femsaphique:

fayanora:

apocalyptic-mailman:

queeranarchism:

queeranarchism:

This is not what a free society looks like.
This is not what a free society looks like.

This is not what a free society looks like.

This is not what a free society looks like.
This is not what a free society looks like.

This is not what a free society looks like.

This is not what a free society looks like.
This is not what a free society looks like.

This is not what a free society looks like.

@astrotwilight: If you have nothing to hide then why are you scared, are you a drug dealer?

Yes, absolutely. And a thief. And a homeless person. And a sex worker. And a graffit artist. And an undocumented person. And a person having sex. And a person carrying illegal medication. And, if I’m brave enough, maybe even someone who would break the law not just for my own needs but to change this rotten world where people suffer and starve and are imprisoned and enslaved and deported and murdered in the name of ‘the law’.

How does anyone look at the sentence “Are you sure we’re not watching you” and not feel immediately threatened by that, to the point of DEFENDING it

“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” Okay then, take a shower in public where everyone can see you. Or pull your pants down in the middle of the sidewalk to take a crap. Or have sex with someone in public. EVERYONE HAS SOMETHING TO HIDE.

Anonymity and being discreet isn’t always about doing something wrong. Like we all have our own reasons to want to hide things from people lol

Those who are already marginalised and targeted know.

“Don’t hide,you have nothing to fear if you have done nothing ‘wrong’”

Just means “Don’t hide,let us see everything so we can decide on which part of you to label as ‘wrong’.”

Joseph Shapiro and an investigative team at NPR have just released an in-depth series on disability and sexual assault that took nearly a year of work. “Abused and Betrayed” unfolds in a series of features exploring various aspects of the sexual assault epidemic in the developmental disability community — from exclusion in sexual education to rape in institutions.

Part of me is glad that this series exists. Shapiro has a long history of involvement in disability reporting and culture — his book No Pity is a must-read — and sexual abuse in disability communities is an issue that rarely receives public attention.

But, to my knowledge, no one who worked on this investigation is disabled, which is extremely disappointing. The lack of visibility for disabled reporters is a serious failure for newsroom diversity that has real consequences — we can tell stories nondisabled people can’t, and consider issues nondisabled reporters and editors tend to miss.

In “She Can’t Tell Us What’s Wrong,” (warning: this article is very graphic) the team looked at cases where communication issues hinder disabled people’s ability to report abuse. In many cases, this also presents challenges for sex education and personal empowerment. A disabled person may not realize that abusive behavior is, in fact, abusive, with some reports of abuse relying on witnesses who observe something going wrong.

That was certainly the case when a staff member at an institution walked into a patient’s room and saw a member of the staff “with his pants down.”*

In rape reporting, there are certain conventions people follow. Many publications will not use rape survivors’ last names, for example, and may at times change the first name as well. They may take other steps to shield a survivor’s identity out of respect for the fact that rape is an intensely personal, violating crime. A special duty of care is required in places where the ability to consent may be compromised.

And so I was startled when NPR opted to redact this rape survivor’s last name, but then provide extremely specific identifying details about her. Her sister is named in full, and the feature includes numerous photographs. The name of the institution is also included, and so is identifying information about the specific room the victim lives in. The detailed reporting on her case suggests that, while she knows some sign language, she lacks the ability to communicate explicit consent to have her story told in such detail.

While the rape survivor welcomed the NPR crew, it’s not clear whether she fully understood what they were doing, or the ramifications. Did she know that an intimate and traumatizing incident in her life would be broadcast nationwide? Would she have consented if she understood that? This decision was made for her by her sister, in a familiar patronizing pattern.

The piece also explored the case of a woman whose sexual assault was revealed when she tested positive for a sexually transmitted infection. Again, NPR shows her photograph, names her family, discloses the specific infection she was diagnosed with, names and shows her aides. Again, her capacity for consent was not explored, and the voices of her family members are centered in her story.

Infantilization and desexualization are troubling themes throughout the series; one family member compares an adult victim to a “child,” expressing shock that she would be targeted for sexual assault. The nondisabled public is horrified at the thought of sexual abuse that involves adults who are “like children,” as though this is somehow “worse” than sexual abuse in general. Turning disabled people into metaphorical children doesn’t stop abuse, though; if anything, it increases vulnerability to assault.

Readers and listeners come away with a strong sense that disabled people aren’t sexual and don’t have agency. Their family members, meanwhile, are given considerable authority — and the series doesn’t delve into the history of caregiver abuse committed by family members.

This kind of storytelling troubles me because it taps into a long, dark history of focusing on the voices of parents and family members while excluding disabled people from their own narratives. Commentary from disabled people was reserved for the end of the series, in a single set of first-person interviews. This is one result of allowing nondisabled people to dominate the media landscape; they tell stories about us without us rather than centering disabled voices.

When the idea that family should be the voices in the conversation is normalized, it makes it much harder to push back on abuse of power. One would expect a series about abuse to empower people, not reiterate the social structures that contribute to abuse. It is very uncomfortable to admit that nondisabled people and reporters should be stepping back to provide room for disabled voices in storytelling. But it is a conversation we need to have.

