Michel Salim @michel_slm@social.privacytools.io

Great overview of the issues with advertising: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

There is a need to spread awareness of your offerings to the people who need them, but advertising has long ago gone beyond that to something actively harmful.

Dear IT workers, are you about to #burnout ? 💊
https://burnoutindex.org

"People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you’re dealing with groups of people as one of your runtime phenomena, you have an incredibly different practice."
— #ClayShirky, 'A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy'
https://october.substack.com/p/part-i-the-next-great-online-community

The Irish have teeth: Facebook wants to roll out dating but provides no documentation. The Irish data protection commission invades their office and takes docs. Facebook stops the roll-out. What a shot across the bow. https://dataprotection.ie/en/news-media/press-releases/dpc-statement-facebook-dating-feature

Not sure I like this. First #Snapchat - now #Pinterest ...

#Facebook keeps copying apps. Meanwhile the blue app still doesn't have a working dark mode months after Android 10 and iOS 13

#monopoly

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/13/21136898/facebook-pinterest-photo-sharing-app

Coronavirus brings China's surveillance state out of the shadows

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-surveillance-idUSKBN2011HO

The moment we start seeing “because their fundamental business model is unethical” in one of these is when we’ll know that things are starting to change.

https://www.alphabetworkers.org/resignation-letter/

#SurveillanceCapitalism

Join Tor, Privacy International, and over 50 other organizations asking Google to take action against exploitative pre-installed software on Android devices.

People shouldn't have to trade privacy and security for smartphone access. https://privacyinternational.org/advocacy/3320/open-letter-google
.onion: https://privacyintyqcroe.onion/advocacy/3320/open-letter-google

Hello, I'm new to Mastodon. I'm here because, after reading Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, I'm astonished and outraged that companies like Google, Facebook, and a growing list of other companies are treating us as the means to other's ends. Our experiences both online and, increasingly, offline are being extracted, rendered, and sold to bidders at auction. Forgive me, here I am preaching to the choir. So hello again, I look forward to listening and learning from you.

How to see which sites are sharing your information with Facebook, and make them stop

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/ezvtbe/how_to_see_which_sites_are_sharing_your/

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/29/facebook-gets-info-about-you-from-other-web-sites-how-to-stop-it.html

The Ethical Design Handbook is out!

Featuring insights from the great @laura, @aral and more…

↓
https://ethicaldesignhandbook.com
↑

💚

Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

https://dev.to/goatandsheep/stop-donating-your-customers-data-to-google-analytics-191

"Aside from only letting you sample 25% of your traffic" WHAT?

"Cookie pop-ups are designed to be confusing and make you 'agree' to be tracked. This add-on automatically answers consent pop-ups for you, so you can't be manipulated. Set your preferences once, and let the technology do the rest!"

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/

Cheap Android phones have hidden costs

Considering all the technology that is packed into a modern Android smart phone it is possible to purchase them for surprisingly low prices.

Most Android phones share lots of data with Google, carefully changing settings and disabling Google apps can limit the information you share with Google.

Our analysis of the cheap Alcatel 4034X found it, like other Alcatel phones, had app launcher and file manager apps, crucial system components which can not be disabled, which send data to Facebook. It also had pre-installed Facebook apps, which had powerful capabilities, that required advanced techniques to disable.

[A recent blog post from Malwarebytes](https://blog.malwarebytes.com/android/2020/01/united-states-government-funded-phones-come-pre-installed-with-unremovable-malware/) shows how they found that the UMX U683CL phones, some of which are supplied under the USA government Lifeline support program, come installed with similar malicious system apps.

They also have a [blog post](https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2019/01/the-new-landscape-of-preinstalled-mobile-malware-malicious-code-within/) that details how such pre-installed malware can sometimes can be removed.

For apps that can not be removed we recommend using [Net Guard](https://f-droid.org/app/eu.faircode.netguard) to reduce their harm by blocking their internet access.