I had planned a series of blog posts about different gender items I’ve seen in blog posts, the news , etc but never got the time. Instead I kept adding them to wallabag and tagging them to blog.
So think of this blog post as a series of micoblog with little comments after each link.
This one sums up so many things I hear and can’t stand. Shes right, how fragile is masculinity that eating a banana in a certain way can cause idiots to worry. Its frankly so stupid I can’t bring myself to say anything more that what I’ve said before.
Dare I say anything more…? To be fair its been a long time since I mentioned who pays on the first date. But to be fair there is arguments and tensions, which is why it keeps coming up. For example if you take the massive gender pay gap and then exercise it in who pays for the bill. Most heterosexual dates would have the man paying 20-33% more for the bill. This was noted to me and I pointed out the minority pay gap is pretty awful too making things even more tricky on a first date.
Lessons in how to be a good man? Maybe? Not so sure as the old-fashioned view from Superman actor Henry Cavill says it all. Generally the men in thrillers I’ve seen, might be better than the toxic masculinity you see now but not exactly enlighten to feminism.
So this is very interesting research. I originally heard the love, sex and money issue a while ago, but didn’t dig into the survey till recently.
When I read,
Pop culture was a source of inspiration for an understanding of manhood for younger men (42 percent of those age 18 to 34), while only 17 percent of men 35 to 64 and 12 percent of men 65 and over said the same.
My instant thought was something of a worry, as I’m not seeing the best examples in pop culture (although I have to admit I don’t spend much time in pop culture so maybe I’m automatically biased).
The society pressure and daily concerns was another key one, which I’d love to have similar results from a decade ago and a decade before that.
The question How would you say it’s an advantage to be a man at your work right now? Blew my mind…
59% of men surveyed didn’t think Men are taken more seriously, Men make more money, Men have more choice, Men have more professional development opportunities, Men generally have more support from their managers, Men are explicitly praised more often?
This is delusion at its worst, even Even with the #metoo movement making this super clear. But it is consistent with a conversation I had in my barbars a while ago to be fair, when I mentioned going to see the Guilty Feminist live recording in Liverpool.
If you’ve so far withstood the temptation to install a smart speaker in your home, worried about the potential privacy pitfalls and a bit embarrassed about the notion of chatting aimlessly to an inanimate object, brace yourselves. This Christmas, the world’s biggest tech giants, including Amazon, Google and Facebook, are making another bid for your living room, announcing a range of new devices that resemble tablets you can talk to.
“It’s very clear what they’re trying to do: sell you more stuff through third-party use of your own information,”
The fear about whether or not such devices are actually always on causes some users to relegate their smart speakers to corridors. “Think about where in the home you want to use these things, particularly if you think they might be listening all the time,”
I think the only thing missing from the article is a link to Mozilla’s buyers guide, which charts in a friendly consumer fashion whats actually going on underneath the surface of the iot devices we may get over the holiday period.
Tickets are still available but there is a waiting list for certain times. Of course if there is space we will add you to the audience, but we do have a physical limit on each showing.
Come and visit us and give your views… See you there!
Its over 14 years since the dataportability project was founded by a bunch of well meaning people including myself. It was a challenging time with vendor lock, walled gardens and social guilt trips; to be honest little changed till very recently with GDPR.
Data export was good but user controlled data transfer is something special and one of the dreams of the data portability project. Service to service; not because there was a special agreement setup between the services but because you choose to move of your own freewill; makes so much sense.
In 2007, a small group of engineers in our Chicago office formed the Data Liberation Front, a team that believed consumers should have better tools to put their data where they want, when they want, and even move it to a different service. This idea, called “data portability,” gives people greater control of their information, and pushes us to develop great products because we know they can pack up and leave at any time.
In 2011, we launched Takeout, a new way for Google users to download or transfer a copy of the data they store or create in a variety of industry-standard formats. Since then, we’ve continued to invest in Takeout—we now call it Download Your Data—and today, our users can download a machine-readable copy of the data they have stored in 50+ Google products, with more on the way.
