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• Microsoft says it will take the heat if Copilot AI commercial users get sued - The Verge — Some users of Microsoft’s Copilot platforms can turn to the company if they get sued for copyright infringement.
• AI | Doc Searls Weblog

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• Cryptid Technologies — Necessary Security at Unprecedented Scale We offer flexible APIs for building zero-knowledge proof based authentication and authorization, authenticated provenance, verifiable authenticity, and privacy preserving decentralized identity that scales to billions of people and devices.
• IIW — The Internet Identity Workshop has been finding, probing and solving identity issues twice every year since 2005. We meet in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Every IIW moves topics, code and projects downfield. Name an identity topic and it’s likely that more substantial discussion and work has been done at IIW than any other conference!

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• Introducing Permission Slip, the app to take back control of your data | Digital Lab at Consumer Reports — Privacy is a right. This is a fact in many states, and it’s one of our fervent beliefs at Consumer Reports. But that doesn’t mean privacy is easy. Anyone who’s tried to make their digital life more private knows how much effort it requires. We create data in nearly every interaction we have with companies. Keeping track and chasing after this data can feel convoluted, frustrating, even futile. The right to privacy is only real if you can use it. So today, we’re announcing a new, experimental service by Consumer Reports to help you do privacy better. Enter: Permission Slip.
• Permission Slip by CR — Find out what companies know about us It’s no secret that a huge number of companies are collecting, buying and selling data about us. Find out what information they collect, and take action to help protect yourself.
• blog: Don Marti

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• Data Protection Commission tries to make victory of its U-turn on Facebook and Instagram – The Irish Times — Watchdog forced to toughen its decision on data protection complaint after European intervention
• Data Protection Commission announces conclusion of two inquiries into Meta Ireland | 04/01/2023 | Data Protection Commission — The Data Protection Commission (DPC) has today announced the conclusion of two inquiries into the data processing operations of Meta Platforms Ireland Limited (“Meta Ireland”) in connection with the delivery of its Facebook and Instagram services. (Meta Ireland was previously known as Facebook Ireland Limited).
• Inside Google’s Ad Display Network Black Box: Porn, Piracy, Fraud — ProPublica — Google’s ad business hides nearly all publishers it works with and where billions of ad dollars flow. We uncovered a network containing manga piracy, porn, fraud and disinformation.
• Meet Performance Max, The Blackest Black Box Of All Google Ad Products | AdExchanger — Lost in the Sturm und Drang of Q4 (Q for quarantine) 2020, Google introduced a beta program called Performance Max, its first ad product spanning all Google-owned media.
• GitHub - dmarti/CAPCA: California Advertising Placements on Criminal Activity Act
• LastPass Data Breach: It’s Time to Ditch This Password Manager | WIRED — The password manager’s most recent data breach is so concerning, users need to take immediate steps to protect themselves.

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• Home Assistant — Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server.
• Ubiquiti - Rethinking IT — A true multi-application network operating system
• Nabu Casa — We successfully crowdfunded Home Assistant Yellow, the easiest way to get started with Home Assistant.

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• Patient Privacy Rights — Patient Privacy Rights’ purpose is to honor and empower the individual’s right to privacy through personal control of health information wherever such information is collected and used. We educate, collaborate and partner with people to ensure privacy in law, policy, technology, and maximize the benefits from the use of personal health information with consent.
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power: Zuboff, Shoshana: 9781610395694: Amazon.com: Books — The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.

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• Who Is Collecting Data from Your Car? – The Markup — A firehose of sensitive data from your vehicle is flowing to a group of companies you’ve probably never heard of
• I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score. Now You Can Get Yours, Too. - The New York Times — Little-known companies are amassing your data — like food orders and Airbnb messages — and selling the analysis to clients. Here’s how to get a copy of what they have on you.
• Locked In A Remote Control Car – Purism — It’s rare to find modern technology that’s actually on your side. For the most part when technology advances today, new features are less for your benefit, and more to benefit the company that made them.
• Tesla Removes About 80 Miles Of Customer's Available Battery Capacity Via Software Restriction — Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) has some of the most advanced cars on the planet. Software updates allow new features to be added for free, such as better performance or enhanced safety features. But having a car that is dominated by software can have its drawbacks, too.
• Ford, GM Push Harder to Stop New Car Flipping and Price Gouging — Some dealers are overpricing such popular cars and trucks as the Ford F-150 Lightning and Chevy Corvette Z06, but the automakers are cracking down.
• In-car monitoring: Surveillance tech will make your car less private - CNET — Everything you do in your car may soon be noticed.
• How your car is spying on you | Daily Mail Online — Experts have revealed the myriad ways that your car can spy on your personal habits.

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• Is Ethical Advertising Possible? – Purism — Is ethical advertising possible? We all certainly know unethical advertising is possible, we live with it every day. The ad-driven Internet has created an insatiable hunger for personal data and as a result most of what the average person does in their web browser, or on their phone, and in real life is being measured, tracked, and sold to some degree. Yet if a company actually cared about your privacy and wanted to advertise its products, could it do so ethically? Can you track what a visitor does on your website without violating their privacy? We have been thinking about these issues heavily at Purism as we consider how to expand our marketing and in this article I’m going to explore where we currently are in our thinking.
• Doc Searls Weblog · People vs. Adtech — Below are blog posts, articles and essays I’ve written toward four goals in fighting surveillance of our private spaces online by the tracking-based advertising business and its dependents in publishing.
• Opinion | In Stores, Secret Bluetooth Surveillance Tracks Your Every Move - The New York Times — Imagine you are shopping in your favorite grocery store. As you approach the dairy aisle, you are sent a push notification in your phone: “10 percent off your favorite yogurt! Click here to redeem your coupon.” You considered buying yogurt on your last trip to the store, but you decided against it. How did your phone know?

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• Authentication With Pseudonymity - Cryptid Technologies — Authentication With Pseudonymity How Elon can Legally Transform Twitter with Pseudonymous Free Speech by Dave Huseby “Authentication is important, but so is anonymity for many. A balance must be struck.” — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) In a well-studied and famous letter dated October 17, 1788 from James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, Madison discusses the proposed Bill of Rights and his plan for getting it passed in the first session of Congress. One fact that many do not know is that the letter is encrypted in part using a cipher invented by Thomas Jefferson. In the letter, Madison details the bitter and extremely contentious politics among the states, especially between the prominent Anti-Federalists and the Federalists like themselves. Madison’s chief concern was passing the Bill of Rights to quell any organized opposition to the Constitution. Political persecution was rampant and serious enough that Madison and Jefferson made careful use of encryption to avoid being doxxed and canceled because of their private political opinions.

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• GitHub - ZbayApp/monorepo — An early prototype for a peer-to-peer alternative to Slack and Discord.

