#personal privacy

This is actually a very real and serious issue.

If you, or your company, are using now or have used OpenAI services for any reason, you need to cancel or stop that service immediately. OpenAI cannot guarantee your privacy when there is an open court case that seeks to extract from OpenAI chat logs that could contain potentially sensitive information - and they want more.

Everyday conservatives are tightening their strangle hold on personal privacy rights and you need to be doing everything in your power to push back, side step, and skirt the rules as often as you can.

"But I don't interact with [insert "bad" thing here]"

Well I have news for you- if you aren't a white able bodied evangelical christian conservative - you are a target to these people. To these people "degenerates" are anyone who doesn't fall in line with the way they think. They have- and will continue- to move the goal post of what is considered "pornographic" and "obscene" to include anything THEY find to be obscene. This includes discussions medical information they don't like- like gender affirming care, public health data, vaccines. This includes discussions of climate change. It includes discussions of race. It includes any kind of talk of queerness or trans identities. Hell, it includes talking about women's accomplishments.

It doesn't matter that you don't like porn or problematic ships, if you don't think immigrants should be rounded up and put in prisons or that trans people should be allowed to exist or that maybe we shouldn't be prosecuting women who have miscarriages for murder, and you SAY that on the internet, you are an enemy to these people. And they want to be able to know who you are. That's why state like Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, and my own state of Indiana are trying to force people to upload their id to access certain sites and apps.

I know a lot of people reading this may think I sound like an alarmist, but I work in a public library in a conservative state. Every day we are getting requests to remove books from shelves for being "obscene". These are books that have two people of the same gender on the cover. Books that have medical and health information in them and therefore depict nude bodies. Books about intimacy at any age. Books that criticize the government or the christian church. Not just in our physical building, but in our digital collections as well.

At this time, there are no state laws that require us to remove those books but there is a danger of that happening. The one good news for libraries is, this has happened before, and that's why most libraries no longer keep a recorded history of the books people check out. But nation wide, library funding has been slashed. Conservative governor's are trying to tighten the leash of what we can allow in our collections in order to push their narrative of the information people should be allowed to access. And as more people turn to the internet for answers, the same people who want to get ride of libraries want to censor the internet too.

So I'm pleading with you, don't make it easy for them. Protecting your personal privacy is one of the best things you can do to fight censorship. Do not submit to putting your real face and government name on your internet presence. Do not submit to being tracked. Do not submit to being followed, surveilled, and advertised to. Do not let conservative politicians and the companies that pay their lobbyists decide what private citizens should be allowed to read, watch, listen to, or talk about. Do not follow their asinine rules designed to make people to scared to access the information and content they want to.

But a kid found it and showed it to the principal.

For the next year and a half or so I'll be studying cyber security, so I may be annoying by posting little bits of info here and there about internet safety and the like.

A lot of times, the easiest way to hack an account of any type is not even with a computer. It's just by talking to people with casual conversation or what I like to call "hairdresser talk". You know, the type of talk you'd have with a hairdresser. They'd ask about your day, your family, your pets, birthdays, recent events in your life. And it seems nice, to talk about your day, because in some way, we all want someone to care about our lives.

But, that type of talk lets you just give away your entire life. What are some of your recovery questions on your account? First pet? Mom's maiden name? School? Year you graduated? Sound familiar?

This is a very simplified example of what I'm talking about. It's really easy to impersonate someone or someone who might be related to the target - like a friend, family, or co-worker. If you call a tech rep with a sense of urgency and state that so and so isn't able to confirm changes and you need access to act on their behalf, more often than not, you'd actually be able to do it with a little knowledge about the person you're targeting.

Reports in technology media say that Twitter is considering implementing a digital ID for users, which would require those enrolling to provide the platform with a government-issued ID and a selfie.  Users who pay to join get Blue-check status would be targeted for the new feature.

If you don’t want your personal data being accessed, be careful about the digital doors you leave open to it.

It’s not without good reason that an increasing number of government agencies have banned TikTok on their devices.

Financial Times journalist Cristina Criddle had personal data being tracked and observed via a TikTok account she had in the name of her cat named Buffy.

TikTok has confirmed members of its internal audit department looked at the location of Cristina's IP address - the unique number of a device - and compared it with the IP data of an unknown number of their own staff, to try to establish who was secretly meeting with the press. They "misused their authority" to do this and were acting unauthorised.

Cristina does not know for how long she was tracked, or how often, but she does know it happened last summer.

"If my location was being monitored 24/7, that's not just limited to my actions at work - which wouldn't be OK even if it was - but this was in my personal life as well," she says. It was when I was out with my friends, when I was going on holiday, all of that stuff's in there.

"The real threat and the real chilling thing is that I was just trying to do my job."

If you’re a journalist who relies on the confidentiality of news sources, being monitored is a danger to your profession and to the sources themselves.

Western users' data is never accessed or stored inside China, it says. And the staff responsible for the data breach of Cristina and a handful of other Western journalists, last year, were fired for misconduct.

TikTok owner Bytedance said it "deeply regrets" what was "significant violation" of its code of conduct and was "committed to ensuring this never happens again".  

Well, that’s nice of them. But if it can happen once then it can certainly happen again. And this was probably not the first time it happened.

Cristina kept her account because it may be necessary to access the platform for her work. But she has limited it to one isolated device.

For now, Cristina has kept her account open because she still needs to be able to access TikTok for work - but the app now lives on a dummy handset kept at her workplace. And she has curtailed both her own and Buffy's social-media use across other platforms as a result of what happened.

"I have really had to think about my safety - mostly my digital safety," she says.

"I'm super-careful now. I have to make sure that there is no chance that my devices are being tracked. I have to make sure that my sources are aware of the possible challenges to their safety as well."

Somebody at the platform did not simply accidentally dig into the account of Buffy the Cat. 

Cyber-security expert Prof Alan Woodward, from Surrey University, said this level of tracking "cannot be described as accidental or even incidental".

"Someone had to do some extra digging to work out that the cat account was in fact Cristina," he said.

TikTok is fighting for survival in the US and there is restricted access to it on official devices in several other countries. ByteDance is headquartered in Beijing - although, it also has offices in Europe and the US - and there are concerns it could share Western users' data with the Chinese state if requested.