#at least duckduckgo came through for me

[haleviyah]

A Hispanic/ Latino Perspective: Border Clarification

This is one of the rare times I’m going to get somewhat political here, but these comments spread by the media are hitting to way close to home for me, so here I go.

Before you pounce on me, let me explain this: I am a moderate. I favor no sides, I don’t treat people by their titles but rather I prefer to judge by character even though I am not the best at it, admittedly. I favour and respect those who keep their word and own their mistakes. In short, if you do what you promise to do, you have my approval whereas if not, you will bear the brunt of my blunt rebukes and sarcastic remarks.

I am also from South Texas, specifically the Rio Grande Valley, and am a descendent of two humble Mexican families who since the Mexican Border War have made Texas their great escape and home.

Bit of a geographical reference, if you don’t know here where the Rio Grande Valley is. Look at the state of Texas, there is a bulge of state going in each direction that makes it look like a fat, lower-case ”t” : El Paso is the most West of the state, the Panhandle (Amarillo) the Northmost, Texarkana the most Eastward followed by Houston, and WAAAAAAY at the bottom is Brownsville and the Southernmost tip of Texas.

And for those of you too lazy to Google or "DuckDuckGo" the map yourself I've attached it:

The four counties: Hidalgo, Cameron, Starr and Willacy county make up the Rio Grande Valley. This is the region I grew up, the place where I experienced the best of a community and the worst of politics and failed promises.

For a bit of background: I have a parent working on the Border and they have been for many years (since I was a kid). Pretty much worked from a security officer to trooper within the span of a decade which is quite impressive and rare considering they never took bribes or anything to get where they were currently. They have told me off and on what their job is like. It’s crazy and boring some days, but also they have admitted somethings that may be fascinating. One of which is, yes, they do own horses and the reason why is so the Troopers can maneuver around tough terrain vehicles cannot go through (such as high water or narrow foot paths in brush). HOWEVER, they DO NOT OWN WHIPS. They don’t even own lassos, according to my Border Agent parent.

The only weapons agents on horse back have is a Glock, ammo, a taser, cuffs, and sometimes shot guns (but they prefer to carry light for the horses and themselves to be more flexible). They mainly carry items that would slow a person down or prevent them from hurting other people, officer or civilian; not for killing. So a whip is absolutely redundant or even absurd to have.

Those long ropes the Troopers are holding are called reins, and they are designed for steering a horse (horses cannot move opposite of the direction of their head; where their head is pointed they move in that direction). They are not made for whipping people, but rather made to get the horse’s attention. That’s it.

I took the liberty of highlighting the reins in red for you all as well as their arms and legs in blue and yellow in contrast to the reins and saddle.

It's clear from a Texan's or horse-riders perspective this Trooper almost fell off catching the other fellow and was holding onto the left rein for dear life hence why the horse looked distressed and its cheek was pulled back.

I'm not joking, you fucking try it if you're so damn horse-smart.

Now, let's look at a more relaxed position.

In short, if you haven't ridden a horse, I advise to keep your comments to yourself on this part. I have and it's way harder than it looks (horses can get cocky).

Second thing, the migrants.

Personally, I don’t know why they were so squirrelly that day. Perhaps they were spooked because they’ve never expected horse back riders to show up, maybe they had some bad experiences back home.

I don’t know!

But it’s clear there appears to be a lack of communication. Perhaps it’s the language barrier given that these guys came from Haiti, African countries and Brazil. English they probably know, but they probably don’t speak a lick of Spanish (Which both languages are mandatory for the Border Patrol).

(Again, I don't know...)

So the reasons why they started running circles around the Troopers’ horses is not for me to speculate, it’s not for YOU to defend blindly, nor is it up for the media to interpret and evangelize.

That should be left to the people to explain. No one else.

(Update: September 29th. I received a tip from a source that the Haitian immigrants (mainly) are not running from anything, they aren’t seeking asylum nor were in poverty as the media claims. They have admitted upon interview they were what we consider middle-low class and had no issues finding jobs before they decided to migrate northward. They’re just coming because they were told to come by “you-know-who”… that’s all. I know, I’m taken aback and scratching my head, too… but anyway. I digress, but do take note.)

Now, another bit of feedback I want to share: When it comes to dealing with Troopers (again, must I remind you this is a Border Patrol agent’s kid speaking), big rule:

DO NOT RUN nor MAKE THREATENING MOVEMENTS. Be calm.

It’s a simple rule, if you’re cool with the Troopers they’ll be cool with you. That’s it. Please respectfully keep in mind, these guys are trained to be safe rather than sorry. So patience and understanding with them is a must. Trust me, I’ve met my parent’s co-workers, they may look stoic and scary or condescending, but they can not let personal emotions interfere their work otherwise they risk safety.

They’re not “paranoid” or “harsh” they just have a job they cannot afford to fuck up otherwise the whole region is FUCKED. They’re the front line of defense, and do keep that in mind.

(Another footnote: I have seen Border Patrol offices, and without giving away how they function it’s not like CIA or Langley level of clean or fancy, so don’t think their offices are high tech and have marble floors with comfy lounges that cost a lot of money. Upon first glance you won’t expect the building to be an office. Border Patrol work with what they have available which isn’t a lot thanks to the ’00, ’04, ’08, ’12 and current administrations. That’s all I can give out.)

I’m going to come clean here and say the citizens in the Rio Grande Valley and the rest of Texas DO NOT FEEL SAFE with a border this wide open and no regulation is applied. Especially the Hispanic/Latino communities. So the pressure is on - and I mean REALLY on! Despite these guys working the Border are overwhelmed, they keep those emotions and opinions on lockdown when on the field. Like I said: If they fuck up, the region is fucked.

Bit of a history lesson: the Border issues on the Rio Grande are not new. Matter of factly, this problem has been happening for decades (The popular peak was during the 80s when cocaine was being distributed), but it was more than just cocaine and pot: Kids were going missing, people getting killed, women were used as mules and sold for sex, etc.

If you watched “Narcos” or “Sicario” you have a brief, dramatized taste of how the cartels function and what life is like for us Latinos. However, coming from someone who grew up there, the parts of watching your back, the abductions and even the gruesome murders are legit. To this day I remember seeing local news coverage (not CNN or MSNBC, our own stations down in the McAllen/Brownsville area) of beheadings, child murders and bodies being found in pieces… It’s something I hope my children won’t have to grow up hearing almost weekly like I did. Now it’s daily… and no one cares. And that hurts.

In the grand scheme of things, at least know this: South Texas has been part of the Cartel battle grounds and it’s obvious we’ve seen shit. Constantly being ignored is the payment we get for being front lines in the Drug War. So don’t blame us for being jumpy, or skeptical, nor even try convince us that the current surplus of immigrants is a good thing.

You can’t argue with our own experiences and history. The way things work down here is simple: You fight along side us, we fight along side you.

It’s called building trust, practicing faith. But we’ve been forgotten and lied to too many times by celebrities and politicians and social movements alike. And those who actually were going to help us are either shut down or unfortunately killed.

We just can’t trust anyone anymore. We are resorting to fending for ourselves basically, speaking up for ourselves… and so far it’s making progress in the mean time.

This level of “doing things on your own” bleeds into why our Troopers are trained they way they are trained - to expect the worst case scenario. To prepare themselves for the corpses, when a criminal pounces, the drugs being hid, for when they find a child with an adult they don’t know, or even a woman who was violated. They just genuinely don’t want to take chances and you just read why. Even my in-laws up in the Northern Midwest are disturbed.

So, considering the case of what happened a few days ago in Del Rio, Texas (as of writing this on September 25th 2021): If you run from a Trooper the first thing they are going to think is either two things:

You did something bad upon coming in to the country or

You don’t want your former government to find you because you did crimes in your home country or the country you were hiding in.

This is protocol, not biased opinions.

If, however, a Trooper commits any form of irresponsibility (such as abusing their power, unreasonable search and seizures etc.) it’s “kiss your badge good-bye” and DEMOTED or FIRED. The stakes of keeping your job in the Border Patrol are HIGH, so they are trained not to act out of line. Even a minor slip up in paper work from being fatigued gets you in SEVERE trouble with the Higher Ups and the County (Yes, that does happen and has happened). But you have to KNOW Border Patrol standards before you accuse them of anything.

With that being said, what’s floating around is not a constructive argument; it’s a distraction. How the public is demanding the trooper in the photo to be fired, tells us Latinos loud and clear that - once again - no one cares about our livelihood; no one is willing to brave enough to face the real hell going on. We are ignored or low-key demonized for simply defending ourselves.

(Now, you guys are seeing why I relate to my Jewish husband and the Israeli’ citizens - Arab and Jew - more; we’re pretty much in the same boat in the case of being ignored. But I digress.)

Before I come to a conclusion, here are other demographic facts to keep in mind that way it’ll help draw conclusions:

86.6% of the Border Patrol is HISPANIC/LATINO in the State of Texas alone.

A majority of children stolen from their families or molested are HISPANIC/LATINO.

A majority of the women violated immigrants on the border are mainly HISPANIC/LATINO.

Latin America collectively (Mexico down to Colombia and Venezuela) has the highest rates of femicide in the world.

So for you or anyone to get angry at Border Patrol agents in an unjust manner, not only are you getting mad at Hispanics and Latinos in UNIFORM for fighting to keep their communities safe, but you are actively contributing to the hell our families go through every day.

When you protest in demand for our cops or even troopers to be defunded, and fired for petty things, YOU are actively contributing to the problem of human trafficking, rape, kidnappings and murder that happens on the border. You are contributing to the Hispanic and Latino communities being dismantled and disintegrated by people who potentially want to kill us or hate us for money’s sake.

Take all of that into consideration before you get angry at anyone here.

In short:

I’ll only consider the accusations if you yourselves have been there and know the burdens we bear.

I’ll only consider your judgement if you genuinely are in law enforcement and know how to ride a horse and try to stop someone from running while riding the beast.

I’ll only consider your feedback if you don’t rely heavily on news like CNN, Telemundo and Tumblr for your information.

Until you grab a gun and fight the cartel yourself, and figure out a way to end this war on human trafficking, don’t come to us Latinos and express that you care and appreciate us.

Because frankly if you GENUINELY did, you’d bring to light what I just said and be slamming the desks at D.C. and DEMANDING the Border to be CLOSED by now.

Regardless of your political and personal beliefs, this is what is REALLY going on, and we’re going to keep fighting. Like the Israeli’s we don’t give a fuck if you hate us. We’re not radicals, we’re not blood-thirsty heathens, we’re not white supremacists (80+% of our population is of Latino Mexican descent) we’re just fed up with running away and being taken advantage of or taken for granted by people who value money over the lives of our neighbors.

