remixtures

"Meta does not appear to clearly and conspicuously describe the data it collects about individuals. It does not have simple, descriptive URLs for these pages—in fact, any single privacy-related document on a Meta website could link to dozens or over 100 other pages and pop-ups that Meta purports provide additional information. Both of these points raise the question of whether Meta is deviating from practices the FTC has indicated are legally required.

Further, the FTC Act prevents deceptive practices in general—defined by FTC policy as “involving a material representation, omission, or practice that is likely to mislead a consumer acting reasonably in the circumstances.” If any number of pages on the Meta website that claim to provide consumers with information about privacy do not, in fact, provide and present said information in a reasonable manner (or, really, at all), it likewise raises the question of whether Meta might be violating the FTC Act by deceptively designing the layout of its privacy policy information.

Lawmakers working on privacy bills should not forget that substance and layout are important for privacy policies, to avoid these kinds of bad practices that bury information from consumers and regulators, further limit consumers’ ability to consent, and threaten individuals’ ability to exercise their privacy rights."

https://www.techpolicy.press/metas-privacy-policies-designed-badly-by-design/

#Meta #Facebook #SocialMedia #Instagram #DataProtection #TechRegulation #Privacy

"A new lawsuit filed by a current Apple employee accuses the company of spying on its workers via their personal iCloud accounts and non-work devices.

The suit, filed Sunday evening in California state court, alleges Apple employees are required to give up the right to personal privacy, and that the company says it can “engage in physical, video and electronic surveillance of them” even when they are at home and after they stop working for Apple.

Those requirements are part of a long list of Apple employment policies that the suit contends violate California law.

The plaintiff in the case, Amar Bhakta, has worked in advertising technology for Apple since 2020. According to the suit, Apple used its privacy policies to harm his employment prospects. For instance, it forbade Bhakta from participating in public speaking about digital advertising and forced him to remove information from his LinkedIn page about his job at Apple.

“For Apple employees, the Apple ecosystem is not a walled garden. It is a prison yard. A panopticon where employees, both on and off duty, are subject to Apple’s all-seeing eye,” the lawsuit says."

https://www.semafor.com/article/12/02/2024/employee-lawsuit-accuses-apple-of-spying-on-its-workers

#Apple #iCloud #WorkerSurveillance #Privacy #DataProtection

"So, what should we make of all this? I’m always worried to see the rise of far-right candidates, but by now we have plenty of examples of establishment parties pointing to social media manipulation (often with some link to Russian interference) as the reason for their declining support instead of probing how the public has (often rightfully) become disillusioned with the politics they’re offering. I don’t know enough about Romania to know where this case falls, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s somewhere in the middle.

It doesn’t appear that TikTok intentionally manipulated its algorithms to promote Georgescu, but rather that actors took advantage of the way its platform is designed to get the results they were expecting — not unlike how Russian actors didn’t actually “hack” the 2016 US election. For now it’s worth watching to see where the Romanian case goes."

https://disconnect.blog/roundup-whats-going-on-in-romania/

#SocialMedia #Romania #TikTok #Algorithms #FarRight #CyberSecurity #Politics #Elections #Russia

"Today, Bauer’s work is immediately relevant to our thinking on multiculturalism, of which it can be seen as a precursor. To be clear, Bauer’s central argument is to reject any essentialist principle in the conceptualization of the national question. For Bauer, we cannot think of modern nations in terms of “metaphysical theories” (such as notions of national spiritualism) or “voluntaristic theories” (as in Ernest Renan’s theory of the nation as a “daily plebiscite”). National identities are not “naturally given” and invariable but are rather culturally changeable.

However, Bauer’s approach to the nation-state is very different from the dominant liberal one today. In the liberal nation-state, it is the cultural practice of the dominant national group that prevails. Multiculturalism is thus always limited by this hegemony and multicultural states cannot easily be constructed. Any commitment to cultural pluralism can amount to little more than a token commitment to diversity within overwhelmingly assimilationist structures.

Bauer criticized the attitude of the early 1900s “German Austrian” workers’ movement as a “naïve cosmopolitanism” which rejected national struggles as diversionary and advocated a humanistic world citizenship as its alternative. There were clear echoes of this attitude in the promotion of “global cosmopolitanism” during the early 2000s. In that sense, we very much need a Bauer 2.0 to move beyond such naïve and complacent indifference to the national question today.

