#not me send me screenshot of my senior citizen

[blackchimaera]

Feeling normal about the old man.jpg

[vagueandominousvibes]

Skyward Sword: In Response to Questions About Deity-Like Link

@guardedchild​ raised some excellent questions in connection with this post about SS Link. For context, in the previous post (essay, really) I explained my thoughts about why I felt like Link, to some extent, was Othered throughout Skyward Sword, as well as semi-deified. I explained this as a division between Link (the Othered) and Groose (the normative).

To answer your questions, I went back and watched the last twenty-or-so (or however long it took me to eat dinner) minutes of this walkthrough of SS, took way too many screenshots (28, total, though I’m not using all of them), and I may have enough to come up with some answers? 

Q1: And with that division by the end of SS, is there any notable difference in people’s interactions with [SS Link]?

Short answer: Beyond an improved relationship with Groose and, presumably, Cawlin and Strich, no.

Long answer: No, but —

We see Link get on exceedingly well with the people he interacts with in the wrap-up of the game. His first interaction with Groose after defeating Demise consists of Groose making a joke about his own importance to the story, pointing out that it’s a joke, and Link looking at him with a smile:

This is very different compared to the beginning, where Groose was being purposefully antagonistic towards Link, so it seems safe to say that Groose has learned to respect him. I also think we can assume that this respect is directly related to the journey Link has undergone, meaning it’s directly related to Link’s Othering. Maybe Link needed to be Othered in order to be respected?

Note that when I say “in order to be respected”, I’m going off of the argument from the previous post about Groose being a stand-in for the normative society. What I’m essentially suggesting here, is therefore that maybe Link needed to be Othered in order to be respected by the general society. Of course, we see him interact with a number of senior (and not-so-senior) citizens of Skyloft, who all seem to have some semblance of respect for him, but most of these interactions are directly related to him either travelling to the Surface, being on a journey to save Zelda, or being a student at the Academy. 

Previous to the start of his journey, we only really get a sense of his relationship with Skyloft through his interactions with Zelda, Groose, and Gaepora — meaning through his interactions with his best friend (who stands up for him when he’s being bullied), with his bully, and with an authority figure of the Academy. I’m not saying he was generally disliked before his journey, because I highly doubt that to be the case, but it’s clear that, to the right people, he was an easy target.

Once his journey starts, that “easy target” is slowly eliminated, but would that have happened if he hadn’t gone on his journey? I don’t know. Personally, I don’t think so. I think he needed that journey to not only be not-disliked, but gain the respect of the general population.

We then get some more general shots of Link standing together with other people (Groose, Zelda, and Impa):

And even one that includes Gaepora and Link and Zelda’s loftwings:

Then we see Cawlin and Strich make a trip down to the Surface to hang out with Groose and the small birds:

It’s almost like we’re getting the first little steps towards an erasure of the divide I talked about in the previous post; the Surface is no longer exclusively associated with Link and Zelda, but also with other people of Skyloft. 

Where this gets muddled, however, is in Link’s interaction with Fi, and in Link and Zelda’s very final scene on the Goddess Statue. 

Fi tells Link: “Master, you have achieved the purpose you were chosen to fulfill. Please, set the sword in the pedestal and bring the goddess’s mission to an end” (1:06:51:11). I think this can be read as an attempt to send Link back to his own existence among the people on Skyloft. He has “achieved the purpose [he was] chosen to fulfill”, and all he has left to do is to “bring the goddess’s mission to an end”. He has to conclude the journey by giving up everything he has gained through the Master Sword and his friendship with Fi — everything he did to gain the respect he now has, including his Othering, because without the Master Sword, who is he? What will he be to the people around him?

But then Fi calls out to him just as he’s about to leave, and she doesn’t call him “Master”, but “Link”. She does it twice in a row, first to catch his attention, and then to address him. And then we get this lovely shot:

I know I like to talk about mirroring, but if there’s one thing my professors taught me, it’s that in visual medias angles are important. The fact that we see Link and Fi’s profiles as they face each other, both looking directly at one another, heads raised, bodies cropped so that the arms (or where the arms should be) and the legs aren’t shown — so that we essentially get “profile style” views of both of them — is important. I think we’re meant to see a little bit of a similarity here, and I think it’s a way of acknowledging that, even though Link’s journey has ended, everything he went through and all the beings he met still will be a part of him. He has been Othered, and that’s not going away.

As a final adieu, Fi says: “Thank you, Master Link. May we meet again in another life ...” (1:06:54:09). I think it’s significant that she combines “Master” and “Link”, because she essentially combines both aspects of Link — the Othered Hero who is the Master of the Master Sword, and the boy at Skyloft who got bullied — and combines them into one. It’s another attempt at erasing the divide between Link and Skyloft, by saying that Link can be both at the same time. 

Unfortunately (or fortunately?) we then see it undermined in Link’s scene with Zelda, where Link and Zelda are literally standing on the Goddess Statue, with the Triforce behind them, while Link plays the Goddess Harp:

Followed by Groose, Cawlin, and Strich flying away from them (it’s not very clear in the screenshot, but I assure you, they’re sitting on top of the loftwings):

And I personally find this scene very decisive, because it’s the very last one in the game, and it’s the one where Zelda says that she’s always dreamed about living on the Surface, that she’d like to stay, and then asks: “What about you, Link? What will you do now?” (1:07:09:25). Zelda, the Goddess reborn, has made her decision. She’s staying on the Surface, alongside the Triforce and everything else associated with the deities, while Groose, the person so strongly associated with Skyloft, and his two friends, appear to be leaving the Surface to return to Skyloft.

Right afterward Zelda has asked Link what he’s going to do, we see Link smile at her, and then both their loftwings fly away, following Groose, Cawlin, and Strich:

It’s not expressed verbally, but I think the loftwings also leaving signals that Link has made his decision to stay with Zelda, the Goddess Statue, the Triforce, the Temple, and the Master Sword. He’s staying on the Surface, right where he was Othered. I feel like any previous attempts at reconciling his two existences — as Skyloftian and as Othered — fall short here. Sure, he’s on good terms with both parties, but in the end, he makes the decision to remain Othered, and that’s important. Yes, it’s the result of a long process, but it’s also a conscious choice he has made.

We could, of course, theorise that the people who left come back, and that a proper settlement is built, because knowing the timeline, we can assume that something like that happens. But within the context of Skyward Sword itself, I think the division stands.

