Dear people in Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Denmark, France and Sweden:
your government is about to squander your #privacy by creating a law forcing scanning of all your app conversations.
https://www.privacyguides.org/newsletters/2025/09/23/the-battle-to-stop-chat-control-continues-act-now/

Fight back!
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

Hello Mastodon!

We’re the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) - a global network of telescopes working together to study black holes and other extreme cosmic phenomena.

In 2019, we captured the first image of a supermassive black hole (M87*), followed in 2022 by Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Follow @ehtelescope for scientific updates, behind-the-scenes looks at our worldwide collaboration, and the latest discoveries from the edge of space and time.

Look, Jeff Atwood, it is difficult to take you seriously when you write authoritatively on a subject you clearly don’t understand.

GDPR doesn’t mandate cookie notices.

Cookie notices are *malicious compliance* by the surveillance-driven adtech industry.

If you’re not tracking people, you do not need a cookie notice, period.

If you’re only using first-party cookies for functional reasons, you do not need a cookie notice, period.

If you’re using third-party cookies to track people – i.e., if you’re sharing their data with others – then *you must have their consent to do so*. Because, otherwise, you are violating their privacy. Even then, the law doesn’t mandate a cookie notice.

How would you conform to EU law without a cookie notice if your aim wasn’t malicious compliance?

You would not track people by default and you would make it so they have to go your site’s settings to turn on third-party tracking if, for some inexplicable reason, they wanted that “feature”.

Boom!

No cookie notice necessary.

What’s that?

But that would destroy your business because your business is founded on the fundamental mechanic of violating people’s privacy?

Good.

Your business doesn’t deserve to exist.

Because the real bullshit here isn’t EU legislation that protects the human right to privacy, it’s the toxic Silicon Valley/Big Tech business model of farming people for data that violates everyone’s privacy and opens the door to technofascism.

https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror/115120175033311443

If you’re in the EU and you opted out of Meta training generative AI on your Facebook, Threads and Instagram posts and pictures, Meta are requiring you to opt out *again* or they will continue training on your data.

Users have until May 27 2025 to opt out again or forever lose the right. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/meta-is-making-users-who-opted-out-of-ai-training-opt-out-again-watchdog-says/

This is the random ass opt out URL, which isn’t advertised in their apps: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/6359191084165019

Instagram opt out: https://help.instagram.com/contact/233964459562201