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• Views on Current Laws and Practices to Protect Personal Data According to US Likely Voters, July 2021 (% of respondents) | Insider Intelligence
• ProjectVRM – Developing tools for customer independence and engagement with vendors
• Ostrom Workshop Calendar — The main business model of the Web goes by a label we all now know from the title of Shoshana Zuboff’s landmark book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. How do we fight surveillance capitalism? And how do we work around it? How, especially, can we keep our new Byway from becoming infested with it—or with the mendacities behind it? Nobody better to help us toward answers than Shoshana herself, who leads this finale to our salon series. Scholar, writer, and activist Shoshana Zuboff is the author of three major books, each of which signaled the start of a new epoch in technological society. Her recent masterwork, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, an international bestseller translated into twenty-six languages, has been hailed as the tech industry’s Silent Spring and the Das Kapital of the 21st Century. Professor Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School and a faculty associate at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights. Her work has received the Axel Springer Award (2019), the EPIC Lifetime Achievement Award (2021), and is the first recipient of the Global Privacy Assembly Giovanni Buttarelli Award (2021).
• Opinion | Facebook and the Surveillance Society: The Other Coup - The New York Times — We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.
• Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America: Wylie, Christopher: 9781984854636: Amazon.com: Books
• Slaughterbots - Wikipedia — Slaughterbots is a 2017 arms-control advocacy video presenting a dramatized near-future scenario where swarms of inexpensive microdrones use artificial intelligence and facial recognition to assassinate political opponents based on preprogrammed criteria.
• Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data: Veliz, Carissa: 9781612199672: Amazon.com: Books
• The Privacy Engineer's Manifesto: Getting from Policy to Code to QA to Value: Dennedy, Michelle, Fox, Jonathan, Finneran, Tom: 9781430263555: Amazon.com: Books
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power: Zuboff, Shoshana: 9781610395694: Amazon.com: Books

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• The Digital Markets Act: ensuring fair and open digital markets | European Commission — The Digital Markets Act (DMA) establishes a set of narrowly defined objective criteria for qualifying a large online platform as a so-called “gatekeeper”. This allows the DMA to remain well targeted to the problem that it aims to tackle as regards large, systemic online platforms.
• Why Alphabet Will Benefit From New European Privacy Rules — European regulators are once again coming after big American technology companies. Some say it is the beginning of the end for them. Not so fast.
• New EU law could spark gold rush of iMessage alternatives — At the moment, getting access to iMessage’s features on non-Apple devices is a complete pain. In fact, getting access to any messaging platform’s features outside of its native apps can range from difficult to almost impossible. Whether it’s Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or Signal, in every case, the services’ developers want you to stick to their own software to message on their platforms.
• Europe agrees on big new package of tech rules — European regulators have come to an agreement on major competition rules that could force the world's biggest tech platforms, including Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, to reshape big chunks of their business.
• US consumer views on privacy laws — A July 2021 survey from Data for Progress found that nearly three-quarters (72%) of likely US voters felt that existing privacy laws are insufficient.
• Computer Crime Hype - Schneier on Security — Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four.
• Apple (AAPL) Working to Bring Financial Services Tasks In-House - Bloomberg — The effort, dubbed ‘Breakout,’ would replace fintech partners
• Wordle Hacking—Suddenly Wordle Is Tracking You, Here’s How To Stop It — Perhaps what will come as some surprise to many players of the game is that it now comes complete with ad-trackers. But don't sweat it, you can stop it with a little Wordle hacking.

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• Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet (FSG Originals x Logic): Hwang, Tim: 9780374538651: Amazon.com: Books — In Subprime Attention Crisis, Tim Hwang investigates the way big tech financializes attention. In the process, he shows us how digital advertising―the beating heart of the internet―is at risk of collapsing, and that its potential demise bears an uncanny resemblance to the housing crisis of 2008.
• Amazon has a $31 billion a year advertising business — Amazon revealed Thursday just how big its advertising business has become. It generated $31.2 billion in revenue in 2021, with fourth-quarter sales rising 32%, according to the retailer’s fourth-quarter earnings statement.
• Facebook and Google stocks have diverged, and the reason is Apple — Facebook’s apps rely almost entirely on Apple and Google for distribution. So when Apple changed its privacy policy last year, limiting the ability of app developers to target users, Facebook was suddenly stripped of one of its most important assets.
• A public apology - on screwing up by not questioning assumptions - my talk at #BIF10 - Ethan Zuckerman — About a month ago, I wrote an article about a simple idea. I asked whether anyone really believed that advertising should be the main way we supported content and services on the internet. Given how poorly banner advertising on the web worksGiven that nobody likes banner ads, and given that the current system puts users under surveillance, which in turn seems to inure us to government surveillance, I wondered whether there might be a better way.
• Doc Searls Weblog · Apple vs (or plus) Adtech, Part I — If you haven’t seen it yet, watch Apple’s Privacy on iPhone | tracked ad. In it a guy named Felix (that’s him, above) goes from a coffee shop to a waiting room somewhere, accumulating a vast herd of hangers-on along the way. The herd represents trackers in his phone, all crowding his personal space while gathering private information about him. The sound track is “Mind Your Own Business,” by Delta 5.
• Fighting FLoC and Fighting Monopoly Are Fully Compatible | Electronic Frontier Foundation — Are tech giants really damned if they do and damned if they don’t (protect our privacy)?
• Facebook says Apple iOS privacy change will cost $10 billion this year — Facebook said on Wednesday that Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature would decrease the company’s 2022 sales by about $10 billion.
• Google Drops FLoC and Introduces Topics API to Replace Tracking Cookies for Ads — Google on Tuesday announced that it is abandoning its controversial plans for replacing third-party cookies in favor of a new Privacy Sandbox proposal called Topics, which categorizes users' browsing habits into approximately 350 topics. The new mechanism, which takes the place of FLoC (short for Federated Learning of Cohorts), slots users' browsing history for a given week into a handful of top pre-designated interests (i.e., topics), which are retained only on the device for a revolving period of three weeks.
• GDPR enforcer rules that IAB Europe's consent popups are unlawful - Irish Council for Civil Liberties — Google, Amazon, and the entire tracking industry relies on IAB Europe’s consent system, which has now been found to be illegal following complaints coordinated by ICCL.  EU data protection authorities find that the consent popups that plagued Europeans for years are illegal. All data collected through them must be deleted. This decision impacts Google’s, Amazon’s and Microsoft’s online advertising businesses.
• Case number: DOS-2019-01377 Concerning: Complaint relating to Transparency & Consent Framework

