Definitely yeah! If you’re just a regular person living in a fairly democratic country and you’re thinking about physically clogging your usb ports to avoid someone breaking in your room and tampering your device while you’re exploring Barcelona, or if you consider removing camera and microphone from your pixel phone that you use every day, you’re probably taking it too far.

OTOH I’m still having trouble getting people away from Meta apps and I think it’s absolutely crazy how little thought people put into the amount of data that Meta collects.

TBH even in many dictatorships you’re mostly fine just using a VPN and fake accounts if you have government critical opinions. But that’s just my personal experience. Goes without saying if you have a decent follower count or are some kind of journalist you should be very paranoid.

Anyway, the point is, it’s probably good to feel slightly paranoid because most people aren’t paranoid enough, but most of us are also not Edward Snowden or Saudi journalists, so there should be a balance between practicality and privacy.

I definetly take things too far in terms of my effort vs my current threat model. But there are many aspects of trying to increase privacy.

For one, I'm very interested in the philosophy, ethics and politics of privacy and adjacent fields such as security. Part of what I do is just learning.

Also I try to be a good role model to my AFK peers and family. Of course I don't try to get everyone to adopt my hobby. But as in every field it's hard to teach even the basic stuff to others without deeper understanding of the field.

Most people have absolutely zero idea how much data they put out there, what's done with it, and why any rational person would be horrified if they knew the extent to which individuals were tracked. Simply put, short of showing them how their lives are made worse, they don't care, and can't be made to care.

For friends and family, you can do things like give them books or send articles explaining it slowly in parts. For everyone else, just ask them if they know how Google tracks what they do in Incognito windows and see what they say. If they say that Google can't or doesn't, they might as well say the Earth is flat. You can't argue with that, even though it's provably false.

Of course some people go too far. I think a lot of folks on here grossly overestimate / overstate their threat model, but I think the discussions are good for the limited few who really do need to cover their asses.

Me personally, I hate the idea of companies bidding for my attention without my consent, so I try and make it as hard as possible for them to get it. This just so happens to overlap nicely with the goals of the privacy community much of the time.

I dunno, considering that Facebook data has been used to go after people, we've got fascists using every method possible to target their current hated group, and police everywhere ignoring or bypassing due process by just buying data, I don't think it all paranoid to think that privacy concerns are already huge, and could get worse

Yes, some people absolutely take things way too far, and often unproductively.

Like the person who was trying to disable websockets. Or the people who will shun signal, but jump directly on the flavour of the month signal clone, which might be completely backdoored.

If you dont know what you are doing, randomly turning things on and off at best does nothing, at worst makes you even more signaturable/trackable.

Its good to educate yourself on various protections, but unfortunately, it requires a lot of careful research and understanding.

Depends how one looks at it. From purely practical POV, probably 90% of us don't need to bolt their doors so much. But as a principle, as a society we've lost the "war" on privacy so much, that it really takes a long way to pull the dial back to where it should be

As long as everyone is having fun, I see no problem.

If you're not having fun switching mail providers, researching Gecko forks, or being a part-time sysadmin for your Fairphone, you should probably stop doing those things.

There are probably some people that go too far, but that is true in any community. There are also people with a very legitimate threat model, for example if they are from insert your favourite dictatorship here and they have insert opinion against said regime

We have people telling us the earth is flat. Them saying so doesn't make our good old planet any flatter ;)

I mean one can find excess absolutely anywhere, that doesn't demonstrate much imho.

It's just a conscious approach to tech.