Google is an advertising platform. Everything it does, all of its products, are geared towards selling advertising. Most of its products are free, many of them are useful, and a few are even great. But they all exist to suck up more data so that it can become even better at selling advertising. […] It’s called surveillance capitalism and it’s certainly not about giving you a great user experience, it’s about making money.
FYI: This post is a rewritten and expanded version of this post that I published on Dreamwidth two years ago.
I’ve long been a pretty avid user of Twitter. I first made an account towards the end of 2007, but it was 2010–2011 that was really “peak Twitter” for me. That was when I had lots of friends on the platform, and we could use Twitter basically like a big group chat. I …
Whether it happens on purpose or by accident, user domestication almost always follows the same three steps:
- A high level of dependence given from users to a software vendor
- An inability for users to control their software, through at least one of the following methods:
- Preventing modification of the software
- Preventing migration onto a different platform
- The exploitation of now-captive users who are unable to resist
The completion of the first two steps left WhatsApp users vulnerable to user domestication. With investors to answer to, they had every incentive to implement user-hostile features without consequence.
So, of course, they did.
For anyone out there who was following the saga: the Australian government has indeed backed down in its stoush with Facebook. Media outlets here are trying to depict it as a big win against Facebook, but the truth is pretty clear with even a cursory glance at the details 😜
“Life Happens” is an acknowledgement that there are numerous things that people experience in their actual physical lives that suddenly take higher priority than nearly anything else (like participation in volunteer-based communities), and those communities (like the IndieWeb) should acknowledge, accept, and be supportive of community members experiencing such events.
Since I moved my blog over to Hugo, I’ve been wanting to do a little series of posts about various aspects of my set-up, just in case they help anyone else thinking of doing the same. This first post is about how I’ve enabled Webmentions, an important building block of the IndieWeb. As you might notice, my blog posts don’t have conventional comment forms underneath them. Instead, …
Under new draft laws, the eSafety Commissioner could order your nude selfies, sex education or slash fiction to be taken down from the internet with just 24 hours notice.
The Australian Government seems to be on quite a roll with insanely bad internet policies, hey.
So, the House of Representatives has passed a bill requiring Google and Facebook to pay money to certain media outlets for content they link to within Australia. Initially Google threatened to block Australians from using their search engine if the legislation passed, but they came around and started negotiating compromise deals with commercial media outlets instead. Facebook, on the other hand, …
Wow, they’ve gone and done it. While Google has tried to reach a compromise with commercial news outlets, Facebook has blocked Australians from sharing news on their platform, and suspended not only news accounts but even emergency warnings accounts. This is one of those disputes where I hate everyone involved 🤯
Even though a compromise seems to be emerging, Australian media is still abuzz with the possibility (or threat) that Google will block our country from using their search engine. Now, if you’re a small business currently relying on Google to refer customers to you, I could see that being a real but short-term problem (until you figure out how to optimise your ranking in whatever search …
Jessica Smith is a left-wing feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also very interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.