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• Byway FAQ – Customer Commons — The Intention Byway—or Byway for short—is a way to move messages of intent between customers and companies, buyers and sellers, demand and supply, anywhere in any value chain or among a collection of participants. Its goal is to maximize the quality and volume of economic signaling by everyone and to expand the range of economic activity that can take place in a networked marketplace.
• Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> My first impressions of web3 — Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” I don’t think I’ve ever actually said the words “get off my lawn,” but I’m much more likely to click on Pepperidge Farm Remembers flavored memes about how “crypto” used to mean “cryptography” than I am the latest NFT drop. Also – cards on the table here – I don’t share the same generational excitement for moving all aspects of life into an instrumented economy. Even strictly on the technological level, though, I haven’t yet managed to become a believer. So given all of the recent attention into what is now being called web3, I decided to explore some of what has been happening in that space more thoroughly to see what I may be missing.
• Matt Mullenweg on Twitter: "People seem to be redefining Web 2.0 as Facebook, etc, that own data, but Web 2.0 at the time was platforms like WordPress, Odeo, Six Apart, Flickr, Technorati, and https://t.co/vlhR5g6fkg that had open data and interoperated. https://t.co/PXuZBaLbP2 https://t.co/sJJT8kyaJG" / Twitter
• What Is Web 2.0 - O'Reilly Media — The concept of "Web 2.0" began with a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O'Reilly VP, noted that far from having "crashed", the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What's more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as "Web 2.0" might make sense? We agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.
• Apple AirTags being used to track cars and stalk victims, police warn — The Apple AirTag is a device created to help people keep track of their misplaced items. But the seemingly harmless tool is being used by some to track people and commit car thefts. As authorities investigate these incidents, the devices are raising privacy and security concerns. 

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• Quad9 | A public and free DNS service for a better security and privacy — Quad9 is a free service that replaces your default ISP or enterprise Domain Name Server (DNS) configuration. When your computer performs any Internet transaction that uses the DNS (and most transactions do), Quad9 blocks lookups of malicious host names from an up-to-the-minute list of threats. This blocking action protects your computer, mobile device, or IoT systems against a wide range of threats such as malware, phishing, spyware, and botnets, and it can improve performance in addition to guaranteeing privacy. The Quad9 DNS service is operated by the Swiss-based Quad9 Foundation, whose mission is to provide a safer and more robust Internet for everyone.
• Pi-hole – Network-wide protection — Instead of browser plugins or other software on each computer, install Pi-hole in one place and your entire network is protected.

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• Exclusive: Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen warns company's encryption will aid espionage by hostile nations — A Facebook spokesman said: “The reason we believe in end-to-end encryption is precisely so that we can keep people safe, including from foreign interference and surveillance as well as hackers and criminals.
• Scripting News: Facebook is us — The bullshit about Facebook keeps coming. It's not a fucking autocracy, it's a carrier. You could say everything you say about FB about a city like NY.
• (15) Post | LinkedIn — I've got a big Twitter thread with tons of screenshots from the unredacted docs between Facebook and Google
• Before the “Whistleblowers” there were “Goodbye” posts: leaving #Facebook Engineering in 2016 because of #China, User Content, and #EndToEndEncryption – dropsafe — Before the “Whistleblowers” there were “Goodbye” posts: leaving #Facebook Engineering in 2016 because of #China, User Content, and #EndToEndEncryption In 2016 I quit the best job I ever had: the most impactful, the most challenging, and (yes) the best paid. I did so in part because of explicable burnout from shipping a radical product, but also and primarily because of a shift in Facebook’s company goals towards degrading user-experience for profit, and for experimentally building message-censorship infrastructure to offer-up as a gift and to show willing, for entry into the Chinese market.
• Eva on Twitter: "It is still a bad idea to idolize whistleblowers instead of focusing on the revelations the whistleblowers bring forward, but Frances Haugen says that her opinions on end-to-end encrypted messaging were misinterpreted and mischaracterized and e2e messaging is good, ok?" / Twitter — It is still a bad idea to idolize whistleblowers instead of focusing on the revelations the whistleblowers bring forward, but Frances Haugen says that her opinions on end-to-end encrypted messaging were misinterpreted and mischaracterized and e2e messaging is good, ok?
• My interview with Steven Levy of Wired re: Frances Haugen leaking my Facebook Engineering “Goodbye Post” – dropsafe — My interview with Steven Levy of Wired re: Frances Haugen leaking my Facebook Engineering “Goodbye Post”
• Facebook CIA Project: The Onion News Network ONN - YouTube
• So...what now? - by Charlie Warzel - Galaxy Brain — There’s so much reporting out there from the consortium of news outlets on ‘The Facebook Papers’ that I don’t really know what to do or where to start. Over at Protocol they’ve collected a running list of stories published and I count 50 pieces (as of Monday evening), many of them thousands of words long. Apparently, (according to Casey Newton and Kara Swisher) there are like six week’s worth of stories like this coming.
• FTC Study Confirms ISPs Collect a Scary Amount of Your Personal Data - ExtremeTech — Frustration with Big Tech is reaching a crescendo, and we could be headed for legislative efforts to reduce the influence of companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, but another technology heavyweight has managed to fly under the radar: your Internet Service Provider (ISP). A new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report examines what ISPs are doing with your data, and it’s not good news. Even when they promise not to sell your information, it often ends up in the hands of advertisers and other third parties. 
• The Facebook Papers Are a Big Fat Nothingburger - Reason.com — More than a dozen mainstream media organizations published reports today on the so-called Facebook Papers, a trove of internal company documents obtained and released by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen. The headlines promised dramatic revelations and damning indictments.

