• utopiah@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    They asked for an alternative to airtags. I provided one.

    And even though I’m not OP I’m genuinely grateful for that.

    Doesn’t matter if they were compromised because like I said, everyone is eventually.

    No! That’s the whole point of this Privacy community! If someone is using, using home automation as an example, Apple HomeKit or Roomba or Google Home they will eventually get compromised BUT if they are using something local, e.g Zigbee with HomeAssistant they WILL never get compromised because by the very local only architecture of that solution no data is leaving the home and thus can NOT be compromised.

    The ENTIRE reason d’etre of this community is not to say “Oh well… the default solutions are imperfect, we have to shrug and accept the statu quo” but rather provide genuinely alternative.

    I understand a lot of people can enter into a learned helplessness mindset imagining that only poor solutions exist and thus, better pick the least worst one, but by doing that we are giving power to Big Tech, surveillance capitalism, etc.

    Please do NOT say that “everybody gets compromised” when you actually mean that “the vast majority of people who accept to use a popular solution with trade offs that are not good for privacy”. It sounds like a finicky difference but it’s actually totally different because it shows that it’s not inevitable.

    By taking shortcut in your language you limit what’s conceived as possible by others who are asking for help, again, in a Privacy focused community.

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago
      1. I didn’t realize what community it was because they weren’t specific at all. They just asked for an alternative.
      2. You don’t seem to realize that it is literally true: everyone gets compromised. I mean not only companies but it also applies to self hosted systems. One example was that my home server got hacked a few years ago. Magically virus filled executables showed up in thousands of my directories. This was a Linux server. Any open port will get hijacked if it is open for long enough.
      3. This type of product asked about literally does not and cannot exist in a self hosted situation. The only way they can work is if a critical mass of other users are near the device, also using the supporting app, with Bluetooth enabled, that way you have any chance of its location being reported.
      4. The data breach that happened in this case affected data that almost every citizen has out there anyhow from a dozen other data breaches. Yes it obviously is sometimes due to irresponsible practices but there isn’t much to be done about it now that the data has been out there for a decade.

      I know you mean well here but you’re off base and it’s coming across as lecturing me about something you aren’t fully informed about. I am not saying people shouldn’t care about privacy. I’m saying if you want this type of product, all the concerns you’re mentioning here are literally impossible to avoid. The best you could do is find the company with the least number of breaches and then pray they remain that way. But that doesn’t really get you very far.

      • utopiah@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        I must express myself quite poorly. It is not a point about technical knowledge, in fact if you were to know more about the topic than I do, I would expect you to even more be upheld to higher standards and thus not promote a bad solution, even more so assume it’s the only one. I can’t imagine that even a PhD student who is supposedly at the frontier of knowledge in their very narrow field would assume no alternative is possible, or will ever be. This even more the case without having both a complete understand of the landscape but also about OP’s actual needs, which is probably hard to express clearly and thus leading to a lot of assumption. Here maybe a simple loud alarm from a BT speaker going out of range might be enough.

        My whole point is that abandoning hope, and leading others to do so, is worst than actively finding for a barely OK compromise.

        Anyway I don’t want to invest more energy on this discussion unfortunately so simply wishing you the best, thanks for the clarifications.