If this were California, fine! Rail all you want, cuss us out as much as you want; hold us to those to California standards you keep yourself. But we’re not California.

We’re not D.C., nor Chicago, nor L.A., or New York, Florida, Canada, Mexico or whatever. We are SOUTH TEXAS so treat us as SOUTH TEXAS.

Honor us for who we are and hold us to the standards of what is SOUTH TEXAS, what is The United States Constitution, and the Texas Constitution; nothing more and nothing less. Don’t tear us down for what we’re not nor hold us accountable to an opinion or law we never agreed to nor knew existed.

That’s all I ask: If you’re not willing to honour our community and help us while holding us to our standards on a cultural, State or Federal level, back the fuck off. Generations we’ve dealt with the pressure from both the cartel and corrupt government from both the U.S. and Mexico, and the last thing we need is pampered kids living in the high rises or going to university on loans from school or your parents' paychecks, telling us how to deal with our issues.

You are FAR from a place to tell us how to function and resolve our war.

I’m not trying nor want to start a fight or otherwise, but I’m simply, humbly asking: when did we ever genuinely ask you “social justice advocates” to be our hero?

When did we ever ask you to fight for us or talk about what you think is wrong with us? Because last I checked we don’t want to drag anyone into our battles.

Also, we only know one messiah, but we never asked you to be him nor for him to act like you.

Did you start throwing punches because you wanted to find something to excuse your anger and outbursts, or is your good intentions married with ignorance?

Either case… it’s extremely unhealthy of you, and please just stop before another person gets hurt. We don’t want that. This is no different from the Crusades our ancestors took part in, and it will only end in more carnage than already sown.

So, just please, stop and take a step back for a moment. We don’t need anymore vehement evangelical-like people who just think with their ideals and not take a moment to have a healthy discussion with the One who created us, or let alone divorce their lust for a fight for ten seconds.

To close this off, even though I haven’t been home in a while, I know the spirit and the struggles the Rio Grande Valley goes through. I have met people on the run from the cartel first hand, and I have met people who may have ties with the cartel. I have seen some creepy shit, I have grown frustrated over the Protestant Baptist church doing nothing, and I have even been feeling the pressure my parent goes through with these apathetic riots threatening their job as a Border Patrol agent.

But aside from the pain, I am tremendously blessed that people and my family are still very optimistic despite the craziness and how bleak things are.

The family-oriented culture of the Rio Grande Valley is what is keeping it together… not trends, not clout and neither these guys in D.C. or Hollywood who are playing G-d.

It's the family-oriented connection. Our faith, that's keeping us going.

And even though I may not be the best voice of that region to speak up, I am blessed to have been there and I do plan on coming back soon.

I am planning on giving a more fun journal featuring the culture of the Rio Grande Valley in the future to finish this month off, but for the sake of this “Hispanic Heritage Month” I wanted to share our REAL issues we deal with rather than the made up ones that media likes to mainstream for money and clout.

In a way, I hope this offers clarity and a level of empathy. Again, I’m not sharing this to start fights or get sympathy - we don’t want it. We just want to know if our fights are not ignored, we just want to know we are heard.

That’s all.

[songbirdmusicnc]

What’s in a Song? | What to Look for When Choosing Your Next Solo

It's one thing to be in an undergraduate, post-graduate, or professional setting where often, if your next piece is not outright assigned to you, you have a number of parameters to keep you within a certain genre, a particular period, or even a specific language. I can write volumes about this. Oh, the seemingly endless search for the answer to one of the most dreaded questions I could have been asked during my studies back when I was in my 20's: "What aria have you chosen to sing?" NEWSFLASH: I am not 20. I'm not even 30. So, you can put two and two together, that this was long before the convenience of online searching through the wonders of Google, Bing and DuckDuckGO. In fact, I would have paid small sums of money (on a student budget 😂) to have had access to any of those three tools to find a number of things when I had to pump out arias like bread in bakery. (Umm, not so sure about that analogy. It was the first thing that came to mind, but you get my drift I think. lol)

For one, I would have completely worn out Google Translator. Like, seriously. 😐 I would have had shortcuts on my computer and on the home screen of my flip phone (yes, flip phone...don't judge me 🤨) that took me directly to literal translations of the arias and choruses I had to perform every single week. The inner dialogue during that process alone was like having to report to after-school detention. Agonizing!! 😩 "So, who's word-for-word translation should I trust? So many of these students actually speak these languages, so they're not looking up anything like I have to. Should I just ask them?! Well, no. I can't let them know that I know that I don't know what I'm saying!!😩" Ugh. I don't miss those days at all. But! But, I got through them just fine, thank you Jesus. 😁 Recalling this is actually a bit comical to me now; I remember those days very well. At the same time, there is a lot to be said about the art of searching out the text, finding its meaning, and being faithful to it.

Given my strong background in the Christian Church, I cannot deny the one Bible passage that instantly comes to mind when examining the process of searching out what one is saying in order to partake of its eternal value. I am referring to Acts 17 verse 11, where it says in the NASB translation, "Now these people were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so.." It was the careful examination of what the Bereans were told, not merely how they felt about that message, that not only intrigued them, but moved them to take action. They diligently searched the Scriptures for themselves as a means of verifying that what they felt was not only wonderful, but inherently true. Both were important to them, and therefore Dr. Luke (the Author of the Book of Acts) attributes nobility to them. Wow.

Well, that's great spiritually speaking. But what about being on stage? I mean, why spend a single minute placing an emphasis on foreign language text when more often than not, people in the audience aren't even fluent in? A number of things can be said about that. The most important thing I believe can be said is that taking that extra time pays off later; for the singer must connect with the text if they want to connect with their audience. This brings me to the point of this post, answering the question, what is the absolute most important element I look for in a song: Personally inspiring text.

I'll reiterate. The singer must connect to the text they are singing if they want to connect with their audience. This is true for all performing arts that involve speech or singing. I can't tell you how many interviews I've watched of actors discussing the roles they've played that they didn't necessarily like per sae, but they still got cast in that role, and then delivered an outstanding performance. How? Each and every one of them will tell you that they found a way to personally connect with the script. The words coming out of their mouths. But isn't that absolutely necessary for actors? I mean, an actor who is not believable in what they say is not acting at all. They may as well be Siri or Alexa, rattling off a bunch of pre-programmed data with no life and no feeling. (Sorry to all the artificial-intelligence-loving techies out there...😌) Similarly, a singer needs to find a means to personally identify with some aspect of the role they play or more specifically, the role they sing. The result? Well, when coupled with superb vocal technique, you've got yourself an unforgettable experience for your listeners right there, and not simply a performance.

This stands true no matter the genre. It is, in my humble opinion, the number one most absolutely necessary element for a Christian singer. (That's a lot of positive assertion, but it's true...) If a Christian singer is taking on the enormous task of delivering the timeless message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ--whether they are exhorting and encouraging the audience with an inspiring message of hope and deliverance, or reverently singing praises directly to God Himself--then that singer best be connected in the heart to the words they sing. For, above all else, it is the testimony of an individual's encounter with God that drives home the message and its profundity. People want to feel the power of the lyrics to the classic hymn, "It Is Well". And furthermore, they want to know why when you sing it, tears gush out from your eyes and theirs. Why was your performance of it so moving? Why did they have flashbacks of their early childhood, sitting on a wooden pew, surrounded by family and community? The answer to that has layers of truth, the key one for this particular discussion being your personal experience oozing from your lips as you utter the words, "Christ has regarded my helpless estate and has shed His own blood for my soul." The text. Yes, I get it; the voice, the technique, even the vocal nuances. But more-so than anything, your heart poured out through words, riding on an unshakable melody that calms the troubled mind and offers a moment of comfort to a broken heart--even if only for a moment. That's the effectiveness you want as a singer.

So, getting back to the original question: What should you look for when you are browsing the endless world of YouTube for your next great song? Text that moves you. Text that speaks to you. To YOU...personally. You should find the song that makes you cry and do that one. If there's a song that makes you so happy you feel like doing cartwheels every time you hear it, do that one. (I literally have a song like that. It's called "Everything" performed by TobyMac. 😏😌) But don't just pick the song that has 65 million views! Please, no! Choose what moves you personally and something you can expound on for at least five minutes with no music and no soundtracks. Just you and the text, dissecting it line-by-line, looking for the author's possible intended meanings, and adding your own life story to it, bringing out what it means to you. If you can't do that to the song you're about to start working on, skip it. It won't be worth your effort and it won't be worth the audience's time. They'll know it, too. You'd just be mimicking someone else's art form and they'll say to themselves, "I could have stayed home to listen to this song on loop mode and kept my money to myself." No. Use your heart to search with your eyes and find the song that speaks to you. You can only reach people to the depth at which your own heart is involved in the song.

-Sharine Buchanan

Owner, Songbird Music LLC

Sharine Buchanan is the Owner of Songbird Music LLC. She earned her Bachelor's of Arts degree in Music with High Honors from the University of California at Berkeley, and her Masters of Music degree with an emphasis in Vocal Performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (valedictorian). She lives in North Carolina's Wilkes County, the foothill of the Brushy Mountains, where she relocated in 2013 to join an international ministry, faithfully serving her pastors in music and various aspects of their ministry.

To inquire about studying voice with Sharine, email her at teachme@songbirdmusicnc.com, or call 510-220-4077.

[fruitsvillage]

Could we please get a tutorial on how you did your latest lookbook? Ily 💌💌

ok this is gonna be a long post so under the cut is a general tutorial, i cant go step by step exactly as i did it since i didn’t save the editing file, but here’s at least my basic process i always start out with, plus how to do the silhouette effect i used in the last example!! also i’m not sure about your experience level re: image editing or digital art so i’m going to try and explain it in a way that hopefully anyone can understand but please feel free to come to me with more questions!! Also my screen res is very wide but I wanted to be able to show off where all the menus are, so clicking on the images for full view may be necessary for you.

OK so step 0 is gathering materials- you will need a photo that you want to edit plus an image editing program. You can easily get photo’s from your switch with the switch’s built in image sharing mode, either by posting them to facebook or twittter, and then saving them to your computer from there. Or if you have a computer that can read a microsd card or you have a microsd card reader you can plug into your machine, you can transfer images that way. The only other thing we need is an image editing software. I will be showing you my process by using Clip Studio Paint but you don’t need to use this specific program. I personally recommend using a program that allows for transparency even if the end result isnt transparent because it’s easier to move layers and elements around but that being said you COULD edit images with a program as simple as microsoft paint. There are free more advanced softwares out there like krita, gimp, fire alpaca, etc.

Step 1) While this step isnt necessary, I personally run my images through a filter to reduce the JPEG noise, to smooth out edges and to make the image clearer. You can also use websites or apps that do this for you like waifu2x or yome2x if you want.