These sexual assault survivors have difficulty communicating their stories in a way that’s accessible to nondisabled people. But does that mean their stories should be told for them in such graphic detail? Reporting like this often justifies such sharing on the grounds that this is the only way to get listeners, viewers, or readers to “pay attention” — by humanizing an epidemic of sexual assault that would otherwise be dry statistics or vague nonspecifics. Does that justification make it okay?

Like many disabled people, I’ve had my stories told for me, without my consent, “for the greater good.” The sense of profound personal violation that results does not make up for the supposed social benefit.

As a journalist, this is an issue I think about: Would this action bother me, if I was on the receiving end? Or has someone who’s been in a similar position told me it was violating and upsetting? Because if so, that’s an indicator that I need to find another way to tell the story.

There’s a way to report on this serious epidemic in our community that respects privacy and autonomy, as for example in a later installment in the series where victim privacy is respected. Why couldn’t the same have been done across the board?

NPR’s Series on Disability and Sexual Abuse Brings Up Complex Ethical Issues

How Facebook Outs Sex Workers

kellyclowers:

gingerautie:

oldfartfangirl:

theunicornsuccubus:

sexworkinfo:

This story was produced by Gizmodo Media Group’s Special Projects Desk.

Leila is a sex worker. She goes to great lengths to keep separate identities for ordinary life and for sex work, to avoid stigma, arrest, professional blowback, or clients who might be stalkers (or worse).

Her “real identity” — the public one, who lives in California, uses an academic email address, and posts about radical politics — joined Facebook in 2011. Her sex-work identity is not on the social network at all; for it, she uses a different email address, a different phone number, and a different name. Yet earlier this year, looking at Facebook’s “People You May Know” recommendations, Leila (a name I’m using using in place of either of the names she uses) was shocked to see some of her regular sex-work clients.

Despite the fact that she’d only given Facebook information from her vanilla identity, the company had somehow discerned her real-world connection to these people — and, even more horrifyingly, her account was potentially being presented to them as a friend suggestion too, outing her regular identity to them.

Because Facebook insists on concealing the methods and data it uses to link one user to another, Leila is not able to find out how the network exposed her or take steps to prevent it from happening again.

“It’s not just sex workers who are careful to shield their identities,” she said to me via Skype. “The people who hire sex workers are also very concerned with anonymity so they’re using alternative emails and alternative names. And sometimes they have phones that they only use for this, for hiring women. You have two ends of people using heightened security, because neither end wants their identity being revealed. And they’re having their real names connected on Facebook.”

When Leila queried secret support groups for sex workers on Facebook, others said it had happened to them too.

"With all the precautions we take and the different phone numbers we use, why the fuck are they showing up? How is this happening?“

“The worst nightmare of sex workers is to have your real name out there, and Facebook connecting people like this is the harbinger of that nightmare,” she said. “With all the precautions we take and the different phone numbers we use, why the fuck are they showing up? How is this happening?”

It’s not a question that Facebook is willing to answer. The company is not forthcoming about how “People You May Know,” known internally as PYMK, makes its recommendations. Most of what Facebook does reveal about the feature is on a help page, which says that the suggestions “come from things like” mutual friends, shared networks or groups, or “contacts you’ve uploaded.”

When the suggestions turn out to be unnerving, that explanation is both vague and woefully incomplete. A Facebook spokesman told me this summer that there are more than 100 signals that go into PYMK. All someone like Leila — who was not connected to her clients by anything like mutual friends, networks, groups, or contacts — can know is that the data that exposed her must be something else, in that large undefined set of factors.

Leila suspects either that Facebook collected contact information from other apps on her phone or that it used location information, noticing that her and her clients’ smartphones were in the same place at the same time.

“We do not use information from third party apps to show friend suggestions in People You May Know,” said a Facebook spokesperson by email. Facebook has said before that it doesn’t use location information for People You May Know, and the spokesperson confirmed that “People You May Know suggestions are not informed by your smartphone’s Location Services.”

So the linkage between Leila and her clients remains a mystery. While the algorithmic black box that is PYMK is simply creepy to most of us, the intrusive network analysis can have serious consequences for people in the sex work and porn industry. One sex toy reviewer devoted a section of her digital security advice to the feature, her cleverest suggestion being to choose a profile photo that doesn’t show your face.

“People think because you have sex on camera, privacy isn’t a big deal for you,” said Mike Stabile, spokesperson for the Free Speech Coalition, a California-based advocacy group for adult performers. “But in this industry, privacy is so important. Performers worry about stalkers on a daily basis.”

Stabile says concerns about People You May Know also go the other way, when people’s accounts for their sex work persona are recommended to people they know in their real, vanilla lives like relatives and friends.

That’s what Ela Darling worries about. Darling, who manages virtual reality adult broadcasting at CAM4, has been working in pornography for eight years, but her family members don’t know that.

"I don’t want my 15-year-old cousin to discover I’m a porn star because my account gets recommended to them on Facebook.“

“I don’t want my 15-year-old cousin to discover I’m a porn star because my account gets recommended to them on Facebook,” Darling told me by phone.

