A few weeks ago I gave a talk for Smashing Meets about Web3. Find the talk description below.

You can watch the video of ‘Web3: creating problems where we need solutions’ on Smashing Magazine’s Vimeo.

Web3 is one of Silicon Valley’s latest buzzwords, hoping to become a movement. Blockchains, cryptocurrencies, the metaverse, and NFTs may paint themselves as futuristic solutions to tech and society’s problems, but who really benefits from their use? We need to confront the harms of Web3. But first, we need to understand them. In this talk, Laura will explain the technologies behind Web3, why she believes they raise serious ethical questions, and how they are not the alternative to Big Tech we need.

I would also really recommend watching Trine Falbe’s talk from the same event on ‘Selling Ethical Decisions’. Trine truly gives the most pragmatic and practical advice on ethical design.

In September I’ll be speaking at Design Matters in Copenhagen. Ahead of the event I was interviewed by Giorgia Lombardo about accessible and inclusive design.

Read the interview, ‘Get on the Path to Accessible and Inclusive Design with Laura Kalbag’.

Unsurprisingly, it’s been a busy few months since I started working with Stately. My website is in a state of neglect, so I’m here with a quick remedy. In vaguely chronological order…

Remove Trackers (on CSS Tricks).

I wrote a response to “What is one thing people can do to make their website better?” on CSS-Tricks. Of course, I chose “remove trackers.”

In related news…

Sadly, Better Blocker is no more.

After years of trying to work through Apple’s App Store bureaucracy and then finding out about Apple’s latest proposals for privacy violation, we decided it was time to retire Better Blocker. If you’re looking for an alternative, we recommend 1Blocker.

I’m still horrified by tracking on the web and will keep an eye on developments, but it’s going to be better for my mental health that I’m no longer examining some of the worst of the web every month.

Speaking at Smashing Meets on 9th February.

On the 9th February 2022, I’m speaking at a Smashing Meets event on (design) ethics. My talk is “Web3 — creating problems where we need solutions.” Yep, I’m a sucker for social media blowback. But it’s a topic we need to discuss in more detail, and I’m speaking alongside the brilliant Trine Falbe, who always gives insightful talks.

My book, Accessibility for Everyone, is back in stock in paperback! Hooray! 💚📗 (And big thank you, A Book Apart.)

Preorder yours now and it’ll be with you in 6-8 weeks.

Finally got my first jab! 🎉

”Snyder and others argue these new arrivals, who drape themselves in the flag of competition, are really just concern trolls, capitalizing on fears about Big Tech’s power to cement the position of existing privacy-invasive technologies.”

… ”If the privacy advocates inside the W3C have been put off by Rosewell’s approach, he hasn’t exactly been charmed by theirs either… From his perspective, browsers have too much power over the community, and they use that power to quash conversations that might make them look bad.”

A long read where everyone comes out looking bad. (And those portrayed as the ”defenders of privacy” aren’t necessarily doing so out of the goodness of their hearts either!)

Folks who signed up for the mailing list, I’m really sorry I can’t email you about the skipped livestream tonight. I’ve managed to lock myself out of my Buttondown account 😞

Promise that I’ll get it fixed and get emails out to you in time for next month’s stream!

Read this whole thread, articulated so well from someone who really knows cryptocurrency.

“I am often asked if I will “return to cryptocurrency” or begin regularly sharing my thoughts on the topic again. My answer is a wholehearted “no”, but to avoid repeating myself I figure it might be worthwhile briefly explaining why here…”

We’re skipping July’s Small is Beautiful this month as Aral is getting his second COVID vaccination the day before. We’ll be back in August!

You can get live stream reminders for next month’s stream via email or RSS.

From today, in addition to my work at Small Technology Foundation, I’ll be working with Stately on developer and designer relations as a contractor.

The pandemic has made finances tighter at Small Technology Foundation as we’d usually support our work with in-person conference talks which would pay speaking fees. We were already thrifty with our income, but we’ve still got a way to go before the Small Web is financially self-sustaining.

With that in mind, I decided to look for suitable additional work that would allow us to keep Small Technology Foundation running and give Aral the space to keep doing the intensive research and development required for Small Tech.

Stately is a good match because they’re working on tools I’d want to use myself, I get to use the full range of skills and experience I’ve developed over my last twelve years in tech, and I’ll have the time to keep things at Small Technology Foundation ticking over.

It’s going to be an adventure!

’Jim Thatcher, an urban studies professor at the University of Washington, Tacoma, is skeptical. “If you give people this power to draw attention based around a dangerous event,” Thatcher says, “then they are actually encouraged to seek out, or at worst manufacture, these dangerous events,” noting the speed with which Citizen escalated the manhunt. Like many others, Thatcher downloaded Citizen during last year’s protests. He wondered whether it might be used as a tool for “sousveillance,” a term surveillance activists use in reference to turning cameras back on authorities. That didn’t shake out. “Let’s be explicitly clear here,” he says. “The ‘frictionless’ solution provided by a for-profit company for a public health and safety issue is just…not good. There’s no outcome where this ends well.”

…

Hamid Khan, founder of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, an anti-police-surveillance group, says the manhunt wasn’t Citizen gone awry; it was Citizen working as designed. Khan sees the app as part of a “culture of deputization and vigilantism” built on the “see something, say something” ethos of neighborhood watch, now “taking a more technological sort of spin.” He says tools like Citizen, with their patina of officialdom and impartial reporting, “are becoming a license to racially profile and go after some of the most vulnerable community members—particularly the unhoused—and to criminalize them.”’

“Every day, consumers are exposed to extensive commercial surveillance online. This leads to manipulation, fraud, discrimination and privacy violations. Information about what we like, our purchases, mental and physical health, sexual orientation, location and political views are collected, combined and used under the guise of targeting advertising.

…

The collection and combination of information about us not only violates our right to privacy, but renders us vulnerable to manipulation, discrimination and fraud. This harms individuals and society as a whole, says the director of digital policy in the NCC, Finn Myrstad.”

Includes a detailed list of the consequences of surveillance-based advertising.

“Slaughter also argued that it’s important for regulators not to pile all the burden of avoiding data abuses on consumers themselves.

‘I want to sound a note of caution around approaches that are centered around user control,’ she said. ’I think transparency and control are important. I think it is really problematic to put the burden on consumers to work through the markets and the use of data, figure out who has their data, how it’s being used, make decisions… I think you end up with notice fatigue; I think you end up with decision fatigue; you get very abusive manipulation of dark patterns to push people into decisions.

‘So I really worry about a framework that is built at all around the idea of control as the central tenant or the way we solve the problem. I’ll keep coming back to the notion of what instead we need to be focusing on is where is the burden on the firms to limit their collection in the first instance, prohibit their sharing, prohibit abusive use of data and I think that that’s where we need to be focused from a policy perspective.’”

Ooh, didn’t realise you could subscribe to an RSS feed by just entering the site’s url into Feedbin. That saves a lot of time hunting around for a hidden feed!

“Because one reason why there is such a visceral ‘gotcha’ response to these posts, is down to the continued dismissal of marginalised communities who want justice for the discrimination they face. Whether it’s Black people speaking out about police brutality, women who have suffered sexual assault being let down by the criminal justice system or trans people who are harassed not only in the street but in supposedly professional spaces, the problems marginalised communities face remain unaddressed. So when a trial-by-social-media does happen after old offensive posts surface, it can be a chance to see justice very publicly served, as well as prove that the discrimination you say you face, really does exist – because it’s right there to see, in a tweet.

But often, raging at individuals for long-past mistakes seems like misplaced energy. What we need to challenge are the people and institutions who continue to discriminate today, and who show no signs of changing.

…

If serious problems are found, then it’s only right that Ollie and Yorkshire CCC should be held accountable for them. In fact, tackling the systemic problems would not only help prevent the attitudes that manifest themselves as offensive posts, but move us away from a culture where we are so justice-starved that we demand to see heads roll.”

“Digiday reported this week that some major players in the adtech industry have started drawing up plans to turn FLoC into something just as invasive as the cookies it’s supposed to quash. In some cases, this means companies amalgamating any data scraps they can get from Google with their own catalogs of user info, turning FLoC from an ”anonymous” identifier into just another piece of personal data for shady companies to compile. Others have begun pitching FLoC as a great tool for fingerprinting—an especially underhanded tracking technique that can keep pinpointing you no matter how many times you go incognito or flush your cache.

…

[W]hat if that guy regularly visits websites centered around queer or trans topics? What if he’s trying to get access to food stamps online? This kind of web browsing—just like all web browsing—gets slurped into FLoC’s algorithm, potentially tipping off countless obscure adtech operators about a person’s sexuality or financial situation. And because the world of data sharing is still a (mostly) lawless wasteland in spite of lawmaker’s best intentions, there’s not much stopping a DSP from passing off that data to the highest bidder.”

Missed this a couple of weeks ago, and it could make a huge difference to our browsing experiences (and compel sites to do better!)

Note: the misuse and overuse of “crazy” is unfortunate in the linked site. Self Defined dictionary recommends more appropriate, and less ableist, alternative words.

“Today, noyb.eu sent over 500 draft complaints to companies who use unlawful cookie banners - making it the largest wave of complaints since the GDPR came into force.

…

The GDPR was meant to ensure that users have full control over their data, but being online has become a frustrating experience for people all over Europe. Annoying cookie banners appear at every corner of the web, often making it extremely complicated to click anything but the “accept” button. Companies use so-called “dark patterns” to get more than 90% of users to “agree” when industry statistics show that only 3% of users actually want to agree.

…

Many internet users mistake this annoying situation as a direct outcome of the GDPR, when in fact companies misuse designs in violation of the law. The GDPR demands a simple “yes” or “no”, as reasonable people would expect, but companies often have the power over the design and narrative when implementing the GDPR.”

“I’m well aware that if you want your health data to remain private, smartwatches are certainly risky. But we’re way past that now. These devices can and have saved lives, and despite some early skepticism, wearables aren’t going anywhere. Why pick a smartwatch made by a company whose founder called early users ‘dumb fucks’ for trusting him? Why trust the company that had a full-page temper tantrum in several national newspapers because Apple introduced stronger privacy features? I’ve got two drawers bursting with smartwatches launched in 2020—there are plenty of lesser evils to choose from.”