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• Apple's Plan to "Think Different" About Encryption Opens a Backdoor to Your Private Life | Electronic Frontier Foundation — Apple has announced impending changes to its operating systems that include new “protections for children” features in iCloud and iMessage. If you’ve spent any time following the Crypto Wars, you know what this means: Apple is planning to build a backdoor into its data storage system and its messaging system.
• Daring Fireball: Apple’s New ‘Child Safety’ Initiatives, and the Slippery Slope — My first advice is to read Apple’s own high-level description of the features, which ends with links to detailed technical documentation regarding the encryption and techniques Apple is employing in the implementations, and “technical assessments” from three leading researchers in cryptography and computer vision.
• Eva on Twitter: "Apple distributed this internal memo this morning, dismissing their critics as "the screeching voices of the minority." I will never stop screeching about the importance of privacy, security, or civil liberties. And neither should you. https://t.co/lLDfxEUIXL" / Twitter — Apple distributed this internal memo this morning, dismissing their critics as "the screeching voices of the minority." I will never stop screeching about the importance of privacy, security, or civil liberties. And neither should you.
• GitHub - nadimkobeissi/appleprivacyletter: An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning. — An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning technology.
• Transactional analysis - Wikipedia — Transactional analysis (TA) is a psychoanalytic theory and method of therapy wherein social transactions are analyzed to determine the ego state of the communicator (whether parent-like, childlike, or adult-like) as a basis for understanding behavior.[1] In transactional analysis, the communicator is taught to alter the ego state as a way to solve emotional problems. The method deviates from Freudian psychoanalysis which focuses on increasing awareness of the contents of subconsciously held ideas. Eric Berne developed the concept and paradigm of transactional analysis in the late 1950s.[2]
• Reality 2.0 Episode 80: NSO Group's Pegasus, Stingrays, and Grindr — Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Kyle Rankin about NSO group and Pegasus, Stingrays and cars, and surveilling priests.
• The Encryption Debate in Australia: 2021 Update - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — In 2018, the heads of Australia’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies were given broad powers by the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018,1 or TOLA Act, to gain access to encrypted communicat
• Internet of Snitches – Purism — Imagine an Internet of Snitches, each scanning whatever data they have access to for evidence of crime. Beyond the OS itself, individual phone apps could start looking for contraband. Personal computers would follow their lead. Home network file servers could pore through photos, videos and file backups for CSAM and maybe even evidence of copyright infringement. Home routers could scan any unencrypted network traffic. Your voice assistant could use machine learning to decide when yelling in a household crosses the line into abuse. Your printer could analyze the documents and photos you send it.
• Reality 2.0 Episode 49: Parler, Ownership, and Open Source — Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, Petros Koutoupis, and Kyle Rankin talk Parler and platform lock-in, the concept of data, software, and hardware ownership, and the open source social contract.
• Reality 2.0 - Blog - Reality 2.0 Newsletter - November 25, 2020: Owned. — This week’s conversation was rooted in the concept of ownership, including hardware, software, and in the case of platform lock-in, even ownership of ideas. Over the course of nearly an hour, we questioned our ownership of our social media profiles, our photo storage accounts, our MacBooks, and our code.
• Apple Adds a Backdoor to iMessage and iCloud Storage - Schneier on Security — Apple’s announcement that it’s going to start scanning photos for child abuse material is a big deal. (Here are five news stories.) I have been following the details, and discussing it in several different email lists. I don’t have time right now to delve into the details, but wanted to post something.
• Apple Privacy Letter: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology — An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology Security & Privacy Experts, Cryptographers, Researchers, Professors, Legal Experts and Apple Consumers Decry Apple's Planned Move to Undermine User Privacy and End-to-End Encryption

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• Defending Against Spyware Like Pegasus – Purism — What’s particularly scary about spyware in general, and is true for Pegasus as well, is that victims have no indication they’ve been compromised. Due to how locked down the iPhone is from the end user, detecting Pegasus in particular requires expert forensics techniques. This has left many at-risk iPhone users wondering whether they too are compromised and if so, what do they do?
• Here’s how to check your phone for Pegasus spyware using Amnesty’s tool - The Verge — Amnesty International — part of the group that helped break the news of journalists and heads of state being targeted by NSO’s government-grade spyware, Pegasus — has released a tool to check if your phone has been affected. Alongside the tool is a great set of instructions, which should help you through the somewhat technical checking process. Using the tool involves backing up your phone to a separate computer and running a check on that backup. Read on if you’ve been side-eyeing your phone since the news broke and are looking for guidance on using Amnesty’s tool.
• Mobile Verification Toolkit — Mobile Verification Toolkit (MVT) is a tool to facilitate the consensual forensic analysis of Android and iOS devices, for the purpose of identifying traces of compromise.
• The FBI Is Locating Cars By Spying On Their WiFi — The FBI is using a controversial technology traditionally used to locate smartphones as a car tracking surveillance tool that spies on vehicles’ on-board WiFi.
• Catholic priest quits after “anonymized” data revealed alleged use of Grindr | Ars Technica — In what appears to be a first, a public figure has been ousted after de-anonymized mobile phone location data was publicly reported, revealing sensitive and previously private details about his life.
• Secure, Fast & Private Web Browser with Adblocker | Brave Browser — Brave stops online surveillance, loads content faster, and uses 35% less battery.1

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• I’m Not a Reporter. But I’m Verified as One on Twitter | WIRED — I NEVER CALLED myself a journalist until Twitter made me. I’m an attorney, activist, and faculty member, but it was only by using the “journalist” label that I was able to get one of the most coveted assets in social media, the blue “verified” checkmark. My months-long effort to get verified revealed a system that is stacked against grassroots activists, particularly BIPOC communities.
• Twitter verification requirements - how to get the blue check — The blue Verified badge  on Twitter lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic. To receive the blue badge, your account must be authentic, notable, and active.
• Goodbye, Fleets — We built Fleets as a lower-pressure, ephemeral way for people to share their fleeting thoughts. We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter. But, in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped. Because of this, on August 3, Fleets will no longer be available on Twitter.
• Black teen barred from skating rink by inaccurate facial recognition - The Verge — A facial recognition algorithm used by a local roller skating rink in Detroit wouldn’t let teen Lamya Robinson onto the premises, and accused her of previously getting into a fight at the establishment.
• Algorithmic bias - Wikipedia — Algorithmic bias describes systematic and repeatable errors in a computer system that create unfair outcomes, such as privileging one arbitrary group of users over others. Bias can emerge due to many factors, including but not limited to the design of the algorithm or the unintended or unanticipated use or decisions relating to the way data is coded, collected, selected or used to train the algorithm. Algorithmic bias is found across platforms, including but not limited to search engine results and social media platforms, and can have impacts ranging from inadvertent privacy violations to reinforcing social biases of race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. The study of algorithmic bias is most concerned with algorithms that reflect "systematic and unfair" discrimination. This bias has only recently been addressed in legal frameworks, such as the 2018 European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. More comprehensive regulation is needed as emerging technologies become increasingly advanced and opaque.
• Face-Detection Cameras: Glitches Spur Charges of Racism - TIME — When Joz Wang and her brother bought their mom a Nikon Coolpix S630 digital camera for Mother's Day last year, they discovered what seemed to be a malfunction. Every time they took a portrait of each other smiling, a message flashed across the screen asking, "Did someone blink?" No one had. "I thought the camera was broken!" Wang, 33, recalls. But when her brother posed with his eyes open so wide that he looked "bug-eyed," the messages stopped.
• Meet the Censored: Matt Orfalea - by Matt Taibbi - TK News by Matt Taibbi — Yes, the government is helping crack down on text messages and Facebook posts, but not to worry. At least your private thoughts are safe, right? Not so fast, found filmmaker Matt Orfalea
• Texas’ social media censorship bill pushes unconstitutional limits on free speech — Amid ongoing allegations that social media platforms are censoring conservatives, regulating Big Tech has become one of the hottest issues across the country. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has called a special legislative session in part to debate and pass content moderation legislation.
• I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score. Now You Can Get Yours, Too. - The New York Times — Little-known companies are amassing your data — like food orders and Airbnb messages — and selling the analysis to clients. Here’s how to get a copy of what they have on you.

