Welp, this is scary.

Public-private surveillance is the worst of both worlds. Ring is creepy.

Facial recognition is the worst.

It baffles me when platforms think “oh, but we can help you see more relevant ads” is a selling point. Also, “not sharing data outside Reddit” doesn’t help either—it’s still an invasion of privacy.

Team Firefox foreverrrrrr

Well, this sucks.

I’m torn between how much I dislike the idea of a connected car and how easy it just now made it to get a question answered at the local dealer. I guess we wouldn’t agree to all this surveillance if it wasn’t actually useful sometimes.

I’m in no way Team Meta, but this may not be a terrible thing?

Some important—if disheartening—observations from Marwick.

Ew, gross, no.

This is not a future I look forward to (or a present I want to live in).

Guns in schools are bad, but adding surveillance to schools is not the solution.

Lots to appreciate here.

Hear hear. Ring is a creepy company, and we shouldn’t support them.

This sounds worrying to me. Surveillance can and will be abused, and we should be wary about embracing it on this scale.

I had never thought of a car as a creepy surveillance device, but this is horrifying.

I’ve enjoyed reading Alice Marwick’s work in the past, and I really enjoyed her appearance on the EFF’s podcast here.

Venmo’s insistence that transactions be accompanied by notes makes me wonder what they’re doing with that data. For several months now, I’ve insisted on replacing any helpful indication with random characters.

To my own surprise, I’ve been getting into audiobooks recently, and having listened to Doctorow’s “Walkaway,” I decided to revisit his Little Brother series in audio form. Parts of the first book haven’t aged well (including some language that was bad enough to be edited out of the print version I have), and while I enjoy Doctorow’s opinions, they sometimes overwhelm the story here. That said, to quote TVTropes, some anvils are worth dropping, and the messages about privacy, surveillance, and civil liberties are as relevant as ever, I don’t know if I enjoyed the book as much as I did my first time through, but I still like it enough to give it four hearts.

Important points in here.

This is dumb and gross, and another reason I’ll never use Spotify.

In the Canvas LMS main interface, it describes analytics reports as based on “near real-time data.” In documentation, it specifies that “near real-time” is “may be delayed by 40 hours.”

Canvas: “You can draw conclusions about student participation with our analytics!” Also Canvas: “Mobile page view data aren’t exact, and our analytics only update every 24 hours, so don’t draw too many conclusions, lol.”

Glad this story is still getting attention, because it so neatly demonstrates why facial recognition is scary. We shouldn’t tolerate this level of surveillance—by private or public actors.

I have written council representatives about this more than anything else, and yet I suspect that it will go through again without a fuss. This isn’t the worst form of surveillance, but it is still surveillance, pure and simple.