A very long read but a fascinating insight into how ethics research works (more specifically, doesn’t) inside Google, which I imagine can be extrapolated to other corporations.

“Gebru’s career mirrored the rapid rise of AI fairness research, and also some of its paradoxes. Almost as soon as the field sprang up, it quickly attracted eager support from giants like Google, which sponsored conferences, handed out grants, and hired the domain’s most prominent experts. Now Gebru’s sudden ejection made her and others wonder if this research, in its domesticated form, had always been doomed to a short leash. To researchers, it sent a dangerous message: AI is largely unregulated and only getting more powerful and ubiquitous, and insiders who are forthright in studying its social harms do so at the risk of exile.

…

To some, the drama at Google suggested that researchers on corporate payrolls should be subject to different rules than those from institutions not seeking to profit from AI. In April, some founding editors of a new journal of AI ethics published a paper calling for industry researchers to disclose who vetted their work and how, and for whistle-blowing mechanisms to be set up inside corporate labs. ‘We had been trying to poke on this issue already, but when Timnit got fired it catapulted into a more mainstream conversation,’ says Savannah Thais, a researcher at Princeton on the journal’s board who contributed to the paper. ‘Now a lot more people are questioning: Is it possible to do good ethics research in a corporate AI setting?’

If that mindset takes hold, in-house ethical AI research may forever be held in suspicion—much the way industrial research on pollution is viewed by environmental scientists.

…

Inioluwa Deborah Raji, whom Gebru escorted to Black in AI in 2017, and who now works as a fellow at the Mozilla Foundation, says that Google’s treatment of its own researchers demands a permanent shift in perceptions. ‘There was this hope that some level of self-regulation could have happened at these tech companies,’ Raji says. ‘Everyone’s now aware that the true accountability needs to come from the outside—if you’re on the inside, there’s a limit to how much you can protect people.’

…

[Gebru]’s been thinking back to conversations she’d had with a friend who warned her not to join Google, saying it was harmful to women and impossible to change. Gebru had disagreed, claiming she could nudge things, just a little, toward a more beneficial path. ‘I kept on arguing with her,’ Gebru says. Now, she says, she concedes the point.

“The outage will likely draw attention to how centralized our ‘decentralized’ internet really is—a depressing reminder as ransomware attacks hit at critical infrastructure around the world.”

“It is worth noting, however, that the new disclosure about biometric data collection follows a $92 million settlement in a class action lawsuit against TikTok, originally filed in May 2020, over the social media app’s violation of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The consolidated suit included more than 20 separate cases filed against TikTok over the platform’s collection and sharing of the personal and biometric information without user consent. … In the grand scheme of things, TikTok still has plenty of data on its users, their content and their devices, even without biometric data.

For example, TikTok policy already stated it automatically collects information about users’ devices, including location data based on your SIM card and IP addresses and GPS, your use of TikTok itself and all the content you create or upload, the data you send in messages on its app, metadata from the content you upload, cookies, the app and file names on your device, battery state and even your keystroke patterns and rhythms, among other things.

This is in addition to the ‘Information you choose to provide,‘ which comes from when you register, contact TikTok or upload content. In that case, TikTok collects your registration info (username, age, language, etc.), profile info (name, photo, social media accounts), all your user-generated content on the platform, your phone and social network contacts, payment information, plus the text, images and video found in the device’s clipboard.”

“Owners of Amazon Echo assistants and Ring doorbells have until June 8 to avoid automatically opting into Sidewalk, the internet giant’s mesh network that taps into people’s broadband and may prove to be a privacy nightmare…

‘A stalker can abuse it to stalk people better. There are no mitigations mentioned’…”

“It does raise concerns about censorship, particularly given how we’ve seen social media platforms bungle moderating Palestinian voices in recent weeks amid the Israel conflict. Twitter’s algorithms have screwed up before, and there’s no arguing that mislabeling inconvenient truths as ‘fake news’ could have lasting repercussions.”

New blocking rules! On 25th May 2021, I blocked three blocker blockers, fixed five sites and blocked four new trackers. In the battle of me vs blocker blockers, I have once again emerged victorious (x4) 💪

Better Blocker update news.

The rules will auto-update if the app is running. If it’s not, you can get the new rules by opening the app and choosing ‘Update rules’ or ‘Check again now’ from Better’s menu.

Thank you to all our donors and patrons who help us continue our work! 💙

If you want to support us, you can tell your friends about our work, leave us a review for Better, gift the app to someone else, or even become a donor or monthly patron.

Yesterday’s Small is Beautiful video is now up on our site with transcript, captions and links to all the cool sites we mentioned!

Thanks to fun guests, Heydon Pickering and Gabe Kangas, and to the lovely folks who stayed for the studio afterparty 😉

If you enjoy this livestream, please help support out work at Small Technology Foundation with a patronage or donation, or share our videos with your friends!

Yes, it is late Friday night here… never underestimate my determination to not work weekends!

Earlier this week a case study of Small Technology Foundation went up on the Scotland’s First Minister’s National Advisory Council on Women and Girls website. I was asked to share our work as part of their digital Spotlight on Women and Girls in Digital Spaces and Industries.

The audience for their site, and the case study structure, made me really think about how to communicate what we do at Small Technology Foundation. I aimed for plain English and clarity, and I think it resulted in a nice summary of our work over the last seven years. If you’re interested, you can read the case study on the NACWG website.

Small is Beautiful

Writing the case study also made me realise that I’ve not mentioned Small is Beautiful on my blog yet. Small Is Beautiful is a monthly livestream hosted by Aral and me. We usually have guests (sometimes not) to discuss their projects and work that is in, or adjacent to, Small Tech. The livestream is around an hour long, and we have an open studio where anyone watching can join to ask questions, either on or off camera. Afterwards, the livestreams are available as videos on the Small Tech website, complete with transcripts and captions.

Next week is our 10th edition, and if you’re interested in livestreaming and making videos without Big Tech, you’ll really want to join this one. We’ll have more information about it tomorrow on the Small is Beautiful page.

New rules out there for you Better Blocker friends. Lots of fixing this time, amazing how fragile big brand websites can be 😬

“At the end of the day, they are not interested in seeing things in their work timeline that make them uncomfortable, or distracts them from what they’re interested in.” from What really happened at Basecamp

This attitude is endemic in the tech industry.

Last night’s Small is Beautiful livestream is now up on our site with transcript, captions (and new for this week), links!

We started discussing the National Rail greyscale “mourning” accessibility issues and so much more.

Now I’m off to sleep for the whole weekend 😴

On today’s livestream (5pm Irish time), we’re going to talk about @BetterBlocker, and its impact on both accessibility and privacy, inspired by the National Rail earlier in the week.

You can join in with us (with headphones and mic!) in the studio too:

https://small-tech.org/events/small-is-beautiful/

Aral has also got something very cool and new to share 😊

If you miss the livestream, never fear! The video is always available on our site near-instantly, and I try to get a good transcript and captions up within a day or two.

Captions are now working on our latest Small is Beautiful video! My fault… detailing below in case anyone else comes across the same issue…

Why my Vimeo captions weren’t working:

I’d generated the captions from the edited automated transcript (using Simon Says) as usual, and exported them in .srt format. When I tried to upload them to the Vimeo distribution section, the usual upload interface didn’t appear after choosing the file, but refreshing the page would show that the captions were uploaded sucessfully. Enabling the captions worked in so far as the CC button was visible and toggle-able on the video player, however the captions themselves did not show up.

Comparing the captions file to previous episode’s files showed no obvious differences. Then I tried different formats too, same issue as above.

Finally, looking through the Vimeo Support page, I noticed advice to run the WebVTT-formatted captions through a validator. Wondering if there might be some problematic characters in the caption text, I used the first WebVTT validator I found to validate the .vtt version of the captions file and got the following errors:

Line 3000, column 13: Incorrect start tag.

Line 3007, column 18: Incorrect start tag.

Turned out the issues were me using <div> and id="" in the caption text, trying to be a bit too clever in making the text more understandable. Both bits of markup were getting confused with the caption meta information. I tweaked the text, reuploaded and now our captions are working correctly. Hoorah!

And now the video for last week’s Small is Beautiful, introducing the Svelte Nano Donation component, is up on our site with a transcript.

Captions coming shortly, just trying to work out why Vimeo isn’t showing them correctly…

I’ve added a custom dictionary and yet the auto-transcription can’t ever transcribe mine and Aral’s names correctly.

Why could that possibly be? 🤔

(I do actually know, it’s because our non-English names are too “foreign.” And clearly my non-American accent doesn’t help.)

This week’s Small Is Beautiful livestream will be on “National Rail Fail: lessons to be learned on privacy and accessibility”

How come Better Blocker fixes the National Rail site? What are the wider implications?

Thursday 15th April, 5pm (Irish time) on the Small Tech website.

It’ll be me and Aral this week. Back in separate rooms, I suspect.

Turns out when you’re blocking trackers, you end up blocking a lot of other nonsense. We just had a little look at why Better Blocker is blocking the “mourning” colour filter on the National Rail website.

It’s devastatingly on brand for UK marketing folks to throw usability and accessibility out the window in favour of a bit of royal deference.

Not just the greyscale filter, but also this homepage satire. In case you’re looking for Further Advice on “Prince Philip” or “Refunds.”

If you missed the live stream, you can watch our unscheduled Small Is Beautiful episode for the Svelte Nano Donation component release. Aral’s tweet.

Much fun was had, being in the same room, messing with the camera focus, and most importantly, talking about Nano (and why we don’t like most cryptocurrencies) and the design and development decisions behind the component.

Also the first “outing” for the first ever outfit I’ve sewed myself.

You can watch Small is Beautiful #8 on the Small Tech website.

A bit close to the end of the month for my liking, but new blocking rules are now out!

If you use Better and find any unblocked trackers or issues with sites, please let me know and I’ll use those reports to make Better better for everyone 😊

A couple of weeks ago, Aral asked me if I could write a user stylesheet for web browsers to make Twitter nothing but a compose box.