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• humanID | One-Click Anonymous Login — humanID is an anonymous, bot-resistant authentication for safer online communities. Non-profit and open source, the project was started in 2018 by the Foundation for New humanID. With the help of Mozilla and Harvard, we’re on a mission to #FixTheInternet.

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• Apple shouldn't use privacy & security to stave off competition, EU antitrust head warns | AppleInsider — Responding to comments made by Apple CEO Tim Cook in June, European Union competition chief Margrethe Vestager said that Apple shouldn't use privacy and security concerns to stifle competition on the App Store.
• Why Google Can't Bring Itself to Make the Internet Respect Your Privacy | Inc.com — The search giant has delayed the rollout of FLoC, its controversial replacement for third-party cookies, until 2023.
• Real Time Lightning Map :: LightningMaps.org

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• Add Permissions-Policy header to block Google FLoC [#3209628] | Drupal.org — Google is introducing what it calls Federated Learning of Cohorts, which is a way to gather user data without cookies, regardless of whether a website is loading any Google-related trackers. This is enabled starting in Chrome 89, and only in select countries on a trial basis. Although other major browser vendors are likely against this technology and will presumably not be implementing it, given Chrome’s market share this will become a concerning issue, because it largely remove users’ ability to easily opt out of being tracked—particularly true in the case of less-savvy users. See a very informative post by Plausible. Since no one can reasonably expect users to just stop using Chrome, it will be up to responsible developers to block FLoC at the source.
• Amazon is blocking Google's FLoC — and that could seriously weaken the system — Amazon is blocking Google’s controversial cookieless tracking and targeting method.
• Privacy analysis of FLoC — In the current web, trackers (and hence advertisers) associate a cookie with each user. Whenever a user visits a website that has an embedded tracker, the tracker gets the cookie and can thus build up a list of the sites that a user visits. Advertisers can use the information gained from tracking browsing history to target ads that are potentially relevant to a given user’s interests. The obvious problem here is that it involves advertisers learning everywhere you go. 
• Surveillance Self-Defense | Tips, Tools and How-tos for Safer Online Communications — We’re the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an independent non-profit working to protect online privacy for nearly thirty years. This is Surveillance Self-Defense : our expert guide to protecting you and your friends from online spying.
• University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons — The Tradeoff Fallacy - How Marketers Are Misrepresenting American Consumers and Opening Them up to Exploitation
• Reality 2.0 - Blog - Reality 2.0 Newsletter - June 4, 2021: More Tracking Tech and Apple — After a lengthy discussion in Drupal’s core issue queue by some of Katherine’s favorite people, the upcoming release of Drupal 9.2 will officially block Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) by default! Similarly, the WordPress and Joomla communities are taking similar measures. With these platforms representing a huge chunk of websites, this must be quite a blow to Google, enough so that a member of Google Chrome’s developer relations team weighed in on the Drupal issue himself. I hope this news inspires you to run off and build a Drupal site, so I’ll just leave this documentation link here just in case.

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• Remove Personal Info from Google - DeleteMe
• Redact | Mass Delete your Social Media — The only platform that allows you to automatically clean up your old posts from services like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Discord and more all in one place
• DuckDuckGo — Privacy, simplified.

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• Doc Searls Weblog · Apple vs (or plus) Adtech — If you haven’t seen it yet, watch Apple’s Privacy on iPhone | tracked ad. In it a guy named Felix (that’s him, above) goes from a coffee shop to a waiting room somewhere, accumulating a vast herd of hangers-on along the way. The herd represents trackers in his phone, all crowding his personal space while gathering private information about him.
• Apple’s New Privacy Ad Is Absurd. That’s Why It’s So Brilliant — The iPhone maker is taking a much more aggressive stand on whether users should allow tracking. At all.
• How to Find the Mobile Ad ID on Apple and Android Devices? — The mobile advertising ID, also known as a mobile ad ID or a MAID, is a sequence of alphanumeric characters assigned to a mobile phone or tablet by the device’s operating system, either iOS or Android.
• Amazon devices will soon automatically share your Internet with neighbors | Ars Technica — If you use Alexa, Echo, or many other Amazon devices, you have only 10 days until you're opted in to an experiment that leaves your personal privacy and security hanging in the balance.
• How Amazon Sidewalk Works—and Why You May Want to Turn It Off | WIRED — It promises connected convenience. But the ecommerce giant doesn't exactly have an inspiring record when it comes to privacy.

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• Ford Patented In-Car Ads Because We Live In Hell Now — I’m all for innovation in the automotive sector, but there are some technologies I simply cannot abide by, and Ford’s newly-patented billboard detector that can read ads and display them inside your car is exactly one of those technologies.
• Apple forcing developers to ditch unique device IDs | Ars Technica — 2013 article about the origins of Apple's IDFA.
• Proposal: Treat FLoC like a security concern – Make WordPress Core — Why is this bad? As the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains in their post “Google’s FLoC is a terrible idea“, placing people in groups based on their browsing habits is likely to facilitate employment, housing and other types of discrimination, as well as predatory targeting of unsophisticated consumers. This is in addition to the privacy concerns of tracking people and sharing their data, seemingly without informed consent – and making it more difficult for legislators and regulators to protect people.
• Add Permissions-Policy header to block Google FLoC [#3209628] | Drupal.org — Google is introducing what it calls Federated Learning of Cohorts, which is a way to gather user data without cookies, regardless of whether a website is loading any Google-related trackers. This is enabled starting in Chrome 89, and only in select countries on a trial basis. Although other major browser vendors are likely against this technology and will presumably not be implementing it, given Chrome’s market share this will become a concerning issue, because it largely remove users’ ability to easily opt out of being tracked—particularly true in the case of less-savvy users. See a very informative post by Plausible. Since no one can reasonably expect users to just stop using Chrome, it will be up to responsible developers to block FLoC at the source.
• Joomla! and FLoC — Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) proposes a new way for businesses to reach people with relevant content and ads. We explore what this could mean and why we are giving you the choice as to whether to use it or not.