To combat this, she searches Facebook every few weeks for the last names of her family and extended family to see if any of her relatives have joined the network or created a new account. If they have, she blocks them.

Darling used to have a second, private account under her legal name for connecting with people she knew in her normal, vanilla life, but it was getting recommended to her fans, revealing her “real” identity to them. Some of them began harassing her and trying to track down her family.

“We’re living in an age where you can weaponize personal information against people,” Darling said. She’s not sure how Facebook linked her porn identity to her legal identity, but it meant one had to go. She deleted her private account a few years ago, leaving only her public, porn one.

“Facebook isn’t a luxury,” Darling said. “It’s a utility in our lives. For something that big to be so secretive and powerful in how it accumulates your information is unnerving.”

The outing problem is, like Facebook’s ongoing fake-news scandals, a result of the company’s growth-above-all strategy: First round up as many users as possible, then start cleaning up (or not) the side effects of operating at that scale. People You May Know may be incidental to an individual user’s experience, but it extends the reach and density of the network.

“For sex workers, this is a huge threat. This is life or death for us,” Leila said.

An obvious solution, from a user’s point of view, would be for Facebook to fully explain what data it uses to make friend suggestions, and to allow users to filter it or opt out of the People You May Know feature entirely. That way, someone concerned about having their identity exposed — whether a sex worker, a domestic violence victim, or a political activist — wouldn’t have to worry about having their account shown to someone who shouldn’t see it.

“An opt out is not something we think people would find useful.”

“An opt out is not something we think people would find useful,” said the spokesperson. “For example, even for people who have been on Facebook for a long time and already have lots of friends, most of us like to know when someone we know has joined Facebook for the first time.”

According to the Facebook spokesperson, while there is no way to clearly and directly opt out of the People You May Know feature, there’s an undocumented trick that does enable users to stop appearing in it. It just requires them to shut off their ability to receive any friend requests at all.

“People can always control who can send them friend requests by visiting their account settings,” said the spokesperson. “If they select ‘no one,’ they won’t appear in others’ People You May Know.”

This solution, which is not explained in any of Facebook’s many help pages, would allow Leila to protect herself from exposure, although at the expense of one of Facebook’s basic functions. And it wouldn’t work for Darling as her account exists for fans to find and follow. So the need for a PYMK opt-out remains.

“We take privacy seriously and of course want to make sure people have a safe and positive experience on Facebook,” said the Facebook spokesperson. “For people who choose to maintain a separate identity, we’ve put safeguards in place to help them understand their privacy choices, moderate comments, block people, control location sharing, and report abusive content.”

Facebook also says you can just “x” out anyone who appears in “People You May Know” that you don’t want to know, but sometimes just appearing there means the damage is already done.

As a sex worker, I would just like to add:

If your favorite stripper/escort/cam person etc. personal account is recommended to you over facebook, the best thing you can do is NOT add them, and instead just let them know the next time that you interact with them during an appointment/at the club etc. Please don’t add them so you can try to tell them through their personal account-it’s dangerous, and scary. Block us, don’t look at said accounts, and notify us as soon as you can. Most check for that kinda shit regularly, but a heads up is always nice.

On the reverse, if one of your loved ones sex worker accounts is suggested to you over social media, do not follow it without their permission. Let them know that their account was recommended to you, block them if they ask you too (and/or don’t get offended if they block you), and most importantly do not tell anyone else you/they know. Outting them to other relatives/friends is really dangerous, so please don’t do that.

Civilians (non-sex workers) please reblog!

A couple of things that may be influencing this.

Hopefully these people are using different browsers for their vanilla and sex worker activities. If they aren’t, they should start now. Don’t trust incognito mode.

The next one is harder – the ip address. I know this is one of the factors in PYMK, because when I was on facebook at work, it started recommending co-workers. The problem that the ip address presents is that even if you are using different computers, if you are using the same hardware to connect to the internet, the ip addresses are almost identical, so that can be used to associate your vanilla and sex worker identities (think apartments in a building). I don’t know how to defeat that, short of getting separate ISPs for your different lives.

Having one account that you only use on your computer, through you home internet, and one that you only use on your phone, using your phone’s data, should work as long as you never use you home internet on your phone.

Frankly, FB has a crazy number of ways of connecting two different identities, up to even facial recognition. Sex workers (or anyone else who *needs* to keep separate identities) probably shouldn’t use FB at all, better to stick to things like twitter, tumblr, personal web pages and sites dedicated to that.

gingerautie:

oldfartfangirl:

theunicornsuccubus:

sexworkinfo:

This story was produced by Gizmodo Media Group’s Special Projects Desk.

Leila is a sex worker. She goes to great lengths to keep separate identities for ordinary life and for sex work, to avoid stigma, arrest, professional blowback, or clients who might be stalkers (or worse).

Her “real identity” — the public one, who lives in California, uses an academic email address, and posts about radical politics — joined Facebook in 2011. Her sex-work identity is not on the social network at all; for it, she uses a different email address, a different phone number, and a different name. Yet earlier this year, looking at Facebook’s “People You May Know” recommendations, Leila (a name I’m using using in place of either of the names she uses) was shocked to see some of her regular sex-work clients.

