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#the billion dollar spy
kanamesengoku · 1 year
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If we purposefully leave enough room and shift our timing, we can make them miss.
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nexysworld · 9 months
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Mission: Safeword
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Read on AO3 🖤 Make a Request 🖤 Masterlist
Summary: Leon has many methods of getting information while on missions, especially from pretty girls like yourself.
Pairing: Infinite Darkness!Leon x Fem!Reader
Tags: NSFW, MDNI, Dubcon (but reader's into it), Face sitting, fingering, slight knife play, light bdsm, overstimulation, no use of y/n, not proofread
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Your fingers quickly scattered across the keyboard, desperately trying to transfer the data and lock the system down. Silent alarms had been blaring and security had given the signal that an intruder – likely a government spy – had invaded  the compound. 
Whoever it was they had been lying low, no obvious break-ins, no knocked out staff, like a mouse. “Come on, come on.” You groaned, bringing your fist down onto the desk in frustration. “Faster you stupid thing. Billion dollar research company and you can’t even afford computers built after 1998?”  Pinching your temples you leaned back in your chair with a sigh, the transfer had been initiated, there was nothing else you could do now but hope that it went through. 
You tapped your fingers on your chair as  you watched the timer continue to recalculate the transfer time. Suddenly the screen went dark, along with the overhead lighting, leaving only a few of the lamps scattered around the office. “What the fuck? No, no this can’t be happening.” You banged the side of the computer, willing it to work again. The backup generators should’ve prevented the lights and systems from going out – this wasn’t making any sense. “Sorry Sweetheart, but I don’t think hitting it is going to fix the issue… on account of me pulling all these plugs here.” The voice pulled you out of your confused rage as you whipped around to see a man leaning back against the wall casually, he lifted the bundle of wires in his left hand to make a point.. ‘When did he get in here, I didn’t even hear the door open?’ You thought to yourself, backing up a little instinctively. 
He wasn’t wearing a standard uniform, instead clad in a black leather jacket, blue jeans, and boots. His well groomed gray-blonde hair framed his face in a way that let you get a good read on his chiseled features – he looked more like a model than a government agent – but you didn’t have time to think on that further. “You’re the spy!” You accused, trying to buy time to decide your next steps. 
“Spy? That’s pretty harsh – I’m just doing my job y’know.” He dropped the plugs and used his right hand to click the lock on the door before making his way towards you. “I didn’t expect that my target would be such a pretty girl.The name’s Leon by the way, nice to meet you.” “St-stay back!” You backed up further, trying to disguise the embarrassed flush as anger. You grabbed the closest lamp to you and lifted it as if it were a bat. ‘Wait – did he just say I was his target?’
He chuckled at your response. “C’mon, you don’t look like a fighter. Just relax and we can get this over with quickly, ok? It’s not my style to hurt pretty women if I don’t have to.”
“I said, s-tay back!” You tried to reaffirm again. When he ignored you, you swung hard, he easily caught you by the wrist and spun you so your back was to his chest. With one arm tucked behind yourself, he squeezed the remaining wrist so tight your hand was forced open sending the lamp shattering at the floor. 
“Knew you weren’t a fighter.” He purred in your ear, you could feel the stubble on his jaw rub against your neck, making you shudder. “Now that that’s out of your system, I don’t suppose we could hurry along to the part where you give me the info I need?” 
“Absolutely not!” You replied, squirming as much as you could against his grasp. He didn’t budge, grip like a vice. A disappointed sigh and hot breath on your neck stalled your movements for a moment as a shudder ran down your body, hyper aware of the muscles under his thin shirt, the smell of his cologne. If this had been some action movie instead of real life, it almost would’ve been seductive – right now though you were frustrated and scared. “So it’s going to be like that, huh? Well, don’t say I didn’t try to play nice.” He cooed before manhandling you over to the office couch that was pressed to the far wall. In a final attempt to get away, you threw your weight to the ground before he could get you on the sofa, and took off to run. 
It was short lived as he grabbed you from behind by your waist, hoisting you backwards and
tossing you onto the couch. Before you could try again, he was straddling your waist with his weight and gathered both wrists into one hand, pinning them above you against the wall. “You really wanna do this the hard way, don’t you princess?” He didn’t wait for your answer as he used his free hand to unbuckle his belt, removing it from his jeans in one swift movement, before latching it around your wrists and tightening it, hooking it to the metal peg built into the wall for keys and coats.
He moved off of you when he latched your hands, leaving you stuck there, hands above your head, wrists sore. “Fuck you! I’m not telling you anything.” There was a noticeable tremble in your voice, especially as he pulled his gun from the holster – which did not go unnoticed by him. 
He tilted his head with a little smirk.“I think that might be a great idea actually.” He set the weapon down on the small side table along with his knife before shrugging himself out of his leather jacket, revealing a tight button up and rolled sleeves. With the jacket off, you had a better sight of just how fit he was, muscles everywhere. You swallowed a gulp, not sure what great idea he was referring to and not fully deciding what emotion you were feeling now – fear, lust, both?
Your body made the decision for you as heat panged between your legs along with wetness. You squeezed your thighs together to alleviate some of it – a small gesture he also picked up on, the smirk on his face growing wider. “I’ll be honest, I’m used to a different kind of reaction when I meet women at work. Gotta say, I’m not complaining.” He separated your legs slightly and dipped two fingers between them under your skirt,, rubbing you gently through your panties. A gasp escaped your lips and you squirmed against the movement. “Atta girl.” He praised, using his free hand to hold you by your chin, making sure you were looking directly at him. 
The coiling pleasure between your legs had your head going a little hazy, eyes locking with his. ‘Fuck he’s handsome.’ Your nipples began to harden under your work blouse, as you took in his features further. 
His fingers sped up their pace, and he tightened his grip on your chin so he could lean in, whispering just against the corner of your lips, teasing a kiss. “Such a pretty, pretty girl.” His lips met your cheek softly, before he slipped his fingers into your panties, dragging slick from your hole up to rub against your clit more easily.
The change in sensation coupled with his words had you spilling over the edge, whining as your orgasm crashed into you, leaving your legs shivering. Leon pulled back, giving you a moment to catch your breath. He crossed his arms over his chest and flopped back against the couch casually. “So….now that we’ve established some rapport, are you ready to answer my questions about project D?” 
In a moment of post-pleasure clarity, your brain had finally processed the situation, leaving you shameful, embarrassed, and aggravated. “Of course not!” You said between pants.
His face morphed into thought before a realization overcame him, like a light bulb went off in his head. “You’re lucky I like ‘em hard to get.” He moved to unbutton your blouse, grabbing the knife off the floor to slice your bra open, both breasts spilling out. “So here’s how it’s going to work.” He made his way down to your skirt, unzipping the side and slipping it down your legs. “I already told you, I don’t like hurting women – but I never leave a mission without getting the intel I need..” He used the knife to make quick work of your panties as well, leaving you in nothing but your button up, slung open and dangling off your arms along with what was left of your bra. “So I’m gonna use another method to get you to talk.” 
You had a good idea of what his plan was going to be, and if you were honest the primal part of your brain was turned on in anticipation.  The working part of your brain still kept your lips sealed. “Try whatever you want, I won’t speak.” “We’ll see about that.” He unhooked you for a moment so he could flip you around, face to the wall. Expecting to hear the sound of his pants unzipping, you were surprised when instead he moved to lay down beneath you, and then it finally clicked what he was planning to do. “The safeword is ‘I’ll tell you.’ The catch is Princess, you gotta actually tell me what I need, otherwise I may have to keep this up.”
You didn’t get the opportunity to protest as his strong arms wrapped around your legs, pulling your wet cunt down against his face, tongue already darting out to lap at your sensitive clit. The sensation of the stubble rubbing against your thighs along with the wriggling muscle against your most sensitive spot made you whimper and moan, wanting to grab hold of something but being unable to in your bound state. 
Already more sensitive than usual from your first orgasm, it didn’t take long before you were grinding down onto his face riding out a second one. Unlike before though, he didn’t give you a moment to rest, holding your thighs in place tightly he continued to lap at your sensitive bud, making you scream. Your wrists yanked against their confines fruitlessly, your legs desperately wiggled, but he kept you exactly where he wanted you, as he continued to eat you like you were the last meal he’d ever have – third orgasm quickly being ripped from you faster than the previous one. “N-no can’t, too much.” Tears spilled from your eyes and stained your cheeks as he didn’t let up, your legs were quivering, muscles tight and sore, his belt digging into your wrists. “P-please….can’t….can’t any–” you were cut off with a choked whimper as your fourth erupted from your aching pussy. Never having had so many back to back, your body felt exhausted, brain not able to come up with any  more coherent thoughts. 
Luckily, he stopped this time for a moment, releasing the bruising grip on your legs and adjusting you so he could talk. You could see the upper half of his face, looking up at you between your legs, which wouldn’t stop shaking with aftershocks. “Look at you, only four in and you’re already sobbing and begging. Such a sweet-tasting girl isn’t made to be so stubborn, are you ready to say the words?” His voice was silk as he rubbed your leg softly adding to the temptation. 
You defiantly shook your head, lip jutting out in a pout, as tempting as it was, you weren’t ready to lose your life or career over this – but your will was wavering, especially between the different sensations of pleasure and pain from the ache in your arms. “Suit yourself.” He said, tucking himself between your legs again, returning to his position underneath you. One arm wrapped itself back around  your leg, but he had different plants for the other one, working it around so he could line his fingers up at your entrance, sliding two of them in until it reached the leather of his fingerless gloves, as he started sucking on your clit. 
