I was happy to see "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" and "Permanent Record" on your list. More people are becoming aware of the threats that surveillance has on our society thanks to books like these and even something like The Social Dilemma on Netflix.
I think unfortunately we're going to see a lot of companies adopt a sort of "privacy washing" (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gGb_vKbJLU) before we see much real change in their privacy practices.
I'll definitely add a few of these to my books to read for 2021.
I think as hacks become more and more common, and as more businesses lose revenue from data breaches, more companies will adopt better privacy and data security practices.
If someone "hacks" DuckDuckGo's databases, for example, they won't find any useful information. If they accessed Facebook's data storage, they would have tons of information about millions of people.
As companies like Microsoft, Apple, etc. adopt stronger data security, I think the general population will shift their practices as well.
This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeBRt4qGHH8) kind of made everything click for me as far as how a "hack" can impact a person beyond just the data being publicly accessible.
I'm not sure I really understand the importance of decentralized web search...yet.
Why not just use something like Ghostpeek (https://ghostpeek.com) or DuckDuckGo (duckduckgo.com), which are ethical and trustworthy (for now)? Is the purpose of YaCy to prevent one company from having all of your search data or to provide better results?
I work almost exclusively remotely. It's been great for me. At first, it was hard to stay productive, but I got a dedicated home office and now I love working from home.
People get so stressed out from commuting, even if they don't realize it.
I've always been skeptical of DuckDuckGo. Some people say it's linked to Google...I'm don't buy that. However, search engines in general are tough to truly know how they work.
Apple gets it. They really have no choice if they're dealing with kids though. I don't know how Google manages to control the majority of the education market for tablets (60%)...because of the immense tracking that they do.
Exactly! Facebook is acting as the scapegoat right now, even though the breaches into its users privacy can be applied to most big tech companies right now.
The internet has been a "wild west" for its entire existence. While this allowed it to grow and improve freely, it also brought about bigger issues. Government intervention could work, but the government getting involved in tech usually sucks.
It all comes down to profits. The media companies need the data. And I would argue that most people aren't sharing information directly with publishers on the internet, it all goes through Facebook and Google (the companies they are criticizing).