So, to get back to your question, beyond the gained respect, there isn’t any notable difference in people’s interactions with Link. The difference lies in the choice Link makes to remain Othered on the Surface, alongside Zelda, rather than return to Skyloft.

Q2: Can they all feel this power he’s been forging or are there subtler differences that separate Link from the normalcy of Skyloft?

This seems like much more of an “oh, that would be fun to speculate about in fan content and headcanons!” kind of question, but to the extent that it can be answered by the game, I think I’ve already partially covered it. Still, for all our benefits, I’ll go (briefly) through it.

I don’t know if Link’s powers are palpable. I don’t think they are. I think the respect he gains rests very heavily on the things he’s accomplished — on saving Zelda, and on defeating Demise. 

As outlined above, I do think there are more subtle differences that separate Link from the normalcy of Skyloft. His final interaction with Fi, for one, reminds us that he’s still part of that same Otherworldly Otherness that Fi’s part of, and his standing on the Goddess Statue, with the Goddess reborn, the Triforce, and the Goddess Harp, further reinforces that. By these exchanges and visual cues, we’re reminded that he’s no longer “purely” Skyloftian the way Groose, Cawlin, and Strich are. In this sense, he’s more akin to Zelda, who herself is a deity reborn.

I think his decision to stay on the Surface also says something about this subtler difference, because he has a choice — he can get on the back of his loftwing and fly back to Skyloft. But he doesn’t. And I think there’s something in that — something that indicates that he himself doesn’t feel like he belongs up there anymore, or that he feels that he should remain by Zelda’s side. Regardless of which option we go with, we’re still left with this: that Link seems more comfortable with remaining in an Othered world than with returning to the normalcy of Skyloft.

.

Apologies for how long it took me to get back to you about this, but I hope I’ve answered your questions satisfactorily!

[carygrantsbeard]

started following you bc one of my mutuals send me a screenshot of your url and said 'this you'? and stayed for the senior citizens ❤️

SCREAM why didn’t I know this earlier that’s the best publicity absjdjdjjfjf I love it 🥰❤️

[schristensen20ahsgov-blog]

EXECUTIVE ACTION ASSESSMENT OF ISSUE

Briefly summarize (four-to-five sentences) President Trump’s stance on your issue.

Trump never explicitly states he is for or anti Second Amendment on his website, but there is evidence to suggest he supports legislation for gun control. After the tragedy in El Paso he stated that “we must make sure that those judged to pose a grave risk to public safety do not have access to firearms, and that, if they do, those firearms can be taken through rapid due process”. He went on to disclose that his administration has strengthened background checks and taken steps to improve school safety. He also encourages Americans to learn how to operate firearms responsibly before partaking in shooting sports. 

Do you agree or disagree with his position?  Explain.

I agree with the words, but not necessarily the actions. He talks a big game of making America safer and imposing new policies to protect citizens from gun violence, but has done little to actually prevent the problem. Most of his responses to mass shootings pointed fingers at mental health, white supremacy and violent video games before briefly mentioning that access to firearms is problematic. I would agree more if he did more with his title of president to enact serious gun control legislation in America. 

Which Executive Cabinet manages your issue?

U.S. Department of Justice 

What is the Cabinet’s mission statement (usually on the homepage)? 

The Department of Justice enforces federal laws, seeks just punishment for the guilty, and ensures the fair and impartial administration of justice.

Who is the secretary of the department (usually under the about tab? What is their background? Are they professionally qualified to lead this department or are they merely a political appointment? Explain how this impacts the department and your issue.

Attorney General William Barr: he was already the Attorney General for George W. Bush, where he was first appointed assistant attorney general and deputy attorney general before earning the role. This means he is professionally qualified to lead the department again currently. He was also a political appointment though, as Trump chose him after he defended Trump’s Russian investigation as well as his ability to fire the FBI director. There are certainly issues of interest surrounding the Mueller report, but as far as gun control goes, his actions have been very professional and unbiased.  

Explore the Cabinet’s Programs and Services.  Which would be suitable for responding to your issue? Briefly identify and explain them.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, since it enforces federal criminal laws regulating the firearms and explosives industries.

Based on your review of the President’s website and Cabinet programs, assess the executive action taken on your issue.  Explain your level of satisfaction and provide examples.  Is this department one which President Trump wants to cut funding?  If so, do agree that this is a viable approach to resolving your issue?  How would decrease funding to this department affect your civic action issue?

It’s evident the topic of gun control has crossed the mind of more than a few White House officials, but little has actually been done about it. It took me a while to even find content about it on their websites, as other issues are clearly the main focus of the current administration. When Trump does take executive action though, it is mainly focused on the prevention of school or mass shootings through new safety and mental health programs, instead of addressing the problem of irresponsible people gaining access to guns in the first place. I even found that Trump plans to veto a bill making background checks on private firearm sales a federal law. So overall, my satisfaction level is low. If Trump were to ever cut funding, it would perhaps send a message to the American people that their safety isn’t very important in the eyes of the man who swore to protect them. 

____________________________________________________________

SACAPS—

A California school shooting survivor says 'I wasn't surprised that it happened'

CNN

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/18/us/california-santa-clarita-school-shooting-monday/index.html

S-  To summarize, this piece is about the aftermath of the Santa Clarita school shooting. The article is mainly interviews with students who witnessed the incident and their reaction to the violence and lock down, as well as coverage on a massive 10,000 people memorial that took place after. 

A-  Holly Yan is a senior news writer for CNN, and from my findings, is a very experienced and trustworthy journalist. 

C- The article is a response to a recent school shooting that happened in Santa Clarita at Saugus High School on Thursday, November 14th. Unfortunately there were two teenage victims and four were left injured. The gunman, a 15-year old boy, shot himself and later died after the incident.

A- The audience should be everyone in America that either has or cares about the safety of kids. It was intended for the general public in order to promote empathy for the teenagers that suffered, as well as for lawmakers to add to the list of reasons they should take action on gun control. 

P- Despite being from CNN, a more often than not left leaning source, I found the article to be objective. Any words that criticized current policy or called for reform were direct quotes from students at Saugus High School, not the author. As a current high school student I agree with the perspective though, especially when one student said the words “I wasn’t surprised that it happened”. I’ve seen firsthand that a shooting can really happen anywhere at anytime, sadly making such an event no real shocker to hear about in the news again. 

S- The author uses lots of direct evidence, such as quotes from a witness interview with a Saugus high school student that heard the gunshots and was locked down during the event. Additionally, the article features screenshots of text messages exchanged between the student and her mother as evidence of just how real and scary the situation was in the moment. It also includes a few emotional words from a victim’s brother and friend.  

