The Cyberfascism Bulletin #2: April Fool’s Edition

I wish I was foolin’. All this stuff’s real, so the joke’s on us.

BIG BIZ

An oldie but goodie: Kim DuToit discovers that the Weather Channel app is selling his location data in near real time. He is not amused.
Heck, I didn’t even realize that drunken online shopping was a thing. How naive of me. Of course, the Amazonians and Googleoids would never try to reinforce or exploit this behavior pattern, would they?

Life’s a bitch for a “discredited individual” under China’s social credit system.
Two US state Teachers’ Retirement Systems are investing pension funds in Hikvision, a Chinese firm whose surveillance equipment is reportedly used in Muslim ~~detention~~ reeducation camps. Which states? Why California and New York, of course.
Google is going to improve Internet access in Cuba.

As an authoritarian regime with an abysmal human rights record, Cuba’s got an incentive to keep its citizens offline, and regularly harasses and arrests digital dissidents. Reporters Without Borders calls the nation an “Internet Enemy,” putting in the same list as North Korea, Syria, and Iran.

The censorship manifests itself in a really interesting way. While there’s not much actual site-level blocking, Cuba does surveil its citizens online.

Google just wants a piece of the action.

Smart speakers may snoop on family conversations. More than 4 in 10 parents of 6- to 8-year olds say their children use the assistants for homework help. OK, letting your kids be raised by robots may actually be a step up from having them raised by ~~wolves~~ their peers.

Smartphones and their ilk are the ultimate tools for pooling our ignorance. And pettiness. And intolerance.

Wikipedia Editors Paid to Protect Political, Tech, and Media Figures. I had no
idea there was such a job as “paid Wikipedia fixer.”
Human contact is becoming a luxury good
There’s an epidemic of teenage loneliness. One obvious culprit is the overuse of social media. A 2017 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that “young adults with high” social media use “seem to feel more socially isolated than their counterparts” who use social media less
Suggesting your fellow students get a grip will only get you death threats. Thanks, Twitter.
Apparently, Twitter has an aversion to the anti-abortion film Unplanned.

News Flash! ‘Technoference’ Is Making Our Lives More Sluggish, Study Finds. Just put the phone down. As Groucho may have said “I love my cigar, too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.”
Francis Turner takes Twitter to task. Is he exaggerating? I think not.