
This is original content. AI was not used anywhere except for the bottom right image, simply because I could not find one similar enough to what I needed. This took around 6 hours to make.
Transcription (for the visually impaired)
(I tried my best)
The background is an iceberg with 6 levels, denoting 6 different levels of privacy.
The tip of the iceberg is titled “The Brainwashed” with a quote beside it that says “I have nothing to hide”. The logos depicted in this section are:
- Apple
- TikTok
- PayPal
- Google Chrome
- CashApp
- Samsung
- Steam
- Microsoft Windows
- Ring (Security Camera)
- YouTube
- Amazon
- Discord
- Gmail
- ChatGPT
The surface section of the iceberg is titled “As seen on TV” with a quote beside it that says “This video is sponsored by…”. The logos depicted in this section are:
An underwater section of the iceberg is titled “The Beginner” with a quote beside it that says “I don’t like hackers and spying”. The logos depicted in this section are:
- Telegram
- Authy
- Brave Browser
- Privacy.com (Virtual Cards)
- DuckDuckGo
- iMessage
- Proton Mail
- AdBlock (Browser Extension)
A lower section of the iceberg is titled “The Privacy Enthusiast” with a quote beside it that says “I have nothing I want to show”. The logos depicted in this section are:
An even lower section of the iceberg is titled “The Privacy Activist” with a quote beside it that says “Privacy is a human right”. The logos depicted in this section are:
- Monero
- GrapheneOS
- Vanadium (Web Browser)
- KeePassDX
- SimpleX Chat
- Accrescent
- SearXNG
- Aegis Authenticator
- OpenWrt
- Mullvad VPN
- An illustration of physical cash
The lowest portion of the iceberg is titled “The Ghost”. There is a quote beside it that has been intentionally redacted. The images depicted in this section are:
- A cancel sign over a mobile phone, symbolizing “no electronics”
- An illustration of a log cabin, symbolizing “living in a log cabin in the woods”
- A picture of gold bars, symbolizing “paying only in gold”
- A picture of a death certificate, symbolizing “faking your own death”
- An AI generated picture of a person wearing a black hoodie, a baseball cap, a face mask, and reflective sunglasses, symbolizing “hiding ones identity in public”
End of transcription.
I was at the bike shop a few weeks back and a ghost walked in. He came in wearing a medical mask covered by a bandana, sunglasses, cap. They wore gloves, long sleaved pants and shirt.
First question from staff, ‘this a robbery?’
Ghost, ‘no, I just need 27 2.5 tubes, miss.’
They get the tubes, he agrees. Staff asks if he has an account. Ghost says, “nope, why would I need one?” Staff says they do it for records, insurance claim assist, and discounts. Ghost goes with a John Doe, pays cash and peaces the fuck out.
Total King, but dude was given up a lot. Half of us were drinking beers enjoying a warm evening in spring. I hope he has had some good rides.
I can say with confidence thay he was a white male. In his 50s. About 5’10". 140 lbs-ish. If anyone wants to get any tips, good luck!
Sometimes anonymity is itself a unique identifier.
Funny how you need more and more technical knowledge to go deeper into privacy, until the last level, which is basically giving up on technology itself.
The last level is living in a cabin in the woods and writing manifestos about industrial society and the ills of technology O_o

Hey, it’s my house! How’d you get a picture of it?!
TIL I’m a privacy activist–who can help me get to the ghost mode?
(Do I even want to get there or is that limited to journalists who have entire states trying to unalive them?)Do I even want to get there
Only you can answer that.
or is that limited to journalists who have entire states trying to unalive them?
Pretty much, but if you want to give up all technology, work for yourself, and fake your death, then more power to you!
Seems like faking your death would cause more privacy problems than it solves. Why not just “stay alive” with a completely innocuous identity? Then adopt some new identity which cannot be traced back to the original?
If you’re alive, you are asked for documents such as property records, taxes, etc. and if you refuse then bad things happen. If you fake your death, no more questions are asked and you can take on fake identities. In essence, faking your death takes your identity out of “the system”
Do you like living in the woods and not enjoy technology (or can live perfectly happily without it)?
There is this steadily growing activist group that you could join up with.
Unless you’re a woman and want to be treated as a human being, I guess.
You should stage your death, like they tried to do on prison break and then move to Mexico or Columbia. Send me a DM for more information /J
Can you explain why you would think Steam is so bad? I would argue they’re pretty fair, especially with the option to buy steam cards for cash to not disclose your personal data. Does the client do some unsavory shit?
