#DSA | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

Text

EU to Facebook: 'Drop Dead'

A leak from the European Data Protection Board reveals that the EU’s top privacy regulator is about to overrule the Irish Data Protection Commission and declare Facebook’s business model illegal, banning surveillance-based ads without explicit consent:

https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-win-personalized-ads-facebook-instagram-and-whatsapp-declared-illegal

In some ways, this is unsurprising. Since the GDPR’s beginning, it’s been crystal clear that the intention of the landmark privacy regulation was to extinguish commercial surveillance and ring down the curtain on “consent theater” — the fiction that you “agree” to be spied on by clicking “I agree” or just by landing on a web-page that has a link to some fine-print.

Under the GDPR, the default for data-collection is meaningful consent, meaning that a company that wants to spy on you and then sell or use the data it gathers has to ask you about each piece of data they plan to capture and each use they plan to make of it.

These uses have to be individually enumerated, and the user has to actively opt into giving up each piece of data and into each use of that data. That means that if you’re planning to steal 700 pieces of information from me and then use it in 700 ways, you need to ask me 1,400 questions and get a “Yes” to each of them.

What’s more, I have to be given a single tickbox at the start of this process that says, “No to all,” and then I have to be given access to all the features of the site or service.

The point of this exercise is to reveal consent theater for the sham it is. For all that apologists for commercial surveillance insist that “people like ads, so long as they’re well-targeted” and “the fact that people use high-surveillance services like Facebook shows a ‘revealed preference’ for being spied on,” we all know that no one likes surveillance.

There’s empirical proof of this! When Apple added one-click tracker opt-out on its Ios platform, 96% of users opted out, costing Facebook more than $10b in the first year (talk about a ‘revealed preference!’) (of course, Apple only opted those users out of tracking by its rivals, and secretly continued highly invasive, nonconsenual tracking of its customers):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Properly enforced, the GDPR would have upended the order of the digital world: any argument about surveillance between product managers at a digital firm would have been settled in favor of privacy, because the pro-privacy side could argue that no one would give consent, and the very act of asking would scare off lots of users.

But the GDPR wasn’t properly enforced, thanks to structural problems with European federalism itself. The first line of GDPR enforcement came from privacy regulators in whatever country a privacy-violator called home. That meant that when Big Tech companies violated the GDPR, they’d have to account for themselves to the privacy regulator in Ireland.

For multinational corporations, Ireland is what old-time con-artists used to call a “made town,” where the cop on the beat is in on the side of the criminals. Ireland’s decision to transform itself into a tax haven means that it can’t afford to upset the corporations that fly Irish flags of convenience and maintain the pretense that all their profits are floating in a state of untaxable grace in the Irish Sea.

That’s because there are plenty of other EU countries that compete with Ireland in the international race to the bottom on corporate governance: Malta, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Cyprus, etc (and of course, there’s post-Brexit UK, where the plan is to create an unregulated haven for the worst, wealthiest companies in the world).

All this means that seeking Irish justice from a corporation that wronged you is like asking a court in Moscow to punish an oligarch’s commercial empire on your behalf. Irish regulators are either “dingo babysitters” (guards in league with the guarded) or resource-starved into ineffectual torpor.

That’s how Facebook got away with violating the GDPR for so many years. The company hid behind the laughable fairy-tale that it didn’t need our consent to spy on us because it had a “legitimate purpose” for its surveillance, namely, that it was contractually obliged to spy on us thanks to the “agreement” we clicked on when we signed up for the service.

That is, you and Facebook had entered into a contract whereby Facebook promised you that it would spy on you, and if it didn’t spy on you, it would be violating that promise.

Har.

But while the GDPR has a structural weakness — allowing corporations to choose to be regulated in countries that can’t afford to piss them off — it also has a key strength: the private right of action, that is, the right of individuals to sue companies that violate the law, rather than having to convince a public prosecutor to take up their case.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy

The private right of action is vital to any privacy regulation, which is why companies fight it so hard. Whenever a privacy bill with a private right of action comes up, they tell scare-stories about “ambulance chasers” who’ll “clog up the system,” trotting out urban legends like the McDonald’s Hot Coffee story:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico

But here we are, in the last days of 2022, and the private right of action is about to do what the Irish regulators wouldn’t do: force Facebook to obey the law. For that, we can thank Max Schrems and the nonprofit he founded, noyb.

Schrems, you may recall, is the Austrian activist, who, as a Stanford law student, realized that EU law barred American tech companies from sending their surveillance data on Europeans to US data-centers, which the NSA and other spy agencies treated as an arm of their own surveillance projects:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/16/text-adventures-resurgent/#nein

Schrems brought a case against the Irish regulator to the EU’s top privacy authority, arguing that it had failed its duty by ruling that Facebook’s “contractual obligation” excuse held water. According to the leaked report, Schrems has succeeded, which means, once again, Facebook’s business model is illegal.

