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 think this is the first time I’ve seen an iceberg meme with sources and explanations for each item. Fantastic. Your work is appreciated.
To be honest, and it wouldn’t work here, but I sometime enjoy the cryptic nature of iceberg memes at the lower ranks. It’s like a scavenger hunt.
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
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!
“No, no… the robbery’s far too far to walk”
Ha. The tubes were the final pieces to the getaway vehicle
Sometimes anonymity is itself a unique identifier.
I would drop off the face of the earth only to stash porn mags all over the woods.
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
Yeap, and Brave in the middle. They only pretend they are for privacy, but they are the very opposite.
Yeah i hate when I see people using Brave, because they have been brainwashed.
Does anyone remember when they were injecting their own referral links into links for online stores (99% certain they did this pls prove wrong if you know better)? This alone leaves them with 0 trust in my books.
Brave is and always has been gross. Never understood how they’ve been so successful at tricking people into installing it.
and then Tor so high up, unless you’re hell bent on leaving 0 traces that thing is a pain to use, can’t have it maximalised, pages load sometimes minutes at a time, no addons, just suffering. nobody sane uses that thing for more than the occasional trip to whatever deep web market is not yet exit scamming
Their bottom line is gold, this should tell you everything you need to know about the creator of the meme.
Agree. Steam doesn’t even save your birthday, and asks for it every time
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…
No. And also chrome is somehow at the bottom of this list, I don’t care if it’s chromium or vanadium, it’s still chrome.
It’s Vanadium, a fork by the people from GrapheneOS. You could say the same about Graphene, that it’s still Android, but reality is more complex.
ExpressVPN is an arm of Israeli intelligence and should be on the tip of the iceberg: https://www.reuters.com/technology/expressvpn-employees-complain-about-ex-spys-top-role-company-2021-09-23/
All users should cancel their accounts immediately.
“As seen on TV” does not imply privacy, it just implies a large advertising budget. These are software that market themselves as private (and are sometimes better than nothing at all) but may still be just as bad as software on the tip of the iceberg.
As is NordVPN and PIA.
I don’t like hackers and spying
brave
lol. lmao, even.
A beginner will choose what seems private, regardless of whether or not it actually is.
It’s genuinely wild that Firefox and LibreWolf are nowhere on these
Tor is based on Firefox. Though I don’t get why Vanadium is below Tor?
Probably because people above the waterline don’t know Mozilla exists, and people below have seen how things have been going lately.
Firefox is really bad a portraying what they’re actually doing, and the privacy concerns people have with them have been widely overblown. But on top of that librewolf is a privacy oriented fork not made by Mozilla
For want of $100 /year Apple developer subscription , the libewolf team can’t sign binaries for Silicon M series Macs.
I spent an hour and a half trying to get librewolf to work, and just gave up for Waterfox instead.
On my laptop I run Firefox for some things, Watefox for others, and fall back to Chrome only as absolutely necessary when Gecko can’t get me there.
I tried waterfox and it was just too glitchy for me I had many more crashes than Firefox, and their claim to fame was that chrome extensions worked with it but I literally never got a single one working. Session buddy just saves your sessions locally, but that would not work AT ALL on waterfox.
What caused it to crash so many times and how long ago did you use it? I’ve been using Waterfox for years and it’s been mostly great. I also never use Chrome extensions; just stick to Firefox add-ons.
I didn’t even know that they claim Chrome extensions will work, I simply use the Firefox extensions in Waterfox.
My browsing style is antiquated, my ADHD will only afford me about eight tabs per browser window and I usually have about four of those going at a time.
I aggressively kill tabs to save my own mental memory more than the machine’s memory.
They do perhaps know, Firefox did have about 27%+ of the market at one point and people outside of the USA are more likely to know about it. Nevertheless, FF is currently about 3.25% of the total browser base. That is still about 160+ - 200+ million users.
Matrix is also missing.
I was disapponted at that, I spooled up one of those instances a few months back and its federated and is magical. If only I could convince my family to move away from that old group text grumbles in person who cosplays as a sysadmin
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”
There is this steadily growing activist group that you could join up with.
Apple: “Brainwashed”
iMessage: “Beginner”
Well which one is it?
Sadly, using small niche VPNs that might be more trusted makes you stand out more. It’s pretty unusual to have a Mullvad user on your server
They don’t rotate IPs as well so a lot of them are blacklisted… and don’t offer port forwarding anymore
I wish they could change IPs reguarly and add port forwarding back :-( - I would happily pay for their service again
Because 5€ for their current service is overpriced
Sadly, using small niche VPNs that might be more trusted makes you stand out more.
This probably doesn’t matter does it? Because being spotted as a mulvad, airvpn, etc user doesn’t make you more of a target for anything.
It just means that if they try to trace your connection back to you, they won’t find anything out, because you have a trusted zero-logging vpn.
Only think I could see is it could potentially be easier to track usage through the ip and assume it’s one person, but idk you could do that with anything if you look at the request timings, etc. It’s still just guesses.
Am i missing something?
It’s pretty unusual to have a Mullvad user on your server
Probably not on the usual sites people visit (youtube, etc, the big sites 99% of ppl go to exclusively), but I can see your point for any smaller site.
Because 5€ for their current service is overpriced
Airvpn provide a discount for each extra month you sign up for in bulk which is nice. It’s a great service in my opinion.
Sadly, using small niche VPNs that might be more trusted makes you stand out more.
This probably doesn’t matter does it? Because being spotted as a mulvad, airvpn, etc user doesn’t make you more of a target for anything.
I’m just taking a stab at this since I’m not entirely certain, but I would think that this would weaken you against fingerprinting since it depends on having many different semi-unique characteristics as you browse?
f-droid? the guardian project?
I’ve been on a anti big tech, de-google, privacy journey then last few months. Thank you for all these resources!
Absolutely incredible you also included links. I’m so used to other sites where some has stolen an image to just post it and has no other information in it. I started trying to figure out what each of then logos was before scrolling down lol.
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
Impressive, an academic grade meme.
You, sir/madam, are an artist and a scholar
Thank you so, so much for the transcription, appreciated!
