this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
331 points (94.9% liked)
Privacy
32130 readers
396 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
digital anything was never a thing you owned. it's a thing you lease.
if you want to own things buy physical copies.
no idea what you are on about the phone. I buy moto phones for like $150 unlocked and they are great.
Data is a physical object. Change my mind.
The value in data is less in the medium than the actual information. Information is by very definition intangible. Data is therefore not physical.
Ah, but without a storage medium, information becomes extremely difficult to exchange. The entire corpus of human knowledge would be worthless and impossible to learn from were it not for storage mediums like books to records to hard drives. Societies without written languages only have oral histories, and oral histories are rife with mistakes and misrememberings.
Do you think you could effectively learn from a lecture that demanded that a teacher remember it all from memory and students weren't allowed to take notes?
Beyond that, technically, the human brain is also a storage medium for information, although an extremely imperfect one.
Sure, the information is by very definition intangible, which means it's effectively worthless without a medium in which to exist and be able to be parsed by other humans.
EDIT: Further, does information not cease to exist when it's storage medium is destroyed? If I drill through a hard drive, or burn a book, or see a person die.... the information in each one of those storage mediums goes bye bye. It goes from intangible to nonexistent.