Jump straight to how it works

I totally get it. Twitter sucks your time and soul. But sometimes you need to use it to share what you’re working on, or promote events. Essentially, you want to use Twitter but you don’t want it to use you. The way to do this is to hide every part of Twitter’s interface that doesn’t help you compose a tweet, or otherwise likely to distract or derail you.

The power of CSS pseudo classes

As part of my work on Better’s blocking rules, I sometimes have to hide parts of the page using CSS. Hiding ads isn’t really Better’s purpose, we try to block the tracking and behavioural advertising scripts before they put anything on the page. But occasionally, sites have rolled their own obnoxious first-party targeted ad system that is inseparable from the rest of their site’s functionality. On such occasions, I roll up my sleeves, and get my pseudo CSS selectors out to set these elements to display: none. Because, of course, these sites design their HTML and CSS to avoid blockers like Better.

The problem with user stylesheets

Hiding parts of Twitter’s interface is a similar problem. Luckily, a lot of Twitter’s interface has semantic naming (amongst the gazillion nested divs and robot-generated CSS classes) for accessibility purposes, so it’s simple enough to hook into these elements for a user stylesheet. The problem with user stylesheets is that they’re a blunt instrument, aimed at making global changes across every site you visit. Really useful for making font sizes big on every site you visit, but if you use it to hide any element with the class of “timeline”, chances are you’ll break a lot of websites you visit.

A solution to target specific websites

My solution was to chain what I suspect are fairly unique element selectors in a likely unique sequence, ensuring that these rules will only apply to twitter.com, even though the stylesheet will be used on every site visited.

/* Hide the Home timeline and Explore timeline */
div[data-at-shortcutkeys] header[role="banner"] + main[role="main"] div[aria-label="Timeline: Your Home Timeline"],
div[data-at-shortcutkeys] header[role="banner"] + main[role="main"] div[aria-label="Timeline: Explore"] {
  display: none !important;
}

As you can tell from the selectors I’ve used, it is fragile as anything. As soon as Twitter decides to change the aria-label for its home timeline, the stylesheet will no longer effectively hide the home timeline. But, as with a lot of Better’s blocking rules, this is a balance between using a fragile rule that works against a big corporation that tends to be pretty slow in rolling out changes to its interface.

After a couple of weeks of using this stylesheet in my primary browser and not noticing any issues with other sites, I’m fairly confident in sharing this stylesheet with anyone else who might find it useful.

How the stylesheet works

I ended up creating two stylesheets, one for Aral’s way of working (write-only.css), and one for my way of working (read-some.css).

Write-only Twitter

write-only.css is a user stylesheet for the browser that hides absolutely everything except the Home feed compose box on Twitter.

Read-some Twitter

My Twitter use varies, particularly as I sometimes use it for Better support, so I need to be able to access a bit more of Twitter’s interface.

read-some.css is a user stylesheet for the browser that hides:

• Home timeline
• Explore timeline
• List timelines

but keeps:

• Mentions
• Messages
• Settings etc

And let me tell you, having this stylesheet on my desktop Safari for the last couple of weeks has made a huge difference. Now I can check our @mentions without getting further distracted. Even when my muscle memory types “twitter.com” when I’m procrastinating or seeking distraction, the page loads so minimally, I take one look at it and close the tab. It no longer appears in my “Frequently Visited” sites!

Where to find the stylesheets

You can download the Write-Only Twitter stylesheets and find out more about them on our Small Tech repository. I’ll update them when needed. There’s not instructions for every browser in there, but it shouldn’t be too hard for you to find that information if you need it. Personally I recommend Safari for everyday browsing as you can use Better Blocker to block trackers while you browse 😉

Don’t mean to keep going on about Better Blocker App Store reviews, but these little bits of feedback have a big impact on my psyche. And if you are one of those people who left a 5 star review lately, you have actually made me a little bit (happy) tearful this morning.

Transcript of a fascinating talk about labelling buttons by Sara Soueidan (via Rachel Andrew’s CSS Layout News newsletter):

Accessible Text Labels For All

App Store review for Better saying “developer is with fake account promoting his own product.” I’ve had to point out that if I were doing that, we’d have more 5 star reviews 😂 (And trust me, my eyes rolled at that assumption of developer gender.)

You can now watch yesterday’s Small is Beautiful livestream with guest David Heinemeier Hansson, with captions, or read the transcript at on the Small Tech site.

We covered so many topics! Including Small Tech (vs Big Tech), business models, ethical design, scaling organisations, and much more.

Tomorrow! Aral and I are doing the Small is Beautiful livestream with guest David Heinemeier Hansson, and we’ll be talking all things Small Tech.

The stream is earlier than usual (midday here in Cork) so make sure you don’t miss it. Especially if you want to join us live in the studio!

“What the buyer is really getting is less tangible: bragging rights, clout, a collector’s item, or simply a nifty new form of money laundering. And because of the meteoric rise of cryptocurrencies, just attaching words like “token” or “blockchain” or “proof of work” to random crap can make its value skyrocket.”

…

”According to CryptoArt.wtf, the Larry transaction used the equivalent of about 11 kilowatt-hours. That’s equivalent to the average electrical consumption of a European Union resident for an entire day—or approximately 21 miles (34 kilometers) of driving with a gas-powered vehicle, one month of laptop use, or a week and a half of desktop computer usage.”

…

“Those figures don’t count, as CryptoArt.wtf noted, the energy cost of “production or storage of the works, or even web hosting.” Nor do they include the energy cost of reselling the NFT, and they don’t include the infinitesimal amount I just contributed to making the blockchain suck up even more juice in the future, which I’m assuming is incalculable.”

There’s a lot of discussion on UK Twitter right now about women’s safety in public spaces. And of course, I’ve been afraid to walk after dark, and sometimes even during the daytime, in most places that I’ve lived and visited. Since I was a young teenager, our friends would always make sure nobody walked home alone at night. That’s why it astonishes me to hear from cis men who don’t understand how much the rest of us fear them.

I don’t feel safe at conferences

A lot of people are wondering what they can do to change this situation. (I mean the reasonable people who aren’t blaming the victims.) And so I wanted to bring up the safety of in-person conferences, in the hope that perhaps conference organisers might take this opportunity to commit to making their events safer, and less scary, for people who justifiably fear harassment and harm from cis men.

For the last few years, I’ve had the following in my conference speaking terms:

Please arrange for someone to meet me at the airport or train station. I’m happy to take public transport, I would just appreciate some company! As a woman, it really means a lot to feel safe travelling to/from venues at night. I’ve had conferences expect me to walk alone across an unfamiliar city late at night in the dark. If the venues are close-by, or there’s someone who can help me get back safely, I’d really appreciate it.

I can count one conference that has actively taken my request seriously, or even acknowledged it.

Most conferences have parties that end late in the evening, often at venues at a distance from the event venue, and potentially further away from the accommodation they book for speakers. I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked back to my hotel from a venue in the dark, trying to map the route on my phone, hoping my mobile roaming plan will hold out for long enough in a city I’ve never been to, trying not to draw attention to myself as a small and weak person. Trying to decide whether it’s safer to travel on faster empty public transport where I could be trapped with someone, or taking longer walking where at least I could try to run away. Never wearing earphones, trying to stand tall and walk stridently as if I’m a strong woman who knows where she’s going. Often having had confrontations with aggressive men at the conferences who disagreed with my views, or thought I wasn’t sympathetic enough to their perspectives. Usually I’ll leave a party or dinner early if I know another speaker (who I feel safe with) is going back to the same accommodation, so we can travel together.

Perhaps my request isn’t strong enough, perhaps I need to chase up the organisers to ensure my requests are heard. If I’m honest, I struggle to ask for “special treatment”. As someone who is not a big name cis white guy, who chooses to speak about “challenging” topics like accessibility, inclusivity, privacy and rights, I’m all too aware of constantly walking a line where I could easily be dropped by an organiser for being difficult, or not worth the effort.

What can conferences do to improve our safety?

It would really help me, and other people who feel vulnerable in these situations, if conference organisers could help keep us safe. I’ve got a few specific ideas below. I’ve tried to focus on affordable options:

• Provide speakers with maps (that don’t rely on internet connections!) and optimal travel information to help them get between your venues and their accommodation.
• Meet speakers at the airport or train station, help them get to the venue or their accommodation safely.
• Arrange a buddy system so that speakers don’t need to travel alone, whether that’s with other speakers, organisers or attendees. Give people an easy option to choose another buddy if necessary, and don’t question their need to do so. (Unfortunately many of us know people in the industry with whom we’d not feel comfortable alone, and do not want the repercussions of sharing their names publicly.)

At the conferences themselves

Safety at the conference itself is a whole other issue. I could write many blog posts about codes of conduct, their lack of enforcement, and the poor behaviour of both conference attendees and organisers. Maybe another time.

For non-organisers

If you’re a cis man at a conference, please be aware that you are, by default, a threat. It’s not personal, it’s statistics. And unfortunately usually based on past experience. You may well be “one of the good guys”, but if you are a stranger (and sometimes even not), there is no way for us to know that you won’t harass or harm us.

What can you do to help? Number one, for all time, pay attention to the people in the room who may feel vulnerable and step in if they are being faced with any questionable behaviour. Passive-aggressive comments can often escalate into worse situations, don’t let it get there. Make sure people know when their behaviour is unacceptable, and take care of the person who had to deal with it, especially when they might be more vulnerable alone later on.

Ask someone if they need company getting to where they need to go, and help them find a safe route, or someone who is suitable to help them, well ahead of the time they need to leave. Realise that offering to take someone back to their accommodation can be perceived as a potential threat, so prioritise finding a person who will make them feel safe over being the hero yourself.

And try to make people feel less of a burden when you help them. When you are socialised as a person from a minoritised group, you are encouraged to politely refuse help that might make a cis man go out of his way. Yes, these requests can be socially awkward, and rely on you stepping out of your comfort zone. But a little of your discomfort could afford someone the safety that might just save their life.

“Like the majority of Google’s privacy pushes that we’ve seen until now, the FLoC proposal isn’t as user-friendly as you might think. For one thing, others have already pointed out that this proposal doesn’t necessarily stop people from being tracked across the web, it just ensures that Google’s the only one doing it.”

