The New York Times reports the tech has mistakenly identified people as connected to Hamas. Israel has deployed a mass facial recognition program in the Gaza Strip, creating a database of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent, The New York Times reports. The program, which was created after the October 7th attacks,...
(A ‘startup’ is not just any new small business. It’s a temporary venture capital funded company that must either fail fast or exit. An exit is where you’re either bought by Big Tech or become Big Tech through an IPO. To understand this better, if you have a sustainable small company, a startup is what will put you out of business.)
Is it ethical to use ad blockers and anti-tracking technology?
Here’s my stance: in print media, was it ethical to flip past a magazine ad without reading it?
Anything that makes skipping ads harder than that—or that gives advetizers one byte more data about me than they would have had when I picked up a magazine off the newstand—is an overreach, and fair game for me to block or evade by any means necessary.
You wouldn’t have McDonald’s teaching your kids about nutrition or Philip Morris teaching them about maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Why are you happy having a surveillance capitalist like Google or Facebook teaching them about technology?
I love it. There’s a poll ongoing about whether folks would ban a Meta (Instagram/Facebook) instance and people are like “well, I’d give them the benefit of the doubt.”
I really have no words.
Is it learned helplessness? Stockholm Syndrome? Masochism? Something else?
A bit of an overview and then I'll get into some of the more specific arguments in a thread:
This piece is in three parts:
First I trace the mutation of the liberatory ambitions of the #SemanticWeb into #KnowledgeGraphs, an underappreciated component in the architecture of #SurveillanceCapitalism. This mutation plays out against the backdrop of the broader platform capture of the web, rendering us as consumer-users of information services rather than empowered people communicating over informational protocols.
I then show how this platform logic influences two contemporary public information infrastructure projects: the NIH's Biomedical Data Translator and the NSF's Open Knowledge Network. I argue that projects like these, while well intentioned, demonstrate the fundamental limitations of platformatized public infrastructure and create new capacities for harm by their enmeshment in and inevitable capture by information conglomerates. The dream of a seamless "knowledge graph of everything" is unlikely to deliver on the utopian promises made by techno-solutionists, but they do create new opportunities for algorithmic oppression -- automated conversion therapy, predictive policing, abuse of bureacracy in "smart cities," etc. Given the framing of corporate knowledge graphs, these projects are poised to create facilitating technologies (that the info conglomerates write about needing themselves) for a new kind of interoperable corporate data infrastructure, where a gradient of public to private information is traded between "open" and quasi-proprietary knowledge graphs to power derivative platforms and services.
When approaching "AI" from the perspective of the semantic web and knowledge graphs, it becomes apparent that the new generation of #LLMs are intended to serve as interfaces to knowledge graphs. These "augmented language models" are joint systems that combine a language model as a means of interacting with some underlying knowledge graph, integrated in multiple places in the computing ecosystem: eg. mobile apps, assistants, search, and enterprise platforms. I concretize and extend prior criticism about the capacity for LLMs to concentrate power by capturing access to information in increasingly isolated platforms and expand surveillance by creating the demand for extended personalized data graphs across multiple systems from home surveillance to your workplace, medical, and governmental data.
I pose Vulgar Linked Data as an alternative to the infrastructural pattern I call the Cloud Orthodoxy: rather than platforms operated by an informational priesthood, reorienting our public infrastructure efforts to support vernacular expression across heterogeneous #p2p mediums. This piece extends a prior work of mine: Decentralized Infrastructure for (Neuro)science) which has more complete draft of what that might look like.
(I don't think you can pre-write threads on masto, so i'll post some thoughts as I write them under this) /1
Saying put a robots.txt file on your site if you don’t want your work to be abused by corporations for profit is like saying wear a t-shirt listing all the people you don’t want to have sex with if you don’t want them to have sex with you.
To the utter befuddlement of techbro douchebags everywhere, turns out that’s not how consent works.
Google wants to make it harder to block ads. Thought experiment:
If, instead of ad blocking per se, we used browser extensions that blocked all tracking, prevented execution of arbitrary code, and made fingerprinting devices impossible, but also left all ad content visible, would Google (and the rest of their industry) still be opposed?
The answer tells you everything you need to know about why it is moral and ethical to use ad blockers.
Are you a privacy professional? Would you like to work with companies like Google and Facebook to help them continue to violate our privacy? The W3C has a job for you.
Pays well, by the way (violating human rights always does).
Zoom is a horrifying company with a long history of causing mayhem and exposing their users to different types of extreme risks, from serving Israel (denying Palestine groups use of Zoom) to installing a web server on Macs that had Zoom installed (which Apple had to remove).
Now, they've updated their terms of service to allow training of AI on user content; one can't opt out of this.
Don't user Zoom. Use Jitsi Meet or Matrix or other stable, free, and open-sourced solutions.
Interested in what could be done to actually reign in this insanity of surveillance capitalism? Cory Doctorow @pluralistic has a great thread up today discussing Privacy First, a set of mandatory measures like Strong Opt-in, No Pre-emption and No Pay For Privacy which would constitute a real first step to fixing the internet; enshrining our rights to privacy.
Israel quietly rolled out a mass facial recognition program in the Gaza Strip (www.theverge.com)
The New York Times reports the tech has mistakenly identified people as connected to Hamas. Israel has deployed a mass facial recognition program in the Gaza Strip, creating a database of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent, The New York Times reports. The program, which was created after the October 7th attacks,...