nation.
There’s more incentives than pure profit - Government seems capable enough to attract people when it comes to cyber weapons.
Governments aren’t currently making these tools, because until last year, private enterprise was good enough. It still is, minus the dependency on America and its political climate.
Personally - The issue isn’t engineer availability or salary, but committee based decision making.
People pay for things and are still spied on.
People wear seatbelts and still die too.
We need to move in the right direction, not get paralysis in the status quo because of high profile edge cases.
No matter what there will always be warrants and wire taps. The goal is to get away from the "free flow" of information.
The point is, paying for things isn’t a solution. Paying for things is a consequence of having fixed the problem. I pay for Kagi and buy groceries from a ma-and-pa grocery store where I’m still going to be tracked if I use a credit card, bring my phone (or go with someone else who brings their phone), drive certain cars…
In most cases there can’t be movement in this direction and to the degree there can be, it isn’t enough.
DuckDuckGo is free to use, and is proof that you can have privacy respecting search. They make their money like Google used to by selling rankings, not by having users log in so that they can be followed across all their devices.
It's easy to say we should all start paying for things.
Most people don't have much of a disposable income.
>People need to start paying for things
...with money. They are already paying for things by violating their own privacy and those around them. The irony is that the amount of money required for the service is much less the expected value of the surveillance for the provider. Service payment is an insurance expense, protecting against individual and systematic violation of the 4th Amendment rights. It's insurance (and cheap insurance) because this usually doesn't matter in practice. But sometimes it does, and when it does it REALLY does matter.
<tinfoil_hat>It would be smart for surveillance capital to fund some of these privacy forward providers, steer them to both charge you for a service and violate your privacy, hope for a very public controversy, and eventually discredit the fundamental approach.</tinfoil_hat>
And the problem with that is, all the money has been siphoned off by the people at the top.
That's one of the big hidden factors driving the ad/surveillance economy: people's purchasing power just isn't what it used to be, while at the same time they're expected to be paying regularly for more things than ever before (home broadband, mobile phone plans, etc).
We could
- regulate the crap out of surveillance capitalism.
- enforce laws on the books
- Break up firms
Tech used to have a leg to stand on in the face of government over reach. Today, tech firms have largely adapted to the incentives that actually make themselves known every quarter.
Customer support, content moderation, compliance are avoided, and lobbying argues that if you dont let tech it easy, your economy wont innovate. Except enshittification is the term to describe how extractive mature tech markets become.
I am all for more subscription models, but this shouldn’t come at the cost of throwing our hands up and ignoring the many changes that can better align the current incentives.
I'm not sure its necessarily that simple. For example, because of the job market for software engineers I have moved to new cities multiple times during my adult life. As a result, my social network is highly fragmented and without Facebook it would be incredibly difficult for me to manage.
So for me "stop using Facebook" sound similar to saying "burn all of your family photos and throw away your ability to talk to many of the people who are important to you."
I don't say this to necessarily mean that you are completely wrong, just to point out that opting out of these companies can be more complicated than it may initially appear.
> So for me "stop using Facebook" sound similar to saying "burn all of your family photos and throw away your ability to talk to many of the people who are important to you."
You just aren't looking for obvious alternatives that would still allow you to do all that privately. Keep your family photos offline on your own hardware. Create a contacts list on your phone (ideally de-Appled and de-Googled) and text people on Signal and/or create group chats. Tell people you are leaving Facebook because it is an evil surveillance machine, and that you can be reached on Signal, email (self-hosted) or phone.
People before Facebook found themselves in exactly the same situation as you and managed to survive.
People have become dependant on the convenience of these tools and become, for lack of a gentler word, lazy. Moreover we have this current sense of entitlement -- that all of these details of modern living should be done for us. Having our social circles organized and maintained for us, having infinite entertainment a button press away, food delivered to our door on a whim, cars to take us anywhere always minutes away.
People survived just fine before these conveniences, it just too a bit more effort. You could collect your friends contact information, keep an address book, call them up from time to time. It's not perfect, but it works and starts to break the silicon valley tech giant dependence.