[marviinmelton]

Bye, Chrome: Why I’m switching to Firefox and you should too

You’re probably sick of hearing about data and privacy by now–especially because, if you live in the United States, you might feel like there’s very little you can do to protect yourself from giant corporations feeding off your time, interests, and personal information.

So how do you walk the line between taking advantage of the internet’s many benefits while protecting yourself from the corporate interests that aim to use your data for gain? This is the push-and-pull I’ve had with myself over the past year, as I’ve grappled with the revelations that Cambridge Analytica has the personal data of more than 50 million Americans, courtesy of Facebook, and used it to manipulate people in the 2016 elections. I’ve watched companies shut down their European branches because Europe’s data privacy regulations invalidate their business models. And given the number of data breaches that have occurred over the past decade, there’s a good chance that malicious hackers have my info–and if they don’t, it’s only a matter of time.

[Screenshot: Mozilla]

While the amount of data about me may not have caused harm in my life yet–as far as I know–I don’t want to be the victim of monopolistic internet oligarchs as they continue to cash in on surveillance-based business models. What’s a concerned citizen of the internet to do? Here’s one no-brainer: stop using Chrome and switch to Firefox.

Google already runs a lot of my online life–it’s my email, my calendar, my go-to map, and all my documents. I use Duck Duck Go as my primary search engine because I’m aware of how much information about myself I voluntarily give to Google in so many other ways. I can’t even remember why I decided to use Chrome in the first place: the browser has become such a default for American internet users that I never even questioned it: Chrome has about 60% of the browser market, and Firefox has only 10%. But why should I continue to use the company’s browser, which acts as literally the window through which I experience much of the internet, when its incentives–to learn a lot about me so it can sell advertisements–don’t align with mine?

Firefox launched in 2004. It’s not a new option among internet privacy wonks. But I only remembered it existed recently while reporting on data privacy. Unlike Chrome, Firefox is run by Mozilla, a non-profit organization that advocates for a “healthy” internet. Its mission is to help build an internet in an open source manner that’s accessible to everyone–and where privacy and security are built in. Contrast that to Chrome’s privacy policy, which states that it stores your browsing data locally unless you are signed into your Google account, which enables the browser to send that information back to Google. The policy also states that Chrome allows third party website to access your IP address and any information that site has tracked using cookies. If you care about privacy at all, you should ditch the browser that supports a company using data to sell advertisements and enabling other companies to track your online movements, and one that does not use your data at all.

Though Mozilla itself is a nonprofit, Firefox is developed within a corporation owned by the non-profit. This enables the Mozilla Corporation to collect revenue to support its development of Firefox and other internet services. Ironically, Mozilla supports its developers using revenue from Google, which pays the nonprofit to have Google Search as Firefox’s default search engine. That’s not its sole revenue: Mozilla also has other agreements with search engines around the world, like Baidu in China, to be the default search engine in particular locations. But because it relies on these agreements rather than gathering user data so it can sell advertisements, the Mozilla Corporation has a fundamentally different business model than Google. Internet service providers pay Mozilla, rather than Mozilla having to create revenue out of its user base. It’s more of a subscription model than a surveillance model, and users always have the choice to change their search engine to whichever they prefer.

I spoke to Madhava Enros, the senior director of Firefox UX, and Peter Doljanski, a product manager for Firefox, to learn more about how Mozilla’s browser builds privacy into its architecture. Core to their philosophy? Privacy and convenience don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Instead, Firefox’s designers and developers try to make the best decision on behalf of the user, while always leaning toward privacy first. “We put the user first in terms of privacy,” Doljanski says. “We do not collect personally identifiable data, not what you do or what websites you go to.”

That’s not just lip service, like it often is when companies like Facebook claim that users are in control of their data. For instance, Firefox  protects you from being tracked by advertising networks across websites, which has the lovely side effect of making sites load faster. “As you move from website to website, advertising networks essentially follow you so they can see what you’re doing so they can serve you targeted advertisements,” Doljanski says. “Firefox is the only browser out of the box that prevents that from happening.” The browser’s Tracking Protection feature automatically blocks a list of common trackers, something you need a specific, third-party browser extension to do on Chrome.

The “out of the box” element of Firefox’s privacy protection is crucial. Chrome does give you many privacy controls, but the default for most of them is to allow Google to collect the greatest amount of information about you as possible. For instance, Google Chrome gives users the option to tell every website you go to not to track you, but it’s not automatically turned on. Firefox offers the same function to add a “Do Not Track” tag to every site you visit–but when I downloaded the browser, the default was set to “always.”

[Screenshot: Mozilla]

Because Chrome settings that don’t encourage privacy are the default, users are encouraged to leave them as they are from the get-go, and likely don’t understand what data Google vacuums up. Even if you do care, reading through Google Chrome’s 13,500-word privacy whitepaper, which uses a lot of technical jargon and obfuscates exactly what data the browser is tracking, isn’t helpful either. When I reached out to Google with questions about what data Chrome tracks, the company sent me that white paper but didn’t answer any of my specific questions.

One downside to using Firefox is that many browser extensions are built primarily for Chrome–my password manager luckily has a Firefox extension but it often causes the browser to crash. However, Mozilla also builds extensions you can use exclusively on Firefox. After the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica firestorm, Firefox released an extension called the Facebook Container, which allows you to browse Facebook or Instagram normally, but prevents Facebook from tracking where you went when you left the site–and thus stops the company from tracking you around the web and using that information to build out a more robust personal profile of you.

[Screenshot: Mozilla]

Firefox isn’t even Mozilla’s most private browser. The non-profit also has a mobile-only browser called Firefox Focus that basically turns Firefox’s private browsing mode (akin to incognito browsing on Chrome, but with much less data leakage) into a full-fledged browser on its own. Privacy is built right into Focus’s UX: there’s a large “erase” button on every screen that lets you delete all of your history with a single tap. Focus and Firefox’s private browsing mode also have a feature called “origin referrer trimming,” where the browser automatically deletes the information about which site you’re coming from when you land on the next page. “The user doesn’t need to think about that,” Doljanski says. “It’s not heavily advertised, but it’s the little decisions we make along the way that meant the user doesn’t have to make the choice”–or even know what origin referrer trimming is in the first place.