Despite the fact that she’d only given Facebook information from her vanilla identity, the company had somehow discerned her real-world connection to these people — and, even more horrifyingly, her account was potentially being presented to them as a friend suggestion too, outing her regular identity to them.

Because Facebook insists on concealing the methods and data it uses to link one user to another, Leila is not able to find out how the network exposed her or take steps to prevent it from happening again.

“It’s not just sex workers who are careful to shield their identities,” she said to me via Skype. “The people who hire sex workers are also very concerned with anonymity so they’re using alternative emails and alternative names. And sometimes they have phones that they only use for this, for hiring women. You have two ends of people using heightened security, because neither end wants their identity being revealed. And they’re having their real names connected on Facebook.”

When Leila queried secret support groups for sex workers on Facebook, others said it had happened to them too.

"With all the precautions we take and the different phone numbers we use, why the fuck are they showing up? How is this happening?“

“The worst nightmare of sex workers is to have your real name out there, and Facebook connecting people like this is the harbinger of that nightmare,” she said. “With all the precautions we take and the different phone numbers we use, why the fuck are they showing up? How is this happening?”

It’s not a question that Facebook is willing to answer. The company is not forthcoming about how “People You May Know,” known internally as PYMK, makes its recommendations. Most of what Facebook does reveal about the feature is on a help page, which says that the suggestions “come from things like” mutual friends, shared networks or groups, or “contacts you’ve uploaded.”

When the suggestions turn out to be unnerving, that explanation is both vague and woefully incomplete. A Facebook spokesman told me this summer that there are more than 100 signals that go into PYMK. All someone like Leila — who was not connected to her clients by anything like mutual friends, networks, groups, or contacts — can know is that the data that exposed her must be something else, in that large undefined set of factors.

Leila suspects either that Facebook collected contact information from other apps on her phone or that it used location information, noticing that her and her clients’ smartphones were in the same place at the same time.

“We do not use information from third party apps to show friend suggestions in People You May Know,” said a Facebook spokesperson by email. Facebook has said before that it doesn’t use location information for People You May Know, and the spokesperson confirmed that “People You May Know suggestions are not informed by your smartphone’s Location Services.”

So the linkage between Leila and her clients remains a mystery. While the algorithmic black box that is PYMK is simply creepy to most of us, the intrusive network analysis can have serious consequences for people in the sex work and porn industry. One sex toy reviewer devoted a section of her digital security advice to the feature, her cleverest suggestion being to choose a profile photo that doesn’t show your face.

“People think because you have sex on camera, privacy isn’t a big deal for you,” said Mike Stabile, spokesperson for the Free Speech Coalition, a California-based advocacy group for adult performers. “But in this industry, privacy is so important. Performers worry about stalkers on a daily basis.”

Stabile says concerns about People You May Know also go the other way, when people’s accounts for their sex work persona are recommended to people they know in their real, vanilla lives like relatives and friends.

That’s what Ela Darling worries about. Darling, who manages virtual reality adult broadcasting at CAM4, has been working in pornography for eight years, but her family members don’t know that.

"I don’t want my 15-year-old cousin to discover I’m a porn star because my account gets recommended to them on Facebook.“

“I don’t want my 15-year-old cousin to discover I’m a porn star because my account gets recommended to them on Facebook,” Darling told me by phone.

To combat this, she searches Facebook every few weeks for the last names of her family and extended family to see if any of her relatives have joined the network or created a new account. If they have, she blocks them.

Darling used to have a second, private account under her legal name for connecting with people she knew in her normal, vanilla life, but it was getting recommended to her fans, revealing her “real” identity to them. Some of them began harassing her and trying to track down her family.

“We’re living in an age where you can weaponize personal information against people,” Darling said. She’s not sure how Facebook linked her porn identity to her legal identity, but it meant one had to go. She deleted her private account a few years ago, leaving only her public, porn one.

“Facebook isn’t a luxury,” Darling said. “It’s a utility in our lives. For something that big to be so secretive and powerful in how it accumulates your information is unnerving.”

The outing problem is, like Facebook’s ongoing fake-news scandals, a result of the company’s growth-above-all strategy: First round up as many users as possible, then start cleaning up (or not) the side effects of operating at that scale. People You May Know may be incidental to an individual user’s experience, but it extends the reach and density of the network.

“For sex workers, this is a huge threat. This is life or death for us,” Leila said.

An obvious solution, from a user’s point of view, would be for Facebook to fully explain what data it uses to make friend suggestions, and to allow users to filter it or opt out of the People You May Know feature entirely. That way, someone concerned about having their identity exposed — whether a sex worker, a domestic violence victim, or a political activist — wouldn’t have to worry about having their account shown to someone who shouldn’t see it.

“An opt out is not something we think people would find useful.”

“An opt out is not something we think people would find useful,” said the spokesperson. “For example, even for people who have been on Facebook for a long time and already have lots of friends, most of us like to know when someone we know has joined Facebook for the first time.”

According to the Facebook spokesperson, while there is no way to clearly and directly opt out of the People You May Know feature, there’s an undocumented trick that does enable users to stop appearing in it. It just requires them to shut off their ability to receive any friend requests at all.