Personally I find adding friction to these processes has actual value. When you slow down and have to put a bit more effort in, it helps you to evaluate what is important, and what truly matters. You prioritize, you make tradoffs. The process IS the richness in life. We all don't need to be jet setting globetrotters to whom paris might as well be New York or london or munich, while robots manage our social lives. There is no substitute for actively working to build a community where you are. You have to put the effort in, and in a single generation we have lost so much of it. But we can get back there again if we try.
Where are you that Facebook (the network, not meta as a company) is still minimally relevant ? I haven’t logged in in about a decade.
Facebook (if you don't use newsfeed) is a very useful product.
Local events - check
Local groups - check
Small time music bands/artist/performances/etc - check
Buy nothing groups where I can get rid of something I don't use - check
Groups for mom with kids to get organized for some kids event - check
A library having a read together event for a kids book author - check
I'm happy I don't have to use FB, but my wife uses it all the time, she just avoids newsfeeds and all the click/rage bait parts.
Is that in the US?
I’m genuinely asking, it wasn’t rethorical - none of that exists in my corner of Europe anymore. Businesses, indie stuff and local stores use instagram, groups are WhatsApp, second hand stuff has its own app.. facebook seems to be just the >60 year old crowd.
Guess what, Instagram and Whatsapp belong to Facebook (Meta).
No shit. That’s why I literally made the distinction in the first post.
Meta as a company is obviously currently relevant, it’s Facebook as a social network still being used what’s surprising to me.
Here they’re almost in the same category as MySpace, something you mention in passing talking about the past.
In the main example cited by the article: how? It involves the use of surveilance systems by other people,These people may be unaware, disinterested, or even enthusiastic participants in this data collection. The same goes with data being collected by Google when the customer did not have an active subscription.
At best, we can only control our own actions. Even then, it is only possible to minimize (rather than eliminate) the use of their products without putting up barriers between ourselves and society. Consider email: we can use an alternative provider, but chances are that we will be corresponding personally or professionally with people who use Gmail or Outlook. The same goes for phones, only the alternatives available are much more limited. Plus you have some degree of tracking by the telecom networks. (I don't consider Apple or Microsoft much better on these fronts. Ultimately they have their business interests in mind and, failing that, their existence is ultimately at the whim of the state.)
Meta is the easiest to cut of those. I don’t use anything from them as I don’t engage on social media, nor use their VR and AR stuff etc.
Google and Amazon are harder to complete cut imo. I have replaced Google apart from using YouTube, and I do rely on Amazon for delivery and running personal projects on AWS.
Agreed.
That said for some I can foresee Meta being hard or harder to disconnect from because of their percieved level of personal social needs.
I left facebook and many of my friendships faded away.
Awkward bumping into people conversations would happen such as: "We missed you at my birthday party!", "I didn't know about it, else I would have been there!" "We posted it to facebook..." "I deleted my facebook account 2 years ago."
My personal philosophy was maybe they were not real friends to begin with. After all in the now 5 years since deletion, not one has reached out to ask if I'm even still alive. I've reached out to a couple people, with little to no reply. None the less, it was a hard transition.
For others', that might be an impossible task.
I removed Facebook about 11 years ago now. I made new friends who know I’m not on social media so we organize through text or discord. And for my core friend group they also moved to discord servers, so that made the switch easier.
I guess it can be hard initially though. Also, my core group of friends is less than 10, but that’s enough for me. I don’t need to follow what 100 other people are doing in their day to day haha.
> stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products
That's the easy part. What do you do about stuff like face recognition and cameras everywhere? Should you hide your face every time you go out? Should you not speak because there might be a mic around picking up your voice?
This is only going to get worse. We can't trust companies or governments to respect our privacy. We can't trust each other to keep the data recorded by our devices private.
It seems like the fight for privacy is a lost cause. What do we do?
"trust"? Lot's of ambitious people are selling extra refined new additions to surveillance right now! "business is good" for example the 90s PDF architect Leonard Rosenthol recently put up ads promoting a brand of Ring cameras that have extra features. Of course he is making money on it. Someone on LinkedIn said "what is this?" and the reply was "adding ownership attributes to Ring camera footage is a step towards publication rights for the owner" .. almost too strange to believe but yes, this is the actual move.
