I'm seeing a bunch of people freaking out about government agencies creating accounts on #Bluesky.

So...

This is just a gentle reminder that blocking government accounts from following you on social media does nothing to protect you from surveillance because you're on the fucking internet.

A lot of advice you see that supposedly "protect" yourself from being monitored are useless theater at best. Social media is anti-privacy *by design*. The blocklists do *nothing* to protect you.

I can't stress this enough. You're not safe if you're on the internet. Assume you're being monitored. It is trivial to circumvent blocklists and other methods people think protect them on places like Mastodon, Bluesky, and so on.

End-to-end encryption is really the safest way to converse on the internet. Signal is an app that enables people to converse securely, but note that even this is not bulletproof. The strongest encryption can be broken easily by someone simply taking a screenshot.

My biggest concern is that people who push for privacy practices on social media fail to take to account that in a online forum designed to literally broadcast your posts to the widest possible audience, the concept of "privacy" does not even apply here.

Anonymity isn't protection either. You think you're safe because you use an online handle instead of your real name?

Not so fast.

You'd be surprised at how quickly it would take someone to connect your account to you.

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@zalasur
All things I post are easily retrievable on the internet by just searching for my name. The rest of the things I post I really doubt anyone cares about. If a government official wants to know more about it they can knock at my door and I'd be happy to blabber about anything in my life in front of a couple bottles of wine. Provided they pay for the wine and that it is good.

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