this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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There are no private spaces online, your privacy is at the whim of whoever owns the servers and whatever government controls them.
Unless you're using end to end encrypted communication with people you know and trust you should assume that everything you do online has your actual name and face attached to it.
I do agree that it sucks.
There should be laws, with criminal consequences, that protect our privacy but essentially every government is of the opinion that actual privacy should never exist online because they think it's better to sacrifice everyone's privacy than to let a single criminal go undetected.
This is why you see all Western governments simultaneously running "think of the children" campaigns as they slowly manuver the Internet into requiring every device be identifiable and linked to a person.
This is why the end-to-end encrypted communication providers are also being pressured right now. Because with systems built using encryption to enforce the rules are actually private.
Governments know this, as they heavily rely on encrypted communication systems. They just don't want anybody else to have that privilege.
Which is it? It logically cant be both. I own at least a dozen servers.
There are no private spaces online, because your privacy is only protected by the people who own the servers. Your data isn't private to them, nor any governments who can compell them.
You cannot trust that any data you put on services, that you're not completely in control of, is going to remain private.
There are countless examples of services selling your data, hackets getting access to your data or governments compelling a service provider to produce your data on demand.
The exception to that are services where you can enforce your privacy through well implemented encryption.
For exsmple, I don't need to trust a cloud storage provider that is storing my data because it's encrypted on my machine using keys that only I control prior to being stored. My privacy doesn't require me to trust that Google will protect my data from insiders, hackers or hostile governments because they don't have the ability to produce it. My privacy is protected by the laws of mathematics regardless of how compromised the service provider is.
Yes, I know all that. I spent 25 years in tech, which is why I also know how to run secure services online. Hence my comment above.