#No Anonymity/No Privacy

[little-klng]

i think kids online should really get back to making internetsonas instead of whatever fuckshit this is with putting their entire real faces, names, ages, and such everywhere. you're not gonna realize how nice internet privacy is until you dont have it anymore and no chance at getting it back. make up a guy and a name and just be that online. make up conflicting details about your completely made up backstory. make a fursona or something

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[ghoulishmorbidchick-blog]

What's App (Messaging App)

The messaging App What's App maybe banned or made illegal to use in England due to a new (Online Safety Law) which would remove the encryption, anonymity & privacy of the messaging App which is why I use it. It's a bit strange for this particular messaging app to be made illegal or banned from being used when the British Government use the app themselves, so they are hypocrites!

The British Government are already attempting to take away our human rights, freedom of speech, anonymity, privacy & they want to dominate, control or dictate every aspect of your life, or who you are as a person (If your British obviously)

They expect you to live a miserable, fucking existence but to also consensually comply with their corporate, evil fascism/dictatorship.

I've already signed the petition against the CBDC.

England is fast becoming a lot like America with their government spying on their own citizens.

Why the fuck does the British government need to see/read what messages people privately send to people on social media/messaging apps??

I'm not saying/doing anything shady, questionable, immoral, or illegal online, or on social media/messaging apps so why should my privacy be invaded due to a minority of sick perverts exchanging indecent images of kids, or they are radicalized and would join ISIS the terrorist group.

Why doesn't the government do something about predatory, coercive, manipulative, abusive peadophiles, incels, misogynists, human traffickers, rapists, or abusers, stalkers, voyeurs, cyberstalking/cyberbullying people that are mentally, emotionally, psychologically unstable, psychotic and violent using social media, Apps like Tiktok, or messaging Apps like What's App?

Taking away encryption, anonymity or privacy on What's App/social media or messaging apps just to invade everyone's privacy versus only looking at the accounts of suspected peadophles, emotionally, mentally, psychologically unstable people that are psychotic & violent & terrorist is a security/privacy breach.

How would it work to take away the end-to-end encryption when politicians use What's App? They don't want to be exposed for the shady, questionable shit they are up to themselves since some are them are known to be a nonce, sexist misogynists or taking cocaine.

Why the fuck is it any of your business who i'm talking to or what i'm talking about? It seems like the government are trying to find new ways to fuck people over, taking away your money, control, anonymity is the best way to do that!

It means absolutely nothing to me to be British, but I will always stand up for my rights as a British citizen, as a woman & as a individual person.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Palantir’s NHS-stealing Big Lie

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

Capitalism's Big Lie in four words: "There is no alternative." Looters use this lie for cover, insisting that they're hard-nosed grownups living in the reality of human nature, incentives, and facts (which don't care about your feelings).

The point of "there is no alternative" is to extinguish the innovative imagination. "There is no alternative" is really "stop trying to think of alternatives, dammit." But there are always alternatives, and the only reason to demand that they be excluded from consideration is that these alternatives are manifestly superior to the looter's supposed inevitability.

Right now, there's an attempt underway to loot the NHS, the UK's single most beloved institution. The NHS has been under sustained assault for decades – budget cuts, overt and stealth privatisation, etc. But one of its crown jewels has been stubbournly resistant to being auctioned off: patient data. Not that HMG hasn't repeatedly tried to flog patient data – it's just that the public won't stand for it:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/nov/21/nhs-data-platform-may-be-undermined-by-lack-of-public-trust-warn-campaigners

Patients – quite reasonably – do not trust the private sector to handle their sensitive medical records.

Now, this presents a real conundrum, because NHS patient data, taken as a whole, holds untold medical insights. The UK is a large and diverse country and those records in aggregate can help researchers understand the efficacy of various medicines and other interventions. Leaving that data inert and unanalysed will cost lives: in the UK, and all over the world.

For years, the stock answer to "how do we do science on NHS records without violating patient privacy?" has been "just anonymise the data." The claim is that if you replace patient names with random numbers, you can release the data to research partners without compromising patient privacy, because no one will be able to turn those numbers back into names.