Firefox Focus [Screenshot: Mozilla]

Many of these decisions, both in Firefox and in Focus, are to guard against what Enros calls the “uncanny valley” of internet browsing–when ads follow you around the internet for weeks. “I buy a toaster, and now it feels like the Internet has decided I’m a toaster enthusiast and I want to hear about toasters for the rest of my life,” he says. “It’s not a scary thing. I’m not scared of toasters, but it’s in an uncanny valley in which I wonder what kinds of decisions they’re making about me.”

Ultimately, Firefox’s designers have the leeway to make these privacy-first decisions because Mozilla’s motivations are fundamentally different from Google’s. Mozilla is a non-profit with a mission, and Google is a for-profit corporation with an advertising-based business model. To a large degree, Google’s business model relies on users giving up their data, making it incompatible with the kind of internet that Firefox is mission-bound to build. It comes back to money: While Firefox and Chrome ultimately perform the same service, the browsers’ developers approached their design in a radically different way because one organization has to serve a bottom line, and the other doesn’t.

That also means Firefox’s mission is aligned with its users. The browser is explicitly designed to help people like me navigate the convenience versus privacy conundrum. “To a great degree, people like us need solutions that aren’t going to detrimentally impact our convenience. This is where privacy is often difficult online,”  Doljanski says. “People say, go install this VPN, do this and do that, and add all these layers of complexity. The average user or even tech savvy user that doesn’t have the time to do all these things will choose convenience over privacy. We try to make meaningful decisions on behalf of the user so we don’t need to put something else in front of them.”

When GDPR, the most sweeping privacy law in recent years, went into effect last week, we saw firsthand how much work companies were requiring users to do–just think of all those opt-in emails. Those emails are certainly a step toward raising people’s awareness about privacy, but I deleted almost all of them without reading them, and you probably did, too. Mozilla’s approach is to make the best decision for users’ privacy in the first place, without requiring so much effort on the users’ part.

Because who really spends any time in their privacy settings? Settings pages aren’t a good UX solution to providing clear information about how data is used, which is now required in Europe because of GDPR. “Control can’t mean the responsibility to scrutinize every possible option to keep yourself safe,” Enros says. “We assume a position to keep you safe, and then introducing more controls for experts.”

Firefox doesn’t always work better than Chrome–sometimes it’ll freeze on my older work computer, and I do need to clear my history more frequently so the browser doesn’t get too slow. But these are easy trade-offs to make, knowing that by using Firefox, my data is safe with me.

Bye, Chrome: Why I’m switching to Firefox and you should too published first on https://petrotekb.tumblr.com/

[wetrumpfeed]

Afternoon MAGAthread: YOUR WEEKLY PRESIDENTIAL RECAP!

HAPPY SUNDAY GUNDAY FOLKS!

This is u/ivaginaryfriend here and I'm back with everything spicy and dank from the past week! For those that missed any past recaps you can check those out here!

Sunday, February 10th:

🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:

Senator Richard Burr, The Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, just announced that after almost two years, more than two hundred interviews, and thousands of documents, they have found NO COLLUSION BETWEEN TRUMP AND RUSSIA! Is anybody really surprised by this?

African Americans are very angry at the double standard on full display in Virginia!

Gallup Poll: “Open Borders will potentially attract 42 million Latin Americans.” This would be a disaster for the U.S. We need the Wall now!

I don’t think the Dems on the Border Committee are being allowed by their leaders to make a deal. They are offering very little money for the desperately needed Border Wall & now, out of the blue, want a cap on convicted violent felons to be held in detention!

It was a very bad week for the Democrats, with the GREAT economic numbers, The Virginia disaster and the State of the Union address. Now, with the terrible offers being made by them to the Border Committee, I actually believe they want a Shutdown. They want a new subject!

The media was able to get my work schedule, something very easy to do, but it should have been reported as a positive, not negative. When the term Executive Time is used, I am generally working, not relaxing. In fact, I probably work more hours than almost any past President..... ... ....The fact is, when I took over as President, our Country was a mess. Depleted Military, Endless Wars, a potential War with North Korea, V.A., High Taxes & too many Regulations, Border, Immigration & HealthCare problems, & much more. I had no choice but to work very long hours!

“President is on sound legal ground to declare a National Emergency. There have been 58 National Emergencies declared since the law was enacted in 1976, and 31 right now that are currently active, so this is hardly unprecedented.” Congressman @tommcclintock

The Border Committee Democrats are behaving, all of a sudden, irrationally. Not only are they unwilling to give dollars for the obviously needed Wall (they overrode recommendations of Border Patrol experts), but they don’t even want to take muderers into custody! What’s going on?

Well, it happened again. Amy Klobuchar announced that she is running for President, talking proudly of fighting global warming while standing in a virtual blizzard of snow, ice and freezing temperatures. Bad timing. By the end of her speech she looked like a Snowman(woman)!

(Retweeting Club for Growth) Agreed! Senate needs to confirm @realDonaldTrump Admin appointees. #SOTU

The U.S. will soon control 100% of ISIS territory in Syria. @CNN (do you believe this?).

Working hard, thank you!

SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:

(D)ouble Standards

god emperor trump

Obama built that...

Donald Trump Jr.: “Are we getting to the PC tipping point yet?”

🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:

Pewdiepie knows what’s up!

The rise of Generation Z, the most conservative generation since "The Greatest Generation" in the 1950's, is scaring the bejeezus out of the Democrats

I never owned any slaves. You never picked any cotton. GET OVER IT.

They came so close to being self aware

Monday, February 11th:

TODAY'S ACTION:

Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence

President Trump Meets with Sheriffs from Across the Country

🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:

“Fact checkers have become Fake News.” @JesseBWatters So True!

No president ever worked harder than me (cleaning up the mess I inherited)!

The Democrats do not want us to detain, or send back, criminal aliens! This is a brand new demand. Crazy!

The Democrats are so self righteous and ANGRY! Loosen up and have some fun. The Country is doing well!

Will be heading to El Paso very soon. Big speech on Border Security and much else tonight. Tremendous crowd! See you later!

(Screenshot)

40 years of corruption. 40 years of repression. 40 years of terror. The regime in Iran has produced only #40YearsofFailure. The long-suffering Iranian people deserve a much brighter future.

۴۰ سال فساد. ۴۰ سال سرکوب. ۴۰ سال ترور. رژیم ایران فقط موجب #چهل_سال_شکست شد�� است. مردم ایران که مدتهاست در رنجند شایسته آینده روشن تری هستند

Coal is an important part of our electricity generation mix and @TVAnews should give serious consideration to all factors before voting to close viable power plants, like Paradise #3 in Kentucky!