Now, we’re taking our commitment to portability a step further. In tandem with Microsoft, Twitter, and Facebook we’re announcing the Data Transfer Project, an open source initiative dedicated to developing tools that will enable consumers to transfer their data directly from one service to another, without needing to download and re-upload it. Download Your Data users can already do this; they can transfer their information directly to their Dropbox, Box, MS OneDrive, and Google Drive accounts today. With this project, the development of which we mentioned in our blog post about preparations for the GDPR, we’re looking forward to working with companies across the industry to bring this type of functionality to individuals across the web.
However! The devil is in the data or rather the lack of it. As the EFF point out theres no tracking data exchange, the real crown jewels. The transfer tool is good but if the services don’t even share the data, then whats the point?
Before I headed on holiday, I got a message from POF then OKcupid a day later, saying they need the request from the email which is on the account. Fair enough, so I forwarded each email to that email address and replied all to myself and to them but from that email account address.
A few days later I got emails, first from POF and then OKCupid.
You have recently requested a copy of your PlentyofFish (“POF”) personal data, and we’re happy to report that we have now verified your identity.
We are attaching a copy of your personal data contained in or associated with your POF account. The password to access the personal data will be sent in a separate email.
By downloading this data, you consent to the extraction of your data from POF, and assume all risk and liability for such downloaded data. We encourage you to keep it secure and take precautions when storing or sharing it.
The information contained in this archive may vary depending on the way you have used POF. In general, this information includes content and photos you have provided us, whether directly or through your social media accounts, messages you have sent and other data you would expect to see from a social media service like POF.
Please note that there is some information we cannot release to you including information that would likely reveal personal information about other users. Those notably include messages you received on POF, which are not provided out of concern for the privacy of the senders.
You have recently requested a copy of your OkCupid personal data, and we’re happy to report that we have now verified your identity.
We are attaching a copy of your personal data contained in or associated with your OkCupid account. The password to access the personal data will be sent in a separate email.
By downloading this data, you consent to the extraction of your data from OkCupid, and assume all risk and liability for such downloaded data. We encourage you to keep it secure and take precautions when storing or sharing it.
The information contained in this archive may vary depending on the way you have used OkCupid. In general, this information includes content and photos you have provided us, whether directly or through your social media accounts, messages you have sent and other data you would expect to see from a social media service like OkCupid.
Please note that there is some information we cannot release to you including information that would likely reveal personal information about other users. Those notably include messages you received on OkCupid, which are not provided out of concern for the privacy of the senders.
Sincerely,
OkCupid Privacy Team
So on my train journey from Stockholm to Copenhagen, I had a look inside the Zip files shared with me. Quite different, I’d be interesting to see what others will do.
Forrester, I – POF Records.zip
UserData.json | 6.2 kb
UserData.pdf | 40.5 kb
Profile_7.jpg | 30.1 kb
Profile_6.jpg | 25.0 kb
Profile_5.jpg | 17.4 kb
Profile_4.jpg | 18.8 kb
Profile_3.jpg | 26.6 kb
Profile_2.jpg | 11.7 kb
Profile_1.jpg | 30.7 kb
OkCupid_Records_-Forrester__I.zip
Ian Forrester_JSN.txt | 3.8 mb
Ian Forrester_html.html | 6.6mb
As you can see quite different, interestingly no photos in the OKCupid data dump, even the ones I shared as part of my profile. In POF the PDF is a copy of the Json file, which is silly really.
So the Json files are the most interesting parts…
Plenty of Fish
.POF don’t have much interesting data, basically a copy of my profile data in Json including Firstvisit, FirstvisitA, etc to FirstvisitE complete with my ip address. I also can confirm I started my profile on 2012-01-25.
Then there is my BasicSearchData and AdvancedSearchData which includes the usual stuff and when I LastSearch ‘ed and from which IP address.
Nothing else… no messages
OkCupid
OkCupid has a ton more useful information in its Json. Some interesting parts; I have logged into OKCupid a total of 24157 times! My status is Active? My job is Technology? The geolocation_history is pretty spot on and the login_history goes from July 2007 to current year, complete with IP and time.