Step 2) Isolate your subject from the image’s background. You can either choose to just erase away directly on the image layer or you can use selection tools to choose the parts of the image you are going to separate first. I prefer the selection method because then I can use a masking layer which I’ll get into in the next step. You’ll want to erase or select out everything except for your character (or other photo elements you want included in there too like if you decorate a bit). There are many different ways you can use the selection tools depending on if you want to opt for speed or for the cleanest possible edges. I usually use the magic wand tool to get  a good chunk of my selection and then go in with the selection brush for precision.

Step 2.5) If you have opted to select out your desired subject then the next step is to create a masking layer. The easiest way to do this is to finish your selection and then to hit the Quick Mask button circled in yellow, it is represented in my version of CSP as a rectangle with a dark circle inside. This will automatically create a mask including everything except your selection, making those unselected elements completely transparent. The mask if shown to the immediate right of the affected layer. The black bits are what is hidden and the white is what is shown. You can edit the mask using the brush and eraser tools- the brush will expose hidden bits of the layer and the eraser will hide. You can also create a layer mask by opening the Layer menu at the top of the window > Layer Mask> Create from Selection.  This is how it works in CSP, other softwares may not make use of the eraser tool but instead only the brush tool will be needed to edit a mask. I encourage you to search the web (google, duckduckgo, etc) “masking layer + (your drawing program)” for specifics on your particular program.

Step 4) Now comes the silhouette effect specifically from my lookbook post. Duplicate the character layer. This will create an identical layer for us to edit.

Step 5) Create a new empty layer and make sure it is on Top of yhe layer we just duplicated in the above step. Then create a Clipping Layer using the empty layer. Clipping layers will chain to the layer immediately below, and allow you to create effects that only affect the layer it is attached to. You may chain multiple clipping layers to a single layer in order to layer almost infinite effects.

Step 6) Using the fill/Paint Bucket tool, fill the empty clipping layer with your preferred color. Notice how the layer is technically completely filled with yellow, but it only shows up in the actual image as the shape of the layer the clipping layer is attached to!

Step 7) Reorder your layers so the original layer we started with is displayed on top.

Step 8) Use the move tool to drag either the copied layer or the original layer around to a position of your liking. You can then repeat this process as many times as you want, using whatever colors or gradients or brushes or textures  you like.

Step 9) Draw or import textures or clip art* or literally whatever to decorate your image how you like. Elements from this piece include a heart shaped brush that came with CSP for free, a polka dot screen tone brush I downloaded for free from the CSP shared asset website, and hand drawn elements and lettering done by me! *When using materials you find on the internet for your edit work please, please make sure you have permission to use it. Don’t take art from people’s art blogs and turn them into stickers or whatever unless u have permission. If you dont want to draw it out yourself i recommend searching the web for royalty free clip art or textures. Hopefully this tutorial was what you were looking for! If not you can always ask me more questions and if it’s helpful or interesting for anyone out there the next time I make a lookbook edit I can record that as a video so you can see my step by step process as I actually create the image,

[memnonofarcadia]

Remembering Joey Bruno

Originally published in the Sacramento Jazz & Blues Quarterly Bedtime is sometime around dawn. Dinner is usually whatever you want it to be. Shall we go to Iceland? Festivals, fliers, wristbands, Sharpies on skin, smoke, grass, hash, molasses, sky, blue, crisp, clear sky. And yet I’m still writing all this within a grey airport terminal, locked into some kind of strange Druid-esque ritual with pen and paper. Deadline is tomorrow, where were you when you were supposed to be working? Don’t have any answers for now, just that I need to write and get it out to my boss within the next day. Or two. It wouldn’t have been the first deadline blown. But think, distract myself with the McDonald’s coffee and keep putting down adjectives and phrases from places I’ve been, things I’d seen, dreams I’d never have again with people I’ve never met and music I had. 40 minutes till boarding starts, I’ll be last, of course. It pays enough to fly but not enough to enjoy it. Been getting harder and harder to deal with the travel, at any rate. Starting to notice the spell everyone is under, the sleepwalking nature of the corporate employee. It had only been noticeable after it had been broken, which I had no problem doing, ever. When your home is a hotel you take your shots however you can get them, besides it wasn’t like you have to live in any particular town past a few days at most. Half-heartedly started keeping a list of rejections and their professions, making sure to note that there was only one waitress on the list, most were from bookstores or places where there was an escape for all parties. Don’t need to make it more awkward than it has to be. Sorry, I didn’t mean, then the words fade off into the ocean. On the edge of nowhere, like a little seaside town. Maybe that’s where I’d like to end up, like a lifeguard in the post-apocalypse, no responsibilities, just looking cool for the seagulls. How many life guards had I asked out? Not many, either way. Concerts didn’t go well with water, not in my experience. Can’t seem to find a way to write about anything other than something on the present times, life and times. I struggle, already flipped through the notebooks to jog the memory with some tit and tat that had to be discarded for the sake of length from another article. Or two. Or four. Or 12. Throwing yourself to the wolves, towards and into the meat grinder that one might just pay the bills with the right amount of ink in the right places on a blank piece of paper. Who cares about music festivals and pop culture when there’s McDonald’s coffee and the cold inside of an airplane to look forward to? Four times I’d attempted to ask about an airline attendant’s relationship status, thrice I’d been rejected. Once she’d pretended not to hear me and instead moved to the opposite end of the plane for the remainder or the flight. Understandable, no harm done. No harm done. By anyone, right? Who said this was ever going to be a love story, you and I?

College had been a breeze, not that I’m bragging. State schools were like that, at least then, and Californ-I-A’s were no different. No doubt now there’s better options available for where I was at when I had to decide where to go to school, but there you are. A degree in journalism is a degree in journalism, and I had little else to go on other than my love of music, substances, travel, female company, and a shocking talent at being able to string together sentences. In a way it’s always given me a bit of a guilty feeling. I never sat down and really worked at learning or improving with regards to writing, I just sort of could do it. That’s the short version of how I found my niche of a career, one I thought I could exploit anyway. Turns out I was right, and in a way it was everything I could (and did!) hope for. Except everybody’s got to grow up sometimes, and I did, regrettably. There’s only so many hungover mornings a human being can take before they’re permanently reduced to a shambling, sickly mess of what used to be a humanoid organism, and I had certainly put myself on that path. Got off of it, thanks to the countless AA meetings I made myself go to, but I digress. That had been the first mark on the wall of things that I could no longer enjoy about the gig, the fact that now I had to do the whole thing sober. The hardest substance I have confidence I can enjoy responsibly now is coffee, and even then the ugly demon of acid reflux put me back in my place before too long. Suddenly all the kids were much more annoying than usual, the travel a hassle, the food revolting, and the music itself just kind of bad, which was the real heartbreaker. Some days before it had been all to keep me going, minus the women, which were always a constant. “Festival sluts” is the term you’ll want to Google (or DuckDuckGo) if you’re curious about what I mean, also colloquially known as upper middle class girls whose parents were too busy working to devote anything past a friendly “hullo” to their children, and thus succeeded in raising a bunch of hedonistic, attention-desperate, and morally naïve young people with excess income and too much time to spend it all in. Nasty ain’t it? But it kept me coming back for more, like the good-natured animal that I am. We all are. That’s the secret that I learned more than anything from the beat, we are all more simple and pleasure driven than we could ever articulate or realize. It’s what keeps the lights on at home, for everything and anything. Probably. Or maybe I’m just bitter. Most of the friends I made during college or were colleagues in my escapades writing about indie rock et al. around the globe are gone now. Burnt out, some burnt up, most just couldn’t hack it anymore and left to go get real jobs at real newspapers. The circus, or pirate ship, as is probably more accurate a nomer, is not for everyone, and rarely does it last forever. Bet you’re wondering where that leaves me. Still bitter, but still coming back for more, just like I was always going to. Always. So why don’t I quit? You tell me. Because I know why.