None of that helps, that's the point. How can you stop a ring camera from recording you as you're just taking a walk outside? How can you stop people's phones from tracking other people's phones, APs and BT? How can you stop ISPs from selling your real time location info, including to the cops?
Alone from that list, it means.
No Go, no Flutter, no Android, no GCP nor AWS or anyone that relies on them like Vercel and Netlify, no llama, no React or framework that builds on top of it.
Keeping the list small, there are other items that depend on those companies money and engineering teams.
As if these tech giants are an aberration? Any company filling their niche will be under the same pressures.
Using AI to do anything isn't going to liberate one. It's just going to shift the dependence from one company to another. Your new feudal lord will be the people running the Santa Claus machine you're running. Don't keep trying to tell people AI is the solution. The real solution is self-hosting. And that cannot be AI'd half as easily.
The suggestion is not to depend on AI for privacy, but to use it to build products like signal which guarantee privacy. Using AI to build a product doesn't mean sharing the data from that product. In addition, right now AI has little vendor lock in and there are multiple competitive alternatives, so becoming dependent on a single company is not so likely.
>The suggestion is not to depend on AI for privacy, but to use it to build products like signal which guarantee privacy.
Uh huh. No. You use their system to do it, they have your prompt, and the output on hand. Even more so, they have the capability to tamper with it. They are essentially in a position to own the entire instance of the work product. It doesn't matter if they don't yet. It matters that they can. Furthermore you lose out on the learning. You lose out on any innovation. You lose out in the eyes of the law on the privacy of the communique you use to drive the black box.
>In addition, right now AI has little vendor lock in and there are multiple competitive alternatives, so becoming dependent on a single company is not so likely.
Yup. Right. Like we don't know how that ends. <gestures to />50 years of market consolidation in the distance, letting the illusion of choice speak for itself>
You can self host AI but speed and quality aren’t going to be as good as what companies can offer.
And the upfront cost will be quite high.
It doesn’t just seem hard, it is hard. I’m working on it, but here’s a few examples:
- I want to delete my Amazon account because service has gotten worse and they mistreat their employees. I also want to be able to get groceries, but I don’t have a car and the walking distance grocery store just closed (due to mismanagement). Now I need to spend hours every weekend walking to the farmers market or to the Safeway a considerably distance away.
- I want my prescriptions, but the pharmacy I used to walk to is closing. Now I need to find a pharmacy delivery service that isn’t tied up with Amazon.
- I signed up for One Medical before it was Amazon and it was great. Now it sucks. There aren’t exactly a lot of great alternatives even if I wanted to pay a premium. Wtf do I do?
- I have a Microsoft account I want to delete. If I do that, I will lose access to my Xbox games, and I will lose access to download anything at all on my Xbox 360, which is loaded up with XBLA games I can only use because Microsoft has kept the download part of their store working.
- I’m not on Instagram, but businesses seem to think Instagram has completely replaced the World Wide Web - many restaurants don’t post their hours _anywhere_ but Instagram. I cannot access these details without logging in. A local “speakeasy” coffee shop has a password you have to get from the Instagram story. I just can’t go. Unfortunately the employees are not accommodating. I’ve left a nasty review but that can only go so far. Without a big tech account I can’t even do that.
Other people are using them.
You are surrounded by people using them.
Therefore, you are subject to the mass surveillance they encode.
And by NOT using them, you mark yourself as dangerous.
Glenn Greenwald is back on substack. Yay! For the past few years, he’s mostly done videos on rumble, and he’s fun to watch, but personally I prefer his writing. In case you’ve been under a rock for 10 years, Greenwald was the guy who published Snowden’s revelations. His focus has always been on censorship, surveillance, and hypocrisy in government.
He's great for privacy, surveillance and a centrist liberal critique of both parties, but his obsession with Israel is annoying and distracting from the other non- partisan contrarian attitude that I like him for.
Laura Poitras' documentary Citizenfour is an excellent introduction to the amazing work that Glenn does and has done, and how he's been personally targeted - although I don't recall whether the doc includes Glenn's partner being harassed by US authorities.
He became well known for exposing surveillance but that instinct to portray himself as exposing government hypocrisy lead him to parrot Russian intelligence/Trump campaign attacks on Clinton and Biden long after he should have realized that the right posed a much greater threat to civil liberties and were feeding him information in service of their own campaigns, not transparency. It’s really undercut his earlier work.
