My last update on the Cyber Cleanse I have been conducting was at the end of March. What have I been up to since then? It’s a bit like a tedious soap opera, with a few surprises as I go along. Once I cleaned out my primary Gmail accounts, I needed to sift through all my other online accounts, those for which I was using these email accounts as the user name. Let me say…
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…
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.…