Your velvety walls clamped down over the digits, the sensation beyond overwhelming as he began to pump them in and out, pleasuring new spots within you. Your brain finally short-circuited and began to imagine what it would be like with someone else inside of you, stretching you open. “L-leon…” you moaned out his name for the first time as he continued to work your hole, and suck on your too-sensitive pearl of nerves. Skilled fingers easily found that special spot that sent you reeling, curling them upwards to make sure each movement stimulated it.
In tandem with the external pleasure of his mouth, the last of your resolve crumbled. You came for the fifth time, head flung back, chanting his name like a prayer. This time when he didn’t stop, you couldn’t take it anymore, too tired, teary, overwhelmed, and exhausted. “St-stop…stop……I can’t……I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you.” You sobbed out. 
As promised his movements ceased immediately. “You sure?” You nodded in confirmation between sniffles. He slid out from under you, wiping his mouth with his sleeve before unhooking your sore arms from the wall, lying you down on your back, facing him. He removed the belt while you caught your breath, before he massaged the reddening marks on your wrists. “See? I knew a girl like you couldn’t be that stubborn. Now….ready to talk about project D?” You nodded again hesitantly. The next smile that graced his features seemed genuine, and while it was likely a trap you couldn’t help but fall for it, much too empty-headed to think about any potential consequences. 
Immediately you were answering every question he had to your best ability in your dreamlike state, he nodded eagerly and praised you for each good answer as he continued rubbing your body in a massage working from bottom to top, pressing small kisses against your skin as he went. He stopped after placing a brief one to your lips, which you pressed into without thinking.  The actions were effective, so much so you hadn’t even noticed you’d fallen asleep. 
When you woke a while later, the lab was still dark but the computer had been turned back on casting a light over to you. You could see Leon, sitting in front of it, a harddrive plugged in obviously canceling and copying the data transfer. Once Leon noticed you were awake he made his way back over to you, sitting on the end of the couch. “Sleep well?” You didn’t immediately respond, not fully ready to process everything that had just happened – like directly handing over intel to the enemy. “It won’t be safe to stay here now. Why don’t you come with me out of here – with my connections come certain protections. I’ll even buy you dinner so we can discuss keeping you safe.”
“Dinner, really? Do you offer that to all the ladies you go down on during missions?”  
He chuckled, “Only the ones I like” He leaned forward to rub his thumb over your cheek, causing your face to flush again. “Besides,I am nothing if not a gentleman and would never leave a damsel to distress.”  You rolled your eyes at the corny comment, but upon realizing he was right you agreed. “Fine. Dinner.”
“Atta girl.” He gave you a chaste kiss before returning to grab the harddrive from the computer and giving you a chance to fix your disheveled state.
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magalorian · 1 month
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NEW - Ex-Director of National Intelligence @JohnRatcliffe warns that Chinese spies are infiltrating the United States through the southern border.
"The fastest growing group they're encountering at our border is coming from our #1 geopolitical adversary, China."
"We had 342 Chinese nationals in 2020. We're at 24,000 and 20,000 in the past two years. That's like a 7000% increase."
"It's not a question of whether the People's Republic of China is sending spies here... it's a question of how many."
Do you remember when the Bank of China launched a billion-dollar investment fund for Joe Biden's son?
Do you remember when Hunter, James, and Sara Biden made millions spreading China's Belt and Road Initiative with CEFC China Energy?
Do you remember when Joe Biden's son called his CEFC China Energy business partner, who got arrested by the DOJ for being a Chinese spy, "the spy chief of China"?
Is anyone surprised that Joe Biden is allowing Chinese spies to pour into our country?
@KanekoaTheGreat
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dilemmaontwolegs · 4 months
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Already Gone || MV1 {7}
Pairing: Max Verstappen x spy!fem!reader Summary: After the attack in your home, Max is serious about learning to fight. Warnings: 18+ only, nsfw, alcohol, sparring, mentions of illegal activities WC: 1.8k
F1 Masterlist || previous chapter || next chapter
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“Are you sure you should be drinking? You might have a concussion,” Max worried as you sipped the gin and tonic Christian had made. 
“Relax, the lady’s earned a drink or two,” Christian said as he sat down with his own. “Nice job.”
You clinked your glass with your bosses before drinking half of the strong beverage in one gulp and sighing happily. “Thank you. Dare I ask where Brett’s taking them?”
Christian chuckled and shook his head. “Best to have deniability.”
Max looked uncomfortable at the conversation as he shifted in his seat beside you, his fingers massaging your shoulder that his arm draped across.
“I know you don’t like it, babe, but this is the reality of the situation,” you said softly as you took his hand and traced the lines that cut across his palm, not that you believed in the life line or the love line crap. “They wanted to break your hands. They weren’t here to have a pretty conversation that magically convinced you to lose your races. They wanted to make sure you could never race again.”
“I’ve increased the security on Checo but they seem to be focusing their energy on you.”
“Of course, Max is the bigger threat,” you stated obviously. “Anyone who can read the standings knows that.” Tilting your head towards the principal you cocked an eyebrow and asked, “You don’t happen to have half a billion hidden in your mattress?”
Christian scoffed as he swirled his drink, clinking the ice against the glass. “I’m not Pablo Escabar, and I don’t think my wife would sleep comfortably on the lumps.”
“That’s a shame, his personal army could’ve been helpful.”
“What do you want half a billion dollars for anyway?”
“Euros, actually.” You grabbed your phone off the coffee table and opened the app for the stock exchange, scrolling through the companies of interest you had saved before tossing it on his lap. “They wouldn’t sell the majority of their shares but there is a sizable chunk up for grabs. Certainly enough to get a seat on the chairboard.”
Christian looked at the trading name and chuffed at the thought of being a board member at Scuderia Ferrari before he took a sip of his drink. “Let me see what I can move about.”
“Wait, you’re not serious?” Max baulked at the idea before helping himself to your drink at the look you gave him. “Fuck, you are serious.”
“If you need a shell company I have a few old ones to spare.”
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Christian chuckled as he finished his drink and started to head to the door. “I’d get that fixed pronto if I were you.”
You gave him the thumbs up as he left while Max walked him to the gaping hole where the broken door used to be. “See you next week, boss.”
Walking back to your side, Max scratched his short beard and said, “I think we should go to a hotel tonight, liefje.”
A gust of wind blew through the open door and swayed the picture frames on the wall to accentuate his words. “I think you’re right, preferably one with a spa.”
He smiled as he kissed your temple, careful to avoid the swelling on your forehead. “I’m sure I can find something for you.”
Two Months Later “Shit,” Max grunted as the wind was knocked from him. 
“Please don’t hurt my star driver before his final race,” Christian said as he walked into the gym and found Max bent over his knees panting. 
“I haven’t touched him,” you defended yourself while you rubbed Max’s back. “The speedball took him out.”
“If anyone asks, it was Rico Verhoeven.”
You snorted a laugh. “He loves you too much to hurt you. He would probably let you take him down.”
“Probably,” Max groaned as he straightened up and cocked a brow at his boss who held a file in his hand. “What’s that?”
“Just some paperwork for you to sign,” he said to you as he held it out. “Our lovely Director here will be heading to Italy next week for her first board meeting.”
You hadn’t really missed your old line of work but you couldn’t deny there was a certain thrill to stepping into the lion’s den. Max wasn’t too happy about it, but you had convinced him not to worry, or at least accept it. Christian had been able to shift some money around to make the investment feasible and it had been collectively decided that you would be the best person to take the seat.
Now that the seat was filled you would be able to give the go ahead to your contacts and Scuderia Ferrari stocks would rise once again over the winter break, lining Red Bull’s pockets with profits. It was a win-win. 
“What I wouldn’t give to see the faces of those smarmy old bastards when you walk in the boardroom,” Christian mused as you signed the last of the documents. “Benedetto doesn’t know what he started.”
Max had recovered from his winded state and pulled his boxing gloves off to have a drink, taking a seat next to Christian on a weight bench. “You are lucky I am so charming. I should get a bonus for saving the team with my good looks and wonderful personality.”
“Greedy bastard, isn’t the €55 million I am paying you each year enough?” Christian said with a burst of laughter.
“My girlfriend has expensive taste.”
“Hey, I had no problem affording my own lifestyle before I met you,” you pointed out as you stole his drink bottle and pointed to the heavy sandbag. “And I didn’t say you could have a break. Gloves back on, Prince Charming.”
“I’ll leave you love birds to it. Don’t forget dinner tonight,” Christian said as he made his way back to the door. “Oh, and try not to be beaten by a bag, Max. It’s bad for your reputation.”
Max held his gloved hand up and you knew he was trying to pull the finger inside of it. “Very menacing,” you teased as you grabbed your own set of gloves and joined him in the ring. “Shall we dance, pretty boy?”
“Do I get a reward if I take you down?”
You blew a kiss to your boyfriend and raised your hands. “How about you focus on just trying to land a punch?”
“I’m competitive, liefje, I respond best to incentives.”
“Is that right...well, in that case, how about this?” You closed the distance between you and brushed your lips along his jaw until you reached his ear. “You take me down, and you can take me down.”