“Critics also argue that the data-gathering and experimental predictive analytics incorporated into some tracking apps are bound to generate false positives that lead to arrests for technical violations of probation or parole conditions.”

…

”Often it’s people of colour who are having their data extracted from them. This valuable commodity is literally the body of black individuals” -Prof Chaz Arnett, Maryland University

✨ checked the app store admin and Better has two new generous and kind reviews (and no new negative reviews!) ✨

I need to bottle this feeling. If those reviewers read this, please know you’ve made my day!

“Increasingly, companies are turning to these firms to review their algorithms, particularly when they’ve faced criticism for biased outcomes, but it’s not clear whether such audits are actually making algorithms less biased—or if they’re simply good PR.”

Blocked some nasty little trackers today.

Getting a blocking rule update together for Better. Got the feeling that today is going to be a big day for blocking blocker blockers… 😎

The Clearleft podcast episode on Accessibility

Some really great insights from the fabulous Léonie Watson and Cassie Evans in a very concise format! (Also featuring me.)

Last night’s Small is Beautiful live stream video is now up along with captions, or a transcript if that’s more your kind of thing. Thanks to Paul Frazee (and Kit) for being a fabulous guest and such an in-depth discussion of decentralised social networks.

(I’ve no idea why I referred to Aral as “that man” multiple times… 😂)

The new Mogwai album is exactly what I needed this morning.

I can’t actually find any information regarding privacy in AccessiBe’s privacy policy. Suspect they might be a route for tracking and should probably be blocked with Better… 🤔

Oh, there it is! (Not in the “privacy policy”, bafflingly.)

“accessiBe tracks… website behaviors (mouse clicks, heat maps, user clicks)”

Having just found proof they neither care about, nor have a proper understanding of, privacy… I’ll be adding them to Better’s blocking rules next week for everyone.

My site hasn’t had an update in a while. I broke the local version in the autumn last year, and told myself I needed to fix it before I posted again… a few months later and here we are!

Site.js and the starter theme

In our Small is Beautiful #2 livestream, I spoke about how I spent a lot of last year creating a Hugo starter theme for Site.js. We decided to move in a different direction with Site.js, but I’d built so much cool stuff into this new theme (please let me be pleased with myself for once!) it seemed a waste to not make use of it.

One of the key ideas behind the starter theme was to make a theme that could work for a whole website, or could be an accessible rights-respecting foundation for a site that has its own added-extras on top. Aral and I both use Hugo as the blogging system for our sites, as well as for the Small Tech website. Hugo has a pretty useful system for overriding the defaults in a theme for your own site, and I built the starter theme with customisation and flexibility in mind.

While we aren’t using Site.js itself (we’ve forked it) for our work with the Small Web, that doesn’t mean that Site.js is abandoned. Our aim is that the Small Web is an alternative to many of the Big Web platforms out there today, with a completely different infrastructure. Site.js is a tool for the web as it is today, for developing on a local server, syncing and deploying to your own server, with SSL/TLS certificates and site statistics, and no configuration required. In the future we aim to have Small Web sites that can communicate with each other, and do other useful things, but they’ll be more than we need for a simple static website. Site.js will still be useful for the good old static website, and so my starter theme should hopefully still be useful for anyone who wants to get a site up and running quickly with Site.js and Hugo.

What has changed?

I’ll explain more about how the starter theme works in a later blog post, but here’s some starter theme features I’m using for the new version of my site that you might find handy too:

• responsive images with different sizes generated using Hugo and implemented with srcset.
• snazzy photo gallery using Hugo to smart-crop the responsive images
• dark mode (following your operating system’s preferences).
• a subscribe page listing RSS feeds and explaining how to use RSS
• no tracking whatsover (naturally.)

Of course any personal site update probably comes with bagloads of bugs, and if you notice any, please let me know!

I responded to this issue on GitHub in good faith, but I can’t stop emphasising YOU NEED TO PAY PEOPLE TO DO THE WORK RIGHT. If you want to do better at covering disability and accessibility, pay a disabled consultant to help you.

Relying on “the community” might get you some nice advice from well-meaning people, but be aware that “the community” is limited to those who can afford to/have free time to participate (and I’ll bet those are mostly non-disabled people.)

“We can’t afford to spend money on inclusivity”. Yet you can afford other aspects of design, development, promotion. Even if you’re working for free on an open source project, your time still costs money. You’re just prioritising based on your existing skills and knowledge.

My not being able to sleep means there’s now a transcript and captions up on our latest Small Is Beautiful #4 video.

We go through our streaming setups, how we do it on a budget, including equipment and creating transcripts and captions.

And now we have the captions and transcript up on our site for the Small is Beautiful #3 livestream.

This was a really great discussion, so much fascinating detail on the strategies for introducing more ethical (and easy-to-use!) computers into schools.

Been testing Simon Says for transcripts/captions today and I think I might be in love with a web app that’s going to save me hours and hours.

Simon Says.

Automated transcript has great accuracy as a starting point (including for non-native English speakers!) and combined with the well-designed editing tools, I’m able to edit so much faster. Prices are also affordable for our tiny not-for-profit organisation.

I really really believe that captions and transcripts should be included with videos by default. But blimey, doing hour-long video streams every week has really been testing my commitment to that. Especially when we don’t have money to spend. But I’m determined!

Just added captions and transcripts to both of our Small is Beautiful live stream videos.

Small is Beautiful, episode #1. Small is Beautiful, episode #2.

For this evening’s stream, and future streams, I’m going to try to get the transcript and caption done and up much faster.

Not going to lie, it is hard work and time-consuming creating a transcript/captions for hour-long conversational streams.

If anyone has any feedback on the formatting/readability of either the transcripts or captions, please let me know. As I’m putting all this effort in, I want to make sure they’re as usable and useful as they can be!

I’ve been using Thisten, which is a really affordable starting point, and editing from there. If anyone has any tips on other tools and workflows for producing both transcripts and captions from the same source material, I’d love to hear them.

Ahead of the Small is Beautiful livestream this evening, I thought I’d share what I’ve been working on recently in text too.

Site.js starter theme

For the last (checks repository) nine months, I’ve been working on a Hugo starter theme for Site.js. As we were using Hugo, a static site generator, for our own sites, and Hugo was available as a binary, Aral decided it made sense to include Hugo in Site.js. The idea was that we make it as easy as possible for developers, and people with a little development experience, to get a basic blog or website up and running with Hugo and Site.js. The starter theme is my attempt to create a theme that has everything you need for an easily-maintainable website with accessible, rights-respecting defaults.

Pretty good defaults

The theme has quite a few elements of the theme that please me:

• Accessible default templates making it easy to author accessible content.
• Vanilla CSS for easy-to-read typography and using flexbox and grid for simple progressively-enhanced responsive layouts.
• Responsive images generated using Hugo, including srcset images, and thumbnail images generated for social media.
• Multiple colour scheme options, including dark modes, with accessible colour contrasts.
• Favicons generated using Hugo, matching the chosen colour scheme.
• A simple-as-possible (especially for Hugo!) six step process for getting a site running locally with Site.js.
• Privacy page
• RSS Feed

Ambition pared back

The current version of the theme is not quite production-ready, but still has a lot of useful bits and pieces if you’re a developer working with Hugo. Ambitiously, we originally aimed to have the theme fit flexibly for a photoblog, standard blog, and simple few-pages website. This led to a lot of different configuration options which I tested across a few different demo sites. Below is a couple of examples of them:

As with all things Small Tech, our aim is to create things that we first use ourselves. That way we very quickly realise if something isn’t working, and we’re not making assumptions about the people who use what we build.

Towards the end of 2020, we came to three realisations:

1. Site.js, now a mature project, worked fine with Hugo, but didn’t need Hugo when it was forked into Place.
2. While my sites has a photoblog section, neither of us currently have a photoblog, and so the scope of the starter theme was moving further away from our specific needs.
3. Having a theme that accommodated so many different requirements added too many configuration options which raised the barrier to entry for anyone trying to understand the theme.

I was divided. Do I completely ditch the starter theme, pulling what I’ve learned into the custom Hugo themes we’ve created for our other sites? Or do I rework the theme, pare back the ambition, into something we can build all our sites upon, and hopefully be more useful for other developers too?

At first I dabbled a little with the former approach. I had learned loads about Hugo in the process, it hadn’t been wasted time and effort. But then I realised that my own site sorely needed the update. The Small Tech site could do with it as well. A website is fairly easy to maintain if you’re never updating the content, or even if updating the content is your full-time job. But if you don’t have much time to update your website, or multiple websites, the maintenance has to be really easy. You should need to re-learn a content management system, add a bunch of new CSS, or write HTML in your markdown every time you want to share a new blog post.

So my 2021 starter theme strategy was born: strip out any excessive configuration, make the theme easy to use, and make it a joy to update my own website again. I’m less than a week in and it’s going well. You’ll know if my new strategy has worked when my site gets updated again!

Better Blocker

Last year, on top of all the other things, I still managed to get a few blocking rule updates out for Better Blocker. Honestly, Better Blocker doesn’t make us a load of money, and we’re running a not-for-profit organisation, so I try to be very efficient with my updates. (And close my ears to people who don’t believe an app is worth a onetime payment of €2 unless it has frequent arbitrary updates!)

Over time, the updates to the blocking rules are fairly repetitive. Not much has changed in the tracking landscape in the nearly-five years that Better Blocker has existed. Every update I find a few more prolific trackers to block, I block a couple more blocker blockers, and I tend to revisit the same German tabloid websites with the most determined anti-blocking strategies.

The absolute state of web development nowadays means I’m seeing more sites break more spectacularly in the face of tracker blocking. The tech industry seems to be increasingly indiscriminate in relying on third-party solutions for large chunks of their functionality. Did you notice how many non-Google sites fell over when Google went down at the end of last year? I see that happen a lot with tracker blocking. Logins broken, checkouts broken, even links broken. CSS and even basic HTML content blocked from loading. No progressive enhancement anywhere. Fragile websites built entirely reliantly on other people’s platforms.

Every time I get cranky about development on social media, it’s usually because I’ve been trying to fix sites that break when visited with Better Blocker. I do a lot of work because of other people’s poor development practices, the venting helps a little. Takes deep breath.

