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Crypto-Centrist Transhumanist Nationalist.
Type-19 Paramilitary Cyborg. Wanted time criminal. Class A-3 citizen of the North American Union. Opposed to the Chinese Hyper Mind-Union, the Ultra-Caliphate, Google Defense Network, and the People's Republic of Cascadia. National Separatist, enemy of the World Federation government and its unificationist allies.
Blogs Topics: Cyberpunk Nationalism. Futurist Shtposting. Timeline Vandalism. Harassing owls over the Internet.
Use whichever typical gender pronouns you like.
Not all content will have sufficient warning tags.
Seriously WHY THE FUCK IS NO ONE PANICKING. This is the point that we can never go back from. No more revolutions, no more coordinating against the powers that be, no more walking down the street to buy food without anyone knowing who you are or what you’ve been doing for the past month.
I was going to say nothing could be done, but actually something could. Unauthorized release of information on someone’s whereabouts and other data could be made a crime of strict civil liability, incurring what would normally be a small fee. Now ordinarily that wouldn’t do much, but after the first few lawsuits, suddenly all those smart features on the phones would be used to auto-blur faces unless the user specifically unblurs them, etc. Also it would kill Equifax and other companies too stupid to adequately secure data.
Problems in privacy engineering that seem unsolvable:
- sending information to another party that lets them observe and interact with it, but not store it indefinitely (or only lets them store it imperfectly)*
- sending information to another party that lets them save it and interact with it however they want, but not share it with a third party*
- verifying that one is not currently being observed (maybe use short-range EMPs to solve this in the case of checking a room for bugs?)*
- being able to store and retrieve information from a device in a quickly and easily human-readabe format that no one else can understand
- being able to e.g. enter passwords without anyone observing or understanding the step between thinking of the password in your mind and the device receiving the password*
- encryption that can be broken only with a warrant somehow
- being able to store information in such a way that it can be retrieved and used publicly, but not without the owner learned why and how you used it (this one may be very bad for people interested in reducing the power of IP laws)
Pretty sure many of these are actually theoretically impossible unless you can restrict the amount of surveillance or computational power that potential observers have access to.
The ones marked with a * are things that, as far as I can tell, intuitive social interaction and subjective feelings of security and privacy depend on. If they end up being major problems and sources of risk, I predict widespread mental health problems.
You may have heard that Twitter is changing their Privacy Policy to stop respecting Do Not Track, and some other stuff. I looked into this and found that it is incredibly slimy and reeks of desperation.
They sent an email announcing this and claiming that it was protecting your privacy. This is obvious lies, but basically SOP so whatever. But it gets worse. There are two main pages linked:
Transparency and control: We’ve launched new Personalization and Data settings and expanded Your Twitter Data to give you more transparent access to your information and more granular controls over how your data is used by Twitter. These enhanced settings will replace Twitter’s reliance on the Do Not Track browser setting, which we will no longer support.
And then when you look at the heading Data Sharing, you see this:
Data sharing: We’ve updated how we share non-personal, aggregated, and device-level data, including under select partnership agreements that allow the data to be linked to your name, email, or other personal information if you give the partner your consent. You can control whether your data is shared under these partnership agreements in your Personalization and Data settings.
So if you read this, you’ll probably think that if you’re concerned about your Twitter data being shared with advertisers, you should go to the page linked there. (https://twitter.com/personalization). So, like a sensible, privacy-conscious human bean, you go to the page:
Handy, a Disable all button. Cool, I’ll press that and then move on to the rest of the settings to check. Unsurprisingly, it makes you click again to confirm. *leaves page*
Oh Wait. I want to check the wording on one of those. Wait, what? It didn’t change!
Oh, this is what’s up:
There is a second button you need to press to actually make changes. It doesn’t warn you if you try to leave without saving, and the extra confirmation that would normally be associated with this is moved to the Disable All button instead. Slime.
Also, take a look at this:
Share data through select partnerships
This setting lets Twitter share certain private data (which will never include your name, email, or phone number) through select partnerships. Partners have agreed not to link your name, email, or phone number to data shared through these partnerships without first getting your consent.
That sounds good, but compare with some text on the next page we’re visiting:
Tailored audiences
Tailored audiences are often built from email lists or browsing behaviors. They help advertisers reach prospective customers or people who have already expressed interest in their business.
You are currently part of 390 audiences from 156 advertisers.
You can opt out of interest-based advertising in your personalization and data settings. This will change the ads you see on Twitter, however it won’t remove you from advertisers’ audiences.
So, you can depersonalize your ads on Twitter, and ostensibly stop them from sharing your data, but they’ll still be sharing it with the advertiser lists they’ve already placed you on. Shiny.
Other than the paragraph mentioned above, this doesn’t look deceptive. In contrast to the totally deceptive first page linked, this one is annoying and awkward to mess around with, which is slimy, but the main concern I have is just how much data they’re collecting, which I am significantly less OK with than previously when I thought they might not be slime.
In conclusion, don’t trust Twitter further than you can throw one of their mainframes. Ceterum censeo Twittrem esse delendam.
This basically came out of a realization that if the government has stored your eye scan, fingerprint, and DNA information, then at some future date, it might be possible to clone you (or rather parts of you) in order to defeat your biometric protection mechanisms.
So a proper cyberpunk government should have some way of not storing this information itself, but only data prints that can be reliably and unidirectionally generated from it. Otherwise that authorization infrastructure could be severely compromised by foreign rivals in the event of a breach - and you can’t so easily change your President’s DNA.
This basically came out of a realization that if the government has stored your eye scan, fingerprint, and DNA information, then at some future date, it might be possible to clone you (or rather parts of you) in order to defeat your biometric protection mechanisms.
So a proper cyberpunk government should have some way of not storing this information itself, but only data prints that can be reliably and unidirectionally generated from it. Otherwise that authorization infrastructure could be severely compromised by foreign rivals in the event of a breach - and you can’t so easily change your President’s DNA.
then you realise that we’re surrounded by billowing clouds of biomarkers wherever we go and private entities will be sucking it all up to add to their databases anyway
So the web history thing is a fishing expedition, but’s a known thing for congress to exempt themselves from things like healthcare laws or insider trading rules or whatever, so it isn’t an entirely ungrounded assumption.
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.
I swear to god he has some kind of ancient Egyptian curse. There is always, always one of these whenever something happens. He stole an amulet from a tomb or some shit.