His athletic stamina that kept him strong for the races showed no sign of weakening as he followed you around the ring, relentlessly trying to take you to the mat. Sweat beaded on your forehead as you ducked and spun out of his reach, and you saw his cheeks flush with the same exertion of his effort. 
Deciding he had pushed himself hard enough for one day, you planted your foot and deflected the throw he made. He overextended past you, leaving his side open for you to wrap yourself around, dragging him to the thin padding on the ground and rolling until you straddled his hips.
“Good work, but it’s time to rest. You have qualifying soon.”
“I’ve already won the championship, plus I could start last on the grid and still get points,” he said with a cocky smile before he stole your signature move. He used your own momentum against you, twisting his hips as he reached across your body. The room spun as you were flipped onto your back and suddenly you were looking up at him. “I just can’t help winning, see.”
“Go on then,” you dared as he hungrily eyed your body pinned beneath his. “Take your reward.”
“We could get caught,” Max groaned as he glanced at the door Christian had left through, knowing it was unlocked. 
“You’re not scared are you?” 
All his blood rushed south of his brain and he found no reason to deny you both. “Fuck it.”
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Dinner was a quiet affair with just the team and their families. The real party would come after the race, but you were quite content as you were when the group broke up at the end of the evening. 
Geri had taken the children off to bed while the mechanics went to a nightclub nearby for a ‘nightcap’. Christian wished them a good evening and a polite suggestion to not stay out too late. It left you, Max and Christian moving to your fully stocked bar in the presidential suite and sinking into the plush seats. 
“What a fucking year it’s been,” Christian laughed as he rubbed his beard. 
You snorted a laugh and kicked your feet up onto Max’s lap. “It’s been exciting though, you have to admit that.”
You smiled as the two recounted their favourite parts of the season while you browsed the NASDAQ Dubai journal you had started reading before dinner.
“It’s a shame George is still sick, he can’t catch a break.”
“You think George being sick is a coincidence?” you commented as you turned the page and chuckled. “Tell me you are not that-“ you fell silent at the look Christian gave you and just shrugged. “It’s quite easy to replicate illnesses with certain substances is all I’m saying…”
“Why go after George?” Max pondered aloud while Christian sat still processing what you had inferred.
Your boss’s eyes lit up with realisation and he grabbed his phone to open the F1 app to confirm his thoughts. “Because if George scores anything above fourth place tomorrow Mercedes will beat Ferrari in the constructors championship. That’s worth a few million euros, at least.”
“Bingo.”
“Do we do anything with this information?” Max asked as he began to massage your ankle. Though he had almost come to accept the dark underbelly of the sport, he still didn’t like it and it made him nervous.
“We can’t prove it,” you said with a shake of your head as his massage glided up your calf muscle, like a cat that kneaded a spot for self-comfort. “It’s not exactly a bad thing too, Ferrari coming second. It will make for great telly seeing Toto throw a bitch fit.”
Christian nearly spilled his drink with the belly laugh that filled the suite. “I’ll cheers to that,” he toasted as he held his drink forward. “To the end of an exciting season.”
You leaned in with yours and tapped it with his and Max’s. “And to another one next year.” They both cut you a side eye and you bit your lip to suppress the smile. “Or not.”
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An interoperability rule for your money
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This is the final weekend to back the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, The Lost Cause. These kickstarters are how I pay my bills, which lets me publish my free essays nearly every day. If you enjoy my work, please consider backing!
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"If you don't like it, why don't you take your business elsewhere?" It's the motto of the corporate apologist, someone so Hayek-pilled that they see every purchase as a ballot cast in the only election that matters – the one where you vote with your wallet.
Voting with your wallet is a pretty undignified way to go through life. For one thing, the people with the thickest wallets get the most votes, and for another, no matter who you vote for in that election, the Monopoly Party always wins, because that's the part of the thick-wallet set.
Contrary to the just-so fantasies of Milton-Friedman-poisoned bootlickers, there are plenty of reasons that one might stick with a business that one dislikes – even one that actively harms you.
The biggest reason for staying with a bad company is if they've figured out a way to punish you for leaving. Businesses are keenly attuned to ways to impose switching costs on disloyal customers. "Switching costs" are all the things you have to give up when you take your business elsewhere.
Businesses love high switching costs – think of your gym forcing you to pay to cancel your subscription or Apple turning off your groupchat checkmark when you switch to Android. The more it costs you to move to a rival vendor, the worse your existing vendor can treat you without worrying about losing your business.
Capitalists genuinely hate capitalism. As the FBI informant Peter Thiel says, "competition is for losers." The ideal 21st century "market" is something like Amazon, a platform that gets 45-51 cents out of every dollar earned by its sellers. Sure, those sellers all compete with one another, but no matter who wins, Amazon gets a cut:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital
Think of how Facebook keeps users glued to its platform by making the price of leaving cutting of contact with your friends, family, communities and customers. Facebook tells its customers – advertisers – that people who hate the platform stick around because Facebook is so good at manipulating its users (this is a good sales pitch for a company that sells ads!). But there's a far simpler explanation for peoples' continued willingness to let Mark Zuckerberg spy on them: they hate Zuck, but they love their friends, so they stay:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs
One of the most important ways that regulators can help the public is by reducing switching costs. The easier it is for you to leave a company, the more likely it is they'll treat you well, and if they don't, you can walk away from them. That's just what the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau wants to do with its new Personal Financial Data Rights rule:
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-proposes-rule-to-jumpstart-competition-and-accelerate-shift-to-open-banking/
The new rule is aimed at banks, some of the rottenest businesses around. Remember when Wells Fargo ripped off millions of its customers by ordering its tellers to open fake accounts in their name, firing and blacklisting tellers who refused to break the law?
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/07/497084491/episode-728-the-wells-fargo-hustle
While there are alternatives to banks – local credit unions are great – a lot of us end up with a bank by default and then struggle to switch, even though the banks give us progressively worse service, collectively rip us off for billions in junk fees, and even defraud us. But because the banks keep our data locked up, it can be hard to shop for better alternatives. And if we do go elsewhere, we're stuck with hours of tedious clerical work to replicate all our account data, payees, digital wallets, etc.
That's where the new CFPB order comes in: the Bureau will force banks to "share data at the person’s direction with other companies offering better products." So if you tell your bank to give your data to a competitor – or a comparison shopping site – it will have to do so…or else.
Banks often claim that they block account migration and comparison shopping sites because they want to protect their customers from ripoff artists. There are certainly plenty of ripoff artists (notwithstanding that some of them run banks). But banks have an irreconcilable conflict of interest here: they might want to stop (other) con-artists from robbing you, but they also want to make leaving as painful as possible.
Instead of letting shareholder-accountable bank execs in back rooms decide what the people you share your financial data are allowed to do with it, the CFPB is shouldering that responsibility, shifting those deliberations to the public activities of a democratically accountable agency. Under the new rule, the businesses you connect to your account data will be "prohibited from misusing or wrongfully monetizing the sensitive personal financial data."
This is an approach that my EFF colleague Bennett Cyphers and I first laid our in our 2021 paper, "Privacy Without Monopoly," where we describe how and why we should shift determinations about who is and isn't allowed to get your data from giant, monopolistic tech companies to democratic institutions, based on privacy law, not corporate whim:
https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy
The new CFPB rule is aimed squarely at reducing switching costs. As CFPB Director Rohit Chopra says, "Today, we are proposing a rule to give consumers the power to walk away from bad service and choose the financial institutions that offer the best products and prices."
The rule bans banks from charging their customers junk fees to access their data, and bans businesses you give that data to from "collecting, using, or retaining data to advance their own commercial interests through actions like targeted or behavioral advertising." It also guarantees you the unrestricted right to revoke access to your data.
The rule is intended to replace the current state-of-the-art for data sharing, which is giving your banking password to third parties who go and scrape that data on your behalf. This is a tactic that comparison sites and financial dashboards have used since 2006, when Mint pioneered it:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/mint-late-stage-adversarial-interoperability-demonstrates-what-we-had-and-what-we
A lot's happened since 2006. It's past time for American bank customers to have the right to access and share their data, so they can leave rotten banks and go to better ones.
The new rule is made possible by Section 1033 of the Consumer Financial Protection Act, which was passed in 2010. Chopra is one of the many Biden administrative appointees who have acquainted themselves with all the powers they already have, and then used those powers to help the American people:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff
It's pretty wild that the first digital interoperability mandate is going to come from the CFPB, but it's also really cool. As Tim Wu demonstrated in 2021 when he wrote Biden's Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy, the administrative agencies have sweeping, grossly underutilized powers that can make a huge difference to everyday Americans' lives:
https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights
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My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!
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Image: Steve Morgan (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._National_Bank_Building_-_Portland,_Oregon.jpg
Stefan Kühn (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abrissbirne.jpg
CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
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Rhys A. (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/rhysasplundh/5201859761/in/photostream/
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
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blazehedgehog · 2 months
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Do you agree with Gaming Journalists and what do you think of gaming journalism in general?
What does this even mean, dude.
"Do you agree with gaming journalists"? On what?
Do I agree with Shacknews that Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a 10/10, and with Digital Spy that it's also a 7/10? Do I agree with Let's Clear Up Those Halo Battle Royale Rumors?
Like, I've gotten some bait on this blog before, but this is 2/10 stuff, man. This is some hot 2014 garbage. Like no matter what I say, you're gonna go all
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"Very interesting. Then do you care to explain why..." No thanks.
