Quotulatiousness

July 4, 2018

Open office plans do not increase personal interaction among workers

Filed under: Business, Health, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

From the abstract of a recent study:

Example of an open plan office
Photo by VeronicaTherese via Wikimedia Commons.

Organizations’ pursuit of increased workplace collaboration has led managers to transform traditional office spaces into ‘open’, transparency-enhancing architectures with fewer walls, doors and other spatial boundaries, yet there is scant direct empirical research on how human interaction patterns change as a result of these architectural changes. In two intervention-based field studies of corporate headquarters transitioning to more open office spaces, we empirically examined — using digital data from advanced wearable devices and from electronic communication servers — the effect of open office architectures on employees’ face-to-face, email and instant messaging (IM) interaction patterns. Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM. This is the first study to empirically measure both face-to-face and electronic interaction before and after the adoption of open office architecture. The results inform our understanding of the impact on human behaviour of workspaces that trend towards fewer spatial boundaries.

This certainly matches my own experiences working at companies that changed their offices to more open or fully open spaces. The accountants may have loved the new spaces as being less expensive, but one of the key advantages claimed for open designs does not appear to be true.

H/T to Claire Lehmann for the link.

April 15, 2018

Facebook is stalking you, even if you don’t have an account

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Gennie Gebhart and Jamie Williams explain why Facebook doesn’t need to listen in on your microphone to serve you with creepy ads:

In ten total hours of testimony in front of the Senate and the House this week, Mark Zuckerberg was able to produce only one seemingly straightforward, privacy-protective answer. When Sen. Gary Peters asked Zuckerberg if Facebook listens to users through their cell phone microphones in order to collect information with which to serve them ads, Zuckerberg confidently said, “No.”

What he left out, however, is that Facebook doesn’t listen to users through their phone microphones because it doesn’t have to. Facebook actually uses even more invasive, invisible surveillance and analysis methods, which give it enough information about you to produce uncanny advertisements all the same.

This was what finally got Elizabeth to close her Facebook account: very shortly after posting a status update that referenced a particular business (that’s been gone for decades), she started getting ads for modern equivalents outside her Facebook session. Clearly, her advertising profile had been updated to include her “new” interest, and the ads were now tailored to this sudden change of tastes.

But how does Facebook know to serve you an ad for a specific product right after you talk about it? What explains seeing ads for things you have never searched for or communicated about online? The list is long. Instead of listening to your conversations through your phone, Facebook:

  • tracks you through Like buttons across the web, whether or not you are logged in or even have a Facebook account.
  • maintains shadow profiles on people who don’t use Facebook.
  • logs Android users’ calls and texts.
  • absorbs unique phone identifiers through in-app advertising to associate your identity across the different devices you use.
  • tracks your location and serves ads based on where you are, where you live, and where you work.
  • tracks your in-store purchases to link the ads you see online with the purchases you make offline.
  • watches the things you start writing but don’t post to track your self-censorship.
  • linked purchases to Messenger accounts to allow sellers to send confirmation messages without affirmative user permission.
  • bought and advertised a VPN to track what users are doing on other apps and crush competition.
  • manipulated your Newsfeed to see if it can make you sad or happy.
  • files patents for emerging tracking technology, like tracking your location through the dust on your phone camera, for potential future use.

Tracking and analysis methods like these power not only those too on-the-nose ads, but also invasive “People You May Know” recommendations.

Users are onto this. If you have ever been creeped out by an ad for a product popping up right after you were talking out loud about it, your fear and even paranoia are warranted — just not for the exact reasons you might think. No matter how Facebook achieves its frighteningly accurate ads and suggestions, the end result is the same: an uncomfortable, privacy-invasive user experience.

I’m getting closer to the point of pulling the plug on my Facebook account as well … it seems like every week or so I need to go spelunking in the privacy settings to shut off yet another way they want to monetize my information or invade my privacy even more. Several of my FB friends are dabbling with MeWe.com as an alternative and they do claim not to track you or otherwise compromise your privacy.