Examining Glenn's work through an ideological lens leads to this kind of rhetoric. It's why he's so good at what he does. He's crossed ideological boundaries constantly in pursuit of the truth of a matter, and in defense of the public.
"pursuit of the truth" is an ideology. What are you trying to say here?
Glenn is, essentially, hypocritcal because he ignores things that go against his predetermined narrative.
Does he post true things sometimes? Sure, but is it really worth filtering through the rest?
I think what they are saying is a common sentiment among people who don't belong in any of the major political camps. It's a common experience to take heat from all sides because, surprisingly, neither "side" in politics is perfect nor particularly virtuous.
But we're not criticizng him for not registering for the democratic national convention or the republican one or whatever you think "belonging to a political camp" even means (what does it mean, exactly?)
He's being crticized for repeating lies and refusing to post truths.
His ideology is “America bad”, which leads to some alignment with foreign influence and arguably leads to him spreading propaganda
If only his ideology was "Republican America bad, Democrat America good", then he would not be aligned with foreign influence and wouldn't be spreading propaganda.
Uh, that’s how he likes to style himself but that’s more of an ideological stance than you’re complaining about. A true focus on truth and defense of the public would have included questions like “are the Russians totally unbiased in feeding me this information?” or “am I serving the public by refusing to admit I made a mistake and repeated untrue claims which were highly beneficial to the political party who amplified my claims?”
To anyone on Twitter in like 2016-2019, this is a rather funny sentiment to have about him. I can remember my respect for him dissolve day by day. I didn't even remember until now if he was pro- or anti- Trump, probably neither still. But I simply remember that he slowly turned into the worst caricature of a smug Twitter media guy. Just turned into "hot take" haver and seemed to lose his own plot.
If you know you know I guess, but even then, broken clocks and all that. There was a point where he was such a cool guy to me, and I grew up a little in a good way seeing him turn into whatever he did.
It may just be Twitter's fault at the end of the day too!
It's probably Twitter. There are people I know IRL who are completely different on that platform, it's unbelievably toxic.
That’s my impression, too. Not hardcore MAGA so much as falling into the addiction of thinking he was smarter than “the establishment” about everything and taking contrarian stances to show they couldn’t boss him around. Twitter’s algorithm was like a drug for those guys because they’d give a radioactive hot take and get a bazillion notification pings.
This was my experience too. So many 'voices' just turned into grifters and self promoters. Garland, Mensch, etc.
This is the same "useful idiot" trap that Julian Assange fell into. It's a challenge to incorporate the lessons of people like these without falling into the opposite trap, that of cynical apathy.
Is he taking a break from being a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda?
Those guys find it useful when there's some kind of legitimate gripe to use. He needn't take a break, it's very much Western companies doing this. He doesn't even need to put in an ad for whatever doubtless sanctioned Russian services would like to replace these Western tech giants.
Sometimes actual problems can be readily exploited for sinister purposes. Doesn't mean the original problems aren't also sinister, just be damn careful where you intend to flee to :)
Right if you’re not a mouthpiece for the US State Depts horrific foreign policy you’re a Russian propagandist. My family fought in every war going back to the Revolution and I think our policy on Russia is complete shit. AFAIC we started the whole conflict.
> AFAIC we started the whole conflict.
Is this talking point still being paid for? I haven't seen it in a while, but I guess I don't keep track that closely.
What are the other russian provided talking points these days?
I would direct you to George Kennan[1] and his 1997 NYT article where he said, among other things:
"... expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking ..."
Is it your position that he was paid for, or in some way disingenuously held, this view ?
I don't have strong opinions on this topic but I note with interest that there seem to be contrary viewpoints that aren't not puppets/trolls.
Did I miss the news of ukraine joining nato or something?
More to the point, this is some hardcore "she was asking for it" victim blaming.
You know who started the war? THE COUNTRY THAT LAUNCHED THE INVASION.
You missed the news where our own state dept officials are on leaked calls hand selecting the anti Russian government of Ukraine weeks before their coup or the news where Merkel admitted we negotiated treaties with Russia over Ukraine in bad faith.