(Retweeting Don Jr.) Beto trying to counter-program @realdonaldtrump in his hometown and only drawing a few hundred people to Trump’s 35,000 is a really bad look. Partial pic of the Trump overflow crowd below! #AnyQuestions

We are fighting for all Americans, from all backgrounds, of every age, race, religion, birthplace, color & creed. Our agenda is NOT a partisan agenda – it is the mainstream, common sense agenda of the American People. Thank you El Paso, Texas - I love you!

(Retweeting Dan Scavino) 🚨Happening Now: @realDonaldTrump overflow crowd in El Paso, Texas....

(Retweeting Laura Ingraham) It was 45 degrees outside and this was the overflow crowd. #ElPaso @realDonaldTrump

SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:

Paramedic makes a valid point about the entitled $15/hr living wage. Red pills are flying.

High energy in El Paso today!

The case for Russia collusion … against the Democrats

Rasmussen: Presidential Approval At 52%

Donald Trump Jr. reacts to Nancy Pelosi and Democrats pressuring Ilhan Omar to apologize for her anti-Semitic remarks on Twitter: "The forthcoming non apology is going to be awesome."

"TIRED OF BEING A WAGE CUCK? WANT TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT BY NO LONGER DRIVING TO WORK? DECLARE YOURSELF UNWILLING TO WORK TODAY!"

PRESS BRIEFINGS, INTERVIEWS, RALLIES:

WATCH PARTY: PRESIDENT TRUMP EL PASO, TEXAS 2/11/2019

🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:

Democrats Continue To Be Shocked By Obvious Things They Vote For

When I realize 75% of the anti-Trump outrage on Reddit is from people who aren't even in the US

Overflow crowd outside Trump's El Paso rally is ABSOLUTELY HUGE

The Emperor Protects

Thank you, Kanye. Very cool!

Tuesday, February 12th:

TODAY'S ACTION:

Five Nominations and One Withdrawal Sent to the Senate

President Trump Hosts a Cabinet Meeting

🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:

Beautiful evening in El Paso, Texas last night. God Bless the USA!

Was just presented the concept and parameters of the Border Security Deal by hard working Senator Richard Shelby. Looking over all aspects knowing that this will be hooked up with lots of money from other sources.... ... ....Will be getting almost $23 BILLION for Border Security. Regardless of Wall money, it is being built as we speak!

Thank you to @MSNBC!

(Retweeting Life On Earth) They are soooo beautiful and magnificent! ❤️❤️❤️❤️

(Retweeting The White House) Americans pay 180 percent of what Europeans, Canadians, and Japanese pay for the exact same drugs! Our seniors aren't going to foot the bill for free-riders abroad any longer, HHS Secretary Alex Azar says.

(Retweeting The White House) President Trump's commitment to improving the quality of life for all Americans has led to the largest single decline in drug prices in 46 YEARS.

I want to thank all Republicans for the work you have done in dealing with the Radical Left on Border Security. Not an easy task, but the Wall is being built and will be a great achievement and contributor toward life and safety within our Country!

(Retweeting Dan Bongino) I don’t feel an ounce of empathy for all of the imbeciles who bought into the Russian collusion hoax now that it’s been entirely debunked. You were warned for over a year about this scam & you fell for it anyway. You did this to yourself.

SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:

President Trump on the congressional deal: "I'm not happy about it. It's not doing the trick."

Ted Cruz wants to confiscate recently-convicted El Chapo’s property to pay for the wall, which means Mexico would pay for the wall.

Still No Collusion.

HAHAHAHAA AHAHAHAHAAAAA HAAAAAA HAHAHAAHAHAAAAA!!!!!!!!!

Dowd Nails It – Former Trump Attorney Outlines Insufferable Behavior of Mueller and Rosenstein in Perpetrating Political Russia Hoax…This is a must Read.

🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:

Trump fence bad...my fence good

The Party of Life vs. Death

MFW 52% approval after 2 years of literal Nazi rule, "Russia collusion", peepee dossier, PEACH 45, Creepy Porn Lawyer, muh drumph's tax returns

Kamala Harris claims to have smoked pot in college while listening to Tupac and Snoop. She graduated college in 1986. Tupac's first album came out in 1991. Snoop's first album came out in 1993. Lying sac of shit.

MAGA

Wednesday, February 13th:

TODAY'S ACTION:

President Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Nominate and Appoint Individuals to Key Administration Posts

President Trump Meets with the President of the Republic of Colombia and Mrs. Ruiz Sandoval

President Trump Speaks at the Major County Sheriffs and Cities Chiefs Association Joint Conference

🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:

The Senate Intelligence Committee: THERE IS NO EVIDENCE OF COLLUSION BETWEEN THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN AND RUSSIA!

The Gallup Poll just announced that 69% of our great citizens expect their finances to improve next year, a 16 year high. Nice!

Today, it was my great honor to address the @MjrCitiesChiefs Association and @MCSheriffs Conference in Washington, D.C. We will never forget your service, and we will never, ever let you down! We love you, and we thank God for you each and every day.

"Every American in every community and from every walk of life has a right to live in security and to live in peace. That is my highest priority as President."

(Screenshot)

(Article)

(Retweeting Ted Cruz) Report: Texas crude oil production breaks 1970s record

California has been forced to cancel the massive bullet train project after having spent and wasted many billions of dollars. They owe the Federal Government three and a half billion dollars. We want that money back now. Whole project is a “green” disaster!

SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:

BREAKING: Roger Stone Files Motion - Alleges Special Counsel Released Unsealed Indictment to CNN

Ilhan Omar calls for investigation into Trans discrimination by U.S.A. Powerlifting... quickly gets her A$$ handed to her.

California: $33 billion is ok for a train with two stops, but $6 billion is too much to defend our nation.

The Silver Fox, Mike Pence Calls For “Jihad Ilhan” To Be Removed From The Foreign Affairs Committee

Breaking: Convington high school students cleared of all wrongdoing by neutral third-party investigators

🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:

When you're a leftist and someone disagrees with you about literally anything.

“Signs of Life”

Thanks Guardian Pepe

Kek

"BORDER SECURITY IS SCARY!" [Crosspost from r/funny]

Thursday, February 14th:

TODAY'S ACTION:

President Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Nominate Individuals to Key Administration Posts

🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:

Disgraced FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe pretends to be a “poor little Angel” when in fact he was a big part of the Crooked Hillary Scandal & the Russia Hoax - a puppet for Leakin’ James Comey. I.G. report on McCabe was devastating. Part of “insurance policy” in case I won.... ... ....Many of the top FBI brass were fired, forced to leave, or left. McCabe’s wife received BIG DOLLARS from Clinton people for her campaign - he gave Hillary a pass. McCabe is a disgrace to the FBI and a disgrace to our Country. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

Reviewing the funding bill with my team at the @WhiteHouse!

