#how to maintain privacy on substack

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Section 6: How to Maintain Privacy on Substack

Summary of my Udemy Course “From Zero to Substack Hero.” Purpose of this Series for New Readers This is a new series upon request from my readers. I recently developed a course titled “From Zero to Substack Hero” and published it on Udemy and shared it on Content Marketing Strategy Insights owned by Dr Mehmet Yildiz who kindly allowed me to use his Substack Mastery book to design the…

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

In other news today, a Georgia judge delivered a rousing defense of reproductive rights and overturned the state's six-week rule: “Whether one couches it as liberty or privacy (or even equal protection), this dispute is fundamentally about the extent of a woman’s right to control what happens to and within her body.”

"Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property ... forcing (her) to carry an unwanted, not-yet-viable fetus to term violates her constitutional rights ..."

full ruling at: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25178630-mcburney-sistersong-final-order

Summary by Marcy Wheeler on her substack:

Here is how Judge McBurney frames the issue:

Whether one couches it as liberty or privacy (or even equal protection), this dispute is fundamentally about the extent of a woman’s right to control what happens to and within her body. The baseline rule is clear: a legally competent person has absolute authority over her body and should brook no governmental interference in what she does -- and does not do -- in terms of health, hygiene, and the like.

(There is the vaccine exception, wherein the government can condition some receipt of benefit (such as public education or Medicaid/Medicare coverage) on the administration of vaccines or other preventative medicine -- or outright mandate the treatment through a valid exercise of state police power.)

And the issue to be decided here: how to balance the rights of a not-yet-viable fetus against the rights of the only person in this great wide world who can -- by choice or by legislative imposition -- maintain that pregnancy until it is viable?

Judge McBurney writes:

While the State’s interest in protecting “unborn” life is compelling, until that life can be sustained by the State -- and not solely by the woman compelled by the Act to do the State’s work -- the balance of rights favors the woman.

Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote. Forcing a woman to carry an unwanted, not-yet-viable fetus to term violates her constitutional rights to liberty and privacy, even taking into consideration whatever bundle of rights the not-yet-viable fetus may have.

And then he invokes the Handmaid’s Tale:

For these women, the liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability. It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could -- or should -- force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another. Considering the compelling record evidence about the physical, mental, and emotional impact of unwanted pregnancies on the women who are forced by law to carry them to term (as well as on their other living children), the Court finds that, until the pregnancy is viable, a woman’s right to make decisions about her body and her health remains private and protected.

When someone other than the pregnant woman is able to sustain the fetus, then -- and only then -- should those other voices have a say in the discussion about the decisions the pregnant woman makes concerning her body and what is growing within it.

He then addresses the mental health issues at hand:

A law that saves a mother from a potentially fatal pregnancy when the risk is purely physical but which fates her to death or serious injury or disability if the risk is “mental or emotional” is patently unconstitutional and violative of the equal protection rights of pregnant women suffering from acute mental health issues.

He concludes:

A review of our higher courts’ interpretations of “liberty” demonstrates that liberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.

Accordingly, Section 4 of the LIFE Act is hereby DECLARED unconstitutional. The State and all its agents, to include any County, Municipal, or other local authority, are once again ENJOINED from seeking to enforce in any manner the LIFE Act’s PECAP termination ban in Georgia. Because Section 4 is stricken and thus its amendments to O.C.G.A. § 16-12-141 are gone, Section 11 necessarily fails as well, as a woman does not require a legislatively bestowed exception to pursue a pre-viability PECAP termination. Finally, O.C.G.A. 16-12-141(f) is DECLARED unconstitutional. It, too, shall not be enforced by the State or any of its agents.

How this ruling plays with the Georgia Supreme Court is another matter. Professor Anthony Michael Kreis says it fails to “center legal history and the evolution of the common law in the analysis much at all, which is going to be a real missed opportunity-- and a limitation of its reach-- on appeal.”