The war started with our expansion of NATO, followed by couping Ukraines govt, multiple fake peace treaties, and finally Ukraine murdering thousands of culturally Russian civilians in Eastern Ukraine. I count a war as started when someone starts murdering people w the military not when someone walks over a border. Although your narrative doesn’t work then right?
His focus has also involved generous amounts of simping for Russian fascists, excusing their colonialist wars, etc. Not an anti-imperialist, just anti-US.
"Yay" Greenwald is (still) playing footsie down at the Nazi bar.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...
Rumble is indeed a free for all, with lots of angry kooks. But it’s also a place where reasonable dissenting voices have found a way to get their ideas heard. It’s a mixed bag.
As it should be. If it's not a mixed bag, you're in an echo-chamber. That's why I hang out here on HN with my fellow crazies who can separate ideas, thoughts and knowledge from the person.
HN is one massive echo chamber. Sorry to be the one to point it out to you. Why do you think HN has such a bad reputation for being smug corporate bootlickers?
The elitism and groupthink here is fucking wild.
Every places have echos of echo-chambers, but some are worse than others. At least on HN you can choose to see stuff heavily downvoted, in many other places moderators just remove posts as they see fit. You'll get more different point of views here than on many other places, but I'd be happy to hear what places you consider less of an echo-chamber than HN.
Wait a second, I instantly recognized your post as self-deprecating humor and not glazing and had a light chuckle. You mean that:
>That's why I hang out here on HN with my fellow crazies who can separate ideas, thoughts and knowledge from the person.
Is unironically what you think and posted in earnest? Thats WILD.
> Is unironically what you think and posted in earnest? Thats WILD.
That's exactly the point! We're both thinking very different, yet neither of us have explicitly (only implicitly) tried to insult each other. What place on the internet does that better than HN?
Purely in terms of "more different point of views"? Pretty much anywhere. Facebook, Steam forums, Nextdoor, twitter, even Reddit if you delve into various subreddits.
Well… let’s be fair… outside of tech specific posts, this place is Reddit/r/poltics maybe the lite version. This is an echo chamber on at least a dozen major topics.
> Revealed: How Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newsletters
If we're gonna judge authors for what platforms they're using, does that mean we're all bad guys here on HN too, since a lot of current misery is because of startups and technology companies who used to receive a lot praise here?
It's always fun reminding people that the internet was invented by the US military
So was the programming compiler, not sure what that's supposed to tell us. Programming languages are violent?
They couldn't possibly make all that money from just Nazis: I'm given to understand they're doing really well these days. I had the impression that Substack became heavily co-opted by anti-Nazis and have done nothing to defend the feelings of the Nazis they're also happy to host. Not sure what the balance is currently, but again: they couldn't possibly be making all that money from just Nazis, and I think that's instructive.
You mean Snowden had to force his material on him, he reluctantly published it, got hooked on the fame and promptly jumped the shark
I personally miss Snowden's revelations so much. Such a brave soul! He should keep doing what he does best and never stop. It's sad that we have not heard any new revelations from him for a long time, though. Any ideas why he stopped?
I'm not sure if it's sarcasm or something, but Snowden essentially lives in exile from his home as the US government would like to punish him for exposing the secrets of the US government spying on everyone. Not sure what new revelations could come from him.
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Snowden is currently more or less trapped in Russia, and therefore unable to expose overreach of authoritarian governments without immediately fearing for his life.
The US has lots of issues but at least it doesn't toss you out a window when you cross Fearless Leader. Maybe you get ICE'd, but Russia's kill rate of people Putin doesn't like is 1000x Trump.
> But the graphic Amazon used seems to have unwittingly depicted how invasive this technology can be
This is a calculated move to normalize such technology. Yes, it will cause controversy in the short term, and these companies knew this was a possibility—but as a result the image in people's minds won't be the gestapo rounding up grannies; it'll kids finding puppies. To call this "unwitting" is simply naive (not surprising for Greenwald).
That’s why I’m hoping the news picks this up more - especially about the intended integration with flock/ICE. That might be the issue that brings awareness mainstream beyond the tech-aware circles
No marketing team would willingly do this and it's insane to think otherwise.
