Eurovision is allowing Israel to participate despite its ongoing genocide against Palestinians.

Boycott Eurovision.

Boycott Eurovision on a local level. Contact your local participating broadcaster and demand that they withdraw from the contest. Pressure representing artists into withdrawing too. Boycott Baileys and MoroccanOil for their support of the contest. Especially if you're from UK, France, Germany, Italy or Spain.

So I've been warning people to not use the tumblr live feature and i had this discussion in the notes of one of the people i warned

said person already used live themselves and was not aware of what all TumblrLive's partner MEETME collects with its feature and i wanted to take the time to make a post going over the privacy policy for anyone who is interested

for the first part here MEETME talks about how creating an account (downloading) (or having a tumblr account that auto updated to include the tumblr live feature (which is a vast majority of the tumblr mobile population in the US rn)) automatically makes any information they collect visible to any of the partners they have

the three partners mentioned there Skout Flurv and Boy Ahoy are all dating sites that promote primarily their location tracking fuck all knows what they want with your live data most likely they want to advertise singles near you??? but MEETME's other current partners are apps like PlentyfFish Zoosk Chispa and Badoo which is Match.com and Bumble

the main important parts to notice from section ii of the privacy policy is the location information limit mobile ad tracking and do not track signals the rest of the section mainly puts the onus of revealing private information that can be used maliciously on the user ie. don't share your password say your full name in a live video where you live etc.

as far as the location information goes what its saying here is that they collect the location information when you first register for tumblr live when you first log in and whenever your phone is on even if youre not using tumblr live

what does it use this information for??? well advertising purposes of course!!!

now they try to get around saying they dont track your location or share it with other users by using this word precise several times now what that means is they have a rough geotag of your location

(your ip address they dont say here its your ip address but in later parts of the document they do in fact say they collect your ip address and if you want an idea how close an ip address can get to your exact location enter your ip address in google maps sometime)

theyre being intentionally vague about that so when you see on the live tab something that says near you you could probably not follow that exactly to said persons house but you can damn well be you will at the very least find their city

heres a reminder to all of you who havent most phones now bury in the settings an option to disable adID do it now!!! but remember that TumblrLive can still use all other information they gather they do not at all process do not track signals so you arent safe there and what data would that be that they can collect other than your location and adID??? glad you asked!!!

this is a non exhaustive list which means there is DEFINITELY other data they collect about and from you

so they collect:

your email and phone number

any info in your tumblr bio

any metadata connected to any photo youve ever uploaded

adID

ip address

cookies and beacon

which devices you use

which features you use

which pages you visit

which chats you use

anything in your private chats or posts

anything from any connected social media accounts

how well ads are doing

what youre interested in

and in some cases even your biometric information

and what do they do with this information???

ads of course

and to give anything they want to cops :)

i dont make this post in order to like ruin peoples fun when it comes to this new feature or to try to talk down to anyone or make anyone feel stupid or anything im not here to make fun of people or belittle anyone but i think its real fucking important people know what privacy rights they are forfeiting by having their phone on right now with this new feature

This is a lot of text just to tell you the main thing you can do is DONT use Live.

BUT YOU CAN DO MORE. YOU CAN BLOCK ITS CONNECTIONS FROM YOUR PHONE ENTIRELY.

Step 1) Install a DNS-based adblocker if you don't have one. The best one available on Android and iOS is Blokada. It's free to use and straightforward to set up.

Step 2) Block any domains that look related to Tumblr Live. So far I've blocked:

api.gateway.tumblr-live.com

auth.gateway.tumblr-live.com

tmg-stream.gateway.tumblr-live.com

video-api.gateway.tumblr-live.com

video-live.gateway.tumblr-live.com

assets.video.tumblr-live.com

But if you see any others that look suspicious, block them too!

You want to install Blokada 5, which is free. If the first thing you see on Blokada.org is "Cloud" or "Plus," you need to scroll the page.

February 1, 2022

I’m so so sorry for the long post but please please please pay attention and spread this

WHAT IS THE EARN IT ACT?

The EARN IT Act has been roundly condemned by nearly every major LGBTQ+ advocacy and human rights organization in the country. This is a bill that will make children less safe, undermine online safety and security, and trample free expression, because it carves out another exception to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230), which the ACLU describes as “foundational to modern online communications.” This has been the law that has let the internet grow into what it is today, we’ve had this law since the 90s. (For context, Trump wanted to get rid of this law because he knew it would lead to mass govt surveillance and censorship of minorities online.)

