Love a company response that comes down to “sure, we talked about it, but we didn’t actually do it.”

Hard to pick a single killer line from this one. There’s this paragraph:

Appreciate for a moment the bind Meta finds itself in: Its product allowed customers to behave so objectionably that the company responded with a content ban, as if to say “Stop making us look bad.”

And then this conclusion hits hard:

In saying the company will police the creepiest version of smart glasses content but sidestepping deeper questions, Meta is trying to have it both ways: It gets to tout its enforcement while creating the conditions for this content to exist in the first place.

Looks like the Trump administration is responding to dumb decisions and cynical cuts with pure exploitation:

After withdrawing from the World Health Organization and losing access to its global network that tracks and combats disease outbreaks, the U.S. is attempting to obtain the information necessary to address potential pandemics through a patchwork of deals with individual countries

Terrifying stuff.

Just so gross.

Self-driving cars are surveillance machines.

So gross.

If edtech doesn’t include this horrifying monstrosity, the field isn’t being broad enough in its inquiry.

My decision a few months ago to import my Twitter archive into my journaling app has been a mixed bag. I’ve been deleting a lot of orphaned references and truncated posts, but also, now I have a record of the time I picked a fight with an LMS CEO about privacy, and that’s fun.

Ugh, this sucks.

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.

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.

Prepping one of my Spring courses, and I’m apparently so tired that I’ve just decided to appeal directly to my students’ sense of decency when it comes to respecting course policies on generative AI.

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.

Another suspected use of generative AI, another decision that I still won’t subject my students to surveillance and policing, another step towards complete grading nihilism.