If you actually value your anonymity, you will not be able to use most popular communication platforms in the coming months. It’s a perfect storm for the outright invasion of privacy in the USA right now.
Learning to code allows you to build and use your own (as well as other less known) tools.
Does this make sense?
Learn. To. Coed. Code.
As someone who has very little experience with coding, where would you recommend I start?
Excuse the reddit link but this is a fantastic comment I had bookmarked that answers your question, at least in regards to learning C.
https://old.reddit.com/r/C_Programming/comments/10zyicb/where_and_how_to_learn_c/j88gr87/
As someone who has a fair bit of experience with coding and with charlatans, don’t trust the one in the OP. They just joined Lemmy today, and they’ve been spreading unfounded conspiracist FUD. Learn IT stuff first and foremost if you value your privacy; the OP has no fucking idea what they’re talking about and gives zero practical examples to illustrate their point. Programming knowledge has rarely if ever been anything more than a tangential aid in maintaining my privacy.
By all means, learn how to program; it’s a great skill. Just don’t learn it because some stranger on the Internet tells you “I promise bro it’ll be the privacy apocalypse if you don’t know how to code in, like, the coming months™ for some reason.” The OP doesn’t even indicate they know how to code, not that it’d make much of a difference.
(Also, this isn’t a shower thought; this is the OP soapboxing.)
Edit: Just to steelman the OP and assume their wholly unfounded and obviously bullshit claim of “you will not be able to use most popular communication platforms in the coming months” (which ones, fuckass?): amateur programming knowledge does not help with that, and it shows they know absolute jack shit about infosec. If you’re an amateur programmer building your own communication platform for the sake of privacy, you’re about to be fucked forwards and backwards until the friction from the fucking vaporizes you to cinders. You need real knowledge of mathematical fields like cryptography, not just “haha
while(1)go brrrrrrr”, to build a messenger secure from the kinds of threat actors the OP vaguely alludes to.I mean, there are software libraries that handle encryption for you. I’m imagining that OP is thinking of some kind of scenario where it becomes illegal to distribute communication software without ID verification, and people must write their own client programs, which is not an impossible task.
You still need to know what you are doing to use them correctly and not introduce vulnerabilities.
If the library is high level enough that it is for the communication protocol itself, of which there are lots, it will probably be fine. Even if you aren’t rolling your own code in this scenario, it would still be useful to learn because it may be hard to verify as trustworthy sources of illegal software without reading the source code yourself.