• it you would have WhatsApp, we could keep in contact
• oh, come one, we have a Facebook Family group
• can’t you just share a Google calendar with me
• …

my mental health was questioned so there’s that.

my explaination about surveillance capitalism and what possibilities corporations have to spy on us fell on deaf ears and raised concern. i got called “paranoid” and also “stupid”

Start using linux and install graphene on your phone ,all hell breaks lose

Do they care about what e-mail you use? Weird.

I’ll expand this question to my entire social circle.

I haven’t found that anybody cares about my email provider. It doesn’t affect them because email is federated. Nobody has ever asked me why I’m mailing them from a domain I own rather than a service provider they’ve heard of.

Where I do run into a lot of resistance is trying to get people to use Signal. Some people seem to find the concept of having multiple messaging apps objectionable, which has never made any sense to me as long as they have basic computer skills. On occasion, I’m on the other side of that conversation when I’m unwilling to use Facebook Messenger for reasons that should be obvious to anyone in this community.

I have found that even when people are conscious of the “technocratic & surveillance” state of the world, they still dont change their habits. Just like “this sucks” but they dont bother on looking for alternatives.

Even when I tell them about E2EE services, or the fediverse, they’re like “that sounds awesome”, but they never try it. Once I had a friend try Pixelfed and they loved it! I was so happy hehe but it goes stale after a few days, since other friends didnt switch. But were both telling others to switch sometimes.

My family uses Life360 for safety or emergencies, and I managed to switch them over to Paralino. It was all working seamlessly until they suddenly decided they wanted to go back, for whatever reason. I don’t know what it was, they wouldnt say, but it frustrates me that they would prefer giving out all out location info in rreal time to a company that has had many breaches and has sold such data, compared to a small one that can’t even access such data, and its just a few bucks. Idunno.

Tell her; “no mom, if some 30 year old man was tracking me, reading my mail, texts and tracked my location you’d be getting ready to murder him. Why should I let gmail get away with the same shit?”

Ask her if all her friends jumped down a cliff would she also jump down a cliff?

If it makes you feel any better, when someone calls on you being normal, they are, by definition, the asshole that can’t adjust. Doesn’t mean they’re an unlovable person, but it’s a personal flaw of them, not you. It’s not like you are changing their way of life. You are changing your way of interacting with them. Respect and understanding should go both ways, not just one.

I’ve known my lady friend for 30 or so now. She lives in her house and I in mine. We value our time together, but we also enjoy our own time alone. When she comes over, she is not as concerned about all the intricacies of privacy, anonymity, and security, she just wants to watch her shows, and doom scroll her phone for tasty recipes and such. She is an accomplished chef as well as a painter, and her confectioneries are divine. I set up a small NUC that is backed up with the main backups. On it is Mealie, so she can transfer recipes to a digital format for preservation.

She does acknowledge the validity of preserving her data, but that responsibility rests on me, the network admin. I made her a special vlan, kind of a ‘dumbed down’ version of my own where she can be reasonably protected, yet enjoy all the things she is used to doing on the internet. Other than that, when friends drop by to visit, they sometimes want to use the wifi. So, I have a guest Wi-Fi which is rather restrictive. So my core network is never accessed or by anyone other than me. It took a lot of time to assemble it all and make it all work, and I’m not going to willy-nilly adjust firewall rules on my core network so you can surf TikTok. Nothing against TikTok other than the shady specter that hangs over it. The content is fine. Some of the videos I’ve seen are funny, educational, etc. but it’s just not my thing.

So, yeah, I’ve had to make accommodations for a handful of people. Her laptop was giving her fits, so I introduced Mint into the mix. She has no problems driving the Linux bus. It looks like Windows, responds like Windows, she’s able to do the same things she did on Windows, so she is comfortable with the installation.

Totally

Don’t frame it as practical. It’s moral.

It was, and in a number of places still is, ‘normal’ to say she’s a woman and therefor has no business having a private email address at all, that all communication with her should be through her father or husband, and that if she were to talk to a man herself she’d have to be beaten to make her behave more ‘normally.’ Normal just means common, not good. If she wants to keep talking to people through Daddy Google, that’s her choice, very ‘normal,’ but you would rather be good.

No, they respect my goals and seem to have accepted that I’m sometimes just unreachable. The only thing they might be annoyed about is my GrapheneOS and Signal proselytism. If anything, it’s more apathy than antagonism. They’ll agree with me on privacy issues but rarely ever give up the conveniences of Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. in practice.

Nah. Got my whole family on Signal. No issues so far

If by family you mean biological family, I never really cared much what they think about anything (or about anyone). Also, I was still a little boy when I had to learn how to protect my privacy from my intrusive mom. So, yeah what anyone else may think about my choice and priorities was never that important.

If you’re referring to my real family, aka the person I decided to share my life with almost 30 years ago, we’re both adults and we both are fine with the other not doing things exactly like we would do them (it happens we also both care about preserving as much of our privacy), like we’re fine with the other having activities we’re not involved in ;)