So scary, so gross. Lexington needs to ditch Flock now.

Lots of good observations in here, and I need to think through the implications for digital methods research.

I spent a lot of the morning anxious about generative AI after reading about other professors’ struggles with how the technology has upended how we teach. It’s long been frustrating to me that teachers and others bear the burden of adapting to a world that big tech companies have created, seemingly with the goal of enriching themselves. Later in the morning, I read a worrying story about how a company called Flock is building tools that will let customers of their automated license plate readers (including Lexington, the city I live in) do even more invasive surveillance of the people they pick up on their cameras.

Some really good reflections in here.

It took an embarrassing amount of trying to figure out the business model my VPN provider was going for—and its implications for my privacy—before I remembered the date.

C’est du n’importe quoi, ça. Quelle honte, ce pays.

Surveillance sucks, and here’s the latest example.

This weekend, I visited family and complained to myself that their Amazon Fire sticks were emphasizing ad delivery over being a TV. I guess that’s the future for my Roku stick, too? What a sucky future we live in.

I’ve been a Mozilla fan for a long time, but this sort of default behavior is why I’m souring on the organization (and why I abandoned Firefox a few months ago).

What gross software.

Uggggggh, ALPRs suck.

For the past couple of years, my colleague Dr. Meghan Dowell and I have been working on a paper on students’ awareness of what data the Canvas learning management system collects (and subsequently makes available to certain stakeholders). I’m a fan of Nick Proferes’s paper [Information Flow Solipsism in an Exploratory Study of Beliefs About Twitter] and have long wanted to do something similar related to LMSs. This is even more Meghan’s area of specialty than mine, though, so I was grateful that she was also interested in the subject and took the lead in turning this idea into reality.

Duolingo is one of those apps I really loved once but now can’t see as anything but creepy adware. It’s hard to complain when it’s teaching kiddo more French than I ever managed to, but I still worry I’ve sold her soul to that little green owl.

It’s uncomfortable for me to think about how close my “digital traces” research is to surveillance and YOLO data mining.

“Your browser settings are preventing an optimal experience with Microsoft 365.” Yes, and that’s how I know they’re set up properly.

I stopped using Strava over five years ago when the stories were about secret military bases being identified through the service were coming out.

This is cute, but also Ring doorbells are seriously the thing that scares me most on Halloween.

Cory Doctorow taking on Proctorio by proxy is such a delight. This story on how dumb proctoring software is, how it could be beat technically, and how it needs to be beat politically ought to be required reading for everyone in ed tech. It also has compelling characters, enough food porn to remind you who the author is, some fun technical asides (learned a lot about WannaCry!), and is just fun.

This is the story of when the FBI ran an encrypted phone company marketed to criminals. Working with Australian Federal Police and European partners, they had a glimpse into gangsters’ and drug dealers’ conversations for years before they wrapped it up with a series of worldwide arrests.

It’s a wild story that sounds like fiction but happens to be true. In fact, that’s Cory Doctorow’s blurb on the back—his recommendation on his blog is what got me to check this out. I’m also a fan of 404 Media, so it felt good to support one of its founders.

It’s that time of year (again) for signing the acceptable use policy for kiddo’s school, and I’m again grumpy about a lot of the details in here. Some of these details are me being a nitpicky academic, like the use of the word “technology” to refer to digital technologies alone. Others strike me as more serious, though.

Let’s take a look at this paragraph, listed under a “Roles and Responsibilities of Parents/Guardians” header:

This sucks on so many levels.

Oh, so the moral panic is hypocritical, too.

Well, this sucks. Appreciate Ron Wyden’s diligence in this area.

Gift link.

The phrase popped into my head before the article could even get to it: We are the product.

This is a really important read. It’s why educational technology researchers should be concerned about more than “does it improve learning?"—and why our understanding of edtech needs to include all of these platforms, not just the obvious stuff.