Gorujo's Blog

Analogizing Digital Privacy to Realstic(ish) scenarios

So do you still not care after that?

Written in 02-12-2024/12-02-2024 07:46 PM UTC, Published in 09:55PM UTC and Finished editing at 03-12-2024/12-03-2024 06:22 PM UTC

Before we start with that idea. The goal of this post is that even with people neglecting privacy, may understand how it works and why it is important! Hopefully to that itended audience. With that out of the way lets start with some analogies I had in mind.

Oh btw if you have a browser that cant render emojis somehow, they're shown in parenthesis

Undermining encryption using the locker analogy with emojis

Lets put the same Bob and Alice example and add law enforcement on top.

This is the Alice's lock (public key) 🔒(lock) 👩(woman), think of it as their public key and this is the key (private key) they use to unlock it 🔑(key).
Now 👨(man) Bob wants to put a secret note📝 tucked away onto the lock end where it closes (public key), Alice will give the lock opened🔓 to bob to place the secret note in and close it🔒 (encrypting using alice's public key).
Bob will hand out the lock🔒 thats closed to Alice👩 and Alice will use the key🔑 (private key) to unlock (decrypt) the lock🔓 and grab bob's tucked away secret note👨📝. This that when during the lock was closed none was able to access that tucked away note. With PFS ([Perfect] Forward Secrecy) It would mean that Bob and Alice get different locks and keys each time they put a note on it so that even if it was compromised it wouldnt affect newer ones. This can also happen with the opposite of course (Alice to Bob)

This is in a nutshell is assymetrical encryption explained in the real world a little, especially something that we often use when we use apps like Signal. Now lets twist it. What happens if the goverment decided to scan your encrypted messages. Alright:
Now take the nutshell analogical explaination I've made and put it this way: Before bob closes the lock, that Law enforcement officer👮‍♂️/👮‍♀️ immediately stops Bob from closing the lock and checks the secret note (obviously was reserved for Alice) but after checking the content they concluded that Bob wrote soemthing that was considered Illegal and arrest bob on the spot wrongfully so

Would you want to be in this spot? I didnt think so right? Let's get into the next analogy

Invasive Data Collection in the analogy of a country

Fun Fact this is more or less happening in China already so I could end the analogy here however I'll be using mine for now:

Imagine a country that's beautiful, rich and very much a respecting of it's citizen's one, Maybe you think of japan equivalent or whatever.
But imagine that country's goverment is now looking for every move of a citizen. The country knows every citizen regardless of characteristics but not only that, They know what you're talking to who and what and every single conversation has been recorded to the Tee, where you've been going. What you are doing in that bathroom business of yours because places like cafés have decided to put audio recording devices and/or cameras to go with it and the goverment is okay with that to spy it's citizens that way or otherwise the goverment has your audio recordings in your own personal bathroom and even banning cash and credit cards in favour of contactless payments in your finger so that you never have to pay privately physically and allow the goverment access to all of your transactions. Now they use all that data point to decide if you're a good and bad citizen and impose restrictions on those especially if they deem you bad or neutral. All for what? So that the goverment can help push physical advertising providers to personalize advertisement? If that doesn't scare you idk what it is.

This is what's happening right now with big tech data collection among other things, now while not necessarily the controlling of you and others [Though some is valid like the fact that you could be pushed into an echo chamber for apps like eg. TikTok, or potentially control what you say for privacy invading messengers but if E2EE like whatsapp, then the concerns around the metadata and potentially plain text backups being stored into unencrypted cloud storage like Google Drive apply], The fact that they collect invasive data alone is worrying and that's GAFAMB (adding B for ByteDance) companies to be clear we're mostly talking about. Here if you even take the slightest time to review their privacy policy (at least a few minutes of scrolling where you're interested) and if not Tos;DR has got you covered too.

Shoutout to Eric Murphy, I will also link a bunch of instances where people's privacy were ruined or invaded because of big tech or the invasive data collection methodology:

Now you might be thinking: Goru dont be silly, this is not happening in the real world.

Wow do you want the normie trophy? I'll give it to you. Sarcasm aside I get it, the post is about analogizing to realistic (but not so realistic at the same time, hence "realistic(ish)") events with Digital Privacy, even though some things aside from the lock analogy are really More or less happening in China if you think about it so do you still choose to call me what?

Nice and all but I don't care still, Besides [Insert some yap about not justifying privacy]

That's fine but we beg you to at least respect the values of the individual that's asking to protect their privacy (eg. If a friend ask you to use Signal, please do them a favour and do so. I will be making another post in regards to how if someone asks you to message them to a more private platform than what they are why you likely should [and when you shouldn't under specific circumstances] and Do not call them sketchy, I'm looking at you some discord fellows)

#privacy