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I disagree with Mike, people do care about privacy, or rather many Europeans do, especially Germans.
A lot of people I know use PiHole, NextDNS or similar services to block tracking and advertising.
My wife is not very technical, but she will not use any social media and when we used to go to parties and people would start taking photos, she would announce that they did not have her permission to upload photos of her to social media - that is legally binding, here in Germany.
Likewise the German GDPR means it is very difficult to have video surveillance. We have cameras at work for key production areas for safety reasons - hazardous chemicals and forklifts driving around. We also have HGV (semis) driving around the site being loaded and unloaded, so they need to keep track of them and watch out for accidents. Before we put the cameras up, we have to have signs up, saying there is video surveillance in operation (we don’t record anything, it is just live video). Some of the cameras also cover the street and we have to use the camera software to block out anything that takes place beyond our premises.
The same is true for private households, the Ring Doorbell and its ilk are not allowed to film the street in front of the house, they are not allowed to film the driveway upto and including the letter box or where parcels will be left, it can only film the private parts of the property, where the general public are not expected to have access.
Additionally, if you live in an apartment building, it cannot film the common hallway in front of your apartment door. Live video is okay, but you can’t store the video.
If you are out on the street and making photos or filming, you cannot film other people, if you do, you have to blur their faces, so they can’t be identified, if you are taking a photo/film of the family or a public monument and people wander across the background, that is permisable, but if they are in the foreground and identifiable, you either have to blur them, remove them or get them to sign a waiver, before you can use the image on social media or commercially.
If you have a dashcam in your vehicle, you have to blur out all numberplates, faces and identifying material (company names, logos, phone numbers etc.) on other vehicles, buildings, billboards etc. and you have to remove the GPS and time information from the video as well, before you can upload it to social media. Failure to do so is a GDPR infringement.
On the news, if the police are looking for a suspect, the face is always blurred out (why do they bother even showing the portrait of the suspect if it is completely blurred out?), likewise if they are filming in a school, they can only film from the waist down or blur the faces of the children.
So, no, Mike, not everybody is happy to share all their information with companies and privacy be damned.
I used a PiHole and I have switched to NextDNS and the whole of Meta, for example, is blocked, that was over 2,500 domains last time I looked. Including WhatsApp. Many people do use WhatsApp, but it is actually not GDPR compliant, so using it on a company phone or a private phone, where you have your employer’s contact database synced, is illegal and can get the employer in hot water, with heavy fines.
Our Data Protection Officer found out that somebody had managed to install WhatsApp on their company phone and we had to block it, while the officer reported it to the Data Protection Registrar for our region. The user could use WhatsApp for Business afterwards, which specifically doesn’t copy all of the contact information to Meta’s servers.
Theoretically, if you use WhatsApp in Europe, before you can let it look at your contacts, you have to get the permission of everyone in your contact list to do so. If anyone refuses, you cannot let WhatsApp access your contacts, until you have removed those contacts from your list. Failure to do so is an offense and can be followed up by the DPR and could land you with a hefty fine, if anyone complained to the authorities about you.
We use Signal and Threema, which specifically do not upload your contact lists to their servers. I believe Signal works with hashes.
With regard to the air traffic control system, that is usual. The original systems were put in place in the 40s and 50 and then replaced in the 90s, so they are coming up for replacement in the next decade, but it is incredibly expensive to replace such systems.
When I lived in the UK, the new Southern England ATC was supposed to open in Swanick in the mid-90s, but it was pushed back and pushed back and finally came online in 2002, with huge cost overruns.
The problem is, it is in nobody’s interest to replace the system, at least only the company that makes radar systems, because it would mean huge interruptions, teething problems and huge price rises for flying over, or rather landing within the coverage of the ATC station, so they can recoup the costs.
In the past, whilst these costs were stratospheric back then, the implementation of radar and ATC centres made a lot of sense for public safety and the investment was amortised over 30-50 years. Which investors are going to invest for a 30-50 year ROI these days?
I work in industry and it is similar here, we have investments in production facilities and the hardware running them that runs in the 20-30 year timespan, which is causing havoc with the production systems (PLCs and the software controlling them, analysis equipment etc.), because the ROI is 20 years, but the manufacturer won’t provide software for newer versions of Windows, so we are stuck with Windows XP PCs running production facilities and lab equipment, because the hardware works fine, the software does what we need it to do, but the manufacturer wants $250,000 for a new piece of lab equipment, because the newer software that works with Windows 11 only works with the new hardware, even though the old hardware is still working reliably and won’t be written off the asset register for another 10 years, or the production line will need to be rebuilt, because the new software doesn’t work with the existing production facility, so that with be 8 figures, thank you very much! Just to replace the PC running Windows XP with one running Windows 11!
We just isolate the equipment and the PCs that control them, so they are not connected to the office network or the internet, they are either standalone or on the production network - and they use dedicated switches and all ports on the switch not being used by the production equipment are deactivated, so nobody can “accidentally” plug is a more modern PC and infect the network.
The manufacturers have no interest in keeping their software updated, they just want to sell new hardware with new software; the customers can’t afford to replace the hardware (not the PC) every time Microsoft changes something in Windows so that the old software stops working.
We even have a metal sign printer from the 90s, the software is DOS only and requires an original parallel port for the printer. We have a cupboard full of old PCs that will still run DOS and have a parallel port and we even found a 2nd printer being sold off on eBay about 4 years ago, it was 25 years old and was still worth nearly $10,000, so the company bought it as a backup for the one they are already using. Why buy a 25 year old printer for $10K? Because a new one is 20-40 times that much and the DOS based software does everything we need and the printer prints the signs reliably, so why swap it out a working system for a new one costing $200K-400K?
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Makes a lot of sense. Which is, I guess, why it requires a government mandate to get done. And, unfortunately, the only thing the US government is focused on at the moment is reducing the tax burden for the very wealthy (and grifting for those in power). Sigh.
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I paid to be one of the Digg Groundbreakers. Progress is being made, and they’re posting updates regularly. They hired the Apollo dev to build their app, so we’re all pumped!
They also held a poll among the Groundbreakers a couple weeks back about where to donate the money they collected. The money was just an entry fee to keep spammers out. Here’s where it ended up:
Based on your votes, we’ll be distributing the funds as follows:
- The Nature Conservancy: $95,000
- Thorn: $10,000
- Code.org: $10,000