This is original content. AI was not used anywhere except for the bottom right image, simply because I could not find one similar enough to what I needed. This took around 6 hours to make.
Transcription (for the visually impaired)
(I tried my best)
The background is an iceberg with 6 levels, denoting 6 different levels of privacy.
The tip of the iceberg is titled “The Brainwashed” with a quote beside it that says “I have nothing to hide”. The logos depicted in this section are:
- Apple
- TikTok
- PayPal
- Google Chrome
- CashApp
- Samsung
- Steam
- Microsoft Windows
- Ring (Security Camera)
- YouTube
- Amazon
- Discord
- Gmail
- ChatGPT
The surface section of the iceberg is titled “As seen on TV” with a quote beside it that says “This video is sponsored by…”. The logos depicted in this section are:
An underwater section of the iceberg is titled “The Beginner” with a quote beside it that says “I don’t like hackers and spying”. The logos depicted in this section are:
- Telegram
- Authy
- Brave Browser
- Privacy.com (Virtual Cards)
- DuckDuckGo
- iMessage
- Proton Mail
- AdBlock (Browser Extension)
A lower section of the iceberg is titled “The Privacy Enthusiast” with a quote beside it that says “I have nothing I want to show”. The logos depicted in this section are:
An even lower section of the iceberg is titled “The Privacy Activist” with a quote beside it that says “Privacy is a human right”. The logos depicted in this section are:
- Monero
- GrapheneOS
- Vanadium (Web Browser)
- KeePassDX
- SimpleX Chat
- Accrescent
- SearXNG
- Aegis Authenticator
- OpenWrt
- Mullvad VPN
- An illustration of physical cash
The lowest portion of the iceberg is titled “The Ghost”. There is a quote beside it that has been intentionally redacted. The images depicted in this section are:
- A cancel sign over a mobile phone, symbolizing “no electronics”
- An illustration of a log cabin, symbolizing “living in a log cabin in the woods”
- A picture of gold bars, symbolizing “paying only in gold”
- A picture of a death certificate, symbolizing “faking your own death”
- An AI generated picture of a person wearing a black hoodie, a baseball cap, a face mask, and reflective sunglasses, symbolizing “hiding ones identity in public”
End of transcription.
ExpressVPN is an arm of Israeli intelligence and should be on the tip of the iceberg: https://www.reuters.com/technology/expressvpn-employees-complain-about-ex-spys-top-role-company-2021-09-23/
All users should cancel their accounts immediately.
“As seen on TV” does not imply privacy, it just implies a large advertising budget. These are software that market themselves as private (and are sometimes better than nothing at all) but may still be just as bad as software on the tip of the iceberg.
Funny how you need more and more technical knowledge to go deeper into privacy, until the last level, which is basically giving up on technology itself.
The last level is living in a cabin in the woods and writing manifestos about industrial society and the ills of technology O_o
Hey, it’s my house! How’d you get a picture of it?!
Beautiful and I love it Thank you
I think this is the first time I’ve seen an iceberg meme with sources and explanations for each item. Fantastic. Your work is appreciated.
To be honest, and it wouldn’t work here, but I sometime enjoy the cryptic nature of iceberg memes at the lower ranks. It’s like a scavenger hunt.
I was at the bike shop a few weeks back and a ghost walked in. He came in wearing a medical mask covered by a bandana, sunglasses, cap. They wore gloves, long sleaved pants and shirt.
First question from staff, ‘this a robbery?’
Ghost, ‘no, I just need 27 2.5 tubes, miss.’
They get the tubes, he agrees. Staff asks if he has an account. Ghost says, “nope, why would I need one?” Staff says they do it for records, insurance claim assist, and discounts. Ghost goes with a John Doe, pays cash and peaces the fuck out.
Total King, but dude was given up a lot. Half of us were drinking beers enjoying a warm evening in spring. I hope he has had some good rides.
I can say with confidence thay he was a white male. In his 50s. About 5’10". 140 lbs-ish. If anyone wants to get any tips, good luck!
I would drop off the face of the earth only to stash porn mags all over the woods.
Speaking as a former kid of rural america you would be doing the lords work, friend
“No, no… the robbery’s far too far to walk”
Ha. The tubes were the final pieces to the getaway vehicle
TIL I’m a privacy activist–who can help me get to the ghost mode?
(Do I even want to get there or is that limited to journalists who have entire states trying to unalive them?)Do I even want to get there
Only you can answer that.
or is that limited to journalists who have entire states trying to unalive them?
Pretty much, but if you want to give up all technology, work for yourself, and fake your death, then more power to you!
Seems like faking your death would cause more privacy problems than it solves. Why not just “stay alive” with a completely innocuous identity? Then adopt some new identity which cannot be traced back to the original?
If you’re alive, you are asked for documents such as property records, taxes, etc. and if you refuse then bad things happen. If you fake your death, no more questions are asked and you can take on fake identities. In essence, faking your death takes your identity out of “the system”
There is this steadily growing activist group that you could join up with.
Can you explain why you would think Steam is so bad? I would argue they’re pretty fair, especially with the option to buy steam cards for cash to not disclose your personal data. Does the client do some unsavory shit?
Seeing steam at the top makes me question the list. Likely a hate of DRM rather than privacy
Yeap, and Brave in the middle. They only pretend they are for privacy, but they are the very opposite.
Yeah i hate when I see people using Brave, because they have been brainwashed.
Does anyone remember when they were injecting their own referral links into links for online stores (99% certain they did this pls prove wrong if you know better)? This alone leaves them with 0 trust in my books.
Brave is and always has been gross. Never understood how they’ve been so successful at tricking people into installing it.