The messages is really interesting! They decided to share one of the messages, so only the ones you send rather what you received. As the messages are not like emails, you don’t get the quoted reply, just the sent message. Each item includes who from (me) and time/date. There are some which are obviously a instant massager conversation which look odd reading them now. In those ones, theres also fields for peer, peer_joined, time and type. Its also clear where changes have happened for example when you use to be able to add some formatting to the message and you use to have subject lines.
Some which stick out include, Allergic to smoking?, insomnia, ENTP and where next, The Future somewhat answered, So lazy you’ve only done 40 something questions, Dyslexia is an advantage, But would you lie in return? No bad jokes, gotland and further a field, Ok obvious question, etc.
Next comes the photos (My photos, no one elses)
"caption": "OkCupid's removal of visitors is so transparent, I don't know why they bothered to lie to us all?",
"photo": "https://k1.okccdn.com/php/load_okc_image.php/images/6623162030294614734",
"status": "Album Picture Active",
"uploaded": "2017-08-08 19:16:20"
Of course the images are publicly available via the url, so I could pull them all down with a quick wget/curl. Not sure what to make about this idea of making them public. Security through obscurity anyone?
As long as you can see the picture above, OKCupid is making my profile pictures public
Now the images strings seems to be random but don’t think this is a good idea at all! Wondering how it sits with GDPR too, also wondering if they will remove them after a period of time. Hence if the image a above is broken, then you know what happened.
Then we are on to the purchases section. It details when I once tried A-list subscription and when I cancelled it. How I paid (paypal), how much, address, date, etc… Its funny reading about when I cancelled it…
"comments": "userid = 7367007913453081320 was downgraded to amateur",
"transaction": "lost subscription",
The big question I always had was the question data. Don’t worry they are all there! For example here’s just one of mine.
After all those questions, theres a bunch of stuff about user_devices I’ve used to log into OkCupid over the years going right back. Stuff about preferences for searches, etc.
Going to need some time to digest everything but the OKCupid data dump is full of interesting things. I might convert the lot to XML just to make it easier for me to over view.
OkCupid has received your recent request for a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
For your protection and the protection of all of our users, we cannot release any personal data without first obtaining proof of identity.
In order for us to verify your identity, we kindly ask you to:
1. Respond to this email from the email address associated with your OkCupid account and provide us the username of your OkCupid account.
2. In your response to this email, please include a copy of a government-issued ID document such as your passport or driving license. Also, we ask you to please cover up any personal information other than your name, photo and date of birth from the document as that is the only information we need.
We may require further verification of your identity, for example, if the materials you provide us do not establish your identity as being linked to the account in question.
Please note that if you previously closed your account, your data may be unavailable for extraction as we proceed to its deletion or anonymization in accordance with our privacy policy. Even if data is still available for extraction, there is some information we cannot release to you including information that would likely reveal personal information about other users. Those notably include messages you received on OkCupid, which are not provided out of concern for the privacy of the senders.
PlentyofFish (“POF”) has received your recent request for a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
For your protection and the protection of all of our users, we cannot release any personal data without first obtaining proof of identity.
In order for us to verify your identity, we kindly ask you to:
1. Respond to this email from the email address associated with your POF account and provide us the username of your POF account.
2. In your response to this email, please include a copy of a government-issued ID document such as your passport or driving license. Also, we ask you to please cover up any personal information other than your name, photo and date of birth from the document as that is the only information we need.
We may require further verification of your identity, for example, if the materials you provide us do not establish your identity as being linked to the account in question.
Please note that if you previously closed your account, your data may be unavailable for extraction as we proceed to its deletion or anonymization in accordance with our privacy policy. Even if data is still available for extraction, there is some information we cannot release to you including information that would likely reveal personal information about other users. Those notably include messages you received on POF, which are not provided out of concern for the privacy of the senders.
Best,
POF Privacy Team
Well I guess they are being careful at least but will be interested to see what other questions they ask me.
Google, Facebook and others do provide a data dump but I found it really interesting to see the difference in my Facebook dump/zip/archive. I request it every year or when something changes. This year I did one while Facebook struggled to deal with the impact of Cambridge Analytica and the new GDPR changes.
