Shamar @Shamar@qoto.org

It's official. After 3 months of back and forth, a major medical provider has elected to drop me as a patient for not having a Google or Apple device.

It is unclear if this is legal, but it is very clearly discriminatory and unethical.

Any tech journalists or lawyers interested interested in this?

I would like to do anything I can to ensure this never happens to anyone else.

The W3C – the standards body of surveillance capitalism – on privacy.

If you had any “privacy principles” to speak of, what would Adobe, Alibaba, Amazon, Baidu, Bloomberg, Google, Huawei, IAB, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, Samsung, Bilibili, SoftBank, Tencent, Yahoo!, Zoom, etc., be doing on your members list?

#privacyWashing #PR #w3c #peopleFarming #surveillance #capitalism #BigTech #BigWeb #corporatocracy https://w3c.social/@w3c/112060072560559832

Is AI inevitable, necessary or good for schools? Short thread on our new report about AI in schools written for schools and leaders

tl;dr question industry and investor insistence that unregulated, untested AI is inevitable, necessary or good for education https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/ai

The current discourse of AI suggests it's inevitable, and schools will be left behind if they don't sign up and pay up. But whatever AI's possible benefits, dropping it into schools is a public issue requiring proper public deliberation and oversight nepc.colorado.edu/publication/ai

AI won't affect schools on its own - it will mix with existing educational contexts, and those contexts are characterized often by political control, austerity, bureaucracy, standardization and datafication. AI's likely to be used to reinforce these aspects of schooling...

AI in edu right now takes different forms:

- Big tech cloud, data and AI infrastructure for schools
- New AI upgrades to edtech platforms via OpenAI APIs
- AI add-ons to routine education enterprise software like Copilot for teachers in MS365

The foundations for AI in schools already existed...

MEMO TO THE MEDIA:

Give the people the full picture

via @rbreich
#Media #Inflation #Profits #AltText

Device neutrality significa che ogni dispositivo digitale può utilizzare qualsiasi software e servizio senza lock-in o scelte obbligate

Il #DMA va in questa direzione perché permette l'interoperabilità - per esempio, #whatsapp dovrà permettere a terzi di accedere ai suoi utenti (https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/06/security/whatsapp-messenger-messaging-interoperability-eu/)

Bene, ma si tratta di andare oltre per avere una completa device neutrality.

Ce lo ricorda e ce lo spiega #FSFE, qui e qui:
- https://fsfe.org/news/2024/news-20240307-01.en.html
- https://deviceneutrality.org/

Bravi!

China: “Remove all VPNs”
Apple: “Sure thing”

China: “…and podcast apps”
Apple: “Can do boss!”

China: “…and also hand over all iCloud data for our citizens”
Apple: “I mean why wouldn’t we? Here you go!”

EU: “Allow alternate app stores, and do it fairly”
Apple: “Ahhh hell no! This is so unfair you guys are bullies! Malware! Privacy! We have standards! Unlike you we care about our users!”

Big Tech's lack of transparency is undemocratic

Google warned Dorchester County, USA, that the amount of water it needs from the county's utility to cool computer server farms and other equipment it plans to build is a closely guarded "trade secret." Google has imposed a gag order on officials elected by the public, warning them that they must not tell the public anything about Google project.

Big Tech is a threat to democracy.

https://www.postandcourier.com/business/charleston-google-data-center-public-records-oregon-portland/article_c5f00fd8-d6f9-11ee-b3c1-f3f5e0012225.html

1/3 🚨 The final negotiations on the European Health Data Space #EHDS law are happening later this week.

✊🏾 We are calling on MEPs to stand firm and insist as a bare minimum on the right to opt-out for everyone in the EU when sharing their personal medical records with third parties.

Here's why...🧵

My remarks at the European DIGITAL SME Alliance this morning:

The Commission should use gatekeepers' persistent GDPR infringement (via DMA Article 5 and 6) to pursue interim measures under DMA Article 24 (for “serious and irreparable damage for business users or end users of gatekeepers")

The Commission move as soon as possible to market investigation of systematic non-compliance under DMA Article 18. Signal with action that it is fully prepared to impose structural remedies.

Thus, by dribs and drabs, freedom leeches out of openness. Today's tech giants have mobilized "open" to create a two-tier system: the largest tech firms enjoy broad freedom themselves - they alone get to decide how their software stack is configured. But for all of us who rely on that (increasingly unavoidable) software stack, all we have is "open": the ability to peer inside that software and see how it works, and perhaps suggest improvements to it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBknF2yUZZ8

11/

Data is never "raw" or "unprocessed" or "neutral" or "objective". The decision to record a thing (and not others), the structures and data formats it's pressed into, the granularity and frequency of collection are already a curation and interpretation of the world.

A data set with unclear collectors, without a declaration of the original purpose and goals is basically unusable responsibly.

If I don't agree, I cannot use the TV that was ALREADY PURCHASED UNDER A DIFFERENT AGREEMENT!

And I just read some of it. I don't agree.
I want my money back. The TV we bought did not have this forced agreement.

That's it! I'm fucking done. My next "TV" is just going to be a monitor. I don't want anymore smarts in what's just being used as a display

La Ue dà ragione a Spotify: multa a Apple da 1,8 miliardi per abuso di posizione dominante nello streaming musicale

https://www.corriere.it/tecnologia/24_marzo_04/apple-multata-dalla-commissione-europea-dovra-versare-1-8-miliardi-di-euro-per-abuso-di-posizione-dominante-c8a33134-11c4-4ae6-a61f-cf764c106xlk.shtml

come se unab persona che gudadagna 30k/anno ricevesse una sanzione da 117 euro

Scrivi 21 volte "l’intelligenza artificiale nell’istruzione è un problema pubblico"

«Questi 21 argomenti contro l’intelligenza artificiale nell’istruzione dimostrano come l’intelligenza artificiale non possa essere considerata inevitabile, benefica o trasformativa in alcun modo diretto.»

@eticadigitale

Grazie a @Shamar per la segnalazione

https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2024/02/22/ai-in-education-is-a-public-problem/

@tkinias @990000 @Daojoan
Firefox is getting a 'shopping' sidebar and ads built-in.

A few months ago, I persuaded a client to abandon an external cloud system and use Nextcloud on their own server instead. Powered by FreeBSD and ZFS, it has already demonstrated its strengths on a couple of occasions (such as in the case of a snapshot rollback). This morning, they expressed the desire to abandon the various WhatsApp groups they use for coordination and to use a solution "all on their servers." I was inspired and quickly installed both an ejabberd and a Matrix server (Synapse) - which they will probably prefer, according to the latest news they sent me - on two FreeBSD jails.

Today, we have the awareness and experience of what it means to give our data to large companies, completely losing control over it. We have the tools, so why not use them?
And I'm really happy when someone like them, thanks to their willingness to try "new" solutions, realizes the alternatives to the colorful, advertised, warmly recommended (by salespeople) "proprietary" solutions.

#Jabber #XMPP #Matrix #Nextcloud #SelfHost #OSS #OwnYourData