Category: Privacy and self ownership
Owning our own information and telling Big Brother to get lost
Got an Internet-connected Vizio TV? Smile, you’re on Candid Camera. And in marketing databases everywhere. The FTC says: Consumers have bought more than 11 million internet-connected Vizio televisions since 2010. But according to a complaint filed by the FTC and the New Jersey Attorney General, consumers didn’t know that while they were watching their TVs, Vizio was watching them. The lawsuit challenges the company’s tracking practices and offers insights into how established consumer protection principles apply to smart technology. Starting in 2014, Vizio made TVs that automatically tracked what consumers were watching and transmitted that data back to its servers.…
Getting weirder all the time. Cops use data from a man’s pacemaker to charge him with a crime. (H/T M) And while of course it’s long been a crime to “drive while black” or even walk or bike while black in the wrong neighborhood, now apparently it calls for police action if you’re a prosperous brown woman walking in your own neighborhood. This woman really handled the abuse with grace, though. (Tip o’ hat to PT) Now we’ll see if it gets through the Senate. But the House has v*ted to repeal Obama’s Social Security-related gun ban. Judge halts Trump’s…
Funny, Karen Kwiatkowski’s “Perfect President” post hitting the ‘Net this morning. Similar thoughts were trying to form in my mind over the weekend. Some related observations: Kwiatkowski is absolutely correct that the big-government left created Trump, not only by the immediate cause of alienating so many ordinary Americans, but by gleefully establishing the “stroke of the pen, law of the land” machinery he’s now using to terrify them. But will they understand that? Will they ever get how naive and wrong they were with their “this is a democracy; you’re just being paranoid to worry about tyranny” attitude? Or will…
The FBI. — yes, the freakin’ FBI. — has cameras on Seattle streets and a judge has just forbidden releasing information about them. Why should the FBI be doing street-level surveillance in U.S. cities (if they’re in Seattle, they’re everywhere else)? We can’t know and I haven’t found a single article that tells more than this one does. (H/T @EasyMac308 on Gab) Why aren’t Americans moving away from impoverished, jobless areas? Government, of course. Oh, there are SO many problems with technocracy — as the technocrats themselves are now learning the hard way (after they made millions of us learn…
I didn’t think he’d do it. But Obama just commuted Chelsea Manning’s sentence. Manning is set to go free on May 17. Here’s another link in case the one in the first paragraph gives you trouble, as it’s momentarily giving me.) This is a commutation, not a pardon. The sentence is cut short, but Manning remains a convicted criminal with all the loss of rights and other problems and stigmas that entails. But this is what she’d asked for, the best she’d hoped for. Hm. Now I wonder if Assange will agree to that extradition to the U.S.?
I’d call that an offer the fedgov shouldn’t refuse: Assange will agree to be extradited to the U.S. if Manning is freed. Gutsy and honorable play on Assange’s part, too. When they tell you Russia hacked this or that, always remember … Greenwald does it again: best summation I’ve seen of the origins and methods of the deep state’s war on Trump. The Russian techie named in this week’s dirty dump says U.S. intelligence (sic) never contacted him. And the former British spy paid (by Dems and anti-Trump Repubicans) to dig up, or make up, the dirty dossier flees in…