There’s no way that saving 10% of the world while destroying 90% of it turns into anything close to a net positive.
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My purpose in writing this isn’t to make you feel bad. You obviously already do. As my grandfather once told me, you don’t need to push a stone that’s rolling downhill. My purpose in writing this is to give you good news. And here it is. If you are looking to make a difference in the world, you are already in the place you need to be. You don’t need to go anywhere else.
Mike Monteiro
Category Archives: on the Web
Let’s stop shaking people down for their email addresses
If you have something to say, say it. If you have something to share, share it. Don’t invent things to say or to share just such that you can package up that pink slime as a golden nugget of truth to trade for someone’s contact information.
That’s the same insincere, manipulative logic behind influencer marketing. It’s all about disguising the sale with a thin, flimsy layer of purchased credibility. No wonder we’re all so skeptical and cynical these days. Because we have a million good A/B-optimized reasons to be.
Not everything needs to be tracked. Not everything needs to pay off. It’s perfectly fine to do things because it’s fun, feels good, is interesting, tickles your brain, or just helps someone out.
DAVID HEINEMEIER HANSSON
Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side
Perona views Google’s use of reCaptcha as an “online land grab” that strengthens Google’s hold over the internet. He thinks reCaptcha is similar in this way to other Google products like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), a program to make news sites’ pages load faster on mobile devices but has caused some consternation from publishers over whether Google is taking web traffic away from news sites. Same goes for Google Chrome, which the Washington Post recently called “surveillance software” (I’m among those who have ditched Chrome for Firefox).
“It’s always a double-edged sword,” Perona says. “You gain something, but you’re also giving Google a little more control over everything online.” The gain is security and a better user experience, but privacy may suffer.
Katharine Schwab, Fast Company
The latest version of the bot detector reCaptcha is invisible to users and has spread to more than 650,000 websites. It’s great for security—but not so great for your privacy.
personal progress
We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.
Carl Sagan
Why I’m done with Chrome
This post has gone on more than long enough, but before I finish I want to address two common counterarguments I’ve heard from people I generally respect in this area.
One argument is that Google already spies on you via cookies and its pervasive advertising network and partnerships, so what’s the big deal if they force your browser into a logged-in state? One individual I respect described the Chrome change as “making you wear two name tags instead of one”. I think this objection is silly both on moral grounds — just because you’re violating my privacy doesn’t make it ok to add a massive new violation — but also because it’s objectively silly. Google has spent millions of dollars adding additional tracking features to both Chrome and Android. They aren’t doing this for fun; they’re doing this because it clearly produces data they want.
The other counterargument (if you want to call it that) goes like this: I’m a n00b for using Google products at all, and of course they were always going to do this. The extreme version holds that I ought to be using lynx+Tor and DJB’s custom search engine, and if I’m not I pretty much deserve what’s coming to me.
I reject this argument. I think It’s entirely possible for a company like Google to make good, usable open source software that doesn’t massively violate user privacy. For ten years I believe Google Chrome did just this.
Why they’ve decided to change, I don’t know. It makes me sad.
Matthew Green