Facebook will doubtless appeal, but the writing is on the wall here: it’s the end of the line for surveillance advertising in Europe, an affluent territory with 500m+ residents. This decision will doubtless give a tailwind to other important privacy cases in the EU, like Johnny Ryan’s case against the ad-tech consortium IAB over its “audience taxonomy” codes:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/16/inside-the-clock-tower/#inference

It’s also likely good news for Schrems’ other ongoing cases, like the one he’s brought against Google:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/15/out-here-everything-hurts/#noyb

Facebook has repeatedly threatened to leave the EU if it is required to stop breaking the law:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/22/uncivvl/#fb-v-eu

This is a pretty implausible threat, growing less plausible by the day. The company keeps delivering bad news to investors, who are not mollified by Mark Zuckerberg’s promise to rescue the company by convincing all of humanity to spend the rest of their lives as highly surveilled, legless, sexless, low-polygon cartoon characters:

https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/12/06/why-meta-platforms-stock-dove-today/

Zuckerberg and his entire senior team have seen their net worth plummet with Meta’s share price, and that means the company needs to pay engineers with actual dollars, rather than promises of shares, which kills the massive wage-bill discount the company has enjoyed. This is not a company that can afford to walk away from Europe!

Between Apple’s mobile (third-party) tracker-blocking and the EU calling time on surveillance ads, things are looking grim for Facebook. You love to see it! But things could get even worse, and soon, thanks to the double-edged sword of “network effects.”

Facebook is a network effects business: people join the service to socialize with the people who are already there — then more people join to socialize with them. But what network effects give, they can also take away: a service that gets more valuable when a new user signs up loses value when that user leaves.

This is beautifully explained in danah boyd’s “What if failure is the plan?” which recounts boyd’s experiences watching MySpace unravel as key nodes in its social graph disappeared when users quit: “Failure of social media sites tends to be slow then fast”:

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/12/05/what-if-failure-is-the-plan.html

Facebook long understood this, which is why it spent years creating artificial “switching costs” — penalties it could impose on users who quit, such as the loss of their family photos:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

This is why Facebook and other tech giants are so scared of interoperability, and why they are so furious about the new EU Digital Markets Act (DMA), which will force them to allow new services to connect to their platforms, so that users who quit Big Tech won’t have to lose their friends or data:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/eu-digital-markets-acts-interoperability-rule-addresses-important-need-raises

An interoperable Facebook would make it easy to leave social media by removing the penalties Facebook imposes on its disloyal users, and the EU’s privacy framework means that when they flee to a smaller safe haven, they won’t have to worry about commercial surveillance:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

But what about advertising-supported media? Sure, being spied on sucks, but a subscription-first media landscape is a world where “the truth is paywalled, but the lies are free”:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalled-but-the-lies-are-free/

Ironically, killing surveillance ads is good news for ad-driven media. Surveillance-based ad-targeting is nowhere near as effective as Google, Facebook and the other ad-tech companies claim (these companies are compulsive liars, it would be amazing if the only time they told the truth is when they were boasting about their products!):

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

And consent-theater or no, targeted ads reach fewer users every day, thanks to ad- blockers, AKA, “the biggest boycott in world history”:

https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2015/09/28/beyond-ad-blocking-the-biggest-boycott-in-human-history/

And when a publisher does manage to display a targeted ad, they get screwed. The Googbook dupololy is a crooked affair, with the two tech companies illegally colluding (via the Jedi Blue conspiracy) to divert money from publishers to their own pockets:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/11/google-meta-jedi-blue-eu-uk-antitrust-probes/

Targeted ads are a cesspit of ad-fraud. 15% of all ad revenues are just unaccounted for:

https://twitter.com/swodinsky/status/1511172472762163202

The remaining funds aren’t any more trustworthy. Ad-tech is a bezzle (“the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it”):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/

As Tim Hwang foretold in his essential Subprime Attention Crisis, the pretense that targeted ads are wildly effective has been slowly but surely losing ground to the wider awareness of the fraud behind the system, and a reckoning is at hand:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

Experiments with contextual ads (ads based on the content of the page you’re looking at, not on your behavior and demographics) have found them to about as effective in generated clicks and sales as surveillance ads.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/29/taken-in-context/#creep-me-not

But this is misleading. Contextual ads don’t require consent opt-in (because they’re not based on your data) and they don’t drive users to install blockers the way creepy surveillance ads do, so lots more people will see a contextual ad than a surveillance one. Thus, even if contextual ads generate slightly less money per reader or viewer, they generate far more money overall, because they are aren’t blocked.