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• I tracked my kid with Apple's Airtags to test its privacy features - CNN — I clipped a keychain with one of Apple's tiny new Bluetooth trackers, AirTags, onto my son's book bag and waved goodbye to him on the school bus. I watched on my iPhone's Find My app as the bus stopped at a light a few blocks down from our street.
• Apple AirTags only partly stop stalking - The Washington Post

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• Signal >> Blog >> Exploiting vulnerabilities in Cellebrite UFED and Physical Analyzer from an app's perspective — Cellebrite makes software to automate physically extracting and indexing data from mobile devices. They exist within the grey – where enterprise branding joins together with the larcenous to be called “digital intelligence.” Their customer list has included authoritarian regimes in Belarus, Russia, Venezuela, and China; death squads in Bangladesh; military juntas in Myanmar; and those seeking to abuse and oppress in Turkey, UAE, and elsewhere. A few months ago, they announced that they added Signal support to their software. Their products have often been linked to the persecution of imprisoned journalists and activists around the world, but less has been written about what their software actually does or how it works. Let’s take a closer look. In particular, their software is often associated with bypassing security, so let’s take some time to examine the security of their own software.
• Australia’s vague anti-encryption law sets a dangerous new precedent - ProtonMail Blog — the Australian government and its Labor partners rammed a shockingly invasive anti-encryption law through Parliament, over the objections of experts, businesses, and civil rights groups.
• Australia's Encryption-Busting Law Could Impact Global Privacy | WIRED — Australia has passed a law that would require companies to weaken their encryption, a move that could reverberate globally.
• P versus NP problem - Wikipedia — The P versus NP problem is a major unsolved problem in computer science. It asks whether every problem whose solution can be quickly verified can also be solved quickly.
• Data Double Dipping: When Companies Mine Paying Customers – Purism — There’s an old snarky saying among privacy advocates: “If you aren’t paying for something, you are the product!” This updated version of “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” arose in the Internet age among the ever-growing list of free services and apps on the Internet funded by collecting and selling your data to advertisers. If large companies like Google and Facebook are any indication, a lot of money can be made with user data and the more data you collect, the more money you can make.
• Eva Galperin: What you need to know about stalkerware | TED Talk — "Full access to a person's phone is the next best thing to full access to a person's mind," says cybersecurity expert Eva Galperin. In an urgent talk, she describes the emerging danger of stalkerware -- software designed to spy on someone by gaining access to their devices without their knowledge -- and calls on antivirus companies to recognize these programs as malicious in order to discourage abusers and protect victims.
• Reality 2.0 Episode 52: Fragmentation and Outrage of the Week — Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Kyle Rankin about fragmentation and software development, the Amazon Halo, and surveilling school children.
• This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends — From New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth, THIS IS HOW THEY TELL ME THE WORLD ENDS is the untold story of the cyber arms trade-the most secretive, invisible, government-backed market on earth-and a terrifying first look at a new kind of global warfare.

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• CCPA opt out, nerd edition — While we figure out how to make general-purpose CCPA opt-outs practical (feel free to set up a time on Calendly if you want to talk with me about Authorized Agent projects), here’s a quick summary of my current CCPA opt-out tools. This is a prototype only, but does work.
• Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) Laws and Regulations | US EPA — The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) is the public law that creates the framework for the proper management of hazardous and non-hazardous solid waste. The law describes the waste management program mandated by Congress that gave EPA authority to develop the RCRA program. The term RCRA is often used interchangeably to refer to the law, regulations and EPA policy and guidance. 
• Resource Conservation and Recovery Act - Wikipedia — The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), enacted in 1976, is the principal federal law in the United States governing the disposal of solid waste and hazardous waste.[1]
• Global Privacy Control — Take Control Of Your Privacy — Online privacy should be accessible to everyone. It starts with a simpler way to exercise your rights.
• CCPA guidance for authorized agents — The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (“CCPA”) creates a variety of privacy rights for California consumers. Microsoft makes it easy for consumers to exercise their rights, including the rights, via a verifiable request, that we (i) disclose and access what personal data we collect, use, disclose, and sell and (ii) delete the consumer’s personal data. Per the CCPA, consumers may exercise their rights through an authorized agent. This guidance is intended for authorized agents acting on behalf of a consumer looking to exercise the above CCPA rights.
• The State of Authorized Agent Opt Outs Under the California Consumer Privacy Act (PDF)
• Consumer Reports Model State Privacy Act — Though consumers have a fundamental right to privacy, there is no comprehensive federal privacy law granting them baseline privacy and security protections. Instead of leaving it to consumers to “opt-in” or “opt-out,” this bill protects consumer privacy by prohibiting companies from engaging in privacy-invasive behaviors. 

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• Starlink: SpaceX's satellite internet project | Space — Starlink is the name of a satellite network that the private spaceflight company SpaceX is developing to provide low-cost internet to remote locations. While SpaceX eventually hopes to have as many as 12,000 satellites in this so-called megaconstellation, the size and scale of the project have flustered astronomers and amateur skywatchers, who fear that the bright, orbiting objects will interfere with observations of the universe.
• Heavens-Above — Awesome site for space nerds.
• How Starlink Is About To Disrupt The Telecommunications Sector — If the logo doesn’t ring a bell, put it on your radar. Starlink, the satellite telecommunications company created by Elon Musk leveraging SpaceX’s rocket development, continues to complete milestones on schedule and announces that it will offer 300Mbps connectivity services with an approximate latency of 20ms by the end of this year. In the United States, where the company has garnered a favorable deal that includes $900 million in funding under FCC programs aimed at providing connectivity to rural areas, that’s a very competitive offer, so much so that many ISPs have protested to the FCC claiming that the technology used by the company is experimental, not sufficiently tested, and will cause problems in the future. If you don’t spot that as a clear sign of disruption, you haven’t seen enough disruptions yet. 
• Introducing State Partitioning - Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog — State Partitioning is the technical term for a new privacy feature in Firefox called Total Cookie Protection, which will be available in ETP Strict Mode in Firefox 86. This article shows how State Partitioning works inside of Firefox and explains what developers of third-party integrations can do to stay compatible with the latest changes.

Show notes:

[02:06]: Twitter outsourcing content moderation with expirimental Birdwatch feature.

[13:32]: Signal's founder has pushed back against internal efforts to have some sort of mechanism to prevent misuse of the platform.

[26:25]: Redditors take on hedge funds and the stock market with Game Stop and others. Robinhood and Discord respond.

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• Twitter introduces 'Birdwatch' to fight misinformation | Engadget — “Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context,” Twitter writes in a blog post. “We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable.”
• Warning Signal: the messaging app’s new features are causing internal turmoil - The Verge — Employees worry that, should Signal fail to build policies and enforcement mechanisms to identify and remove bad actors, the fallout could bring more negative attention to encryption technologies from regulators at a time when their existence is threatened around the world.
• The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook - WSJ — Deciding what does and doesn’t belong online is one of the fastest-growing jobs in the technology world—and perhaps the most grueling. The equivalent of 65 years of video are uploaded to YouTube each day. Facebook receives more than a million user reports of potentially objectionable content a day.
• Mind Your Own Business! - YouTube — Gladys Kravitz.
• Amazon.com: Shephard's Drone: A Novel (9780960051908): Frischmann, Brett: Books
• Amazon.com: The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (9781984897787): Hyde, Lewis: Books
• Amazon.com: COMMON AS AIR (9780374532796): Hyde, Lewis: Books
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power: Zuboff, Shoshana: 9781610395694: Amazon.com: Books
• Opinion | Facebook and the Surveillance Society: The Other Coup - The New York Times — We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.
• GameStop, Reddit and Robinhood: A full recap of the historic retail trading mania on Wall Street — GameStop mania took Wall Street by storm, thanks to a legion of retail traders glued to the WallStreetBets message board on Reddit.
• Discord bans the r/WallStreetBets server, but new ones have sprung to life - The Verge — Discord says it did not ban the WallStreetBets server for financial fraud — rather, it was banned because it continued to allow “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.” The Verge gained access to the server and can confirm the claim that users of the channel were spamming hateful language, including racial slurs.