Talk about high effort content holy shit
Also my toxic trait is that I use stuff from every single tier
Tried the Privacy Activist and Enthusiast section. Was not really fun and you loose connection to most of your friends and family. Now I have a balanced setup with something out of each layer. Perfect balanced, as things should be
I have taken my own approach; there are things from each layer that I use. Some begrudgingly but others gladly.
The problem I faced when starting this journey is it does cut out a lot of people. And it becomes isolsting. So I did reel back a bit.
It’s equally frustrating to talk to people who’re completely entrenched in the Enthusiast / Activist section. The utter disconnect when it comes to what’s viable for most people is annoying to deal with sometimes. Statements like “Everyone who is able to read can easily learn to use Arch Linux” or “Everyone can flash their phone” do give me headaches. Was there, did both, wouldn’t recommend to my less nerdy family.
The FOSS circlejerk for lack of better term is very loud on Fediverse as a whole. It’s tiring when each time anyone mentions using Windows, or Apple there’s at least one fucker telling you to swap to linux lol…
It’s very loud so I have thought at times to switch back to reddit, where it’s at least less pervasive.
yeah honestly i really think that you should swap to linux!
To be fair some non-fuckers also tend to recommend linux.
May I suggest Arch btw?
Any Chromium-based browser in anything but the top-most panel is a non-starter with their abandonment of Manifest v2. Manifest v3 seriously cripples any Chromium-based browser’s ability to be secure, as extensions like uBlock Origin are no longer compatible by design.
Google has it’s ad business to protect, after all.
Not all Chromium-based browsers are bad. Browsers such as Vanadium or Trivalent are very secure, and discourage the use of extensions altogether due to privacy and security risks. These browsers come with ad blocking preinstalled.
TAILS is missing :(
as is i2p, qbittorrent and a few others
So what’s the deal with i2p? I heard it was a more secure alternative to vpns, I downloaded it but I haven’t been motivated to figure out how to set it up on Linux.
It’s more similar to tor than a vpn.
Ah, is it considered more secure, or is it just different?
In some ways I2p is more secure, but it has its own pros and cons. It’s primarily used with services & sites within its own network, similar to onion sites, and used that way it’s said to be faster than Tor. It can be used for torrenting with a client that supports it, like qBittorrent or BiglyBT, without harming the network. There are outproxies you can use if you want to anonymize access to normal websites, but there’s only a few of them, and it’s slow. You can have it and Tor running at the same time without them interfering with each other, though.
So, it sounds like you’d be better off just running Tor or a vpn unless you have a specific use-case for i2p. I looked briefly at the install instructions, but it seemed to be like it would be a hassle to initially setup on my linux build.
I think that would be fair to say. I mostly run it to contribute to the network, so that other people can communicate or share files more privately. (On OpenSuSE, it can be installed from the repo and just run with no special configuration.)
What’s the issue with steam? I thought the epic game store was the one actively spying on your device
Steam has telemetry. They gather a ton of data on you. What details, how they use it, and how secure it is I can’t answer, but it’s clear that it’s happening.
I love this! May I share on my blog and with my newsletter subscribers at Punching Up Press? We’re probably in boxes #2 and #3, with a lot of readers starting off in box #1.
I was actually expecting you to comment.
May I share on my blog and with my newsletter subscribers at Punching Up Press?
Absolutely! Giving credit is appreciated, as well.
Haha, I always love a good infographic! Who can I credit for the infographic and links? I have only like 65 subscribers since I don’t do much promotion, but I think this will be very helpful to them.
Who can I credit for the infographic and links?
Simply leaving a link to this post is fine. Thank you!
The post is here! Thanks again for letting me use the infographic.
Looks good! Thank you!
I’d be happy to collaborate in the future if you ever want to :)
I always love a good infographic! I’d be happy to collaborate on projects related to the theme of the broligarchy and data privacy. Let me know if you have ideas!
Sadly, using small niche VPNs that might be more trusted makes you stand out more. It’s pretty unusual to have a Mullvad user on your server
They don’t rotate IPs as well so a lot of them are blacklisted… and don’t offer port forwarding anymore
I wish they could change IPs reguarly and add port forwarding back :-( - I would happily pay for their service again
Because 5€ for their current service is overpriced
Sadly, using small niche VPNs that might be more trusted makes you stand out more.
This probably doesn’t matter does it? Because being spotted as a mulvad, airvpn, etc user doesn’t make you more of a target for anything.
It just means that if they try to trace your connection back to you, they won’t find anything out, because you have a trusted zero-logging vpn.
Only think I could see is it could potentially be easier to track usage through the ip and assume it’s one person, but idk you could do that with anything if you look at the request timings, etc. It’s still just guesses.
Am i missing something?
It’s pretty unusual to have a Mullvad user on your server
Probably not on the usual sites people visit (youtube, etc, the big sites 99% of ppl go to exclusively), but I can see your point for any smaller site.
Because 5€ for their current service is overpriced
Airvpn provide a discount for each extra month you sign up for in bulk which is nice. It’s a great service in my opinion.
I use Keepass but mostly for convenience and I don’t understand why it’s in the 5th category. If I have 50 different accounts with 50 different passwords but they can all be had with one keepass password, how is that different than having 50 different accounts all using the same password?
~ how is that different than having 50 different accounts all using the same password?
Because the password manager would have to be hacked itself.
If you just use the same password for everything, any of those 50 sites could be hacked.
- With a long enough passphrase, your keepass db is uncrackable by any current tech.
- If you have 50 accounts using the same password, if any one of those websites get hacked, they now have access to every other account.
