#data privacy
The Chrome browser exists to show you ads and track where you go so that Google can show you more ads. Please stop using Chrome. Firefox is open source, and while Mozilla is not perfect, it isn’t actively fucking evil the way Google is. It has a bazillion plugins, including various (FREE!) ad block plugins (I recommend uBlock Origins, which will even block YouTube ads – you can watch videos without interruptions again!). It will also function very effectively with a lot more tabs open than Chrome. I’ve got around 800 tabs open right now (not loaded, of course, except for maybe 2 dozen; it’s been a heavy browsing day), and my wife has between 2k and 3k at any time.
We are in the New Browser Wars. This time there’s a helluva lot of money up for grabs, because a lot of it is about running those ads. Monopolies are bad for consumers.
Just go download Firefox.
Firefox plugins I 100% recommend if you don’t want to be tracked (and want to cost corporations money)
AdNauseam is an adblocker that generates false clicks on the ads it blocks, which costs the corporations that pay for them money.
Privacy Possum messes with the tracking data collected about you, rendering it essentially useless
TrackMeNot generates random search terms across sites, meaning that any data collected about things you actually search is buried in a sea of random bullshit. Makes it very hard for people to figure out what you’re actually doing. You can block terms in the options, which means it won’t search for anything incriminating on your behalf (I think the word bomb is blocked by default)
WhatCampaign replaces tracking analytics used in website code with data that can’t be used to track you. I’m pretty sure it replaces it with “fuck off” by default.
I’m not adding links because tumblr will not show this up if I do, but you can search these on the Firefox addons site and they’ll come up.
Some particularly ridiculous moments from my new “Hello NSA” music video. I picked some because I was proud of the wordplay and others because there were jumper cables on my nipples. I’ll leave you to sort out which is which.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1z7Nmrn1WcI&list=PL283994E151539F68
Post link
If you like wordplay, guitar solos, and criticism of surveillance states, check out my new music video ft. a love song using the NSA watchwords!
resources for staying safe online
always important, but i feel like especially recently. particularly stuff that’s a bit more than just the usual “don’t post personal info”
feel free to share this post on twitter or anywhere else, staying safe is important
- justdeleteme.xyz - direct links to delete accounts
- how a photo’s hidden exif data exposes your personal information
- have i been pwned? - check if your accounts have been compromised in a data breach. CHANGE ANY ACCOUNT THAT USES THE SAME EMAIL AND PASSWORD
- online harassment field manual
- form for removing personal information from google (for the eu), see also: “remove your personal information from google”
- extreme privacy: what it takes to disappear (personal data removal workbook)
- filter lists for ublock origin, and more
- restore privacy - online privacy resources center
- privacytools.io
- online spyware watchdog
- how secure is your password?
- defensive computing checklist
- cloudflare dns
- non-technical tips on staying anonymous
- webrtc leak shield - chrome,firefox
- web safety tutorials by the electronic frontier foundation
- crash override network - resources for victims of doxing and online harassment
note: very slightly updated, reblog this version instead
DuckDuckGo has a ‘tracking deal’ with Microsoft and here’s why no one is happy about it
It would’ve been one thing if they were upfront about this, but hiding it means they can’t be trusted. Time to look for a new search engine. Any one know any other tracker-resistant search engines?
I looked into this because I use DuckDuckGo and I think it’s really important to keep organizations accountable especially when they claim to be different TM than shitty ones. So it looks like this is true (as of now) for the mobile browser application specifically, not the search engine in general.
which means that using the search engine on another browser like Firefox should be fine, and also now is a great time to let the company know exactly why you are uninstalling their *application* on your device to hopefully either force a backpedal or heavily discourage further shit like this down the line.
it’s a slimy move to be sure. I just think it’s important to be specific and precise. Here’s another article on the subject:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/duckduckgo-microsoft-trackers/452006/
DuckDuckGo’s Search Deal Stops Browser From Blocking Microsoft Trackers
DuckDuckGo has a ‘tracking deal’ with Microsoft and here’s why no one is happy about it
It would’ve been one thing if they were upfront about this, but hiding it means they can’t be trusted. Time to look for a new search engine. Any one know any other tracker-resistant search engines?
I looked into this because I use DuckDuckGo and I think it’s really important to keep organizations accountable especially when they claim to be different TM than shitty ones. So it looks like this is true (as of now) for the mobile browser application specifically, not the search engine in general.
which means that using the search engine on another browser like Firefox should be fine, and also now is a great time to let the company know exactly why you are uninstalling their *application* on your device to hopefully either force a backpedal or heavily discourage further shit like this down the line.
it’s a slimy move to be sure. I just think it’s important to be specific and precise. Here’s another article on the subject:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/duckduckgo-microsoft-trackers/452006/
DuckDuckGo’s Search Deal Stops Browser From Blocking Microsoft Trackers
in case anyone in the notes is shilling for Brave: they’re soaking in crypto, iirc the browser itself has a miner built into it that uses your computer to mine for them, which last i checked is a thing malware does
So y’all wanted morerants about information security & data privacy? Let’s talk about the two main privacy paradigms that are currently competing for dominance in Big Tech. For the sake of not writing a full goddamn thesis I’m going to only talk about models that actually address user privacy (so NOT Facebook’s “privacy is no longer a social norm” bullshit), and only in the context of the USA with a light dip into GDPR.
Very broadly speaking, Big Tech in the US is coalescing into two camps regarding privacy: “opt-out privacy” and “opt-in privacy”. Apple is the flagship and main driver for the concept of “opt-out privacy”. Over the last few years, they’ve leaned heavily into the idea that data should be kept private by default, and only shared under limited circumstances at the user’s request. In other words, the user has privacy by default, and must opt out of that default for data to be shared.
