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Increasingly, surveillance is being normalized and integrated in our lives. Under the guise of convenience, applications and features are sold to us as being the new better way to do things. While some might be useful, this convenience is a Trojan horse. The cost of it is the continuous degradation of our privacy rights, with all that that entails.

As appalling as it is, the truth is the vast majority of software companies do not consider privacy rights and data minimization practices strongly enough, if at all. Most fail to implement the principles of Privacy by Design that should guide development from the start.

Whether this comes from ignorance, incompetence, greed, or malicious intent can be debated. It matters little, because the result is the same: Technologies collecting (and monetizing) a shameful amount of data from everyone.

This horrifying trend ends up facilitating and normalizing surveillance in our daily lives. It is the opposite direction of where we should be going.

The more we accept this normalized surveillance, the harder it becomes to fight back. It is critical that we firmly and loudly object to this banalized invasion of our privacy.

There are countless examples of this growing issue, but for now let's focus on three of them: Airport face scans, parking apps, and AI assistants.

In December 1993, the New York Times published an article about the “limitless opportunity” of the early internet. It painted a picture of a digital utopia: clicking a mouse to access NASA weather footage, Clinton’s speeches, MTV’s digital music samplers, or the status of a coffee pot at Cambridge University.

It was a simple vision—idealistic, even—and from our vantage point three decades later, almost hopelessly naive.

We can still do all these things, of course, but the “limitless opportunity" of today's internet has devolved into conflict, hate, bots, AI-generated spam and relentless advertising. Face-swap apps allow anyone to create nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation propagated online hampered the COVID-19 public health response, and Google’s AI search summaries now recommend we eat glue and rocks.

The promise of the early web—a space for connection, creativity, and community—has been overshadowed by corporate interests, algorithmic manipulation, and the commodification of our attention.

But the heart of the internet—the people who built communities, shared knowledge, and created art—has never disappeared. If we’re to reclaim the web, to rediscover the good internet, we need to celebrate, learn from, and amplify these pockets of joy.

Source. Thread.

Ireland is the data centre capital of the world with 89 data centres storing your Instagram reels, TikTok dances and endless folders of photos that keep us connected in the digital world.

Data goliaths like this are at the centre of the rise in AI, with every ChatGPT prompt or AI-generated image requiring huge amounts of data to be processed.

But why should you care?

Because data centres have a major environmental cost too.

In order to keep social media scrolling, data centres use huge numbers of backup and emergency generators to stay online when the electrical grid can’t provide them with enough power.

Stop Big Tech Complicity in Genocide & Apartheid

Archive.

This kind of cross-platform tracking is unprecedented - and it’s especially surprising coming from two companies that serve billions of users worldwide

• In 2024, Russian drone strikes killed dozens of civilians and injured hundreds more in the city of Kherson, in apparently deliberate or reckless attacks that constitute war crimes.
• The attacks have the apparent purpose of instilling terror in the civilian population in Kherson, part of a widespread attack against that population.
• These attacks underscore the urgency of identifying effective ways to enforce respect for international humanitarian law, including through prosecutions of serious crimes in Ukraine.

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