Terrifying stuff.

Hate this so much. The company statements are weaselly and gross. This also demonstrates one of the worst things about this whole issue. I would never buy Meta smart glasses, but I know two people in my life who own them, and the privacy burden of this product isn’t borne by the owner of the device so much as by those around them. Barf, barf, barf.

An important read on OpenAI’s seeming selling out.

Don’t think I’ve posted anything on this story yet because as the article points out, it’s hard to focus on this evil with so many other evils distracting us.

WAIT. Read the letter more carefully, and my “health plan” gave this third party printing/mailing service my SSN and address. This is even dumber.

Just got word from a “third-party printing/mailroom services” provider whose name I don’t recognize that they had a data breach involving my SSN and address. Literally no idea how they got those data. Did I sign up with them? Does my employer work with them? What a stupid world we live in.

I’ve been sour on Ring for a long time, but literally everything their CEO is saying to Nilay Patel in these interview clips I’m listening to makes me even angrier at the company.

Who could possibly have predicted this?

Ring sucks and is creepy. Here’s the killer paragraph from this story;

Unlike, say, data analytics giant Palantir or some other high-profile surveillance companies, Ring is a surveillance network that homeowners have by and large deployed themselves, powered by fear mongering against our neighbors and unfettered consumerism.

Look, I genuinely appreciate my university employer sending this out in their daily email, but it would be cool if they also acknowledged how much data they and their various platform partners are collecting on faculty and students. Because it’s a lot.

Surveillance sucks.

Over the past several months, I’ve noticed something funny about what kinds of video recommendations I get when I watch something on YouTube. I have watch history turned off on both my personal and professional Google accounts, so if I’m logged in to Google in the browser where I’m watching the video (usually on a desktop/laptop), I get pretty generic recommendations, with an obvious connection to the video at hand but no awareness of my past viewing. On my phone, though, I’m not logged into Google in my main browser, so if I bring up a video there, I get way more personalized recommendations that are very tied in to what I’ve previously watched on my phone.

Darkly hilarious.

Today, on the last day of class, a student shared some of their ongoing efforts to mess with local Flock cameras and develop makeup patterns to defeat facial recognition. It was like realizing I’d had a Cory Doctorow character in class all semester, and it brought me joy and hope.

That this article talks up (and uncritically repeats) purported advantages of surveillance and only briefly acknowledges privacy concerns is a real failure. Reporting needs to do better so that we can walk back surveillance instead of sleepwalk into more of it. Gift link

Flock continues to suck.

Very happy for Linkletter, but it’s shameful that Proctorio got away with as much nonsense as it did.

Sometimes blocking external images in my email clients is worth it just because the alt text makes me chuckle. “Drone over corn” could be a good band name.

What. The. Hell.

Wish I’d made more of a stink about Lexington adopting Flock cameras. It’s a creepy-as-hell technology, and we need to get rid of them.

5,000 cameras?! What the heck?

Surprised that more isn’t made of the fact that Anthropic was surveilling users’ conversations for its research. Are professors and students thinking about the company’s ability to read everything they type?

Did not realize that dashcam surveillance was a thing. I hate that it is, and I hate that Flock is going here.

Good article (here’s a gift link), and one worth adding to the right kind of syllabus.

Good article. I’m not here to defend CEOs who have affairs with executives in their companies, but the tech ecosystem that allowed for this will do more harm to everyday people than it will ever hold CEOs to account.