Privacy on CatalystND

AI Concerns

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 22:54:47 -0500

Its bad in new and exciting ways I never expected

This is what I kept saying at dinner tonight with my friend Andrew. We were out to dinner in between rounds of Undaunted Stalingrad and got on the topic of AI. It came up because our hometown favorite grocery store Wegmans stated collection biometric data in some of its stores which drew huge deserved backlash. I wanted to outline some of the concerns we discussed at that dinner.

AI Facial Recognition is Different

We are all used to cameras in stores and public areas in cities, and I am not entirely against them fully, although I do have reservations. Stores have a right to protect their goods and employees, and cameras help them identify criminals and security risks. If an incident occurs, they can go review the footage and hand it off the authorities.

When an incident happens.

Thats one of the big differences with AI facial recognition. It is constantly watching you. Before, there wasn’t someone in the back room checking how long you stared at that box of Fruit Loops before setting it back on the shelf. There wasn’t someone listening to who you were on the phone with. Or looking at who you went shopping with and linking you as friends in your file. But AI can do that, and that is different than just being recorded…

Now if I want to know everytime a certain person came to our store, I can list them all out. I could tell you how long they stay on average. Who they come in with. I can predict when they will be here again. These are all extremely problematic ideas.

First off - why do we give companies and cities the right to track us? This is not an inherent right that they have. Privacy needs to be legistlated yesterday. Walmart shouldn’t have the right to collect and sell information about me. That is my data, not Walmart’s, not Wegman’s, not Facebook’s.

Second - this is prone to abuse. Lets say someone working at a store with one of these systems is a stalker. All of a sudden, they have access to a potential victims routine and paterns. In this video researching Flock AI camera security vulnerabilities Ben does a great job going over the potential issues of this technology in the wrong hands - and to be clear it will fall into the wrong hands. If we allow this to become widspread, bad actors will use and abuse these systems.

What is the plus side?

Lets be honest, at best companies get slightly better lose prevention for this. If your local city or PD impliments it, maybe they are able to catch a few more petty crimials. But at what cost? Liberty lost is rarely taken back. Once we allow every private company and the government to track you with AI cameras, there is no taking it back.

Energy Implications

One part of the AI issue I rarely see discussed is the energy, land, and resource usage. Normally enviornmental impact is something towards the front of our minds with new technology, but for some reason the general public seems pretty quiet on the large amounts of energy, land, water, and resources used in the construction, build out, and operation of these data centers. Even today, while we are still fairly early in the AI boom, large tech companies are asking to revive long closed power plants to provide energy to their new AI focused datacenters. Not to mention the large amounts of land these massive data centers consume. The concrete to build them and the cooling systems used also consume massive amounts of water.

These datacenters are going to have massive enviornmental impacts. AI is by FAR the least efficent computing in the mainstream. By miles. Its not even close. Arguements between C and python are hilarious now that we are in the world of AI computing where we run a 100GB text model to tell you what to make for dinner tonight.

The Loss of Knowledge and Expertise

Forum usage has dropped to an all time low. People aren’t asking questions and having troubleshooting discussions where they can be indexed anymore.
This graph shows stack overflow submissions overtime. I did not validate the content of this graph, so please take it with a grain of salt. But I think we can all agree the internet has felt a lot more dead since AI started taking over.

On top of this, the jobs AI is automating today tend to be entry level jobs. It has, so far, mostly failed to replace senior technical resources (at least in IT|Cyber Securty).

This leads to a couple of problems:

Inablity to find information via web search

Have an issue that you are pretty sure is very common? Well too bad, the answer isn’t going to be on Google in a few years. If people are moving their troubleshooting conversations for technical issues to private, non-indexed AI tools search tools are going to continue to get worse (and lets be honest, they are pretty bad today). This is also an issue with Discord and Facebook groups over forums, but that is a rant I will save for another day.

A lack of juniors today is a lack of seniors tomorrow

It is looking like the tech industry is going to have a very similar issue to the issue the trades have had recently. Very few new workers are joining the workforce, and the current workers are aging out and retiring. This has lead to a shortage of workers in these industries causing increased prices and delayed timelines.