(Thanks Rebecca Solnit)

[crazyfilterlady2024]

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[jessgartner]

Leaving Facebook Part II: The Long Tail of Leaving

On June 3, I announced that I would be winding down my Facebook account with a goal of deleting it by June 30. (In the first part of this series, I detailed my reasoning for leaving Facebook.) Fortunately, I had the sense to recognize that this was going to be a slightly more involved process than simply hitting Delete My Account, but I don't think I fully comprehended the long tail of disentangling myself from the platform. 

I started out the same way I approach any project: I made a spreadsheet:

Exports and backups

A big challenge of moving away from Facebook is making sure you download and backup all of your data. On Facebook, you can do this by going to Settings > Your Facebook Information > Download Your Information. There, you'll see a terrifying scrolling list (less than half of items pictured) of the many categories of information that Facebook has been logging on you. Depending on how long you've been on Facebook and how much data you have, this can take some time, but it will run in the background.

On Instagram, click on the gear icon and go to Privacy and Security; scroll down to Account Data > Request Download. Here, you'll enter your email and you'll receive a notification when your files are ready for download.

Once these mega-files were ready and downloaded, I transferred them to my personal Dropbox and a new 3TB external hard-drive that's hooked up to Apple's TimeMachine on my MacBook.

While I was at it, I downloaded all of my WordPress data, because I hadn't yet decided if I was going to continue hosting my domain/blog with WordPress.

Where to next?

I was intent on leaving Facebook, but I wanted to continue sharing ideas and pictures somewhere on the Internet (I'm not an animal). But where to next? 

I like Twitter and, as I mentioned in my previous post, I'm planning to continue using it, but I have grown to like Twitter primarily for professional discussions so I needed another place to post cat photos and other nonsense with reckless abandon. There was also the issue of wanting to delineate the best of tools for creation, consumption, and connection according to my (ideal) criteria:

I pretty quickly recognized that there wasn't going to be a single tool/platform out there that hit all of these criteria, so I focused my search on tools that addressed one or two of these categories.

Platforms Reviewed:

Consumption

Nuzzel/Newslit

Google Alerts

Feedbin

Thread News

Apple News

Creating

WordPress

micro.blog

Tumblr

pine.blog

bearblog.dev

Drafts

MarsEdit

Mighty Networks

Patreon

ButtonDown

Substack

TinyLetter

Connecting

Mastadon

Twitter

micro.blog

Telepath (private beta)

You can read more about my exploration process of these platforms here.

Contacts

Dunbar's Number posits that there is a cognitive limit to the number of stable social relationships that a person can maintain: 150. That’s it!

At the start of this project, I was following/friending about 7k people between Facebook and Twitter. Intellectually, I know that those are not all authentic relationships-- they can't be.

One of my biggest concerns about leaving Facebook and Instagram was that I would lose touch with people I care about. So I set about the uncomfortable task of listing out my most authentic relationships-- people I genuinely wanted to stay connected to in real life. And guess what? My brain is no exception. 

Just off the top of my head, I tapped out right around 130 people. Most of these people already have and use my personal email and/or phone number. Most of these people, I have seen in the past year or so. Only about 2% of the people I claim to follow or 'keep in touch with' are authentic, stable relationships. Instead of worrying about missing out, I started wondering how my life would change if I focused more of my social energy on my most important relationships. There's another category of acquaintances with whom I'd genuinely like to stay in touch, so I'm asking people to opt-in to hearing from me here.

In the third part of this series, I'll detail my final-ish plan for life after Facebook.

[thelmasirby32]

Subscription Fatigue

Subscription Management

I have active subscriptions with about a half-dozen different news & finance sites along with about a half dozen software tools, but sometimes using a VPN or web proxy across different web browsers makes logging in to all of them & clearing cookies for some paywall sites a real pain.

If you don't subscribe to any outlets then subscribing to an aggregator like Apple News+ can make a lot of sense, but it is very easy to end up with dozens of forgotten subscriptions.

Subscription fatigue is turning into subscription stress. Something alarming, guilt inducing about having 40+ reoccurring charges each month. Financial death by a thousand cuts.— Tom Goodwin (@tomfgoodwin) January 28, 2020

Winner-take-most Market Stratification

The news business is coming to resemble other tech-enabled businesses where a winner takes most. The New York Times stock, for instance, is trading at 15 year highs & they recently announced they are raising subscription prices:

The New York Times is raising the price of its digital subscription for the first time, from $15 every four weeks to $17 — from about $195 to $221 a year.

