My “not a book review” of Careless People – the book Facebook doesn’t want you to read.

With highlights on Ireland’s complicity and the lengths people farmers (as I call them) will go to to appease authoritarian regimes like China.

ar.al/2025/03/21/careless-peop…

It’s clear from this that Ireland should be stripped of the authority to enforce GDPR and, really, people farmers – and the business model of people farming in general – should be banned in the EU.

(Don’t hold your breaths.)

#carelessPeople #facebook #peopleFarming #surveillance #capitalism #surveillanceCapitalism #BigTech #SiliconValley #ventureCapital #USA #fascism #technofascism #EU #Ireland #tax #GDPR #tech #humanRights #democracy

Careless people

Notes from “Careless People: A story of where I used to work: Power. Greed. Madness.” by Sarah-Wynn Williams

^{Aral Balkan}

Important #UK #petition to sign: "Ban behavioural data extraction for advertising"

petition.parliament.uk/petitio…

If you are a UK citizen or UK resident PLEASE SIGN THIS 🙏🏼

We need the #government to take this seriously so creeps like this #databroker don't get more data:
gizmodo.com/data-broker-brags-…

And #democracy is undermined by the #microtargeting from #socialmedia - #Trump /Brexit/Romania etc

#surveillancecapitalism #dataprivacy #advertising #RTB #databreach #infosec #uspol #data #selfhosting

Data Broker Brags About Having Highly Detailed Personal Information on Nearly All Internet Users

The advertising industry is immensely powerful, and disturbingly opaque.

^{Lucas Ropek (Gizmodo)}

You might as well throw your Echo and Alexa-powered devices in the trash like you should have done years ago.

arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/0…

Cory (@pluralistic) with a banger of a post:

pluralistic.net/2025/03/15/alt…

And this factoid:

"Congress hasn't passed a consumer #privacy law since 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act banned video store clerks from disclosing which VHS cassettes you brought home."

#Amazon #Echo #Alexa #surveillance #surveillancecapitalism

Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28

Amazon is killing a privacy feature to bolster Alexa+, the new subscription assistant.

^{Scharon Harding (Ars Technica)}

#Privacy #SurveillanceCapitalism #Amazon's #Alexa

(3/3)

... felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense."

//

Source:
pluralistic.net/2025/03/15/alt…

#Privacy #SurveillanceCapitalism #Amazon's #Alexa

(2/n)

... for a copyrighted work:

pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/rec…

That means that once Amazon reaches over the air to stir up the guts of your Echo, no one is allowed to give you a tool that will let you get inside your Echo and change the software back. Sure, it's your property, but exercising sole and despotic dominion over it requires breaking the digital lock that controls access to the firmware, and that's a...

#Privacy #SurveillanceCapitalism #Amazon's #Alexa

(1/3)

👉Amazon annihilates Alexa privacy settings, turns on continuous, nonconsensual audio uploading👈

Is this globally?

How e. g. in the EU.
US laws don't apply there.

"If the #Echo is your property, how come Amazon gets to break it? Because we passed a law that lets them. Section 1201 of 1998's #DigitalMillenniumCopyrightAct makes it a felony to "bypass an access control"...

pluralistic.net/2025/03/15/alt…

If you still have an Echo turned on anywhere, now's the time to crush it like the bug it is.

arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/0…

#ai #surveillancecapitalism #amazon #broligarchy

Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28

Amazon is killing a privacy feature to bolster Alexa+, the new subscription assistant.

^{Scharon Harding (Ars Technica)}

Happy 10th anniversary to Spyware 2.0 – the video we released at the launch of Ind.ie (what is now Small Technology Foundation¹).

Have we learned any lessons in those ten years, I wonder.

vimeo.com/116656700

#spyware #SiliconValley #BigTech #technology #fascism #technoFascism #peopleFarming #surveillance #capitalism #surveillanceCapitalism

¹ small-tech.org

Home

Hello! We’re a tiny and independent two-person not-for-profit based in Ireland. We are building the Small Web. No, it’s not web3, it’s web0.

^{Small Technology Foundation}