Commonplace
This commonplace is an archive of articles, notes and quotes from books and the web.
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18 October 2021
‘But some parents said they were unsure whether their children had been given enough information to make their decision, and suggested that peer pressure had also played a role.’
Surely, this is a decision that parents should be making? It seems incredible that this incredibly invasive tech would be entering the school for such a trivial ‘gain’.
It will be interesting to see the fallout from the first data breach.
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16 October 2021
‘A lot of companies could be still pretty profitable if they chose to go this route,’ Weinberg says. ‘They may be a little less profitable. But you know, it’s like—is that extra profit worth all this societal impact and problems? We don’t think so.
’Even some ad buyers are questioning whether endless tracking works; a survey by Digiday found that 45 percent of ad execs saw “no significant benefit” from behavioral tracking, and 23 percent found it made revenues decline.
Societal benefits vs pure profit.
A trade-off many companies don’t seem to be willing to make.
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14 October 2021
In 2014, Google released a report suggesting that 56.1 percent of all ads displayed on the internet are never seen by a human.
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14 October 2021
...the accuracy [of data profiles used for advertising] was often extremely poor. The most accurate sets still featured inaccuracies about 10% of consumers, with the worst having nearly 85% of the data about consumers wrong.
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11 October 2021
This interesting study suggests UK consumers would collectively pay over £1bn a year for control of their data. That’s a little over £1 per person per month.
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9 October 2021
Because they use emails to recognize people who have asked not to have their data shared, some ad technologies require an email address to actually enable people’s privacy preferences.
Just in case there was any doubt about how broken privacy is on the web, huh…
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24 August 2021
Ultimately, saying you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.
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24 August 2021
Still, if we don’t act to reclaim our data now, our children might not be able to do so. Then they, and their children, will be trapped too—each successive generation forced to live under the data specter of the previous one, subject to a mass aggregation of information whose potential for societal control and human manipulation exceeds not just the restraints of the law but the limits of the imagination.
Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanisms by which predictability is calculated, you come to understand that its science is, in fact, anti-scientific, and fatally misnamed: predictability is actually manipulation. A website that tells you that because you liked this book you might also like books by James Clapper or Michael Hayden isn’t offering an educated guess as much as a mechanism of subtle coercion.
We can’t allow ourselves to be used in this way, to be used against the future. We can’t permit our data to be used to sell us the very things that must not be sold, such as journalism. If we do, the journalism we get will be merely the journalism we want, or the journalism that the powerful want us to have, not the honest collective conversation that’s necessary.
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23 March 2021
If you have the luxury to organise your schedule, realise you don't have to suffer overload.
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16 December 2019
Desktop browsers tend to render fonts at 16px by default. There is a rationale for reasonably large defaults: anything else risks alienating a huge swath of users, many from older populations whose eyesight has deteriorated. “But my audience is young and hip!” I hear you say. Sure, but generous font sizes don’t offend young, keen-eyed folks. The key to inclusive design isn’t to target specific groups, it’s to not exclude groups arbitrarily — there’s nothing to gain.
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16 December 2019
The key to inclusive design isn’t to target specific groups, it’s to not exclude groups arbitrarily — there’s nothing to gain.
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25 May 2014
There is no equation which shows that an increase in creativity is a direct cause of the time spent.
6 / 6 pages
The end!