Bauer fundamentally disagreed with the idea that the national movements were simply an obstacle for the class struggle and that internationalism was the only way forward. He was convinced that it was only the working class that could create the conditions for the development of a nation, proclaiming that “the international struggle is the means that we must use to realize our national ideal.”"

https://jacobin.com/2023/11/otto-bauer-austro-marxism-nationalism-theory-history

#Nationalism #History #Marxism #Multiculturalism #Socialism

"Has Israel ever had a real opportunity to break out of this cycle of blood?

"I think this has been increasingly the direction [taken by Israel] for most of this century. The last Israeli attempt, the last sign of a willingness by an Israeli government to do something other than to use force, was under [former Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert.

And I'm not suggesting that was an off-ramp [from the conflict].
But with that exception, it's been an 'iron wall' since Jabotinsky [Revisionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who coined the term in 1923]. Force and more force. Because you're trying to impose a reality on the region, trying to force people to accept something that has sent shock waves throughout the Middle East since the 1920s and 1930s. I mean, you read the press in Syria and Egypt and Iraq in 1910, and people are worried about Zionism."

At the beginning of "The Hundred Years' War," you quote from a letter sent by a member of your family, an accomplished Jerusalem scholar, to Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, in 1899. Zionism was natural and just, he wrote – "who could contest the right of Jews in Palestine?" But it's inhabited by others, he added, who will never accept being superseded. Therefore, "In the name of God, let Palestine be left alone."

"He saw it as clearly as I see you today. This reality has been causing shock waves from the beginning. You had volunteers coming to fight in Palestine in the 1930s from Syria, Lebanon and Egypt; and again in 1948. I see it as a continuum, but I don't think it's possible to see it otherwise, frankly. You have to pretend that history started on October 7 or on June 7, 1967, or on May 15, 1948. But that's not the way history works.""

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-11-30/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/rashid-khalidi-israel-has-created-a-nightmare-scenario-for-itself-the-clock-is-ticking/00000193-7b6a-d1df-a79f-7beab0db0000

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Zionism #Genocide #History #MiddleEast

"Disputing Disaster is a book unlike any other on the 1914 debate. Anderson digs deep into, between and around the works of his subjects to expose the taproots that feed each project. The result is a monument to a lifetime of reading and writing propelled by the conviction that something is at stake. Fellow Marxists will admire the author’s forensic panache and enjoy the beams of utopian effulgence that dart through the occasional chinks in his text. But even readers who are not ‘unreconstructed Jacobins’ (Anderson’s self-description) will find in it a wealth of sharp and compelling reflections on how and why historians argue as they do, why they rethink, abandon or double down on their positions, and how politics and emotion flow into the writing of history and back out of it into the world."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n23/christopher-clark/the-murmur-of-engines

#History #Europe #WorldWarI #WWI

"Recent reports from Tor users in Russia indicate an escalation in online censorship with the goal of blocking access to Tor and other circumvention tools. This new wave includes attempts to block Tor bridges and pluggable transports developed by the Tor Project, removal of circumvention apps from stores, and targeting popular hosting providers, shrinking the space for bypassing censorship. Despite these ongoing actions, Tor remains effective.

One alarming trend is the targeted blocking of popular hosting providers by Roscomnadzor. As many circumvention tools are using them, this action made some Tor bridges inaccessible to many users in Russia. As Roscomnadzor and internet service providers in Russia are increasing their blocking efforts, the need for more WebTunnel bridges has become urgent."

https://blog.torproject.org/call-for-webtunnel-bridges/

#Tor #Privacy #Anonymity #Russia #Censorship

"Last week, a tweet by Stanford researcher Yegor Denisov-Blanch went viral within Silicon Valley. “We have data on the performance of >50k engineers from 100s of companies,” he tweeted. “~9.5% of software engineers do virtually nothing: Ghost Engineers.”

Denisov-Blanch said that tech companies have given his research team access to their internal code repositories (their internal, private Githubs, for example) and, for the last two years, he and his team have been running an algorithm against individual employees’ code. He said that this automated code review shows that nearly 10 percent of employees at the companies analyzed do essentially nothing, and are handsomely compensated for it. There are not many details about how his team’s review algorithm works in a paper about it, but it says that it attempts to answer the same questions a human reviewer might have about any specific segment of code, such as:

“How difficult is the problem that this commit solves?
How many hours would it take you to just write the code in this commit assuming you could fully focus on this task?
How well structured is this source code relative to the previous commits? Quartile within this list
How maintainable is this commit?”

