Month: January 2020

Companies you may have no relationship with can receive information about you and your guests from the camera on the doorbell on your front door. This is in addition to the ability for law enforcement to access your video and employ facial recognition software without your permission (see earlier posts, Feeding the surveillance state from your doorstep, and Ring cameras part 2).

“Facebook, via its Graph API, is alerted when the app is opened and upon device actions such as app deactivation after screen lock due to inactivity. Information delivered to Facebook (even if you don’t have a Facebook account) includes time zone, device model, language preferences, screen resolution, and a unique identifier (anon_id), which persists even when you reset the OS-level advertiser ID.”

[from the EFF]

Ring Doorbell App Packed with Third-Party Trackers

Ring isn't just a product that allows users to surveil their neighbors. The company also uses it to surveil its customers.

Amnesty International makes surveillance capitalism a human rights issue. Download the pdf report.

SURVEILLANCE GIANTS: HOW THE BUSINESS MODEL OF GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK THREATENS HUMAN RIGHTS

Google and Facebook help connect the world and provide crucial services to billions. To participate meaningfully in today’s economy and society, and to realize their human rights, people rely on access to the internet—and to the tools Google and Facebook offer. But Google and Facebook’s platforms come at a systemic cost. The companies' surveillance-based business model is inherently incompatible with the right to privacy and poses a threat to a range of other rights including freedom of opinion and expression, freedom of thought, and the right to equality and non-discrimination.

Excellent update to her amazing book. She is absolutely correct on all of this.

‘Data scientists describe this as the shift from monitoring to actuation, in which a critical mass of knowledge about a machine system enables the remote control of that system. Now people have become targets for remote control, as surveillance capitalists discovered that the most predictive data come from intervening in behavior to tune, herd and modify action in the direction of commercial objectives. This third imperative, “economies of action,” has become an arena of intense experimentation. “We are learning how to write the music,” one scientist said, “and then we let the music make them dance.”.’

[from the New York Times]

You Are Now Remotely Controlled

Surveillance capitalists control the science and the scientists, the secrets and the truth.

You could quibble with the order a bit, but they’ve pretty much got it right.

[from Slate]

The Evil List

Which tech companies are really doing the most harm? Here are the 30 most dangerous, ranked by the people who know.

Totalitarian states are mostly peaceful and well-behaved too. This excellent article reminds us that gun violence can take many forms, including forms that can be passed off as benign. 

“With the streets largely cleared of contrary viewpoints, reporters sopped up simplistic talking points from pro-gun ralliers, then effectively congratulated them for not killing anyone. They then constructed a vague notion of peace—one uncomplicated by trauma or intimidation—and gawked at it. “

[from the Columbia Journalism Review]

Intimidation is a form of violence

EARLIER THIS WEEK more than twenty thousand people, many of them armed, converged on Richmond, Virginia, to protest legislative efforts meant to reduce gun violence.

Happily subscribed to the Criterion Collection’s streaming Criterion Channel. First week watched Federico Fellini’s Amarcord, which I hadn’t seen since it came out in 1973. And tonight, don’t know how I never saw it, Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour (1967) with Catherine Deneuve. Netflix-HBO-Prime-DisneyPlus are all fine, but you just can’t find essential, classic world cinema like this anywhere else.

Long, revealing read. 

“If you’re me, scrolling through Instagram, you’re the confidant being whispered to by a face shot from under the chin. You’re the recipient of a holiday card from a family in matching turtlenecks. You’re the magazine subscriber flipping through editorials. You’re the woman standing in front of the screen miming the aerobic movements of your instructor. You’re the mother, adult height, looking down at her child. You’re the lunch companion peering across the table. You’re the customer browsing for deals. You’re the scholar sifting through archives. You’re the fan admiring Beyoncé. You’re the mirror, reflecting the image of the photographer. You’re the photographer, seeing through her eyes. You’re the phone.

Or you’re the voyeur at the window, trying to get a closer look — in which case the villain who enters your private space, not through the window but through the front door, is the ads.”