We’ve also enrolled in Apple’s new Small Business programme, which essentially means we’ll see a little bit more money from app sales in the future. It’s something, but our involvement with Apple as a platform is plagued with irritations, and not a long-term investment, so I won’t go on about it here!

Apparently my site is one of only five sites reviewed by Terms of Service Didn’t Read that has been given a Privacy Grade A rating. (Because I don’t track anyone.) Strange/cool thing to wake up to on a Monday morning!

LauraKalbag.com on Terms Of Service Didn’t Read.

Reddit thread from Terms Of Service Didn’t Read “Ask Us Anything”.

Missing my family and friends this Christmas so I made a silly Osky card to send them.

Lots of love to everyone, especially those staying away to keep the ones they love safe x

“After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really.”

Classic tech bro move: do the bare minimum, screamingly obvious, and then proclaim it like you’re an exceptional genius who deserves applause.

No cookie for you - the GitHub blog.

Yes, it’s the right thing to do. But framed so badly. It’s truly a desperate sight watching developers exalting a multinational that’s doing the bare minimum because developers find cookie notices “annoying” when it’s still working with ICE

Developers adding multiple third-party analytics to their pages like they really want to find out how much visitors hate slow websites.

Today is the day you got your boss-friendly reason to remove Google third-party functionality from your website.

Take advantage of it!

I always recommend switching.software as a good place to start if you’re looking for alternatives to Google products.

In case you managed to miss the reason behind my post… Google services were down in many countries.

Really? REALLY? From a tweet by Kelly Rose

Wow. I’m going to do a little thread on the many levels of awful here.

1. Accessibility: The government site for requesting coronavirus tests is using a third-party service (Google reCAPTCHA) to shut out bots. reCAPTCHA is notoriously hard to use for people using screenreaders.
2. Accessibility: A US service (Google reCAPTCHA) to shut out bots is asking visitors to the UK government website to identify “crosswalks”. (Most people visiting this site are likely more familiar with British English vs American English. “Crosswalks” is not used by Brits.)
3. Privacy: A US-based third-party service (Google reCAPTCHA) is being embedded on the UK government’s website, sharing all sorts of its citizens’ information with Google.
4. Privacy: A US-based third-party service (Google reCAPTCHA) is being embedded on the UK government’s website where people are requesting coronavirus tests. Sharing (incredibly personal) information about citizens who suspect they may have coronavirus with Google.

It’s just so irresponsible. And frustrating. The number of people who didn’t care about citizens’ rights for this to happen…

Before my usual lazy bleating reply guys jump in here:

switching.software has some decent recommendations for alternatives to reCAPTCHA.

My setup isn’t as fancy as last time I did a livestreamed event 😂 but I’m looking forward to it!

Join us in 10 minutes!

Me: Need to stop doing every task at 150%, got to learn to relax.

Also me: Better learn calligraphy to finish off these homemade Christmas cards.

Feels like it’s the right time of year to share this again…

‘Big Mood Machine: Spotify pursues emotional surveillance for global profit’ by Liz Pelly on The Baffler.

The Period Products (Free Provision) (Scotland) Bill has been passed unanimously by MSPs this evening.

Thinking about how great this would’ve been for me, suffering with awful heavy periods at school from the age of 11.

Great news for people with periods in Scotland.

Looking for a bio for me? Help yourself to a third-person (she/her) short bio or long bio below. There’s also first-person bios just in case that’s your thing.

If you’re after a photo/headshot, you’ll find some at the end of this page.

Short third-person bio (she/her)

Choose from plain text without links, plain text with links, markdown or HTML:

Plain text without links

Short third-person bio:

Laura Kalbag is a British designer living in Ireland, and author of Accessibility For Everyone from A Book Apart. She’s co-founder of Small Technology Foundation, a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit organisation advocating for and building small technology designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.

Plain text with links

Short third-person bio:

Laura Kalbag (https://laurakalbag.com) is a British designer living in Ireland, and author of Accessibility For Everyone (https://abookapart.com/products/accessibility-for-everyone) from A Book Apart. She’s co-founder of Small Technology Foundation (https://small-tech.org), a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit organisation advocating for and building small technology designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.

Markdown

Short third-person bio:

[Laura Kalbag](https://laurakalbag.com) is a British designer living in Ireland, and author of [Accessibility For Everyone](https://abookapart.com/products/accessibility-for-everyone) from A Book Apart. She’s co-founder of [Small Technology Foundation](https://small-tech.org), a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit organisation advocating for and building small technology designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.

HTML

Short third-person bio:

<a href="https://laurakalbag.com">Laura Kalbag</a> is a British designer living in Ireland, and author of <a href="https://abookapart.com/products/accessibility-for-everyone">Accessibility For Everyone</a> from A Book Apart. She’s co-founder of <a href="https://small-tech.org">Small Technology Foundation</a>, a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit organisation advocating for and building small technology designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.

Long third-person bio (she/her)

Choose from plain text without links, plain text with links, markdown or HTML:

Plain text without links

Long third-person bio:

Laura Kalbag is a British designer living in Ireland, and author of Accessibility For Everyone from A Book Apart. She’s co-founder of Small Technology Foundation, a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit organisation advocating for and building small technology designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.

On an average day, Laura does everything from design and development, learning how to run a sustainable not-for-profit, and trying to make privacy, and rights-respecting technology, accessible to a wide audience. You can find her making design decisions, writing code, nudging icon pixels, or interpreting a privacy policy into something humans can understand. Sometimes she speaks at conferences and writes articles too.

Plain text with links

Long third-person bio:

Laura Kalbag (https://laurakalbag.com) is a British designer living in Ireland, and author of Accessibility For Everyone (https://abookapart.com/products/accessibility-for-everyone) from A Book Apart. She’s co-founder of Small Technology Foundation (https://small-tech.org), a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit organisation advocating for and building small technology designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.

On an average day, Laura does everything from design and development, learning how to run a sustainable not-for-profit, and trying to make privacy, and rights-respecting technology, accessible to a wide audience. You can find her making design decisions, writing code, nudging icon pixels, or interpreting a privacy policy into something humans can understand. Sometimes she speaks at conferences and writes articles too.

Markdown

Long third-person bio:

[Laura Kalbag](https://laurakalbag.com) is a British designer living in Ireland, and author of [Accessibility For Everyone](https://abookapart.com/products/accessibility-for-everyone) from A Book Apart. She’s co-founder of [Small Technology Foundation](https://small-tech.org), a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit organisation advocating for and building small technology designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.

On an average day, Laura does everything from design and development, learning how to run a sustainable not-for-profit, and trying to make privacy, and rights-respecting technology, accessible to a wide audience. You can find her making design decisions, writing code, nudging icon pixels, or interpreting a privacy policy into something humans can understand. Sometimes she speaks at conferences and writes articles too.

HTML

Long third-person bio:

<p><a href="https://laurakalbag.com">Laura Kalbag</a> is a British designer living in Ireland, and author of <a href="https://abookapart.com/products/accessibility-for-everyone">Accessibility For Everyone</a> from A Book Apart. She’s co-founder of <a href="https://small-tech.org">Small Technology Foundation</a>, a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit organisation advocating for and building small technology designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.</p>

<p>On an average day, Laura does everything from design and development, learning how to run a sustainable not-for-profit, and trying to make privacy, and rights-respecting technology, accessible to a wide audience. You can find her making design decisions, writing code, nudging icon pixels, or interpreting a privacy policy into something humans can understand. Sometimes she speaks at conferences and writes articles too.</p>

Short first-person bio (I/my)

Choose from plain text without links, plain text with links, markdown or HTML:

Plain text without links

Short first-person bio:

I’m a British designer living in Ireland, and author of Accessibility For Everyone from A Book Apart. I’m co-founder of Small Technology Foundation, a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit organisation advocating for and building small technology designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.

Plain text with links

Short first-person bio:

I’m a British designer living in Ireland (https://laurakalbag.com), and author of Accessibility For Everyone (https://abookapart.com/products/accessibility-for-everyone) from A Book Apart. I’m co-founder of Small Technology Foundation (https://small-tech.org), a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit organisation advocating for and building small technology designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.

Markdown

Short first-person bio:

[I’m a British designer living in Ireland](https://laurakalbag.com), and author of [Accessibility For Everyone](https://abookapart.com/products/accessibility-for-everyone) from A Book Apart. I’m co-founder of [Small Technology Foundation](https://small-tech.org), a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit organisation advocating for and building small technology designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.

HTML

Short first-person bio:

<a href="https://laurakalbag.com">I’m a British designer living in Ireland</a>, and author of <a href="https://abookapart.com/products/accessibility-for-everyone">Accessibility For Everyone</a> from A Book Apart. I’m co-founder of <a href="https://small-tech.org">Small Technology Foundation</a>, a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit organisation advocating for and building small technology designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.

Long first-person bio (I/my)

Choose from plain text without links, plain text with links, markdown or HTML:

Plain text without links

Long first-person bio:

I’m a British designer living in Ireland, and author of Accessibility For Everyone from A Book Apart. I’m co-founder of Small Technology Foundation, a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit organisation advocating for and building small technology designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.

On an average day, I do everything from design and development, learning how to run a sustainable not-for-profit, and trying to make privacy, and rights-respecting technology, accessible to a wide audience. You can find me making design decisions, writing code, nudging icon pixels, or interpreting a privacy policy into something humans can understand. Sometimes I speak at conferences and write articles too.

Plain text with links

Long first-person bio:

I’m a British designer living in Ireland (https://laurakalbag.com), and author of Accessibility For Everyone (https://abookapart.com/products/accessibility-for-everyone) from A Book Apart. I’m co-founder of Small Technology Foundation (https://small-tech.org), a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit organisation advocating for and building small technology designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.

On an average day, I do everything from design and development, learning how to run a sustainable not-for-profit, and trying to make privacy, and rights-respecting technology, accessible to a wide audience. You can find me making design decisions, writing code, nudging icon pixels, or interpreting a privacy policy into something humans can understand. Sometimes I speak at conferences and write articles too.