My real answer: Something I learned during my time at TSSZ and being around a few people who were deeper into "the biz" than I is that everybody needs journalism more than they realize. Corporations are pushing for consumers to become their personal cheerleaders more than ever before, which makes criticism and the journalistic exposing of information seem villainous.
After all: Xbox is my friend now, so how dare you attack the Xbox. Behavior that used to be reserved for the most dedicated fanboys is now the expected room temperature. I've talked about "The Cult of Naughty Dog" before, and that's the same thing. If a corporation can get you to be parasocial with them, then they have won, and being parasocial with a corporation means shunning real investigative journalism that would otherwise undo them. Journalists and critics used to be marketing tools, but by undoing the press pipeline and talking directly to fans, journalists and critics are painted as untrustworthy for being wildcards that don't always toe the company line.
And there has been more than a decade of people with a "I choose to be stupid and ignorant on purpose" outlook, which just makes that more frustrating. We've all seen screencaps where some brainless rando tries to explain something to a person who is an expert in that field. The rando thinks they're flexing their brain, but in some cases they are arguing with the person who literally wrote the book on their topic of conversation. Some people don't want to know anything but still pretend like they know everything, when there are real people out there doing real work to uncover real truths.
Misinformation is the real problem. It should not surprise anyone that there are people out there deliberately eroding the foundation of journalistic integrity, because the less people trust journalism, the easier it is to get away with lying. The easier it is to lie, the easier it is to control the mainstream, the easier it is to scam people out of their money, so on and so forth.
And misinformation is more than just "this one news article is fake." There are long running campaigns to install people into news organizations themselves to publish false information for all manner of different goals, but it's all the same: nobody trusts anyone and it's making everyone dumber.
That's when we get crypto currency. And NFTs. And now people claiming that generative AI will save humanity. Grift after grift after grift where the people at the top of the snake oil food chain make off with billions of dollars while the rest of the world is left scratching their heads.
The law isn't going to catch them. If they do, it'll take years. Look at how long it took for Sam Bankman-Fried to get caught -- he operated for almost half an entire decade. The amount of damage somebody can get away with in five years is significant.
We need journalism. Real journalism. Good journalism. Watchdogs that keep an eye on things and blow the whistle when it goes bad. Somebody to enforce accountability that isn't a cop.
Where do you find that? That's the hardest question. I'm lucky enough that I know people I trust because they are long time friends, or friends of friends, and thus they've been properly vetted in my circle as The Real Deal. But there are a lot of outlets out there who claim to champion "truth" and "intelligence" in a way to prey upon insecurity. I mean, c'mon, Trump's social media platform is called "Truth Social" and is basically the furthest thing from the truth you will ever get from anyone, ever.
The more obsessively they try to convince you they're telling the truth, the less likely it is they actually are. Which in itself could be an attack meant to undo the foundations of trust in people who actually know what they're talking about. By casting doubt on the very concept of truth itself, they can lie with increasingly greater efficiency.
Any advice I give feels like it is incredibly circumstantial. Which is the point, and is why we're in the state we're in.
Here's a good pdf by The News Literacy Project that's probably a good place to start. The general gist is "you'll have to do a lot of fact checking for yourself" but that's unfortunately where we're at these days.
But by and large I would say life is a lot harder for real journalists right now than I think some of their critics have ever thought about. There are people out there trying to do actual good work and being a bubble-brained moron about it just makes everything harder for everyone.
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It was supposed to be an easy job. In and out in the span of three, possibly four, months. You weren’t supposed to become compromised and possibly ruin everything you’ve worked for.
You definitely weren’t supposed to fall in love.
But you’re getting ahead of yourself. This all really started well before you ever accepted the job to infiltrate into the Belmont Estate. Before you even became a Field Agent within Tenebria; an underground force within the CIA and other covert agencies around the world.
It all started from the day you were chosen— out of dozens of children— to become a part of an organization that was even more infamous then the MIB.
You should have known that simplicity within your line of work— within your life— was simply an illusion. The question? Whatever shall you do with the reality you’ve found yourself in now?
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Customizable MC: Name, gender, appearance, hobbies, sexuality, and parts of your background. Skills can range from an affinity for technology, interpersonal skills (being able to connect with people), and fighting with or without weapons. Each skill can be developed depending on your choices!
Romance 1 of 6 possible options. From the heir(ess) of the Belmont Estate, your partner, a rival agent, and the suspected villain of the entire story. There may be poly relationships developed later on.
Tropes: Found Family, Rivals to Lovers, Spy Dramedy, Forced Proximity, Slow Burn, and much more!
RO PoVs? Definitely. Masquerade Ball Shenanigans? Obviously. Light hearted fun to intersect some of the angst? Always.
This game is romance focused, but that doesn’t mean you should neglect your platonic relationships. There’s fun to be had in both situations.
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Yvan/Yvonne Belmont [M/F] || The Target
The target of the assassination plot. You’re not exactly sure of their importance to Tenebria, but you’re well aware of the consequences if you fail. With an aloof attitude, silver tongue, and inability to stay in one spot for long; they’ll definitely make your job interesting in the long run.
Cane/Cara Drakos [M/F] || The Villain
The number one suspect in the plot against the Belmont Empire. A genius level intellect, a charming grin, and an ease around people, one could definitely see why they’d be at the top. Especially since they’ve grown their multi-billion dollar empire from the ground up by the time they were 28. The only kink? They’ve been best friends with the Belmont Heir since they both were in diapers. Of course, that won’t stop you from figuring out their darkest secrets.
Blake Alexander [M/F] || The Rival
Cocky doesn’t even begin to cover their attitude. While they certainly have a reason to be, after everything they’ve been able to accomplish, you’ve never been able to mesh well with them. Especially since you’ve always been pitted against one another; only ever working together twice before. This time would mark the third. Would anything different come about? Or will the forced proximity finally be one of your end?
Skylar Grant [M/F] || The Partner
A people pleaser to the max, Skylar has always been able to figure people out better than anyone you’ve ever met. You’ve never been able to understand how they do it, but you’re more than happy to have them on your side. A constant within the hectic world of shadow organizations and espionage; Skylar is the one person you know you can count on most in the world. Will that ever change?
Grayson Walker [M] || The Exasperated Handler
Grayson Walker is a legend within Tenebria. A walking myth that many can’t even believe is actually real. You’ve known him closely for the last four years; ever since he took over from your last Handler. While he isn’t one for many words, Grayson definitely lets you know when he thinks you’re being an idiot. Especially when it comes to taking missions that you don’t know the whole story of. Can you count on his expertise while figuring out this case? Will you be able to find out why he quit the field? Or will he only ever just sigh when you mic turns on?
Andrea Solaris [F] || The Recon Expert
A new addition to the Squad upon entrance into the Belmont Estate; the quiet, almost soulful, partner to Agent Alexander. You’re almost surprised by how well they work together— although Blake does seem to partner well with anyone that’s not you. Getting a read on Andrea isn’t the easiest, but you can definitely understand why she was chosen for the job. Maybe you’ll learn more along the way as you work closer and closer together.
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DEMO (TBA) || RO APPEARANCES || FAQ
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saywhat-politics · 8 months
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A Texas woman was awarded a $1.2 billion settlement after a Houston-area jury ruled she was the victim of revenge porn. 
The woman, who went by her initials D.L. in court documents, filed a harassment lawsuit in April 2022 in Harris County against her former boyfriend Marques Jamal Jackson. According to the suit, Jackson posted intimate images of his ex-girlfriend, obtained while they were dating, onto social media platforms and adult websites "with the intent to embarrass, harass, torment, humiliate, and publicly shame" her.  
The lawsuit also accuses Jackson of tapping into the plaintiff's mother's home security system to spy on D.L. after the two broke up, as well as sending links to her friends and family to sites where intimate images of her had been uploaded. 
A symbolic win
The billion-dollar settlement offers a symbolic win for victims of "imaged-based sexual abuse," known as "revenge porn," which is used to inflict "a combination of psychological abuse, domestic violence and sexual abuse," the plaintiff's attorney, Bradford J. Gilde of Gilde Law Firm, said in a statement.
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The Spy Balloon: What It Contained
The mysterious spy balloon recently shot down over American airspace has finally been recovered, and the US Government has now released what they found inside:
Extensive long range video of popular singer Grimes
Location coordinates and intercepted logins by Grimes
A complete record of texts by Grimes
A copy of Miss Anthropocene in MP3 format
Downloads of Grimes's Facebook page
A log of addresses which posted material critical of Tesla cars
The location of Grimes's Tesla car, updated 10 times/second
A "destruct code" that can make any Tesla lock and catch on fire
A list of Tesla cars that have done so without use of the code
Footage of a faked SpaceX Moon landing
Footage of a faked SpaceX Mars landing
Footage of a faked Tesla drive on Mars
Faked footage of Grimes and Elon Musk kissing on Mars
A cure for COVID that works on everyone but Grimes
Millions of dollars of emeralds
$1.76 in Dogecoin, formerly worth over 500 billion dollars
The remains of the real Shaquille O'Neal
Authorities are reevaluating the idea that the balloon was Chinese.
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zvaigzdelasas · 2 months
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“I don’t worry much about it,” Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s defense intelligence directorate, told CNN in an exclusive interview in Kyiv.
Trump “is an experienced person. He has fallen many times and gotten back up again. And this is a very serious trait,” Budanov said of the former president[...]