With a Trump re-election all but assured after the Russsia, Russia, Russia garbage, the party-line impeachment (less private equity plunderer Mitt Romney) & the ridiculous Iowa primary, many NYT readers will pledge their #NeverTrumpTwice dollars with the New York Times.

If you think politics looks ridiculous today, wait until you see some of the China-related ads in a half-year as the novel coronavirus spreads around the world.

Outside of a few core winners, the news business online has been so brutal that even Warren Buffett is now a seller. As the economics get uglier news sites get more extreme with ad placements, user data sales, and pushing subscriptions. Some of these aggressive monetization efforts make otherwise respectable news outlets look like part of a very downmarket subset of the web.

Users Fight Back

Users have thus adopted to blocking ads & are also starting to ramp up blocking paywall notifications.

Some of the most popular browser extensions are ad blockers & tracking blockers like Adblock Plus, Ghostery & Privacy Badger.

Apple has made tracking their users across sites harder with their Intelligent Tracking Prevention, causing iPhone ad rates to plummet: "The allure of a Safari user in an auction has plummeted," Rubicon Project CEO Michael Barrett told the publication. "There's no easy ability to ID a user."

The Opera web browser comes with an ad blocker baked in.

Mozilla is also pushing to protect user privacy in Firefox.

Google recently announced they will stop supporting third party cookies in Chrome in the next couple years. Those who invested into adopting AMP will have to invest into making yet more technical changes to manage paywalls on AMP pages.

Each additional layer of technological complexity is another cost center publishers have to fund, often through making the user experience of their sites worse, which in turn makes their own sites less differentiated & inferior to the copies they have left across the web (via AMP, via Facebook Instant Articles, syndication in Apple News or on various portal sites like MSN or Yahoo!).

A Web Browser For Every Season

Google Chrome is spyware, so I won't recommend installing that.

Not good enough for you? Not a direct enough corollary? How about this?Also out today: https://t.co/6dUWCCEyii Google has a backdoor to track individual Chrome users by installation ID.Even GG's denial admits pieces of the same complaints y'all had about Jumpshot last week! pic.twitter.com/Km2mQfOgbJ— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) February 4, 2020

Here Google's official guide on how to remove the spyware.

The easiest & most basic solution which works across many sites using metered paywalls is to have multiple web browsers installed on your computer. Have a couple browsers which are used exclusively for reading news articles when they won't show up in your main browser & set those web browsers to delete cookies on close. Or open the browsers in private mode and search for the URL of the page from Google to see if that allows access.

If you like Firefox there are other iterations from other players like Pale Moon, Comodo IceDragon or Waterfox using their core.

If you like Google Chrome then Chromium is the parallel version of it without the spyware baked in. The Chromium project is also the underlying source used to build about a dozen other web browsers including: Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Cilqz, Blisk, Comodo Dragon, SRWare Iron, Yandex Browser & many others. Even Microsoft recently switched their Edge browser to being powered by the Chromium project. The browsers based on the Chromium store allow you to install extensions from the Chrome web store.

Some web browsers monetize users by setting affiliate links on the home screen and/or by selling the default search engine recommendation. You can change those once and they'll typically stick with whatever settings you use.

For some browsers I use for regular day to day web use I set them up to continue session on restart, and I have a session manager plugin like this one for Firefox or this one for Chromium-based browsers. For browsers which are used exclusively for reading paywall blocked articles I set them up to clear cookies on restart.

Bypassing Paywalls

There are a couple solid web browser plugins built specifically for bypassing paywalls.

Academic Journals

Unpaywall is an open database of around 25,000,000 free scholarly articles. They provide extensions for Firefox and Chromium based web browsers on their website.

News Articles

There is also one for news publications called bypass paywalls.

Mozilla Firefox: To install the Firefox version go here.

