The Nexus of Privacy

@thenexusofprivacy.net

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A newsletter about technology, justice, equity, and strategy -- including privacy, AI, and social networks. Posts by @jdp23.thenexus.today

From Punchbowl! News Tech. Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) would support Sen. Marsha Blackburn's proposed package of kids digital protections and Al measures in an upcoming markup if she introduces it as legislation, according to a person familiar with the matter. Cruz told President Donald Trump during a Monday meeting that Blackburn's package would have less support among Senate Republicans than if the panel moved her Kids Online Safety Act as a standalone bill. But Cruz would include Blackburn's broader package in an upcoming markup if she decides to formalize her proposal, the person said. More in Midday.
A post from TIMxAI (@timxai.ai) asking "How do you balance vigilance against bad actors with keeping the public’s trust". On top, the words BAD ACTOR in big red capital letters, with an arrow pointing to TIMxAI's account name making it clear who the bad actor is.
Today 4:01PM, From Punchbowl News Tech. The Senate Commerce Committee is eyeing July 29 for a markup on kids digital protections and measures related to artificial intelligence, according to two people familiar with the planning. The date hasn't been finalized. The closely watched session is likely to take up measures including the Kids Online Safety Act and priorities of panel ChairTed Cruz (R-Texas), like his chatbots bill. It could potentially even take on what Cruz has called "catastrophic risk" due to Al.
Oh noes! The Democratic sponsor of the bill that Meta, Microsoft, Apple, X, Snap, Pinterest, and OpenAI all support is very concerned that the House version of the bill is too friendly to big tech and his colleagues might get influenced by the tech industry! Heaven forbid.
Hi, my name is [Your Name], and I’m a constituent from [Your City, State]. I am calling today to ask that reject any extension to FISA Section 702 unless it includes key bipartisan reforms: closing requiring a warrant and closing the data broker loophole. Please do not be fooled by fake reforms that simply restate existing law, and please stop passing short-term extensions that just kick the ball down the road. Instead, support real reform like the GSRA — which has bipartisan support in both chambers.
A screenshot of a skeet from resistbot with a big red X over it and the word DISINFO.
A slide with the title "[they] can't stop this 2-3 zone", followed by avatars labeled 1st invites, 3rd most rsky commits, moderation how-tos, created Umoya Fellowship, building SAFEskies
Meanwhile, the developer ecosystem in the ATmosphere (the ecosystem of software built around the AT Protocol, including Blacksky and Bluesky) is thriving with a lot of collaboration and synergies. Northsky Social (in Canada) focusing on the 2SLGBTQIA2S+ community – and is currently testing a PDS migration tool as well. Skylight Social, Streamplace, and Spark (in Brazil) are focusing on video. Gander (also in Canada) is planning on launching this fall. There's a lot of energy behind Eurosky. The AT Protocol dev community, after several successful conferences on multiple continents and both coasts of North America, is starting up a working group on bringing private data to the ATmosphere, a project that Rudy added to Blacksky's roadmap several months ago. Smoke Signal (events), Flashes (an Instagram alternative), Leaflet and Offprint for long-form text ... The list goes on and on and on, and Laurens Hof's weekly ATmosphere report keeps getting longer and longer. That's a good thing!
Blacksky is now hosting almost all of their own infrasctructure. Hundreds of people have set up accounts on the blacksky.app and blackskycomra.de PDS (personal data server) – including me. The blacksky.community app has the outstanding Blacksky Moderation service enabled by default, and the also-outstanding Blacksky: Trending as the feed for new users instead of Bluesky's crappy Discover feed). Behind the scenes, the Blacksky feeds use the Blacksky relay at atproto.africa, which extends relay functionality by including a "mod relay" - and other ATmosphere software is starting to use it as well
The 2020-2022 Tigray war is reported to be the deadliest armed conflict of the 21𝑠𝑡 century, with an estimated 600 to 800,000 documented deaths and more than 100 thousand victims of rape as a weapon of war. Social media platforms were instrumental in spreading genocidal content during the conflict, and failure to effectively moderate hateful content resulted in the murder of civilians. This work investigates the expertise and processes required to effectively moderate such genocidal content, and compares these findings to the expertise and processes prioritized by social media platforms.
“By tracking our every click, hover, and movement on and offline, Big Tech companies represent a powerful weapon for carrying out the Trump administration’s surveillance, prosecution, degradation, and deportation of people,” the organizations write. “To counteract the dangerous alignment of Big Tech and Trump’s authoritarianism and extremism, it is of the utmost urgency for your state to pass legislation to erect a firewall between government and Big Tech, safeguard our sensitive personal data, curtail Big Tech’s incentives for the collection and retention of data, and empower people with control over their own data. These are universally popular measures for data privacy and consumer protection that will impede President Trump’s agenda to punish political opponents, deport millions of people including citizens, restrict access to reproductive care, and undermine LGBTQ+ rights.”
- Bluesky and AT are a surveillance-capitalism friendly, all-public, architectures. - While in principle Bluesky and the ATmosphere's approach doesn't necessarily centralize power, in practice power today is completely concentrated. Bluesky runs all they key servers and controls the open-source implementaions as well as the protocol. As the network expands, it's likely to be extremely expensive to have other full-network Relays and AppViews, making the ATmospere as a whole dependent on Bluesky's infrastructure. Today it's possible to host your own PDS's (personal data stores) but Bluesky currently puts a lot of restrictions on them and in practice almost nobody does. It's not clear that will change. - The Protocols not Platforms paper that inspired Bluesky advocates a libertarian approach to free speech, and highlights that a benefit of this approach is that fascists like Alex Jones aren't banned and can still reach their audience (although hopefully "those who don’t wish to be bothered with his nonsense need not deal with it") – and Mike Masnick, the author of the paper, was Jack Dorsey's replacement on the board. Unlike Dorsey, Masnick does understand the value of content moderation and the threat of fascism (plus he's a lot smarter than Dorsey), so it's certainly an improvement ... but this is still very likely to remain Bluesky's philsophy.
Don't amplify disinfo! Think before you engage or share. Avoid headlines that include the disinfo. Be careful! Reshares and comments amplify it even if you're debunking!
There are many fediverses. a fediverse (a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe") is a decentralized social network of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers, and the people and organizations with accounts on them, that communicate through one or more protocols, bridges, and hubs. Participants in a fediverse can be social networks (either centralized or decentralized) in their own right; participants can also be part of multiple fediverses. "the Fediverse" is a fediverse whose boundaries, culture, software, protocols, change over time. and mean different things to different people but typically include a network organization based on instances, a specific kind of server . Since 2018 or so most people have used "the Fediverse" to refer to an ActivityPub-centric fediverse – but that's not the only fediverse out there!