Activity tagged "privacy"

Posted:
There’s people who are really angry about a lot of tech stuff who disagree with each other about everything, including whether or not they really even have a problem. But all of their problems start with the fact that there’s a lot of commercial surveillance. So these people might disagree about everything else, but they will agree that their problem could be solved if we could do something about commercial surveillance.
So if you think Mark Zuckerberg made grampy into a QAnon, or if you think Insta made your teenager anorexic, or if you think that TikTok is convincing millennials to quote Osama bin Laden, right? Or if you think that it’s ugly that red state attorneys general are following teenagers into out-of-state abortion clinics, or that Google reverse warrants reveal the identity of everyone in a black lives matter demonstration or for that matter, the January 6th riots, or if you are worried about deep fake porn, or if you’re worried that people of color are having the surveillance data captured about them mobilized to discriminate against them in employment and financial products, right? All of these different things all start with cutting off the supply of surveillance data.
– Cory Doctorow
Posted:

"it's all stored locally" is not a panacea for these alarming privacy-invading products!

what exactly is stored locally? what data is extracted from that local data and sent to the company's servers? is that local data being backed somewhere?

what additional risks are now being posed to people who share devices, whose devices might be accessed by others or compromised, or who might not realize these tools are running? what is the risk that the company might later change its decision on local storage?

Listened to:
Last week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee had a hearing all about Section 230, in which they didn’t even attempt to find a witness pointing out its benefits. Among the many organizations that could have provided that vital perspective is the Wikimedia Foundation (as seen in three excellent posts on Medium), and this week we’re joined by Rebecca MacKinnon, Wikimedia’s VP of Global Advocacy and long-time open internet defender, to talk about why the hearing was bad and Section 230 is very, very important.