Cambridge Analytica was an experiment run by a marketing team. I wouldn't say marketing will always side on ethics.
Propaganda is, and always has been, a subset of marketing aimed at shifting public perception. It would be wild to assume it never happens.
> Cambridge Analytica was an experiment run by a marketing team. I wouldn't say marketing will always side on ethics
The argument isn't against ethics. It's about self interest. Amazon bought the Super Bowl ad to sell Nest units.
"Unwitting" is correct. There are no lizard people coordinating our march towards dystopia. Just individual people who will–like me–read this article, think we should do more, and then probably do nothing.
(If you want a realistic conspiracy, Amazon may have greenlit the spot with an eye towards an audience of one or two in D.C.)
I do not see the difference, between influencing policy by targetting "one or two", or a greater mass of people.
Both serve the same goals, in a different manner. Both require the same choices by marketing - active and with conscience aforethought.
There are no lizard people coordinating our march towards dystopia. Just individual people who will–like me–read this article, think we should do more, and then probably do nothing.
It's very much possible for people to brand the surveillance state as cute; and for consent for a surveillance state to spontaneously emerge / be generated from the attempts of marketers trying to make the Ring dystopia cute.
Insane is a bit hyperbolic. The history of marketing is full of grand mistakes that seem absurd in hindsight.
OP was suggesting this wasn't a mistake. They are suggesting it's a win for Amazon, even with the backlash, because it frames the technology the way they want to.
Of course, they would. If the administration asked Bezos, and he gets a benefit out of it. He will task his marketing team to come up with something which tries to frame it in a positive light. Knowing that even if a few people make a stink this will blow over eventually and when it rolls out, he can always say it is just about puppies and neighborhood security. Nobody cares.
> If the administration asked Bezos, and he gets a benefit out of it. He will task his marketing team
On what planet would the ask be marketing copy versus straight access?
I meant that the admin would ask Bezoz for the surveillance, and he would tell his marketing team to find a frame which makes the surveillance look good.
And yet this went up. I understand it’s easy to just say “marketing teams don’t understand anything,“ but I have worked with many and they are incredibly sensitive to negative feelings/reactions. They get it wrong but they tend to air on the side of caution which means the vast majority of the time they avoid situations like this incredibly intentionally.
>they tend to air on the side of caution
Completely off topic, and for future reference, it's "err" not "air".
Completely fine mistake, stupid homophones and all. Just thought you'd like to know.
Also, these things happen to me all the time if I use voice dictation. I don't trust it because of edge cases like this.
> they get it wrong but they tend to air on the side of caution
Then this guy [1] walks into the room and says no, be bold, who could possibly object to my life's work, and he gets his way because he's signing the cheque.
Marketing teams are constantly out of touch with the message they want to convey vs the message that gets conveyed. The creative team is usually not even talking to the other teams that would drive decisions like this - they almost exclusively are an isolated team (purposefully, like how engineers are often isolated from customers) that talks to a separate marketing team that then manages things like legal/compliance, which then bubbles up to other orgs etc.
The people creating ads are just organizationally isolated in most cases.
I worked in that world for a solid decade as a “creative” (video production) and when it comes to the big dogs, that is absolutely not true. They are incredibly top down and have to review everything. We have to pitch our ideas even when we’re in the door. They have strict brand bibles we have to adhere to. Ones that gave us free rein were the exception, not the rule.
Sometimes it was for no other reason than a bunch of people in house felt they needed to justify their existence, but regardless that’s how it was 90% of the time.
I feel like what you're saying is compatible. I'm not suggesting that things aren't top down or that you wouldn't have brand guidelines, that's actually exactly what I'm suggesting. I just mean that there is organizational isolation between creative teams and other teams, just as there is organizational isolation between engineering and other teams.
So it is unsurprising to me that a creative team might have been given brand guidelines and a goal, like "hey we want to sell this, we want people happy with this" (much more concretely, obviously) and that could lead to this sort of ad, and I think that's probably more plausible than the team going "we're going to psyop everyone into surveillance statehood".
> on the side of caution which means the vast majority of the time they avoid situations like this
They'll avoid negative perception because this is their job, the message is still arbitrary.
