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0 pointssph1y ago0 comments

Are you saying that most people are likely to support this, or that people actually demanded it?

No one asked for this law, but you can convince the populace a posteriori that this is good for them, certainly. It's all part of the game.

The fact that the hoi polloi can be easily persuaded in any direction is not a reason for the people in power to do whatever the f they want with our rights, hiding beneath the banner of democracy.

Also, whoever says that we, the nerds, should do more to educate the masses is disingenuous when the people in power have massive reach. I can go rant on a blog about what this means for our privacy, while the politician goes on a TV show and on mass media campaigns to claim that this law is to save the children from the baddies.

Call me a silly idealist, but representative democracy is a bloody scam.

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aniviacat1y ago

Do you believe someone who uses Windows, chats on Discord and posts on Instagram cares about surveillance?

I think there are only two groups of people who still care about this:

- Tech people who are willing to give up QoL to cling to privacy-respecting alternatives. (People like us.) These people are a tiny minority which would be irrelevant in any democratic system.

- Old people who haven't yet arrived in the digital age. These are also a minority, and keep becoming fewer.

I think the vast majority of people have fully accepted constant surveillance of their digital activity by companies (and therefore governments) as simply the way things are.

To these people, this law is a benefit to security with zero tradeoff.

Normal people have no online privacy whatsoever anyway.

And only evil people would use encryption and anonymization, right?

(Tangent 1: Goverments could educate people in a representative democracy, too. People could also use the educational material readily available. But I think most people don't want to be educated on the majority of topics.)

(Tangent 2: I don't think direct democracy is a good system. I think that the vast majority of people (including me) are incapable of making good laws. I believe only a trained professional, aka a politician, is capable of understanding and predicting all the possible long term effects a law, such as e.g. a trade deal, can have. I certainly cannot.)

(ETA: I would go so far as to say that this law being controversially debated is the result of representative democracy working well. I'd claim that in a direct democracy it could easily get passed without much scrutiny.)

rightbyte1y ago

> Normal people have no online privacy whatsoever anyway.

This is a depressing realization. I did convince my mother to use Ublock Origin, just to realize Iphones does not allow it.

The amount of techical competence needed is just way too high when most companoes and states are hostile to your privacy.

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