Few vehicles covering tech will say anything about terms of use that don’t rely on a superficial, slightly biased view of stuff everyone’s too lazy to read about, like privacy law. The debate around privacy was supposed to have started when the maker of AdBlock, Michael Gundlach, who apparently worked for Google, released his product. As this blog has reported, Google announced in 2015 that it would monetize private conversations, and nobody said a thing about that — until the GDPR came, and the discussion became more complex.

Human Rights Watch reports that efforts have been made not to apply the same standards in, for example, Latin America, than there would be in the United States and the EU. This raises some questions. We’re in 2023, but these provisions are from 2018. In Brazilian law, the “LGPD” was approved also in 2018, but measures were only put in practice later in September 2020, through a Constitutional Ammendment, in peak COVID pandemic. Its basic understanding is disputed, reports show.

However, this blog is more interested in talking about online culture rather than telling people to read legal text, or commentary on it.

The understanding that people across the globe can communicate freely, but must respect certain basic principles, is somewhat a general accord. Countries with a history of, for example, political repression and human rights abuses, or culturally based traditions that affect gender positivity or sexual freedoms, are many to count. So no, we don’t live in a perfect world. The first point of this entry was how marketing decisions were made by people who had access to the data. I indicate that this access can be contested, and it’s not me who says so, it’s the European Union, and the Government of California, and the Brazilian Senate, and so on. But what’s the data?

It seems to me that people are too scared to have a conversation on sexual encounters on the web. Nobody has even written down the “pros and cons”, with fear of backlash. There must be a lot of “cons”, right? But if you’ll excuse me while I raise my hand, according to freaking whom?

The shock of some people is predictable and apparent, if captured, when they see a sex worker talk about their practices. But nobody knows the details. This blog has mentioned this before, referring to the adult website Chaturbate and its Florida headquarters, but out of a spur of outrage — which is part of reporting. A contained analysis would require more information, and with that, an understanding that things are not so simple.

We live in a world where even the most “outgoing” place of the web (pun intended, because that’s the place people visit in their bedrooms, very much hiding inside in their bubble), that is to say, Pornhub, requires your full name, government issued ID and home address just in order to show your face, or part of your body, or some stuffed animal maybe, on a avatar picture. It becomes a little clearer what the GDPR is trying to ensure, but not quite. Is it the safety of the sex worker? Try to go on a grind and realize you might wanna take precautions, and watch your list grow longer by the day.

But the thing that some people don’t seem to realize is that Pornhub represents a huge portion of the internet (it’s among the top 10 most visited websites on the planet), and everything referring to the context of porn goes through minor, but still existent analysis. When they said that the age of parental consent for using the internet was 13 years old, they did two things: produce extraordinary demand to instruct teens on what the internet offers and what may be points of caution, but also introduce to companies the responsibility (which, again, happened just the other day) to treat the information received with secure proceedings. But that means that by the time an internet user reaches the “adult age”, they’re expected to do an astounding amount of things.

If you’re not working to pay bills at home, you’re expected to get into college. And so the social stratification that this produces is not being fairly debated. But in terms of our relationships, with flexibility in the use of that otherwise strong word, we are suffering from a lack of commitment that was probably produced by the ones who allowed such a mass offering of content to be placed. That is to say, teens watch a lot of porn! But this topic is very much a taboo, even in developed countries.

The concept of privacy then extends to the life of youth who can’t be bothered by more pressure other than school and social relationships; but in a double standard and complete hypocrisy, that’s what the social media companies are retrieving, “for a better user experience”.

In terms of young adults and people who grew older watching technology evolve, who are often referred to as “millennials”, the workplace just vanished, replaced by remote work, and none of the processes of data retrieval and experience, including moods and reactions, activities and failures, has been explained by a specialist whose role is to make sure you can perform at your best and still live a fairly decent life, regardless of whether you’ll be looking at dog videos, listening to music or watching Netflix from your aunt’s account, but we’ve learned, because we’re scared, to accept that in case we chase a sexual encounter experience on the internet, there will be, inevitably, punishment, and it might be severe.

So it happens that, again, sex work is a thing, and it’s treated seriously — in some places, by some people. In other words, people will still like you if you show yourself on the web, and it might be precisely because you did so. But the moment of recognition of the looming threat of surveillance, or worse, authority inspection, makes everyone anxious to the point of severe sickness, all because of a message to a stranger that, back then, used to be something along the lines of “hey, pretty girl”.

The lifestyle of sexual encounters chased on the web is surely going to make people pay attention to you, but it’s not what you think at all. They just want to see something interesting happen. These are tech companies, and they were created to make livelihoods good enough to shape public opinion at will. There’s nothing wrong with saying “hi, baby”, but in today’s internet, the stalkers that come with you at the time you enter your PIN code on a Microsoft account will be saying, silently or not: “you’re a faggot”. And surprisingly or not, this is a cultural thing — there are countries where gay people are treated a lot more harshly than fraudsters, actual sex abusers (which is essential to put emphasis on, given that we all seem to have agreed that the internet is “virtual” because it creates an alternative reality), rapists and even members of organized crime — who, in case a lawyer is consulted, might be a group of hackers.

There are many examples of “strangers” meeting on the web, and if I was writing 10 years ago, I could talk about how crazy things were and maybe tell some stories, preserving everyone’s privacy and maybe using a pseudonym to protect mine. But today, the people who still haven’t figured out what to do to maintain a stable relationship with people based on mutual trust and good vibes, fulfillment and happiness, are inevitably going to search for people. And whether it’s on websites this blog has made harsh comments on, like Omegle, or any other people-meeting app, there seems to be an interest to know first the sex of the person you’re interacting with.

What people don’t say is that whoever’s asking is not just interested in the gender, but also in sex, literally speaking, but with the timid observation, given circumstances, that it’s an online interaction that means nothing, and you can make a survey to find out that it doesn’t. If it did, many things would have to change on the entire web, one of which being age-verification, a proposal made by American politicians and explained by the EFF, who doesn’t respond to my requests for comment.

We’re literally spending, some of us, our times talking to black screens because people are scared to reveal their identity, while the real danger is remote device invasion; we’re going from one person to another without any filter we can choose, other than the fact that we are interested in sex and, regardless of what you believe in, that’s going to play a role in your life eventually, sooner or later; the answer from tech is to make user experience the most unenduring process that could ever be thought of, unless we pay. And they wonder why people are making anti-capitalist memes and going on strikes.