Seeing steam at the top makes me question the list. Likely a hate of DRM rather than privacy
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afaik the client does collect a bunch if data, most (all, i think? but not a 100% on that) of which is opt-in.
they do need stuff like IPs for internet related features.
telemetry wise there’s the steam hardware survey, which is opt-in, and it asks every single time it attempts to collect your systems hardware and OS information. this could technically be identifying information, but since it’s opt-in it’s not a privacy violation and it’s entirely optional. (plus it’s super useful for all involved: users, devs, and steam. it’s kind of a win-win and straight up necessary info for devs to know which hardware they should optimize for)
they might be putting it at the top because steam has native support for DRM?
but that’s also weird, because DRM isn’t a privacy violation. it’s a shitty practice, barely does anything, barely works, and keeps breaking or hobbling otherwise perfectly good games, all of which is shitty, but it’s little to do with privacy. and the dev has to specifically opt-in and integrate it as a feature…unless they’re thinking of 3rd party DRM that can be waaay more intrusive, like Vanguard… THAT’S a privacy and security nightmare just waiting to blow up in people’s faces.
otherwise…i haven’t really heard anything bad about steam privacy wise?
doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to be concerned about, but i feel like there’d been some news about it if there was…
I have no clue why telegram is often mentioned when it comes to “privacy focused messaging”. They don’t even have e2e encrypted group chats. Only 1:1 chats may be encrypted as an opt-in. Even WhatsApp is more secure than that, since they use signals encryption.
Also the “we don’t give out even a byte of data to anyone” statements made by telegram have been thoroughly debunked as lies. When telegrams bottom line is in danger, they have and will give out your data.
well that section has a few not so effective services, like authy, and imo brave and adblock, to depict what people believe at that point. and telegram probably gets to be there because it’s not the usual big tech companies, and it seems fine, even if unencrypted.
Only 1:1 chats may be encrypted as an opt-in.
and only on the phone app
well that section has a few not so effective services, like authy, and imo brave and adblock, to depict what people believe at that point.
Yes, this is the exact reason Telegram was put there. I even see Telegram recommended alongside Signal, despite the privacy risks.
WhatsApp claim to use this. They do not show their code nor did they do any kind of audit. Therefore we have to assume that there is no encryption.
or that some part of the encryption, like key handling is flawed. also, considering they have an RCE vulnerability every year, I wouldn’t be surprised if the encryption keys could just be stolen remotely.
we also don’t know if facebook has implemented some kind of analytics for message content, sent files and media.
Tried the Privacy Activist and Enthusiast section. Was not really fun and you loose connection to most of your friends and family. Now I have a balanced setup with something out of each layer. Perfect balanced, as things should be
I have taken my own approach; there are things from each layer that I use. Some begrudgingly but others gladly.
The problem I faced when starting this journey is it does cut out a lot of people. And it becomes isolsting. So I did reel back a bit.
It’s equally frustrating to talk to people who’re completely entrenched in the Enthusiast / Activist section. The utter disconnect when it comes to what’s viable for most people is annoying to deal with sometimes. Statements like “Everyone who is able to read can easily learn to use Arch Linux” or “Everyone can flash their phone” do give me headaches. Was there, did both, wouldn’t recommend to my less nerdy family.
I can totally understand where you are coming from.
I do hold the view that if you can read, you too can install GrapheneOS, or try Linux; but that doesn’t make it right for everyone. It’s a self imposed journey. I can’t expect everyone to make the same choices I do.
That is where I will educate people as to why I chose what I chose; however I will not try to force someone down the same road.
So totally understood.
Giving it a try is most of the time the first step. I tried GrapheneOS , used it until my device no longer received updates. Then Google Pixels got disappointing and iOS 14/15 got out with big privacy changes, so I switched the first time to Apple. I know, ironic , but it works for me. I remove most permissions from apps, use my own DNS block list enforced by MDM and if possible, self host my apps and services or use paid / open source ones. I am here on Lemmy instead of Reddit or Instagram…. I also tried Jollas SailfishOS v3 , it was ok, but this was back at the time very limited for social interactions, now with v5 it would have been better. Also good to know, at my place , Apple Pay is one of the most secure and private pay systems…. I hate that, this feels wrong.
I used to run LineageOS with a lot of my own tweaks to meet my privacy needs; however I reached a point I decided it didn’t fit my needs for security. So, I went back to GrapheneOS. Which, I am 1uite haply with. Ultimately, I dream of a fully operational Linux phone of sorts; but we aren’t there yet.
