We’re just waking up to this Facebook hangover. The first impulse will be for quick fixes, and I’m sure some of those will be helpful. But the real work to getting sober means reimagining the entire privacy-exploiting advertisement industry. It’s your job to keep up the pressure so that actually happens. Don’t just swear off Facebook for a week, then go back to your bender ways.
David H. Hansson, on Medium
Thousands of third party apps were designed solely to obtain and sell your data. It’s no surprise that the data ended up being used again on Facebook, one of the biggest advertising platforms on Earth.
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Jason Koebler on the pages of Vice’s Motherboard is making one of the best analysis – in my opinion – of the Cambridge Analytica / Facebook scandal roaring up in these days.
If you’re getting worried by the tracking moves of giant corporations… well, seems you’re not alone!
Today I’ve discovered this repo on GitHub by Jonathan Dugan proving blocklists
A group project to catalog and list domain names that people may want to block.
Current focus on corporations, for which there are no other maintained lists.
Files in this project list the domain names of servers, one per line that can be added to your local hosts file to tell your computer to never talk to servers on that domain name.
Editing your hosts file with the infos provided in this directory you’ll stop any kind of tracking made by those Corporations with their services to your machine.
At the moment I don’t think I’ll try this on a production machine, but for sure I’ll try to see what the world seems like with this approach on a test machine. I’ll update this post when the experiment will be done. In the meantime, if you try, could you please share your experience? Thanks!
Our world is increasingly mediated by the internet, and that internet has just a few gatekeepers, collecting tolls as we browse. As Python guru Matt Harrison put it, “Vendors control the default browser which 99.9% of people use.” Those vendors are happy to sell us access to information. Nothing about it is free.
A nice article by Matt Asay about Mozilla’s role to be our bulwark against the the closure of the web…
And please regulate, regulate, regulate this industry, while you can.
Maciej Cegłowski
Nicola D’Agostino linked to me to the text version of Maciej Ceglowski talk given on May 10, 2017, at the re:publica conference in Berlin.
Worth every second the time you’ll need to read this … especially if, like me, you live in Europe, and then share it everywhere you can!