Chrome-like web browsers: To install the Chrome version of the extension in Opera or Chromium or Microsoft Edge you can download the extension here, enter developer mode inside the extensions area of your web browser & install extension. To turn developer mode on, open up the drop down menu for the browser, click on extensions to go to the extension management area, and then slide the "Developer mode" button to the right so it is blue.

Regional Blocking

If you travel internationally some websites like YouTube or Twitter or news sites will have portions of their content restricted to only showing in some geographic regions. This can be especially true for new sports content and some music.

These can be bypassed by using a VPN service like NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Witopia or IPVanish. Some VPN providers also sell pre-configured routers. If you buy a pre-configured router you can use an ethernet switch or wifi to switch back and forth between the regular router and the VPN router.

You can also buy web proxies & enter them into the Foxy Proxy web browser extension (Firefox or Chromium-compatible) with different browsers set to default to different country locations, making it easier to see what the search results show in different countries & cities quickly.

If you use a variety of web proxies you can configure some of them to work automatically in an open source rank tracking tool like Serposcope.

The Future of Journalism

I think the future of news is going to be a lot more sites like Ben Thompson's Stratechery or Jessica Lessin's TheInformation & far fewer broad/horizontal news organizations. Things are moving toward the 1,000 true fans or perhaps 100 true fans model:

This represents a move away from the traditional donation model—in which users pay to benefit the creator—to a value model, in which users are willing to pay more for something that benefits themselves. What was traditionally dubbed “self-help” now exists under the umbrella of “wellness.” People are willing to pay more for exclusive, ROI-positive services that are constructive in their lives, whether it’s related to health, finances, education, or work. In the offline world, people are accustomed to hiring experts across verticals

A friend of mine named Terry Godier launched a conversion-oriented email newsletter named Conversion Gold which has done quite well right out of the gate, leading him to launch IndieMailer, a community for paid newsletter creators.

The model which seems to be working well for those sorts of news sites is...

stick to a tight topic range

publish regularly at a somewhat decent frequency like daily or weekly, though have a strong preference to quality & originality over quantity

have a single author or a small core team which does most the writing and expand editorial hiring slowly

offer original insights & much more depth of coverage than you would typically find in the mainstream news

Rely on Wordpress or a low-cost CMS & billing technology partner like Substack, Memberful, sell on a marketplace like Udemy, Podia or Teachable, or if they have a bit more technical chops they can install aMember on their own server. One of the biggest mistakes I made when I opened up a membership site about a decade back was hand rolling custom code for memberhsip management. At one point we shut down the membership site for a while in order to allow us to rip out all that custom code & replace it with aMember.

Accept user comments on pieces or integrate a user forum using something like Discord on a subdomain or a custom Slack channel. Highlight or feature the best comments. Update readers to new features via email.

Invest much more into obtaining unique data & sources to deliver new insights without spending aggressively to syndicate onto other platforms using graphical content layouts which would require significant design, maintenance & updating expenses

Heavily differentiate your perspective from other sources

maintain a low technological maintenance overhead

low cost monthly subscription with a solid discount for annual pre-payment

instead of using a metered paywall, set some content to require payment to read & periodically publish full-feature free content (perhaps weekly) to keep up awareness of the offering in the broader public to help offset churn.

Some also work across multiple formats with complimentary offerings. The Ringer has done well with podcasts & Stratechery also has the Exponent podcast.

There are a number of other successful online-only news subscription sites like TheAthletic & Bill Bishop's Sinocism newsletter about China, but I haven't subscribed to them yet. Many people support a wide range of projects on platforms like Patreon & sites like MasterClass with an all-you-can-eat subscription will also make paying for online content far more common..

Categories: 

publishing & media

from Digital Marketing News http://www.seobook.com/bypass-paywall

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Substack Mastery Book: Chapter 6

This chapter is about How to Configure and Maintain Privacy of Substack Publications with Compelling Reasons

How to Configure and Maintain Privacy of Substack Publications with Compelling Reasons Dear beta readers, Thank you for your invaluable feedback, which is helping refine this book and enhance it as a valuable resource for fellow writers. I’ve covered five critical aspects that have already helped many readers jumpstart their Substack journey. Just yesterday, the discussion on editorial…