I’ve spent years championing Linux as the only escape from Big Tech, but I’m starting to get twitchy.
While we’re distracted by the Steam Deck making Linux “mainstream,” the corporate players and politicians are busy building a digital cage. Between California’s AB-1043 mandates and Microsoft’s “Face Check” infrastructure, I’m worried we’re heading for a hard schism: “Sanitised Linux” vs the “Free Rebel” distros.
If the compliant, age-gated version becomes the industry standard, where does that leave the rest of us? Digital exile?
I’ve put some thoughts together on why the “Golden Cage” is closing in and why education, not mandates, is the only real fix.
You’re right that the average person doesn’t care about fingerprinting, but that’s exactly the problem. To me, browser fingerprinting isn’t just a technical quirk, it’s a violation of privacy that effectively erases your ability to be anonymous, regardless of whether you have a VPN or not.
If we let OS-level ID checks become the standard because people don’t care, we’re essentially legitimising that tracking. My red line isn’t just a government log of my identity, it’s the fact that the tech is being built to make that log possible in the first place. Once the infrastructure is there, the incidental proof of identity quickly becomes the primary feature.
Your response again doesn’t really follow from what I wrote. It retains some key words but not the ideas.
Browser fingerprinting which exists because the average person can’t be bothered concealing it and the theoretical sharing of your ID with the sites you visit due to a government mandate are two entirely different things. The relevant difference is that the government doesn’t mandate browser fingerprinting, it exists because it is technologically possible and the mitigation measures are more inconvenient than the average user is willing to deal with.
As for normalizing OS-level ID checks as a slippery slope towards sharing your full ID as part of a HTTP request … firstly that is not something you can get around with an alternative distro anyway, because it would involve all major websites. Secondly, that is a hypothetical within a hypothetical. Thirdly, if that really is the path that we’re on, now is not is not the most effective time to oppose it, because the slippery slope argument is far more persuasive from the bottom of the slope.
EDIT: I think I just did the same thing I accused you of, talking past you. My response basically just rejects your core conceit, that being a distinction between the private power-user experience and the non-private normie experience, and nothing else. I’ll need to edit this.
EDIT 2: Okay, fixed.