Right now, for whatever reason, the TikTok generation think that people who try to stay private online are weird, grizzled old people with no sense of style. That's the corporate feudal state talking. No matter what they try to cram down your throat, they're not your friend, they're not your neighbour, they're not your brother, sister, mother, father, girlfriend, or boyfriend. They're taking all the information you willingly provide them about everything you do, everywhere you go, and everyone you see on the street and they're putting that data into a database, which gets fed into a block of computers designed to study habits, preferences, and interests. If you're a regular user of TikTok; if you use the mobile app, you watch videos, you make videos, and you do this at least 7 times a week; I would lay odds that Google, Facebook, ByteDance (TikTok's parent company), Amazon, and about 50 smaller-time advertising companies know exactly where you live, down to the house number, or the suite number in a flat, the street you live on, the city you live in, what you have in your house, what you've purchased recently, whether or not you're on some kind of welfare, who your parents are, who your siblings are, the name of your pet, what kind of animal your pet is, and what breed it is. Thanks to Amazon Ring and Google Nest, there's a database of individual movement, including what car you drive, how often you take public transit, your typical jogging route, and where you work, thereby permitting the corporate feudal state to know when your house is likely to be empty, allowing the police detectives and federal agents a comfortable margin of time in which to illicitly enter your house and look for things that might incriminate you.
There was a time when that kind of thinking was nothing more than conspiracy theory; but as Edward Snowden proved in 2013, it's not only possible, it happens. That was the strangest case of corporate-sponsored de-evolution I've ever seen: Ed comes in with hard evidence that the corporate feudal state has not only had the ability to do this kind of monitoring, but has been doing it for about 5 years at that point, ruins his career and makes himself public enemy #1 doing so, and as anticipated, it sparked a whole lot of panic immediately. But, it only took about a week for the panic to die down and for people to just accept that "oh, that's just the way it is." The same way with the Panama Papers; that incriminating dataleak from Mossack-Fonseca in 2016 that implicated hundreds of the world's wealthiest people in money laundering schemes, fraud, and racketeering. Certainly there was enough evidence in both cases to completely bring down the corporate feudal state, but what happened? Edward Snowden is hiding from half the world's spy agencies and the journalist who broke the Panama Papers story was assassinated, and the corporate feudal state went on as Condition Normal.
"Well, if they can win against a spy and an investigative journalist, what makes you think I can make a difference?" Because the corporate feudal state is only as strong as you make it. It needs your money. It needs your data. It needs to know key information in order to make its profits. The average American person uses Spotify, Facebook, Twitter, Google Search, Google Maps, YouTube, and TikTok every day. They tend to use their phones or tablets in all cases. What's the single biggest hit the corporations can take? If everyone, instead of using their mobile devices, used computers to access that information. Not Chromebooks, but real live actual personal computers, running an older version of Windows 10 Pro with O&O ShutUp10++ on it. If every one of the active userbase on Tumblr used a refurbished Windows 10 laptop, Firefox with the Privacy Trifecta, ShutUp10++, and terminated their accounts on TikTok, the damage this would do to the entire corporate structure would be incalculable. They would probably insist to the US Congress and the UK Parliament that everyone online must have a Facebook page, listing their full first, middle, and last names, street addresses, phone numbers, and a current portrait... oh, wait. Facebook users already do that!
When I was on Facebook back in 2008, there was a guy (I assume) who would frequent the Star Trek pages whose name was "Warp Drive" and whose portrait was Norman from Star Trek 208-"I, Mudd". I never went to their page, but they had the right idea. Fake name, fake portrait, at the time the corporation couldn't tell the difference. Unfortunately, as I understand it (I haven't been back to Facebook since 2009), they have a means of detecting fake names now (which often raises false positives with transgender people and the traditional names of Pacific Islanders). Now, as you undoubtedly do, I read the HackerNews Gopher portal, and whenever some new duplicity from Facebook comes up, there's a few dozen commenters who claim they can't just ditch Facebook for a variety of unlikely reasons. "It's the only messaging app my grandmother will use." "It's the only place I can talk to my dad anymore." "My mom has a family chat on Facebook and won't answer her phone anymore." I personally am of the opinion that if other people can't change their behaviour after they know it makes you uncomfortable, you should cut them out of your life, but I'm not going to advocate for shutting your family out of your life in this manner. The facts of the matter are that the vast majority of people do not have these excuses to hide behind. In this case, you must terminate your Facebook account. You must do this. Facebook (well, "Meta", so they can pretend to be a subsidiary to skirt the monopoly laws) is one of the top three major players in the corporate feudal data game. It goes Amazon, Google, Facebook. If everyone on Tumblr with a Facebook account didn't even shut their account down, they just abandoned it; changed the password to something random and left it; Facebook would no longer get updated information. Yes, they would still have all the information they've been provided with over the course of that account's activity period, but it would no longer get any new information. You stand to gain nothing by updating the corporate feudal state's information database for it. Now, you'll probably be in some trouble if you've linked any other accounts to Facebook; say Pokémon Go or some other app where you clicked on "Log in with Facebook". You'll probably have to examine what kinds of data that app transmits to Facebook. And, if you've ever used (if you've ever used) the Facebook mobile app on your phone—I'll level with you—you're going to need to get a new phone. Facebook's datamining software is more pernicious than any malware; it can never be fully removed from your device.
The thing that really set this whole post into motion was Marginalia. Not the website itself or its search engine, but the websites that keep turning up on the Random searches. So many bloggers, just like me, who all have Wordpress-style homepages with a high-DPI photograph of their own face, front and centre. More often that not, these people are in the tech sector, so they know all of this and choose to ignore it. Some people even have their own home and office addresses, phone numbers, and personal e-mail addresses right there on their website! Why?! What possible use could you have for putting your full name, portrait, physical address, and e-mail address on your website? This isn't 1997 anymore, bucko—there's bad people and bad computers just looking for rubes like you to add to a couple hundred spam lists. Get yourself a couple hundred robocalls, spam emails? Come on, guy, use your MIT-educated brain and work it out. You don't need to put that stuff up in public. News-flash! You are a grizzled, unfashionable old person, and so am I. If "fashionable" means "exploitable", then there's way too much fashion on the internet right now. Don't add to it. Maybe you're just starting out on Neocities. You came from Tumblr or even TikTok and your index folder's got a picture of you in it that you're going to put on your about page. Don't do it. Just don't do it. The Sims 4 is free to play, make yourself in it, then use that instead.
--1 September 2023--