> I have worked with many and they are incredibly sensitive to negative feelings/reactions.
And yet there are countless examples that show the exact opposite.
This made it through one of the largest marketing budgets in the world…
All of y'all keep saying variations of this yet the whole point is it’s the exception to the rule. The vast majority of ads aren’t controversial. That’s why it’s such a big deal when one is. It’s newsworthy and everyone has an opinion on that one ad.
I don't think people grasp the gravity of the situation.
I see everyone talking about how to stop using products. I even thought about legislation that could help. But that's just it, none of that is possible. You can't even employ a "torches and pitchforks" approach. For any of this to be possible, people would have to coordinate. The means by which people communicate and coordinate are under the influence and control of the very entities that the people are trying to bring under control.
The only way to win this war is by means of economic warfare. And I don't mean "vote with your wallet". If I could spell out what I mean here, then the previous paragraph would have been invalid.
No, the only way to win this war is to reform your system of governance, decentralisation and democratisation. Power to the people.
How can you do that if you can't coordinate and communicate with others to that end?
> The only way to win this war is by means of economic warfare.
We are only in this situation because the economic war was lost. You want the world to fight Amazon and Google while they're in the middle of counting their spoils?
It is not yet illegal or dangerous to call for a general strike. Only by shutting down the ports, the rail, the trucks and the delivery services will people create enough economic disruption that the billionaires will call their political toadies to heel and get them to start fixing this shit.
We still have the power to panic the billionaires, and they have the power to get what they want. If what they want is temporarily in sync with what society needs, then so much the better.
How do you convince people to participate in a general strike when the tiktok, facebook (and as a result threads, instagram), and twitter are controlled by the whitehouse and are actively taking down such posts?
Even if you want to inform people the old fashioned way, or organize in person, a few might, but you need majority of voters, how can you reach them when they only want to be reached by mediums controlled by the white house?
> We still have the power to panic the billionaires
Yeah, and making them lose a few billions of dollars isn't it. Even criminal punishment is useless, they'll get pardons, and if not they can just flee to any country that would protect them for their money. there are ways to make them scared for real though.
> Only by shutting down the ports, the rail, the trucks and the delivery services
This is the right track for sure, but the problem is scale, you need coordination to do that. But more than that, you need lots of people agreeing to do without nice things like a good and stable economy, mass layoffs, and dire consequences that aren't worth mentioning here. Matter of fact, the one group of people in the world that could have the most impact are all gathered here on HN :)
For the extreme measures that need to be taken by the people to actually be taken, the people need to understand that those measures are neccesary, and actually be informed of the strategies behind those measures and have some awareness of some of the tactics available to implement those strategies.
The problem is, there is no one even considering any unconventional means. Anyone with power to act is waiting for elections and campaigns. Why can't people just read history and learn from it? Why do we need tragedies to keep teaching us the same lessons again and again. The people in charge are not idiots. they also know elections are ahead. They're actively ignoring courts and making clear and public threats of subverting elections. Why do people have to wait until that actually happens to plan ahead of time?
Americans are still in a catatonic state of "that could never happen here where I live", despite things that could never happen in America continuing to happen every day. The answer is the same as my original post: communications and media are controlled where they matter now.
It's a clear violation of the 4th Amendment, but the government acts like they've found a "loophole" because it's private businesses doing the spying.
The Pinkerton National Detective Agency, founded in 1850, operated largely outside the constraints of the Fourth Amendment for much of the 19th century because they were private agents, not government actors. Congress passed the Anti-Pinkerton Act in 1893, which prohibited the federal government from hiring Pinkerton employees or similar organizations.
As an attorney I’d like to understand why you think there is a “clear” Constitutional violation going on here. What activity, specifically, are you referring to, and what precedent supports your claim?
You're an attorney and you're asking me why the government spying on everyone is a clear violation of the 4th Amendment?
Yes. You’re the one making the assertion (not just that there is a violation but also that the activity is that “the government spying on everyone”); the burden of proof is thus on you.
Attorneys challenge each other as a matter of course in every case before a court. This is how the adversarial system works.