Markdown

Long first-person bio:

[I’m a British designer living in Ireland](https://laurakalbag.com), and author of [Accessibility For Everyone](https://abookapart.com/products/accessibility-for-everyone) from A Book Apart. I’m co-founder of [Small Technology Foundation](https://small-tech.org), a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit organisation advocating for and building small technology designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.

On an average day, I do everything from design and development, learning how to run a sustainable not-for-profit, and trying to make privacy, and rights-respecting technology, accessible to a wide audience. You can find me making design decisions, writing code, nudging icon pixels, or interpreting a privacy policy into something humans can understand. Sometimes I speak at conferences and write articles too.

HTML

Long first-person bio:

<p><a href="https://laurakalbag.com">Laura Kalbag</a> is a British designer living in Ireland, and author of <a href="https://abookapart.com/products/accessibility-for-everyone">Accessibility For Everyone</a> from A Book Apart. I’m co-founder of <a href="https://small-tech.org">Small Technology Foundation</a>, a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit organisation advocating for and building small technology designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.</p>

<p>On an average day, I do everything from design and development, learning how to run a sustainable not-for-profit, and trying to make privacy, and rights-respecting technology, accessible to a wide audience. You can find me making design decisions, writing code, nudging icon pixels, or interpreting a privacy policy into something humans can understand. Sometimes I speak at conferences and write articles too.</p>

Photos

Choose whichever image best fits your need. Please don’t edit the image or change the colours (no filters!) without asking me first.

This looks like it’ll be a top read…

‘Your Computer Is on Fire’ Edited by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip. Out in March 2021.

Wouldn’t say I’m particularly sensitive to motion, but I upgraded to Big Sur and had to turn on Reduce motion within 10 minutes.

System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > Reduce motion

IAB Europe’s ad tracking consent framework found to fail GDPR standard

It’s not that I told you so but… no actually I told you so.

If you want to read or watch the whole talk, it’s up at Defying the mainstream: building technology that respects our rights.

Managed to have a stretched-out birthday week thanks to Aral spoiling me rotten, making up for being separated from my family by covid restrictions, 500km and the Irish sea. Topped the week off with a stinking cold. Just got to get through today to make it to new Discovery!

I read this article yesterday. Coincidentally, this morning an Acast podcast played me an ad which listed three other Acast podcasts I listen to in order to promote its platform. Big old no thanks to that creepy nonsense.

Is Your Favorite Podcast Tracking You?

Incredibly clever, enlightening, fun and totally privacy-respecting.

Learn about facial recognition while this website analyses your face.

How Normal Am I

As a tracking nerd (as in I hate it, but know a fair bit about it), the subtitle on this article made me chuckle. This is a really great explainer about first party vs third-party tracking, focusing on Facebook:

I Scanned My Favorite Social Media Site on Blacklight and It Came Up Pretty Clean. What’s Going On?

I think any person building stuff for the web should be subscribed to The Markup. They’re publishing really useful explainers, and giving us a lot of insight into the impact of “our” common practices.

Tech boys… egos as fragile as their javascript-riddled websites.

This post brought to you by my work this afternoon:

Q: “Why does the content not load on this site?” A: Third-party JS! Q: “Why are all the links on this site broken?” A: Third-party JS!

Text and links should not require another person’s JavaScript to work.

Or should that be…

Tech boys… websites as fragile as their javascript-riddled egos.

Blacklight

This is really useful if you want to check your own site or even point out privacy issues with your organisation’s site to your boss.

(Devs:) it’s worth reading the writeup on what’s being checked: How we built a real-time privacy inspector.

Does selecting “Whatever” constitute consent? 🤔

Pretty immense lineup for @id24conf, and it’s free with no registration required! Know what I’ll be doing this Thursday…

Schedule for Inclusive Design 24

My slides from yesterday’s talk at SmashingConf are now up on Notist, if you wanted to read any of the reference material or catch something you missed!

Slides for ‘This One Weird Trick Tells Us Everything About You’ on Notist.

Turns out that I still get nervous before an online conference talk! But I’m set up and ready to go for SmashingConf! (Thanks Aral for the photo)

So much worthwhile reading.

Emotional Labor: The MetaFilter Thread Condensed via Eriol Fox on Twitter.

Lots of me talking about “data transparency” and how I don’t think transparency is enough:

‘Designing data transparency – ideas from the community’ on openDemocracy.

Giving this talk was fun. Got to enjoy so many fabulous talks and meet loads of lovely people that day, it gave me a lot of energy.

Defying the mainstream: building technology that respects our rights. Laura Kalbag at NA Conf 2020 (YouTube).

Making myself a little web tool and using a whole range of stuff that Chris Ferdinandi’s Vanilla JS Academy taught me. I struggled with JavaScript for a decade so I really would recommend it for anyone who needs a big friendly confidence-booster.

It’s also a really friendly, inclusive and supportive community (and I don’t say any of those words lightly!) A lot of that is also due to the work of Kieran Barker. The projects also have a focus on accessibility and writing great HTML. All the good stuff!

33 years since this photo, 5 years without her. Still feels so weird.

A few weeks ago I recorded a short video for the NYC School’s Tech Summit and the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Hackathon about accessibility in 2020. A lot of work went into it, so I thought I may as well share it with everyone!

Fellow white-passing/white folks: don’t say yes to events with all-white lineups. It is 2020, you should ask about the lineup, put it in your event rider, and ensure you’re not part of the problem. You’ve got to be willing to sit an event out to make space for non-white people.

Not got an event rider? Write one! It’s a really easy way to set expectations. Use it (and your privilege) to make events more inclusive. You can also use it for accessibility requirements (ask for captioning!) You can use a rider for online events too.

Sometimes lineups aren’t finalised when you’re asked to speak. This is a poor excuse. Specify that you will pull out of an event if you find yourself on an all-white lineup. And if an event is the kind of event where they think you’re too much trouble for asking those questions, you’ve got to ask yourself if that’s the kind of event you want to be associated with.

“We examined more than 15,000 recent popular queries and found that Google devoted 41 percent of the first page of search results on mobile devices to its own properties and what it calls ‘direct answers,’ which are populated with information copied from other sources, sometimes without their knowledge or consent.”

…

Cummings, of SpanishDict.com, said something similar. “Google delivers the traffic for the whole internet. Unless your name is Facebook, you rely on Google,” he said. “It’s very risky to speak out at Google because you don’t know what type of retaliation you’ll face.”

“Very soon, Cerence announced, it plans to deepen that data mining operation with in-cabin cameras linked to emotion-detecting AI—algorithms that monitor minute changes in facial expression in order to determine a person’s emotional state at any given time. 

…

But safety is only one attraction of in-cabin monitoring. The systems also hold huge potential for harvesting the kind of behavioral data that Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalists have exploited to target ads and influence purchasing habits.

…

Eyeris CEO Modar Alaoui likewise told Motherboard that while his company’s technology is primarily designed to improve safety, “we do foresee at some point that [automakers] will try to leverage the data for several use cases, whether it be for advertising or [determining] insurance” premiums.”

The new A11y Project website is stunning. Tatiana Mac has really proved that accessible design can be beautiful inside and out. 😍👏🏼 Also I’m totally thrilled to have Accessibility For Everyone featured on there. What an endorsement! 💚📗

And Eric Bailey’s dev work! What a dream team!

Spent hours making a video of me giving a 5 minute talk. Excruciating to watch back. I blink 10 times more often than the average human and pull faces like this when I’m talking…

“Even a cursory look at Facebook’s “mistakes,” as they refer to them (or “Facebook’s business model” as it is known to most everyone outside of the company), includes redlining users, enabling age discrimination in hiring, offering “Jew haters” as an advertising category, promoting the “boogaloo” movement, fueling genocide in Myanmar, and aiding Duterte’s rise in the Philippines. It’s not so much that the problem of hate on Facebook is new, so much as that each new revelation is met mostly with an apology and a “promise” to do better moving forward. Facebook has been apologizing and promising this way since at least 2007. Yet the “mistakes” continue.”

…

“A company whose business model necessitates that it consistently discharge poison into the environment should be dismantled.”

For those who prefer audio-only, the chat I had with Josh Nesbitt last week is now available in podcast-form 😊🎧 Hey Stac Radio Episode #3

“Investments in anti-democratic technologies come at an incredible cost to the public at a time when deeper investments should be made in public health, education, public media and abolitionist approaches in the tech sector.”

“Tech Inquiry’s research comes as technology companies have ramped up efforts to win large military and law enforcement contracts, despite employee activism against the work.”

…

“It’s important to recognize that the marketing that happens inside of these companies, assuring workers that what they’re doing is good and that their surveillance program is used for disaster relief and not drone targeting, for instance, is much like the marketing targeted at the public,” [Meredith Whittaker] said.

“What we learn from consistently studying the discourses of Silicon Valley is that its successes come at the expense of a growing number of communities. The costs to these communities are masked by investments in an imagined post-racial, post-gender, post-class reality that is seemingly sympathetic to inclusion, but resists it in material, quantifiable and cultural terms.”

“In this critical time, when scarcity is a reality, you see the hierarchy. Certain groups are valued over others. This is the world that so many disabled and chronically ill people already live in. Our lives are still seen as expendable. Now the magnitude is much greater.”

…

“My hope for coming out of this pandemic is that we don’t return to the status quo. Many don’t realize that “normal” was actually not great for a lot of people. Just because all of the nondisabled people go back to work—or to Burning Man, or to Coachella—that doesn’t mean we should stop thinking about accessibility.”

If you want to caption your videos (you should want to caption your videos!), Thisten is fantastic. And incredibly affordable. Does live captioning and captions existing audio/video.

“We’ve been active in trying to sound the alarm bells around facial recognition, both as a threat to privacy when it works and a racist threat to everyone when it doesn’t,” said Phil Mayor, an attorney at [American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan]. “We know these stories are out there, but they’re hard to hear about because people don’t usually realize they’ve been the victim of a bad facial recognition search.”

“Not having access to the internet is expensive, locking you out of essential services and a surfeit of helpful information. Giving people full access to the splendors and knowledge of the online world should be imperative for everyone who works on it.”

