If the Soviets had what the West now has, they would be collectively creaming their pants.

I'm not talking about grocery stores with aisles of plentiful and exotic food, or cars that actually work when bought new, or apartments that are more than a matchbox. I'm talking about how much the Soviet KGB, or the East German Stasi would love to have a populace like the West has right now. We are utter suckers.

A person recently posed an interesting question to me. What is worse: to have a neighbor that consented to watch you and all your goings on, on behalf of the police state, or to have a police state that doesn't need your neighbor at all to know every going on about your life? Where the surveillance states of Eastern Europe had to painstakingly agglutinate files upon files of information on every citizen in physical databases, with manual surveillance techniques using neighbors, family, bosses, cops (perhaps, an occasional wiretap or opening of your mail) to track your every movement and punish you for dissent there is no such need of such an involved system here. We have voluntarily submitted to technologies which give a window of opportunity that terrifying organizations like the Staasi never had. And unlike the Staasi there was effectively no manpower needed or expended to actually make use of these tools, because private industry freely and happily did it with their only considerations being their own greed.

While I could talk about the absurdities of welcoming a device in your home as egregiously and transparently bad for privacy as an Alexa, I think it should really go without saying that installing a device that effectively always listens to you and uploads arbitrary information about you to a server in who knows where goes without saying, especially as agencies have already started using warrants to demand recordings in criminal cases.

Your smartphone is an all in one GPS tracker, conversation recorder, contact book, personal ledger, and likely depending on the person you are, much more. It is a locked down black box in which any potential hardware/software backdoors demanded by alphabet agencies around the world are more or less completely blocked to you. If you have any reason to be suspected of thoughtcrime, you cannot trust even something like telegram or signal to protect your private conversations. As recent leaks confirmed, it is very possible for your phone to be compromised with malware which reads your conversations from memory, where they must necessarily be unencrypted to be displayed to you. Yet, despite the massive privacy hole it represents I would contend that most of us here still have one. Hardware like smart TVs (as Vizio proved) or other IoT devices are no better even if on face value their capabilities seem more innocuous compared to smartphones.

To trust a service like Facebook or even Google is even more folly. They attempt to dig their cyclopean, argus-eyed, tentacled masses deep into your skin. The data they collect on you which many voluntarily give is absurd – not just everyone you potentially know, or your jobs, or your religion, or your politics, or your relationship status, or your every conversation had on Facebook messenger, or every group you associate with, or every place you shop and decided to like, or what sites you browse and decide to share with your friends, or the structure of your face thanks to every picture both you and your friends upload and get tagged in, but even more absurd can often be the things which they collect on you which you might not even be aware of like the messages you delete and decide not to send. Or you might consider how these services love to manipulate narratives, and encourage echo chambers that bounce off continuous streams of bald-faced lies.

Yet, to escape this is difficult – if not in a very practical matter impossible – when everyone you associate with voluntarily uses these services, and social pressures encourage or even demand of you in some sense to participate in them, lest you be outcast as paranoid or abnormal. In some cases, to escape is entirely impossible; big stores for years have been attempting to track your purchasing habits. While the regimes of the Marxist-Leninist states used brutal gulags, psychiatric hospitals, and disgusting tortures to enforce their will upon an unwilling populace – and you might in that sense consider the comparison disrespectful or invalid – we took and engineered a road which is a far less infantile in its principle, much more effective, and much more insidious. Creating a system where social pressures and ignorance enforce subservient behaviors and voluntary surveillance results in a surveillance state that can't be effectively called out, and where dissent can be very quietly hidden away as it happens. Everyone in plain sight can understand the brutality of a gulag or see through the injustices of a show trial, but it's far more difficult to see the potential dangers and wrongs that can be done when private agencies are collecting profiles on you that can be mixed together into a statistical model of how theoretically "dangerous", or "lazy", or "questioning" you are. Even without a government threat in the form of the "five eyes" or other surveillance ventures, this Private Staasi is a danger to ourselves in their abilities to manipulate our behavior through the careful control of information, and their capability of monitoring this information to suppress or hurt our relations with others.

We need to build and encourage people to use systems that can stand up to these forces, and the only way we can truly prevent these travesties from happening is by moving to systems that are more distributed, more anonymous, and more free (as in freedom) so that we can see their potential wrongs and exploits, and correct them. You cannot trust policy; policy can always be changed and abused by those in positions of economic or political power, but systems which fundamentally make it difficult for anyone to violate your privacy in your first place ensure that the human greed of a tight oligarchy cannot get in the way of mass human liberty.

To do that we need technology that supports it: We need an open, extensible, and free smartphone platform with a fully free and adjustable operating system. We need a distributed, encrypted and private social network that may run on it. We need systems that wholly discourage these abuses of power by destroying the existence of these powers, and we need economics that can reward and encourage these ventures instead of ones that profit at the expense of our individual freedom and agency.

Some of these things (like the social network, and the operating system) already exist, and we need to improve their usability, press use of them, and extend use of free and distributed solutions as best as we can especially to those who are less than completely technically literate. We need conversations to happen, and disentangle the webs of disinformation currently out there preventing such technologies from wide distribution, lest we see the remaining shreds and capabilities of staying private be fully brushed away some time within the next 3-10 years.