#Google ads spy tools 2022

[mostlysignssomeportents]

We should ban TikTok('s surveillance)

With the RESTRICT Act, Congress is proposing to continue Trump’s war on Tiktok, enacting a US ban on the Chinese-owned service. How will they do this? Congress isn’t clear. In practice, banning stuff on the internet is hard, especially if you don’t have a national firewall:

https://doctorow.medium.com/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography-33aa668dc602

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/30/tik-tok-tow/#good-politics-for-electoral-victories

My guess is that they’re thinking of ordering the mobile duopoly of Google and Apple to nuke the Tiktok app from their app stores. That’s how they do it in China, after all: when China wanted to ban VPNs and other privacy tools, they just ordered Apple to remove them from the App Store, and Apple rolled over:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/11/foreseeable-consequences/#airdropped

That’s the completely foreseeable consequence of arrogating the power to decide which software every mobile user on earth is entitled to use — as Google and Apple have done. Once you put that gun on the mantelpiece in Act I, you damn betcha that some strong-man backed by a powerful state is going to come along and shoot it by Act III.

The same goes for commercial surveillance: once you collect massive, nonconsensual dossiers on every technology user alive, you don’t get to act surprised when cops and spies show up and order your company to serve as deputies for a massive, off-the-books warrantless surveillance project.

Hell, a cynic might even say that commercial surveillance companies are betting on this. The surveillance public-private partnership is a vicious cycle: corporations let cops and spies plunder our data; then the cops and spies lobby against privacy laws that would prevent these corporations from spying on us:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/25/nationalize-moderna/#hun-sen

Which makes the RESTRICT Act an especially foolish project. If the Chinese state wants to procure data on Americans, it need not convince us to install Tiktok. It can simply plunk down a credit card with any of the many unregulated data-brokers who feed the American tech giants the dossiers that the NSA and local cops rely on.

Every American tech giant is at least as bad for privacy as Tiktok is — yes, even Apple. Sure, Apple lets its users block Facebook spying with a single tap — but even if you opt out of “tracking,” Apple still secretly gathers exactly the same kinds of data as Facebook, and uses it to power its own ad product:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

There is no such thing as a privacy-respecting tech giant. Long before Apple plastered our cities with lying billboards proclaiming its reverence for privacy, Microsoft positioned itself as the non-spying alternative to Google, which would be great, except Microsoft spies on hundreds of millions of people and sells the data:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

Tech’s surveillance addiction means that Tiktok’s own alternative to the RESTRICT Act is also unbelievably stupid. The company has proposed to put itself under Oracle’s supervision, letting Oracle host its data and audit its code. You know, Oracle, the company that built the Great Firewall of China 1.0:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/selling-china-surveillance

We should not trust Tiktok any more than we trust Apple, Facebook, Google or Microsoft. Tiktok lied about whether it was sending data to China before:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-tapes-us-user-data-china-bytedance-access

And even if it keeps its promise not to send user data to China, that promise is meaningless — it can still send the vectors and models it creates with that data to China — these being far more useful for things like disinformation campaigns and population-scale inferences than the mere logs from your Tiktok sessions.

There are so many potentially harmful ways to process commercial surveillance data that trying to enumerate all the things that a corporation is allowed to do with the data it extracts from us is a fool’s errand. Instead, we should ban companies from spying on us, whether they are Chinese or American.

Corporations are remorseless, paperclip-maximizing colony organisms that perceive us as inconvenient gut-flora, and they lack any executive function (as do their “executives”), and they cannot self-regulate. To keep corporations from harming us, we must make it illegal for them to enact harm, and punish them when they break the law:

https://doctorow.medium.com/small-government-fd5870a9462e

After all, the problem with Tiktok isn’t the delightful videos or the fact that it’s teaching a generation of children to be expert sound- and video-editors. The problem with Tiktok is that it spies on us. Just like the problem with Facebook isn’t that it lets us communicate with our friends, and the problem with Google isn’t that it operates a search engine.

Now, these companies will tell you that the two can’t be separated, that a bearded prophet came down off a mountain with two stone tablets, intoning, “Larry, Sergey, thou shalt stop rotating thine logfiles and, lo, thou wilt data-mine them for actionable market intelligence.” But it’s nonsense. Google ran for years without surveillance. Facebook billed itself as the privacy-forward alternative to Myspace and promised never to spy on us:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

The inevitabilist narrative that says that corporations must violate our rights in order to make the products we love is unadulterated Mr Gotcha nonsense: “Yet you participate in society. Curious. I am very intelligent”:

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Of course, corporations push this narrative all the time, which is why American Big Tech has been quietly supporting a ban on Tiktok, which (coincidentally) has managed to gain a foothold in the otherwise impregnable, decaying, enshittified oligarchy that US companies have created.