…

“People with disabilities are more likely to be a captive audience to apps and websites using their data inappropriately or engaging in other unethical practices. This may be because they rely on a particular site to interact with other people with disabilities, because they lack the tools to visit other sites, or lack other suitable websites or apps to use.”

…

“All the tenets of intersectional feminism, web accessibility, and diversity and inclusion are inextricably tied up in making the web a better place, for all and by all.”

So suddenly there’s a lot of attention around email and it’s exposing how many people in the web community still use Gmail. Like actually trust all your personal information and communication (and that of your potentially marginalised or vulnerable contacts) with Google. 🤮

There are a lot of hard problems and lack of alternatives when it comes to rights-respecting technology. But email (as imperfect as it is) has a fair few affordable alternative providers. Small change, big difference.

Maybe I’ve not been saying it loudly or frequently enough for the last however-many years… Privacy is not a luxury. Same with accessibility. Neither are luxuries, they’re life-sustaining rights. And you’re unusually privileged if you’ve not had to care about either.

Really looking forward to this:

Hey! Live: Using the web for social good with Laura Kalbag. 2nd July 2020.

And I should mention that the tickets are free! ❤️

If I had a euro for every time a salaried person from a for-profit company asked me to do work for them for free… well, our not-for-profit organisation would be considerably better-funded.

“If cisgender anti-racists aren’t working to ensure that black trans people can survive and thrive, any commitment that Black lives have always mattered is rendered meaningless.”

“‘Black Trans Lives Matter’ – we can’t let the government bury an assault on trans rights” by Leah Cowan on gal-dem.

A transcript of the video in this tweet where Dr. Angela Davis speaks on the role of the trans and non-binary communities in the fight for the feminist abolition she advocates for:

“The feminism I’m referring to does not respect the binary structure of gender. And recognising the contribution of non-binary communities is so important, not only in terms of pointing out the concrete issues that we need to address. And of course many of us already know that Black trans women constitute the target of racist violence more consistently than any other community. We’re talking about state violence, we’re talking about individual violence, stranger violence, intimate violence. So if we want to develop an intersectional perspective, the trans community is showing us the way. And we can’t only point to… and we need to point to cases such as the murder of Tony McDade, for example. But we have to go beyond that, and recognise that we support the trans community precisely because this community has taught us to challenge that which is totally accepted as normal. And I don’t think we’d be where we are today, encouraging ever-larger numbers of people to think within an abolitionist frame, had not the trans community taught us that it is possible to effectively challenge that which is considered the very foundation of our sense of normalcy. So if it is possible to challenge the gender binary, then we can certainly effectively resist prisons and jails and police.”

Hmm, might sound nice when a big corp announces that they won’t sell their human rights-eroding tech to police.

How about they don’t build it in the first place.

How about we check they’re doing what they’re saying and it’s not just PR performance.

“People with disabilities are more likely to be a captive audience to apps and websites using their data inappropriately or engaging in other unethical practices.”

YES! This whole article is 🔥. Absolute must-read by Olu Niyiawosusi!

‘Building the Woke Web: Web Accessibility, Inclusion & Social Justice’ on A List Apart.

Also appreciate the UK-focus looks pointedly at the brits who dismiss important issues as being a US-based problem. (This article is totally relevant if you’re not in the UK too.)

Stop relying on third-party libraries for core functionality. This post is brought to you by a website where I can’t click a link OR use the scrollbar 😒

Happy Birthday A Book Apart!

Got pissed on champagne because my mother would’ve been 60 today and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

Hayfever can do one.

“Eco-fascist rhetoric works to obscure the responsibility of white colonialism and its long history of destruction, as well as imperialist presences in predominantly black and brown countries”

Today is CSS Naked Day 2020. Inspired by Eric Meyer, I’m joining in for the first time in years, so today my website has no CSS.

What’s the point?

The point of removing the CSS on your website is to draw attention to how the content still works in just plain HTML. It’s close to a visual equivalent to how screen readers access a website’s text content. Screen readers can’t interpret the fancy styles (mostly), but they still understand the content. You can still read the links and know heading text from body text. This is all because this website and its contents were written using semantic HTML. If you can see the page in your browser, the browser’s default styles present you with a little bit of formatting based on my HTML choices.

You should give it a try!

You don’t need to make your site naked for all the public to see. Maybe just try it in the privacy of your own home. Use it as an opportunity to find out where you’re using <div>s and <span>s where you could be using a more descriptive element. Try disabling styles in your developer tools and browsing other sites without CSS for the day. (Many of them are completely unusable! 🙃)

If you want to know more about semantic HTML, Eric Bailey published a blog post about using semantic markup just a couple of days ago, and it’s a great place to start.

Today the Smashing Podcast came out with its 13th episode, featuring me talking to Drew McLellan about privacy.

I had a lovely time last week chatting to Drew about privacy and our responsibilities as developers and designers.

You can listen to the podcast, get the shownotes and read the full transcript on the Smashing Magazine site.

“Rather than simply accepting tracking with open arms, Americans should be wary of geeks bearing gifts. Today’s startups could do more than squander venture capital dollars—their misguided COVID-19 surveillance measures may cost lives and undermine our democracy.

… This points to one of the most fundamental concerns in any new health surveillance tool: Who else gets the data? Even if a tool is shown to be effective, even if it’s deployable at scale, how else might the data be used by government agencies?”

Great cause, gorgeous animation by the always brilliant Scott Coello. The kids will love it! (Grownups too): Matt Lucas – Thank You Baked Potato

What you don’t cope with pandemic anxiety by building a complicated system to derive colour palettes with accessible colour contrasts?

I’ve been working on a starter blog for people to use with Site.js. We want this blog to have easy-to-use, accessible and rights-respecting defaults so it’s simple to just get blogging. One of defaults is RSS feeds. But what if you’ve not come across RSS before? What are the benefits of RSS and how can you get subscribing?

What is RSS?

RSS is a way to get updates from a website without visiting the site itself. It’s particularly useful for getting the latest news from a news site, or blog posts from a blog. The updates are listed in a “feed” which is syndicated (synced) from the website to your “feed reader” of choice.

The feed is accessible from a URL that usually ends in .xml. For example, my site’s full RSS feed is available at https://laurakalbag.com/index.xml. If you follow that URL, you might just get the raw XML file, or your browser might render the RSS in a readable format for you. Nowadays it seems most browsers won’t render RSS by default, or without an extension, and you’ll need a feed reader to read RSS feeds.

A feed reader is a service or app that collects together all the feeds you’ve subscribed to, and displays them in a readable format. It makes it easy to read the updates from all your favourite RSS feeds in one location, whether that’s on the web or using a dedicated feed reader app.

An RSS feed usually contains reverse chronological list of posts each with their date, title, author and content. Sometimes the content is just an excerpt, encouraging you to read the rest of the content on the original site. I think this defeats the point of providing RSS, where a big benefit is that the reader can customise how the posts display in their feed reader to improve their reading experience.

The benefits of RSS

Another big benefit of RSS is that you curate your own feeds. You get to choose what you subscribe to in your feed reader, and the order in which the posts show up. You might prefer to read the oldest posts first, or the newest. You might group your feeds by topic or another priority. You are not subjected to the “algorithmic feed” of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, where they choose the order for you. You won’t miss your friends’ posts because the algorithm decided to suppress them, and you are not forced to endure ads disguised as content (unless a feed you subscribe to includes ads inside their posts).

Also, RSS does not track you. Not by default, anyway. Sites can often see that their RSS feed is being accessed, and where from, but it is harder to embed tracking into RSS feed content compared to the original website. You should also be aware that some feed readers will use tracking, and it’s probably good to find one that does not track you. Feedbin is a good example of a feed reader that doesn’t track you, and also curbs tracking from your feeds too.

Feed readers

RSS feed readers come in a variety of forms.

• Feed reader app. An app where you can subscribe to feeds using a feed’s URL. Usually will let you read posts offline once they’ve been downloaded. Often will require a syncing service to sync your feed subscriptions across multiple devices.
• Feed reader service. A web service where you can subscribe to feeds using a feed’s URL. You can read posts from any web browser, and can often be used as a syncing service with other feed reader apps.
• Browser extension. A browser extension which can identify a feed’s URL on any site. Sometimes the extension will also render RSS feeds. Usually it will open the feed in a feed reader app already on your device.

Some feed reader recommendations

There are a lot of feed readers out there. The recommendations below are independent and not supported by ads or tracking (at time of research!) I’ve also focused on those that are quick to set up and use, not reliant on any other software or specific technical skills.

• Feedbin. (For web.) Feedbin is a feed reader service. It’s $5 USD a month (there is a free trial) and works as both a web-based feed reader and a syncing service for other feed reader apps. Feedbin is private by default.
• Lire. (For macOS and iOS.) Lire is a feed reader app that has good screenreader accessibility and works with a range of feed reader services. It’s $19.99 USD on macOS and $6.99 USD on iOS, and is developed by Kunal Sood. Thanks to Jennifer Sutton for the recommendation.
• NetNewsWire. (For macOS and iOS.) NetNewsWire is a free and open feed reader app that works with a range of feed reader services. It’s free (as in no monetary cost) and developed by a team of volunteers.
• NewsBlur. (For web, iOS and Android.) NewsBlur is a feed reader service with apps. It’s freemium, with a limited free account or $36 USD a year. It works as both a web-based feed reader, with its own apps, and as a syncing service for other feed reader apps. Thanks to Orde Saunders for the recommendation.
• BazQux. (For web.) BazQux is a feed reader service. It’s $30 USD a year (there is a free trial) and works as both a web-based feed reader and a syncing service for other feed reader apps. Thanks to Mats Staugaard for the recommendation.
• Flym News Reader. (For Android.) Flym News Reader is a free and open feed reader app. It’s free (as in no monetary cost) and developed by Frédéric Julian, who takes donations for his work. Thanks to Lucas Dondo for the recommendation.
• Wildcard option: Fraidycat. (Firefox and Chrome browser extension.) Fraidycat is a quirky free and open browser extension. It’s free (as in no monetary cost) and is fairly new.

I’ve written a basic intro on how to read RSS in 2020, with some recommendations for feed readers. (I started writing this a few weeks ago, but now might just be a great time to curate the news you want, and filter out the needlessly overwhelming stuff.) How to read RSS in 2020.