“We are expecting a positive decision anyway,” Budanov said of the US debate over aid, “To say that [Trump] and the Republican Party are lovers of the Russian Federation is complete nonsense.”
“I’m confident that the United States will remain a staunch ally” no matter who wins, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview Wednesday during his dayslong visit to Washington.
The NATO chief is in town to make his pitch that supporting Ukraine and rearming NATO — issues that are inexorably intertwined — helps the U.S. in the Pacific and creates American jobs.
“I worked with former President Trump for the four years he was president,” Stoltenberg told POLITICO[...]
The NATO chief also pointed to the traditional bipartisan support for NATO in Congress, something he said he witnessed on Tuesday while meeting with Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Stoltenberg also noted that Trump’s criticism of NATO wasn’t really aimed at the alliance, but at individual countries that have failed to live up to the 2014 pledge to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense by 2024. “It’s important to listen,” he said, because the criticism from Trump “is not a criticism of NATO not investing enough in NATO.”
The comments came immediately after the NATO leader made a pitch to conservatives in Washington that supporting Ukraine and re-arming Europe is good for America.
“NATO is a good deal for the United States,” Stoltenberg said at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank closely aligned with Trump.[...]
The NATO leader didn’t just come to rebut critics, however. He also arrived with a story to tell.
“NATO creates a market for defense sales,” he said, noting that member states have purchased $120 billion worth of weapons from U.S. defense companies over the past two years, including 600 F-35 fighters by 2030.
“From Arizona to Virginia, Florida to Washington state, American jobs depend on American sales to defense markets in Europe and Canada,” he said.
That line of thinking is similar to the message being touted by the White House: supporting Ukraine is good for the American economy. U.S. manufacturers build weapons that are sent to European capitals, which are looking to restock after donating their machinery to Ukraine.[...]
“We must organize ourselves for enduring competition with China,” Stoltenberg said, adding that since Trump began pushing shifting U.S. priorities toward the Indo-Pacific in 2017, “NATO has gone a long way in helping European allies fully appreciate the challenge posed by China.”
31 Jan 24
Trump Calls on Europe To Shoulder ‘Equal’ Ukraine Burden - RealClearPolitics
Former President Trump does not sound like a man ready to abandon Ukraine as some fear. This week, he instead called on Europe to match dollar-for-dollar the amount of aid the U.S. has sent to counter Russian aggression. “I say pay, and they’ll pay too,” he said. “You have to equal it.”[...]
“Ukraine is an interesting case,” Trump said Tuesday at a Las Vegas rally. “People always want to know my feeling.”
“Number one, we’re in for $200 billion plus, and the European nations are in for $20 billion, and it’s more important for them,” he continued. “And don’t you think they should equalize?”[...]
When it comes to how the land war in Eastern Europe affects American politics, it isn’t a clear-cut case of dove vs hawk, however. While Trump regularly warns of the possibility of “World War III” and promises to negotiate a peace deal, he has left the door open to continued support for Ukraine.[...]
After calling on European allies to “retroactively” pay back the U.S. for support already rendered, Trump said that Ukraine ought to be told “that there will be little more money coming from us, UNLESS RUSSIA CONTINUES TO PROSECUTE THE WAR.”[...]
“I feel strongly if elected president, Trump would not abandon Ukraine,” said James Carafano, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation[...]
“The first step he would take would be to sit down with European allies and have a heart-to-heart talk,” added Carafano, who advised Trump’s presidential transition, “saying we all have to be realistic, step up to the plate, and do the sensible, responsible things we need to do, to end the suffering of the Ukrainian people, help them retain their freedom and look after our interests, and everyone needs to step to the plate and take this seriously. If you do, the U.S. will.”
A former senior White House official familiar with Trump’s thinking told RCP that he expected Trump to immediately make good, if elected, on his promise to reach out to Putin and Zelensky. If Russia rejects a peace deal, the official said he anticipates that Trump “would give Zelensky everything needed to complete the operation, which this administration has not done.”
2 Feb 24
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actuallyastingray · 2 months
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So, after my last Supa Strikas post, I decided to go ahead and make another personal takes. Watched a few more seasons and decided to make this one about the coaches. I will very much be making at least one more of these in the future.
Also, big, BIG shout-out to the Supablr community for the reception. You guys are awesome!
Vince: People simp over him and say he's 'fine AF'. Sorry ladies, but he's a bastard and I have standards when it comes to my men
Toni Vern: He's an irredeemable bastard AP college physics professor preaching to a bunch of frat boys, and then wonders why no one takes him at all seriously. I certainly don't
Inyo: Former Bond villainess/love interest. The only mysterious thing about her is how a British woman can pull off such a flawless American accent
Ura Giri: I imagine this would be Shredder in his late 70's. No matter how evil he is, after one too many encounters with ninja teenage superheroes, anyone remotely younger than you and semi-proficient in martial arts will have you walking on eggshells 24/7
Buddy Watkins: So this is how other countries stereotype America. It's okay guys, you don't have to be nice about it.
Del Aqua: In the same boat (Haha! get it?) as Coach in that he puts up with way too much daily shenanigans from his adopted charges. Is secretly glad his boys are surfers and stay out of the house, cause he is never caffeinated enough to deal with their nonsense otherwise.
Dr. Black: This guy uses billion-dollar NASA equipment to cheat at football games. I'm no rocket scientist but something just isn't adding up about this.
Colonel von Pushup: Acts super done with life but is really just super done with his dumbass kids. Isn't the best at dading coaching which is why he so often resorts to spying on the other dads coaches for ideas. Wishes Uber and Ja Nein would stop all their sexual tension infighting before someone takes notice
Belmont: His kids are perpetually dressed up as zombies, vampires, and werewolves and act the part in public too. Tell me with a straight face he doesn't have a legendary tolerance level that would make Coach jealous.
Golare: His kids are all grown up and independent, but he really, reeaaaaally wants to still be relevant in their lives
Sheikh Ali Zaman: Guys like this are why Americans hate Jeff Bezos
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kp777 · 1 year
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By Thom Hartmann
Common Dreams
March 31, 2023
The Republican Party's most dangerous grift today has been their embrace of the lie that America is not a democracy but instead is a theocratic republic that should be ruled exclusively by armed Christian white men. It's leading us straight into the jaws of fascism.
Nobody ever accused Republicans of not knowing how to make a buck or BS-ing somebody into voting for them. Lying to people for economic or political gain is the very definition of a grift.
Whenever there’s another mass- or school-shooting, Republican politicians hustle out fundraising emails about how “Democrats are coming to take your guns!” The result is a measurable and profitable spike in gun sales after every new slaughter of our families and children, followed by a fresh burst of campaign cash to GOP lawmakers.
But the GOP’s ability to exploit any opportunity that comes along — regardless of its impact on America or American citizens — goes way beyond just fundraising hustles.
When Jared Kushner was underwater and nearly bankrupt because he overpaid for 666 Fifth Avenue and needed a billion-dollar bailout to cover his mortgage, his buddies in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and the UAE) blockaded American ally (and host to the Fifth Fleet) Qatar until that country relented and laundered the money to Jared through a Canadian investment company.
Just this week, after Trump deregulated toxic trains leading to a horrible crash and the contamination of East Palestine, Ohio, Steve Bannon — already charged with multiple fraud-related crimes and then pardoned by Trump — showed up this week to hustle $300+ water filters to the people of that town.
The grift is at the core of the GOP’s existence, and has been since Nixon blew up LBJ’s peace talks with the Vietnamese in 1968 and then took cash bribes from the Milk Lobby and Jimmy Hoffa in the White House while having his mafia-connected “plumbers” wiretap the DNC’s offices at the Watergate.
— Republicans successfully fought the ability of Medicare to negotiate drug prices for decades; in turn, Big Pharma pours millions into their campaign coffers and personal pockets (legalized by 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court).
— Republicans beat back Democratic efforts to stop insurance giants from ripping off seniors and our government with George W. Bush’s Medicare Advantage privatization scam; in turn, the insurance companies rain cash on them like an Indian monsoon.
— Republicans oppose any effort to replace fossil fuels with green energy sources that don’t destroy our environment; in turn, the fossil fuel industry jacked up the price of gasoline into the stratosphere just in time for the 2022 election (and you can expect them to try it again in 2024).
— Republicans stopped enforcement of a century’s worth of anti-trust laws in 1983, wiping out America’s small businesses and turning rural city centers into ghost towns while pushing profits and prices through the ceiling; in turn massive corporate PACs fund ads supporting Republican candidates every election cycle.
— Republicans authored legislation letting billionaires own thousands of newspapers, radio stations, and TV outlets; in turn the vast majority of those papers (now half of all local papers are owned by a handful of rightwing New York hedge funds) and stations all run daily news and editorials attacking Democrats and supporting the GOP.
— Republicans Trump and Pai killed net neutrality so giant tech companies can legally spy on you and me, recording every website we visit and selling that information for billions; in turn, major social media sites amplify rightwing voices while giant search engines stopped spidering progressive news sites.
Newspeak — George Orwell’s term for the grift where politicians use fancy phrases that mean the opposite of what people think they mean — has been the GOP’s go-to strategy for a half-century.
Richard Nixon, for example, promised to crack down on drugs, but instead used that as an excuse to crack down on anti-war liberals and Black people. Instead of an economic grift, it was a political grift.