In 2017 my zip was 31.4 MB (31,425,658 bytes)
In 2018 my zip was 171.3 MB (171,267,617 bytes)
Unlike previously FB included ALL the media in the messages I’ve exchanged with friends. All those gifs and videos friends have shared are now in the dump. I find it interesting they were not included previously. Which always raises the question of ownership. Something we (dataportability group) talked a lot.
Thanks to Ubergill for much improving the email I originally drafted…
I’m looking forward to the replies!
Dear {service}
I am making this request for access to personal data pursuant to Article 15 of the General Data Protection Regulation. I am still concerned that your company’s information practices may be putting my personal information at undue risk of exposure or in fact has breached its obligation to safeguard my personal information.
I would like you to be aware at the outset, that I expect a reply to my request within one month as required under Article 12, failing which I will be forwarding my inquiry with a letter of complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
Please advise as to the following:
Please confirm to me whether or not my personal data is being processed. If it is, please provide me with the categories of personal data you have about me in your files and databases.
In particular, please tell me what you know about me in your information systems, whether or not contained in databases, and including e-mail, documents on your networks, or voice or other media that you may store.
Additionally, please advise me in which countries my personal data is stored, or accessible from. In case you make use of cloud services to store or process my data, please include the countries in which the servers are located where my data are or were (in the past 12 months) stored.
Please provide me with a copy of, or access to, my personal data that you have or are processing.
Please provide me with a detailed account of the specific uses that you have made, are making, or will be making of my personal data.
Please provide a list of all third parties with whom you have (or may have) shared my personal data.
If you cannot identify with certainty the specific third parties to whom you have disclosed my personal data, please provide a list of third parties to whom you may have disclosed my personal data.
Please also identify which jurisdictions that you have identified in 1(b) above that these third parties with whom you have or may have shared my personal data, from which these third parties have stored or can access my personal data. Please also provide insight in the legal grounds for transferring my personal data to these jurisdictions. Where you have done so, or are doing so, on the basis of appropriate safeguards, please provide a copy.
Additionally, I would like to know what safeguards have been put in place in relation to these third parties that you have identified in relation to the transfer of my personal data.
Please advise how long you store my personal data, and if retention is based upon the category of personal data, please identify how long each category is retained.
If you are additionally collecting personal data about me from any source other than me, please provide me with all information about their source, as referred to in Article 14of the GDPR.
If you are making automated decisions about me, including profiling, whether or not on the basis of Article 22of the GDPR, please provide me with information concerning the basis for the logic in making such automated decisions, and the significance and consequences of such processing.
I would like to know whether or not my personal data has been disclosed inadvertently by your company in the past, or as a result of a security or privacy breach.
If so, please advise as to the following details of each and any such breach:
a general description of what occurred;
the date and time of the breach (or the best possible estimate);
iii. the date and time the breach was discovered;
the source of the breach (either your own organisation, or a third party to whom you have transferred my personal data);
details of my personal data that was disclosed;
your company’s assessment of the risk of harm to myself, as a result of the breach;
vii. a description of the measures taken or that will be taken to prevent further unauthorised access to my personal data;
viii. contact information so that I can obtain more information and assistance in relation to such a breach, and
information and advice on what I can do to protect myself against any harms, including identity theft and fraud.
If you are not able to state with any certainty whether such an exposure has taken place, through the use of appropriate technologies, please advise what mitigating steps you have taken, such as
Encryption of my personal data;
Data minimisation strategies; or,
iii. Anonymisation or pseudonymisation;
Any other means
I would like to know your information policies and standards that you follow in relation to the safeguarding of my personal data, such as whether you adhere to ISO27001for information security, and more particularly, your practices in relation to the following:
Please inform me whether you have backed up my personal data to tape, disk or other media, and where it is stored and how it is secured, including what steps you have taken to protect my personal data from loss or theft, and whether this includes encryption.
