fear

1. Don’t use Tiktok (and other low quality social media like Twitter) and encourage people you know to do the same. Suggest alternatives like federated sites, and help people navigate it if you can.

2. Firmly correct disinformation when you see it. If you have a topic of interest you find yourself repeatedly addressing, keep a short copy/paste response with easily digestible sources to make the process quick and painless.

3. Engage as little as possible with disinformation, since any kind of engagement is exactly what they’re looking for. When you stumble upon it, state a brief sourced correction and quickly leave. If someone beat you to it, simply leave and avoid in the future.

4. Teach your friends and family about the dangers of misinformation, and the importance of vetting sources. Peer reviewed journal = great. Random youtuber/tiktoker = needs sources to confirm validity.

5. Try to be as polite as possible when addressing disinformation because aggression can cause people to dig their heels in and push them further into the false narrative.

6. Learn terms to describe the spread of disinformation that are easy for people to grasp. Learning and teaching others about things like “good/bad faith arguments” so you can spot and effectively counter trolls, recognizing “irony poisoning” that is a driving force behind the normalization of extremist views, and understanding how “woke” actually means “tolerant and respectful of the differences between human beings” can all help people to see what’s happening and protect against disinformation.

7. If you’re motivated enough, start your own publication that provides accurate, well sourced information on your topics of interest, or join an already established publication as a freelance contributor.

8. Don’t give up. Don’t let anyone convince you that the fight is already over and that we’re doomed to live out 1984. The real fight hasn’t even begun, because so many people are too caught up in their own stressful lives to realize there’s a full blown culture war going on here. Once more people open their eyes to it, sanity will prevail. These points here are exactly how you can begin opening people’s eyes.

Pretty sure you could substitute “autism” with any topic at all and the point would be accurate.

Stop closing in on me!

I did. He assured me in more professional terms that they don’t give a shit. I do a lot of business with them and have been a client in good standing since I became an adult. They apparently have nothing set up to retain customers who leave over this, which would indicate that hasn’t been an issue for them. Or they might be banking on me not following through, but that just means they don’t know me very well. When it comes time for me to make those changes to my policy, I’m gone.

Privacy has been beaten to a bloody pulp, but the fight doesn’t need to be called yet. Don’t give up, keep telling everyone you can. I know things are looking low right now, but every person you reach matters.

In the case of Zoom, an approach that could actually work is having every step of the solution already completed if you’ve got an employer trying to push Zoom on employees. Make sure you can clearly state here’s the problem, here’s why it’s dangerous for the company, here’s a great alternative, here’s why it’s safest for the company, and here’s how you install it. Reach out to the IT dept if you’re not the IT dept to get them on board. If the advice is coming from multiple employees, that will help your case.

Imagine getting caught and having your claim denied or being sued for insurance fraud. I’m happy to use ublock origin, but what you’re describing is playing with fire. We need to make sure it never gets to this point in the first place by making it illegal for insurance companies to do this.

Something needs to happen to clue in the average person about why this is such a problem. I don’t know what that something is though. Continued breaches of privacy? The government and police continuing to make obvious use of the data they can easily buy from any of these companies? What is it going to take for people to care and for laws to be made to prevent more of this going forward?

I was talking to my insurance company the other day and they warned me that if I make any changes to my policy they’ll drastically jack up my rate because of the changes in the economy. But I can bring it down a bit if I install their tracking software on my phone that can interface with my vehicle and send all of my driving data to them. It would tell them everywhere I ever go whenever I drive, my exact speed at any moment, braking habits, etc. Does anyone ever say yes to this? Do people realize that they could sift through everything you’ve ever done effortlessly with AI to find that one time in your life you came to a rolling stop at a deserted stop sign and claim you’re a dangerous driver who doesn’t follow the rules of the road in order to deny your claim?

Is there a chance in hell that one day this won’t be a requirement just to have vehicle insurance? Why isn’t everyone up in arms about their data being harvested and sold to the highest bidder? Why are there not laws being made against this kind of undemocratic, authoritarian control over people? I am so disappointed in my fellow man, both the ones guilty of the harvesting and everyone who couldn’t be bothered to complain and put a stop to this.