I came across this (well-aged) tweet a couple days ago and it really resonated with me, because I find myself doing a lot of these things also:

🖖Jochen Mader 🇪🇺 @codepitbull

I work in IT, which is the reason our house has: - mechanical locks - mechanical windows - routers using OpenWRT - no smart home crap - no Alexa/Google Assistant/... - no internet connected thermostats

10:21 PM ∙ Jan 19, 2019

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22,141Likes7,162Retweets

I thought it would be interesting to put together a list of things that, having worked in tech and particularly data, I don’t have/do:

• I don’t use grocery store or restaurant loyalty cards

• I don’t give my email to be a part of loyalty programs or get discounts at stores

• I don’t order food through restaurant portals

• I disable GPS on my phone apps (the ones I know about, at least)

• I don’t use Siri or even turn it on

• I don’t use fingerprint readers or facial recognition on the iPhone

• I don’t use YouTube kids and I pay for YouTube (per the Normcore on this)

• I don’t have a Nest thermostat or a Roomba

• I don’t own a car with Bluetooth or smart car features (although it’s only a matter of time before my current car needs to be replaced and I’ll have to upgrade. Knock on wood.)

• I don’t have Alexa or Google Home

• I don’t link my Whole Foods card to my Amazon account (Take that, Jeff! You don’t get ANY of my 13 transactions a month!)

• I’ve never logged into Facebook on my primary browser and I don’t have Facebook on my phone and have never accessed it on my phone

• I don’t use Google as my default search engine

• I don’t have a Fitbit or similar (anymore)

• I delete UTM query strings from URLs

  

  Vicki Boykis @vboykis

  One of my greatest weird little joys in life is stripping the UTM parameters in links before I send them to other people.

  3:05 AM ∙ Dec 16, 2018

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  2,317Likes235Retweets

• I don’t send my social security details over email

• I don’t post pictures of my kids to public or social media websites and I try not to use their names online. I also don’t post/take pictures of other people’s kids without permission.

To be fair, there’s only so far you can go with this. There’s no way I can ever get on RMS’s level without going insane. This is my favorite:

I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation).

And probably, honestly, most of the stuff I’m doing is futile. After all, I, like most of us, do carry a spy device on me almost at all times, and we’re leaking data wherever we go.

But maybe not! I’d be curious to read other’s lists, or hear from other people which of these bullets is completely unreasonable and unnecessary, and what you personally do that’s either reasonable or not to mitigate <extremely Orwell voice> 1984 </voice>.

Art: Crying Woman, Picasso, 1937

What I’m reading lately:

1. How is he so good at this?

   

   Keaton Patti @KeatonPatti

   I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Batman movies and then asked it to write a Batman movie of its own. Here is the first page.

   

   

   2:33 PM ∙ Aug 13, 2019

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   70,570Likes26,604Retweets

2. This piece on the Tumblr acquisition

   

   Vicki Boykis @vboykis

   "Suppose you’re running the top furry blog on tumblr and in 2013, tumblr sells out to mega corporation Verizon for a giant pile of cash (1.1 billion). What happens to all the data you’ve created running your furry blog?" Great post on second-hand privacy.

   

   privacyfax.substack.com👋 your tumblr data 👋One topic that often comes up in the class I teach on privacy is: what happens to your data when a company is sold? Suppose you’re running the top furry blog on tumblr and in 2013, tumblr sells out to mega corporation Verizon for a giant pile of cash (1.1 billion). What happens to all the data you’v…

   3:00 PM ∙ Aug 13, 2019

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   15Likes4Retweets

3. Hate-reading this Cal Newport piece on email

4. This piece reminding me why I love the Pacific Northwest so much

5. The best writers over the age of 35

About the Author and Newsletter

I’m a data scientist in Philadelphia. This newsletter is about tech topics I don’t see covered in the media, but would like to. Most of my free time is spent kid-wrangling, reading, and writing bad tweets. I also have longer opinions on things. Find out more here or follow me on Twitter.

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