April 6, 2018

QotD: Bordertown, USA

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Welcome to Bordertown, USA. Population: 200 million. Expect occasional temporary population increases from travelers arriving from other countries. Your rights as a US citizen are indeterminate within 100 miles of US borders. They may be respected. They may be ignored. But courts have decided that the “right” to do national security stuff — as useless as most its efforts are — trumps the rights of US citizens.

Tim Cushing, “Wall Street Journal Reporter Hassled At LA Airport; Successfully Prevents DHS From Searching Her Phones”, Techdirt, 2016-07-22.

March 30, 2018

New Firefox extension to reduce Facebook‘s default tracking

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

If you use Firefox as your primary browser, you might be interested in a new Firefox extension that limits how Facebook tracks your activity:

Mozilla Firefox has a new extension to prevent Facebook from tracking your online habits.

Capitalizing on the fears surrounding Facebook privacy, Mozilla has designed the “Facebook Container,” a Firefox add-on that blocks Facebook from tracking users when they click on ads or links that take them off the site.

Facebook currently uses a program called Pixel to collect information on how users engage with the site. When users click on links, they visit external sites but are still logged in to Facebook‘s platform. These outside sites will contain “share” or “like” buttons, and when users engage with these functions, this activity is connected to their Facebook identity. That’s how Facebook is able to fine-tune its advertisements to its users. While this is a well-known practice, many aren’t aware that their behaviors outside the core function of Facebook are tracked.

But when people using Facebook Container click a link on Facebook, it loads in a seperate blue tab that isolates users’ activities from the core site. In these blue tabs, users will not be logged into Facebook, which prevents further data collection. Users do have the option to continue to use the “share” and “like” buttons, but Mozilla notes that these activities may still be tracked. The extension doesn’t prevent data collection, but it offers users more control over their privacy.

It may only be a token toward reclaiming a tiny bit of your online privacy, but even tokens can be valuable in the aggregate.

March 29, 2018

Google, Facebook, anti-trust laws, and the Network Effect

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Google and Facebook (and other, lesser, social media companies) have a lot of information on you. Lots and lots and lots of information on you. Many people are coming to the conclusion that this is bad, bad news and “something must be done”. Politicians and activists share a tendency to respond to such demands by pushing “something” they already favour as the solution to the popular demand for action. A few days ago, the “something” seemed to be some form of anti-trust action over the social media giants.

In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall explains why an over-the-top anti-trust offensive is likely to leave everyone in a worse state than the status quo:

Which brings us to the tech companies of today:

Big Tech May Be Monopolistic, But It’s Good for Consumers

Quite so, thus no antitrust actions should or need be taken.

At the first level there’s the simple point that Facebook, Google a little less, Microsoft, e-Bay, they benefit from network effects. The more people who use them the more attractive they become to the next user. Meaning that size, in and of itself, creates yet more size. That’s just what we mean by network effects.

In turn that also means that the efficient size of an organisation here is that global monopoly. It isn’t true in most cases because there are diseconomies of scale as well as economies of it, but another way to describe network effects is just that we’re insisting that the -economies outweigh the dis- at scales up to and including 7 billion people.

In that first reading of antitrust that would mean they gain economic power and thus government must step in. In our second reading that’s not enough.

Firstly, the monopolists must exercise that economic power they have. Something not greatly in evidence as just having power doesn’t mean it can be exercised. For when you do try to, say, raise prices can someone come in and try to undercut you? If so you’ve got contestable economic power, or even a contestable monopoly. As an example, think the Chinese and rare earths. They were producing some 97% of the world’s supply. So, they decided to play silly buggers, exercise that power. It took a couple of years but two new mines opened, China’s share of rare earths fell and prices halved, below their original point. People contested that Chinese economic power when China tried to exercise it. China didn’t win either.

If Google tried to raise the price of adverts then business would flow away from them. If Facebook started charging for access then there wouldn’t be a Facebook. They’ve got contestable monopolies.

[…]

Sure, we should keep a wary eye open and if the consumer is being gouged then we could and should do something. But while we’ve got efficient companies, monopolies or not, benefiting consumers then the correct response is to get the hell out of the way.

