Previously:August 30, 2025: Alameda Linux Installfest We had a Linux installfest at the Alameda Free Library and got a pretty decent turnout. Some of us were there all day and we had people coming in and out as intended. So yay us. Linux installfest at the Alameda Free LibraryBesides run-of-the-mill laptops, one of our volunteers helped a new user install Linux on a Chromebook (from across the table it looked like the hard part was removing a bunch of screws to put it in developer mode, and t...| blog: Don Marti
Don’t go to ChatGPT or some other LLM-based service for privacy advice. Here are four reasons you should read my article instead. (or find somebody’s. I have links.) Whatever the LLM puts out is based on the documents in its training set, and the Internet has a lot of material that looks like credible privacy advice but is either expired or wasn’t really useful in the first place. Some of the problem material that will have been fed into an LLM includes: Out of date information. Today, ...| blog: Don Marti
The title of this comes from an old Reddit post. So there’s only one channel in this motel. This morning when I was getting ready I was watching Sesame Street. They were doing this bit where some clown was trying to wash his hands but kept washing his feet or his elbows and Elmo would go, “no mister noodle, your HANDS!” and all the kids would laugh. Around the fourth or fifth time he couldn’t find his hands, I heard a grown man yell from somewhere else in the motel, “GODDAMMIT, MR. ...| blog: Don Marti
Previously:advertising personalization: good for you? Looks like the Dubé et al. paper, a review of claimed benefits for personalized advertising, is making the rounds again. The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Privacy Regulation for Consumer Marketing by Jean-Pierre Dubé, John G. Lynch, Dirk Bergemann, Mert Demirer, Avi Goldfarb, Garrett Johnson, Anja Lambrecht, Tesary Lin, Anna Tuchman, Catherine E. Tucker. One argument that the paper makes against restricting personalized ads is...| blog: Don Marti
19 Aug 2025| blog.zgp.org
AI teacher tools show racial bias in suggestions for struggling students by Norah Rami. (say the line, Bart…) After Chalkbeat asked about Common Sense Media’s findings, a Google spokesperson said Tuesday that Google Classroom has turned off the shortcut to Gemini that prompts teachers to Generate behavior intervention strategies to do additional testing. AT&T CEO’s Memo Just Made It Official: Workplace Loyalty Is Dead by Aki Ito. (This is also why I’m cautiously optimistic about the c...| blog: Don Marti
previously:common sense one, bullshit documents zero Lots of coverage of the Frasco v. Flo case (more links at the end). Lead trial attorney Michael Canty claims a Landmark win. Our clients entrusted their most sensitive information to a health app, only to have it exploited by one of the world’s most powerful tech companies. This verdict is a wake-up call to companies that view consent as a formality and transparency as optional. But it could have gone the other way, as other cases have. T...| blog: Don Marti
California Privacy Protection Agency, in LOCKED Series: Right to Limit & Opt-Out: If you are on a business’s website and you can’t find the links to exercise your rights, remember to check their privacy policy. The privacy policy should tell you how you can exercise your rights under the law. No way, that’s CPPA’s job. That’s what I pay taxes for. Individual Californians need to read privacy policies like restaurant diners need to read food safety manuals and microbiology textbooks....| blog: Don Marti
(Update 5 Aug 2025: a scanned copy of the jury verdict form is up. Also please remember that this is a personal blog, not a corporate blog, which should be obvious because I can say damn and bullshit on here.) Some recent privacy news: Meta violated privacy law, jury says in menstrual data fight by Margaret Attridge on Courthouse News Service. This was a big class action case over the Flo app, which was covered in the 2019 Wall Street Journal story You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information...| blog: Don Marti
Previously:tires, myths, and reality Just read the Google and Meta quarterly earnings reports, and there sure is money in the advertising duopoly business. Total Google advertising revenue for the quarter ended June 30 is $71.34 billion Meta ad revenue is up more than 20%, at $46.38 billion. Add those together, multiply by 4, and the ad duopoly is pulling in about $472 billion per year. This is just their advertising businesses, not other lines of business like cloud services or hardware. Mea...| blog: Don Marti
30 Jul 2025| blog.zgp.org
Russian networks flood the Internet with propaganda, aiming to corrupt AI chatbots by Annie Newport and Nina Jankowicz. Our report details evidence that the so-called “Pravda network” (no relation to the propaganda outlet Pravda), a collection of websites and social media accounts that aggregate pro-Russia propaganda, is engaged in LLM grooming with the potential intent of inducing AI chatbots to reproduce Russian disinformation and propaganda. Since we published our report, NewsGuard and...| blog: Don Marti
previously:Big Tech platforms: mall, newspaper, or something else?, surveillance licensing in practice The problem with big, do-everything state privacy laws is they have oversized impact on smaller and more honest companies, while the larger and more criminally inclined have the lawyer budgets to just throw compliance paperwork at the problem. It’s time for a new approach to state privacy laws: start with known surveillance harms and look for places where the state has some leverage to add...| blog: Don Marti
Kaushik Gopal has a good post on How to Firefox. Basically on Firefox you can still get real uBlock Origin, not the Lite extension. More on how uBlock Origin works best on Firefox by Raymond Hill. That post also has some good info on extensions to change the appearance. I have a few more Firefox extensions and settings that I also use. This list has gone through some churn since I last did a post like this, so here’s a new version. ClearURLs For me, this one is mainly useful as part of fixi...| blog: Don Marti
Getting set up with an authorized agent service is a key part of any effective privacy plan. The big problem, though, is that many of the surveillance companies I need to have my data deleted from are companies that have me identified by a third-party cookie or a mobile ad identifier (MAID). I can’t get them to delete my location data or whatever by asking using my email address or other identifiers for myself that I actually know. As Tony Ficarrotta writes, in Some authorized agent provide...| blog: Don Marti
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How does this work?| blog.zgp.org