As Nixon‘s right hand man, John Ehrlichman, told reporter Dan Baum:
“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. Do you understand what I’m saying? “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.“
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The grift is a recurrent theme through Republican presidencies in the modern era.
Ronald Reagan told us if we just destroyed America’s unions and moved our manufacturing to China and Mexico, great job opportunities would fill the nation.
He followed that up by promising if we just cut taxes on the morbidly rich, prosperity would trickle-down to the rest of us.
Reagan even assured us that raising the Social Security retirement age to 67 and taxing Social Security benefits would mean seniors could retire with greater ease.
All, of course, were grifter’s lies. Republican presidents since Reagan have continued the tradition.
George W. Bush called his program to make it easier to clear-cut America’s forests and rip roads through wilderness areas the “Healthy Forests Initiative.”
His program to legalize more pollution from coal-fired power plants and immunize them from community lawsuits (leading to tens of thousands of additional lung- and heart-disease deaths in the years since) was named the “Clean Air Act.”
Bush’s scam to “strengthen” Medicare — “Medicare Advantage” — was a thinly disguised plan to privatize that program that is today draining Medicare’s coffers while making insurance executives richer than Midas.
Donald Trump told Americans he had the coronavirus pandemic under control while he was actually making the situation far worse: America had more deaths per capita from the disease than any other developed country in the world, with The Lancet estimating a half-million Americans died needlessly because of Trump’s grift.
Jared and Ivanka cashed in on their time in the White House to the tune of billions, while Trump squeezed hundreds of millions out of foreign governments, encouraging them to illegally pay him through rentals in his properties around the world.
Other Trump grifts — most leading to grateful industries or billionaires helping him and the GOP out — included:
— Making workplaces less safe — Boosting religious schools at the expense of public schools — Cutting relief for students defrauded by student loan sharks — Shrinking the safety net by cutting $60 billion out of food stamps — Forcing workers to put in overtime without getting paid extra for it — Pouring more pollution from fossil fuels into our fragile atmosphere — Gutting the EPA’s science operation — Rescinding rules that protected workers at federal contract sites — Dialing back car air pollution emissions standards — Reducing legal immigration of skilled workers into the US from “shithole countries” — Blocking regulation of toxic chemicals — Rolling back rules on banks, setting up the crisis of 2023 — Defenestrating rules against racially segregated housing
While Nixon was simply corrupt — a crook, to use his own term — in 1978 when five Republicans on the Supreme Court signed off on the Bellotti decision authored by Lewis Powell himself, giving corporations the legal right to bribe American politicians, the GOP went all in.
Ever since then, the GOP has purely been the party of billionaires and giant corporations, although their most successful political grift has been to throw an occasional bone to racists, gun-nuts, fascists, homophobes, and woman-haters to get votes.
Democrats at that time were largely funded by the unions, so it wasn’t until the 1990s, after Reagan had destroyed about half of America’s union jobs and gutted the unions’ ability to fund campaigns, that the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton was forced to make a big turn toward taking corporate cash.
Since Barack Obama showed how online fundraising could replace corporate cash, however, about half of the nation’s Democratic politicians have aligned with the Progressive Caucus and eschewed corporate money, returning much of the Party to its FDR and Great Society base.
The GOP, in contrast, has never wavered from lapping up corporate money in exchange for tax cuts, deregulation, and corporate socialism.
Their most dangerous grift today, though, has been their embrace of the lie that America is not a democracy but instead is a theocratic republic that should be ruled exclusively by armed Christian white men. It’s leading us straight into the jaws of fascism.
Bannon’s grift in East Palestine is the smallest of the small, after his being busted for a multi-million-dollar fraud in the “Build the Wall” scheme and others, but is still emblematic of the Republican strategy at governance.
When all you have to offer the people is a hustle, then at the very least, Republicans figure, you should be able to make a buck or gain/keep political power while doing it.
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exmovibes · 1 year
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Going over the LDS church with the BITE model because I'm bored
If I skip over any bulletpoints, it's because I didn't feel they applied to the church
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Promote dependence and obedience- you need to follow specific doctrine if you want to get into the Celestial Kingdom
Modify behavior with rewards or punishments- wearing garments 24/7 will protect you from harm, paying tithing and following the word of wisdom etc will let you into the temple
Restrict or control sexuality- not even going to touch on the blatant homophobia, the church has a massive sexual purity culture problem. No porn, no masterbation, no sex before marriage. (Ever heard of Soaking? Not normal behavior)
Control clothing- modesty is expected. Much more in adults than kids because of garments, but no sleeveless shirts or crop tops or shorts that go above the knee etc
Regulate food and drink intake- monthly fasting, fasting as a valid way to get closer to God if you need help with something, word of wisdom
Exploit you financially- tithing. 10% of all income to get to the Celestial Kingdom.
Require you to seek permission for major decisions- not "required" per se but it is expected that you meet with a bishop or pray thoroughly before making big decisions
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Deliberately withhold and distort information- hiding billions of dollars from members, changing church history
Forbid you from speaking with ex-members and critics- label exmos as apostates. Taught that anyone who left the church left purely to engage in sinful behavior and therefore cannot be trusted
Discourage access to non cult sources of information- taught to only go to the official church website for any questions we have about the church. Any information that criticizes the church is seen as hate and Satan trying to lure members away
Use information gained in confession sessions against you- if you go to the bishop about anything that contradicts the church teachings, you aren't allowed to take sacrament and you can't go to the temple, which are public acts of shame.
Gaslight to make you doubt your own memory- constant changing of church doctrine "God lives on a planet near Kolab, except no he doesn't" "joseph Smith translated the bom using the urim and thummem except no he actually stuck his head in a hat" "if you make it to the Celestial Kingdom you get your own planet except no you don't"
Require you to report thoughts and feelings to superiors- if you have any thoughts that contradict the church teachings you are expected to tell your bishop. Talking about sexual thoughts with an old man while 11 because I was scared I was going to hell is not fun
Encourage you to spy and report others misconduct- you're expected to tell your bishop if someone is acting against what the church teaches. Someone's drinking coffee? Tell the bishop. Someone is dating while being 15? Tell the bishop
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Instill Black vs White Us vs Them Good vs Evil thinking- there's a right and a wrong way to do things. There's no arguing or bargening your way out of sin. Don't really know how to describe it
Change your identity- you're a mormon first, yourself second. Taught that God comes before literally everything else.
Reject doubt- taught to "doubt your doubts"
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Instill fears of leaving the church- you're taught that if you leave, you lose your community, your shot at eternal happiness and mortal wellbeing.
Label some emotions as evil, worldly, sinful, or wrong- you feel anything sexual in any context other than towards a spouse? Sinful. You have any doubts about the church? Sinful.
Shun you if you don't believe or want to leave- I've lost all of my close friends when I left. I don't even want to mention the way my parents reacted to the idea that their child will have "Excommunicated" on their church record. Stuff of nightmares I'll say that much
Teach that there is no happiness or peace outside the group- taught that people only leave to sin. To live a worldly life. Sinning and living a worldly life is taught to result in sorrow.
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exeggcute · 3 months
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there's a developing story in Australian media about Tiktok pixels collecting unauthorised data in an aggressive manner via their ads on thrid party websites, and I was wondering what a Professional like yourself made of it
ooh reading into this now... full disclosure that (1) until/unless I get another job in adtech I am technically not a Professional anymore lol and (2) pixel tags weren't a big component of my last role so I only have a fairly basic understanding of how they work. but from what I'm seeing here it sounds like the main issue with tiktok rn isn't the data collection per se, since these pixel tags are functionally identical to the ones employed by facebook and others, just that tiktok isn't obtaining user consent the way other companies are ostensibly do. although even that seems like a convenient lead-in for the whole Oh My God A But Chinese Company Is Doing It thing.
and tbf I kinda can pull that in both directions—on one hand facebook in particular has gotten in a lot of trouble before for bad data collection practices and putting that data in the hands of people who used it to (maybe, allegedly) sway public opinion, so the general fear underpinning this thing is like, not unfounded right. (even though I don't think the issue behind the cambridge analytica scandal was centered around tracking pixels specifically?) on the other hand the very nature of facebook's rocky history re. data and privacy proves that western companies can and will spy on their users and it's for sure disingenuous to act like ~shady foreign governments~ are the only ones with any incentive to do so lol.
