Privacy
In The Bold Italic. More on Medium.
How the Google Chrome extension made me an asshole
Several years ago, I pitched a story to an online publication. It was my first time pitching anything anywhere, and I was nervous about the usual stuff: how they’d respond, if they’d respond, and when they’d respond.
“You don’t use an email tracker?” a friend asked when I confided my deep, dark worries. (I didn’t have a lot going on at the time.)
“Huh?” I eloquently asked.
“It’ll show when someone opens your email and how many times,” she explained.
And that was the day when I downloaded the Chrome Email Tracker extension.
I didn’t see a problem with tracking…
But what does it want to hear?
It started with a photo. A floral arrangement, to be precise — wild flowers and leafy sprigs stuffed haphazardly into a bouquet that screamed, “You could do this yourself, but you won’t,” in a way that seemed specifically designed to fit into my Instagram feed. Were it not for the tiny “sponsored” tag, I never would have given it a second glance.
“I was just talking about needing flowers for the party next week,” I muttered.
Then I stopped. I hadn’t just been talking about needing flowers for a party next week; I had been talking about needing flowers exactly…
Let’s throw some sand in the face of insidious ISP privacy laws.
Last week, most congressional Republicans voted to let Internet service providers (ISPs), the companies that pipe the Internet to consumers, harvest intimate online user data for profit. Since the big ISPs, such as Comcast, have near-monopoly power in most of this country, the only way for a consumer to opt out of this kind of data harvesting would be to not have a home Internet connection.
Rather than hide, perhaps it would be most effective to render our information worthless to these greedy corporations.
For the privacy-minded citizen, tech sites like Gizmodo recommend covering one’s tracks by using virtual private…
Facebooks tells the ACLU they’re done helping police spy on users, but their privacy policy says otherwise
While it doesn’t seem to bother most Facebook users that their intimate personal data is being compiled to sell them stuff (and establish global hegemony), it did stir the waters of public perception when profile information was utilized by law-enforcement agencies to spy on protesters in Oakland, Baltimore and Ferguson.
Last week, Facebook made a pledge to halt the practice of selling data used to keep tabs on activists and protesters. But a closer look reveals a clever legal and public-relations maneuver to cover their corporate arses and cloak this profitable practice in contractual darkness.
Policing Facebook
Zuckerberg’s plan to build a global hegemony through “social credit.”
In mid-February, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published his “Building Global Community” manifesto, in which he called for “supportive,” “safe,” “informed,” “civically engaged” and “inclusive” communities.
Which sounds lofty and benevolent, yet if you read between the lines, the message is: we want to own all the data of all the interpersonal/community interactions in the world and profit off of them through advertising and other as-yet-unveiled value-added propositions. (Facebook Bucks, anyone?)
Facebook launched a few years after I graduated from college, so I guess this makes me an old fuddy-duddy—an old fuddy-duddy who doesn’t want a corporation like Facebook owning my…
[Editor’s note: This is the continuation of a developing story about AT&T’s clandestine surveillance service, Hemisphere, which they secretly sold and marketed to law-enforcement agencies. Read the breaking story at the Daily Beast here.]
AT&T tells people — its customers, the public and the media — that its clandestine work with national-security and law-enforcement agencies is about compliance with the law.
I published a story in the Daily Beast on Tuesday that demonstrates that AT&T’s claim of merely “complying” with the law is false; rather, AT&T’s for-profit surveillance platform, Hemisphere, went above and beyond in its capacity to harness customers’…
The Bold Italic
Celebrating the free-wheeling spirit of the Bay Area — one sentence at a time.
