MOTIVATIONAL MOMENTS
“When you’re going through hell, keep going…”
– Winston Churchill
THE BAD NEWS - YOU STILL LIVE ON A HACKED PLANET
Privacy is a battered area across many forays in our society. I managed to catch the Congressional hearings on the Equifax breach. I heard the head of Equifax (US) say to Congress, “I wonder what are we trying to protect anymore?”
I think that became the most challenging moment for me in 2017, both as consumer and personal data protection advocate. I realized demoralizing the privacy interests of every individual was someone’s goal. If your opponent couldn’t lawfully achieve that, as if you had no legal recourse or protection from their infringements, they still seek to bombard you, networks and infrastructures with smaller privacy breaches, to desensitize you to the negative effects. Why? To break down your resistance with frustration and demotivation, so you fail to fight back over your personal data property and your privacy.
Americans are in a double bind, of sorts. We are held underneath a public-private mass surveillance aperture; which won’t relinquish much power back to the individual. Part of the infrastructure capitalizes on voter information brokerage. Another part forces or incentivizes private social media to do government surveillance work on the people who feel compelled to use it. You have an opportunity to use your voice, to direct Congressional leaders to Sunset Section 702 of the warrantless surveillance act, FISA. A bill to renew it has been filed. There is a lot of fight for you and US privacy rights in that fight.
Every day you wake up you are the Data Owner, not merely the Data Subject, a victim of theft or a serf in someone’s digital fiefdom.
Grasp this and you have a future to self determine your privacy.
THE GOOD NEWS -PUBLISHING IS HAPPENING!
IEEE is releasing 2nd edition of Ethically Aligned Design, Ethics in Action 12/12/2017. I contributed to the Consent section. I also have joined other IEEE data ethics subgroup P7003 –(Addressing)Bias producing content, curating research and being helpful to ethical data standards development. You can read the ethics production from end-t0-end here. [Updated 2/22/2018]
'REBALANCE PRIVACY' SLUG-MARATHON 2018.
Yes. So slow. Good solutions take time.
I have finally found my self-publishing house to produce chapters; which include privacy-accountability hacks, letters and templates to stay organized and to fight back. The plan is to produce the initiate select chapter around February. You can purchase directly from this website or my Patreon page. There is a placeholder live under the 'Authoring' tab for the 2018 release.
Please tell all of your friends. (If your friends have great publishers market skills, send them my way!)
Do you have news or a personal story of how you overcame a privacy infringement? Please write to me. I would like to do a feature on you and demonstrate your talent.