#Protect Data

[jeremyfuscaldo]

Hey everyone,

Today is the last day to possibly opt out of Meta (Facebook/Instagram)'s AI program and there is a way to opt out if you are trying to protect your data privacy.

Please do what you can to save your art and data before it's too late. Edit/Update: It may not be applicable to the US because people living in Europe have the direct ability to opt out-- but US citizens can still submit the form for consideration.

[8pxl]

PSA: Tumblr/Wordpress is preparing to start selling our user data to Midjourney and OpenAI.

you have to MANUALLY opt out of it as well.

to opt out on desktop, click your blog ➡️ blog settings ➡️ scroll til you see visibility options and it’ll be the last option to toggle.

to opt out on mobile, click your blog ➡️ scroll then click visibility ➡️ toggle opt out option.

if you’ve already opted out of showing up in google searches, it’s preselected for you. if you don’t have the option available, update your app or close your browser/refresh a few times. important to note you also have to opt out for each blog you own separately, so if you’d like to prevent AI scraping your blog i’d really recommend taking the time to opt out. (source)

[ayeforscotland]

If you have ever used 23andMe, they have now filed for bankruptcy and will be asset stripped. Delete your account information as soon as possible.

[news4nose]

When you sell or pass on your computer without properly erasing everything, there’s a risk that tech-savvy people could get your data back, which could lead to problems like hacking or data theft. So, it’s crucial to make sure your data is completely gone by performing factory reset to avoid any costly mistakes. Read More

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ad-tech targeting is an existential threat

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me TORONTO on SUNDAY (Feb 23) at Another Story Books, and in NYC on WEDNESDAY (26 Feb) with JOHN HODGMAN. More tour dates here.

The commercial surveillance industry is almost totally unregulated. Data brokers, ad-tech, and everyone in between – they harvest, store, analyze, sell and rent every intimate, sensitive, potentially compromising fact about your life.

Late last year, I testified at a Consumer Finance Protection Bureau hearing about a proposed new rule to kill off data brokers, who are the lynchpin of the industry:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

The other witnesses were fascinating – and chilling, There was a lawyer from the AARP who explained how data-brokers would let you target ads to categories like "seniors with dementia." Then there was someone from the Pentagon, discussing how anyone could do an ad-buy targeting "people enlisted in the armed forces who have gambling problems." Sure, I thought, and you don't even need these explicit categories: if you served an ad to "people 25-40 with Ivy League/Big Ten law or political science degrees within 5 miles of Congress," you could serve an ad with a malicious payload to every Congressional staffer.

Now, that's just the data brokers. The real action is in ad-tech, a sector dominated by two giant companies, Meta and Google. These companies claim that they are better than the unregulated data-broker cowboys at the bottom of the food-chain. They say they're responsible wielders of unregulated monopoly surveillance power. Reader, they are not.

Meta has been repeatedly caught offering ad-targeting like "depressed teenagers" (great for your next incel recruiting drive):

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/01/105987/is-facebook-targeting-ads-at-sad-teens/

And Google? They just keep on getting caught with both hands in the creepy commercial surveillance cookie-jar. Today, Wired's Dell Cameron and Dhruv Mehrotra report on a way to use Google to target people with chronic illnesses, people in financial distress, and national security "decision makers":

https://www.wired.com/story/google-dv360-banned-audience-segments-national-security/

Google doesn't offer these categories itself, they just allow data-brokers to assemble them and offer them for sale via Google. Just as it's possible to generate a target of "Congressional staffers" by using location and education data, it's possible to target people with chronic illnesses based on things like whether they regularly travel to clinics that treat HIV, asthma, chronic pain, etc.

Google claims that this violates their policies, and that they have best-of-breed technical measures to prevent this from happening, but when Wired asked how this data-broker was able to sell these audiences – including people in menopause, or with "chronic pain, fibromyalgia, psoriasis, arthritis, high cholesterol, and hypertension" – Google did not reply.

The data broker in the report also sold access to people based on which medications they took (including Ambien), people who abuse opioids or are recovering from opioid addiction, people with endocrine disorders, and "contractors with access to restricted US defense-related technologies."

It's easy to see how these categories could enable blackmail, spear-phishing, scams, malvertising, and many other crimes that threaten individuals, groups, and the nation as a whole. The US Office of Naval Intelligence has already published details of how "anonymous" people targeted by ads can be identified:

https://www.odni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ODNI-Declassified-Report-on-CAI-January2022.pdf

The most amazing part is how the 33,000 targeting segments came to public light: an activist just pretended to be an ad buyer, and the data-broker sent him the whole package, no questions asked. Johnny Ryan is a brilliant Irish privacy activist with the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. He created a fake data analytics website for a company that wasn't registered anywhere, then sent out a sales query to a brokerage (the brokerage isn't identified in the piece, to prevent bad actors from using it to attack targeted categories of people).