“People can always control who can send them friend requests by visiting their account settings,” said the spokesperson. “If they select ‘no one,’ they won’t appear in others’ People You May Know.”

This solution, which is not explained in any of Facebook’s many help pages, would allow Leila to protect herself from exposure, although at the expense of one of Facebook’s basic functions. And it wouldn’t work for Darling as her account exists for fans to find and follow. So the need for a PYMK opt-out remains.

“We take privacy seriously and of course want to make sure people have a safe and positive experience on Facebook,” said the Facebook spokesperson. “For people who choose to maintain a separate identity, we’ve put safeguards in place to help them understand their privacy choices, moderate comments, block people, control location sharing, and report abusive content.”

Facebook also says you can just “x” out anyone who appears in “People You May Know” that you don’t want to know, but sometimes just appearing there means the damage is already done.

As a sex worker, I would just like to add:

If your favorite stripper/escort/cam person etc. personal account is recommended to you over facebook, the best thing you can do is NOT add them, and instead just let them know the next time that you interact with them during an appointment/at the club etc. Please don’t add them so you can try to tell them through their personal account-it’s dangerous, and scary. Block us, don’t look at said accounts, and notify us as soon as you can. Most check for that kinda shit regularly, but a heads up is always nice.

On the reverse, if one of your loved ones sex worker accounts is suggested to you over social media, do not follow it without their permission. Let them know that their account was recommended to you, block them if they ask you too (and/or don’t get offended if they block you), and most importantly do not tell anyone else you/they know. Outting them to other relatives/friends is really dangerous, so please don’t do that.

Civilians (non-sex workers) please reblog!

A couple of things that may be influencing this.

Hopefully these people are using different browsers for their vanilla and sex worker activities. If they aren’t, they should start now. Don’t trust incognito mode.

The next one is harder – the ip address. I know this is one of the factors in PYMK, because when I was on facebook at work, it started recommending co-workers. The problem that the ip address presents is that even if you are using different computers, if you are using the same hardware to connect to the internet, the ip addresses are almost identical, so that can be used to associate your vanilla and sex worker identities (think apartments in a building). I don’t know how to defeat that, short of getting separate ISPs for your different lives.

Having one account that you only use on your computer, through you home internet, and one that you only use on your phone, using your phone’s data, should work as long as you never use you home internet on your phone.

How Facebook Outs Sex Workers

Autism Registries are Dangerous

nosmag-blog:

Cranston, Rhode Island, has just established a voluntary registry to record information on autistic people between the ages of 6 and 21. The registry is managed by the Cranston Police Department and is intended to help autistic young people who interact with the police. Autism registries aren’t limited to Cranston. Several US states and Canadian provinces have databases that require or encourage…

View On WordPress

rad-roach:

ptenterprises:

lady-feral:

lokispriestess:

wilwheaton:

brucesterling:

Hey! He’s watching

HEY KIDS! WANT TO LIVE IN A PANOPTICON?! YOU SURE DO!!

HEY PARENTS! WANT TO NORMALIZE INTRUSIVE SURVEILLANCE AND MINIMIZE PRIVACY RIGHTS?

WELL YOU ARE GOING TO LOVE THIS!!

CW/TW for under the cut:

abuse, child emotional abuse, mental health,

I feel like vomiting.

Its like someone took all the toxic, disgusting, vile, broken aspects of capitalist society and *distilled* them into one product.

Maybe I’m a bit sensitive to this in particular. But I was an intensely anxious child. My parents consistently and grossly invaded my privacy as a child to the point where I started to suffer from delusions that people around me could read my mind.

When I was out of the house mum would occasionally go through my room, my draws, cupboards, bags, school books, and pockets.

I never knew when it was coming. I wouldn’t know until I got home and she presented the “evidence” of wrongdoing and demanded explanation (anything from unfinished schoolwork to empty food packets).

To this day I start to feel severely I’ll if I stay away from home for more than one night. Even though I no longer live with parents.

So I think I probably feel more strongly than most about the necessity of privacy and agency for children.

But this right here feels like it was custom *designed* to induce paranoia.

Fuck. I am so angry and sad and sick.

Gods protect these kids. ❤

There’s plenty of similar products and the reviews just get worse.

Please please don’t do this sort of thing to your kids. I cannot stress just how damaging creating this atmosphere in your home is.

It might seem like a funny joke or a great parenting tool, but believe me your kid will deeply feel that lack of trust.

Teach your kid good morals, teach them compassion and empathy, teach them to be “good” purely because its the best way to be.

Kids need room to make mistakes. They need room to fuck up, realise their own fuckup, and fix it *without* authority figures finding out and taking control.

Otherwise all they’ll ever learn is that rules must be followed blindly, and authority figures must be feared and obeyed rather than respected.

And for the love of god don’t teach your kid that their privacy can justifiably be violated by authority figures based on the suspicion of “bad” behaviour.

Don’t teach them that the constant threat of punishment is the only reason to be good.

This is what these “toys” do.

Please don’t buy them.

As someone who was denied privacy growing up… Yeah. Don’t do this shit.

