#20 Data Privacy Day 2024
A good day to celebrate the freedoms we have, fight for the rights we lack, and establish the policies we will need in the future.
in principio
January 28th was Data Privacy Day, so… mark your calendar for next year.
For me, this annual memento is a good day to reflect on why I write this newsletter and what I want it to be about. Ads are part of a much larger framework in our society that has poisoned our public marketplaces and poisoned our lives. It’s convenient to refer to this as Surveillance Capitalism (credit to Shoshana Zuboff for coining the term).
I’ve been privately concerned about this general subject for years and now I feel for the first time in my life like there is a sweeping awareness across society about the issue. Awareness of the problem is having a moment. I am writing this newsletter for anyone else who thinks this whole… ball of wax… matters and deserves our attention. I read about this topic of interest daily, and wanted an outlet to share what I think are important stories. Ultimately, I’d like to create more privacy nerds. I think the world needs more of them right now.
I don’t know if this newsletter will continue being intermittent, or if I’ll find a cadence at some point. I do know that this could very easily be a daily newsletter and there would be no shortage of things to talk about. We really are in a very serious data and privacy crisis. There is so much good original reporting being done, and this is just an attempt to curate some of it for interested citizens. If you’re reading this and have thoughts or opinions about what sort of content you’d like to read - let me know.
et cetera
The Good:
AI is helping to ID victims in Holocaust photos [Freethink]
The Bad
Amazon fined $35M in France for 'overly intrusive’ employee monitoring [PC Mag]
FBI Director admits agency rarely has Probable Cause when it performs backdoor searches of NSA collections [TechDirt]
The Ugly
Online atrocity database exposed thousands of vulnerable people in Congo [The Intercept]
Food delivery robots are feeding camera footage to the LAPD [404 Media]
Various and Sundry
CEO Reminds Everyone His Company Collects Customers' Sleep Data to Make Zeitgeisty Point About OpenAI Drama [404 Media]
The problem of creeping commercial surveillance [Elnion]
AI system helped cops identify a drug trafficker by analyzing his driving patterns [Gizmodo]
Finis.