They have conspicuously failed to call for any kind of working solution, like a federal privacy law that would ban commercial surveillance, and extend a “private right of action,” so people could sue tech giants and data-brokers who violated the law, without having to convince a regulator, DA or Attorney General to bestir themselves:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy

Instead, the tech giants have the incredible gall to characterize themselves as the defenders of our privacy — at least, so long as the Chinese government is the adversary, and so long as its privacy violations come via an app, and not buy handing a credit card to the data-brokers that are the soil bacteria that keeps Big Tech’s ecosystem circulating. In the upside-down land of Big Tech lobbying, privacy is a benefit of monopoly — not something we have to smash monopolies to attain:

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

Not everyone in Congress is onboard with the RESTRICT Act. AOC has come out for a federal privacy law that applies to all companies, rather than a ban on an app that tens of millions of young Americans love:

https://www.businessinsider.com/aoc-first-tiktok-congress-ban-without-being-clued-in-2023-3

You know who agrees with AOC? Rand Paul. Yes, that absolute piece of shit. Paul told his caucusmates in the GOP that banning an app that millions of young American voters love is bad electoral politics. This fact is so obvious that even Rand fucking Paul can understand it:

https://gizmodo.com/rand-paul-opposes-tiktok-ban-warns-republicans-1850278167

Paul is absolutely right to call a Tiktok ban a “national strategy to permanently lose elections for a generation.” The Democrats should listen to him, because the GOP won’t. As between the two parties, the GOP is far more in thrall to the Chamber of Commerce and the rest of the business lobby. They are never going to back a policy that’s as good for the people and as bad for big business as a federal privacy law.

The Democrats have the opportunity to position themselves as “the party that wants to keep Tiktok but force it to stop being creepy, along with all the other tech companies,” while the GOP positions itself as “the party of angry technophobes who want to make sure that any fun you have is closely monitored by Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pinchai and Tim Cook and their pale imitations of the things you love about Tiktok.”

That’s not just good electoral politics — it’s good policy. Young voters aren’t going to turn out to the polls for performative Cold War 2.0 nonsense, but they will be pissed as hell at whoever takes away their Tiktok.

And if you do care about Cold War 2.0, then you should be banning surveillance, not Tiktok; the Chinese government has plenty of US dollars at its disposal to spend in America’s freewheeling, unregulated data markets — as do criminals, petty and organized, and every other nation-state adversary of the USA.

The RESTRICT Act is a garbage law straight out of the Clinton era, a kind of King Canute decree that goes so far as to potentially prohibit the use of VPNs to circumvent its provisions. America doesn’t need a Great Firewall to keep itself safe from tech spying — it needs a privacy law.

Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Here’s how you can: I’m kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A modified vintage editorial cartoon. Uncle Sam peeks out over a 'frowning battlement' whose cannon-slots are filled with telescopes from which peer the red glaring eyes of HAL 9000 from '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Topping the battlements in a row are Uncle Sam and three business-suited figures with dollar-sign-bags for heads. The three dollar-bag men have corporate logos on their breasts: Facebook, Google, Apple. Standing on the strand below the battlements, peering up, is a forlorn figure with a Tiktok logo for a head. The fortress wall bears the words 'RESTRICT Act.']

[infopoweradsspy]

Google Ads Spy

In this infographics, you will get to know about Google ads spy.

[fanfic-reading-challenge]

2022 Multi-Fandom Event

We're baaaaaack! *cackles*

Hello! First of all I'd like to thank @jandjsalmon for essentially being my 'beta' as I developed this second year's Fanfic Reading Challenge. You did so much, and deserve tons of credit for this alongside me! @attractiverock also helped by looking over new tasks and asking some really spectacular questions that helped develop what I think is a really superior challenge this year. Three cheers!!!

But now... It's time to get ahead/on top of the doldrums of 2022 and immerse ourselves in fantasy worlds --- The Neverending Story will always be a classic exactly for that reason --- because we all need a break from the world we live in, right? I know that the 2021 challenge helped relax me and others who participated, and hopefully the trend can continue into this year! (But don't forget to be a good, productive, and caring citizen of Earth, because everyone needs love these days.)

Before we get into the brass tacks of the basics new participants will need/want (though this is all repeated on the first tab of the challenge spreadsheet, and in more detail!), let me give you the link(s) to the challenge and to two wonderful reading log tools @jandjsalmon and @juuls developed to make keeping track of your reading that much easier! (It can also be used for books!)