Ghost Engineers, as determined by his algorithm, perform at less than 10 percent of the median software engineer (as in, they are measured as being 10 times worse/less productive than the median worker)."

https://www.404media.co/are-overemployed-ghost-engineers-making-six-figures-to-do-nothing/

#SoftwareDevelopment #GhostEngineers #Surveillance #Overemployment #Programming

"Workers should have the right to know which of their data is being collected, who it's being shared by, and how it's being used. We all should have that right. That's what the actors' strike was partly motivated by: actors who were being ordered to wear mocap suits to produce data that could be used to produce a digital double of them, "training their replacement," but the replacement was a deepfake.

With a Trump administration on the horizon, the future of the FTC is in doubt. But the coalition for a new privacy law includes many of Trumpland's most powerful blocs – like Jan 6 rioters whose location was swept up by Google and handed over to the FBI. A strong privacy law would protect their Fourth Amendment rights – but also the rights of BLM protesters who experienced this far more often, and with far worse consequences, than the insurrectionists.

The "we do it with an app, so it's not illegal" ruse is wearing thinner by the day. When you have a boss for an app, your real boss gets an accountability sink, a convenient scapegoat that can be blamed for your misery.

The fact that this makes you worse at your job, that it loses your boss money, is no guarantee that you will be spared. Rich people make great marks, and they can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Markets won't solve this one – but worker power can."

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/26/hawtch-hawtch/#you-treasure-what-you-measure

#Work #WageSlavery #WorkerSurveillance #Bossware #Privacy #AI #DataProtection #FTC #USA

This may be true for tech writers who work for large companies, but not necessarily for the vast majority of cases...

"In technical writing roles, you have a surprising ability to focus your efforts on documentation projects you believe in. I have about 60+ documentation bugs sitting in my queue. Which ones do I work on? Which do I prioritize? If a product has an upcoming release, sure, I make sure we have docs for those features. Or if partners are complaining loudly about an issue, I also prioritize those fixes. But beyond those P0 type bugs, there’s a lot of leeway to ignore some products and prioritize others. Making that judgment call could be more significant than the quality of documentation you write. In other words, instead of focusing so much on documentation quality, focus on documentation priority. Are you working on products that matter to the company? That decision might matter more in your promotion efforts than the quality of documentation you write."

https://idratherbewriting.com/blog/reading-lynch-focus-on-high-priority-projects

#TechnicalWriting #SoftwareDocumentation #SoftwareDevelopment #Docs #Programming

"I’ve developed the impression that, as humanists in tech, technical writers are constantly subjected to the pull of two separate forces. One is eminently technological, embodied by the Developer-Maker; the other is communicational, represented by the Writer-Storyteller. I see you muttering “Woz & Jobs” in glee while reading about those profiles, and you wouldn’t be too far off, despite how trite those stereotypes have become over time. For the sake of the discussion, let’s assume that they’ve always been there.

If you represented both forces in a diagram, you’d get something like the following: the Developer strain diverging from the initial trunk towards more engineering-colored shades of writing, and the second strain, the Writer’s, moving towards meaning and connection and away from explaining buttons and menus. As UIs become more self-explanatory, and coding more accessible, writers pursue deeper specialization, and so the tech writer becomes an API writer and then a Docs Engineer, for example.

I think it’s still entirely possible to remain at the center as a full-stack writer, but it’s becoming harder due to the way job titles convey expectations and foster teamwork. It’s easier for tech writers to embed with engineers if they carry the engineer sobriquet, as it’s simpler to work with designers if you attach the UX patch to your business card. It’s all meant to say “I understand and respect your work, let’s collaborate”. And since technical writing is a landing pad, switching between those sides isn’t impossible."

https://passo.uno/what-is-a-documentation-engineer/

#TechnicalWriting #SoftwareDocumentation #DocumentationEngineering #Docs #SoftwareDevelopment #Programming

"The civil rights organization European Digital Rights (EDRi) is making serious accusations against the EU Commission regarding the agreement on data sharing with the USA. Eleven years after the Snowden revelations and the associated outcry, mass surveillance is simply continuing based on the EU-US data protection framework, the umbrella organization complains. The EU now appears to have adopted an attitude of "business as usual", which suggests at least a certain tolerance of the ongoing mass collection of information on internet users by certain countries, such as the USA."

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Rights-activists-EU-US-data-exchange-undermines-fundamental-rights-10081843.html

#EU #USA #DataSharing #DataProtection #Surveillance #Privacy #FundamentalRights