About (temporary!)

Elements of my alma mater recently decided to dump Twitter (X) because the values of that social platform have diverged significantly from what the academic institution can tolerate. I suspect numerous other organsations will folow suit. EDRI announced it today and suggest we follow them on Mastodon which I already do. As to Meta, well, there is plenty of press on that and I suspect there will be too on Trump's declaration in endign federal censorship (of social media sites). Let's see what happens next! Personally, and this is purely personal choice really, I escaped from Facebook over a year ago after first deleting all my content on there. I did the same with Instagram. I kept Whatsapp because of all the contacts and groups there. I have WeChat for Chinese friends, and now I am also on Xiaohongshu as well as (still) Tiktok. I left Twitter maybe two years ago, and I left LinkedIn because it held no relevance once I retired. My reasons are varied. For example, I had no issue with LinkedIn, it's just that it is no longer useful to me. As to Facebook, I also have their domains blocked on my Mac via the hosts file after I noticed that despite me leaving I kept on getting thier cookies. On Twitter I had abiut 6 tweets ever, so I simply never used it. YMMV as they say.

So, here we are, waiting for the US Tiktok ban to either take place or not, apparently with droves of US users abandoning ship and running to what has become known as Red Note - actually Little Red Book / Xiaohongshu. It is really rather interesting to see just how many people simply click away the terms given they are in Chinese. One person reported by the BBC was worried about accepting the terms unseen but did so anyway (sorry, can't find the article now - will edit later!). Update: And there we are. The US Supreme Court has upheld the ban. I do like this from the judgement regarding the data collection practices of Tiktok: "the House Report focuses overwhelmingly on the Government’s data collection concerns" (1). Remember Snowden? Pot kettle black. (Note there is a lot more reading in the judgement that my ramblings here... it deserves proper analysis and I'm sure others will do so) (1) https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf at p.18

There seems to be an increasing number of websites now that are finally coming round to the act that they should not set cookies unless the user accepts them. They do this by having an Accept / Reject button which is great and fulfils the requirement nicely. On visiting the site one can simply press Reject All or whatever and then no cookies should be set other than those classed as strictly necessary. True, there are still many websites whose designers falsely consider that advertising cookies are strictly necessary but many websites are now far more compliant than they were a few years ago. However, not being too negative on thise conforming websites but does anyone actually check the number of users clicking Accept vs Reject? That kind of information, which can of course be collected entirely anonymously (developers please note!) would be most useful. It occurs to me - and I can't be the only one - that if a website clearly gives the choice to reject all these cookies and still functions without, then if people are generally rejecting them why do they even need them. It would be far nicer if these websites simply did not use those cookies in the first place.

(this is an update of a previous post) Ad blockers work well on PCs and other things, smartphones included. But what about your TV? Some time ago our Samsung SmartTV had a software update after which it started displaying rather infuriating adverts in the TV guide. It has shown ads before in the list of apps and things but not in the guide. And in a glaring colour scheme too so it really stood out. I tried blocking various domains via the broadband router as was suggested in forums, but this was not successful. privacy settings at that time also offered little hope. On that particular subject, the privacy settings on the TV were set in a way to trip one up in my opinion. One could de-select advertising partners one by one (they are all on by default and there is no global turn-off option) but if one strayed outside the box or clicked the wrong thing the whole process was abandoned. And on entry to the options ‘Allow all’ was preselected. there are hundreds of advertising partners too. Consent was confusing as well. The list seemed to suggest that consent had been given but on entry to that section it was then possible consent, the unticked box presumably meaning consent had not been given (nor would it have been!) The TV was not a cheap model and I really did not expect advertising in this way. In the end I installed pi-hole which 'cured' the advertising issue in the TV guide. It is interesting to note that the default block list that comes with pi-hole included all the relevant Samsung domains so no other settings were required in order to achieve this aim.

A well known supermarket-attached clothing website has a privacy notice apparently powered by OneTrust. It gives the usual cookie choices where one can deny certain classes of cookie. On the positive side of things the selections are off by default. Good. But that’s where the positive ends… Certain cookie classes cannot be switched off – they are ‘always active’. These include data which: Now ok I’ve lumped them all together as displayed and not all are definitely evil at first glance. But let’s tease the evil out a little… Monitoring for the prevention of fraud is fine but it is not saying how. Does it mean that my data will be sent somewhere for fraud checks? Now, that may still be acceptable but it really needs to say. Sending and receiving information for advertising purposes. Ok, this is a big no. They can’t do that with no way to switch it off, no matter how much they want to. Cookies used for this can never be classed as strictly necessary. Combining my data with offline sources – again, what on earth is their plan here, tell me. The same goes for distinguishing my device from others. Do they even know how most home broadband routers work? Are they going further than just the IP address, which would be common across a household, or are they suggesting browser profiling? If the latter, stop it. In any event I browse this particular vendor in private mode with my cookie cruncher running so good luck with that!