And here they be...

The Long-Awaited 2022 Fanfiction Reading Challenge!

Open it! Click 'File'! Make a copy! It's yours now! We can't spy on it! Now personalize it, and start reading your hearts o... well. Really, read just as much as you always do! xD This we do know!

The above spreadsheet includes:

Tab 1, the FAQ/Rules/general info section. A welcome page!

Tab 2, Regular Mode

Tab 3, Hard Mode

Tab 4, Extreme Mode

Tab 5, Swappables (see the challenge spreadsheet or blog FAQ for more info on what these are (when the latter is updated)). To put it simply, however, they are tasks you can swap out for any other challenge task you don't wish to complete.

Tab 6 and 7, 'Fic Tracking Sheet' and 'Reading Log', created by @jandjsalmon and @juuls respectively, are there to use if you wish. Both fic tracking tools (to see what you've read over the course of the year, like this example of mine from last year) have their pros and cons, so give each or neither a try, and figure out what works best for you if you want to keep track of each fic. This is not necessary to complete the challenge, though!

Jandy's Fic Tracking Sheet

Juulna's Reading Log

These here, above, are separate copies of the logs if you so wish to keep your files separate from the challenge or... I mean, you could just want to keep track of what you read without even participating in the challenge! *shrugs* Who am I to judge?

For further assistance, here's a link to my reading log from 2021, so you can see how I (sometimes in a very hodge-podge way) kept track of what I was doing, reading, and how I was labelling fics, adding fics for the future, etc.

Don't worry, it may seem like a lot (!!) but it's really quite easy to navigate and understand, and you are always welcome to ask me questions at any time. :) The first step is to open the spreadsheet and then make a copy of your own. Then we can talk if you need to!

(If you need another format other than Google Sheets, like Excel or Word or something else, please let me know so I can get those to you ASAP!)

So what is this 'challenge(s)'? Here are the basics:

The event runs from January 1st to December 31st, 2022. If you started a fic in 2021 but finished it in 2022, that absolutely counts in full towards the 2022 challenge and word count. Anything you read before you start this challenge (whether in January or May or October) counts too!

Signing up: You don't need to sign up at all! You can just grab a copy of the challenge spreadsheet and fill it out however you wish (or even keep track of your tasks in an entirely different manner like a Word doc). Declaring your intention to participate is more of a thing if you want to be held accountable for your goals, but it's not like we're going to be angry with you if you don't finish any of it!

This challenge operates on the honour system. If you said you completed a fic for a certain task, that's between you and whichever ghost/saint haunts/watches over you. Come January 2023, all I'll ask is just to see the document you've used to keep track of your challenge, so I can match it up to the numbers which determine which prize you get!

Yes! Prizes! Here's an example of Juulna's 2021 badge for completing hard and regular mode:

Badge(s) created by the amazing and incomparable artist @saganarojanaolt, who I will be commissioning for next year's badge and a banner as well! (Until then you get my shoddy banners.) They based this particular art on my own basset, Ygritte, and I could just stare at it forever. <3 Here's the link to the post with the other badges!!

So what do I have to do? … Just read!! Have fun! Enjoy yourself! And fill out the challenge spreadsheet if you'd like any of the following badges (further info on the FAQ page or on the spreadsheet itself):

~~~ Participant Prize: Complete at least one task from the challenge!

~~~ Regular Mode: Complete at least 80% of the regular mode tasks, which is the equivalent of 100/125 tasks, regular mode only.

~~~ Hard Mode: Complete at least 90% of the hard mode tasks, which is the equivalent of 78/87 tasks, hard mode only, along with the previous requirement of 80% of the regular mode tasks being completed.

~~~ Extreme Mode: Complete at least 95% of the extreme mode tasks, which is the equivalent of 62/65 tasks, extreme mode only, along with the previous requirements of 80% of the regular mode tasks and 90% of the hard mode tasks being completed. (Grand total of at least 240/277 task completions.) … it's easier than it sounds. *snorts*

~~~ and some secret prizes you can unlock with no clue that you did just that until the end of the year!

Please help signal boost this post, as I only have so much reach into so many fandoms, and it's a rather small number! I will be encouraging friends of mine to reblog this, and I would love it if you could as well. Everyone deserves a distraction this year (wasn't it just 2019 last year???), especially if it keeps you happy, occupied, and away from those who sit just a wee bit too close to you!

That's about it for the Year Two Opening Post! I need a nap now...

But...…

The most important thing of all, in the end..... is to have a frickin' blast, my loves! <3