The Privacy Iceberg

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:

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:

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:

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.

  • ISOmorph@feddit.org
    633·
    vor 2 Tagen

    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?

    • lazynooblet@lazysoci.alEnglish
      523·
      vor 2 Tagen

      Seeing steam at the top makes me question the list. Likely a hate of DRM rather than privacy

      • lb_o@lemmy.world
        662·
        vor 2 Tagen

        Yeap, and Brave in the middle. They only pretend they are for privacy, but they are the very opposite.

        • dogs0n@sh.itjust.works
          21·
          vor 2 Tagen

          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.

          • const_void@lemmy.ml
            4·
            vor 2 Tagen

            Brave is and always has been gross. Never understood how they’ve been so successful at tricking people into installing it.

            • SirPea@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              1·
              vor 11 Stunden

              OP replied in another comment its because “firefox is not secure” https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/43710170/18564861 :

              […] Chromium-based browsers aren’t all bad, such as Vanadium or Trivalent, so people sometimes feel more comfortable sticking with what seems familiar (coming from Chrome).

              In another reply parents to this one:

              LibreWolf is far from secure, as it is based on Firefox and so comes with the same security issues. If you meant to say privacy and not security, the reason nobody makes high threat model browsers for Windows is because Windows itself is not private and it would be a losing battle.

              So OP is saying it’s not private nor safe? I get what some people are saying of Firefox constantly changing Terms of Services but that’d be in regard to privacy not security and OP tries to argue not being safe which his iceberg also implies in terms of privacy not being good too. Yeah, LibreFox’s ToS isn’t the same as Firefox’s ToS and his counterarguments to Firefox and Firefox-based on replies is Chrome-based browsers exclusive to niche OSes (also OP don’t even try arguing Brave on comments so probably just trying to rage-bait with every opportunity). I’d love OP to argue using the examples he used in the iceberg. So many discourse incosistencies along with the iceberg. Also OP FYI while privacy does not mean secure, lack of privacy could mean security risks in some cases.

        • EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
          2·
          vor 2 Tagen

          Yeah. All the issues, even small and quickly-resolved ones, paint a picture - that they are eager to disrespect users’ consent.

        • MajesticElevator@lemmy.zip
          33·
          vor 2 Tagen

          They’re not the very opposite. They have done wrong things, just like Mozilla. Doesn’t make them Google though.

        • shneancy@lemmy.world
          15·
          vor 2 Tagen

          and then Tor so high up, unless you’re hell bent on leaving 0 traces that thing is a pain to use, can’t have it maximalised, pages load sometimes minutes at a time, no addons, just suffering. nobody sane uses that thing for more than the occasional trip to whatever deep web market is not yet exit scamming

      • Nalivai@lemmy.world
        10·
        vor 2 Tagen

        Their bottom line is gold, this should tell you everything you need to know about the creator of the meme.

        • antbricks@lemmy.today
          4·
          vor 2 Tagen

          it also has a log cabin… and Log Cabin is a maple syrup brand… and maple syrup is from maple trees… and maple leaves are on Canadian flags… so… a snowman?

    • onion_trial@europe.pub
      21·
      vor 2 Tagen

      It might be there because there is a lot of data associated with the steam account, especially the community part of it, e.g.:

      • Recorded playtimes
      • Times and dates when you are regularly logged in
      • Possession of games which are precisely tagged by genre/interests/etc.
      • On which time and date you spent how much money (participation in sales in the steam store)
      • Timestamped posts and comments in groups based on various interests etc.
      • Curators/devs/publishers you follow
      • Your game wishlist
      • Connection and interaction with other steam accounts (friends list, chat, trades, gifts)

      All this can be used to create a very detailed behaviour profile and accurately deduce the social status of the real person who uses the account. Maybe the data isn’t misused and it’s just there so the features can actually exist.

      Personally, I doubt Valve actually does this as expansive and invasive as other big tech companies. I’m pretty sure they at least aggregate anonymised data to measure how e.g. their sales perform, which game to promote on the store front page etc.