The finest writer I ever met was a journalist by the name of Joey Bruno, a guy I came across one of the many late nights I spent at the pathetic office of my college’s newspaper. I was editing a freshman’s piece about how the White Album was actually really bad, sighing uncontrollably the whole time, when Mr. Bruno walked in and struck up a conversation with yours truly. I happily engaged, as any activity that didn’t involve that stupid piece of writing was fine by me. He explained that he was friends with the real Editor , who was at his parents’ in Wisconsin for the weekend, and would drop by periodically when he got off work to help out where he could. “Why spend your time working on bad writing by dumb college kids?” I’d asked him. “Free beer, plus it can be fun sometimes. There’s been plenty of stuff come through here that I rewrote beyond all recognition just for fun, and nine times out of ten the original author doesn’t even notice. Good times.” Maybe so, I’d thought. In any case every other Friday or thereabouts I’d get a late night revising buddy to help cull the newspaper’s intimidating stack of submissions. It was in those early morning hours that I came to the conclusion that I wanted to become a music journalist, mostly from talking to Mr. Bruno about his own adventures. But I don’t think I listened, not really. Maybe if I had I’d be off this conveyor belt by now, but then again maybe not. Maybe I’d never have started. One night in particular while we were enjoying our cigarettes, coffee, and beer (all courtesy of the newspaper of course), he retailed me with a story of his long lost love, a girl he’d known briefly in the California punk scene of the late 80s. I was instantly entranced. “It was a magical time,” he’d said to me while stroking his magnificent beard. “But I’m glad it’s over now. It was getting messy there at the end,” I brought up how those little parts of the world, at that time were being romanticized an awful lot in contemporary media then. “And for good reason, too.” He’d responded wistfully. “A lot of great things happened for a lot of good people. It was about as close to the 60s as anyone came since then, I think. That much hope,” And this is where he began to tell his story, the story of “the rebel known as ‘Justine,’” as he’d put it. However it had happened, the two had come into contact through the various zines they’d each produced and sent out to the other punks in town. The closest thing to an internet forum for back then was to just be louder than everyone else, apparently. That was the only real way to get heard, to start a dialogue of some kind. That or take your chances at the shows, which they did anyway, but there wasn’t much talking going on there. Joey had written to Justine complimenting her on “Pop!,” which was her way of pushing her radical politics and militant-feminist views out on to the unsuspecting public behind the thin-façade of a bubblegum periodical. The art had been good, and the writing made everyone Joe showed it to laugh out loud, so he made a point to let the author know, whoever they were. There was an address included in the back for people to write in, so he did just that. He also included a copy of his own creation, the somewhat popular (in those circles anyway) “Buzz ‘n’ Stuff.” “What was it about?” I asked as my friend rolled himself another cigarette. “Nothing really, I just sort of made stuff about interesting things I found at the library then slapped it together in that. It seemed to work. I remember the one I sent her had something about how to get popped bubblegum out of your hair without cutting it all off, so I think that’s what got her interested. There wasn’t anything of value or substance in there, let’s be real,” Joey took another swig of his beer and reached into the cooler below his desk for another, being sure to throw me one too like a sport. “Thanks, boss. But continue, you got me interested now,” So he did. It had started slowly, really, with the trading of zines and letters, the occasional patch or pin by mail too. Eventually after a lengthy correspondence they made a plan to meet up at a concert, The Vandals to be precise. Joey had taken painstaking measures to show up in the most hip clothing of the day, studded leather jacket, combat boots, the whole nine yards. “I looked like a freak,” he told me with a chuckle. “But then I saw her,” Justine had arrived looking like everything and nothing Joey had expected her to. She had the familiar punk gear, Doc Martins and an army jacket covered in patches and safety pins, but the rest of what she had on departed from the norm drastically. It had been some bizarre cross between a punk, hippy, and cult leader all in one, macabre golden jewelry offsetting the “meat is murder” t shirt underneath. “It was great,” said Joey. “People were afraid of her at that show. She looked really scary,” They hit it off and had a jolly old time watching The Vandals play, and later they found themselves alone on a hill overlooking the suburbs, talking about the issues and passing a joint back and forth. It was all music to my ears, as it would be for most any young person, I suspect. “Tell me more,” I’d implored. These were fantasies that I needed fulfilled. Joey paused and rocked back and forth in his chair contently for a few seconds before he complied. My heart sank before he spoke. “We were inseparable after that first time. It really was something. We could go anywhere, do anything, and we would always end up on the same page somehow. It was easily the deepest spiritual, emotional, whatever you want to call it connection I’ve ever had with another human being, let alone girlfriend. But then a year or two later her Mom moved her and her brother up to Connecticut to be closer to the rest of their family. Last I heard she went to school in Maine, but that was it as far as we were concerned. Finito,” He smiled through all this as though recalling some rosy-cheeked memory but I was aghast. “What do you mean that’s it? You didn’t try to follow her or anything?” Joey just laughed. “Yeah, that was really an option at 17 without a car or money. It was just something that happened when we were kids, nothing really. I’m glad it happened at all, now.” Well then. What do you make of that? The conversation drifted pretty heavily after that point, as it always did when Joey and I got to jabbering and drinking, and as usual it was stories of the times he’d been on tour years later with Ozzy Osbourne or The Stooges or someone, then got to interview them endlessly and write about it. The usual vices were there as well in his stories, the drugs, the travel, the women, the glamor, the romance. But it all left pretty quickly once the novelty wore off, hence why Joey had quit after a few years and moved back home to Sacramento. When I knew him at the college newspaper he was a jazz correspondent, if you can wrap your head around that, for several of the snootier publications in the area. “I skipped to the fun part,” he told me. “The shows never get old, now. Plus jazz cats have the best shit,” he said with a wink. I probably just laughed, I don’t know, maybe downed the rest of my beer. I’ll be bound to have another once I get on the plane, off to Finland this time. Apparently it’s festival season in Scandinavia and its surrounding territories. Guess I’ll be writing about that all then though, from a different airport terminal that looks just like this one, with coffee and food and cigarettes and beer that shortens the life as much as the ones that came before. I could go on, but I won’t, for both our sake. There’s no moral to be gleaned from all this just a simple explanation of the reality, and how I’m passing the time in the airport by writing this, because I said I would. I promised. It’s my group now, and I have to go.

[holytheoristtastemaker]

Frequently asked questions of programming.

• Should I learn Python or JavaScript? • Data Science vs Web Development vs App Development, which one should I choose? • Why should I learn Web Development when there are popular Web Developing tools like Wix & WordPress? • All these points made me confused 😕 about what should I do?

So before starting with the questions Here's something about who I am and What makes me qualified to answer such questions? I'm a gradiot (an idiot who did his graduation and who has wasted money and time getting zero skills from college while there's an actual opportunity to learn everything online for free). Yes, I am a CS graduate. I have a great desire to make things, you might know the feeling of IT'S ALIVE if you have developed anything. During my college years I came across multiple technologies from Arduino to Raspberry pi, from PHP to JavaScript, Python, flutter you name it. I tried to learn and understand various technologies not due to college curriculum, but due to my desire to learn more and google 😎. Throughout my journey I encountered many questions and here are some of the questions I think will help you guys. Hope You'll like it.

Should I learn Python or JavaScript?

Before I start with why Python🐍 or JavaScript⚡. Let's talk about programming in general. Programming is a way of thinking and implementing the logic you create in a language that machines understand. Now there are styles or you can say structures of programming aka programming paradigms like Object-oriented programming (OOPs), Functional programming, procedural programming, etc. As a developer, you should at least know one of these paradigms. The more paradigms you know the broader choices you'll have for creating efficient and flexible code.

Back to the topic, Python and JavaScript both support OOPs and functional programming along with other paradigms. JavaScript is considered as the king of web programming that is used to create highly functional and dynamic websites. It has a vast ecosystem of libraries and frameworks to choose from like ReactJS, Angular, and Vue for front-end and NodeJS for the backend. You can also create native Apps for phones using React Native in JavaScript. So, with JavaScript, you can develop full-fledged websites as well as mobile applications. Whereas, Python is Best-suited programming language for Machine learning and data science. It has multiple Libraries like Keras, TensorFlow, Scikit-learn, etc. Along with that, Python is easy to use and has large community support. You can also create websites in python using frameworks like Django and Flask. You can also create apps in python as well using Tkinter, kiwi, etc. Both languages have powerful rounding development.

TL;DR Here is my perspective on this topic. As a developer, everyone must know basic web development since Machine learning and Data Science is a service-based skill While Web and App Development is a product-based skill. Hence, Data Science and Machine learning people are called engineers and not developers. Notice the very subtle difference between an engineer and a developer. Also, you know Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, well they started with web dev and created their products. Ask yourself what you want, define your goals, and then choose wisely and always bet on JavaScript.

Data Science vs Web Development vs App Development Which one should I choose?

If you are reading this, you might be knowing very well the pay of a Data Science and ML engineers as compared to a Web Developer or an App Developer. All this huge burst about AI is the future and might very well draw you towards thinking that even I should learn Data Science for a huge package and a job opportunity. Here's the ugly truth, it's hard to get a job in Data Science since companies will prefer a person having the Domain knowledge and usually majoring in Mathematics and statistics, you should at least have Masters or Ph.D. for getting a job in this field. For Example- A fintech company will choose a CFA or Finance major rather than a CS engineer and teach them Data Science since python is easy and it's the efficiency that counts. So, the person with finance knowledge is well suited for the job. However, As I said It's hard to get a job, not impossible. Some CS grads have got into data science and are earning handful. All you need to learn is python and some libraries and mathematics. Now, As I said before, data science is a service-based skill you are not technically a developer you're an engineer who is figuring out solutions for a given problem. On the other hand, being a web or app developer means developing products. You can create applications and websites and release them to earn using ad revenue, selling them, or even creating and maintain them for companies that way you don't have to rely on companies to give your services. I suggest you to first, learn web development and then Data Science while earning through your web dev skills. That way you will have a decent skill set, portfolio, and a budget to start experimenting into the world of machine learning where processing power is everything.

Why should I learn Web Development when there is a popular Web Developing tool like Wix & WordPress?

WordPress and Wix are popular content management systems. They are best for creating small websites and blogs. Yes, they made it easy for anyone to create websites but that doesn't mean web developers' jobs are gone. You can't create Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, and large fully functional websites using them. So, if you are trying to be a low-level web developer, you can pretty much say goodbye to developing websites. You can google top trending tech skills in demand and you will find AngularJS, ReactJS, NodeJS developers in demand. Not only websites but you can also create native applications for android and iOS using React-native and games using ThreeJS a JavaScript library. Possibilities are endless, all you have to do is START. I'll suggest you start with MERN stack just my personal opinion but you can research and pick whichever stack you like.

Is NodeJS better than Django?

Before comparing let's talk about what is NodeJS and Django. Node JS is a JavaScript runtime taken out of the client-side browser environment which uses OS binding for I/O, and Django is a Python framework. So comparing both is like comparing apples with oranges. Though let's have these points clear. When It comes to performance, Yes. NodeJS is faster than Django or in general python since it's written in C++ and is a JS runtime. You ask why? because JavaScript is faster than python because it works on an asynchronous non-blocking object model. When It comes to scalability, No. Django or python, in general, is highly scalable as the caching of applications is quite easy. Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. With the introduction of npm which stands for the Node Package Management system, the open-source community has been boomed towards NodeJS since managing packages and dependencies has never been that easy. Also, npm is far better than pip when it comes to package management, you can research about it. Here are some of the big fishes and the backend tech they preferred for their development. Uber, Twitter, eBay, Netflix, Duckduckgo, PayPal, LinkedIn, Trello, Mozilla, GoDaddy are some big names using Node JS as their backend technology. Pinterest, Instagram, Eventbrite, Sentry, Zapier, Dropbox, Spotify, YouTube are also some big names using Django as their backend technology. Notice the trend here, Uber, Twitter, and Netflix are some of the applications that priorities performance whereas Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube requires a lot of space and thus scalability is their priority. So, the choice is upon you what you want scalability or performance.

All these points made me confused 😕 about what should I do?

First, ask yourself what do you enjoy doing. Do you like to create games, apps, websites? What intrigues you? What sparks your curiosity? I have listed some of the questions depending upon the choices you make.

• GAME Development – If you want to get into the game development industry, you will have to learn C# or C++ for hardcore game development. You can create web games using ThreeJS or any other library but you won't be exactly a game developer.

• App Development – You can create an application using JAVA for android or Swift for iOS. Further, you can use React-native or Flutter for creating apps that would run on both android and iOS. If you want web apps, you can use Ionic as well.

• Web Development – There are many stacks (a set of technologies that suits well with each other) you could choose to learn like MEAN stack, MERN stack, LAMP stack, etc. You can create a website from WordPress or Wix as well. Develop an interactive portfolio for yourself with the stack you find interesting.

• Data Science, ML, AI – Start with python and take courses on data science, mathematics, machine learning, from popular websites like Udemy or LinkedIn. Start competing on Kaggle and maintain your Kaggle profile. Second, do yourself a favor and start learning algorithms and data structures in the language that fits your answer to the above question. Third, Start applying for internships with some projects and try to make an exemplary portfolio. Maintain your GitHub, LeetCode or HackerRank or any other profiles which you can include on your resume.

I hope this might help you; I tried my best to answer some of the questions that I've faced throughout my journey as a gradiot. If you feel that I'm missing something or something is wrong please feel free to correct me in the comment section. Thank you for your valuable time.

[mattved]

On blogging, again

Everybody makes a mistake from time to time, and the junction came where I gotta admit belonging to that exact domain. My blog went through about as many changes in platform as it had posts. (Everybody sometimes exaggerates, right?)

