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.

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.