It would be great if this were true, but it isn't. In theory and in practice, it is surprisingly easy to "re-identify" individuals in anonymous data-sets. To take an obvious example: we know which two dates former PM Tony Blair was given a specific treatment for a cardiac emergency, because this happened while he was in office. We also know Blair's date of birth. Check any trove of NHS data that records a person who matches those three facts and you've found Tony Blair – and all the private data contained alongside those public facts is now in the public domain, forever.

Not everyone has Tony Blair's reidentification hooks, but everyone has data in some kind of database, and those databases are continually being breached, leaked or intentionally released. A breach from a taxi service like Addison-Lee or Uber, or from Transport for London, will reveal the journeys that immediately preceded each prescription at each clinic or hospital in an "anonymous" NHS dataset, which can then be cross-referenced to databases of home addresses and workplaces. In an eyeblink, millions of Britons' records of receiving treatment for STIs or cancer can be connected with named individuals – again, forever.

Re-identification attacks are now considered inevitable; security researchers have made a sport out of seeing how little additional information they need to re-identify individuals in anonymised data-sets. A surprising number of people in any large data-set can be re-identified based on a single characteristic in the data-set.

Given all this, anonymous NHS data releases should have been ruled out years ago. Instead, NHS records are to be handed over to the US military surveillance company Palantir, a notorious human-rights abuser and supplier to the world's most disgusting authoritarian regimes. Palantir – founded by the far-right Trump bagman Peter Thiel – takes its name from the evil wizard Sauron's all-seeing orb in Lord of the Rings ("Sauron, are we the baddies?"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/#public-private-partnership

The argument for turning over Britons' most sensitive personal data to an offshore war-crimes company is "there is no alternative." The UK needs the medical insights in those NHS records, and this is the only way to get at them.

As with every instance of "there is no alternative," this turns out to be a lie. What's more, the alternative is vastly superior to this chumocratic sell-out, was Made in Britain, and is the envy of medical researchers the world 'round. That alternative is "trusted research environments." In a new article for the Good Law Project, I describe these nigh-miraculous tools for privacy-preserving, best-of-breed medical research:

https://goodlawproject.org/cory-doctorow-health-data-it-isnt-just-palantir-or-bust/

At the outset of the covid pandemic Oxford's Ben Goldacre and his colleagues set out to perform realtime analysis of the data flooding into NHS trusts up and down the country, in order to learn more about this new disease. To do so, they created Opensafely, an open-source database that was tied into each NHS trust's own patient record systems:

https://timharford.com/2022/07/how-to-save-more-lives-and-avoid-a-privacy-apocalypse/

Opensafely has its own database query language, built on SQL, but tailored to medical research. Researchers write programs in this language to extract aggregate data from each NHS trust's servers, posing medical questions of the data without ever directly touching it. These programs are published in advance on a git server, and are preflighted on synthetic NHS data on a test server. Once the program is approved, it is sent to the main Opensafely server, which then farms out parts of the query to each NHS trust, packages up the results, and publishes them to a public repository.

This is better than "the best of both worlds." This public scientific process, with peer review and disclosure built in, allows for frequent, complex analysis of NHS data without giving a single third party access to a a single patient record, ever. Opensafely was wildly successful: in just months, Opensafely collaborators published sixty blockbuster papers in Nature – science that shaped the world's response to the pandemic.

Opensafely was so successful that the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care commissioned a review of the programme with an eye to expanding it to serve as the nation's default way of conducting research on medical data:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis

This approach is cheaper, safer, and more effective than handing hundreds of millions of pounds to Palantir and hoping they will manage the impossible: anonymising data well enough that it is never re-identified. Trusted Research Environments have been endorsed by national associations of doctors and researchers as the superior alternative to giving the NHS's data to Peter Thiel or any other sharp operator seeking a public contract.

As a lifelong privacy campaigner, I find this approach nothing short of inspiring. I would love for there to be a way for publishers and researchers to glean privacy-preserving insights from public library checkouts (such a system would prove an important counter to Amazon's proprietary god's-eye view of reading habits); or BBC podcasts or streaming video viewership.