The EARN IT Act will lead to online censorship. Platforms will be incentivized to scan their users’ communications and censor all sex-related content, including sex education, literally anything lgbt, transgender or non-binary education and support systems, and sex worker communication according to the ACLU. All this in the name of “protecting kids” and “fighting CSEM”, both of which the bill does nothing of the sort. In fact it makes fighting CSEM even harder.

If this bill passes, we're going to see most, if not all, adult content and accounts removed from mainstream platforms, for fear of the liability that could come with ever accidentally hosting CSAM, as well as the erasure of end-to-end encryption on messaging platforms.

This is really not a drill. Anyone who makes or consume anything “adult” online has to be prepared to fight Sen. Blumenthal's EARN IT Act, brought back from the grave by a bipartisan consensus to destroy Section 230.

EARN IT will open the way for politicians to define the category of “pornography" as they — or the lobbies that fund them — please, (Right now, right wing organizers are catgorizing books about racism as ‘porn’ to ban them from schools) which is a cherished goal of organizations that seek to reintroduce obscenity prosecutions for content now protected by Free Speech jurisprudence. This will 1000000% be used to eradicate anything LGBT online.

What this bill says it does on the surface is make platforms liable for their users’ activity if that activity involves sex and minors. However, because of 230, platforms are not liable at all about their users' activity. This has allowed platforms to grow and thrive and many niches online to as well. The bill also creates an unelected commission to create “best practices” to combat online child sexual exploitation. While these recommendations are nominally voluntary (so Americans have no decision on who gets to be on it), platforms that refuse to comply will be liable for criminal prosecutions and lawsuits should the government decide any of their users is engaging in online child sexual exploitation.

This is already a nightmare enough. But the bill also DESTROYS ENCRYPTION, you know, the thing protecting literally anyone or any govt entity from going into your private messages and emails and anything on your devices and spying on you.

This bill is going to finish what FOSTA/SESTA started. And that should terrify you.

Senator Blumenthal (Same guy who said ‘Facebook should ban finsta’) pushed this bill all of 2020, literally every activist (There were more than half a million signatures on this site opposing this act!) pushed hard to stop this bill. Now he brings it back, doesn’t show the text of the bill until hours later, and it’s WORSE. Instead of fixing literally anything in the bill that might actually protect kids online, Bluemnthal is hoping to fast track this and shove it through, hoping to get little media attention other than propaganda of "protecting kids" to support this shitty legislation that will harm kids.

The entire EARN IT act is based on *multiple* misunderstandings of the law and reality. It's a really really really bad policy that will do serious harm. But because Senator Blumenthal wants headlines, he'll pretend that it "helps protect the children." It won't. It'll do real damage. It will make CSEM much much worse.

One of the many reasons this bill is so dangerous: It totally misunderstands how Section 230 works, and in doing so (as with FOSTA) it is likely to make the very real problem of CSAM worse, not better. Section 230 gives companies the flexibility to try different approaches to dealing with various content moderation challenges. It allows for greater and greater experimentation and adjustments as they learn what works -- without fear of liability for any "failure." Removing Section 230 protections does the opposite. It says if you do anything, you may face crippling legal liability. This actually makes companies less willing to do anything that involves trying to seek out, take down, and report CSAM because of the greatly increased liability that comes with admitting that there is CSAM on your platform to search for and deal with. This liability would allow anyone for any reason to sue any platform they want, suing smaller ones out of existence. Look at what is happening right now with book bans across the nation with far right groups. This is going to happen to the internet if this bill passes.

(Remember, the state department released a report in December 2021 recommending that the government crack down on "obscenity" as hard the Reagan Administration did. If this bill passes, it could easily go way beyond shit red states are currently trying. It is a goldmine for the fascist right that is currently in the middle of banning every book that talks about race and sexuality across the US.)

NCOSE, the far right anti-LGBT hate group behind the global anti-sex legislations, is pushing the idea that any form of sexual expression, including talking about HEALTH, leads to sex trafficking. Their goal is to eliminate all sex, anything gay, and everything that goes against their idea of ‘God’ from the internet and hyper disney-fy and sanitize it. This is a highly coordinated attack on multiple fronts.

