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this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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You know.. here's the thing..
Years ago, I'd be on Reddit and reading the usual rants and raves about the government, and how the public should be wary of it and we are heading into a security state.. and I always positied that the real threat actors WRT privacy and security were going to be companies like facebook and google and the businesses that made internet-connected devices.
Compared to them, as far as data colleciton and surveillance of people - the government was filled with rank amateurs.
I'd consistently get downvoted or pooh-poohed for being "naive."
God fucking dammit.. on this.. I am absolutely pissed off that I was calling this one - and have been - for over a decade.
FML, I hate this SOOOOOO much.
edward snowden pretty much spilled the beans on government mass surveillance many years ago, but most people just said "meh...whatever"
Sounds like naked people in a cage wondering about which is more dangerous: the leopard or the lion.
It's certainly frustrating pointing out obvious end results and seeing all the fanboys and normies call you a conspiracy theorist or just dunk on you.
There's no such thing as privacy anymore. People still believe it exists, but it's dead and gone.
You can bet none of those people that argued with you and ridiculed your predictions will admit it now. That personality never will. How far back are we talking about with those predictions though out of curiousity?
Oooh, IIRC it dawned on me about the time that facebook insisted all users have their actual names on their pages. (I can't remember when that was, maybe 2012 or 2013? Not sure, it was a while ago however.)
That was the red flag for me.
It was also the point when I deleted my posts and comments on fb (it took months to get it all) then unfriended everyone and logged out for a month. When I logged back in I had a handful of comments on the (ex-)friends pages that popped up, since the feed will scour the servers to show you content on your home page, so I re-friended them, deleted the comments, logged out and waited another month. After the last time I logged in (I did four deletion waves of comments) fb was showing me totally random strangers "I Might Know.."
Perfect.
I then changed up my primary email on FB to my yahoo throwaway, logged out for another month, logged in with the new email and made a totally fake name for myself.. Who I am does not exist on facebook, nor are any friends or family listed as friends and no one can see anything on my page.