I’ve talked about Elf On The Shelf in this context before, but it’s still aggravating to see the subtext becoming text.

So the concept of Elf On The Shelf wasn’t creepy enough already, they had to go out and make a straight up fake security camera to terrorize children with? For fuck’s sake.

Source: brucesterling

cocofinster:

butterflyinthewell:

This rant can apply to any disability that makes toileting difficult or impossible. I’m just specifying autism because freaking Autism Moms™ always broadcast the diapers and it pisses me off.

Having to wear incontinence products isn’t something to be ashamed of, but it’s not cool to out somebody who wears them either unless they say you can or do it themselves.

THAT INCLUDES: All you damn autism moms who post videos / photos on the freakin’ internet explicitly showing that your autistic child (adult or young) still wearing diapers at age whatever.

THAT INCLUDES: All you damn autism moms who talk about how your child isn’t toilet trained at age whatever and stating that they wear diapers as if you have to make them as embarrassed as possible to shut down advocates like me who can speak or type to tell YOU to shut up.

“They won’t see it / they won’t understand” is not a valid excuse. Talking about or showing a disabled person’s diapers without their consent serves zero educational purpose. That is not how you treat someone you claim to love and respect.

Outing someone’s incontinence without their consent is NOT educational, loving or respectful.

I mean, they clearly think anyone with what’s simply a separate medical disability (incontinence) has no mind with which to comprehend they have it, but they probably talk to people they don’t know have it every day. It’s just that obvious disability in someone you live with makes every comorbid condition seem like a symptom and treated like a behavior problem (or treated with non-science).

butterflyinthewell:

This rant can apply to any disability that makes toileting difficult or impossible. I’m just specifying autism because freaking Autism Moms™ always broadcast the diapers and it pisses me off.

Having to wear incontinence products isn’t something to be ashamed of, but it’s not cool to out somebody who wears them either unless they say you can or do it themselves.

THAT INCLUDES: All you damn autism moms who post videos / photos on the freakin’ internet explicitly showing that your autistic child (adult or young) still wearing diapers at age whatever.

THAT INCLUDES: All you damn autism moms who talk about how your child isn’t toilet trained at age whatever and stating that they wear diapers as if you have to make them as embarrassed as possible to shut down advocates like me who can speak or type to tell YOU to shut up.

“They won’t see it / they won’t understand” is not a valid excuse. Talking about or showing a disabled person’s diapers without their consent serves zero educational purpose. That is not how you treat someone you claim to love and respect.

Outing someone’s incontinence without their consent is NOT educational, loving or respectful.

Yes, Non-Binary People Experience Gender Dysphoria – The Establishment

neutrois:

This discussion is important – absolutely nonbinary people experience dysphoria. But I also want to say that:

a) dysphoria comes in many different forms (social, physical, emotional, mental),

b) you do not have to experience dysphoria to question your gender, feel your gender does not fit your assigned gender at birth, etc.

c) experiencing dysphoria – and/or degree of dysphoria – should not be used as a measuring stick for who does and does not deserve care (hint: everybody deserves care)

Yes, Non-Binary People Experience Gender Dysphoria – The Establishment

seasonoftowers:

nonbinarypastels:

stumbling-while-balancing:

greeneyespurpleheart:

writing-prompt-s:

writing-prompt-s:

imthedoctor12:

coltrer:

thecrystalfems:

rabbittiddy:

writing-prompt-s:

earth-ruins:

pizzaalle:

xdvisyrx:

tikalgirl:

xdvisyrx:

Farewell online privacy

What happened?

Trump happened.

just get a VPN?

You can’t just tell people to ‘get a VPN (Virtual Private Network)’. Buying a VPN is like buying a house. It’s very very important. Having no VPN or having a ‘wrong’ one can seriously damage your life. Especially for Americans because their privacy laws are garbage. I am going to try explain why you should get a VPN but bare with me, I am from Germany and my English is far from perfect.

Let’s start with a simple test.
Click this link here: https://whatismyipaddress.com/
It will tell your IP adres, your ISP (internet service provider), and your location. The location might not be very accurate, but then again, it’s just a simple website. Imagine what the government can do!

So basically, everyone can find out where you live. But there is more danger. Your ISP. Your ISP logs your every move online and they are required to keep it in case the government wants access to it (or if a 3rd party wants to buy your data (yikes). They have everything. What websites you visit. How long you stay on a website. What you download. Your search terms. European laws are more subtle on this but if you are from the US you are #@*#&, especially because Trump doesn’t support the open internet. It’s scary but maybe in the future you can’t get a job because the recruiter knows your searched on ‘how to deal with depression’ or anythings else that’s supposed to be private because it’s your f*cking right. Or you get a $100k fine because you pirated a movie 15 years ago. You need a VPN. You’re dumb for not using one. but what does a VPN do?

A VPN encrypts all your data so if it were be intercepted no one can ‘crack the code’ and damage your privacy.

Usually being online goes like this (simplified): Your computer —-> ISP (—–> keeps data —–> sells it)

But with a VPN it goes like: Your computer —–> VPN (encrypts data)—–> ISP (ISP can’t see shit)

Furthermore, a VPN hides your IP address and location by giving you another IP address located in Spain for example (you can often choose from a list and change as many times as you want).