So I am here today to give an account on journey of my content across individual platforms, outlining their upsides and downsides and ranting about my fuckups leading to choosing them.

The Beginnings: Blogger

One of the most popular blogging platforms of the 90s offered two gates of entrance to your Google-hosted website: Hitting an URL, either name.blogger.com or your own domain, and being discovered through hub of all Blogger articles, featuring the most popular favorite-tag-relevant along a fulltext search. Both obviously played role in googlability and building an on-line brand.

It seemed to work for a while. I was getting units of traffic from people and crawler hits every now and then. With keywords including my name and username, I slowly made it to the first page of results in Search and DuckDuckGo, pushing the pamphlet article about a person of my name dying at the age to the second, and enabling to compete with identically named photographer for #1. The latter, I unfortunalely did not make. And am obviously mad about it.

The problem was that Blogger lacks some cool features of the modern web. To this day, you are limited to a raw/wysiwyg HTML editor, forced to do more clicking than real writing. Uploading images was a completely separate activity from the writing process and involved browsing filesystems three times before inserting one into the article.

Besides, people no longer visit the article hub, making it useless for anything than that SEO aspect mentioned earlier, and professing the site's backend obsolescence with the a searchbar included along the top edge by default. Of course you can hide it through creation of custom theme including a CSS tweak, but that is just more hassle. Besides, you are not really allowed to do much other than raw CSS to manipulate the site's looks. And the loading times of some articles were just horrible, especially when the engine attempted to apply analytics tools on embeded content, often causing its failures to even load.

And even though Blogger was my big love for the early posts and I stayed for almost 9 months with it, these aspects had driven me elsewhere. Somewhere I was in control of both my content, looks, and structure of the homepage.

The Techie Period: Webhosting

I had rented a cheapo webhost my friend and I had been using for ages as a platform for our various PHP projects the history of which ran all the way to our sweet boarding school development sessions, which were known throughout the staff hierarchy and occassionaly lifted the curfew imposed on us by the system.

Since I was now able to do whatever I wanted with the whole base, many experiments were done and a lot learned in the process. I even made a switch to self-hosting everything on my very own BananaPi webserver, gaining a lot of sysadmin skills.

May I write, please? Wordpress

So many people love wordpress, since there is a massive ecosystem around it, with so many commercially available themes, wonderful plugins, and an open-source base. But I was not overly excited about having somebody else's work showed off on my little personal site. I wanted to build my personal brand and allow myself to be actually proud of it.

But the time it takes even a fairly skilled webbie to get into the zipped-theme format with about as many files as a fresh core linux installation has is not the shortest. And the tweaks always seemed to break whatever I was trying to customize. I sure could've had a blog in no time, but getting to something I'd be happy with was a question of becoming fairly expert in the wordpress ecosystem, which is honestly not worth it, unless you wanna capitalize on it as soon as you can. Besides, there is no certainty in how long such profession would remain relevant. And there is all the Filipinos beating you in sales.

Wordpress is really not for you if you want to give individualist impression. After about a month, I deleted the folder.

This is actually fun! Anchor CMS

Real perfection for those who know pure PHP and want to build a unique site really quickly. It is also where I first encountered markdown outside of GitHub. And it had been my platform for over a good year and a half.

But my audience disappeared entirely. The search engine performance remained, true that, but that was about it and it seemed that some social network marketing was necessary. And even though I do have some outreach on Facebook and Instagram, I consider these to be purely personal devices, that I give public limited access to. So in spite of my general satisfaction with the workings of my wonderful brown colored design featuring many elements enriching the text, I now understand that this alone just won't cut it. And maintaining the website along with a different platform is just not something I have time to do.

So long, my love. I'll pull you out once I'm famous enough. I'll rebuild you on something less outdated than Anchor.

Taking it seriously: Medium

The problem here is that I rarely react to immediate news. Because I am long-term oriented individual aware of the self-adjusting nature of running averages of almost anything. And it doesn't even need to be on index-based variables. Because yes, I do believe that all functional relationships have some sort of equilibrium. Logical or strictly endogenous.

Besides, Medium is filled with... well, media. Wide-readership accounts shitposting five times a day in order to maintain audience, especially of those behind the paywall, who may even consider that the media they are paying for through means other than advertizing are more reliable as a source of infromation.

Yes, I went through the grind of migrating my entire blog to this site, copy-pasting almost everything and adhering to that non-markdown article editor, which made me feel well in the very beginning. It made it a no-bullshit platform after all.

I even wrote one medium-exclusive post, which is never gonna be on Tumblr as I managed to delete it along with my entire account days after doing all the hard work.

Medium is a great concept badly executed. Adios.

Terminal station: Tumblr

At least so far. I may be giving up on fully custom theme for a short time or I may be on a retreat. I may have decided to use an exclusively ad-based platform (at least I can remove ads on my personal tumblr, if not in the feed.

I don't like that there is very little original content on here, but I might soon benefit from reblogs. I don't plan to reblog a lot myself, unless I find a post to be five-star. But I will always like whatever feels appropriate and amazing. And I am always happy to stay in touch with any number of followers. Because some audience is better than massive audience. And I can get at least some feedback here. Hit me, guys. I'm posting for my own benefit and hope somebody will take time to read and reflect on what I am about to post here.

I even plan to switch back to the slightly more interesting topics, showing off my knowledge and passing it on.

Wish me luck ^^

[onlinemarketingcourses]

SEO Year In Review: 2018 saw Google updates and a focus on mobile

So, 2018 was an exciting year in SEO, with a number of large Google search algorithm updates, big changes within Google’s management team, mobile first indexing and all the changes with Google Search Console. In addition, Google local, Google My Business and maps related changes were very active this year.

The reliance on structured data within Google search and the pullback on personalization features, shows signs of where Google is headed with rankings. Let’s not forget the huge shifts in voice search with Google Assistant and other devices, including big Google user interface changes this year. And Bing wasn’t quiet at all this year in search. Here is our recap:

Google search ranking and algorithm updates

Google has made numerous search ranking algorithm updates this year, some were big, some were small, some were confirmed, some went unconfirmed – heck, some were even pre-announced.

Speed Update. For example, the Speed Update was pre-announced in January of 2018 and released several months later in June. The update, according to Google, only impacted the slowest sites in terms of their ranking position in search. Google said it “only affect a small percentage of queries.” We posted a large FAQs on the speed update so you can catch up on that quickly.

Medic Update. Probably the most substantial search ranking algorithm that was felt by the SEO community was the so-called “Medic Update.” It happened around August 1. Google confirmed it happened after the SEO community took notice. Google classified it as a “broad core algorithm update,” something they do several times per year. This specific update was fully rolled out about a week later and seemed to a wide range of sites around health and YMYL categories. Google told SEOs there is “no fix” to get your site to rank better overnight with this update. We have pretty deep coverage of this update over here.

Other search algorithm updates. Google also confirmed, after the fact, the March core update and the April core update.

Mobile-first indexing

In 2016, Google began its mobile-first indexing experiment. In short, Google wanted to start crawling and indexing the web from the view of a smartphone and not a desktop computer. And Google did that in a big way in 2018 by starting to roll out the change to many many sites in 2018.

Google also began sending out notifications through Google Search Console when a site was moved to mobile-first indexing.

Today, 3 years later, Google said over 50 percent of search results are now indexed through mobile-first indexing.

To learn more about this, see our mobile-first indexing FAQs, the recent clarifications on this topic and Google’s very own developer docs on mobile-first indexing.

SEO changes

Structured data. The overall theme with SEO this year, specific to Google, was probably around how much emphasis Google has put towards structured data and schema. Enabling speakable markup for voice search related queries, a new indexing API for job posting schema, image search changes, various updates to recipe markup, new job posting guidelines, the new Q&A schema, live stream support, datasets schema, how to, QA, FAQs schema and so much more. The list goes on and on.

Other changes. Google dropped support for the news meta tag and the standout tag and Editors’ pick in Google News was big for publishers. Google’s various efforts around dynamic rendering and lazy loading content and photos is an effort you’ve seen a lot around with JavaScript SEO in 2018 and will continue through 2019.

Personalization is light. With all the fallback on Facebook targeting, and using personal data for targeting over 2018 – Google made a point to say they don’t use personalization that much. Google said at best, personalization is light and used for things like knowing when to show local results, when to show American football versus European football and things like last query used. Although, DuckDuckGo released a study saying Google does otherwise.

Google Search Console and other tools

Google Search Console. It was a very busy year for the Google Search Console team, with giving access to the new Google Search Console to everyone, then removing the beta label from the new version and redirecting some old Search Console reports to the new version on December 13th.

Google also started showing Search Console snapshots directly in the search results for site owners. Google removed the ability to use the public URL submission tool, and changed the limits and quotas on crawling and indexing within Search Console. Google also made it easier to gain access to Search Console by automatically verifying you if you have a Google Analytics account.

New slow site notices started going out via Search Console, Google tested a new form of domain properties for cross site reporting, and added a bunch of reports for event listings, AMP, links, mobile usability and so much more. Let’s not forget the new awesome URL inspection tool that gives you a snap shot of how Google sees your page at any point in time.

The new Search Console came with 16 months of historical data, and Google added that to the Search Console API as well. They also expanded the API to give you 25,000 rows of data.

Lighthouse. Google updated the PageSpeed Insights tool to bring in data for Lighthouse. Version 3.0 of Lighthouse was released this year and there is a new SEO audit tool in Lighthouse.

Google local

Google Posts. Google Post was a feature that Google spent a lot of time fine-tuning this year. They tested many user interfaces around Google Posts in desktop and mobile search. They updated the Google My Business console to enable Google Posts on the web or via the mobile app. But ultimately, at least towards the end of this year, Google Posts traffic and engagement levels have declined according to many local SEO experts. You can follow all the changes to Google Posts this year over here.

Google My Business. Google My Business is the control panel for local SEOs and business owners to manage their local listings in Google Maps and Google search. Recently, Google vastly updated the Google My Business mobile apps to let business owners update and manage their listings on the go. Google added more “insights” data, analytics, to the portal including branded searches, more query data, and even created an Agency dashboard for local SEO agencies.

Google added new attributed for women led and veteran-led businesses. Google also let business set open dates before they open up for business. Google updated the Google My Business API numerous times over the year.

Mobile search and voice assistants

Voice assistants and the spread of the adoption of Google Home and Google Assistant devices was and still is of much interest to the SEO community. How Google responds to someone asking “Okay Google, tell me about X,” is something at the top of mind of many SEOs. Google’s featured snippets play a big role here, and SEOs know that. Google Home devices are still considered the smartest out there, but there is competition with Amazon Echo, Apple Home and Microsoft Cortana to name a few.