One year ago today, a horrific act of violence took the lives of 14 students and 3 educators in Parkland, Florida. On this somber anniversary, we honor their memory and recommit to ensuring the safety of all Americans, especially our Nation’s children... https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/presidential-message-school-safety-remembering-parkland-tragedy/ …

“After The Flight 93 Election, The Vote That Saved America - And What We Still Have To Lose,” by very talented Michael Anton, is a terrific read. Check it out!

(Retweeting The White House) .@PressSec: President Trump will sign the government funding bill, and as he has stated before, he will also take other executive action—including a national emergency—to ensure we stop the national security and humanitarian crisis at the border.

“Trying to use the 25th Amendment to try and circumvent the Election is a despicable act of unconstitutional power grabbing...which happens in third world countries. You have to obey the law. This is an attack on our system & Constitution.” Alan Dershowitz. @TuckerCarlson

SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:

Trump Frees Up $8 Billion To Build The Wall

White House Statement on Government Funding Bill

Jussie Smollett has SCRUBBED his Twitter & Instagram accounts of ANY references of the hoax attack. Sorry buddy you can't make this go away that easily.

McCabe, Rosenstein must testify to explain claim that DOJ discussed removing Trump, GOP leaders say

EATING THEIR OWN! Gov Cuomo blames Donkey Face for Amazon leaving NY 😂

🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:

Got caught and now calling each other liars.

When you believe in a conspiracy with no proof for more than two years, are you a conspiracy theorist then?

HOLY HOAX ALERT. Two suspects arrested in Jussie Smollett case. African American FRIENDS of Smollett. Worked w. him on Empire. Sussie deleted their #s out of his log.

Just pointing out the obvious

Trump signs the Farm Bill making dog and cat meat illegal in the United States

Friday, February 15th:

TODAY'S ACTION:

Presidential Proclamation on Declaring a National Emergency Concerning the Southern Border of the United States

President Donald J. Trump Signed H.J.Res. 31 into Law

President Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Nominate Individuals to Key Administration Posts

🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:

(Retweeting The White House) President Trump Speaks on the National Security & Humanitarian Crisis on Our Southern Border

Great job by law enforcement in Aurora, Illinois. Heartfelt condolences to all of the victims and their families. America is with you!

SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:

China's REALLY mad now...

He did it! Trump declares emergency on border, eyes $8B for wall as he signs spending package

Thanks Everyone!! I am but a humble memesmith, without all of you enjoying and sharing my work I am nothing

AHAHAHHA TRUMP RETWEETED @CARTPEDONKTUM.. IM DYING... TROLL LEVEL 9999

Twitter took down u/carpedonktum's meme

🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:

I was the victim of a hate crime today and I don’t know where else to talk about it. I need support

Let's go Ted, We're building a Wall!

The Lying Left

Early morning shitpost by Jr:

Hello, Chicago PD? I'd like to report an ACTUAL murder this time.

Saturday, February 16th:

🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:

(Video)

BUILDING THE WALL!

Trade negotiators have just returned from China where the meetings on Trade were very productive. Now at meetings with me at Mar-a-Lago giving the details. In the meantime, Billions of Dollars are being paid to the United States by China in the form of Trade Tariffs!

The United States is asking Britain, France, Germany and other European allies to take back over 800 ISIS fighters that we captured in Syria and put them on trial. The Caliphate is ready to fall. The alternative is not a good one in that we will be forced to release them........ ... ....The U.S. does not want to watch as these ISIS fighters permeate Europe, which is where they are expected to go. We do so much, and spend so much - Time for others to step up and do the job that they are so capable of doing. We are pulling back after 100% Caliphate victory!

(Retweeting Real_Defender) Protecting America and putting Americans first. Thank you Mr. President!

THE GREATEST MEME EVER

SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:

THE MADMAN TWEETED MY NEW VERSION!

Twitter has censored POTUS.

Don Jr is shocked

How come Congress never introduces Hate Crime Hoax Legislation?

🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:

That's me in the corner

Aaaaand it’s gone...

R.E.M Meme War: It's the end of the World (TDS remake)

YOU CANT HANDLE THE TRUTH!

WEW LAD!

Without further ado, some tunes to help you get through all this WINNING:

Raingurl

Tadow

Gold

Doin' it Right

Crazy

Talk Is Cheap

MAGA ON PATRIOTS!

submitted by /u/Ivaginaryfriend [link] [comments]

[robgrayofficial]

