Airlines Don’t Want You to Know They Sold Your Flight Data to DHS
https://www.wired.com/story/airlines-dont-want-you-to-know-they-sold-your-flight-data-to-dhs/

#privacy #ice #databroker #dhs #surveillancecaptalism #surveillance #dataprivacy #airline #airlines #americanairlines #deltaairlines #unitedairlines

Sent an email to the CEO of eBay today. He'll probably never read it but hopefully you will!

Subject: I have a driving license, a passport and a balding head

Message: Dear Jamie,

I am a hard working tradesman. I come home everyday dirty, tired and little less healthy but there are things one needs to do and the pay is OK.

Today at lunch break I found a tool on your website that could make my job a bit easier and more efficient. It's not cheap, so I pondered a lot and I felt a bit guilty for giving in to the temptation, but then I though: "It's for work, you can spend money on work stuff".

So I braced at the idea of spending almost £400 and pressed the "buy it now" button. I got told that I needed to verify my age because the tool contains a blade. Fair enough, gotta keep the kids safe. To my surprise, the only option to proceed was to provide credit card details. I do not own a credit card. My mother always told me to not spend money that I don't have.

I have a driving license, a passport and a balding head to prove that I'm an adult but no credit card. I believe a real adult plans ahead and doesn't need one.

So I contacted your customer support. A large language model asked me how it could help and I explained the issue. As these things do, it got confused and told me about ways to pay for the item, so I requested to talk to a human.

This human, I presume an underpaid worker in some South East Asian country, told me he was going to try and help with alternatives, beat around the bush for 15mn, using extremely polite sentences but never really answering the simple question: "Are there alternatives to using a credit card for age verification on eBay". All he did was ask me for the item's number, then explained to me that the item was age restricted because it contains a blade and that the only way to buy it was to provide a credit card number. I tried to keep my composure for as long as possible but, sadly, I eventually failed.

I failed because these seemingly insignificant issues make up the reality that us normal people experience. It is chinese water torture. Each droplet barely exists, but the accumulation is unbearable.

I just wanted to buy a tool, so I could be more efficient at playing a role I don't really want to play in a system I don't really want to exist into, for no real gain but affording to exist until dusts and nasty chemicals take me away just before retirement like my father and my step father. Instead, I'll have to do without the tool, and I was mean to a stranger in a poor country.

I am not sure why I emailed you. I guess, I just thought you should know.

Robin

#ebay #carpenter #surveillancecaptalism

I feel conflicted with Meta AI research.
On the one hand, I disapprove of basically anything Facebook or Instagram, as much as I do not like many LeCun stances or how he presents them.
On the other hand I've found much research on deep learning to be interesting and even ethical.
If I were in highschool I'd be very excited with their MEG image decoder, instead now it excites me more or less like a MEG classifier whose outputs prompt Stable Diffusion/Midjourney/DALL-E.... I cannot find it very interesting and I don't even know if it's just more skepticism and knowledge, or the uneasy feeling of seeing a company whose business model is surveillance capitalism + enshittification suggesting they can now directly surveil the brain (although they can't).

#meta #deeplearning #facebook #enshittification #surveillancecaptalism #meg #neuroscience

Amazon, #AMZN, lets users buy alcohol with its palm-scanning payment system, per CNBC

Because scanning your palm is just what we need #surveillancecaptalism #surveillance #Privacy