If I have to disable ePrivacy protection to use your business’s -website -rating form -parcel tracking -unsubscribe …then you’re failing to respect your customers and never getting another penny from me. Web devs, take note….this is *your* problem

Update: I finished it, and oh my gods it is a masterpiece. A tale of folly and hope, idealism and cold-eyed practicality; people being people and what makes them people. Beautifully written (so many quotes saved!) lyrical, lucid, perceptive, amusing, wise. Straight onto my top 10 list 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

Had a lovely chat today with Jacqui from Leadership Through Data about data ethics, the Data Use (And Access) Act, and what ‘compliance’ really means. have a listen and tell me what you think - what does ‘data ethics’ mean to you? youtu.be/FZniicyvd3I

Wow. Reading ‘The Future’ by @naomialderman.bsky.social and- 1) it absolutely *nails* the dangers of surveillance capitalism and the AI bubble 2) it’s a ripping good yarn, with detailed, interesting characters; told with savage wit and a keen eye for human nature. Might be the best read of 2025

The @openrightsgroup.org is writing to DSIT to ask for oversight powers to be exercised in regard to the ICO’s woeful - and apparently intentional - underperformance as a data protection regulator. I’ve signed, and I hope you will too cloud.openrightsgroup.org/nextcloud/ap...

I HATE it when autocarrot sneakily changes my spelling to a grammatically-incorrect version and I don’t notice until after I’ve hit ‘post’. It’s a trivial but profound example of how automation bias renders ‘human in the loop’ ineffective as a safeguarding measure.

Holy cow. They "discovered" that facial features are weakly correlated with the financial success of MBA graduates. Obvious reason is nepotism. How can they not realise that?

It’s important to keep in mind that phrenology isn’t JUST racist, it’s also massively ableist. People with facial injuries, visible skin conditions, tics, birthmarks; neurodivergent people, and visually-impaired people are *already* being judged as less-than-human by facerec systems,

It's so funny how all jobs demand of you to be sociable but the process of getting hired is the most anti-human it could possibly be.

No, no, no, no. Absolute bullshit. Ableism-fuelled junk pseudoscience pushed by mendacious techsalesbros, given false legitimacy by ad-driven churnalism; an entire wobbling stack of fraud and fail.

I doubt many of us will shed a tear over the losses of a big corporation BUT what lies beneath* is thousands of independent ethical adult content producers whose perfectly legit livelihoods are being destroyed by the OSA’s unworkable, excessive, ineffective nonsense *pun intended

"Meanwhile, the regulations to bring in a requirement on providers to report CSAM content to the National Crime Agency have been revoked; they were due to come into force on 3 November and, at the time of writing, there are no further details available as to why they have been reversed." > Curious.

Brilliant 😄

I published my responses to the ICO’s complaint handling consultation, because even if they don’t pay any attention, it might just inform or inspire someone else to get serious about data protection. A girl can dream. Anyway: www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-res...

I have a new niece! Hurrah!!

ICO complaints handling consultation TL;DR- ‘We can’t keep up so we’ve decided mostly not to bother. This is Good Actually, because <PR babble>”

I’m laughing so hard at the ICO’s assertion that rising data protection complaint numbers are a result of growing public awareness of DP rights… It’s just as likely to be prompted by increasing laxity of enforcement and corporate indifference to a toothless regulator 😂

The ICO’s proposals for regulatory ‘reform’ are a classic example of ‘policy-based evidence-making’ in action, being designed to serve the convenience and image of the institution while failing to account for the actual purpose or real-world outcomes of its activities.

1. Make a set of superficial assumptions and spurious correlations 2. Obtain data from wherever, accept it at face value without verifying its reliability 3. Build a system that uses the data to justify presumption of guilt 4. Find ‘guilt’ everywhere, interpret as system working OK 5. FAIL

Well, what is there to say? “Yes, we approved this simply because it brought us revenue muahaha”, or “some fuckwit let this happen because they were either slack AF or pro-fascism, oops”.

Adorable Niece #3 wore her puffin t-shirt to visit me 😍😍 Where can I get one of these in my size?!

Oh god, I feel so seen 😂😂😂

Surveillance capitalism is in the shit (We saw this coming - dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...)