Now that you know why you should get a VPN and what is does it is important to educate yourself because people often choose the wrong VPN. VPN providers are also businesses and have to obey the law. If you choose a VPN provider located in the US then you are throwing your money away because the laws in the US shits on your privacy. If the US gov wants the provider to give all their logs they have to obey. The ISP still can’t see what you are doing online and sell your data but the US gov can interfere with your VPN provider so NEVER CHOOSE A PROVIDER LOCATED IN THE US.

I just wanted to make that very clear so my followers don’t buy false security.

There is still more danger!
Who says your VPN provider isn’t selling your data? You need to check their logging policy. Do they keep logs? If yes, what for? For how long do they keep them? Tip: Choose a provider who doesn’t keep logs

More about law
The US is part of the Five Eyes program (the worst):

The Five Eyes, often abbreviated as FVEY, is an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are bound by the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence (source)

There is also a Nine Eyes (bit better) and Fourteen Eyes Program (better).
You don’t want a VPN provider who is located in one the Five Eyes countries.
If you had to choose go for a provider located in a country that’s part of the Fourteen Eyes Program or even better, go for a country that isn’t part of any program!

I know this is a shitty explanation and please pardon my english but now it’s time to do your own research. Take your privacy seriously. Maybe WWIII breaks out and you get killed for liking the ‘wrong’ FB-page.

Go to this website: https://thatoneprivacysite.net/simple-vpn-comparison-chart/

Make sure that your future VPN provider both has green boxes for Privacy Jurisdiction and Privacy Logging.

I recommend ovpn.se and trust.zone. ovpn is located in Sweden so they are part of the 14 Eyes Program and they keep minimal logs. Their business ethics, however, are alright.

Trustzone is located in the Seychelles. No country can interfere and their privacy jurisdiction is the best you can get. The US want your data but needs to get it from Trustzone? The Seychelles will simply give them the finger and wave them goodbye. However, this makes this provider very appealing for people who torrent and criminals because they keep no logs (and that is how it shoud be) Also, there are almost no marketing efforts so this provider is one the cheapest)

Also, often providers such as ExpressVPN are being called ‘The Best’ on websites about VPNs but know that this is just marketing which also makes those provider more expensive (and they too shit on your privacy)

This must be the worst article you have ever read but please, please take your privacy very seriously.

EDIT: I got many people asking me which provider I use. For those who want to know, I use Trust Zone. They offer a free 3-day trial with no strings attached. But still do your own research!

I am also with Trustzone but I think you forgot to explain one of it’s most important features. It protects you when you are using someone else’s Wi-Fi.
If you are at Starbucks and you use their Wi-Fi your privacy is at risk. Anyone with ill intentions could steal your information. Especially if you are using an unsecured Wi-Fi hotspot. With a VPN your data gets encrypted so no one can steal it.

Wait, what’s going, on? Did trump destroy internet privacy with a bill or something? Where’s the news? Oh wait, why am I getting visions of Alex Jones and selling water purifiers?

He hasn’t yet but he says he wants to. And if he is serious about it it would be really easy to do. Since all our data is already recorded, as the person above explained.

Trump wants more surveillance of Muslim Americans. This in a country where internet privacy is already close to non-existent.

Trust.Zone has a free trial. Use it.

btw this post only has 11k notes? That’s quite disappointing for something this important.

Don’t reblog this post to save a life.
Reblog this to protect an entire family!

@earth-ruins @writing-prompt-s Should I get trustzone for my mobile device?

If you use public Wi-Fi, then yes. Which VPN you use is up to you, amigo. Take @earth-ruins advice. Do your own research first.

@elvesfromthedeep just brought the current situation in the US to my attention (March 30, 2017).

Sources

Anger as US internet privacy law scrapped

Congress just voted to let internet providers sell your browsing history

To all my friends in the US, please read this entire post. Making everyone aware of VPNs is going to be my mission. Your privacy matters. Please reblog this post.

Don’t tell me you just wanted to scroll past this. Stop looking at pictures of cats for a moment, okay? Don’t you realize how important this is? This is dangerous! ‘America, the best FREE country in the world’ my ass.

With this new law your ISP can sell your Internet history which could include passwords, usernames, religion, credit card numbers, race and much more to the highest bidder. So here is what I want you to do.

You are going to read the whole thing and before you think ’this is so important. Let me reblog this real quick and go back to admiring cats again-’ NO! Don’t reblog this. Take action first. Then reblog. Sign up for a free trial! Trust.Zone offers one (here). Yes. It might be difficult to set up a VPN for some people. But is that going to stop you from protecting yourself and your family? 30 minutes. 30 minutes is all that it takes. 5 if you know how to install software. The problem with some of you is that you see ‘difficult’ as something negative. I want you to see difficult differently. I need you to push through this stuff. You are going to protect yourself. There is nothing negative about that.