Foreign states, including China – a favorite boogeyman of the US national security establishment – can buy Google's data and target users based on Google ad-tech stack. In the past, Chinese spies have used malvertising – serving targeted ads loaded with malware – to attack their adversaries. Chinese firms spend billions every year to target ads to Americans:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/business/google-meta-temu-shein.html

Google and Meta have no meaningful checks to prevent anyone from establishing a shell company that buys and targets ads with their services, and the data-brokers that feed into those services are even less well-protected against fraud and other malicious act.

All of this is only possible because Congress has failed to act on privacy since 1988. That's the year that Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you have at home. That's also the last time Congress passed a federal consumer privacy law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

The legislative history of the VPPA is telling: it was passed after a newspaper published the leaked video-rental history of a far-right judge named Robert Bork, whom Reagan hoped to elevate to the Supreme Court. Bork failed his Senate confirmation hearings, but not because of his video rentals (he actually had pretty good taste in movies). Rather, it was because he was a Nixonite criminal and virulent loudmouth racist whose record was strewn with the most disgusting nonsense imaginable).

But the leak of Bork's video-rental history gave Congress the cold grue. His video rental history wasn't embarrassing, but it sure seemed like Congress had some stuff in its video-rental records that they didn't want voters finding out about. They beat all land-speed records in making it a crime to tell anyone what kind of movies they (and we) were watching.

And that was it. For 37 years, Congress has completely failed to pass another consumer privacy law. Which is how we got here – to this moment where you can target ads to suicidal teens, gambling addicted soldiers in Minuteman silos, grannies with Alzheimer's, and every Congressional staffer on the Hill.

Some people think the problem with mass surveillance is a kind of machine-driven, automated mind-control ray. They believe the self-aggrandizing claims of tech bros to have finally perfected the elusive mind-control ray, using big data and machine learning.

But you don't need to accept these outlandish claims – which come from Big Tech's sales literature, wherein they boast to potential advertisers that surveillance ads are devastatingly effective – to understand how and why this is harmful. If you're struggling with opioid addiction and I target an ad to you for a fake cure or rehab center, I haven't brainwashed you – I've just tricked you. We don't have to believe in mind-control to believe that targeted lies can cause unlimited harms.

And those harms are indeed grave. Stein's Law predicts that "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Congress's failure on privacy has put us all at risk – including Congress. It's only a matter of time until the commercial surveillance industry is responsible for a massive leak, targeted phishing campaign, or a ghastly national security incident involving Congress. Perhaps then we will get action.

In the meantime, the coalition of people whose problems can be blamed on the failure to update privacy law continues to grow. That coalition includes protesters whose identities were served up to cops, teenagers who were tracked to out-of-state abortion clinics, people of color who were discriminated against in hiring and lending, and anyone who's been harassed with deepfake porn:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/20/privacy-first-second-third/#malvertising

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[emacrow]

Jolly stringbean.

Babs was sitting at her desk in the library, glaring holes into the obviously hiding in disguised Tim.

Her friendly smile could hide the twitching lip as she checked out books for the few people in line. Ignoring the constant buzzing coming from the BatChat.

Bruce and the Robins had let this lie down after 3 weeks, which was a clear point that she knew they feared her, but it seemed Tim didn't get the memo.

Reminder note to replace his yearly concentrated espresso coffee supplies with decaf, and uploads his embarrassing toddler videos in him in a ducky outfit singing the duck song on the media.

Thankfully, Danny kept her wedding ring translucent, considering she was pretty sure Isabelle would try to chew on it again after she left it on her nightstand last time.

A different chime buzz on her phone as she flick her gaze at it, the message comes from Jolly StringBean💚 with a gif pfp of a tall elderitch sleeping, very inhumane impossible position on the kid's wardrobe after Isabella got sick that one time, only for his long ears to ping upwards startle with his glowing green eyes flashing the screen, white hair expanding to reveal camouflage fake hundreds of glowing green eyes like a peacock, tripping and falling off where he was standing as she had accidentally startled him awake in that moment.

She glances back at tim, who at the time was being distracted by a book before looking into the chat real quick.

Jolly StringBean💚: Dante and Isabella figured out the juice was on the top shelf of the fridge and tried to get it out, only to fail again.

Danny sent a few pics of 3 year old Dante and Isabella trying to sneak into the fridge. Isabella determined face while Dante looked around, obviously searching for danny, scratching his split white and black curly hair a bit.