Google released their Google Home Hub, the voice assistant with a display. We reviewed it in detail from an SEO perspective and a local perspective. Google even let you trigger the Google Assistant by asking Siri.

It is also important to read the Google voice search quality raters guidelines.

Google UI changes

One constant in the SEO and Google world is “change.” And that is what Google did a lot this year between many user interface tests and changes. Google rolled out a new design for desktop search results with a rounded search box that sticks to the top of the page. Google officially now shows zero results as it is being called for time, calculations, and conversions related queries on mobile. The Google mobile home page now shows a discover feed and not just a simple search box. Google also rolled out the more results button on mobile.

Google increased and then decreased their snippet length in a very noncommittal manner. Google autocomplete predictions expanded this year, began showing famous people cameos in search.

AMP. On the AMP end, Google released a developer preview of showing the publisher URLs in search and not the Google AMP cache URL. Google launched AMP stories in search, and lots of other AMP related features listed here.

Other big Google news

In addition to all of that, Ben Gomes replaced John Giannandrea after he left Google as the head of search to work at Apple as the head of AI.

Plus, Google+ is closing down earlier than expected after several security incidents.

Bing

Bing was very active this year as well – more so than in past years. Bing is taking efforts to improve crawler efficiency, fixed backlogs with Webmaster Tools, after shutting down their public URL submission tool like Google did.

Bing also did a lot of work around intelligent answers, their AI with Bing spotlight, facts from multiple sources, and big improvements to visual search including solving complex math problems and other areas.

Bing now supports JSON-LD for markup. Bing supports viewing AMP content for news via mobile search. They also created a Bing entity search API for public use.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.

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How Companies Turn Your Data Into Money

New Post has been published on https://britishdigitalmarketingnews.com/how-companies-turn-your-data-into-money/

How Companies Turn Your Data Into Money

The best description of the data economy comes from AOL, of all places. The once-mighty internet service provider now runs a tidy business in the ad-exchange space. The site promoting the service is hip and tasteful, showing happy, partying people and white text that spells out things like “Monetize your most valuable asset” in all caps.

“A publisher’s audience is their currency,” the site says. “No matter how they make money from content—be it through advertising, paid subscription or syndication, a publisher’s core asset is audience and audience data.”

This is weapons-grade marketing speak, but it’s also a surprisingly honest assessment of digital media’s beating heart—one that pumps out content and takes in reams of data from the people who consume that content. And somewhere, unseen, money is being made from what we see and do online.

Targeting and Retargeting

Bill Budington, a senior staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sees the avenues for data gathering everywhere: advertising identifiers in the headers of mobile web traffic, fingerprinting browsers, customer tracking in stores using Wi-Fi probe data, SDKs inside mobile apps, and ultrasonic tones from TV that are outside the range of hearing but can be detected by apps on smart devices to track viewing habits.

Some data isn’t being used yet—he said, for example, that the genetic information gathered by 23andMe could one day be used for advertising or for discrimination. Genetics being used for advertising is something from a hyper-capitalist cyberpunk fever dream; and yet, it’s plausible.

“There is no legal regime for the protection of that data, so consumers need to be on watch for it in the US and make those choices,” said Budington. “The US is at the forefront of deploying those technologies, and the companies that are starting are going to target US customers first. In a lot of ways, the US serves as a playground for the big-data economy, which means that US citizens have to be more aware of the dangers.”

The collected data has value because of how it’s used in online advertising, specifically targeted advertising: when a company sends an ad your way based on information about you, such as your location, age, and race. Targeted ads, the thinking goes, are not only more likely to result in a sale (or at least a click), they’re also supposed to be more relevant to consumers.

Budington pointed out that there’s a dark side to this kind of advertising. “I have targeted ads that are more attuned to my desires and my wants… But if you have someone who has an alcohol abuse problem getting a liquor store ad…” He trailed off, letting the implication hang.

Your local liquor store probably isn’t advertising in this way, but vulnerable communities are being targeted for specific ads. For-profit universities, for example, target low-income people, Budington said. “You pay thousands and thousands of dollars, and they give you a diploma that isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Targeted advertising has a really pernicious side.”

A subset of targeted ads is ad retargeting. Retargeted ads take into account your previous online activity in order to push an ad your way. For example, tracking pixels can be added to a webpage. When the site loads, the owner of a tracking pixel will see that a computer requested said pixel and that it loaded at a particular time. It can even capture identifying information about the computer that visited the site.

This is what creates the unnerving experience of seeing an ad on one website, and then seeing it again on another site. The ad “follows” you across the web, hoping for a click.

This has given rise to a popular conspiracy theory: that phones and smart devices are listening in and then targeting ads based on what you’re saying. One study debunked this claim, demonstrating that mobile phones didn’t seem to be sending audio data—but some apps were found to be transmitting screenshots of device activity. Apps using the Silverpush software development kit (SDK) were listening for ultrasonic beacons (as mentioned above), but Google has worked to suppress the use of this technology on its Android platform.

Budington said that in some cases, app developers may be including tracking SDKs without fully understanding the privacy implications for users and perhaps without ever receiving the data themselves. Developers sometimes get paid for including the SDKs and may include them as tools for debugging or gathering analytics. The SDK operators, however, can then potentially receive information about people’s behaviors and app usage.

As for devices with built-in digital assistants, such as the Google Home and Amazon Echo, it is true that these services send recordings of your queries back to the respective companies for processing. With the Google Assistant and Alexa voice assistants, you can even listen to recordings of every question you’ve ever asked. Budington said that while companies have been clear on what kind of data they’re gathering with these devices and services, what they’re using the data for is much more opaque.

Budington doesn’t expect this data economy to change, at least without external pressure. Most efforts by companies to improve user privacy typically don’t solve what he sees as the real problem. “[Companies] are willing to set up privacy filters with regard to other users, because that doesn’t affect their bottom line; but they’re still getting that data themselves.”

Budington also doesn’t see fixes coming from Congress. “I don’t see much hope for that in the US,” he told me. “Often, I think, when regulation comes into play, it’s ill-worded and misapplied. And because of that, you don’t have the necessary protection, and [it] can often do more damage than it does good.”

The argument against Budington’s position on privacy is that targeted advertising and the data collection behind it are fair compensation for companies that provide free online services. Google, Facebook, and Twitter would likely not exist if they couldn’t turn user data into cash. Not everyone has the money to pay for subscriptions or is willing to—but most people have value to advertisers as potential consumers.

That argument rings hollow to Budington. “People don’t have a lot of options if they’re going to interact with the world. Most people like to take pictures and upload them to Instagram,” he said. The EFF created Privacy Badger—a browser extension that blocks ads and trackers—to address this lack of choice. It lets users toggle which trackers are allowed to interact with their web experience, and it replaces social widgets and embedded YouTube videos with badger icons that viewers have to click in order to activate (and then, in turn, information about the viewer is transmitted).

So for now, change is coming not from companies and regulators but from the people who are being advertised to in the first place.

The Data Must Flow

The founder of DuckDuckGo, Gabriel Weinberg, is not a huge fan of Google. That’s not surprising, because DuckDuckGo is a competing search company—but one that has positioned itself as a search engine that won’t absorb your data. Given Google’s (actually, Alphabet’s) numerous niches, it’s easy to forget how the company has made its money. It’s not primarily a smartphone operating system developer, a web browser, or even a search company. Google, as privacy advocates are quick to point out, is an advertising platform that takes advantage of the enormous insight the company has into the activities of users.

“What people don’t realize is that there are these hidden trackers across the web that are scooping up your personal information,” Weinberg told me. Facebook and Google have deployed most of these trackers. “That lines up with their dominance in the advertising market.”

Weinberg isn’t just concerned with the privacy implications of consumer data collection. He also worries about the social effects that have arisen as a result, in part because many apps and services gather data in exchange for services and also aid in advertising retargeting, which encourages people to buy more things. “You’re paying with your data, but you’re also literally buying stuff,” said Weinberg.

He argued that Facebook and Google’s business model is filtering what you see in order to drive clicks. “As a result, people get into these echo chambers,” he said, recalling the efforts by Russian intelligence operatives to sow discontent among American voters online. “Those harms are somewhat unique to Google and Facebook.”

“Facebook is a contained internet,” Weinberg continued. “It’s literally what they’re trying to do in places like India. The internet is Facebook to them, in the same way as it was for AOL back in the 90s for the US.”

And the consequence of that kind of containment, he said, is that people believe things they wouldn’t necessarily believe otherwise. A deeply troubling example: the deaths by mob violence in India that were spurred by rumors spread via WhatsApp.

Weinberg believes the road to our current moment came through a lack of oversight or regulation for online tracking, at least in the US, which continues to this day. As long as websites and apps have a publicly posted policy, companies can do more or less as they please. He characterizes the data collection efforts of US companies this way: “Collect everything, and we’ll figure out what to do with it later.”

By contrast, the European Union recently introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which requires companies to get user consent for the collection of data, among other things. This was why many websites the world over simultaneously informed all of us that their user policies had changed. On this side of the Atlantic, it was a bewildering but minor inconvenience. In Europe, the enforcement of the GDPR has been a step toward putting people in control of their data.

Weinberg said US residents are subjected to a web of different tracking techniques. Cookies and IP address gathering track users as they move from website to website, but your own web browser can also give you away—in browser fingerprinting, configuration factors about users’ device and software (such as the browser version number), are used to identify them.

More identifying information can simply be purchased. “Facebook is taking offline credit card data and mixing it with their site,” Weinberg said, to illustrate the lack of transparency he sees in the data market. “You wouldn’t expect that. The bigger the data profile . . . the better you can be targeted. They have incentives to buy and combine extra data.” After our interview, it came to light that Google had penned a secret deal with MasterCard for data on offline spending habits.

I reminded Weinberg of the argument in favor of this kind of data collection and advertising—that it allows companies to provide services and apps for free. He ruefully said he’s heard a phrase that describes his feelings on it: “The best minds of our generation are being put to work on seeing if people will click more ads.”

“I think it’s a travesty and waste of innovation,’ he said “I think it’s manipulative, driving consumption and [making people] believe things that they don’t want to believe.”

“Some business models that are dependent on this need to change,” Weinberg added. “Google and Facebook have sucked out the profits for organizations and media, and if those profits were better distributed, things would be better.”

Weinberg considers monetization schemes like paywalls, in which visitors to a site pay to view some or all of the site’s content. Turning back to Facebook, he said, “Their business models are such that they will be more targeted over time and more intrusive.”

What’s the fix? Voting with your feet—leaving a service with intrusive policies—does work, Weinberg said. But he notes the network effects of sites such as YouTube (which is part of Google) and WhatsApp (part of Facebook). “While I advise people to leave Facebook, I am also realistic, and I know people never will.”

