Laura Kalbag @laura@mastodon.laurakalbag.com

If you were at #ffconf on Friday and you missed the link to my slides. They’re at: https://noti.st/laurakalbag/Y4Q95l/slides

There’s also all the resources I referenced in my talk:

https://noti.st/laurakalbag/Y4Q95l/8-unbelievable-things-you-never-knew-about-tracking

Spotted at Gatwick (annotation my own)…

Ah Brighton, you’re exactly as I remember you. Dark, wet and with terrible mobile signal. Very glad to be back ☺️

“We need lawmakers and regulators to help protect our children, our cognitive capabilities, our public square and our democracy by creating guardrails and rules to deal directly with the incentives and business models of these platforms and the societal harms they are causing.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/04/i-worked-political-ads-facebook-they-profit-by-manipulating-us/

“Facial recognition and emerging forms of AI give landlords alarming power to harass rent-stabilized tenants.”

https://www.cnet.com/news/install-smart-home-tech-evict-renters-surveillance-company-tells-landlords/

Me… and the boys in my mentions.

“You are building an infrastructure that can be later co-opted in undesirable ways by large multinationals and state surveillance apparatus…”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/09/alexa-are-you-invading-my-privacy-the-dark-side-of-our-voice-assistants

As I’m approaching my mid-thirties, I thought it was about time I had my first ever professional hair cut… now I feel like a Hollywood person. (Nobody told me how luxurious it feels to have another person wash your hair!)

“That trans and gender nonconforming people are excluded from or subjugated to information systems is a phenomenon [Anna Lauren Hoffmann] labels data violence…”

https://slate.com/technology/2019/10/gender-binary-nonbinary-code-databases-values.html

One very large cup of coffee down, I made it to Accessibility Scotland. Now got the whole day to get nervous for my talk, as I’m closing! #a11yScotland

“There is no time to waste. Authoritarian surveillance programs are always used to target the most vulnerable and marginalized, and facial recognition enables the automation of oppression.”

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/evangreer/dont-regulate-facial-recognition-ban-it

Good morning Edinburgh. I’ve been awake for far too long, but I found some good coffee and I’m looking forward to Accessibility Scotland tomorrow!

“For black students, and students with disabilities, who already face a disproportionate amount of harsh disciplinary measures, the introduction of new kinds of surveillance may be especially harmful, privacy experts said.”

“Unlike gun control, Marlow said, ‘Surveillance is politically palatable, and so they’re pursuing surveillance as a way you can demonstrate action, even though there’s no evidence that it will positively impact the problem.’”

“Some people think that technology is magic, that artificial intelligence will save us,” Vance said. “A lot of the questions and a lot of the privacy concerns haven’t [been] thought of, let alone addressed.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/22/school-student-surveillance-bark-gaggle

“Ubiquitous computing is still a fantasy, but not because the technology isn’t ready. It is. The fantasy is that any system mediating someone’s personal experience of the physical world that uses a modern corporation’s digital infrastructure would be objective or neutral. Humans are data and data is money, and this is the business model of many of the technology firms up to the task of ubiquitous computing.”

https://kotaku.com/the-creators-of-pokemon-go-mapped-the-world-now-theyre-1838974714

Got a Raspberry Pi 3B+ or 4B and want to get a static or dynamic server up and running really really quickly?
@aral’s got Site.js working on those tiny creatures: https://ar.al/2019/10/18/site.js-and-pi/

Related: hours of my life spent trying to find the original url from an amp url is TOO MANY.

How to tell a true friend: they strip the tracking identifiers and amp junk from a url before sharing it with you.

“Activists and tech critics sometimes use the word complicit when talking about companies that look the other way when their inventions are causing harm. Assistive might be more accurate. Providing database and web services—even just email—to a cruel immigration regime assists in the cruelty.”

https://slate.com/technology/2019/10/apple-chinese-government-microsoft-amazon-ice.html