Just wait a few months, something else will probably show up. the single greatest abomination I’ve seen a corporation claiming to support the LGTBQ+ community commit. I’m frankly fuming, like - on the verge of an anxiety attack - over this.įrankly, this makes me want to preemptively leave HER (the lesbian equivalent of Grindr) - before I find out the same shit is happening.Īs a queer person this may be the single greatest abomination I’ve seen a corporation claiming to support the LGTBQ+ community commit. If you are not out - it is not okay for ANYONE you don’t know to know you’re gay/lesbian/bi/whatever.
This marks the official crossing of the line from any potential ‘if you don’t have anything to hide, why do you care’ bullshit excuse that fucking idiots use to push privacy issues aside. She comes from such a traditional family, and her home country is so anti-queer - that if they somehow found out her parents would literally likely commit suicide - the exact same thing happened to a friend of hers, and it’s unfortunately a very real concern. Not for myself - because I’m out - but because the fact that I am out would potentially be for sale, and - for instance - my primary partner - isn’t.
Trying to "reduce the harm" of smartphones, more and more, feels like trying to figure out how to mitigate the impact of a world class meth addiction by focusing on the symptoms - "Oh, you need to hydrate better!" "Here's some skin moisturizer and a toothbrush!" and so on - without ever stating that the problem is the meth and that you need to stop using that, not try to figure out how to avoid losing your teeth while doing it. You can't go hoovering up all my data from a dumber KaiOS device because it doesn't run all the apps, and if a company makes their desktop/laptop interface so painful to use to drive people to the phone interface, well, they're probably doing things I don't want to support anymore. I'd encourage those who can get away with it to do the same thing. I've given up and I no longer carry a smartphone.
There's no reason that a TV needs to be doing automatic content recognition on various inputs, but they're all doing it these days. Trying to "de-evil" this sort of system is, first and foremost, fiddling around the edges of what's possible (I expect various people are reading and thinking, "Oh, you think spoofing GPS will matter, cute!), but it's also remaining in the ecosystem that has, repeatedly, demonstrated that they're going to get their paws on everything they think they can justify, and then expand that over time. I assume the state of what's actually being done is far worse than what's in the papers, because someone, somewhere, though they could get a signal out of something.
I've seen some fun papers of "Well, you could do this awful thing." (comparison of accelerometer data to deconflict which nearby phones are in the same vehicle vs separate ones to better refine social graphs), in addition to all the stuff we know is being done (ultrasonic signals in various ads, tracking shoppers by their wifi/bt beacon MACs, etc). At this point, the "sneaky snacky smartphone" approach to data collection (in which everything that can be collected is being collected, and probably used for things you can't imagine it would be useful for) starts to press heavily on the "And I therefore shouldn't carry a smartphone" side of the scales.