Both outside and inside forces seem to be the solution. Regulation is important, but Weinberg, like Budington at the EFF, is more focused on the actual tools that could solve the problem of intensive data collection and user tracking. Sites and apps need to offer users real ways to opt out, he believes, and companies should be prevented from combining data from other companies.

Inside the Ad Exchanges

Julia Schulman is the chief privacy counsel for the ad-exchange company AppNexus, and she speaks with easy confidence and the lung capacity of a skin-diver. Without taking a breath, she explained to me how AOL One, AppNexus, and ad exchanges like it connect people who have websites and want ads with people who have ads that want to appear on websites.

“We’re the pipes,” she said crisply. It’s a carefully neutral position that emphasizes her employers’ place in a larger web of interests. AppNexus and similar companies provide clients with a demand-side platform (DSP) that serves as a dashboard for buying ads. The people with the ads can then decide the audience for the ads: people in a particular geographic area, people browsing sites at a particular time of day, or determined by contextual information such as the kind of site a person is visiting. A car company might want to buy ads on a site that reviews cars, for example.

When someone navigates to a page that has that code, it wakes up AppNexus and checks whether there’s a deal already in place. If there’s not a direct deal in place, something more interesting happens. In this situation, services like AppNexus hold a real-time auction among potential ad sellers for the space. Advertisers duke it out with automated bidding—think eBay with its maximum bid thresholds—all before the site finishes loading. “It’s happening in milliseconds,” said Schulman.

This wouldn’t be possible without consumer data, but Schulman said AppNexus doesn’t want or even really need information on the people who end up seeing the ads. “We don’t ourselves have data that we use for targeting; our advertisers bring that to the table,” she explained. “We don’t have names. We don’t have email addresses.”

Stockpiling that kind of information would expose AppNexus to risk should it leak out. But Schulman said huge piles of data are not useful for the company’s purposes.

“We’re looking to reach wide swaths—millions and millions of impressions,” she said. It’s also not particularly efficient to target individuals: “We receive very, very basic information. We don’t know who these people are, and we don’t care who they are,” she said.

Instead of handling the information, the AppNexus system allows publishers to tie information to random IDs. Schulman said that even those within her company can’t parse what these random IDs represent. That’s on the clients. This is what Schulman means when she talks about privacy by design: “We prohibit our clients from sending us ID information, and we prohibit our clients from tying directly to identifiable information.”

The fears about her industry, she said, are caused by a lack of understanding. She also pointed to the actions of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), a self-regulatory agency for online advertisers. The NAI publishes codes of conduct and guidelines for data handling that members agree to follow. She wryly noted that there are some actual teeth to this agreement: “If you are a member of the Network Advertising Initiative, you’ve committed to complying with this code, and a violation of that is a violation is of section five of FTC [Act].”

In total, Schulman doesn’t see this model of advertising as problematic. “As a consumer who uses the web, and I’m privileged to know this business inside and out, I think it is more useful to see a relevant ad.” She considers companies like AppNexus to be part of, in her words, a “virtuous cycle” that improves the web overall.

Although she positions AppNexus and the like as neutral services in a larger industry, she believes that even the data brokers don’t deserve their reputation. At least, not entirely. She pointed out that the publishers and advertisers are looking for that information in the first place. “They don’t exist without clients. It feeds their business.” The web of commerce that supports the industry, it seems, distributes the blame as well.

Dropping Out of the Data Economy

Some people are very knowledgeable, but in interviews, they speak with incredible care, perhaps too aware that their words could be taken out of context or twisted against them. And then there are people who know just as much, but throw caution to the wind and simply say what they think. These people are quote machines.

Rob Shavell is a cofounder of the privacy company Abine, and he is a quote machine. He’s fast and direct with his comments, and he’s biting in his criticism of the online ad industry.

“It’s a specific problem, and the industry has made it very hard for consumers to put a value on privacy,” he said. “The data mining industry [couldn’t] exist if everyone really understood it clearly.” For the everyday person, he said, it’s very hard to not somehow be a part of this economy. “People are giving away information every day, if not every hour.”

He frames the problem this way: If a company came to you and said “Fill in this form with all your personal information because we can sell it for $39,” no rational person would agree to it.

Abine offers some unique tools to combat the rampant leakage of personal information. The Abine Blur service couples a tracker-blocking web plugin with the ability to disguise or “blur” your personal information. When a website requires an email address, Blur generates one for you and automatically forwards any messages to your real email address. It can do the same with your phone number, substituting a disposable number that keeps your real number private. Blur even generates virtual credit card numbers that decouple online payments from your true identity. The prepaid digital card is funded by your real credit card, but the virtual card’s number and associated address are generated by Abine and have nothing to do with you.

Blur is designed to keep you from spreading your information across the web, and Abine’s DeleteMe service cleans up what’s already out there. For an annual fee, DeleteMe manages the arduous task of removing your personal information from data broker sites, which gather personal information such as your address, phone number, and so on, and make it available online for anyone to search.

According to Abine, public records are the biggest source of data for brokers. The company says that activities that are necessary to functioning in society—say, buying property, registering to vote, and even renewing a driver’s license—can create public records that are mined by data brokers. Several brokers also collect information from court records, meaning that an individual’s criminal history is potentially for sale.

In Abine’s research, the company has seen the price of an individual’s information drop dramatically. Peoplefinder, a company Abine considers a data broker, previously sold a basic background check for $40, but that price has now dropped to $20. Basic information, such as old addresses, current addresses, and family connections can be bought for as little as 95 cents. The implication is that this information is so readily available that its inherent value has dropped.

Similar price fluctuations can be seen in personal information for sale on the Dark Web. A report from the security firm Flashpoint showed that stolen bulk data can go for as little as 10 cents per person. The price goes up depending on how much information is available and what kind of person the information represents. The Social Security number of someone with good credit, for instance, can sell for between $60 and $80.

“It’s cheaper to buy your personal information in 2018 than [it was in] 2016, sometimes 100 percent cheaper,” said Shavell, based on data removed by DeleteMe—which, it should be noted, communicates only with data broker sites that have publicly available information removal mechanisms. There are likely other services that aren’t so public-facing that DeleteMe does not engage with. But according to Shavell, DeleteMe found 1,000 pieces of information per person in 2016. By 2018, the service was tracking 1,500 pieces of information.

“That’s not a great trend for privacy,” said Shavell.

Personal data has value on its own. People, it seems, are willing to spend money to find out the real addresses of other people, or these data brokers would be out of business. But Shavell noted that there’s a connection between data brokers and online targeted advertising.

Taking the information from these information brokers and making it useful for advertising is, Shavell explained, an entirely other piece of the business. He describes a “galaxy of companies” that play different roles in connecting user data from a myriad of sources and making it more valuable. The pipeline is familiar to me from my writing about how hackers monetize stolen information. One person might steal millions of records from a website and sell them cheaply to someone else who can add more to them or collate the information more efficiently, and then resell the data for a higher price.

Shavell described a similar arrangement in which data companies buy and sell data, slicing and dicing it in different ways in order to glean something new. “Each one of them has very sophisticated pricing,” he said. “The prices go up and down depending on who we are, how recent the information is, whether it’s from a mobile device, whether it’s from iOS or not, what county you’re in, and what you’ve searched”

One example Shavell gave is LiveRamp, which is owned by Acxiom. “What they specialize in is matching the cookies of where you visit that advertising networks place and matching it to your actual profiles from data brokers.” This gives advertisers two critical pieces of information: a person and their intent.

“It’s this incredible real-time stock market that combines information of what we’re doing on our phones and websites we visit and then matches that to the personal information we’ve given out about us,” said Shavell. The result is ads targeted toward what a theoretically receptive audience, based on information on consumers (that’s us) pulled from several different sources.

The LiveRamp service says it can apply unique identifiers to user data: “applying individual-level identity resolution through a privacy-safe, deterministic (exact one-to-one) matching process.” The blurb continues, “To ensure the highest level of accuracy, LiveRamp and Acxiom maintain consistent recognition on 98% of U.S. adults and nearly 100% of U.S. households.”

Acxiom did not respond to my request for an interview, and I couldn’t try out the service for myself. It’s an odd feeling since, if the company’s statistics are correct, they know who I am.

Each link in the chain gets something out of the arrangement, but Shavell contended that there’s something bigger happening here. By avoiding centralization of this information in any one company, the individual companies get their cut, and they also avoid culpability.

“They will tell you that this information is anonymous in their little database, and it’s always anonymous, but what these marketplaces do is they allow everyone to claim that their data is anonymous, and matched in a marketplace. It allows every individual company to basically claim that they’re innocent when [they’re] really completely guilty.”

Noticeably missing from the galaxy Shavell described are the titans of the modern internet: Amazon, Facebook, and Google. These companies might seem an odd addition to the list of data companies, but each has enormous insight into what many—perhaps most—people do online.

While Google’s most visible product is a search engine, and the company has expanded into just about every facet of modern existence, it has always been an advertising and data company at heart. “When you search, they know exactly what keywords you have, what history of keywords you’ve used,” said Shavell. “They sell those to their ad networks, and people bid on them, and that’s where they continue to make most of their money.”

Facebook also has enormous reach, thanks to its size and to the captive audience that clicks on links shared in the news feed. Some of the credit also goes to the sites and services Facebook owns, as well as sharing links and buttons that appear on different websites outside Facebook. These can provide telemetry, allowing Facebook to track you even when you’re not on a Facebook-owned site.

A 2017 study of 144 million page loads found that 77 percent of all page loads included some kind of tracker. Google was the outright leader, receiving data from 64 percent of page loads. A distant second, but still far ahead of the rest of the competition, was Facebook at 28 percent.

Amazon, recently the second-ever company to be valued at over a trillion dollars (after Apple), is also looking to expand its reach into the advertising data space. “Amazon is making a lot of investments into ad tech and into becoming a player in this area, when they already have so much information about our ecommerce habits,” said Shavell.

Google might know a lot, but its shopping efforts haven’t gathered much traction. “Amazon is coming from a very entrenched position and is going to try to use some of the tools that Google is using to expand into this advertising business. That’s a little bit nerve-wracking, in the sense that it hasn’t really happened before. [Amazon is] the company that knows the most about our buying habits.”

Data for Sale

Although the data economy is filled with intermediaries, Shavell reserves special ire for the data broker websites that collate and sell personal information such as phone numbers and addresses. He believes that the solution doesn’t lie in products like DeleteMe but with government. “We think there should be more government regulation, not less, in this industry. We work with the FTC and the FCC when we can to make them aware of what we consider to be terrible behavior of these data brokers, and we will help to gather evidence and grassroots support for regulatory reforms that give consumers more power over these data brokers.”