If we do not find a place for entry level workers in tech to sink in their teeth and learn then the gap between skilled seniors and the incoming juniors will continue to grow. This will lead to security issues as inexperienced workers are forced into possitions they are unqualified for with little oversight as the seniors get streched thin

A lack of ability to troubleshoot

One of the most important skills someone early in their tech career can learn is how to properly and quickly troubleshoot issues. Part of that workflow involves searching for similar issues so you do not have to reinvent the wheel. If the only spot you can find troubleshooting information is via an AI, then people will begin to fully rely on these tools and will lose many of the troubleshooting skills that are key to progressing their careers. I have already seen this trend in those entering the workforce right out of college - they more often than others will accept the output of an AI as the way things are “supposed” to work, instead of understanding that like any search tool, AI often supplies an incorrect answer or gives you a spotty explaination. You as the end user need to be able to digest that information and decide if that solution seems valid before taking it as gospel. I am going off on a tangent here, but hopefuly I made my point.

AI is coming. There is no stopping it. I wish there was.

Privacy and Why You Should Care

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 21:02:21 -0500

I have nothing to hide, why would I care if a company or the government is keeping track of what I do?
What are they going to see, me scrolling on my phone?

Over the years, we have come to accept such a low level of privacy that many Americans no longer seem to even care about privacy as a concept. I am going to attempt to tell you why your privacy matters, why you should care, the harm this has done, and some steps that you can take to move help restore your anonymity.

How did we get here?

Imagine the advertising landscape in America 100 years ago. To these Americans advertisements are a small excerpt in the news paper letting the local community know about a sale at the local hardware store. You might see a billboard or hear a radio ad for larger companies advertising a new product, but besides that you wouldn’t know what they were offering unless you tracked it down in a catalog. The newspaper didn’t track which articles you spent more time reading, and they didn’t worry about “engagement”. They simply put out the best version of the local news they could to earn your business over other papers. It was a different world from the one we are exist in now.

The Invasion of Our Attention

Now we are bombarded by ads from so many sources that you likely don’t realize how many you are shown per day. Your TV serves you ads before you have even selected an app, that app then shows you ads to help you pick what to watch, and then unless you pay to avoid it, ads play at the throughout your show. Your scrolling session on TikTok or Instagram reels can have up to 30% of the videos attempting to sell you something. Your email inbox has become a horde of advertisements and receipts instead of a tool to communicate with your friends. Facebook no longer shows you posts from your family, now it shovels piles of AI generated content to keep your eyes on the screen. The tools we used to use to educate, entertain, and communicate have all been coopted by corporations trying to make one more sale. Understanding the infiltration of corporate greed into all facets of our lives is key. Each day they encroached into your life just a little bit further, until it became nearly impossible to keep your eyes away from their content.

The Trade

Unless you make a concentrated effort, you likely never go for a full hour during your day without getting served an advertisement. This is not normal, but because we were trading this invasion into our lives for convenience, we took the trade without knowing what we were giving up. We wanted free video entertainment, free news, free updates from our friends and family, but it was never free - your information and attention was the price.

At first, this seemed like a pro more than a con. Instead of getting random ads like we used to on TV, you were at least seeing ads that were a little relevant to you. Some of the products you were sold even solved problems you didn’t know you had yet! Nice. However, over time these ads got better and better, and because they got better at selling to you the products they were selling were able to get worse. In the current day it is often near impossible to tell the quality of a product, even if you try to put in the effort. How often do you buy a product on Amazon from a brand like JIQLAD without looking at the reviews since the product page looks nice, just to get it and find that, surprise, its trash. This is true of other “products” as well - mainly the news. Much of the news an average American now consumes is targeted to them, aiming to get them to click. After they click, the quality of the reporting is secondary, as their ad money has already been collected. This has lead to news sites with more shocking and provoking headlines, and with near nonexistent journalism. Many of these sites are now even adopting AI to generate the articles for them.

But apart from this side effect of product and news quality declining, you were paying a bigger price. Data brokers and advertising companies like Google and Facebook were building profiles on you. They were writing down what videos you watch and for how long, so they could keep you scrolling. They were seeing which of your friends posts made you mad, which kept you on the site longer than the ones that made you happy. They showed people more content that made then angry in the quest for engagement and screen time. This anger developed into hate after enough time. We can now no longer stand our fellow man, and social media’s drive to anger us to keep us engaged was a large part of this.