Unless you’re a politician who simply wants to expand the powers politicians have over society – something which explains most politicians – but then we can tell them to go boil their heads. Only the exercise of economic power to the disbenefit of consumers justifies intervention.

March 24, 2018

Today in bad ideas examined – Time to [nationalize | regulate | break-up] Facebook?

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Facebook is having a particularly bad moment right now. Earlier this year, it was the Republicans in the US demanding that “something must be done” about Facebook. Now, after discovering that the Trump campaign did exactly what the Obama campaign did in 2012, it’s the Democrats insisting that “something must be done”. In Britain, it’s both the Tories and the Corbynistas howling for action. Well, [nationalizing | regulating | breaking-up] Facebook is something, and here’s why we shouldn’t do it:

The latest bright idea from Paul Mason is that Facebook must be regulated or changed in some manner to make darn sure it does what Paul Mason wants Facebook to be doing.

There are lots of problems with the Corbynista columnist’s idea. They include: not understanding how the internet or corporate law works; ignoring how innovation happens; and the political problem of allowing the government to control a social network, real or digital.

That’s not to mention the broader point that the people best placed to control Facebook are the 2 billion users of Facebook, who can choose to use the service or not. But such free-market liberalism isn’t quite the fashion de nos jours, is it?

[…]

Mason, along with far too much of the British Left, is pretty relaxed about repeating Soviet mistakes, but there’s no reason why the rest of us have to go along with it. That rather covers the regulation and ownership aspects. As to breaking the company up, we find more in his thread of tweets on the subject.

He points to the UK corporate registration as proof that we can control the local bit, or break it off from the whole. Such a conclusion is hard to square with the complaint about the Facebook profits HMRC struggles to tax. The reason Facebook doesn’t pay UK corporation tax on all the money collected from the UK is that the UK company just does some engineering bits, and doesn’t actually run the service. That engineering could be done from elsewhere just as the ad sales are. And the design. And there’s absolutely no one at all who has insisted that there must be a UK company out there before signing up for the service, is there?

We then come to what is arguably Mason’s silliest claim: “Next comes the f***wittery about ‘we don’t want the state owning our data.’ Me too. Hence I proposed a public owned digital ID service.“

There might be some manner in which “public owned” and “state” are different, but I’m absolutely certain that this wouldn’t be the case in modern Britain. As even Gordon Brown ended up agreeing when he revealed that the BBC license fee was indeed just another tax all along.

March 18, 2018

Border privacy issue should (eventually) get to the US Supreme Court

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Reason, Damon Root reports on two duelling precedents about US citizens’ right to privacy and the government’s interest in what’s on your smartphone when you re-enter the United States:

In its 2014 decision in Riley v. California [PDF], the U.S. Supreme Court held that law enforcement officials violated the Fourth Amendment when they searched an arrestee’s cell phone without a warrant. “Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. “With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans ‘the privacies of life.’ The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.”

But what about when an American citizen is returning home from abroad and U.S. border officials want to thoroughly search the contents of that person’s cell phone? Does the Fourth Amendment require the government to get a warrant before searching cell phones at the border? According to a decision issued this week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, the answer to that question is no.

[…] a divided panel of the 11th Circuit took a different view. “The forensic searches of Vergara’s cell phones occurred at the border, not as searches incident to arrest,” declared the majority opinion of Judge William H. Pryor. “And border searches never require a warrant or probable cause.”

Writing in dissent, Judge Jill Pryor wrote that while she agrees “with the majority that the government’s interest in protecting the nation is at its peak at the border,” she disagrees “with the majority’s dismissal of the significant privacy interests implicated in cell phone searches.” In Riley, she noted, the Supreme Court recognized “the significant privacy interests that individuals hold in the contents of their cell phones.” And in her view, “the privacy interests implicated in forensic searches are even greater than those involved in the manual searches at issue in Riley.” If it were up to her, “a forensic search of a cell phone at the border [should require] a warrant supported by probable cause.”