Even better for publishers: contextual ads don’t erode their own rate cards. Today, when you visit a high-quality publisher like the Washington Post, many ad brokers bid to show you an ad, but only one wins the auction. However, all the others have tagged you as a “Washington Post reader,” and they can sell that to bottom-feeder junk sites. That is, they can collude with Tabooleh or its rivals to offer advertisers a chance to advertise to Post readers at a fraction of what the Post charges. Lather, rinse, repeat, and the Post’s own ad revenues are drained.

This doesn’t apply with contextual ads. Indeed, none of the tech giants’ much-vaunted “data advantage” — the largely overstated value of knowing what you did online 10 or 20 years ago, the belief in which keeps new companies out of the market — applies to context ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/11/halflife/#minatory-legend

The transformative power of banning surveillance advertising goes beyond merely protecting our privacy. It also largely answers the case for “link taxes” (pseudo-copyright systems that let giant media companies decide who can link to them and charge for the privilege).

The underlying case for link taxes, snippet taxes, etc, is that Big Tech is stealing the news media’s content (by letting their users talk about and quote the news), when the reality is that Big Tech is stealing their money (through ad-fraud):

https://doctorow.medium.com/big-tech-isnt-stealing-news-publishers-content-a97306884a6b

Unrigging the ad-tech market is a much better policy than establishing a link-tax, like the Democrats are poised to do with their Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA):

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-influence/2022/12/06/jcpa-opponents-spring-into-action-to-block-ndaa-inclusion-00072602

It’s easy to understand why the monopoly/private-equity-dominated news industry wants JCPA, rather than a clean ad market. The JCPA just imposes a tax on the crooked ad-tech giants that is paid to the largest media companies, while a fair ad market would reward the media outlets that invested most in news (and thus in expensive, unionized news-gathering reporters).

Indeed, the JCPA only works if the ad-tech market remains corrupt: the excess Big Tech rents that Big News wants to claim here are the product of a rigged system. Unrig the system and there won’t be any money to pay the link tax with.

Image: Anthony Quintano (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Zuckerberg_F8_2018_Keynote_%2841118883004%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A theater proscenium. Over the proscenium, in script, are the words 'Consent Theatre.' On the screen is an image of Mark Zuckerberg standing in front of the words 'Data Privacy.' He is gesturing expansively. A targeting reticle is centered on his face. The reticle is made of the stars from the EU flag.]

317 notes · View notes

titleknown · 3 months

Text

I will say, wrt the electoralism-discourse, while I deeply understand the desire to punish the Dems for their active support of Israel's monstrous actions and make them fly right, witholding your vote's not really gonna do much.

Like, "witholding votes to push them left" has basically never worked, if anything they always go farther right after a loss due to the Skeksis running the party only holding to "It's the principle of the thing" whenever if fucks over their base, themselves, or basically anyone who's not a far-right fascist republican.

And while the current emerging idea of "playing chicken with the prez until they cave" is more solid than I usually see, it probably needs to get way more organized way more quickly, and even then it's risky as hell...

...But, that all being said, there is a way we can actually organize to hold their feet to the fire, perhaps even transcend them (Though I think it will take decades of work/changes to voting laws to get there).

The Democratic Socialists of America is one of the biggest leftist orgs in the US, getting bigger by the day, and if you want to create a force to counterveil the shitty center-Dems power by both electoral and non-electoral means, they're the ones to join.

Their dues are reasonable (They even have a tier for low-income folks), the local chapters across the US are doing a lot of good work you can get involved in now, if you're looking for a way to try and build an org to fix things, here you go.

So, on the voting question, my answer would be, either way, join the DSA.

#dsa #democratic socialists of america #politics #american politics #signal boost #us politics

22 notes · View notes

tagedeszorns · 3 months

Text

Something not Warhammer-related: Revro, the professional Imman-player.

In Germany, the role-playing game system DSA ("Das Schwarze Auge" - "The Black Eye"), now also forty years old, is more popular than D&D. It has much more complex rules (both blessing and curse) and is more geared towards building a character that fits into the incredibly detailed world and interacting with the creatures and circumstances there. The power level is lower and the characters rarely become overpowered heroes. On the other hand, there is the opportunity to explore all kinds of well-developed areas, cities and political contexts and you can easily be a travelling blacksmith, a cartographer or a wonderfully useless, incredibly nerdy mage. Or a trader, a mercenary who is actually a cook (or vice versa) or a tattoo-artist.