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• Evan Greer (@evan_greer) / Twitter
• Fight for the Future — We are a group of artists, engineers, activists, and technologists who have been behind the largest online protests in human history, channeling Internet outrage into political power to win public interest victories previously thought to be impossible.

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Show notes:

Katherine (41s):
The concept of fragmentation as it applies to software development.

Kyle (1m 44s):
[I]f you're an application developer today and you're writing a program, you know, 20 years ago, what you had to do is think about, well, do I want my application to run on windows, Mac, or Linux, or what combination of those? And then depending on your decision, you would pick different frameworks, different languages, maybe, and each individual platform you had, the support basically made you had the fork, the code in many cases.

Kyle (2m 31s):
I mean, depending on what, what graphical libraries you picked, but these days it's way worse. Because with mobile devices, you've added a couple of extra platforms on top of those three. So now it's not just windows, Mac, or Linux, it's also Android or iOS. And so, and then, so what ends up happening is the developer will say, well, do I want to make a mobile application or do I want to make a desktop application? And then they'll start with that standpoint. And they, or they may say, well, I want to do all of the above, but then there's a minimum of like five different platforms. They have to support them. And all of them are often in different languages, you know, different development, methodologies, different frameworks, different tools to test and build all of that stuff.

Kyle (3m 16s):
[W]e decided, well, it makes the most sense to avoid fragmentation and have the same operating system that our laptop runs just instead of sort of making an application, porting an application to the phone, let's just make the existing Linux desktop ecosystem as a whole portable to a small screen

Katherine (10m 1s):
[W]hat's happening now with the new M1 processor the whole idea is that any Mac app can now be, or rather the other way around, any iOS app is now a desktop app, which is interesting because it's sort of the opposite reality.

Katherine (16m 41s):
[I]t's almost ridiculous to me at this point that I can't just plug in my, if, if I were to have a fancy new iPhone, which I don't, but if I did, why shouldn't I just be able to plug it in? You know, it's a powerful device, it has a massive amount of computing power

Kyle (19m 43s):
If at all, you know, depending on the provider, Google has had huge problems with, you know, all of these third parties that create custom versions of Android and they never update them. So they've had to go through all of these engineering efforts to try to avoid just the fragmentation in the Android market, with all of these custom Androids that are out there.

Katherine (31m 28s):
[T]he Amazon halo wearable device because all of the coverage, even, and maybe even, especially in mainstream press outlets has been so bad. I mean, it's, you know, it's not just privacy advocates or, you know, geeks like us who are going really, who thought this was a good idea. The Washington post, which is as they even pointed out owned by Jeff Bezos is just tearing this thing apart.

Doc (31m 60s):
So the headline Amazon's new health band is the most invasive tech we've ever tested. And then the subhead is even better. It says the halo band asks you to strip down and strap on a microphone. So it can make 3d scans of your body fat and monitor your tone of voice after all that. It still isn't very helpful.

Katherine (43m 47s):
An article in Gizmodo about schools, us schools, having access to the same technology that federal law enforcement has for breaking into phones. And they use this technology to conduct warrantless searches of student phones.

Katherine (46m 6s):
[I]t knows everything that you're anxious about. It knows everything that you're curious about. It knows, you know, it knows everything. And yet somehow some school districts and in fact judges, apparently because these, these issues have gone to court, find it perfectly acceptable for a school to be able to hack into somebody’s device. So I, I find this really disturbing. I wonder, Kyle, if you could kind of maybe give us some insight about how, how potentially dangerous this is.

Kyle (46m 40s):
I mean, I've, I see this trend over and over again, where what will happen is someone will come up with a new invasive technology and it's sort of like boiling the frog kind of thing where you could not, you know, throw this against everybody. Like everyone would rise up and say, this is not okay. But so what you do instead is you start with people with the least possible agency. You can normally, if you have some sort of invasive privacy invasive tech, the first step is to either sell it for stopping terrorism or maybe pedophiles. And then after, after you get sort of a proof of concept there, then you have to expand. If you're selling a product, you need to expand your user base.

Doc (54m 21s):
Yeah. The weird thing for me is that almost nobody's worked on starting with giving us agency, you know, I mean, we should be able to say, here's privacy. Here's, here's what I've got. You can't see anything. You're not seeing anything we're doing.

Doc (57m 34s):
That's my message to all of you. We can't do that. And we need to be able to do that, that's why my preference would be for the default to be, you have to default to, I'm not collecting any of your data. Your data is yours. I'm not allowed to do it. I'm only allowed to do it. If you expressly give me informed consent to do it. And then at that point I will do it, but you, but, but if I, if you do nothing, then I can't do it. I can't take any of your data. It's yours. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's one of the more quoted things that I've written in the last few years.

Katherine (58m 58s):
But I kind of feel like we are in the wild West. That's how I feel like when digitally, when we start talking about things like, you know, schools being allowed to quite literally digitally strip search your children, you know, people should be outraged by that

Kyle (59m 38s):
Well, but that's also because your average parent given the preference, and many of them already do put spyware on their children's phones to track their children, right. Because they want to be able to see everything that their kid did.

Kyle (1h 0m 18s):
I keep, I keep saying, it's not that people don't care about privacy, as much as they don't understand the implications of what they're giving up, you know? And so I, you know, a lot of parents don't necessarily understand the implications of, of what it normalizes.

Special Guest: Kyle Rankin.

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Links:

• Preventing Fragmentation with the Librem 5 – Purism — Fragmentation is a massive problem in computer software development that has only gotten worse with mobile computers. By fragmentation I’m referring to incompatible platforms that require a developer to maintain separate forks of their code. Twenty years ago if you wanted to write software for an end user, you had to decide whether to support Windows, Macs or Linux. Each of those platforms required you to build, test, and maintain different forks of your software.
• Amazon’s Halo Band wearable tracks your voice and body fat, but isn’t helpful - The Washington Post — The Halo Band asks you to strip down and strap on a microphone so that it can make 3-D scans of your body fat and monitor your tone of voice. After all that, it still isn’t very helpful.
• U.S. Schools Are Buying Cellebrite Phone-Hacking Tech — While companies like Cellebrite have partnered with federal and local police for years, that the controversial equipment is also available for school district employees to search students’ personal devices has gone relatively unnoticed—and serves as a frightening reminder of how technology originally developed for use by the military or intelligence services, ranging from blast-armored trucks designed for use in war zones to invasive surveillance tools, keeps trickling down to domestic police and even the institutions where our kids go to learn.

