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

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.

• 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
• …

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?”

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”

When Google bans their account ask them, is having no email normal?

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

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.

Parry and hit back. Ask her why it matters what you use if you can function with them as if you use google. Then return fire with your favorite reason not to use google. For me, I like to open the dev tools in Firefox, and show the head of any website. Let them choose. Find the line with google analytics, google tag service, or google ad sense. “Wow this website has nothing to do with google. Why is this here? To track you. Did you know that google can track your mouse? Even if you don’t click on anything? Or they can track you by installing fonts?” Etc. Etc. Scare the shit out of them and they’ll leave you alone. Hopefully you can slowly begin to convert them.

• Never defend. Always make a good attack.
• Never say privacy. Never get dragged into tech yapping. Always say control, power, scam and abuse.
• Never lead with gains. Human care most about loss. Always focus on loss.

Something like:

Watching big tech gape my inbox was never normal but, if you’re into that, I’m not judging you.

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.

I get this all the time. 99% of the comments are from tech-illiterate people so I don’t care.

My brother surprised me recently by making a comment: “why would you go to the length of tinkering if you could just use [commercial solution].” So we’ll have a chat when I see him next month. He is quite tech literate and the last one I would expect to say something like that.

Otherwise I flat out ignore the comments. People have no clue and are absolutely ignorant sheep blinded by convenience and comfort. Which I am convinced this is going to end the human race. 🤷🏻‍♀️

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.

I’ve always been like that since decades ago and my family just always had this “oh you…” attitude. Most people don’t understand.

Having said that, happy to see more girls and women interested in this! That used to be very different

Whoa. These comments are quick to jump to “your parent doesn’t love you” or talking about divorce. Chill out, folks.

“Come on, Sarah, can’t you just be normal and use Gmail like everyone?”

my mom, scolding me.

I don’t know the context, but… that doesn’t seem like something that should hold your Mom’s attention?

Maybe she’s worried about something else, and the email topic is just a proxy. My Mom was the same when I really got into tech hobbies in some problematic points of my childhood.