Forcing Privacy and Respect

Glenfiddich! Wow that’s top shelf stuff, even at the lowest number of years aged.

Here I was quietly sitting, when your post poked me in the eye. Took my time away. With what? Your ideas of how it is or how it should be. And what were those ideas? That you want us to leave you alone. But that you won’t leave us alone.

I’m not poking fun at you, and I’m not putting your ideas down. Rather I’m simply calling attention to the widespread hypocrisy, that I like to rather call widespread reality.

Because in reality the environment around us not under our control. Oh, we might be able to adjust all of the stuff around us for a time, but that is just temporary. It is insanity to think that we can control the environment around us. All we can do is to try and deal with it as it is, not how we want it to be.

So I would say to you, that I too have lost my privacy in big ways, and then I started all over to get it back, only to have it lost again. It’s a struggle, and one that never ends.

The name for that fragile struggle is life.

Walls work both ways. Don’t forget that. Not everyone wants to shut themselves off from that great big world and what’s going on in it. But it comes with a price. So you get to choose how much you want of what, at least for the moment. But life is like a boat. You have to constantly correct it’s direction, or the wind and the waves will take you where they want you to go.

you know what they say … it takes much effort for the boot to not step on the ant and that’s hard even when it’s going SLOW … when it accelerates it becomes nigh impossible to NOT crush it …

I disagree with the premise that says ‘if you want to engage with the world, that you should have no say in how the world engages with you’.

Now if you’re in the telemarketing business but you don’t want to hear from other telemarketers, that would be hypocritical. But for the rest of us (the majority), we have an absolute right to be treated with respect as we ourselves define respect. When someone sends me a text message to advertise their business, they’re using services that I pay for, to try to get something from me. The same goes for my mail box or fax machine. I pay for paper and ink in my fax machine. Someone else prints their advertisement to me using my own paper and ink, without my permission. I paid these expenses for my own benefit, not for someone else to use without permission. Is it okay to commit theft because everyone else is doing it and you probably won’t be caught and if you are caught, there is no penalty?

It’s not always the solicitation that is offensive. If a licensed real estate agent calls me and asks if I want to sell my house, I don’t care. If he identifies himself with his real identity, that’s okay. But if a call center has an anonymous nobody employee make that call, I have a problem with that. The first initial contact needs to have the real identity of the caller or sales person attached to it, right up-front. They need to be verifiable and to have some skin in the game. Otherwise, the first contact is either fraudulent or from someone who doesn’t care about their customer. In addition, I want the source of the call, not a robot or a paid-hourly flunkey to be the one who calls. It’s the anonymity and the use of technology that diminishes the value of the interaction. I could go buy a robo-calling machine myself today and not disclose my identity when using it. That doesn’t make me a real-estate agent who is honest about my identity or who cares about my customers… and I am not even a real estate agent at all, nor would I have to be one to diminish that otherwise legitimate profession. Most of the people using these things aren’t even licensed or if they are, they don’t want to risk their license nor reputation by disclosing their real identity information on first contact. That makes them scammers and boundary violators… even if they do have some kind of license. Everyone has the right to be isolated from takers and boundary violators. The fact that technology enables their behavior doesn’t excuse them from their obligation to respect my boundaries. These practices are so common that even well known politicians have stooped to using them. But that doesn’t mean that what they are doing is okay with me. Those who accept these intrusions as okay by them are caught-up in a personal maze that prevents them from using critical thought processes to guide their own respective futures. They buy what is advertised, think what others want them to think, vote how others want them to think. It’s really sad. I can protect myself from these maladies with some effort required. But I shouldn’t have to. Technology should allow me to have the ability to call the owner of the robo-calling machine at his home. If he is not home when I call, his wife would get an ear-full of why her husband is a dispicable person for setting up that machine. After she takes a hundred or so of those kinds of calls herself, maybe she will make him stop. This is how we build real communities of honest people who work together, even if our community is global now.

I recently took an interest in solar power for my home. I had the idea on my own as others who I know are starting to do it. While on the verge of signing a $30K contract with a company that I sought out and initiated contact with myself, I decided I needed to do more research and comparison from other solar power installation companies before signing. I hung up on two home solar power installation company telemarketers in the morning one day and initiated contact with two different solar power installation companies in the afternoon of that same day, after carefully researching which ones I wanted to call first. These telemarketers are just vultures with nothing to offer. Even if they might have something to offer, I wouldn’t want to patronize them because we have differences on ethical issues related to how they market their products.

