Android was a victim of the NSO’s Pegasus because of WhatsApp, and possibly that only worked because Facebook negotiated with phone manufacturers to bundle dodgy pre-installed system apps outside the Google Play Store.
Apple’s iOS was a victim of the NSO’s Pegasus because of iMessages.
For me, that’s enough to completely steer clear of iOS altogether. I mean, the lack of customisation and control over my device was already enough, but that kind of vindicated it for me.
Lol for a moment there I thought I was going off the rails with my puffa jacket rant above, but your segway into “free market feefees” is far more unhinged.
The legality was only ever a grey area. Their days may be numbered, however. During the lockdowns they removed the one physical copy per digital copy lent, and as a result of that they got sued. Instead of settling out of court they drummed up donations to a legal fund and lost hard, and during the trial a judge ruled that their practice was illegal. In my opinion, they should have done everything they could have to settle out of court, rather than try and build a frivilous defense that had no grounding in law.
Right now, they’re appealing it, so I guess that’s why it’s still up. However it looks like their strategy isn’t any better now than it was then.
uBlock Origin is essential. Firefox (or a hardened fork) with uBlock Origin is the bare minimum protection, IMO. Definitely don’t use Chrome or any derivative (which is basically all of them these days, eg Microsoft Edge, Brave).
uMatrix is deprecated and breaks websites by default. I love it, but it’s not for everyone. I don’t use it on all my devices, though.
Staying true to the centuries-old library concept, only one patron at a time can rent a digital copy of a physical book for a limited period.
This is misleading. IA had a restriction of one digital copy per real copy scanned, however they removed this restriction during covid - and that was when the publishers sued.
End of the day, IA tried to test the limits of them and ended up having them defined better in favour of the publishers. They paint themselves as the victim, but actually it’s their actions that made things worse. Hopefully they’ll straighten things out a bit in the appeal, but IA only have themselves to blame here.
I enjoyed reaching the gist of your meaning: Legislation needs to be written.
So let’s hope that can happen.
Agreed. The first step I think is education, letting people know the value, pointing out that it is a pandemic problem that affects everyone, then convincing politicians that they are being robbed too. If a lawmaker thinks they’re a victim, then they might actually pull their finger out.
And on a personal level, what have you heard about people who intentionally make their data useless?
This has been my strategy.
I do that to some degree, with some things. Like with captcha, I play a game of getting things wrong, but just enough to get through. Not every attempt though, I want it to still think I’m a human that’s smarter than the machine, then when I think it’s giving me a genuine training screen I spoil it.
I don’t use cash as much as I maybe should, I prefer it in some regards, but contactless card purchases are just so easy. I’ve never used Google or Apple Pay, though, but that’s more because I run custom firmware. Also, I’ve since learned that when you use your phone to pay it’s the equivalent to chip and PIN. You are authorising the transaction and taking responsibility for it, whereas if you use a contactless debit/credit card it is processed as “cardholder not present”, whereby the seller assumes more responsibility if you dispute it. This method of transaction isn’t new, it’s how catalogue or telephone purchases were always done, as well as online purchases. But if you use your card with chip and PIN, or if you use your phone, you will have a much harder time disputing any transaction.
Have you heard much about this strategy? How might it work if everyone used it? Generally thoughts for how we can defy their machine and protect ourselves?
In terms of user data protection, really I think the cat is long since out of the bag. There’s no putting it back in - and in many ways we shouldn’t, as data is useful and has benefits to society. I think it should go either one of two ways:
Allow businesses to continue their free data collection, but force them to make the raw data public. Any processing they do can be private, but the raw data doesn’t belong to them.
Have businesses start paying the data subject for their data.
In the meantime, one way a user can limit their data collection using restrictive privacy browsing settings. For my personal PC’s, I not only run uBlock Origin but also uMatrix - a deprecated extension made by the same author. This has similar funcionality to uBlock Origin when you set it to author mode, where it can selectively block different domains, but uMatrix presents it as a matrix which also allows you to select the type of content as well as domains. By default, it blocks all 3rd party frames, audio/video media, scripts, XHR, and “other”, so quite often it leaves websites broken on first load, but then I pick through and enable the bare minimum of content to get it working. This isn’t for everyone, of course, as it can be a hassle sometimes - particularly with payment processors which are all done on multiple 3rd party servers. However, it does highlight to me how endemic Google are with captcha, even when it doesn’t give you a captcha prompt. I can’t log into some of my online banking without enabling connections to Google, which is sickening. This is an example of what uMatrix looks like:
The extension doesn’t get updates anymore, so my lists are out of date compared to uBlock Origin. I’m pretty sure I could update them manually, but since I run uBO as well I don’t really feel the need. I’ve tried running just uMatrix, but uBO has its own array of special lists and without those YouTube ad blocking doesn’t work.
Yeah I really hate that kind of thing. I went into a gas station once, and at the registers it had a tiny little label saying they had CCTV with facial recognition, for crime prevention and “legitimate interest” - the GDPR term that websites always hide and sneak in pre-ticked, even when you think the main points are completely unchecked. There wasn’t even a clear way to opt out either, just a QR code you could scan. I didn’t scan, I’ve avoided that place since.
I also vote for finding a new weed shop, but ideally do tell them your reason why.
Damn lmao did we kill my first source? It won’t load anymore for me to double check what is included.
With regards to consumer data being aggregated insights, rather than personal info or targeted ads, that still doesn’t mean they should get it for free, though. Furthermore, I’d argue that all info is personal info, given that it is so easy to identify a person with very few data points.
Edit: You’re right, it includes business data. However I’d expect much of that data is paid for down to the data subject, excluding the stuff that’s public domain.
It’s not reasonable that business data should be fairly paid for, while consumer data isn’t.
Yes I’ve noticed that as well, the links have always been borked. Doubt it’ll get fixed any time soon, but at least the ground work is there and it makes it ever so slightly easier to make the formatting.
That’s very interesting! I’d also read somewhere that data collection was a trillion dollar industry, however the figure I found here is purely data brokerage so does not include Google per se - Google sell advertising, the data they collect is kept to themselves, so it’s much harder to pin down a value.
It also stands to reason that an American’s data is worth more on the market than, say, a North Korean’s - users who use the internet more will have more data being traded.