Show Notes:

00:02:17 Page Xray and Blacklight
00:07:27 While you interact with one web page, who else is harvesting your information?
00:14:13 Listen to which tracker Katherine used for about 10 minute, and promptly removed!
00:15:57 What is malvertising
00:18:55 What about the browser extension privacy trackers?
00:25:54 Who should use PageXray?
00:32:30 What are some good consumer tools?
00:42:26 What is "fingerprinting" and how does a site "fingerprint" you?
00:48:21 Covering your "privates"
00:51:32 Marketers are chasing the shiny object called Digital
00:53:26 what is the ratio of registered domains vs websites vs humans visitors vs real ad impressions?

Special Guest: Dr. Augustine Fou.

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Links:

• Episode 13: Surveillance Marketing — Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Dr. Augustine Fou about surveillance marketing, ad tech, and privacy.
• Page X-Ray Data Privacy Analysis Featured in Episode 43 — A brief overview of Page X-Ray.
• FouAnalytics - Ads By Domain — Privacy Analytics tool from Dr. Augustine Fou.
• Blacklight – The Markup — A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector
• Privacy Badger — Privacy extension from the EFF.
• Ghostery: Online Privacy Made Easy — Ghostery demystifies online privacy by exposing the forces that lurk behind your screen and enabling you to block them.
• Secure, Fast & Private Web Browser with Adblocker | Brave Browser — The Brave browser.

For more about Dave's projects, keep an eye on:
https://vi.rs
https://virs-group.slack.com
https://medium.com/@dwh_3562

Show notes:

00:01:27 The importance of individual sovereignty, autonomy, independence, liberty etc.
00:03:50 Linus doesn't take s#!t off of anybody...
00:06:15 The legislative power shifts
00:11:30 Wizards vs Moguls vs Geeks, who leads the way?!
00:15:03 "Garage Engineering", it's a thing...
00:20:00 Dave's take on passion vs. paycheck
00:21:41 Passion projects
00:31:03 Challenging the power structure, divorcing traffic from it's originators and recipients
00:33:21 Going into cryptography
00:36:54 Social rituals that Facebook has totally F'd up
00:41:32 "Second Life" 'nuff said...
00:43:30 So what are we going to do with that information???
00:46:49 Dave's new project and stepping out of the shadows
00:54:10 The motto is "Respectful Technology"
00:56:20 What is the harm in non-user sovereign systems
(01:06:46 The Jocks vs Nerds paradigm)
01:07:25 The "Earn-it" act

Special Guest: Dave Huseby.

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Show notes:

0:00:25: Contact tracing apps
0:02:31: Contract tracing false positive and false negative
0:04:24: Contract tracing apps adoption rate
0:07:36: Katherine agrees apps should build more trust
0:11:44: The 2nd anniversary of the GDPR
0:13:31: Bruce talks about his RSA presentation about the notion of hacking
0:15:26: Katherine dove tails hacking into contact tracing
0:18:24: Hacking discipline around SSI (Self Sovereign Identity)
0:19:08: Should we need proof of immunity or carry an immunization card/immunity passport?
0:23:28: Do the people we entrust to regulate our tech even understand it?
0:29:10: Should we give the FBI digital forensic capabilities?
0:32:24: Katherine wonders if our cellphones are at all secure
0:36:33: Doc ponders the future of travel
0:38:18: Bruce predicts we're in the midst of a major system reset
0:46:49: The political divide between the way people digest information
0:49:36: Bruce: "Truth wins because it actually conforms to reality."

Links:
Bruce Schneier on COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps
Contact-tracing apps are not a solution to the COVID-19 crisis

Special Guest: Bruce Schneier.

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Show notes:

0:00:54: Introduction to a couple of tools

0:02:04: Doc's take on Zoom.

0:05:13: A lot of what we do online is not especially private.

0:06:33: Apple and Google and contact tracing.

0:09:00: Healthcare is a B2B insurance business.

0:11:15: Health information and advertising.

0:13:04: Convenience versus privacy.

0:13:26: SaaS products and convenience, Facebook, Apple. Concerns of the individual versus the concerns of the many.

0:15:46: The inevitable part where we go dark.

0:16:02: We're in the weirdest moment in modern civilization.

0:20:36: Radio, Internet, Television and Trump.

0:22:21: Bill Gates.

0:23:45: SaaS collaboration tools and privacy.

0:27:20: Who can you trust with your data, especially during a pandemic among questionable actors.

0:28:00: Mattermost

0:30:23: NextCloud

0:31:07: Jitsi

0:33:19: Cost differences.

0:38:31: ideology and dogmas way easier than real life, right?

0:39:23: Edward Snowden and Signal.

0:40:35: Signal vs. What's App.

0:41:20: Self-hosting and technical skill. Privacy trade-offs.

0:44:17: Apple watch.

0:45:12: Pragmatism.

0:46:58: Zoom and security scrutiny.

0:50:54: Facebook, privacy, and politics.

0:55:29: Facebook vs. Google.

0:56:36: Zoom scrutiny and appeal.

1:02:11: Conferences, air travel, climate change.

1:08:07: COVID innovation.

1:11:23: Stay home, be safe, deploy Mattermost and wash your hands.

Special Guest: Robert Douglass.

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Show notes:

0:04:08: How is this situation a little bit different from what we're used to?

0:04:36: E-learning

0:06:00: Shawn on e-learning and computer-based training.

0:08:09: Kids without computer or internet access.

0:11:31: What is lockdown? What’s on the horizon?

0:14:14: Remote work, how to do it well.

0:16:22: What can distributed open source software teams teach everyone?

0:17:35: This is not normal right now. Don’t judge remote work.

0:18:56: The chicken suppression system's working.

0:25:12: Asynchronous communication, time zones.

0:27:19: This plague may be elevating the Big Bad companies.

0:30:21: Ethical and privacy concerns.

0:35:20: Should harvested data be used to save lives?

0:37:29: Apple privacy

0:37:49: Fourth amendment concerns.

0:39:11 Facial recognition.

0:43:12 Law enforcement and Clearview AI.

0:44:12: What is the step too far? What are the unintended consequences?

0:44:44: Local vs. large scale communication.

0:47:03: Shawn is hopeful.

0:49:05: Innovation in the works.

0:52:45: Return to normal?

0:55:52: Small business.

0:57:16: Shawn’s bidet.

0:57:34: What happens to conferences?

1:02:33 DrupalCon and #vanlife.

1:07:58 Shawn: Wash your hands.

Special Guests: Kyle Rankin, Petros Koutoupis, and Shawn Powers.

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Special Guest: Kyle Rankin.

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Special Guest: Gabriel Weinberg.

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Links mentioned:

https://twitter.com/torproject/status/1049370119338713088

http://customercommons.org/

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Support Reality 2.0