HAPPY SUNDAY GUNDAY FOLKS!This is u/ivaginaryfriend here and I'm back with everything spicy and dank from the past week! For those that missed any past recaps you can check those out here!Sunday, February 10th:🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:Senator Richard Burr, The Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, just announced that after almost two years, more than two hundred interviews, and thousands of documents, they have found NO COLLUSION BETWEEN TRUMP AND RUSSIA! Is anybody really surprised by this?African Americans are very angry at the double standard on full display in Virginia!Gallup Poll: “Open Borders will potentially attract 42 million Latin Americans.” This would be a disaster for the U.S. We need the Wall now!I don’t think the Dems on the Border Committee are being allowed by their leaders to make a deal. They are offering very little money for the desperately needed Border Wall & now, out of the blue, want a cap on convicted violent felons to be held in detention!It was a very bad week for the Democrats, with the GREAT economic numbers, The Virginia disaster and the State of the Union address. Now, with the terrible offers being made by them to the Border Committee, I actually believe they want a Shutdown. They want a new subject!The media was able to get my work schedule, something very easy to do, but it should have been reported as a positive, not negative. When the term Executive Time is used, I am generally working, not relaxing. In fact, I probably work more hours than almost any past President..... ... ....The fact is, when I took over as President, our Country was a mess. Depleted Military, Endless Wars, a potential War with North Korea, V.A., High Taxes & too many Regulations, Border, Immigration & HealthCare problems, & much more. I had no choice but to work very long hours!“President is on sound legal ground to declare a National Emergency. There have been 58 National Emergencies declared since the law was enacted in 1976, and 31 right now that are currently active, so this is hardly unprecedented.” Congressman @tommcclintockThe Border Committee Democrats are behaving, all of a sudden, irrationally. Not only are they unwilling to give dollars for the obviously needed Wall (they overrode recommendations of Border Patrol experts), but they don’t even want to take muderers into custody! What’s going on?Well, it happened again. Amy Klobuchar announced that she is running for President, talking proudly of fighting global warming while standing in a virtual blizzard of snow, ice and freezing temperatures. Bad timing. By the end of her speech she looked like a Snowman(woman)!(Retweeting Club for Growth) Agreed! Senate needs to confirm @realDonaldTrump Admin appointees. #SOTUThe U.S. will soon control 100% of ISIS territory in Syria. @CNN (do you believe this?).Working hard, thank you!SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:(D)ouble Standardsgod emperor trumpObama built that...Donald Trump Jr.: “Are we getting to the PC tipping point yet?”🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:Pewdiepie knows what’s up!The rise of Generation Z, the most conservative generation since "The Greatest Generation" in the 1950's, is scaring the bejeezus out of the DemocratsI never owned any slaves. You never picked any cotton. GET OVER IT.They came so close to being self awareMonday, February 11th:TODAY'S ACTION:Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial IntelligencePresident Trump Meets with Sheriffs from Across the Country🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:“Fact checkers have become Fake News.” @JesseBWatters So True!No president ever worked harder than me (cleaning up the mess I inherited)!The Democrats do not want us to detain, or send back, criminal aliens! This is a brand new demand. Crazy!The Democrats are so self righteous and ANGRY! Loosen up and have some fun. The Country is doing well!Will be heading to El Paso very soon. Big speech on Border Security and much else tonight. Tremendous crowd! See you later!(Screenshot)40 years of corruption. 40 years of repression. 40 years of terror. The regime in Iran has produced only #40YearsofFailure. The long-suffering Iranian people deserve a much brighter future.۴۰ سال فساد. ۴۰ سال سرکوب. ۴۰ سال ترور. رژیم ایران فقط موجب #چهل_سال_شکست شده است. مردم ایران که مدتهاست در رنجند شایسته آینده روشن تری هستندCoal is an important part of our electricity generation mix and @TVAnews should give serious consideration to all factors before voting to close viable power plants, like Paradise #3 in Kentucky!(Retweeting Don Jr.) Beto trying to counter-program @realdonaldtrump in his hometown and only drawing a few hundred people to Trump’s 35,000 is a really bad look. Partial pic of the Trump overflow crowd below! #AnyQuestionsWe are fighting for all Americans, from all backgrounds, of every age, race, religion, birthplace, color & creed. Our agenda is NOT a partisan agenda – it is the mainstream, common sense agenda of the American People. Thank you El Paso, Texas - I love you!(Retweeting Dan Scavino) 🚨Happening Now: @realDonaldTrump overflow crowd in El Paso, Texas....(Retweeting Laura Ingraham) It was 45 degrees outside and this was the overflow crowd. #ElPaso @realDonaldTrumpSIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:Paramedic makes a valid point about the entitled $15/hr living wage. Red pills are flying.High energy in El Paso today!The case for Russia collusion … against the DemocratsRasmussen: Presidential Approval At 52%Donald Trump Jr. reacts to Nancy Pelosi and Democrats pressuring Ilhan Omar to apologize for her anti-Semitic remarks on Twitter: "The forthcoming non apology is going to be awesome.""TIRED OF BEING A WAGE CUCK? WANT TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT BY NO LONGER DRIVING TO WORK? DECLARE YOURSELF UNWILLING TO WORK TODAY!"PRESS BRIEFINGS, INTERVIEWS, RALLIES:WATCH PARTY: PRESIDENT TRUMP EL PASO, TEXAS 2/11/2019🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:Democrats Continue To Be Shocked By Obvious Things They Vote ForWhen I realize 75% of the anti-Trump outrage on Reddit is from people who aren't even in the USOverflow crowd outside Trump's El Paso rally is ABSOLUTELY HUGEThe Emperor ProtectsThank you, Kanye. Very cool!Tuesday, February 12th:TODAY'S ACTION:Five Nominations and One Withdrawal Sent to the SenatePresident Trump Hosts a Cabinet Meeting🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:Beautiful evening in El Paso, Texas last night. God Bless the USA!Was just presented the concept and parameters of the Border Security Deal by hard working Senator Richard Shelby. Looking over all aspects knowing that this will be hooked up with lots of money from other sources.... ... ....Will be getting almost $23 BILLION for Border Security. Regardless of Wall money, it is being built as we speak!Thank you to @MSNBC!(Retweeting Life On Earth) They are soooo beautiful and magnificent! ❤️❤️❤️❤️(Retweeting The White House) Americans pay 180 percent of what Europeans, Canadians, and Japanese pay for the exact same drugs! Our seniors aren't going to foot the bill for free-riders abroad any longer, HHS Secretary Alex Azar says.(Retweeting The White House) President Trump's commitment to improving the quality of life for all Americans has led to the largest single decline in drug prices in 46 YEARS.I want to thank all Republicans for the work you have done in dealing with the Radical Left on Border Security. Not an easy task, but the Wall is being built and will be a great achievement and contributor toward life and safety within our Country!(Retweeting Dan Bongino) I don’t feel an ounce of empathy for all of the imbeciles who bought into the Russian collusion hoax now that it’s been entirely debunked. You were warned for over a year about this scam & you fell for it anyway. You did this to yourself.SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:President Trump on the congressional deal: "I'm not happy about it. It's not doing the trick."Ted Cruz wants to confiscate recently-convicted El Chapo’s property to pay for the wall, which means Mexico would pay for the wall.Still No Collusion.HAHAHAHAA AHAHAHAHAAAAA HAAAAAA HAHAHAAHAHAAAAA!!!!!!!!!Dowd Nails It – Former Trump Attorney Outlines Insufferable Behavior of Mueller and Rosenstein in Perpetrating Political Russia Hoax…This is a must Read.🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:Trump fence bad...my fence goodThe Party of Life vs. DeathMFW 52% approval after 2 years of literal Nazi rule, "Russia collusion", peepee dossier, PEACH 45, Creepy Porn Lawyer, muh drumph's tax returnsKamala Harris claims to have smoked pot in college while listening to Tupac and Snoop. She graduated college in 1986. Tupac's first album came out in 1991. Snoop's first album came out in 1993. Lying sac of shit.MAGAWednesday, February 13th:TODAY'S ACTION:President Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Nominate and Appoint Individuals to Key Administration PostsPresident Trump Meets with the President of the Republic of Colombia and Mrs. Ruiz SandovalPresident Trump Speaks at the Major County Sheriffs and Cities Chiefs Association Joint Conference🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:The Senate Intelligence Committee: THERE IS NO EVIDENCE OF COLLUSION BETWEEN THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN AND RUSSIA!The Gallup Poll just announced that 69% of our great citizens expect their finances to improve next year, a 16 year high. Nice!Today, it was my great honor to address the @MjrCitiesChiefs Association and @MCSheriffs Conference in Washington, D.C. We will never forget your service, and we will never, ever let you down! We love you, and we thank God for you each and every day."Every American in every community and from every walk of life has a right to live in security and to live in peace. That is my highest priority as President."(Screenshot)(Article)(Retweeting Ted Cruz) Report: Texas crude oil production breaks 1970s recordCalifornia has been forced to cancel the massive bullet train project after having spent and wasted many billions of dollars. They owe the Federal Government three and a half billion dollars. We want that money back now. Whole project is a “green” disaster!SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:BREAKING: Roger Stone Files Motion - Alleges Special Counsel Released Unsealed Indictment to CNNIlhan Omar calls for investigation into Trans discrimination by U.S.A. Powerlifting... quickly gets her A$$ handed to her.California: $33 billion is ok for a train with two stops, but $6 billion is too much to defend our nation.The Silver Fox, Mike Pence Calls For “Jihad Ilhan” To Be Removed From The Foreign Affairs CommitteeBreaking: Convington high school students cleared of all wrongdoing by neutral third-party investigators🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:When you're a leftist and someone disagrees with you about literally anything.“Signs of Life”Thanks Guardian PepeKek"BORDER SECURITY IS SCARY!" [Crosspost from r/funny]Thursday, February 14th:TODAY'S ACTION:President Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Nominate Individuals to Key Administration Posts🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:Disgraced FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe pretends to be a “poor little Angel” when in fact he was a big part of the Crooked Hillary Scandal & the Russia Hoax - a puppet for Leakin’ James Comey. I.G. report on McCabe was devastating. Part of “insurance policy” in case I won.... ... ....Many of the top FBI brass were fired, forced to leave, or left. McCabe’s wife received BIG DOLLARS from Clinton people for her campaign - he gave Hillary a pass. McCabe is a disgrace to the FBI and a disgrace to our Country. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!Reviewing the funding bill with my team at the @WhiteHouse!One year ago today, a horrific act of violence took the lives of 14 students and 3 educators in Parkland, Florida. On this somber anniversary, we honor their memory and recommit to ensuring the safety of all Americans, especially our Nation’s children... http://bit.ly/2DSnqBA …“After The Flight 93 Election, The Vote That Saved America - And What We Still Have To Lose,” by very talented Michael Anton, is a terrific read. Check it out!(Retweeting The White House) .@PressSec: President Trump will sign the government funding bill, and as he has stated before, he will also take other executive action—including a national emergency—to ensure we stop the national security and humanitarian crisis at the border.“Trying to use the 25th Amendment to try and circumvent the Election is a despicable act of unconstitutional power grabbing...which happens in third world countries. You have to obey the law. This is an attack on our system & Constitution.” Alan Dershowitz. @TuckerCarlsonSIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:Trump Frees Up $8 Billion To Build The WallWhite House Statement on Government Funding BillJussie Smollett has SCRUBBED his Twitter & Instagram accounts of ANY references of the hoax attack. Sorry buddy you can't make this go away that easily.McCabe, Rosenstein must testify to explain claim that DOJ discussed removing Trump, GOP leaders sayEATING THEIR OWN! Gov Cuomo blames Donkey Face for Amazon leaving NY 😂🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:Got caught and now calling each other liars.When you believe in a conspiracy with no proof for more than two years, are you a conspiracy theorist then?HOLY HOAX ALERT. Two suspects arrested in Jussie Smollett case. African American FRIENDS of Smollett. Worked w. him on Empire. Sussie deleted their #s out of his log.Just pointing out the obviousTrump signs the Farm Bill making dog and cat meat illegal in the United StatesFriday, February 15th:TODAY'S ACTION:Presidential Proclamation on Declaring a National Emergency Concerning the Southern Border of the United StatesPresident Donald J. Trump Signed H.J.Res. 31 into LawPresident Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Nominate Individuals to Key Administration Posts🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:(Retweeting The White House) President Trump Speaks on the National Security & Humanitarian Crisis on Our Southern BorderGreat job by law enforcement in Aurora, Illinois. Heartfelt condolences to all of the victims and their families. America is with you!SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:China's REALLY mad now...He did it! Trump declares emergency on border, eyes $8B for wall as he signs spending packageThanks Everyone!! I am but a humble memesmith, without all of you enjoying and sharing my work I am nothingAHAHAHHA TRUMP RETWEETED @CARTPEDONKTUM.. IM DYING... TROLL LEVEL 9999Twitter took down u/carpedonktum's meme🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:I was the victim of a hate crime today and I don’t know where else to talk about it. I need supportLet's go Ted, We're building a Wall!The Lying LeftEarly morning shitpost by Jr:Hello, Chicago PD? I'd like to report an ACTUAL murder this time.Saturday, February 16th:🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:(Video)BUILDING THE WALL!Trade negotiators have just returned from China where the meetings on Trade were very productive. Now at meetings with me at Mar-a-Lago giving the details. In the meantime, Billions of Dollars are being paid to the United States by China in the form of Trade Tariffs!The United States is asking Britain, France, Germany and other European allies to take back over 800 ISIS fighters that we captured in Syria and put them on trial. The Caliphate is ready to fall. The alternative is not a good one in that we will be forced to release them........ ... ....The U.S. does not want to watch as these ISIS fighters permeate Europe, which is where they are expected to go. We do so much, and spend so much - Time for others to step up and do the job that they are so capable of doing. We are pulling back after 100% Caliphate victory!(Retweeting Real_Defender) Protecting America and putting Americans first. Thank you Mr. President!THE GREATEST MEME EVERSIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:THE MADMAN TWEETED MY NEW VERSION!Twitter has censored POTUS.Don Jr is shockedHow come Congress never introduces Hate Crime Hoax Legislation?🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:That's me in the cornerAaaaand it’s gone...R.E.M Meme War: It's the end of the World (TDS remake)YOU CANT HANDLE THE TRUTH!WEW LAD!Without further ado, some tunes to help you get through all this WINNING:RaingurlTadowGoldDoin' it RightCrazyTalk Is CheapMAGA ON PATRIOTS! #robgray

[digitalmark18-blog]

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