The Cost

We now live in a world without nuance. A world where there is right, there is wrong, and there is no in between; except the right and wrong is not consistent and switches depending on who you speak to. We now live in a world where the far-right is pushing us to authoritarian and isolationist policies because the media has preyed on fears of the average voter - fears of losing their job, rising prices, and of wars abroad - and sold them a silver bullet. A silver bullet, which is firing thousands of government workers, and raising prices through tariffs, and increasing tensions across the globe. Yet, anyone who stands in the way is the enemy, checks and balances be damned - he has a mandate. We now live in a world where the far-left praises acts of terror carried out by Hamas since those leftists disagree with Israel’s existence and actions - therefore any action taken against Israel is justified. Many others fully ignore the tremendous loss of civilian life inflicted by Israel, and would prefer Gaza be cleared out, bulldozed, and turned into a strip mall. There is no in between - no room for nuance. One side is good, one side is evil, but many don’t agree on which one is which. We live a world where we can not talk openly about these things, because if you voice the wrong opinion to the wrong person, you are no longer their friend, but instead the enemy.

The cost of the loss of your privacy is the loss of your sanity. Many Americans can no longer think for themselves, and simply wait for the algorithm to serve them their next opinion. Until we learn to value our privacy and our attention we will continue to be driven to further extremes, we will be encouraged to spend more to get less, and we will be lulled into a false sense of security. The ads and the propaganda you see are more effective than you realize because they were tailor made for you. They know what will keep your attention. They know which types of posts have changed your behavior in the past. They know you, every search you have made, and have accounted for every minute you have spent starring at a screen. There is no escaping if you keep playing.

The Way Out

To escape the system they designed for you to never leave, the first thing you need to do is care. By simply thinking about privacy and by analyzing what you are being shown, you will begin to see the patterns - both in what opinions you are being manipulated into holding, and also the patterns of behavior that are being engrained into you.

How many times a day do you check your phone? How many hours did you spend on social media this week? What did you gain from the time spent there? If you can’t remember what Instagram reel or TikTok you watched an hour ago, why do you keep going back to scroll?

The second step is to flip the table. Currently, the only way to respect your privacy and your attention is to leave. If you can not leave these sites fully, make it more difficult for them and for yourself. Remove the social media apps from your phone at the minimum if you can not delete your accounts fully. Allow the device that is on your person 24/7 to be a tool, not a distraction. There is nothing wrong with small doses of social media for entertainment but keep it on a separate device. This limits the amount those apps are able to track your activity, as well as lowering the amount of time you will spend there.

Unsubscribe from advertisements wherever possible. Use an ad-blocker whenever possible. Google has disabled many blockers from working on Chrome, take note of this act of aggression - it has been many years since Google removed “Don’t be Evil” as their core value, and the reason why has become more pronounced. Disable their location tracking when you are not using their apps, and consider using alternatives wherever possible, including gmail and maps. Switch to Firefox or other options that prioritize security and privacy.

Move back to offline backups instead of relying on cloud storage providers. This includes iCloud and Google drive/photos. Google is already analyzing the location data from your photos to stitch where you go. Right now, the FBI is pushing to get backdoors implemented into these service’s encryption. That means that your data would be able to be accessed without your knowledge or consent. Even if these systems are designed with the best of intentions to only be used in criminal trials, they will be abused. The threat of your own data being used against you in a criminal proceeding should be enough to concern you. What if the FBI demanded your document safe’s lock was replaced with a lock similar to TSA lock, so they can always get into it just in case they need to. We wouldn’t trust the government with that key, and thieves would certainly use the master key once they figured out how. Suddenly, the amount of trust we put in safes and these locks plummets. We should treat this no differently.

When you notice a service trying to manipulate you, ask yourself why, and if the reason is malicious, do your best to separate yourself from that service. Open source alternatives exist that solve many of the problems of modern digital life, and who have no incentive to manipulate you. Adopting these options does take an investment of time, but that is a small price to pay to begin to remove the interest of corporations and billionaires from your mind. Consider alternatives to social media like Mastodon, PixelFed, and Matrix where accounts and data are not controlled by a central source. Encourage movement to communication platforms with end to end encryption, where your messages can not be read in transit such as Signal or Matrix.

The future of the internet must become distributed. To continue down the path we are going down is to hand big tech the keys to our psyche, and that is simply unacceptable.

TLDR

When you protect your privacy, you protect yourself from influence. The opinions you hold should be your own - opinions that you have spent time forming and that are based on your experiences, not from the carefully crafted campaigns carried out by companies and politicians to sway us one way or another. Do not trust your data to others, their motive is always money and power. Remember that we are all human, and that the bonds that join us are stronger than those that divide.

There is a war going on for your mind, if you are thinking, you are winning.