As a side note on critical thinking, none of the solar installation companies offered quite what I demanded. I didn’t want to just break even every month. I wanted power independence and immediate savings. I ended up buying a mini-split air conditioner in the room where we spend most of our time as a first step to my own plan. That unit will pay for itself in the first year and enable phase two of my self-thought-out plan. I live in a big city but am buying an off-grid solar power system that will cost around only $6K out of pocket after government tax rebates. The city power grid will still supply my off-peak power in the summer and winter while the summer and winter peak demand will be covered by my non-grid-tied solar power system. In the spring and fall I will be completely power self-sufficient. A sophisticated transfer switch near my main power box will switch different circuits in the home back and forth from private-solar to the grid-connected and back, depending on time of day and the state of my batteries to make this happen. I’ll even be able to charge the batteries using city grid power on cloudy days using off-peak power to carry us through the peak demand time without using city grid power during peak demand hours, if necessary. But my solar power system will never be connect to the city power grid. Instead, both systems will connect to my home. In a grid power outage, I’ll get along just fine but may end up sitting in the dark if I want to use air conditioning for part of the day. In any event, long before the fifteen year contract on the $30K grid-tied system would have been paid off (before making a profit on it), I’ll own a much better system at a much lower cost. None of the solar power companies offered this option. I am shopping the system components myself and arranging permits myself, and hiring contractors piecemeal for the parts that I can’t do myself.

Maybe you should get well dug too? Not an open hole, but like one of those old farm pipe pumps where Ma and Pa Kettle primes it with a jug of water and they pump it by hand.

All the home emergency power won’t help if the water company isn’t pumping water. Storage of a few gallons will last only so many days.

My purpose isn’t to be completely independent from the grid. It’s to avoid all peak demand charges in the summer and winter, to get through any power outages in 115 degree weather without suffering, and to have a few rudimentary options available if something catastrophic happens to the main power grid. If the water gets cut off here in this desert city, I can get by on stored water for a few weeks anyway.

Perhaps you should look into one of these?

Clickable version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6ZL0ll6ZkA

One of the things you need to be aware of is that, in some US states, an innocuous post card is sent to households to see if you still live at the address you used for your voter registration. The Post Office is directed not to forward the cards, even though, by Federal law, you do not have to re-register if you move within your jurisdiction (NVRA 1993). However, some secretaries of state are using the ignored cards as “evidence” that you do not live where you registered. (https://www.gregpalast.com/cancel-culture-scourge-of-purge/)

I don’t know that the post by Chelmite is relevant to privacy or to this forum. But I’ll respond to it anyway. The article is highly partison and discriminatory against Republicans. People of any party can and do cheat the voting system, probably in equal numbers.

Anyone who can’t produce a form of legal ID certainly shouldn’t be allowed to vote until after they can and do present their legal ID. Managing the official legal affairs of ourselves and others requires having and presenting and verifying legal state-issued ID. It’s preposterous to think of allowing anyone to vote if they can’t/won’t properly identify themselves.

Okay, before this thread gets too off topic, because I can see where this is going and I can say with reasonable certainty that this is an argument that’s not going to help any of us forums.puri.sm users, I’m going to have to ask, for the sake of our sanity, that we stick to what this thread is about.

The thread title reminds me of a poster I saw in my elementary school gymnasium, that said something like “respect is earned, not given”. The problem is, the world is increasingly becoming a place where you don’t have any opportunity to earn someone’s respect. Before the internet, before megacorporations with continent sized spheres of influence, you could earn your neighbor’s respect through your interactions with them. With megacorps, you’re forced to do business with people who will never see you and can’t even tell if you’re a real person, using interactions that can’t possibly earn their respect for you. With the internet, most common interactions are over a machine made of ways for people to avoid seeing anything they don’t like, and that includes any efforts by you to earn their respect, which is as hard as earning the respect of a google accounts processing clerk, since you’re about as distant and easily separated even further. Now, interacting with someone you might not 100% agree with becomes abnormal on the internet, and this bleeds into real life where no one talks to their neighbors anymore and we just shout at each other with yard signs that don’t really convey how we feel. The result is that ad companies can imagine you as a collection of data rather than a human being that most likely reached a semi-productive adulthood without committing any crimes we’d all have problems with, and parallel societies develop that all hate each other.

The system you’re proposing might force privacy, but it’s not going to force people to respect you and in fact is going to make it even harder for you to earn people’s respect, as people self-isolate even further, making interactions only when you absolutely need to. Things are already really bad if this discussion on debate.org this comes anywhere near approaching how half of people really think of others.

I suppose I’m admitting that Purism’s products can’t actually make the world a better place and they’re dependent on something that’s making it worse. They could certainly be part of a half decent world, which can’t be said for most cell phones, but if you want to FORCE respect…there’s nothing Purism can offer that’ll absolutely compel someone to agree to your personhood.

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I agree that respect has to be earned whereas privacy is a right. Purism’s mission is about privacy and there’s not anything they can do about personal respect issues. I don’t have a desire to use this forum to promote my own political views. At the same time, people should be sensitive about the political views of others. We can talk about the technology quite safely. But when someone starts disparaging the political views based on a news article or by something they’ve seen on CNN, the discussion isn’t as worthy. If we want to discuss how Twitter and Facebook are controlling what can be said, that discussion is worthy too as long as we discuss implications and not actual political issues as the topic.

yes and the best thing any of us here can do is learn and teach others how to demand and fight for it … providing adequate tools is an important step in the process but we also have to help people become aware of them and ease their transition into such tools … rights can be forgotten if not exercised just like skills … or at least dulled …

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