One thing is clear: We have not heard the last of this debate. Either this case, or one very much like it, is almost certainly headed for the Supreme Court.

November 18, 2017

QotD: A key drawback of a cashless society

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When I was just starting out as a journalist, the State of New York swooped down and seized all the money out of one of my bank accounts. It turned out — much later, after a series of telephone calls — that they had lost my tax return for the year that I had resided in both Illinois and New York, discovered income on my federal tax return that had not appeared on my New York State tax return, sent some letters to that effect to an old address I hadn’t lived at for some time, and neatly lifted all the money out of my bank. It took months to get it back.

I didn’t starve, merely fretted. In our world of cash, friends and family can help out someone in a situation like that. In a cashless society, the government might intercept any transaction in which someone tried to lend money to the accused.

Unmonitored resources like cash create opportunities for criminals. But they also create a sort of cushion between ordinary people and a government with extraordinary powers. Removing that cushion leaves people who aren’t criminals vulnerable to intrusion into every remote corner of their lives.

We probably won’t notice how much this power grows every time we swipe a card instead of paying cash. The danger is that by the time we do notice, it will be too late. If we want to move toward a cashless society — and apparently we do — then we also need to think seriously about limiting the ability of the government to use the payments system as an instrument to control the behavior of its citizens.

Megan McArdle, “After Cash: All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses a Bank Account”, Bloomberg View, 2016-03-15.

October 24, 2017

More on Quebec’s niqab ban

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ted Campbell is emphatically against Quebec’s attempt to ban facial coverings for Islamic women:

These laws are stupid … but they are worse than stupid, they are an assault on individual liberty by a bunch of political nincompoops.

Now, there are a number of variants of head and face coverings, they are especially common among some Muslim women …

… and some restrictions on some of them in some situations are, pretty clearly, justified on common sense or security-identification grounds. We, most of us, can probably agree that a lady should not wear a burqa or chador or even a niqab when she’s driving a car (it might restrict her vision) or when she is applying for a driving licence, which is a pretty common form of recognized identification … and it seems pretty clear that airport security should insist that a burqa or chador must be removed for security screening (to permit positive facial recognition).

But, why the hell does the state ~ the BIG, collective, state ~ care what any individual wears when (s)he boards a bus. It ought to care that she deposits the correct fare, of course, or taps her card to pay, but why does the state care if her face is covered? It’s arrant nonsense, and it is an infringement on a fundamental right.

    Reminder: you (and I, and Muslim women, too) have lots of rights but four of them are quite fundamental: life, liberty and property as defined by John Locke in 17th century England and privacy, as defined by Brandies and Warren in 19th century America. These rights all accrue to all individuals, only, and they, those individuals, need to have their fundamental rights protected against constant threats from collectives including religions, societies and states, themselves. These new laws, passed by big, collectivist states, are threats to individual liberties and must be challenged and overturned. Liberals, like Justin Trudeau, will not do it because they are progressives, not liberals, and because people like Justin Trudeau cannot think about fundamental rights … only about partisan, short term, political advantage.

Let me be clear about my own position:

  • Women may wear whatever they want for their own (good or not so good) reasons; but
  • It is wrong for anyone (including any father or husband or rabbi or provincial premier) to force women to dress in some certain way for social (including political) or religious reasons.

Your religion is a wholly private matter between you and your gods … you may never try to impose your beliefs on others, including your wife and children.

September 8, 2017

Google’s unbridled market power and ability to quash critics and competitors

Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Wired, Rowland Manthorpe reports on another case of Google roughing up someone for being critical of their current “be evil” business philosophy:

The latest allegation against Google? Jon von Tetzchner, creator of the web browser Opera, says the search giant deliberately undermined his new browser, Vivaldi.

In a blogpost titled, “My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil,” von Tetzchner accuses the US firm of blocking Vivaldi’s access to Google AdWords, the advertisements that run alongside search results, without warning or proper explanation.