[from n+1]

My Instagram

We all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift

Was having dinner with my daughter at Marisol at MCA Chicago last week and got there a little early, enough time to wander into the Water After All exhibit with John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea three-screen documentary as the centerpiece. Absolutely stunning. Could only stay for 20 of the 40 minutes, and will make a point to return for the whole thing before the exhibit ends on June 14th.

From an interview with Tate in 2015, the year he produced Vertigo Sea:

“The question of why history matters is connected to why the non-fictive or non-fictions matter. ‘Cause you could tell…and I’m using the two phrases here in metaphoric terms…you know you could tell when a surplus of fiction got into the mix.

You know, so, one of the reasons why um, uh, I was compelled in a way to make Vertigo Sea is because, you know, you’re sitting there, listening to someone referring to quote unquote migrants as cockroaches. And you think, okay, what’s going on here.

How do people migrate from being human beings to cockroaches. What do you have to forget, what’s the process of amnesia that allows the kinds of forgetting that builds into hierarchies in which there are beings and non-beings.”

What happens when we do?

[from The Paris Review]

Inner Climate Change

What happens to my attention span for every hour I spend on social media? What happens to my memory? And what happens to my openness to new ideas?

“Yeah, I know Facebook is evil, but I stay on anyway to share and see pictures of everyone’s kids and stuff.”

Might want to check out who Peter Thiel is, his politics, who he hangs out with, and what he’s been up to.

[from The New York Times]

The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It

A little-known start-up helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images — and “might lead to a dystopian future or something,” a backer says.

2001 is when I first started to travel there on business. Was last there in 2016, and someday soon need to round out a hat trick on the Austin Statesman Cap10k. The slider in the photos in the link show how incredibly the city has changed in 20 years. 

These photos are taken from the top of the hill on South Congress–you can see the Allens Boots sign on the left in the 2020 shot.

[from Austin Statesman-American]

Fast forward: Austin metro area sees two decades of explosive growth

Take a look back. Take a look forward. Or just take a look around and see how the Austin area is growing.

Even for an area accustomed to doubling in size every two decades, the past 20 years have brought tremendous change and challenge.

The most spectacular show of our lifetimes…if it happens in our lifetimes. Or sometime in the next million years.

“It takes light from this star about 600 years to reach us, meaning that we’re actually observing the star as it was 600 years ago. If we do see it detonate in our sky any time soon, that means the star actually blew up sometime during the European Middle Ages, and light from the blast is just reaching Earth.”

[from National Geographic]

A giant star is acting strange, and astronomers are buzzing

The red giant Betelgeuse is the dimmest seen in years, prompting some speculation that the star is about to explode. Here's what we know.

“For all the damage inflicted since Inauguration Day 2017, America is still standing, a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump, and the laws of gravity, if not those of the nation, remain in full force. Moral gravity may well reassert its pull, too, with time. Rather than being the end of American history as we know it, the Trump presidency may prove merely a notorious chapter in that history. Heedless lapdogs like Kennedy, Devin Nunes, and Lindsey Graham are acting now as if there is no tomorrow, but tomorrow will come eventually, whatever happens in the near future, and Judgment Day could arrive sooner than they think.”

[from New York Magazine]

What Will Happen to The Trump Toadies?

Look to Nixon’s defenders, and the Vichy collaborators, for clues.

Outstanding report on how surveillance capitalism tracks you online, on your phone, and in the real physical world. Some of this may be a little technical for non-industry people; worth a read anyway, because most of it is understandable in plain language.

[from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)]

Behind the One-Way Mirror: A Deep Dive Into the Technology of Corporate Surveillance

When you browse the web, go shopping, and even drive around, corporate trackers are watching your every move. Our new report walks through the most common kinds of tracking, from pixels to facial recognition.

If you’re someone I’ve homesteaded with for a long time, and you don’t have access to WT.social yet but would like to try it out during the alpha stage, please let me know and I’ll send you an invite. Still fewer than 500,000 users as of this post.

“Diet can be used like acupuncture needles to elicit exact health goals and treatments…”

…or maybe just go for the macro view and eat, to quote our friends at Thug Kitchen, like you give a fuck. 

“Vegan Shui” in the War on Cancer

The Tao of Prevention and Cure.