In January, I started Janet Vertesi’s Opt Out Project Cyber Cleanse. (Refer to my blog post for links to the Cyber Cleanse.) The Cyber Cleanse is meant to help you reclaim some of your online privacy. If you’re active at all online, you give up your privacy, simply by being there. Even if you attempt to do everything anonymously with tools to hide your location, computer forensics specialists can track you down eventually. The only…
Friday, January 31, 2025. That’s the day I read a Reuters article that said Elon Musk had locked Office of Personnel Management (OPM) staff out of computer systems containing the data of federal employees. I heard the same day he was seeking access to Treasury Department payments systems (the U.S. government’s bank account) and he got it that weekend. That night, while trying to fall asleep, I had the sinking feeling that this narcissistic, unelected…
It took me seven years to leave Facebook. I wanted to leave in 2018 but, as administrator of a work account, I had to remain. While greatly reducing my activity on the site in that time, I saw the steady decline of the platform (what Cory Doctorow calls ‘enshittification’). My timeline was filled with advertising, some of it creepy because it was for things I had searched for elsewhere online, most of it completely irrelevant.…
Can I just say … Mastodon is great! I follow several people there who are part of the free and open source (FOSS) tech movement and are working to free themselves from online surveillance. It was there that I learned of the Opt Out Project by Janet Vertesi, a sociology professor at Princeton University who works at the intersection of society and technology. She opted out of Google in 2012 (an eternity ago in tech)…
Note: A couple of the links in this post are appearing as though words are crossed out. Go ahead and click on them to get to the link. Not sure why this is happening and apologize for this hopefully short-lived wonkiness. —– About a month ago, OpenAI released a new model of generative AI, GPT-4o, with ‘o’ standing for ‘omni,’ meaning the AI could work in a multi-modal way. That may sound like a bunch…