According to Von Tetzchner, the problem started in late May. Speaking at the Oslo Freedom Forum, the Icelandic programmer criticised big tech companies’ attitude toward personal data, calling for a ban on location tracking on Facebook and Google. Two days later, he suddenly found Vivaldi’s Google AdWords campaigns had been suspended. “Was this just a coincidence?” he writes. “Or was it deliberate, a way of sending us a message?” He concludes: “Timing spoke volumes.”

Von Tetzchner got in touch with Google to try and resolve the issue. The result? What he calls “a clarification masqueraded in the form of vague terms and conditions.” The particular issue was the end-user license agreement (EULA), the legal contract between a software manufacturer and a user. Google wanted Vivaldi to add one to its website. So it did. But Google had further complaints.

According to emails shown to WIRED, Google wanted Vivaldi to add an EULA “within the frame of every download button”. The addition was small – a link below the button directing people to “terms” – but on the web, where every pixel matters, this was a potential competitive disadvantage. Most gallingly, Chrome, Google’s own web browser, didn’t display a EULA on its landing pages. Google also asked Vivaldi to add detailed information to help people uninstall it, with another link, also under the button.

The links Vivaldi says it was forced to add to comply with Google’s demands (image via Wired)

August 12, 2017

Why The Government Shouldn’t Break WhatsApp

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 3 Jul 2017

Encryption backdoors – breaking WhatsApp and iMessage’s security to let the government stop Bad Things – sounds like a reasonable idea. Here’s why it isn’t.

A transcript of this video’s available here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tom-scott/why-the-government-shouldnt-break-whatsapp/1378434365572557/

August 1, 2017

Ontario adopts voluntary self-surveillance app from CARROT Insights

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I often joke about how inexpensive it appears to be to “influence” politicians, but it’s only fair to point out that the voters those easily influenced politicians represent are even more easy to influence:

Ontario announced earlier this month that it will become the fourth Canadian government to fund a behavioral modification application that rewards users for making “good choices” in regards to health, finance, and the environment. The Carrot Rewards smartphone app, which will receive $1.5 million from the Ontario government, credits users’ accounts with points toward the reward program of their choice in exchange for reaching step goals, taking quizzes and surveys, and engaging in government-approved messages.

The app, funded by the Canadian federal government and developed by Toronto-based company CARROT Insights in 2015, is sponsored by a number of companies offering reward points for their services as an incentive to “learn” how to improve wellness and budget finances. According to CARROT Insights, “All offers are designed by sources you can trust like the BC Ministry of Health, Newfoundland and Labrador Government, the Heart and Stroke Foundation, the Canadian Diabetes Association, and YMCA.” Users can choose to receive rewards for companies including SCENE, Aeroplan, Petro-Canada, or More Rewards, a loyalty program that partners with other businesses.

It’ll be interesting if they share the uptake of this new smartphone app … just how many of us are willing to let the government track just about all of our actions in exchange for “rewards”.

In order to use the app, users are giving Carrot Insights and the federal government permission to “access and collect information from your mobile device, including but not limited to, geo-location data, accelerometer/gyroscope data, your mobile device’s camera, microphone, contacts, calendar and Bluetooth connectivity in order to operate additional functionalities of the Services.”

Founder and CEO of CARROT Insights Andreas Souvaliotis launched the app in 2015 “with a focus on health but the company and its partner governments quickly realized it was effective at modifying behavior in other areas as well,” according to CTV News.

April 20, 2017

We now know that there are more than 30,000 registered gun owners in London

Filed under: Britain, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

What’s disturbing about the knowledge is that London’s Metropolitan Police revealed that information to a private company and may have violated British privacy laws in the process:

London gun owners are asking questions of the Metropolitan Police after the force seemingly handed the addresses of 30,000 firearm and shotgun owners to a direct mail marketing agency for a commercial firm’s advertising campaign.

The first any of the affected people knew about the blunder was when the leaflet (pictured below) landed on their doormats in Tuesday’s post.

Titled “Protect your firearms and shotguns with Smartwater”, the leaflet – which features Met Police logos – advises firearm and shotgun certificate holders to “buy a firearms protection pack at a reduced price” of £8.95.

