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  • 5 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: May 16th, 2020

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  • I think the only reason it’s controversial is that the wording of the OP is very confusing. I certainly use “they” to refer to others by default but it’s not for privacy reasons…it’s because I don’t automatically know the pronouns of strangers. I took this post as saying that we should use one pronoun for everyone to create the smallest amount of data to be collected.


  • If that’s what was meant then yeah I wouldn’t mind that, but I read this as more a suggestion that we shouldn’t refer to the genders of others because doing so would leak information. I use “they” for others by default but this reads as telling me that I shouldn’t tell others I use “she” and that others shouldn’t use “she” for me to maintain the utmost of anonymity.


  • Whom@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 years ago

    Nah, my pronouns and gender are a key part of my personhood and I intend to assert them wherever I can. I’m not going back in the closet for any privacy concerns.

    Data collection is a problem but the solution isn’t for us all to hide who we are, it’s to smash the political environment that makes that abuse possible.


  • Having read his page on that, his suggestion was to use another one instead of “they” for petty prescriptivist reasons. While to me it comes off as a silly Stallmanism that I don’t mind that much, it’s plenty understandable for people who use “they” and have come across thousands of arguments making the same linguistcally questionable points for transphobic reasons to be suspicious of that. Especially given his awful thoughts on other things.









  • I’m not super concerned as a user of the search engine and not the browser. When I see stuff like this it certainly gets me paying a bit more attention, but I think DDG is still fine and I don’t mind using it while it continues to have the best experience for privacy-conscious search engines. This appears to be a legitimate issue with the browser, but nearly every bad headline I’ve seen about the search engine has turned out to be complete bs.

    If this is enough to shake your trust in anything they touch, fair enough, but I’m not there yet.




  • I’m going to paste my comment from a similar topic:

    I find that conversation flourishes when you limit it to a certain degree. In spaces which are completely open and have a massive range of opinion, what you’ll find is mostly yelling at each other over broad talking points that everyone is already familiar with. After a while, nothing of interest comes out of the far left clashing with the far right all the time. But when you limit it, time can be spent doing other things than yelling at the dickhead on the other side who you have little to no overlap with and see as a dire enemy. You can talk about nuances in principles, differences in organizing, etc. It makes for richer, more interesting conversation.

    There’s also quite a huge range within the umbrella of leftism, and honestly we already have a huge enough gap there that there’s a lot of worthless clashing. Broadening that would only make the site worse.