Google is likewise the flagship and main driver for “opt-in privacy”: the idea that data should be shared broadly for the benefit of both the user and the service provider, and sharing is restricted on a case-by-case basis at the user’s request. In other words, the user shares data by default, and must opt in to privacy where desired.
It’s not a coincidence that Apple and Google are the leading drivers for Big Tech’s privacy models. Mobile phones are the most personal devices most people own: your phone goes with you everywhere, and on average, most people check their phones 344 times(!) per day. If you’re like roughly half of US mobile users, you have at least one personal health app on your phone. And until very recently, nobody was stopping shady advertising companies from harvesting every drop of user data they could from people’s phones. All this has made mobile phones one of the primary battlegrounds for digital privacy.
Let’s look at Apple’s model first.
(cut because this is 2k words and I don’t want to murder anyone’s dashes)
Don’t Lie To Me About Web 2.0
If you’re like me and you’re trying to keep an open mind that there may someday be a non-scam application of blockchains, you’ve probably read some articles about “Web3”, which promises to re-decentralize the web by something something Blockchain.
I realize this is far from the most important criticism but i think it’s really interesting that the standard explanation you find replicated nearly word-for-word at the beginning of most “Web3” articles has a big ol’ chunk of historical revisionism in it. It goes like this:
“First there was web 1.0, which was, like, geocities pages and stuff, and it was decentralized. Then there was web 2.0, which was the centralized silos of social media - facebook, twitter, etc. Now Web3 is gonna re-decentralize everything by letting you own your own data on the blockchain…”
No! Stop there! Web 2.0 was not social media! You’re rewriting history that’s less than 20 years old!
Web 2.0 was:
- blogs with comment sections
- wikis (wikipedia was far from the first wiki!)
- forums (that is, discussion that was previously on Usenet migrating to like phpBB web forums)
- bookmark sharing sites like Del.icio.us
- user-defined tagging systems as in del.icio.us (and computer nerds who spent a lot of time defining taxonomies being blown away when it turned out you could let users define their own tags and a useful system could organically emerge)
- on a technical, behind-the-scenes level, static HTML files, server-side includes, and Perl CGI scripts were getting replaced with structured, database-backed web frameworks (Ruby on Rails, Drupal, etc.)
- AJAX as a way of loading content dynamically into a page without the user navigating to a new page
- Javascript in general allowing more full-featured applications - as did Flash
- RSS feed as a user-defined way of aggregating content
when someone tried to buzzwordify all these disparate trends they noticed that what a lot of them had in common was “Website owner allows website visitors to enter words that will be seen by other website visitors” and summed that up as “User-generated content” and branded it “Web 2.0” around 2004-2005.
I was there. I worked on backends for a lot of this stuff!
The key shift was where things were hosted. In Web 2.0 you might use off-the-shelf software like WordPress or phpBB or whatever but you were still hosting all that stuff on your own server. Your server, your rules; you’d set your own moderation policy and wield your own “banhammer”. The free speech compromise was “don’t like my moderation policy? Make your own website.”
It was a huge paradigm shift in 2005-6 when YouTube started and said “we’ll host your videos for you”. (What? trust a third-party website to host my videos? Sounds sketchy) That was the beginning of the end, because once people gave up running their own server in favor of letting a big company host their stuff on a centralized server, we gave up all the power.
Social media wasn’t web 2.0, it’s what killed Web 2.0!
You might think I’m arguing over mere nomenclature but the important fact is that this era existed, and the Web3 pitch pretends it didn’t. We already had decentralized internet with social features. This fact contradicts the story the Web3/blockchain advocates want to tell you, so their story skips this entire era.
Web 2.0 lost to siloed social media because:
- running your own server is a pain
- running your own server costs money, especially if you want to host video
- signing up for facebook/twitter/etc is much easier for non-computer-literate users, who outnumber us 1,000 to 1
- once there’s a critical mass of users there, anybody who wants an audience has to be there (network effects)
- non-technical users didn’t understand about paying with their privacy, and in most cases had no experience with the freedom they were giving up
- the price was not apparent until everybody was locked in
- Apple made a fateful decision that mobile-phone internet should be app-centric, not browser/website centric. Then Android copied their mistake.
To make the web3 argument you have to explain why “a distributed ledger where each update contains a cryptographically signed pointer to the previous update, replicated across many computers via a decentralized protocol, that rewards people for hosting nodes by paying them pretend money when they brute-force solve a cryptographic hash” is relevant to any of these problems. I suspect it is not relevant, because:
- the blockchain is incredibly slow, inefficient, and energy-intensive, and it can only hold miniscule amounts of data. (The ape pictures are not on the chain, only links to them are on the chain). So everything still has to be hosted elsewhere.
- for most web3 stuff “the” blockchain means the Ethereum blockchain, where it sometimes costs thousands of dollars to make a single transaction process.
- people who don’t want to run their own webserver sure as heck aren’t gonna run their own blockchain node
- in practice, people don’t interact with the blockchain directly, but through intermediarires (coinbase.com etc), who inevitably become centralized.
- in practice, control over blockchain itself, for any popular blockchain, is highly centralized to a tiny number of the largest mining consortiums
if you want to make the dream of “buy your Minecraft skin as an NFT and bring it with you to wear in Fortnight!” work (why is this the example every article uses?) you would need to get all the games involved to decide to implement equivalent items, or some kind of framework of item portability, and if you could do that then you wouldn’t need the blockchain!
What might help solve any of the problems that killed Web 2.0:
- cheap and easy (EASY!) web hosting
- portable data standards
- antitrust enforcement with teeth
- privacy laws around data collection that make the centralized social media business model unprofitable
- a critical mass of dissatisfaction with corporate social media
I want a decentralized internet to come back more than anybody, but blockchain is completely irrelevant to that.