I guess you could argue that facebook's incentive for all the spying was simply Making Money, even if they took money from people who did use that spy data to spread propaganda; like, to the parent company, the propaganda wasn't the goal. whereas many will obviously argue that with tiktok data some undefined form of propaganda is the goal. but seeing that tiktok ads are a multi-billion dollar enterprise(!) I'm way more inclined to believe that tiktok is also spying for the sake of Making Money. clearly a whole fucking lot of money!
this is something I've for sure said before but I also wholeheartedly believe (and to some extent, know, although again pixel tracking isn't my exact wheelhouse) that advertising data is a lot less granular and therefore less useful than most people imagine it to be, which severely limits the kind of compromising shit you can pull under normal circumstances.
even in the article I linked, where they talk about tiktok pixels being able to track the shopping/browsing habits of users, basic device info, and occasionally some PII like phone numbers and email addresses... like, okay, so let's say tiktok knows that [email protected] used an iphone to look at a website that sells orthopedic shoe inserts. or even maybe something more salacious like, idk, questionably legal gas station dick pills. from a "let's use tiktok to spread propaganda" perspective I really struggle how that information would be valuable or what you'd do with it other than emailing that person outright to taunt them about their fucked up feet and/or dick? (if the goal is to show people certain kinds of content in tiktok's app then certainly you have both the means to do so and plenty of behavioral data to draw up on in the app itself. it's a literal video platform lol.) otoh from a "let's use this data to create advertising segments" perspective then you can easily monetize this info by telling advertisers that you know a guy who's a prime target for ads about podiatry treatments or whatever, in which case advertisers are more eager to spend money on ads because they think they're talking to a relevant audience. and in that case advertisers don't really care what the guy's name or email is, just that he ticks certain boxes that make him a worthwhile use of ad dollars. and even in cases where bad actors do want more specific data for shady purposes, it's pretty difficult to collect it and even harder to propagate it across different platforms; one thing I think gets overlooked a lot with cambridge analytica in particular is that it happened on a platform where users willingly share their full name, birthday, gender, relationship status, political leanings, job title, etc. outright, and then create connections between other people who also willingly share all that info. in some ways I don't think it could've happened anywhere but facebook, because this is a situation where you really didn't have to squeeze anything out of users—they just came out and told you! (it's also part of why non-shady facebook ads are so lucrative; you don't have to guesstimate audience data when you can literally just specify that certain ads should only be shown to people whose profile says they're between the ages of 35 and 55.) and as far as I'm aware tiktok just does not have anything remotely approaching that kind of profile data.
anyway lol. as far as I can tell I think this is a GDPR-y consent issue first and foremost, which will probably turn into a thorny battle over whether tiktok can/will be held to EU data standards or similar statues with a good helping of Chinese Company Bad mixed in for good measure. also side note but remember the whole thing about tiktok data transparency but the american company they put in charge of it is fucking oracle?
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dilemmaontwolegs · 11 months
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Already Gone || MV1 {3}
Pairing: Max Verstappen x spy!fem!reader Summary: Max learns more truths about you and he is faced with a tough decision Warnings: criminal activities, angst, panic attack WC: 2.2k
F1 Masterlist || One || Two || Three || Four
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The handcuffs had been traded for cable ties that were far more irritating on your wrists, and far harder to escape from. The hours had passed by painfully slowly from where you lay on the cold concrete floor of the empty room you had been shoved into. 
Every once in a while you would hear Max’s voice raise in anger before a door slammed and he would disappear once again. 
It was the waiting that was the worst. Perhaps it would have been easier if they had just handed you over to the police, at least then you knew what to expect. But this waiting for the unknown to occur left you exhausted.
You didn’t even have the energy to sit up when the door creaked open, though you should have tried if you were to come up with an escape plan. Not even the narrow window, that was out of your reach, let in enough light to see where they were keeping you. The only way out was the door.
“You must be freezing,” Max said quietly as he unzipped his jacket and shrugged it off to drape it over your body. 
It smelled like his cologne and held his warmth. “Why are you being nice to me?” 
“Because I’m a fucking idiot apparently.”
You chuckled at his misplaced humour and sat up, hugging your knees to your chest for warmth as you pulled his jacket around you the best you could. “Y/N,” you murmured as you rested your chin on your knees and watched him lean against the doorway. “That’s my name.”
His eyebrows raised in surprise. “Is that meant to make everything better?”
“No,” you sighed and closed your eyes. “I just don’t want there to be any more lies between us.”
“Not us, you,” he corrected. “I never lied to you.” He looked out the door before stepping inside and closing it behind him, his finger flipping the light switch on the wall. You knew just how thin the door was but it gave him the semblance of privacy as he slid down the wall and mirrored your position. “Why did you do this? Why me?”
You couldn’t look at him as his broken voice became a weapon that cleaved deep into your chest. But you owed him the truth, it was the least you could do. 
“Because I was paid to. It was just a job. It was meant to be just a job.” You fell silent as he absorbed the truth. “I fucked it up when I, when I fell for you.”
He swallowed deeply at the admission and it only seemed to hurt him more as his eyes turned down to his fidgeting hands. “Who hired you?”
“Does it matter?” You shrugged and tested the strength of the cable ties again, the plastic cutting into your wrists enough to almost draw blood before you gave up. “What’s done is done.”
“Of course it matters.”
You looked up from the thin crease dented on your wrists and pinned him with a stare he held. “Even if sharing that information could get me killed?” 
A flash of concern caught you by surprise before he shut down and laughed instead. “That’s a bit dramatic.”
“Is it?” You challenged him with an arched eyebrow. “Why does your boss have his own little black site? Why not hand me over to the police and let them investigate it? I’ll tell you, Max. Because this is a billion dollar business we are talking about and every team that wants to win has played dirty to get there.”
“Bullshit.”
It was your turn to laugh at his nativity but it turned to a wince as the bitter smile split your swollen lip. “My employer would kill me to protect their investment without losing a wink of sleep. They’ve already threatened me for taking too long to finish things.”
You tenderly wiped the blood away with the back of your but more quickly welled at the cut as Max pushed himself up and left the room. 
“Here, let me,” he said softly as he returned and knelt in front of you with a damp cloth. “Just don’t break my nose.”
A snort escaped before you could stop it and his lips twitched as he fought back a smile. The moment didn’t last as you pushed his hand away and took the cloth yourself. 
“I don’t want to hurt you, Max.”
He sat back on his heels and his shoulders slumped. “I think we are past that.”
You nodded because there wasn’t anything you could say to that. You had done more than hurt him, you had broken his trust and that would take longer to fix than a simple broken heart.
“I know I have no right to ask for a favour,” you started and flinched when he pinned you with a stare that agreed wholeheartedly. “Can you take Achilles when I’m gone?”
He crossed his arms as he looked down his nose at you. “Where do you think you are going?”
You pushed off the ground and paced the room as the walls suddenly felt narrower with your impending fate. “People like me don’t go to jail, Max. We disappear by choice or…not by choice. Either way, I don’t want him being abandoned again. Just please say you’ll take him. Please, Max?” 
Your chest was aching and you rubbed furiously at the sensation you hadn’t felt since you were a child. Your breaths were rapid and shallow, your vision dimming as you slid down the wall furthest from him as he took a step closer. “Please…”
Max took another step, his hand reaching for you as you looked up with tears in your eyes. He stopped himself before he could touch you, his hand falling limp at his side and he nodded before backing away to the door. “I’ll take care of him.”
The snap of the bolt locking the door behind him snapped you from the panic that had gripped your lungs and it took a moment to remember you weren’t young and defenceless anymore. You had survived greater odds before and you would do it again.
Ten Minutes Earlier “What happens now?” Max asked Christian who was sitting with Brett and two other men he didn’t recognise, one nursing a bloody broken nose beneath an ice pack.
“We find out who she really is and who employed her,” Brett answered as he typed on your laptop, lines of code filling the screen as he tried to access the hard drive.
Max looked at Christian, ignoring the man who was clearly employed to be more than just a chauffeur. “You knew and you didn’t tell me.”
“Look, Max, it’s not that simple,” Christian said as he stood and guided Max away from the others. “We started to suspect someone was stealing information at the start of the season but we didn’t know who.”
“What made you think it was her?” he asked, mentally running through every moment of your relationship as he tried to see the signs. All he saw were the memories of a happy couple in love.
“She never wanted the publicity, she had access to our building-”
“I invited her, she never asked,” Max interjected.
“She played you. She’s still playing you. I’m sorry but it’s not the first time this has happened. We run serious background checks on every employee for this very reason.” Christian ran a hand down his tired face and mumbled, “Now we need to add significant others to the list too.”
“Fuck,” Brett growled as failed yet again to break through the firewall. “This is taking too long.”
“We don’t have time, videos of what happened at the train station are already going viral,” Christian stated coldly. “We need to know who she is. Max, go and talk to her, see what you can get her to disclose.”
“What the fuck? I’m not James Bond. Just call the police, isn’t that their job?”
Christian scratched his beard nervously. “Strictly speaking, it’s best for everyone if they aren’t involved. I’m sure you can understand how bad that would be for the sport.”
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“Y/N Y/L/N,” Brett broke the silence as Max sat alone with his head in his hands. He had relayed every piece of information he knew about you and it had been enough to identify you.“Parents unknown, bounced around a dozen foster homes before ageing out of the system and then nothing. No social media presence, no bank accounts, nada. She’s a ghost.”
Max’s head had snapped up as he remembered the tears in your eyes when you begged him to take Achilles. “She’s an orphan.” 
He had witnessed your panic attack at the thought of the kitten being abandoned. He may not have known what was real and what wasn’t in your relationship but his gut told him the fear for the kitten’s safety certainly was. Or, maybe it was what the kitten represented - another little creature left to fend for itself. 
The rage he had been holding within receded at what he realised and he regretted leaving you in that state. His father had instilled into his very core that Verstappen’s do not give up. But that was what he had done when he left the room you were all but caged in.
“Makes sense, no one would care if her work finally caught up with her,” Brett shrugged callously and Max’s hands turned to fists. 
“What is that supposed to mean?” he asked as he stood to his full height and Christian stood up too.
“Nothing, he didn’t mean anything,” the principal said calmly after sending a glare Brett’s way. “Why don’t you take a walk and get some air?”
Max narrowed his eyes at Brett’s back before heading to the kitchen and grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge on his way outside where the chilly night air cooled his burning cheeks. The moonless night meant the stars were all that illuminated the sky and not even the glow of the city on the horizon could dim their lights twinkling above. 
