I often find myself trying to describe data brokers to people and its such a large concept that is very hand-waivy and alien to people that I end up stumbling over my words.

I want to write a post or a zine about this, so maybe its a bit more understandable.

In relation, I’ve been trying to think about how to do education for non-techie people on a lot of these technology things.

Often in the spaces I’m in, people have decent security practices/websites they use, often through a recommendation from someone who is a techie/knows this stuff, but there’s often something that they can’t give up (which is fair, youtube is the thing I can’t seem to get away from).

I don’t want to make them feel bad for being a human and using social media, because in my age demo/community, using social media is the normal thing to do. There are trade-offs everywhere, but since these platforms are often free, people are not aware of the trade-offs, past some “big company bad”, “you are the product” platitude.

When one of my friends asks me “well, why use this technology over this one” or “what are the risks with using VPNs/logging into websites/which browser should I be using?”, I don’t feel good giving them a one word answer because the technologies and recommendations that people have change all the time. There’s sort of two audiences for this, I suppose:

• People who are interested in knowing why I tell them to follow ‘x security practice’ or ‘use this application’
• People who just want me to give them an answer

In the former camp, I could imagine a good zine or teaching them why could actually go pretty far in them developing their own sense of what is good/bad practice (perhaps this is me being far too optimistic though)

Still - I think I plan to create a collection of writing somewhere, maybe they’re just pages here with images/links to elsewhere which has good recommendations, or some kind of physical zine.

Have also been thinking of doing a sort of in-person workshop or open hours where people can come in and I can show them how to use linux/the steps that go into flashing a phone with a non standard OEM because for people who don’t know any of this, these are not easy things to do. Evangelists for these espouse the positives, and yes, there are lots, but I think that skips the hours of troubleshooting missing firmware causing your build to not flash properly, the dozens of installs that I’ve done in my life and all the learning that came with it or hours spent just tinkering with my install and the experience reading log messages/errors.

I too, would love if more people used the CLI and removed themselves from the GUI nightmare of the web, but it doesn’t feel like a pragmatic solution for people who don’t have hours or their lives just to get their data away from big companies.

I think far too often the education surrounding doesn’t meet people where they’re at. Instead of fear-mongering about all the scary things that data brokers and websites have access to, I sort of want to just explain what they are and how they work, and see where that takes me. The fear-mongering feels like I’m making someone feel bad for just using social media because its what everyone does nowadays, and I feel that just creates a further divide rather than reaching any sort of understanding as to why I might not use social media.

To summarize, I suppose, there is a spectrum of audiences here:

• someone who just wants me to tell them what to use
• someone who wants to know why I’m recommending one thing over another
• someone who wants to understand the technology/concept (data brokers, encryption, cookies, how tracking works) enough to make the decision as to why to pick one over another
• anyone above this probably already has an opinion or knows what to use (or, could pretty quickly be convinced with a few sentences, assuming they already understand the jargon)