What a wild, frustrating experience.

Glad I went back to read this after originally missing the article. Here’s a heck of a paragraph:

While the sheer amount of data McDonald’s stored over the years caught me off guard at first, the way it was used by the company’s predictive algorithms was what I found most concerning. The company predicted how often I would visit in the next six weeks (2.16 times), what I would spend on average ($13.49), and what I would spend in total ($29.15). One reporter at WIRED joked that McDonald’s had created a Minority Report-style dossier to predict my next snack wrap purchase.

Hell yes. Disappointed in myself for not being one of these people.

Hard article to read, but an important one. Here’s the thing: I know two people who own Meta “pervert glasses,” and I think if there is an innocuous use case for these glasses, they’re demonstrating it.

And yet, here’s Ellul on technical ambivalence:

And this technological nexus is characteristically ambivalent. Because the solution of one problem by technological means immediately raises a multitude of others, which result directly from those very means, it is impossible to say whether technique produces good or evil effects. It does both, simultaneously. We are confronted with a system in the strict sense of the word, what I will call the “technological system,” hence ethical issues may only be considered relative to the system as a whole, and not to specific instances.

This response is such a CEO way to apologize for something:

“It took me maybe longer than it should have to realize the sheer impact of the company,” he says. “I’m still surprised. I got our July update a week ago, and we helped find almost a thousand missing people, over 22,000 stolen cars — in July. That’s crazy. That’s such a big impact on the world. And what I came to realize over time was that the responsibility that bears with it is an obligation to make sure that it’s creating a society that we both, you and I, and everyone around us, want to raise their kids in.”

Oof, this is terrifying.

Taken aback when I found some of my siblings listed within one of the systems where I work. There’s probably an “explainable creepy” rather than “inexplicable creepy” reason for this, but it’s still weird.

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.