Of course, this also means that an average DSA adventure is not a dungeon crawl.

Which led to our game master "gifting" us an NPC who is a celebrated Imman player in Havena the not very mage-friendly town we are currently involuntarily staying in. Imman is a very popular team sport, distantly related to hurling. Revro, that's his name, plays for the Havena Bulls and has developed a crush on my clueless mage. Much to the continued amusement of the rest of our group.

Doesn't matter - my mage is happy. Finally, someone who is willing to listen to his elaborate explanations of old-puninian number magic!

And because I had so much fun with Revro, I sketched him and hope we can keep him.

#Roleplay #OC #DSA #Das Schwarze Auge #pen and paper #TTRPG #RPG

21 notes · View notes

oldschoolfrp · 4 months

Text

Sleigh ride (Ugurcan Yüce cover for Das Bornland, supplement SH2 for Das Schwarze Auge 2e, Schmidt Spiele, 1989)

#Das Schwarze Auge #DSA #Ugurcan Yüce #Ugurcan Yuce #fantasy art #fantasy #Das Bornland #wolves #sleigh #barbarian #adventuring party #horse #Schmidt Spiele #winter scene #snow

91 notes · View notes

wallisninety-six · 1 year

Text

People may claim that anti-capitalism and the push for a classless, non-divisive and non-exclusionary society and the like are unrealistic because they think we want to create a utopia that is free of all pain and suffering.

Such a painless utopia *is* impossible- But it’s also impossible to overstate how many things that are afflicting everyone in today’s society are completely created, fabricated, and controlled & dictated by humans in power (the 1% that controls it all) in a capitalist society

Debt, bills, exorbitant costs on literal-lifesaving health care (and prescriptions like insulin) credit scores, homelessness, joblessness, complete abuses of natural resources that we *need* to survive (abused for profit)- and even money itself are all just complete man-made concepts, controlled by a very minuscule yet overtly powerful rich and economic class. Are any of these “fair challenges” in life that are just here to stay forever and are ordained by nature itself? God no. It’s all something that can be ended and replaced with something better- even if the process and transition may be complicated & difficult, it’s worthwhile- no matter what capitalist propaganda the rich push out.

Pain and suffering will still exist even in a freer, post-capitalist, post-class, post-money world: Death will still loom over everyone, natural disasters and new diseases will test us in different ways, etc, challenges that are ACTUALLY ordained by nature. And *work* itself will still be needed to feed the population, build housing, and care for the sick- not in the capitalist way for profit with a boss spying you at all times, but for the betterment of community, no matter your background, race, gender, and the like.

But what’s important is that any challenges that are thrown our way are not the results of a power-hungry few that makes everyone else suffer because of their cancerous greed and have us all chained to a devil-economic system. We will still have the issues that face ALL life on earth, not just humans, but it is 100% possible to live a life of decency, amidst it all.

#late-stage capitalism #anti-capitalism #socialism #anarcho-communism #marxism #marxism-leninism #anarchism #communism #2022 midterms #bernie sanders #AOC #alexandria ocasio-cortez #democratic socialism #DSA #democratic socialists of america

297 notes · View notes

hero-israel · 6 months

Note

I really don't know how to get leftists to care about the truth again. Facts matter. I feel like so many leftists are willing to use very specific, serious words like a toy and lob them at their enemies (or perceived enemies) without a single further thought of how this might impact the situation.

Genocide is a very serious accusation. Genocide denial is a very serious accusation. Apartheid is a very serious accusation. Apartheid denial is very serious accusation. Bombing civilian targets like hospitals is a very serious accusation. Excusing or denying that that happened is a very serious accusation. Etc.

And so many people are so afraid of being unfairly tarred as being deniers of human rights abuses that they won't ask the necessary questions to get the information and facts needed to decide whether those allegations are true or not. And it doesn't impact them directly, so they have zero motivation to actually ask the questions that one must to substantiate such claims.

I'm just so exhausted and infuriated by having to constantly defend myself against people who refuse to engage past the slogan and Instagram graphics point.

What happened to caring about fake news? Is that only relevant when Republicans do it? Is there no guardrail of truth on the left?

There is not.

It looks like we are seeing a full-on magnetic polar realignment in American political / activist culture. The Voting Rights Act famously made all the Deep South racist conservatives switch from Democrat to Republican. 10/7 made the anti-fascist Nazi-punchers into, well...

The one-day glimpse into what it would look like to truly destroy Israel and kill all the Jews - looking so tantalizing, so achievable, so appealing in particular to men with poor financial and family prospects and who see women as rewards - that was their activation code, it tripped their sequence and once they have witnessed the dream there is no going back to life before they saw it. They will always cherish it and always want more. Along with the QAnon, Jan.6th crowd, they are another front in the social destruction of American sanity and functionality.

