tl;dr Corporate internet’s aversion to online privacy tools add so much inconvenience that it is starting to make me think that going back to the old ways of actually accomplishing something in-person or over the phone is better. Have you experienced the same thing?
tl: Those of us who have taken steps to protect online privacy are well aware of the headaches that come with it. You have to prove your human all the time because only sketchy people use VPN. Emails you send get blocked when it is not from one of the major providers. Websites break because you choose a non-chromium based browser with blocker add-ons. We spend a lot of time proving to the machine that we are human. We begrudgingly go through all those steps just for the chance that it reduces the amount of information on us that will get collected.
But what if instead of grinding through all of that to prove we are human to a machine, we instead just communicate with another human?
Here’s an example of what I mean. Today I was buying train tickets online, and because of one or more of these privacy safeguards I take the website was kind of broken and really slow. I kept at it, growing impatient to do something in 20 minutes for what used to be less than 5. One of the error codes suggested I call to book my train online, but I ignored it and kept going the online route because that used to be the most convenient method.
I think next time I might actually listen and try calling the number to book it in the beginning. I have done it in the past to change a booking, and it wasn’t that bad. Or maybe I will swing by the train station and book it in person since I work near the area. Either way, I think being more privacy conscious online makes being online so inconvenient that interacting with people sounds like a way better option. And maybe that is not a bad thing.
What do you all think? Is there anything that you can think of where the terrible form the internet could be encouraging you to actually interact with people instead?
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One of the grocery stores in my area has self check-outs (which had become more and more annoying to use) or a single regular checkout (which takes far longer than self-checkout).
I keep asking the question: do I get out of the store faster and give up my privacy by using the self-checkout or pay with cash at the regular checkout and keep my privacy?
Given the option, I specifically avoid stores with self check outs. Thankfully that’s still an option for now
I mostly avoid the self checkouts but I have to shop where the best prices are. Truthfully, I use the SC is one store because the cashiers are as slow as cold molasses.
The time you spend waiting at the checkout line is the time the business running the grocery store realized they could steal from you.
I usually go for self checkout unless the line at the regular checkout is short.
terrible form the internet could be encouraging you to actually interact with people instead?
I got most of my friends trained. I am not gonna talk to them on BigTechCo Spyware Of the Week. If they wanna talk to me, they have to call. They think it’s weird but they do it.
I have bypassed some AI support agents for co’s. I mash ‘0’ over and over instead of talking to the AI and voice recog. That sometimes steers me into some ADA compliance path. I can get to a human. It might not always work. But sometimes it does! Human is way more helpful, most of the time. Down side is, often you have to wait a loooong time for a human.
There is a name for the techniques co’s use to make it harder to talk to a human. Sludge!! The more sludge they put before you, the more ppl give up and use the AI. My vow is to power through the sludge.
I should add. Even training my friends, that still lets google scrape my complete social graph. Google does that with its dialer app. It sends logs to Google about the voice call.
Well, there’s nothing I can do about it. I hate it. But the perfect is enemy of the good.
Am I missing something here, couldn’t you install a FOSS dialler instead? Same for messages?
Sorta, but the prob is not on my end. It’s on the phones of my friends who are calling me. In theory you are right. But practically speaking, I can’t get them to do something like that.
That means Google obtains data about when and how long my friends call me. Despite not needing to collect that data themselves, only needing to pass it to the telephony system. That lets Google gather almost my whole social graph.
They could, but I doubt they’re going to get their friends to do that as well
They might if it meant they could text again! 😁
They are using a dialler to phone the OP anyway!
call
also not private tbqh
I would say that is true in a sense, but the post is more about online privacy. For the website be less terrible I might have had to drop my VPN and use Chrome and no blockers, which opens the door to whatever third party trackers they may use.
A phone call prevents me from being anonymous but the information third parties can gather is potentially much less.
I don’t disagree with your thought per se. I’m looking at your train reservation example and think that soon you won’t be talking with a real person but two ChatGPTs in a trenchcoat. So corpos aversion to privacy tools drives you to corpo’s desire to cut overhead. And I’m sure there are plenty of examples where the phone in option simply does not exist. Or where it cannot exist because they can’t find people to staff it or a model to fake it effectively.
I see a future where you sadly have to feed one of these agenetic models, when proven much safer to use than today, with the minimum of information necessary to get your train tickets or whatever, and then let it fight with the other side while you do something else.
That is certainly true with the phone call method. Another comment mentioned spamming ‘0’ on the phone until a live person answers. But buying the ticket in person would probably get me another human. At least for now, until eventually even in person is just a kiosk of their website.
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