These were the nights you would beg him to go for a ride on your Harley, holding him tightly as he took the mountain roads to the peaks. When he parked at the top you would throw your arms up in the air as if you could pluck one right out of the sky and make a wish. He had never seen anything more beautiful than the smile that came with those midnight rides.
“What the fuck are am I doing?” he asked himself as he slipped back inside.
“What are you doing?” Christian asked as Max sauntered through the living room and towards the door with the large deadbolt attached. 
“Pretty sure even prisoners get food and water,” Max snapped as he continued on his way. You were still where he had left you, only now the tears had dried on your cheeks. “I thought you might be hungry.”
He took a seat in front of you and placed the plate of food on the floor before reaching under his shirt. “Don't make a sound,” he warned as pulled out a steak knife that had been tucked into his belt. You held back a hiss of pain as the cable ties bit into your wrists but the pressure released when they snapped apart with one last cut.
Max stared at the angry lines on your skin but this time he couldn’t stop himself from taking hold of your hand and brushing his thumb over the marks. “You have to go, Y/N,” he said as he stood up and reached the window to open it as wide as it could go.
You couldn’t breathe for a moment as you heard your real name on his lips, the sound so sweet you wished you could hear it again. “Why?” you asked when you recovered and rubbed at your wrists before pulling his jacket on properly. 
“Because I have to believe it wasn’t all a lie, liefje.” He cupped your face in his hand and stared into your soul as he searched your eyes for the truth. “But maybe I’m just making another mistake.”
You caught his hand before he could pull it back and you tipped your cheek into the warmth, savouring the roughness of the calluses on his palm. “This would be easier if it was all a lie, but it wasn’t. I didn’t know love until I knew you.”
You sighed and dropped his hand before the threat of tears stole your vision. His hands gripped your waist and he lifted you up to the window sill, helping keep you steady as you took a seat on it.
“You need to hit me,” he said with a thick lilt in his accent. “Make it believable.”
“Never change,” you whispered as you leaned down and indulged in his kiss one last time. Salt invaded your taste as the tears broke free and his eyes closed as he deepened the kiss and waited for the pain to come.
You couldn’t hurt him, not after all you had done already.
He didn’t notice your fingers tightening from where they had clung to his collar. He didn’t fight your hands climbing the thick column of his throat or feel his consciousness fading as you blocked the blood flowing to his head and he slipped down the wall to sleep for a few minutes while you disappeared into the night. 
“I love you, Max.”
Click here for part four.
Tagging: @octaviareina @omgsuperstarg @mvclff1 @alwaysclassyeagle @icantcomeupwithamusicalname-blog
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To save the news, ban surveillance ads
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Tonight (May 31) at 6:30PM, I’m at the MANCHESTER Waterstones with my novel Red Team Blues, hosted by Ian Forrester.
Tomorrow (Jun 1), I’m giving the Peter Kirstein Lecture for UCL Computer Science in LONDON.
Then it’s Edinburgh, London, and Berlin!
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Big Tech steals from the news, but what it steals isn’t content — it steals money. That matters, because if we create pseudo-copyrights over the facts of the news, or headlines, or snippets to help news companies bargain with tech companies, we make the news partners with the tech companies, rather than watchdogs.
How does tech steal money from the news? Lots of ways! One important one: tech steals ad revenue. 51% of every ad dollar gets gobbled up by tech companies — primarily the cozy, collusive ad-tech duopoly of Google/Facebook (AKA Googbook). If we can shatter the market power of the concentrated ad-tech industry, news companies would go back to getting 80–90% of the ad revenue their reporting generated, which would pay for more reporting.
There’s lots to like about fixing ads. For one thing, a fair ad marketplace would benefit all news reporting, not just the largest news companies — which are dominated by private equity-backed chains and right-wing billionaires who have repeatedly shown that any additional revenues will go to pay shareholders, not more reporters. Fair ads would also provide an income for reporters who strike out on their own, covering local politics or specific beats, without making themselves sharecroppers for Big Media.
One way to fix ads would be to break up the ad-tech “stacks.” Googbook both operate impossibly conflicted ad-placement businesses in which they bargain with themselves on behalf of both advertisers and publishers, with the winners always being the tech companies. The AMERICA Act from Senator Mike Lee would force ad giants to divest themselves of business units that create conflicts of interest. It’s popular, bipartisan legislation — and I do mean bipartisan; its backers include Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz! I wrote about the AMERICA Act and the role it will play in saving news from tech for EFF’s Deeplinks Blog last week:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech
This week, I’ve got a followup on Deeplinks about another important way to unrig the ad market: banning surveillance ads:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising
Even if we break up the ad-tech stacks, ads will still be bad for the news — and for the public. That’s because the dominant form of digital ads is “behavioral advertising” — the ad-tech sector’s polite euphemism for ads based on spying. You know these ads: you search for shoes and then every website you land on is plastered in shoe ads.
Surveillance ads require a massive, multi-billion-dollar surveillance dragnet, one that tracks you as you physically move through the world, and digitally, as you move through the web. Your apps, your phone and your browser are constantly gathering data on your activities to feed the ad-tech industry.
This data is incredibly dangerous. There’s so much of it, and it’s so loosely regulated, that every spy, cop, griefer, stalker, harasser, and identity thief can get it for pennies and use it however they see fit. The ad-tech industry poses a risk to protesters, to people seeking reproductive care, to union organizers, and to vulnerable people targeted by scammers.
Ad-tech maintains the laughable pretense that all this spying is consensual, because you clicked “I agree” on some garbage-novella of impenatrable legalese that no one — not even the ad-tech companies’ lawyers — has ever read from start to finish. But when people are given a real choice to opt out of digital spying, they do. Apple gave Ios users a one-click opt-out of in-app tracking and 96% of users clicked it (the other 4% must have been confused — or on Facebook’s payroll). The decision cost Facebook $10b in the first year. You love to see it:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/facebook-says-apple-ios-privacy-change-will-cost-10-billion-this-year.html
But here’s the real punchline: Apple blocked Facebook from spying on its customers, but Apple kept spying on them, just as invasively as Facebook had, in order to target them with Apple’s own ads:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
The thing that stops companies from spying on us isn’t the strength of their character, it’s the discipline imposed by regulation and competition — the fear that they’ll get fined more than they make from spying, and the fear that they’ll lose so much business from spying that they’ll end up in the red.
Which is why we need a legal ban on ads, not mere platitudes on billboards advertising companies’ “respect” for our privacy. The US is way overdue for a federal privacy law with a private right of action, which would let you and me sue the companies who violated it, even if no public prosecutor was willing to go to bat for us:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy
A privacy law that required companies to get your affirmative, enthusiastic, ongoing, specific, informed consent to gather and process your personal data would end surveillance ads forever. Despite the self-serving nonsense the ad-tech industry serves up about people “liking relevant ads,” no one wants to be spied on. 96% of Ios users don’t lie.
A ban on surveillance ads wouldn’t just serve the public, it would also save the news. The alternative to surveillance ads is context ads: ads based on what a reader is reading, rather than what that reader was doing. Context-based ad marketplaces ask, “What am I bid for this Pixel 6 user in Boise who is reading about banana farming?” instead of “What am I bid for this 22 year old man who recently searched for information about suicidal ideation and bankruptcy protection?”
Context ads perform a little worse than surveillance ads — by about 5%:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/29/taken-in-context/#creep-me-not
So presumably advertisers won’t pay as much for context ads as they do for behavioral targeting. But that doesn’t mean that the news will lose money. Because context ads favor publishers over ad-tech platforms — no publisher will ever know as much about internet users as spying ad-tech giants do, but no tech company will ever know as much about a publisher’s content as the publisher does.
Behavioral ad marketplaces have high barriers to entry, requiring troves of surveillance data on billions of internet users. They are naturally anticompetitive and able to command a much higher share of each ad dollar than a contextual ad service (which would have much more competiition) could.
On top of that: if behavioral advertising was limited to people who truly consented to it, 96% of users would never see an ad!
So contextual ads will show up for more users, and more of the money they generate will land in news publishers’ pockets. If context ads fetch less money per ad, the losses will be felt by ad-tech companies, not publishers.
Finally: publishers who join the fight against surveillance ads won’t be alone — they’ll be joining with a massive, popular movement against commercial surveillance. The news business is — and always has been — a niche subject, of burning interest to publishers, reporters, and a small minority of news junkies. The news on its own is a small fry in policy debates. But when it comes to killing surveillance ads, the news has a class alliance with the mass movement for privacy, and together, they’re a force to reckon with.
My article on killing surveillance ads is part three of an ongoing, five-part series for EFF on how we save the news from tech. The introduction, which sets out the whole series, is here:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech
The final two parts will come out over the next two weeks, and then we’re going to publish the whole thing as a PDF that suitable for sharing. Watch this space!
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Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Manchester, Edinburgh, London, and Berlin!
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[Image ID: EFF's banner for the save news series; the word 'NEWS' appears in pixelated, gothic script in the style of a newspaper masthead. Beneath it in four entwined circles are logos for breaking up ad-tech, ending surveillance ads, opening app stores, and end-to-end delivery. All the icons except for 'ending surveillance ads' are greyed out.]
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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/31/context-ads/#class-formation
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Image: EFF https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising
CC BY 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
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