Dissent’s Articles at PogoWasRight.org, Page 2

Dissent

New Privacy Badger Prevents Google From Mangling More of Your Links and Invading Your Privacy

Sep 202023

September 20, 2023 Posted by Dissent Business, Online

Alexei Miagkov and Daly Barnett write:

We released a new version of Privacy Badger that updates how we fight “link tracking” across a number of Google products. With this update Privacy Badger removes tracking from links in Google Docs, Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Images results. Privacy Badger now also removes tracking from links added after scrolling through Google Search results.

Link tracking is a creepy surveillance tactic that allows a company to follow you whenever you click on a link to leave its website. As we wrote in our original announcement of Google link tracking protection, Google uses different techniques in different browsers. The techniques also vary across Google products. One common link tracking approach surreptitiously redirects the outgoing request through the tracker’s own servers. There is virtually no benefit 1 for you when this happens. The added complexity mostly just helps Google learn more about your browsing.

It’s been a few years since our original release of Google link tracking protection. Things have changed in the meantime. For example, Google Search now dynamically adds results as you scroll the page (“infinite scroll” has mostly replaced distinct pages of results). Google Hangouts no longer exists! This made it a good time for us to update Privacy Badger’s first party tracking protections.

You can always check to see what Privacy Badger has done on the site you’re currently on by clicking on Privacy Badger’s icon in your browser toolbar. Whenever link tracking protection is active, you will see that reflected in Privacy Badger’s popup window.

We’ll get into the technical explanation about how this all works below, but the TL;DR is that this is just one way that Privacy Badger continues to create a less tracking- and tracker-riddled internet experience.

Inside ShadowDragon, The Tool That Lets ICE Monitor Pregnancy Tracking Sites and Fortnite Players

Sep 192023

September 19, 2023 Posted by Dissent Govt, Surveillance

Joseph Cox reports:

Daniel Clemens sits in a darkened room and speaks about why he thinks people should not protest. This applies to “pretty much every different group that’s out there protesting right now. There’s probably a better way to do it,” the bearded Clemens says into his microphone.

Whether its people on the left or the right, protestors are “probably not moving the needle at all,” he says. “Nobody is going to listen. It’s a bunch of noise. And don’t be surprised when people are going to investigate you because you made their life difficult.”

First OpenAI Web-Scraping Class Action Voluntarily Dismissed

Sep 192023

September 19, 2023 Posted by Dissent Artificial Intelligence, Business, Court

Isaiah Poritz reports:

Plaintiffs in a wide-ranging consumer class action alleging OpenAI LP scraped private information from hundreds of millions of internet users dropped their lawsuit only a few months after filing the complaint in San Francisco federal court.

The 16 plaintiffs are reserving their right to re-file the complaint, according to the voluntary dismissal docketed Sept. 15.

The proposed class action alleged OpenAI and investor Microsoft Corp. violated a range of federal and state privacy and anti-hacking laws with an “unprecedented” web-scraping operation to harvest data used to train its popular generative AI programs ChatGPT and DALL-E.

Governor Hochul Signs Legislation to Strengthen Workers’ Rights in New York State

Sep 192023

September 19, 2023 Posted by Dissent Laws, U.S., Youth & Schools

Snippets from a press release last week by NY’s governor:

Governor Kathy Hochul today signed three pieces of legislation to strengthen workers’ rights in New York State. This support will uplift workers in addition to recent employee protections surrounding mandatory political and religious meetings, strengthening wage theft penalties, and increasing benefits for injured workers. The Governor’s action builds upon her nation-leading worker agenda that includes historic plans to increase New York’s minimum wage and index it to inflation, offering 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave to more than 150,000 state employees, and other initiatives to increase wages and benefits, expand prevailing wage, connect job seekers to employment opportunities, and help ensure retirement security for private sector workers.

Legislation (S. 4878-A /A. 398-A) requires employers to give notice to their employees that they are eligible for unemployment insurance whenever the employer makes a permanent or temporary separation of the employee or reduces hours to a point that the employee qualifies for total or partial unemployment.

Legislation (S. 2518/A. 836) prohibits employers from requesting or requiring username, login information, and passwords, of personal accounts as a condition of hiring, as a condition of employment, or for use in a disciplinary action.

Legislation (S. 1902-A/A. 1245-A) requires the Department of Labor to provide notice to unemployment applicants of the supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP) and the special supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children (WIC).

It would have been nice if they actually linked to the legislation, but we did that for you, so all’s good, right?

h/t, Joe Cadillic

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