      But we can’t be sure because it’s not public.

      • shneancy@lemmy.world
        71·
        vor 2 Tagen

        i don’t think valve does much with the data even internally. if they did at least the game recommending queue would be slightly accurate. instead i have to manually blacklist tags for it to stop showing me things i’m just deeply uninterested in. like yes Mr. Valve my steam library of RPGs, puzzle games, and open world sandboxes clearly profiles me as someone who’d be interested in the newest Fifa game every year, sure buddy

    • lb_o@lemmy.world
      182·
      vor 2 Tagen

      Agree. Steam doesn’t even save your birthday, and asks for it every time

    • 9bananas@feddit.org
      17·
      vor 2 Tagen

      afaik the client does collect a bunch if data, most (all, i think? but not a 100% on that) of which is opt-in.

      they do need stuff like IPs for internet related features.

      telemetry wise there’s the steam hardware survey, which is opt-in, and it asks every single time it attempts to collect your systems hardware and OS information. this could technically be identifying information, but since it’s opt-in it’s not a privacy violation and it’s entirely optional. (plus it’s super useful for all involved: users, devs, and steam. it’s kind of a win-win and straight up necessary info for devs to know which hardware they should optimize for)

      they might be putting it at the top because steam has native support for DRM?

      but that’s also weird, because DRM isn’t a privacy violation. it’s a shitty practice, barely does anything, barely works, and keeps breaking or hobbling otherwise perfectly good games, all of which is shitty, but it’s little to do with privacy. and the dev has to specifically opt-in and integrate it as a feature…unless they’re thinking of 3rd party DRM that can be waaay more intrusive, like Vanguard… THAT’S a privacy and security nightmare just waiting to blow up in people’s faces.

      otherwise…i haven’t really heard anything bad about steam privacy wise?

      doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to be concerned about, but i feel like there’d been some news about it if there was…

    • chingadera@lemmy.world
      2010·
      vor 2 Tagen

      No. And also chrome is somehow at the bottom of this list, I don’t care if it’s chromium or vanadium, it’s still chrome.

      • OrganicMustard@lemmy.world
        201·
        vor 2 Tagen

        It’s Vanadium, a fork by the people from GrapheneOS. You could say the same about Graphene, that it’s still Android, but reality is more complex.

      • Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        92·
        vor 2 Tagen

        Chromium-based browsers have arguably better security than Firefox. https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html

        Vanadium further improves Chromium’s security by disabling the JS JIT Compiler, using a hardened memory allocator (GrapheneOS hardened_malloc) enabling ARMv8.5 MTE, and applying other hardening patches (https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Vanadium/tree/main/patches).

        The secureblue project maintains a hardened Chromium build for Linux called Trivalent, which uses most of the patches from Vanadium, among others. You can get it from their repo: https://repo.secureblue.dev/secureblue.repo

            • The 8232 Project@lemmy.mlOP
              2·
              vor 2 Tagen

              An issue arises with that. Linux is fundamentally insecure, as you are likely well aware if you use secureblue. secureblue is designed to be as secure as possible while still being Linux, and so is still bound by the same constraints. Qubes OS is not a distro, so it (should be) more secure, but it is an absolute pain to use. Furthermore, Qubes OS emulates Linux distros, so the question becomes “Why not just emulate the most secure Linux distro?” which is either Whonix or secureblue depending on who you ask. Is that more secure than running secureblue on bare metal? What about GrapheneOS used in desktop mode? And what about emulating Linux inside of GrapheneOS using the Linux terminal? There are plans to use multiple distros inside of the terminal, so what about secureblue inside of GrapheneOS?

              The whole situation spirals out of control. I know this iceberg chart isn’t ranking security, it’s ranking what software people generally use for each experience level, but neither secureblue nor Qubes OS would fit nicely in any category. You can read this post for more of my thoughts about this mess.