VPNs are fun and costsaving too! A VPN bypasses geographical restrictions so you can access websites you normally can’t or you could start Netflix’s one month free trial over and over again- forever. And it’s legal! (~~unless you use it to buy weapons etc.,~~)

Don’t tell yourself that you are too tired and that you will do this tomorrow. Because that isn’t going to happen and you know it. You have to do this right now. You only have to click on it.
Don’t let this/shit/life just happen to you. Take yourself seriously. Get a VPN.

Privacy is not a privilege, it’s a fundamental human right

I had this pointed out to me, and I wanted it to be the last thing I reblogged so it was the first anyone entering my blog would see. It’s not something I usually post, but it definitely is important enough to make an exception.

Goodnight everyone!

Just a note for people who simply can’t afford to pay for a VPN that free VPNS do exist. They’ll likely not be as good quality as ones you pay for (for example, they may have a cap on how much data you can use with them or have bandwith limits or limited support options) but they’ll still get the job done and they’re better than nothing.

You can find a list of different free VPNs and the descriptions + pros/cons of them here:

https://www.bestvpn.com/free-vpns/

All this is terrible advice combined with needless panicking.

First of all, your searches are already protected. Any site whose URL says https rather than http is encrypted, so all the ISP can see is that you visited google*. Or thepiratebay. Or suckinghorsecocks. The actual torrent traffic will be visible, I think, but if you’re in the first world and torrenting stuff it might be a simpler idea to just buy a seedbox.

* also, when you did that, and how much data you got from it

Why not use a free VPN for torrents? Well, free, good performance, trustworthy, pick 2 … and in most cases it’s pick 0 or 1. Plus, remember that with a VPN you’re just moving the burden of trust from your ISP to the VPN – they still have just the same access to your data the ISP would have, and a helluva lot of them are dodgier than most ISPs. After all, what better way for whatever authority it is that you’re worried about to get the traffic of whoever is especially worried about their traffic being listened to (and therefore is much more likely to be Up To Something from the authority’s point of view) to go through their free-and-fast-no-logs-whatsoever-pinky-promise VPN.

Now, if you do still want a VPN (I’ve been procrastinating on setting one up on my phone for when I’m travelling, f’rex) and you’re not trying to run the Revolution off it, I’d recommend protonvpn. Personally, I find them trustworthy (they’re a bunch of CERN scientists with privacy grudges hosting this shit in Switzerland, which has excellent data protection laws, not in the least because the proton folk have campaigned for it :D) and you can switch from free and good performance depending on your resources and requirements 🙂 They’re also running a very good email service called protonmail which I recommend you use for all critical purposes – free version only has 500MB of inbox space, but it’s 500MB that are also encrypted on your side, so nobody but you has access to it.

If you *are* trying to run the Revolution, for whatever “running the Revolution” means in your regime, I’m really not competent enough to advise you. You’ll probably want TOR, and have to worry about a lot of niggly details that wouldn’t be a problem for someone just trying to escape mass dragnets but would be one for someone who’d risk actually being targeted. All the rest of y’all who aren’t running the Revolution, feel free to use TOR too (it’s waaaay more secure than any VPN, free or not, and stuff like ProtonVPN will also route your traffic through TOR if you ask them to, plus the more “innocent” ppl run their traffic through TOR, the less credible is the argument that only people with something to hide use it) but please don’t fucking try torrenting or streaming on it, even if you somehow manage to, since you’ll be eating up a whole lot of bandwidth and slowing shit down for everyone, including the people in too deep danger to use anything else.

And while we’re doing advice…remember your social media accounts are far easier to associate with you than your internet searches. Does it have your phone number? It knows you. Does it have your main email address instead of a different one you made just to sign up on that platform? It knows you. Do you access it from your phone, and have location enabled*? It knows you, and knows where you live. Do you have RL friends on it, or same friends you also have on a different social media platform? It’ll know you if you’re directly targeted, and corellating-this-as-a-dragnet-rather-than-spearfish isn’t technically difficult either. Do you post about stuff you like, or like stuff you like, or generally interact with stuff you like? Boy does your friendly data mining person have some bad news for you.

*srsly ppl, the only time you should have location enabled is when you are fucking lost or trying not to become such, and if you’re on android 6+ you can stop it from sharing location info with apps on a case-by-case basis. Probably iOS too.

However, note that the friendly data mining person has a tumblr account,
and posts crap, and likes crap, and such. Reason being, there’s no such
thing as perfect security, just a tradeoff between security and
convenience, and the vast majority of people reading this (esp first
world) have more to lose from not living their life, or from panicking uselessly, than from not having better security than most everyone else. There’s a lot of stuff you can do for better security that won’t be more than a minor inconvenience * , but beyond that? Stay informed about internet privacy issues, especially on how they relate to your own country, and don’t let the politicians representing you not stay informed of either the issues or your opinion on them either 😉

*beyond the stuff I’ve mentioned above, also adblock, either in-browser or by hosts file, use the PrivacyBadger extension or Brave browser (or Noscript if you’re really serious about stuff – it’s great and does stuff PrivacyBadger and Brave don’t do, but it’s not the sort of thing you install once and then never notice), HTTPS everywhere, have a restrictive cookie policy and I could go on, but seriously, for most of y’all, anxiety is a bigger problem than internet security.