I ditched reddit, and most centralized social media. I ditched many big tech services in place of self hosting my own. And even that is mostly locked down. Very little exposed to the web. Ad blocking, as well as my own underlying upstream DNS, with a fallback that isn’t Google or Cloudflare. Services being firewalled off. Reverse proxy setup limiting access via IP:Port while also including SSL certs for local only https.
And this list goes on; it’s a constant journey. But the hard part is to still be social. Hahaha
Did you look at SailfishOS (Linux Smartphone) It supports Android App virtualization.
Cant say that I have, but will now!
i also hate the idea of giving up apple pay when testing graphene. i really hope to find a somewhat ok alternative, but from what i’ve heard it seems to be the best there is atm :(
My bank app just has its own NFC payment system, independent from Google, and that works fine.
The FOSS circlejerk for lack of better term is very loud on Fediverse as a whole. It’s tiring when each time anyone mentions using Windows, or Apple there’s at least one fucker telling you to swap to linux lol…
It’s very loud so I have thought at times to switch back to reddit, where it’s at least less pervasive.
yeah honestly i really think that you should swap to linux!
I already use linux where it belongs, on my home server. Don’t need it for my personal PC.
To be fair some non-fuckers also tend to recommend linux.
May I suggest Arch btw?
It’s easy, just don’t have any friends or family! /sad panda
Totally agree with this, two steps forward one step back basically
On browsers, as you put Chromium then also put Firefox or deMozillaed Firefox e.g. WaterFox.
I’d put Brave back to the 2nd layer due to relying on Chromium and being heavily marketed while gathering data for its crypto scheme. I’d also put Firefox on the 2nd or 3rd layer.
FF doesnt deserve much better than Brave as it sends telemetry, so both on tier 2. LibreWolf would fit for tier 3 or maaaybe 4.
Do you trust this preference panel on telemetry? If not why not? If you do believe it is legit what do you believe it remains problematic?

Lol, no. Here’s a list of all the things that panel doesn’t account for.
Also, there’s nothing close to even attempting privacy without strong fingerprint protection anyway, which I should have also mentioned. Vanilla FF allows a bright shining canvas fingerprint that Brave and Librewolf disable.
I’m not sure what’s that’s supposed to show as “there are built in settings for some of this stuff, it’s not complete and many settings are abstracted away from the user. Enter about:config” since it might be hierarchical, i.e. disabling a single telemetry toggle, either via Preferences or
about:configmight disable all the other ones. I haven’t looked specifically at that part of the code of Firefox but I’d trust more a Wireshark analysis than this since it doesn’t actually show (unless I missed that part, quite possible as it’s relatively long) that information does actually go back to Mozilla even while one has disabled all telemetry option.Fingerprinting is fair, in the sense that yes, if you do broadcast your userAgent and other public information you do narrow the potential search space and thus expose you as an individual more, yet has nothing to do with Mozilla.
More on Brave https://lemmy.ml/post/29741804
But we’re taking about this in the context of this infographic. So we have to distill this down to:
Should FF be with, or above, Brave?
I assume we’re also taking about relatively low-barrier changes that most users can implement. So vanilla FF vs vanilla Brave, there’s a difference. Can we harden FF? Sure. Will 95%+ of people do that with Librewolf or 3 dozen other forks out there? Why bother when there’s nuance to be gained with other forks? So now vanilla FF stops being relevant.
And to be clear, I don’t use Brave unless I absolutely have to. I don’t love it, but vs. normie Vanilla FF, there’s a slight edge.
Up to you and OP but the fact that there isn’t even Firefox or LibreWolf or WaterFox but there is Chrome, Brave and Chromium is problematic to me. At the very least Firefox should be there and IMHO below Chrome.
Not up to me, I would have done the same as you suggested.
Thank you so, so much for the transcription, appreciated!
TAILS is missing :(
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as is i2p, qbittorrent and a few others
And qubes/whonix.
So what’s the deal with i2p? I heard it was a more secure alternative to vpns, I downloaded it but I haven’t been motivated to figure out how to set it up on Linux.
It’s more similar to tor than a vpn.
Ah, is it considered more secure, or is it just different?
In some ways I2p is more secure, but it has its own pros and cons. It’s primarily used with services & sites within its own network, similar to onion sites, and used that way it’s said to be faster than Tor. It can be used for torrenting with a client that supports it, like qBittorrent or BiglyBT, without harming the network. There are outproxies you can use if you want to anonymize access to normal websites, but there’s only a few of them, and it’s slow. You can have it and Tor running at the same time without them interfering with each other, though.
