I do not want your cookies.
I do not want your email.
I do not want your notifications.
I do not want your ads.
I don't need to see your socials,
at least not those of the greedy kind,
And I don't need to see your AI for
whatever you have in mind.

I just wanted to see your website,
What's that, a popup survey?
Oh for fucks sake: never-mind.

Especially now. More than ever. This is the way.

#LGBTQ #Pride #PrideMonth #DontLetFolksRollAlone

I use one dedicated email address per service.

This is a golden rule I started about 20 years ago. Today I have about 700 email addresses in use. The Password Manager keeps track, which Email address is used for which service.

This has several advantages:

• An attacker has no idea which email address I use for a certain service: this makes attacking my accounts a lot more painful
• I can very easily sort incoming email associated with those services
• It becomes more difficult to track me

Lately more and more services do no longer allow me to create an account with an email address I designate.

Instead authentication is delegated to a third party (e.g. Discord, Paypal) and the email address associated with that service is used.

Such a service will never receive any money from me.

If you care at all about whether public bodies, like the NHS, publish the code you paid for, you probably want to take a look at https://keepthingsopen.com

#openSource

When you read about Bans of Social Media for Teens and Age Verification, you must remember what it truly means:

• Official identification of every adult using social media.

• Deanonymization of every account, endangering groups that often rely on pseudonymity for safety, such as victims of domestic violence, victims of stalkers, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people.

• Putting every adult at great danger of exploitation, fraud, and identity theft by forcing them to share their official ID with a for-profit third-party company with no incentive to protect it. Breaches have already happened.

• Constructing a system of mass surveillance to attach every comment on social media to a legal identity. Effectively allowing authoritarian governments to silence their critics and opposition.

• Potential for dystopian censorship and cutting off means of organization for groups of resistance to oppressive regime and organizations.

• Endangering children online by putting a clear identification beacon over every child or family with children online.

• Endangering the data of children who will inevitably try to pass as adults, and have their information collected by the third-party for-profit company.

• Diminishing the value of official identification due to the inevitable data breaches, eventually pushing the system to require even more intrusive identification techniques, such as iris scans and fingerprints.

• Installing a system of mass surveillance capable of attaching even more information to everyone's legal identity. With a potential to built list of people in certain groups, and scale-up state censorship and discrimination in unprecedented ways.

• The list goes on and on.

This isn't about protecting the children.
It never was.

Do not be duped by this excuse used to convince you to let go of your human rights. They are only trying to manipulate people lacking information.

Stay informed on the issues related to Age Verification, and push back for your rights to privacy and democracy.

The future depends on us.

#AgeVerification #Privacy #HumanRights #MassSurveillance #Authoritarianism

From the Anti-Authoritarian Playbook;

“The targeting of trans people - and specifically trans youth and trans women in sports - is not a policy agenda. It is a strategic operation. Understanding it as policy produces the wrong response. Understanding it as strategy produces the right one.

Jason Stanley, in How Fascism Works, identifies the targeting of vulnerable minorities as a core mechanism of authoritarian consolidation. The function is not primarily to harm the targeted group, though that harm is real and intentional. The primary function is to test the solidarity of potential opposition coalitions, to find and exploit the fracture lines, and to establish a precedent: that some members of the coalition can be sacrificed when the political cost of defending them is judged too high.

Every successful authoritarian project has done this. The question it is always asking of the opposition is: is there anyone in your coalition you will abandon to protect the rest? Because if the answer is yes, we know exactly how to proceed. We find that person. We make defending them as costly as possible. And we watch the rest of the coalition either hold together or fracture. If they fracture, we learn where the next fracture line is, and we push there.

The targeting of trans people is not the end of this strategy. It is the test. And what the test is measuring, in real time, is whether LGBTQ organizations, progressive coalitions, and pro-democracy movements will sacrifice their most vulnerable members when the pressure is sufficient.