Category: Privacy and self ownership
Owning our own information and telling Big Brother to get lost
F*c*b**k announced today that the personal data of most of its two billion users has been scraped — that is harvested, stolen, collected, aggregated, collated, probably sold, used, and otherwise misused by outside parties. This scraping has been done by what they call “malicious actors” or “bad actors.” That is, identity thieves and their ilk. But the truth is that the real bad actor here is F*c*b**k. Their site was set up to enable this. They did nothing to prevent it and everything to make it possible. It was built in to the way FB did business. Then they tried…
The bad news: Amazon kicked back the paperback file on a technicality. The good news: The technicality was small, but the rejection gave Kit and me a chance to rethink the release of the printed book. So. Tomorrow — Wednesday, April 4 — you can place your order for the paperback of Basics of Resistance. Not your pre-order. Your order. UPDATE: See below. We’ve been absolutely thrilled by your response. We know a lot of you are awaiting the paperback. Because it’s print-on-demand it’ll probably take longer than a standard Amazon order (how much longer we don’t yet know) and…
Source —– Cambridge Analytica is a red herring. Oh, look, F*c*b**k gave your data to eeeeeeeevil Trump people! Never mind that it gave five times as much to those wuuuuuuuuuderful Obama people in 2012! No matter. It’s still lovely to see people finally waking up to the fact that when you’re on FB, you’re the product, not the customer. I wonder how long this will last? Will the rage and revelations against FB begin an online privacy revolution? Or, more likely, will data-gobbling and stupid data-spilling go on unabated after a few token crony-gov regulations? It’s encouraging that even big…
After an eight month paid vacation, the officer who shot Justine Damond has been charged with murder and manslaughter. But for most bad cops, there’s still no fear of being caught. Take happy family photos at the gun range, get suspended from school. Sigh. New Jersey again. Scott Greenfield on those odd income disparities uncovered in a study this week. Yes, the bizarre outcomes are probably a lot more than mere racism. What if some girls just don’t want STEM careers? A VPN you use on your own server, no need to contract with a provider. That would be great.…