You see, there is an alternative. We don't have to choose between science and privacy, or the public interest and private gain. There's always an alternative – if there wasn't, the other side wouldn't have to continuously repeat the lie that no alternative is possible.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies

Image: Gage Skidmore (modified) https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_Thiel_(51876933345).jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[canisalbus]

i live in venice (not exactly but close enough) and while we dont have many beaches here many people instead just go directly into the shallow parts of the laguna! its so shallow that its basically like a sort of beach in the middle of water? many ppl esp that live there take small boats and get to those parts (at least from what ive seen when i was passing by on a boat). im not sure about it being a thing historically but maybe machete and vasco could do that too instead of a normal beach?

.

[learnwithmearticles]

A Violation of Two Amendments

If you’ve seen a lot of posts online about KOSA, it’s because it has the potential to drastically change the internet.

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is a proposed bill receiving U.S. Democratic and Republican support.

It pulls on strong concerns about the safety of children, especially the fabricated concerns of LGBT+ topics propagandized by conservatives. It would permit the government to censor the internet at will, restricting what information is available online for everyone, even people in other countries.

The bill would permit attorneys general to prevent basic information about healthcare, mental health, world news, and more from being accessible online, keeping adults as well as children from finding important information and resources.

There are valid concerns about the internet and its ability to harm people, especially children. I have written a thesis specifically about the relationships between mental health and social media. In no way would I ever advocate for increased censorship in the way that this bill does.

It specifically violates the First Amendment of the Constitution, inserting governmental control over people’s speech, the sharing of news, and the sharing of opinions. This would be placing the responsibility of parenting on the government, and allowing them to determine exactly what children -and adults- are allowed to learn.

Furthermore, it is disguised as a bill to ‘protect children’, and that phrase itself has unfortunately become a dog whistle for conservatives referring to LGBT+ topics existing in the world. This bill is extremely dangerous to young LGBT+ individuals.

It is also dangerous to people of different races, nationalities, economic backgrounds, and gun owners. This is because it would virtually mandate age verification. This poses danger for children, people facing domestic abuse, and houseless people, as well as violating the Fourteenth Amendment, which asserts that the state cannot exert undue control over its citizens’ private lives.

Many organizations and websites have initiated petitions and calls to action to express disapproval of this bill, outlining its rights violations, and helping individuals find out how to contact their senators. Some of those resources are linked below.

Additional Resources

1.https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/02/dont-fall-latest-changes-dangerous-kids-online-safety-act

2. https://www.stopkosa.com/

3.https://www.change.org/p/save-our-free-and-open-internet-stop-the-kids-online-safety-act4. https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/censorship-wont-make-kids-safe?nowrapper=true

[gayvampyr]

people have been noticing and complimenting my outfits lately and it makes me happy because i really do put a lot of thought into them. today my supervisor said “you’re always coordinated and you’re very good at it” like yay ❤️

[jakeperalta]

it's an odd strategy to me to have the promo for an upcoming album kind of... invalidate her past albums. it's probably not that deep, but personally, it makes me less excited, not more.

aka no one can take lover away from me and act like that's a denial song. so many swifties have gotten married to that song, please.

yeah same, I feel like in the past she's always very much tried to put the music at the forefront and resist the gossip appeal of it all whereas this time round it's like she's leaning into it for the sake of building the hype and conversation :/

[botgal]

California Internet Bill Petitions

If you've been following my other post regarding social media legislature that's been making its way through California's senate and assembly, then you'll know that there are a few bills that are currently in circulation that could restrict the internet freedoms of Californians in multiple ways. From forcing age verification via government IDs to restricting what kinds of content can be accessed and when. If you'd like to help spread the word further and show greater numbers of resistance to these laws being passed, then here's a series of four change.org petitions you can sign! If you can add your signatures and share them around, no matter if the numbers are small at first, it can at least help to show that there are numbers of Californians that are against these laws being passed.