To Shavell, data brokers are equivalent to blackmailers. “There’s no reason [individuals] shouldn’t be able to tell these data brokers to take it down, and there’s no reason they should pay DeleteMe.” It’s notable that the services DeleteMe engages with do, in fact, have mechanisms for individuals to remove their information. The function of DeleteMe is to offload the work, for a fee, to a dedicated staff.

“Regulatory reforms make sure data brokers are getting away with data murder, so to speak, and doing whatever they want. And ultimately, you want regulation to be so strong that [consumers] can do most of this stuff themselves, and services like DeleteMe become less and less necessary.”

“Advertising is not evil,” Shavell conceded. “But our position is that there need to be boundaries, and consumers need to have control over what information is out there specifically.”

As for what individuals can do to protect their privacy, Shavell is surprisingly optimistic. “The more you talk about it, the more daunting it seems,” he said, but he adds that individuals can take action to protect their own data. “Just installing an ad blocker and giving out a little bit less information—that stuff does a lot.”

Crude Data

Ad targeting and retargeting aren’t the only ways to monetize data.

If trackers and exchanges like AppNexus handle the refined, polished, and (allegedly) anonymized, data brokers handle the crude—the raw data, gathered not from Google searches or tracking pixels but aggregated from publicly available sources.

One such data broker has a familiar name: Whitepages. Although the name recalls a book of local phone numbers, the digital incarnation is a different beast. “With comprehensive contact information for over 500 million people including cell phones, the most complete background check data compiled from records in all 50 states, and much more, we’re not your traditional white pages directory or phone book,” its site reads.

Typing my name into Whitepages pulled up 77 results. I discovered that there was another Max Eddy living in my parents’ town, less than a mile away. My grandfather, or rather a misspelling of my grandfather’s name, was there, too. It listed his age as 80, although he’s been dead for over a decade. I found a Maxwell A. Eddy who apparently lives close to my current address, which might explain why I’ve been receiving letters from The New York Times addressed to that name for several years.

I showed up under my legal name, along with my current domicile and the last three places I’ve lived. Next to that are both my siblings, my father, three cousins, and one uncle. To see more information, including my phone number, more previous addresses, and public records (such as arrests), I’d have to pay.

After I paid $1 for a limited trial, Whitepages obligingly delivered a report with my current address, several previous addresses, accurate phone numbers (including the phone number of my parent’s home), along with even more relatives and their profile information.

A full background report would include criminal records, traffic records (tickets and such), bankruptcies and foreclosures, a listing of properties purchased in my name, liens and judgments against me, and professional licenses. This last one is interesting in that it apparently includes things like FAA-issued pilots’ licenses and concealed-weapons permits. It appeared that Whitepages didn’t have any information on me in these categories, but I’d have to pay $19.95 to get the full report and be sure.

I reached out repeatedly to Whitepages for an interview, but after much back and forth, no interview resulted. I also found my information (available at varying price points) on other data broker sites, including Intellius and BeenVerified.

To get an idea of the scope of what data brokers know about me, I asked Abine to provide me with access to its DeleteMe service. For $129 a year, real humans at Abine work to have your personal information removed from data brokers and public record sites. Because Abine looks into other services to find your information, you must, unfortunately, hand over a lot of personal information to Abine. I added my legal name, a few nicknames, my current and former addresses (that I could remember), phone numbers, and so on. I clicked a blue button and waited.

Initial results came back within a few days. Subsequent reports varied but showed that my information was definitely for sale. By July, 30 services were included in my DeleteMe report, and my information appeared on two them. A follow-up report in August showed 28 sites in my report, and my information on 19 of them. Nearly all of the data broker sites had my name, age, past addresses, and family members; some included phone numbers, photos, email addresses, and social media accounts.

Reports from DeleteMe include an indicator that an opt-out request has been sent and a note on how long such an opt-out takes. In some cases, it’s instant; in others, it takes weeks. I asked Abine whether my information might appear on these services even after DeleteMe successfully had it removed. The answer was yes, it could.

It’s remarkable how much of my personal information was available on these services, and even more remarkable how far back it went. For me, there’s an implicit threat to this: Anyone could find it. Wouldn’t I want to find out what’s there, in case it’s truly awful? To even see how much information a service had on me, embarrassing or otherwise, I would have to pay up.

I Don’t Know You, but You Know Me

Harrison Tang is the CEO and co-founder of Spokeo, a data broker site similar to Whitepages and one of the sites that has my personal information displayed online. When I search my name on Spokeo, I find my address, my phone number, and much of the same information I found on Whitepages. Spokeo is a bit hipper: It also searches 104 social-media platforms, including Twitter and YouTube, and even dating services such as OKCupid. When I searched, Spokeo claimed it had 14 photos of me, along with nine social networks associated with a personal email address. It would cost me $7.95 to see what this all included.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I spoke with Tang. His office had been surprisingly forthcoming and engaging, unlike other data brokers. But I had a real sense of dread going into the interview—a holdover, I suppose, from seeing so many of my intimate details available for sale on so many websites.

On the phone, Tang was relaxed, and he spoke very deliberately. Right away, he pointed out that his company isn’t part of the ad economy that I was asking about. “We’re not in the ad industry; we don’t sell our data to third parties.”

Tang said that the signup process for purchasing information from Spokeo requires customers to declare what they intend to use the information for, and that the company actively screens out data or ad purchasers. The company offers no API to access its information, and it limits customer access to only a web portal and mobile app. “They can’t download our data en masse,” explained Tang.

When I ask whether Tang would be willing to give me the names of services that do sell data en masse, he politely declined. Rather than advertisers, he said his customers are people and companies trying to find other people—sometimes family members, sometimes for fraud detection.

While the privacy advocates I spoke with described data brokers like Spokeo as the source of personal data online, Tang considers Spokeo to be the end of the pipeline. Spokeo, he explained, aggregates data from more than 12 billion public records, including phonebooks, court records, public social media profiles, historical records, property records, and so on. “All this data, aggregated together. And we organize them into simple, easy-to-understand profiles so people can search connections and know who they’re dealing with.” Only publicly available data goes into Spokeo, Tang said.

The desire for this information is clearly there, as Tang points out several times that 8 percent of searches online are for first and last names. “Some people call data the third industrial revolution,” said Tang. To him, Spokeo as well as Google and Facebook are “people-search companies.”

While Spokeo does offer a one-step opt-out, Tang doesn’t believe that is a good solution. “People mistake that privacy is about hiding your information, hiding from your world,” he said. “We believe privacy is about control—it’s about transparency.”

According Tang, the future of Spokeo actually sounds remarkably Facebook-like. In the future, he hopes that Spokeo will be a platform where people claim their profiles and edit the available information. Verification that people are who they say they are, Tang conceded, is the biggest challenge. But this approach, said Tang, would put people in control of their information, rather than simply hiding it.

When I hung up the phone after speaking with Tang, I didn’t think too much about this new privacy he describes. It sounded like a pipe-dream, the enthusiastic vision of a man who genuinely believes his service helps people. Only months later, when I revisited the interview, the sense of menace crept back in. The implicit threat, I realize, is still there, whether Tang realizes it or not. That future vision is a kind of nonconsensual Facebook, where we have to sign up—or else someone else is in control of our information. Ignore it at your peril.

A Galaxy of Ads

Looking at the data economy, it’s hard to find actual bad actors. As weirdly threatening as data brokers are, most do include a mechanism to remove your information. Ad targeting and retargeting, meanwhile, isn’t the product of a single company, but a concept that has invaded the foundations of just about every online service you can think of. And all of them get their information from somewhere else, and pass it on to someone else, and make a little bit of money along the way.

Shavell called the data economy a galaxy, and the metaphor is apt. From far enough away, a galaxy is just a single point of light among other lights; get too close, and you see just a lone star. It’s only with the proper perspective that the full complexity is visible. And while I can watch the numbers tick up and down on my tracker blocker as I go from site to site, I still don’t really know who’s watching me, or how the money is flowing. Just that, somehow, it is.

This story first appeared in the ad-free, curated PCMag Digital Edition, available on iOS, Android, and other mobile platforms.

Source: https://www.pcmag.com/article/364152/how-companies-turn-your-data-into-money

[dressedporn]

Should Apple Make Safari’s Default Search Engine DuckDuckGo?

Post by Sam

In recent years Apple has really been pushing the fact they’re focused on user privacy, at least more than other tech giants such as Facebook and Google. Apple even released a TV ad that indicates their phones protect your personal data like no other.

Watch iPhone Privacy ad 📹 

I'm a huge fan of Apple’s privacy stance, I trust them with my photos a lot more then I’d trust Google Photos or DropBox. At every opportunity Apple pushes the fact they care about their customer's privacy, it’s great because no other company their size seems to take our privacy as serious (especially not Facebook and Google). But this got me thinking, if Apple cared so much about my privacy why do they make Google the default search engine in Safari? 

Apple could really show customers they care about privacy by ditching Google in favour of DuckDuckGo, a search engine that, unlike Google, doesn’t track you. If you think about it this wouldn’t be such a crazy idea. If Apple really does care about privacy then this would make total sense and Apple could still make money. 

DuckDuckGo generates revenue through ads at the top of its search results so, the money it makes through Safari could be split with Apple. With DuckDuckGo as the default search engine on hundreds of millions of iOS devices that will still drive significant revenue to both Apple and DuckDuckGo. For those who still wanted to use Google they’d be able to switch back via Safari’s settings. 

In the last couple of years DuckDuckGo has really grown, they now deliver an average of 23million searches on a daily basis. Their search results have gotten better and are now just as good as Google’s.

When iOS first launched it came with Google maps and YouTube built directly into the operating system and Google as default in Safari. However, with the release of iOS 6 Google Maps was replaced with Apple Maps and Apple’s YouTube app was removed from iOS’ default apps. So it would make sense for Apple to stop relying on Google for search too. 

So what’s stopping Apple from switching Safari’s default search engine?

The obvious answer here is money. Google pay Apple a reported $3billion a year in order to remain the primary search engine within Safari so I’m not that surprised Apple would choose Google. And I get it, at the end of the day Apple is a business and they need to make money and Google is giving them $3billion for doing very little so most of that money (if not all) is pure profit, but that $3billion isn’t actually that big when you consider their total profit for 2017 was $48.35 billion.

Of course, another reason Apple won’t switch from Google could be that they’re building their own search engine. While this might sound unlikely the company does have experience building a search engine. Spotlight is a search engine that’s bake directly into iOS and macOS that helps users find answers to questions, apps, news articles and more. Apple could be working to make spotlight more intelligent with a view to making it more robust for web searching. 

Whatever Apple is planning it’ll be interesting to see how Apple approach search over the next year or two. While there is definitely a strong $3billion case for Apple to keep its ties with Google you can’t help but feel if they really wanted to be the privacy-focused company they claim to be there’s also a robust case for them partnering with DuckDuckGo.