You know what, Nigel? Writer’s block isn’t really a thing. The real “block” is trying to survive in a capitalist system, in which creativity has been devalued & publishing taken over by managerial types who only understand productivity & see writers as “brands.” www.theguardian.com/business/202...

One of the gnarliest things about data protection is the way it brings to light all the preceding cognitive debt and wobbly dependency stacks. Years - sometimes decades - of half-arsed, just-in-time, reactive, improvisational bodging suddenly becomes visible….and is framed as a DP problem 🙄

Client: tell us what data protection stuff to put in this contract Me: well, that depends on what the contract’s actually for Client: we were hoping you’d tell us that too Me: 👀

A law that proposes blanket tagging and surveillance of all children under the disingenuous guise of ‘well-being & safety’ - with weak data protection enforcement, government by corporate interests, widespread corruption and a resurgent far-right. Dangerous. petition.parliament.uk/petitions/72...

Hahahaha yeah well, data protection law has always required organisations to ensure their workforces are data protection-literate, and look how that went. An industry regurgitating ‘training’ bollocks and certification mills with outcomes that bear no resemblance to *actual competence*.

Chatbots are the feedlot of industrialized information where humans get fattened up for processing, slurping up slopaganda from the trough.

Sing Disney songs everywhere you go, rabid copyright enforcement should make it too expensive for the techbros to indulge their abusive surveillance fetish 😋

Oooh, Black Mirror exercise time! Let me see, mandatory access to the data for digital polygraph ‘deception analysis’ when dealing with law enforcement, insurance claims investigators, recruitment agencies, landlords, employers and banks… Linkage to grocery cart data for lifestyle analysis >

I’d like to see one of these ‘AI makes you stupider’ studies control for the covid factor. Long-term effects of covid include impairment of cognitive facilities - perhaps people are turning to AI *because* they are feeling less able, rather than AI being the cause of brain rot?

AWS is down, post hog

Every AWS outage makes it extremely, painfully clear that consolidating the entire Internet in the hands of one fucked up billionaire is not a good idea. And then it's resolved and everyone kind of forgets about it til the next time. And the next time, their fridge stops working because of it.

Your occasional reminder that ‘the cloud’ is just ‘someone else’s computer’, and contracts are not magic spells

software designed to encourage negative behaviors or create difficulty for the user (especially in the form of advertising or coercion) is a form of violence

There should be an administrative equivalent to the death penalty for corporate personhood.

Using an LLM as a replacement for knowledge or critical thinking is parasitical and destructive.

I strongly disapprove of charities giving away/selling non-recyclable plastic and exploited-labour-produced items to further their fundraising efforts.

Business continuity planning is challenging in an age where most internet functionality depends on only a handful of monopolistic companies with more power than any government.

I see we’re stress-testing the tolerance of intolerance paradox again today by giving air-time to someone who thinks that trans people ‘just need to learn to live together’ with people who seek to eradicate them with maximum suffering 🙄

Question for neuroscientists; how closely does fMRI measured brain activity when in pain align with the subject’s experience of that pain? Like; does more intensely-felt pain glow brighter or anything like that?

I am BEGGING data ‘scientists’ to learn the difference between a trend and a rule. Real science acknowledges that the world is messy, complex and full of variation. Data ‘science’ seeks to reduce all of that to the lowest common denominators in order to monetise it as much and as fast as possible

As someone with turbo-charged nociception, fuck these technofascist eugenicist-inclined dehumanisers with a rusty chainsaw. Then tell me it shouldn’t hurt that much ya bastards

“There are few things more dehumanizing than being told by a machine that you’re not real because of your face" For the last month, I've been speaking to people living with facial differences and disfigurements about how face verification tech is failing them. Spoiler: things aren't going well

SALVATION CAN'T BE BOUGHT AND SOLD

"Big tech know that they're stoking a bubble that will end in a crash. They are not concerned. The crash will wipe out smaller rivals and weaken the governments that they want to control." — @moonalice.com

Data protection is health and safety for rights and freedoms

Data protection law is only effective at preventing data harms to the extent that it is applied diligently and in good faith, by people with a genuine desire to protect others; even when it is inconvenient, unprofitable or complicated to do so.