Smartwater is basically invisible ink. You mark your property using it and if you are burgled, police can use a UV light reader to see who rightfully owns stolen items. The company behind it was formed by an ex-police detective and his industrial chemist brother, and the firm has since forged very close links with a number of UK police forces. Its website boasts of the “traceable liquid’s” crime-reducing properties, something that police actively endorse.

[…]

The front and reverse of the Metropolitan Police Smartwater firearms leaflet

Questions were immediately raised as to whether the Met had broken the law. The data protection statement that both police and certificate holders agree to is found in Firearms Form 201 (PDF), the application form for a firearm certificate. It says:

    I understand that all information submitted will be handled in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and connected legislation. I understand and give consent for information contained within my application form or obtained in the course of deciding the application to be shared with: my GP, other government departments, regulatory bodies or enforcement agencies in the course of either deciding the application or in pursuance of maintaining public safety or the peace.

    Note: Any information shared will be shared in accordance with data sharing protocols. We do not share your personal or company details with other applicants or members of the public and treat information in connection with the application in confidence, but individuals should be aware that we may be required to disclose some information in accordance with the legislation referred to above.

The Register has made the Information Commissioner’s Office aware of the breach and is awaiting a statement from the data watchdog.

April 16, 2017

If Walls Could Talk The History of the Home Episode 3 The Bedroom

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 1 Feb 2017

March 31, 2017

“You can’t buy my internet data. You can’t buy your internet data. That’s not how this works“

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick bravely attempts to tamp down the hysteria over this week’s vote in Congress to kill broadband privacy protections (which, as he notes, hadn’t yet come into effect anyway):

People are rightfully angry and upset about this. The privacy protections were fairly simple, and would have been helpful in stopping truly egregious behavior by some dominant ISPs who have few competitors, and thus little reason to treat people right. But misleading and misinforming people isn’t helpful either.

[…]

But here’s the real problem: you can’t buy Congress’ internet data. You can’t buy my internet data. You can’t buy your internet data. That’s not how this works. It’s a common misconception. We even saw this in Congress four years ago, where Rep. Louis Gohmert went on a smug but totally ignorant rant, asking why Google won’t sell the government all the data it has on people. As we explained at the time, that’s not how it works*. Advertisers aren’t buying your browsing data, and ISPs and other internet companies aren’t selling your data in a neat little package. It doesn’t help anyone to blatantly misrepresent what’s going on.

When ISPs or online services have your data and “sell” it, it doesn’t mean that you can go to, say, AT&T and offer to buy “all of Louis Gohmert’s browsing history.” Instead, what happens is that these companies collect that data for themselves and then sell targeting. That is, when Gohmert goes to visit his favorite publication, that website will cast out to various marketplaces for bids on what ads to show. Thanks to information tracking, it may throw up some demographic and interest data to the marketplace. So, it may say that it has a page being viewed by a male from Texas, who was recently visiting webpages about boardgames and cow farming (to randomly choose some items). Then, from that marketplace, some advertisers’ computerized algorithms will more or less say “well, I’m selling boardgames about cows in Texas, and therefore, this person’s attention is worth 1/10th of a penny more to me than some other company that’s selling boardgames about moose.” And then the webpage will display the ad about cow boardgames. All this happens in a split second, before the page has fully loaded.

At no point does the ad exchange or any of the advertisers know that this is “Louis Gohmert, Congressional Rep.” Nor do they get any other info. They just know that if they are willing to spend the required amount to get the ad shown via the marketplace bidding mechanism, it will show up in front of someone who is somewhat more likely to be interested in the content.

That’s it.

* Amusingly, Rep. Gohmert voted to repeal the privacy protections, which makes no sense if he actually believed what he was saying in that hearing a few years ago…

H/T to Amy Alkon for the link.

On a related note, LifeHacker posted a recommendation for “The Laziest, Cheapest Way to Circumvent Your Snooping ISP“. (Spoiler: it’s Opera). I use Opera, but not exclusively … I also use Brave, Chrome, and Firefox on a daily basis.

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