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Complementary and Disparate: Conceptualising Female and Male Genital Cutting in Northern Tanzania
Mary-Anne Victoria Decatur, PhD dissertation, U of London 2023.
Yes, I do read your dissertations!
"It is the normal, functioning cells of all foreskins that are deemed dangerous. And yet it is specifically Black male bodies that are being constructed as promiscuous sources of infection in need of medical intervention."
"Integral to this appears to be the assumption that if medicalised, (male) genital cutting will be consensual and safe."
Doctors have conflated medicalization with consent and safety. Just because you are using sterile instruments does not mean that your surgery is consensual nor does it guarantee that the patient is safe from iatrogenic harm.
Sara Parker et al.: "Privacy consent is fictitious"
"Both approaches [to consent] fail. The evidence of actual consent is non-existent under the notice-and-choice approach. Individuals are often pressured or manipulated, undermining the validity of their consent."
"Because it conceptualizes consent as mostly fictional, murky consent recognizes its lack of legitimacy."
A new bill from #SanFrancisco Assembly Member #MattHaney would clearly outline when companies can communicate w/their #employees during off hrs, following other countries that have passed “right to disconnect” #laws.
…“We’re simply saying there should be #consent around when (people) are working & not,” Haney said. “Not an expectation of 24/7 availability in a contract that they have not agreed to, & that gives people no time where they can expect to be not working.”
Countries including France, Australia, Argentina, Italy & others have passed #laws to safeguard #employees’ personal #time.
Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hospital - Wikipedia
"Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body; and a surgeon who performs an operation without his patient's consent commits an assault for which he is liable in damages. This is true except in cases of emergency where the patient is unconscious and where it is necessary to operate before consent can be obtained."
The #DigitalMarketsAct mandates Meta to "enable end users to freely choose to opt-in to [combining or cross-using personal data] by offering a less personalised but equivalent alternative".
When I pointed out to Meta that by offering users to either #consent to #SurveillanceAds or pay € 275 per year for #Instagram & #Facebook isn't "equivalent alternative" they said, Meta has to do that because of #GDPR 😤 Really??
Wow, #Google's engineering lead claims that they had 3,000 employees working for 2 years full-time to implement the #DMA's article 5(2) prohibition of cross-sharing or combining people's personal data across services without #consent.
"We're unpacking the Consent Protocol** step by step so your team can bring equity, inclusion & forward momentum into decision-making spaces in any context.
Plus, we'll share more tools and practices that you can begin to use & experiment with right away."
Dismembering the Ethical Physician
Genuis, 2006. Postgrad Med J.
"Informed consent is not an objective reality that secures autonomy and negates paternalism, but a subjective interpretation heavily influenced by the state of knowledge and perception of the educating clinician, which in turn may reflect the values and perspective of that individual doctor."
I wish to reinforce: Automattic may be the primary focus of this blogpost, but there's barely an exception across the entire tech industry. Which I agree is atrocious!
@alcinnz
The so called Tech Industries definitely understands the meaning and implications of Consent, they just don't give a damn about it, that's all. 😒
How about making all corporations and the rich have to opt out of giving £1 to every single person on the planet, individually, via a CAPTCHA guarded online system with only a chatbot for support?
We are also working directly with select AI companies as long as their plans align with what our community cares about: attribution, opt-outs, and control.
Emphasis mine
This is not the tech industry’s most egregious lack of understanding of consent in recent years. That dishonor belongs to LegalFling: A blockchain app for sexual consent.
However, this is still pretty stupid, and the result of an insidious trend that doesn’t get questioned enough in software engineering circles. So I’m asking that my readers shout this from the fucking rooftops.
Opt-Out Is NOT Consent
Opt-out is “our lawyers told us to make this an option to cover our ass, but we don’t want you to actually do it”.
Opt-out is “if you missed the memo, we assume we have your consent”.
The default state of any decision regarding user data should be opted out. Users should instead be required to opt in for your decision to take effect, and they must not be coerced into doing so.
If consent is not explicitly given by an informed user, you haven’t received consent at all, and to pretend otherwise is unethical.
Your users don’t fucking care about opt-out. We care about opt-in.
“But Soatok, That’ll Hurt Our Revenue”
If you have to make money doing unethical things, or by following dubious practices that don’t actually respect other users’ autonomy, then you should go out of business.
End of.
What Automattic Should Do
If Automattic wants to make things right, they must do two things and could do a third thing (but I’m not holding my breath):
First, nuke the existing opt-out mechanism and replace it with an opt-in mechanism. If nobody checks it, then don’t include their data in the sale to Midjourney or OpenAI.
Second, they should make the permission for third-parties more granular. Some of us don’t care about third parties, but do NOT want “AI” companies using their data to enable plagiarism.
Third, if you want to go the extra mile, add support for a plugin that uses Nightshade on all hosted media in all WordPress.com plans, including free plans, to increase your users’ protection against LLM scrapists.
This is my open challenge to Automattic leadership to do better.
This Issue is Bigger than Automattic
The tech industry has gotten very bad at respecting users’ consent lately. Your options are no longer “Yes” and “No” anymore. Instead it’s “Yes” or “Maybe Later”, without a “Never” option.
ugh not even @signalapp is safe from the unstoppable deprecation of consent in favour of “not now” pic.twitter.com/sW4Ss2pqMb
It does keep going. I’m going to skip a few, but check it out.> the unstoppable deprecation of consent in favour of “not now”, episode 18 pic.twitter.com/CRdfujOBZt
Yes, even Linux is affected.Even worse, you can rarely uninstall the crapware that nags you with these consent dialogs.
This needs to stop. It’s a toxic mentality and it cultivates a culture that doesn’t respect humanity. (Which is kind of funny to write as a furry blogger.)
If you work in the tech industry, scream very loudly about properly implementing human-respecting consent controls into your software.
Just because it’s widespread doesn’t mean it’s inevitable. Push back against it. Your less privileged, less technical neighbors deserve better.
Canada-based University of Waterloo is racing to remove M&M-branded smart vending machines from campus after outraged students discovered the machines were covertly collecting facial-recognition data without their consent.