The Blind Trust

@theblindtrust.org

57 Followers 166 Following

Investigating scams and establishing trust for the benefit of those using assistive technologies. Social model of disability. SWOT over DNS. A11y.

Screen shot of a scam Guardian page for a crypto scam. Devtools is open showing that this is not performing complex redirections as most of these scams do. In the bottom left corner is a floating inset showing the ad from MSN that was the source of the scam.
A screen grab of a scam website using the image of Martin Lewis on a fake BBC News page. Dev tools is open showing the hops from AppNexus (xandr), Taboola, Rocktoon to the site wealthwisecenter The image of the orginal ad is shown over the dev tools, and is a pair of hands holding a bunch of £50 notes in front of a Barclays Bank.
A photo of the front cover of a book by Jimmy Wales "The Seven Rules of Trust" signed "To Colin, Good luck fixing the internet - smiley face - Jimmy Wales"
An appeal "sexually suggestive" label dialog placed on a report of a scam advert. The text of the appeal reads: I am reporting a series of scam adverts featuring fake celebrity endorsement by Deborah Meaden which drive traffic to a fake MailOnline page with a scam diet pill pitch. I guess that the faked 'before and after' image triggered this label!
Six different variants on a scam advert featuring the image of Deborah Meaden. In the bottom corner of the image is a screenshot of a report of one of the instances to srtb.msn.com containing the following data which will allow Microsoft Advertising to identify the serve information and ban the advertiser: rid: ab299f1d05204fab863f90f6ccaa7005 r: infopane i: 2 p: webcompar l: en-gb d: appnexus b: Edg a: 06761c2a-e6dc-4bdd-8205-93926787a94b ii: 1 c: 18298244562584589309 bid: b6ce8d81-0af9-4cfb-a62c-58cc9990db66 tid: webcompar-infopane-2 ptid: webcompar-infopane-2 f: MisleadingAd
Infographic by visualcapitalist from April 16, 2020: How long it would take to read the terms of service agreements of popular online services. Even the shortest terms and conditions are a few thousand words long. 97% of people aged 18-34 consent without reading. Read @240wpm by readinglength.com - From Insta at 9:43 & 2451 words, to MS at 1:03:30 & 15260 words. Left to right, is FB, Insta, Spotify, Twitter, LI, Tinder, YT, Apple, Amazon, Zoom, TikTok, Netflix and chill for 11 mins while reading their ToS which was then the second shortest. The mega MS! and finally Uber which in 2020 was 23 mins 35 seconds and 5,658 words. Not shown: On Uber today Dec 6th, 2024 I've spent 26 mins skimming around multiple "Privacy check-up, interactive tour of privacy settings" centres, full of clever drop down, external links in an in-app webview requiring cookie consent, with other external content each requiring consent, the consent process spawned another ToS to consent to to read a ToS many of which were 37 min reads each, and each different with more links, many also loading US terms with dropdowns for country pickers that took you back out of one WebView to another in my geo to start the journey again, finding a "Privacy Centre" & a "Legal hub", and quite a few 404s, A "Data tracking" page with a consent tick box which "For more information please see our United States privacy page" which claimed a 2 min read which had a "Proceed to opt-out" button and then I gave up. So I can't give a total, but my skimming around without reading took more that 30 mins and without learning much. There was also a legal section at the bottom of the page that I didn't explore! Maybe time to do a SAR for my analytics data they've collected (with my consent?) to see what % of policy docs I've actually read! Then a SAR on Telium... MS recently asked me to skim a 3 hour 56 min "Privacy" document and consent.
An image of the header of the Google blog post from 2020 entitled "Find wheelchair accessible places with Google Maps" with a graphic showing three people, a man with a pram, a woman with a 'stroller' walking aid, and a man in a manual wheelchair with his hands on the push rings. The article is dated May 21, 2020 by Sasha Blair-Goldensohn a Software Engineer on Google Maps the article is a 3 min read. An audio version of the blog post is available at the top of the article but is not shown in the image.
Screen shot of my Bluesky post of a long URL to the Cisco Webex company Slido.com, which is using a URL shortener with the domain name of app.sli.do for the Sight Tech Global event. The original URL is 54 characters long, but Blue Sky has truncated the URL shown to 23 characters and an ellipsis.
The image is a screengrab from the sighttechglobal.com website about their online free conference. The text from the image is: December 4-5, 2024 Shaping New Technologies to Create a More Accessible World for People with Blindness and Visual Impairments Sight Tech Global is the first global, virtual conference dedicated to fostering discussion among technology pioneers on how rapid advances in AI and related technologies will fundamentally alter the landscape of assistive technology and accessibility.
AI generated image of Martin Lewis on a MSN news article. Dev Tools is open showing the creative ID of a scam ad.