Of course, keep calling your legislators as much as you can. But if even signing and spreading petitions can help bring awareness and resistance to these bills before it's too late, the more support the better.

Keep calling and writing. Don't give up the fight for free speech and internet privacy in California.

[nalyra-dreaming]

Hey,how are you? I was wondering do the people in universe know Louis de Pointe du Lac is the vampire from Daniel Molloy 's best-selling book ''Interview with the vampire'' It seems like Daniel is famous enough to go on television so i'm wondering about Louis ?Is the reception on the book different?

I think Louis has a lot of names, not just his real one (Lestat does in the books as well as other vampires, I don’t see that being different for Louis). And he pays a lot of money for privacy.

Obviously the vampires know about him though. I think the mortals… might not find much on him (on the internet) if Daniel‘s season one comments are to be trusted.

As such most likely take the book as fiction. And Louis simply as a character in it.

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[cactuslester]

“Don’t you get tired of over qualifying your words for random people on the internet” YES GOD SAY IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(context)

thank you anon! like i really feel this so hard because like i know we often can't help caring what other people think and can't help feeling like we need to overexplain ourselves for a myriad of reasons, some of them being that social media culture has bred such an environment of like constantly performing and being scrutinized and scrutinizing others to see who is saying exactly the right thing in exactly the right way, and it's like, of course it's always important to be aware and thoughtful about what we say and how we conduct ourselves, but really sometime the black and white mentality goes too far, and learning how to distance yourself and care less about what others think is honestly so vital to enjoying your internet experience and feeling free

and when it comes to the phandom and talking about dnp's relationship specifically, i think a lot of people (mostly outside of tumblr, i feel like most of us here Get It) are still stuck deep in that ~2012-2016 mindset. and like i get that era did a number on a lot of us, but dnp themselves have moved on, and we're allowed to move on too. like so many people on here have already said, it's perfectly natural to think dnp are in a relationship because, lbrh, they've made it pretty much as clear as they can make it without outright saying it. dnp are very aware of how we as a fandom operate and think and know that right now, they're existing in a space where they can be just short of being explicit about their relationship, such that those who actively keep up with their content Know What's Up, but it's not enough for any tabloid site to pick up and run an article on and get the public spotlight trained on them again. given that, i think it's fair for us to pick up what they put down, and anyone in the year 2024 jumping down people's throats for saying they're together just looks silly, and it's time that everyone who still cares about what those people say to just stop caring

[blkkizzat]

urgh, im so lazy so i've never done this before but i just had to go and block like 80+ bots/blank blogs. with so many ppl on the tl getting their shit stolen recently and more and more blanks/bots following it was time for a purge lol.

this wont be a regular thing (i hope). but just a PSA to like plz have an actual pfp, bio and reblog content or at least have your likes visible so i know you are interacting in someway and not a bot, someone trying to follow to steal work, a minor, etc.

[do-you-ship-this-taz-ship]

Propaganda: im gonna be real i just genuinely want to know if people still ship this. because this WAS a thing. at LEAST two people shipped it. Clint made a joke in crystal kingdom about Killian having a crush on Johann and writing it in her diary, and she blushes iirc. there was a whole jumbotron of a couple who called themselves Killian and Johann.

[emyluwinter]

Иди нахрен AI

You know, I'm currently torn between the idea of deleting my social networks completely. Or stop doing anything for this damn damn AI machine.

All the platforms that I wanted to use to gain an audience, take orders for art or make merch are crashing…

Moreover, the unemployment rate and working conditions are only getting worse. So now some more capitalist insatiable gluttonous shit is going to take away my opportunities.

I really want it all to burst like a soap bubble and not remember this nightmare in reality.

I'm so damn tired of this madness.

[howlsofbloodhounds]

Guysss just real quick. Because I kinda need to know.

If any of you ever usually send messages to my inbox anonymously and then sent a message to my inbox seemingly having accidentally kept anon off, how should I navigate that?

Reply to it, don’t, contact your account to ask you? Since the point of the anonymous option is to remain anonymous.