Please also advise whether you have in place any technology which allows you with reasonable certainty to know whether or not my personal data has been disclosed, including but not limited to the following:
Intrusion detection systems;
Firewall technologies;
iii. Access and identity management technologies;
Database audit and/or security tools; or,
Behavioural analysis tools, log analysis tools, or audit tools;
In regards to employees and contractors, please advise as to the following:
What technologies or business procedures do you have to ensure that individuals within your organisation will be monitored to ensure that they do not deliberately or inadvertently disclose personal data outside your company, through e-mail, web-mail or instant messaging, or otherwise.
Have you had had any circumstances in which employees or contractors have been dismissed, and/or been charged under criminal laws for accessing my personal data inappropriately, or if you are unable to determine this, of any customers, in the past twelve months.
Please advise as to what training and awareness measures you have taken in order to ensure that employees and contractors are accessing and processing my personal data in conformity with the General Data Protection Regulation.
I won’t lie, its bloody exciting not only for the experience but what it enables and stands for. I highly recommend taking part in the research if you are able to come to Liverpool from Thursday 3rd – 8th May.
Of course I don’t want to reveal too much and although its hard to do much of a spoiler as its about a shared experience. Our twitter bot is doing a good job showing the inners of what going on if you are wondering.
Lots of activity in the Living Room of the Future discussing how data and algorithms will play their part pic.twitter.com/t2O5AUFPuR
— Objects of Immersion (@ImmersiveObject) April 16, 2018
— Objects of Immersion (@ImmersiveObject) April 11, 2018
There has been a question for a while which people always ask. Why the living room? To which I answer sensitive place, common private area for discussions, there are existing social hierarchies at play in the space and its place for small audiences. Its also a complex space which I’ve seen talked about a lot recently.
A prominent architect has argued millennials do not need living rooms and their housing prospects would be greatly improved if size regulations were overhauled.
Patrik Schumacher, who took over as head of Zaha Hadid Architects after the legendary founder died in early 2016, said “hotel room-sized” studio flats were ideal for young people who led busy lives.
In a paper published by the Adam Smith Institute, he suggested size rules should be reviewed to increase the number of studio flats available to those on lower incomes.
While a 25-square-metre flat is the minimum in Japan, in the UK the minimum is 37 square metres for a one-bed.
Although reading through the piece, it sounds like a land grab to change the regulation and fit even more property in smaller spaces. There is a slight point that the price of property is super high and this could help (IF) prices don’t increase they are currently.
Polly Neate, CEO of housing charity Shelter, hit back at the architect’s remarks. “Tiny homes don’t necessarily mean cheaper homes, and at Shelter we know that having a decent place to live is vital for people’s well-being. So compromising on space and quality isn’t going to do anyone any favours,” she told The Independent.
“Homes in the UK are not expensive because they are too large, they are too expensive because our housing market is broken. When big developers realise they can squeeze, for example, 20 tiny homes on the same patch of land that once fit just ten then the price of land will rise to reflect this.
“The solution to the housing crisis is not to build ever smaller homes but to bring down the price of land and build the type of genuinely affordable homes that people actually want to live in.”
My thoughts went back and forth while reading but I wondered if the living space is squeezed what will disappear? Maybe the living room or kitchen will be first to go, looking at Japanese flats for example.
There was a choice in building the living room of the future, that it should be big or small? What was it it and what wasn’t. We decided on small to reflect the trend on smaller shared spaces and the need for the 3rd space.
In December, I converted my one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco into a “smart home.” I connected as many of my appliances and belongings as I could to the internet: an Amazon Echo, my lights, my coffee maker, my baby monitor, my kid’s toys, my vacuum, my TV, my toothbrush, a photo frame, a sex toy, and even my bed.
Its super revealing and a very good long read. It speaks volumes about the different data which flows around our homes and spaces like the living room.
The thing about the statement is although it might be throw away in nature it speaks volumes about the way Zuckerberg thinks about Facebook users. It also interesting to think how Facebook is makes users feel that way, taking the power and control out of their hands. The reactions to the reveals have been so-so like when Edward Snowdon revealed the mass surveillance of millions of citizens around the world.
But its super clear, no matter how powerless we all feel, its super important to not lose sight that these giant companies have weaponised data, algorithms and psychology against us all. Running from one service to another isn’t so helpful in the long run.
