Category: Privacy and self ownership
Owning our own information and telling Big Brother to get lost
You may have heard that Equifax, one of the three major credit bureaus, let cyberintruders steal data on at least 143 million of their “customers.” (What’s the proper word for people who are in a company’s database whether they want to be or not? “Ccustomer” doesn’t quite describe it.) If you go the the PR site Equifax has set up in response, you’ll find this “news” bolded at the very top: No Evidence of Unauthorized Access to Core Consumer or Commercial Credit Reporting Databases But the moment you dip into the actual statement text you get: The information accessed primarily…
Good advice from Brad R.: how to keep your libertarian website alive in the face of arbitrary decisions by domain registrars, cloud services, Google, and other “providers” who may not like your views. Poll (take it FWIW) says a majority of Americans, and even a plurality of black Americans, don’t want those Confederate statues torn down. Others, OTOH, want to begin with Lincoln, then tear down every monument to anyone who ever owned a slave. Bye-bye Washington and Jefferson. Bye-bye signers of the nation’s founding documents. Welcome to un-personhood. (Going to be quite interesting when that state at the top…
“Embrace a post-digital ethos.” I borrowed that phrase from a poster at Claire’s Cabal. The phrase came up in the midst of a wistful discussion about the need to create just enough of an online profile to reassure potential employers while also scrubbing (or avoiding in the first place) a profile that surrenders too much privacy. Participants lamented the increasing need to create a sanitized public facade. One said that while leaving the ‘Net was out of the question, backing away from ‘Net life was imperative. We’ve talked about this before. Many of us are in love with — married…