The reason these bills keep showing up is because there is this false lie spread by organizations like NCOSE that platforms do nothing about CSEM online. However, platforms are already liable for child sexual exploitation under federal law. Tech companies sent more than 45 million+ instances of CSAM to the DOJ in 2019 alone, most of which they declined to investigate. This shows that platforms are actually doing everything in their power already to stop CSEM by following already existing laws. The Earn It Act includes zero resources for proven investigation or prevention programs. If Senator Bluementhal actually cared about protecting youth, why wouldn’t he include anything to actually protect them in his shitty horrible bill?

The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) along with a coalition of 26 civil society organizations urged the United States Senate to reject the EARN IT Act. Groups on the left and right, including the ACLU, Fight for the Future, EFF, and Hacking // Hustling oppose it. Because it threatens free expression online and will threaten marginalized people’s safety while being totally unnecessary and failing to fix the problem it claims to address. The EARN IT Act empowers states to give law enforcement access to users’ private conversations and force companies to create encryption backdoors for law enforcement. This is totally unnecessary. Platforms are already handing over CSAM to the federal government. It’s actually likely to make prosecuting child molesters more difficult since evidence collected this way likely violates the Fourth Amendment and would be inadmissible in court.

I don't know why so many Senators are eager to cosponsor the "make child pornography worse" bill, but here we are.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

EARN IT Act was introduced yesterday! And it’s already scheduled to get marked up, which is the first step post-introduction. Most bills never go to markup, so this means they are putting pressure to move this through. IF YOU LIVE IN THESE STATES (IL, VT, CA, RI, MN, DE, CT, HI, NJ, and GA), CONTACT YOUR SENATOR AND HOUSE MEMBERS NOW. THIS IS URGENT. This is who gets first crack, and folks in all have Senators who are on the Judiciary committee.

I'm guessing this month or March is when the bill would be passed if there is no opposition 😭 The bill was re-introduced yesterday, already set for markup this Thursday. This feels like an attempt to fast track it this month. Additionally the current makeup of Congress favors those who want it passed. Back in 2020 it was mostly Senate republicans and democrats who are basically republicans (just like now, check the sponsors) pushing it with Ron Wyden using the filibuster to stop their efforts. The house dems didn't want to give Trump a win and needed to appear as pro-privacy/free speech for the 2020 election. Now the dems have the presidency, both chambers of Congress and if you've noticed have spent a few years repeatedly demanding social media censorship and desperately want to give Biden victories. biden isn't like obama who opposed sopa/pipa to appeal to younger voters. This is similar to how FOSTA passed with the group who made it happen last time back again. Far as I'm aware Wyden hasn't spoken about new earn it yet but even if he does oppose it, it's very possible there will be enough Senate democrats to join the republicans in passing it beating a filibuster. Then pelosi's band of house idiots pass it and we have to choose between breaking the law because they can't stop us from using encryption or being obedient sheep to a group who consider themselves above laws.

It already has a fifth of the Senate cosponsoring it. There is a very very very real chance this bill becomes law. This is an uphill battle that's going to happen fast and quick. PLEASE, FIGHT NOW.

202-224-3121 connects you to the congressional hotline.

This website takes you to your Senator / House members contact info. EMAIL, MESSAGE, SEND LETTERS, CALL CALL CALL CALL CALL. Calling is the BEST way to get a message through. Get your family and friends to send calls too. This is literally the end of free speech online.

More sources to read about this bill:

https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/the-earn-it-act-is-anti-evidence

Fight for the Future’s Statement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=678EW8v09z8&t=1s

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20220131/22423648395/senates-new-earn-it-bill-will-make-child-exploitation-problem-worse-not-better-still-attacks-encryption.shtml

EARN IT Act treats Myths as Facts.

https://surviveearnit.com/what-is-the-earn-it-act/ From 2020, but little has changed about the bill.

https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/earn-it-act-back

Center for Democracy and Technology’s Statement

There was this post circulating around Tumblr a while back talking about how “useless” it is to try and call your senators. But, while it’s less effective than most of us would like and you should do other methods if you can, the main wrinkle to people pushing back against that is that it does matter if a bunch of constituents are complaining about the same issue in aggregate, notifying that it’s a widely held sentiment.