SEVERELY tragic irony: the general uselessness and lack of concrete accomplishments of American Leftists is now going to be something of a protector for American Jews, who overwhelmingly support most of those Leftists' other goals (besides Jewish genocide, that is). The activist Left couldn't protect Roe vs Wade, which was enormously popular; couldn't enact gun control, also a bipartisan issue; has won utterly fuck-all when it comes to the environment, an issue that is literally life-or-death to literally everybody. If they can't take power on those issues, they won't take it for establishing a National Quds Day Rally.

But they might not need political influence if they are just so much more confident in rampaging in the streets and burning synagogues down.

I also think a lot of their participants will come to regret their normalization, their eager endorsement, of punitive rape. The distance between "never" and "once" is much, much bigger than the distance between "once" and "more".

#leftist antisemitism #dsa #blm #rape culture

46 notes · View notes

libero-de-mente · 3 months

Text

La Cassiera

Nel supermercato vicino a casa mia, da qualche giorno, è arrivata una nuova ragazza. Credo appena assunta vista la giovane età.

Vedendola è la versione femminile di mio figlio n. 1, stesso colore di capelli (solo che i suoi sono mossi), occhiali da vista su occhi chiari e carnagione bianca. Classica di chi è rossiccio di capelli.

Questa mattina mi sono fermato per un acquisto al volo e quando sono giunto alla cassa eravamo solo io e lei. Nessun altro in fila.

Noto che mi fissa. Cerco di interpretare quello sguardo e riesco a sistemarlo in una scala di valori delle emozioni che va da serenità ad angoscia. La posizione su questa scala è: ansia.

Tra me e me penso: "Ma si, non è abituata. È nuova suvvia. Avrà paura di sbagliare nel battere lo scontrino, poverina, magari si è già dimenticata l'uso corretto del POS o il comando per aprire la cassa".

Passati i miei acquisti sopra il lettore dei codici a barre mi dice il totale.

- Pago con il Bancomat, grazie - le dico.

Sospira con sollievo - Meno male - le esce in maniera impercettibile dalle labbra.

La guardo fissa.

Mi guarda fisso.

- Discalculica? - le mormoro così senza averci pensato e di pancia.

- Sì - risponde con un sorriso grande come una casa.

- Lo sono anche io, benedette le carte per pagare.

- Non me lo dica - risponde quasi come se fosse un sottile miagolio.

Mi si apre il cuore, e darle del tu mi viene spontaneo, potrebbe benissimo essere coetanea di mio figlio.

- Ma t'immagini - le dico a bassa voce - cosa sarebbe successo se tu mi avessi detto quattordici euro e trentacinque centesimi? E io non avessi un bancomat?

- Uh, cosa?

- Panico. Avrei tirato fuori la banconota più alta per non calcolare le monete.

- Mi avrebbe dato venti euro allora?

- Ma anche cinquanta!

- Cinquanta?! Addirittura?

- Si per sicurezza.

- Urca.

- Poi tu avresti cominciato con "Non ha trentacinque centesimi che le do trentasei euro?". Sarei diventato rosso. A quel punto vedendomi così mi avresti detto "Se vuole mi dia un euro e trentacinque centesimi, così io le do trentacinque euro". Sarei diventato viola. Capisci il dramma che abbiamo vissuto prima dell'avvento dei pagamenti digitali?

- ...

- Tutto bene?

- Ehm, si... si. Credo.

- Credi?

- Si, credo di essermi persa.

- Dove?

- Ai trentacinque centesimi per darle trentasei euro.

- Ah, dici che ho sbagliato?

- Aspetti un attimo - mi risponde mentre maneggia con una calcolatrice - no, tutto giusto.

Prendo il sacchetto con la spesa, i raggi del sole che entrano dalla grande vetrata dietro di lei le creano un'aurea surreale di riflesso su capelli. Stessi riflessi e colori di mio figlio, quello che chiamo "Generoso Cuore Solitario". Mi sciolgo. Sono così adorabili coloro che hanno delle DSA e un cuore generoso. Credo che lo abbia anche lei. Un cuore senza centesimi e a prezzo arrotondato.

- Buona giornata - mi dice.

- A te e ricorda... hasta la discalculia siempre.

Ride, si porta la mano sulla bocca come per una cortesia mentre le parte una risata che strozza sul nascere.

Da oggi ho la mia cassiera preferita.

#libero de mente #pensiero #racconto #dialoghi #supermercato #cassa #ragazza #ironia #dsa #discalculia

18 notes · View notes