Perhaps what you meant to say is that “I don’t like the activity that is happening here,” or “I think some of this might be unconstitutional.” When someone makes a naked blanket assertion about the law, it’s usually a sign that that person doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
I'll bite. We live in a society where the 2nd amendment is a rorschach test for interpreting century old English. Yet, because of how people feel, particularly a couple of activist judges, it has been given the strongest possible interpretation to impart the strongest possible freedoms to the citizenry.
Why have the other amendments not enjoyed this same individual freedom absolutism? Why are we cherry picking which amendments get expanded modern powers "in the spirit of the text"? It's because of how the judges feel.
So before you dismiss someone's opinion because how it might be, let's all be honest with ourselves and realize constitutional law of this nature does not depend on precedent and is largely do to the whims of the supreme court.
I'm not dismissing the opinion; I'm asking for it to be supported by law and facts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47024599
I also disagree with your characterization of 2nd Amendment jurisprudence, but I'm not going into that rathole!
Not overtly but the subtext is there, but you also miss my point: there is no argument to give. There is no good faith argument with this supreme court. Unless you're the kind of person who is going to defend overturning the precedent of Roe v Wade.
This sort of nihilist/defeatist attitude serves no one.
People have good-faith disputes over whether their activities should be permitted or forbidden, and--like it or not--it's up to our judicial system to interpret the law, especially when it's unclear (which is rather often). The judges hear the arguments and, having heard both sides out fully, has to decide who has the strongest case. It's not an easy job, but in a vague, messy, and imperfect world, someone has to do it.
There are ways to reduce ambiguity, like passing new laws, clarifying existing ones, and even amending the Constitution. That requires we vote and press our representatives to do these things. This has the benefit of making it clear what we want, as opposed to leaving it to the unelected judiciary to try to figure it out and anger half the country who thought they decided wrong.
And the entire organizational structure we base ourselves around also collapses routinely throughout history. The supreme court has demonstrated that they are corrupt, the only solutions at this point are radical.
You seem to be playing dumb here. You realize us "normal people" believe the Bill of Rights is to protect us from the government, and the 4th means the government doesn't get to spy on everybody indiscriminately?
And yes, they are spying on everybody. They have access to things like cellphone metadata, which to a normal human being is a very clear violation of privacy.
It's also my firm belief that our legal system has been undermining these basic concepts for decades now. It benefits the federal government to make this all very vague, as if modern technology suddenly means you have no expectation of privacy anymore. They've also mixed in some of that wonderfully authoritarian "for purposes of national security".
There's actual lawyers saying these same things, if you'd like someone to properly debate with.
I'm not going to argue over principles, as that's not law, and I largely agree with them.
However:
> They have access to things like cellphone metadata, which to a normal human being is a very clear violation of privacy.
In the U.S., when you study 4th Amendment law in Criminal Procedure, you learn there is a "third party doctrine" that says that if you voluntarily provide a third party with information--even information you consider private-it's the third party's property and you can no longer object to it being sought by the Government. There's a good overview of this on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
The Supreme Court declined to extend the third-party doctrine to tracking one's location via cell-phone metadata in Carpenter v. U.S., 585 U.S. 296 (2018), so it's not absolute.
> I'm not going to argue over principles, as that's not law,
> The Supreme Court declined to extend the third-party doctrine to tracking one's location via cell-phone metadata in Carpenter v. U.S., 585 U.S. 296 (2018), so it's not absolute.
In other words, principles are law -- in the US, whatever the principles of 9 judges at a given time, because they are the final arbiter of what anything written down by Congress means. "Third-party doctrine" is not law as written by Congress, it is something the Supreme Court made up out of thin air according to their principles. And these principles are not binding; a later panel of judges is free to throw out the rulings of older judges if they decide their principles differ, as famously happened to Roe v. Wade among other cases.
Yep, that's the exact "loophole" I mentioned in my original comment!
The government can now partner with private businesses to effectively bypass the Fourth Amendment.
Yes, that is true. But that is not a violation, which was in the first clause of your original claim. It's an end-run.
If it were a violation, Courts could enjoin it. But since it's not a violation, there's nothing to enjoin.
You had me up until now. Turns out your whole point is arguing semantics? You're arguing just to argue and not providing anything of substance on this point. As another person said, this isn't a court.