So, it sounds like you’d be better off just running Tor or a vpn unless you have a specific use-case for i2p. I looked briefly at the install instructions, but it seemed to be like it would be a hassle to initially setup on my linux build.
I think that would be fair to say. I mostly run it to contribute to the network, so that other people can communicate or share files more privately. (On OpenSuSE, it can be installed from the repo and just run with no special configuration.)
as a darknet it’s more secure than tor, but less people use it so less anonymous. the benefits are really for using in-network services there, not so much for accessing the clearnet, though you’ll find clearnet things bridged to i2p
Ah, so for in-house networks to remain secure from others on their network?
to remain secure from outside observers is the main goal, the i2p network is much more secure than tor or a vpn, though it does a good job protecting you from others on the network too.
What’s the issue with steam? I thought the epic game store was the one actively spying on your device
Steam has telemetry. They gather a ton of data on you. What details, how they use it, and how secure it is I can’t answer, but it’s clear that it’s happening.
I could also imagine DRM, though not directly privacy related, being a thing. Like the issues of freedom and openness are probably also important to many people who value privacy and might therefore prefer GOG or something over Steam.
Edit: I see someone else mentioned this already: https://lemmy.world/comment/16903223
Until recently, your steam activity and games played are public and your relationship with other steam users can be traced even if you have a private profile.
Good to know, thanks
They also have so many security breaches that it won’t even make the news anymore.
Many of those are caused by people having insecure accounts without enabling 2FA etc. And there is a lot of money involved, even the top TF2 accounts are worth tens of thousands of euro’s
I am now paranoid about someone getting in and deleting my gibus
I give workshops on privacy. I always tell them that if they get nothing else out of my presentation, its that they should use a password manager.
Honestly I think keepass should be beginner. That comes first before everything else.
Also I think Tor Browser should come before VPNs. Its free and easier to use than VPNs (for when you want to google something secret and don’t want to be tracked. Most beginners are selective like that)
Kudos for inclusive alt texting!!
That’s the only reason I upvoted this!
Oh, am I that far gone?
spoiler
I don’t see Qubes, Whonix or Tails on there.
Weird how Apple and iMessage are not in the same category. How do distrust apple’s privacy claims but trust iMessage?
True. Apple would need a category on its own, but if i have to choose would place it on “As seen on TV”.
It is fairly private and they quite give a fight about maintaining that status. There are no cases I am aware off they comply to open the system for authorities publicly and if so, they do not claim encryption anymore (as per UK.) Now… the key word is publicly; If I were a zealous top intelligence agency I would not force Apple to break an account for me so to obtain evidence on an individual so I can present it to a judge… for me Apple or Protonmail (or any other popular encrypted service really) would be far more valuable a place where I quietly could obtain intel on tens of thousands of targets and with that find other ways to find evidence if need be. It is a good sacrifice for the sustainability of the scheme.
Of course, this is just a thought and no evidence has been brought up. Apple is a large company and some whistleblower could easily popup if that were the case… yet again, having the right tight team is easy to keep it undercover, specially in a closed sourced software. The fact that the US is eyeing so many encrypted SaaS but Apple, with its omnipresence reach, is almost always left alone is a bit odd.
Well, following that (not fully wrong) logic everything until enthusiast level is useless since it runs on Windows and often not degoogled Chromium. And (given the meme doesn’t contain /e/OS, iode, ShiftOS or Linux Mobile anywhere) anything until activist that happens on mobile phones is equally useless since it runs on Apple/Google Android.
I’m more annoyed about “Linux” as a whole being sorted into “Enthusiast”. Using your Steam Deck in Desktop mode, buying a brand new Linux laptop for +600€ or even installing and using Linux Mint really isn’t as enthusiastic anymore. :D
I guess maybe that iCloud (photo’s, storage etc) isn’t encrypted but iMessage is? But good point
What if you turn on advanced data protection? Though even if that does achieve what you want it sucks that it’s opt in.
I haven’t had an iPhone the last few years so I’m not sure what would be the best way to go about it. A decade ago I definitely felt safer with apple than I would now, even though stuff might actually be better encrypted now.
This is a modern art masterpiece. I’ve starred at it for hours while installing Arch Linux on my brand new T480.
install gentoo
install Yocto
install haiku
install slackware
Wanna cyber?




