The second one is Isabella standing on Dante crouching as she tries to pull the tropical punch out of the fridge after they open it.

The third Pic was Isabella falling backward due to the weight of the juice container being very heavy, her face completely surprised and gobsmacked.

Fourth pic was Dante sobbing on the floor, his tiny hands rubbing his eyes with tropical punch spilled all over the floor and Isabella sucking onto her hand, both of them soaked in fruit juice with the broken fruit punch container between them on the floor, in front of the fridge.

Along with the last Pic of Isabella taking a bath, Dante's puffy red eyes as he nibble on a blob ghost marshmallow already in a fluffy bunny towel, Isabella smacking the tiny green glowing ship on duplicated danny's obviously screaming as she didn't want to leave the bubble bath.

Babs's eyes soften in amusement before immediately blanking her phone to off upon seeing Tim at the front of her desk.

"Are you checking out these books, Tim?" Babs said with a polite smile planted on her face as she scanned the books.

"Who was that guy's voice on your com? Are you dating again? What if he is a-

"Tim, I have your ducky video on speed dial to be sent to the media. Do you really want to test me in public?" Babs comeback with a bright smiling that sent shiver down Tim's spine.

"...."

"My thoughts exactly, now your book is due next Saturday, don't be late again." Babs said, putting in the due date in the book's folder. Tim's eyes narrowed as she knew this wasn't over by far.

Babs watched and waited until Tim left the building completely before wheeling over to where he was spying on her, checking every shelf and book using her extender stick to find 5 mini batspy bots cameras planted.

This noisy litt-.. Babs took a deep breath as Frostbite told her not to get too angry in her state as she disabled the batspy bots.

She can't wait to get home and be a potato on the couch watching Danny cook. It is spaghetti and fudge brownie night.

Part 1 here <-

[would-you-punt-them]

Websites that demand you give them extremely private information to "verify your age"

[kimmytsu]

squish that owl something wholesome to start the year 🥹

[drachenmagier]

For all the people who can't use Glaze on their own computer and have not yet gotten a hold of a WebGlaze Invite, Cara has Glaze integrated into their platform. :)

Not only that, but cara uses Hive to detect and remove A/I regurgitated images. Finally a use for A/I I can fully support! <3

Always remember kids: support those people who support you. Don't waste time trying to please those who care not about your happiness.

Glaze and Nightshade everything.

https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/

https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/

[bookshop]

reminder not to do what i almost did just now and tell tumblr what your high school mascot is/was just because someone made a fun poll about it, because that's a SECURITY QUESTION ON A BUNCH OF YOUR PASSWORD-PROTECTED PLATFORMS

[lethality-of-dual-strike]

"I would hug you, but I do not have human arms or warmth."

[barksbog]

Salamandra s. salamandra - Dunkelsteinerwald NÖ Austria

we saw three!! different fire salamanders on our morning walk

[bittercafanddatapads]

Marshall Commander Fox is scarcely seen without his iconic helmet, even within the confines of the Coruscant guards headquarters. The freshest of shinies usually don’t see his face until a few rotations into their deployment, even then usually in private moments and passing chances. The very rare occasion Fox eats with his corries in the mess hall (the times he actually has time to), glances of Fox in the medical bay being treated after a sideways operation (only after everyone else has been cared for by his firm insistence,) the training assessments he’s able to schedule and be apart of and participate in (swift healing to the pride of cocky shinies he calls to the sparring mat.)

Rather, it’s not impossible that he’s most often unhelmed in the situations of senate view.

Talking down antsy senators is one thing, and there’s numerous reasons why Fox’s number one rule for his Corries to follow is to never remove your helmet in senate view. The ability to decorate yourself and make yourself unique is a freedom the Coruscant guard gets to indulge very little in. They can’t decorate their armor for their own safety, and still enabling them the freedom to decorate their bodies and hair Fox is thankful he’s able to allow. But Fox’s mismatched armor isn’t unique to be hypocritical towards his own rules and troopers. It’s to protect them.

When a senator finds yet another fickle complaint about the troopers in red, they can’t discern amongst a selective Trooper to pin the blame. But in the line of white and red, Fox’s red and white armor catches their eye. There’s someone they can funnel their frustrations towards. Fox’s scars, hardened eyes, and graying hairs is the only face they’ve seen helmetless, the face they think about when building their ire.

[info-data]

The way Data treats Spot is such a big proof of how much he feels... human feelings. And how he understands boundaries etc. Cats just *know* and Spot is treated so so well

Data treats his cat better than some humans treat theirs seriously