Laura Kalbag @laura@mastodon.laurakalbag.com

And mid-flop

Don’t want to move. Just finished cutting the grass and he’s come to snuggle up next to me…

Why are the Quantcast consent dialogs now redirecting you to the site’s privacy policy when you hit “Do not accept”…? I don’t know what the legal term is, but imho it’s properly dodgy.

Honestly my Twitter feed isn’t much better.

Yikes, my RSS feed is a tedious regurgitation of Google press releases this morning.

Even dorkier IRL

Nice little sunrise drive to the airport, heading off to Stockholm for the first time, and with a new talk too.

https://frombusinesstobuttons.com/

Good read on the UK’s age verification porn block: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/18/age-verification-block-porn-ethical-sites-sex

Insightful and horrifying:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/17/18308466/invisible-women-pain-gender-data-gap-caroline-criado-perez

https://abookapart.com/products/everyday-information-architecture

Everyday Information Architecture by the brilliant Lisa Maria Martin is out today (you might have to hold tight til the US is on working hours) and I wrote about how much I loved reading this book and why you should buy it.

https://laurakalbag.com/everyday-information-architecture/

Using the hand grinder to grind coffee this morning…

One of which is a tracker that “empowers healthcare marketers to stand out and influence their most valuable audiences by combining state-of-the-art digital identity and data with the scale of programmatic advertising.” That’s what you expect on a site about Apple stuff… right?

Blimey, imore.com has a cool (not cool) 100 trackers on its homepage.

Got our EORI number, so by the UK government’s standards, I’m as prepared for no deal as I need to be… 😑

@better I regularly post links about the impact of tracking on @indie (or at https://ind.ie/radar) if you want more background.

I’m so angry and want to write more about this, but I also want to get a @better update out today (going to try to smash those trackers before they get to you.) In short: TRACKING IS BAD and invasive. Consent dialogs are not good enough for consent, let alone opt-out options. Discrimination based on tracking impacts marginalised and vulnerable people first and most. Yet 99% of the web is complicit in it. Go check yourselves.

Given that Apple have just removed Do Not Track from Safari because it was being used for tracking via “fingerprinting”, the decision to add trackability for assistive tech is *baffling.*

Léonie Watson wrote very clearly on this specific issue years ago: https://tink.uk/thoughts-on-screen-reader-detection/

Looking forward to Think About! conference. It’s designed to be properly inclusive, has some great-sounding talks in the lineup, and me and @aral are doing our first ever keynote *together.* Only a couple of weeks left on “regular bird” tickets: https://think-about.io/en/speakies/laura_kalbag_and_aral_balkan.html