The Pains is what a monk experiences when another soul is about to go bad. The head of a religion’s founder is still talking. A punk professor in an authoritarian USA. The last part of a trilogy, Mind over Matter, of separate but connected and overlapping stories.
Tag: surveillance
Surveillance Under Surveillance
Open Street Map has the option to add the location, type and viewing angle of surveillance cameras.
Peter wrote about adding the cameras in his neighbourhood to the map, and says ‘we didn’t have to walk far‘ to add 47 cameras, including his own door bell. Cameras are added to Open Street Map but not shown in the usual map interfaces. The Open Street Map wiki does list a number of projects that render this information. These projects have different areas of focus and different selection criteria for information included it seems. One of them that seems most comprehensive is Surveillance Under Surveillance.
It shows about 3500 cameras listed in the Netherlands, surely a tiny fraction of the total.
And only a handful in my city, none in my neighbourhood. Again, a low number far from reality.
This reminds of a game that, I think Kars Alfrink and/or Alper Çuğun conceptualised, where you had to reach a destination in Amsterdam avoiding the views of the cameras along the way. It also reminds me how a former colleague had some basic camera detection device in his car years ago that became useless as surveillance cameras at private homes increased in numbers. It detected not just speeding camera signals, but also all those other cameras. At some point driving down a residential street, especially in more affluent neighbourhoods, the warning noises the device made were constant.
I’ll be on the lookout for cams in our area. There are I know two in our court yard (one on our frontdoor, not connected though, and one on a neighbour’s frontdoor).
Suggested Reading: GDPR, PSI Directive, Q and more
Some links I thought worth reading the past few days
- A brief overview of how the GDPR and EU PSI-Directive interplay : The PSI directive and GDPR – European Data Portal
- Some discussion on how blockchain and GDPR go together. Says it’s not about the tech but about use case implementation. That emphasises my position that GDPR is a quality assurance tool, not a gate with a sign ‘forbidden’ : EU Blockchain Forum says blockchain, GDPR compatible – Ledger Insights
- A statement like “Therefore, our primary focus is to get millions of Q members registered” makes this initiative sound very spammy and pyramid like, banking like they do on FOMO. Having everyone wait for whatever they plan until they have millions of users is an odd way of getting those users. Why not have something of value now, so that it brings users in? Anyway I have an account, and you are invited. More info on: Initiative Q
- An old posting, although still worth reading (about the need for your own webspace if only to tinker) mostly bookmarked because of the still very useful video of Amber Case outlining the reasoning behind the IndieWeb (independent web): The IndieWeb, Revolution, and Other Reasons You Should Learn to Code
- In terms of privacy it really is not a good idea to use smart home devices that have a centralised web service / data store behind them: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google’s Nest To Hand Over Data 300 Times
New York Irony – AdTech and Privacy
Does the New York Times see the irony? This article talks about how US Congress should look much less at the privacy terms of big tech, and more at the actual business practices.
Yet it calls upon me to disable my ad blocker. The ad blocker that blocks 28 ads in a single article, all served by a Google advertisement tracker. One which one of my browsers flags as working the same way as cross site scripting attacks work.
If as you say adverts are at the core of your business model, making journalism possible, why do you outsource it?
I’m ok with advertising New York Times, but not with adtech. There’s a marked difference between the two. It’s adtech, not advertising, that does the things you write about, like “how companies can use our data to invisibly shunt us in directions” that don’t benefit us. And adtech is the reason that, as you the say, the “problem is unfettered data exploitation and its potential deleterious consequences.” I’m ok with a newspaper running their own ads. I’m not ok with the New York Times behaving like a Trojan horse, pretending to be a newspaper but actually being a vehicle for, your own words, the “surveillance economy”.
Until then my ad blocker stays.
My browser blocking 28 ads (see the address bar) on a single article, all from 1 Google ad tracker.