“It’s no secret that connecting with co-workers and management through tools like Slack, Zoom, and Google Hangouts is just not the same as going into the office. But technical glitches aren’t the only area of concern as meetings are relegated to bits and bytes. User privacy is, as well.”

It took til nearly 2pm for me to clock why I’m being terrible and irrational today. (Mothers Day).

Unless your company is emailing me to tell me how you’re paying your employees and contractors during this time, I do not care for your coronavirus marketing email one bit.

“The diseases that are most successful in the coming century will, as always, be the diseases that exploit our major failure modes and popular delusions.

…

If you design a world economy that rewards self-interest and makes altruism unaffordable, it’s unsurprising that some people start acting like they’re in the prisoner’s dilemma.”

We’ve been self-isolating since Thursday. We’re not high-risk but already work from home in a semi-rural area so we’re equipped (and have some privilege) to hopefully prevent us from being spreaders to more vulnerable people or using up valuable medical supplies.

Doing my daily panic scroll.

“If quarantines are ineffective or improperly carried out, millions of people could die, according to some estimates, but that doesn’t mean we can throw civil liberties out the window.

…

Aside from the spread of COVID-19, the other prevailing story this week was a rush of revelations about companies peddling AI-powered surveillance technology to businesses, governments, and law enforcement agencies.

…

Global economies are bracing for recession, and no one knows exactly how the spread of COVID-19 will impact global supply chains, public events, travel, and other industries. And even as we’re actively discussing whether a company like Clearview AI will mean the end of privacy, COVID-19 could easily be used as an excuse to spread mass surveillance.

This is not intended to be alarmist, but it’s important to keep an eye on mission creep in this space.”

I just can’t with Google. I do not understand why the web community (mostly) views Facebook as questionable but treats Google as socially acceptable. Lines drawn at their own convenience.

“Despite the benefits Google has received from the Black community, the company has refused to or has been slow to correct the discriminatory algorithmic practices at YouTube, such as its language filter, ads, and its search algorithms. Whether intentional or unconscious, all of these biases have harmed the Black community. For some people, Google is the internet. Civil rights considerations must be central to big data and the platforms they drive. Google should not celebrate the contributions of Black people without also making their platforms welcoming to them.

…

Technology will not be the silver bullet solving the problem of content moderation. Neither will sensitivity training nor diverse hiring. Dismantling these structures will require racial literacy and more multifaceted changes.

…

To say the internet has a huge impact on our society is an understatement. And the data and privacy missteps committed by Big Tech disproportionately affect historically marginalized communities.”

“Prodigal tech bro stories skip straight from the past, when they were part of something that—surprise!—turned out to be bad, to the present, where they are now a moral authority on how to do good, but without the transitional moments of revelation and remorse… It’s a teleportation machine, but for ethics.

…

(While we’re thinking about the neatly elided parts of the prodigal tech bro story, let’s dwell for one moment on the deletion of the entire stories of so many women and people of color barely given a first chance in Silicon Valley, let alone multiple reinventions.)

…

The prodigal tech bro doesn’t want structural change. He is reassurance, not revolution. He’s invested in the status quo, if we can only restore the founders’ purity of intent.”

The lot of this is infinitely quotable. And if you’re a person in tech who is starting to care about justice, equality, ethics and so on, please please read the exceptional advice at the end of the article.

Please tell me International Women’s Day is the right day for a woman to have a tearful meltdown about her worklife inadequacies. (You don’t need to tell me… I already did it.)

Snoozy boy

I don’t post like I used to because the responses from men have become unbearable. The gamut of creepy, condescending or copycat. They do it in person at conferences too, which makes me think twice about speaking. (And I witness this being far worse for women less white than me.)

Nevertheless, Ali Coded on dev.to

“[W]hen you look into the way Spotify’s slowly morphed its playlists into data-mining machines, suddenly it makes a lot more sense.

…

See, to Spotify, playlists and podcasts aren’t just what you’re listening to, but who you are… In the process of tapping into Spotify day after day after day with some variation of this routine, I’m giving the company not only my emotional state but also my entire schedule.

…

Since going public in 2018, Spotify hasn’t been quiet about its push into the big data space, partnering with third party after third party (after third party) to bulk up the intel it can already guesstimate from its user base. More and more, it’s starting to look like Spotify’s less about knowing my “mood” and more about knowing the car I’m most likely to drive, the beer I’m most likely to order at a bar, whether I still live with my parents, and the exact location where I’m binge-eating Baskin Robin’s.”

my new plant has my attitude

If you insist on Mothers Day marketing, please give me a quick way to opt out. This time of year is a constant pummelling reminder that my mum isn’t here anymore. It’s a very unsubscribey feeling.

[L]ots of health companies use Facebook to advertise. As my “off Facebook activity” download showed, much of what gets shared with Facebook is indirect information, such as dates and times I visited a website or app, products, or prescriptions I have looked at or purchased, and products I put in a digital shopping cart.

But glued together, these scraps of information create a collage of my overall health, which Facebook can then sell advertisements against. In collecting data about my health behavior and interests, Facebook probably knows more about my health than my doctor.

…

At the end of last year, Planned Parenthood decided to stop using Facebook’s mobile software development kit to make ads for its period tracking app Spot On. When I downloaded my off-Facebook data in January, an outdated version of the Spot On app on my phone had recently pinged Facebook’s servers (this stopped once I updated the app).

…

The organization decided that it was worth losing access to some of Facebook’s targeting capabilities in exchange for better user privacy in this instance.

Good on Planned Parenthood for doing the right thing and removing the Facebook tracking. But it’s shocking that developers are ignorant to the tracking embedded in these frameworks and libraries.

“You may have forgotten about the photos you uploaded to a then-popular social media site ten or fifteen years ago… but Clearview hasn’t,” Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, wrote in an email. “A lot of data about individuals can quickly become ‘stale’ and thus low-value by those seeking to monetize it. Jobs, salaries, addresses, phone numbers, those all change. But photos are different: your face doesn’t go stale.”

…

“What is clear is that this information is available to far more people than Clearview likes to acknowledge, and that they have future, as-yet-unannounced plans for their photos of your face.”

…

“The face search results show exactly why we need a moratorium on face surveillance. In a democratic society, we should not accept our images being secretly collected and retained to create a mass surveillance database to be used, disclosed, and analyzed at the whim of an unaccountable company.”—Jeramie D. Scott

“We should not be scared of permanent records. We should be scared of informational power dynamics that bring immediate, harmful consequences and a serious lack of preservation infrastructure for contemporary culture.”—Meg Leta Jones

“Rather than focus on data (as in the term “data protection”), shouldn’t we be focused on people and communities and the good and the harm that can be done to them with data? I would argue it is far more useful and more practical to focus on what can be done with data, no matter how old or how collected—how can that data be used? So we could identify uses that are harmful or objectionable or likely to cause offense, and either prohibit them outright or require explicit, opt-in consent.”—Fred H. Cate

“A company may have to ask you for consent to collect your geolocation data, but you have no idea what’s being inferred from it. And this is important, because the potential for privacy-invasive harms don’t necessarily occur at the input stage, where you volunteer information to a company. The interesting stage comes afterwards, once machine learning and AI are applied to that data, a process that can derive a lot of potentially very intimate information: your sexual orientation, your housing status, your religion, your political beliefs, potential disabilities, your gender identity. The user often has no idea that the data they’ve surrendered can actually disclose those things.”—Sandra Wachter

You can subscribe to new posts on this website with an RSS feed reader. Below you’ll find a list of feeds available on this site:

• Whole site RSS feed
• Whole site ATOM feed
• Blog RSS feed
• Blog ATOM feed

What is RSS?

RSS is a way to get updates from a website without visiting the site itself. It’s particularly useful for getting the latest news from a news site, or blog posts from a blog. The updates are listed in a “feed” which is syndicated (synced) from the website to your “feed reader” of choice.

The feed is accessible from a URL that usually ends in .xml. For example, this site’s full RSS feed is available at https://laurakalbag.com/index.xml. If you follow that URL, you might just get the raw XML file, or your browser might render the RSS in a readable format for you. Nowadays it seems most browsers won’t render RSS by default, or without an extension, and you’ll need a feed reader to read RSS feeds.

A feed reader is a service or app that collects together all the feeds you’ve subscribed to, and displays them in a readable format. It makes it easy to read the updates from all your favourite RSS feeds in one location, whether that’s on the web or using a dedicated feed reader app.

An RSS feed usually contains reverse chronological list of posts each with their date, title, author and content. Sometimes the content is just an excerpt, encouraging you to read the rest of the content on the original site. An excerpt can defeat the point of providing RSS, where a big benefit is that the reader can customise how the posts display in their feed reader to improve their reading experience.

The benefits of RSS

Another big benefit of RSS is that you curate your own feeds. You get to choose what you subscribe to in your feed reader, and the order in which the posts show up. You might prefer to read the oldest posts first, or the newest. You might group your feeds by topic or another priority. You are not subjected to the “algorithmic feed” of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, where they choose the order for you. You won’t miss your friends’ posts because the algorithm decided to suppress them, and you are not forced to endure ads disguised as content (unless a feed you subscribe to includes ads inside their posts).

Also, RSS does not track you. Not by default, anyway. Sites can often see that their RSS feed is being accessed, and where from, but it is harder to embed tracking into RSS feed content compared to the original website. You should also be aware that some feed readers will use tracking, and it’s probably good to find one that does not track you. Feedbin is a good example of a feed reader that doesn’t track you, and also curbs tracking from your feeds too.

Feed readers

RSS feed readers come in a variety of forms.

• Feed reader app. An app where you can subscribe to feeds using a feed’s URL. Usually will let you read posts offline once they’ve been downloaded. Often will require a syncing service to sync your feed subscriptions across multiple devices.
• Feed reader service. A web service where you can subscribe to feeds using a feed’s URL. You can read posts from any web browser, and can often be used as a syncing service with other feed reader apps.
• Browser extension. A browser extension which can identify a feed’s URL on any site. Sometimes the extension will also render RSS feeds. Usually it will open the feed in a feed reader app already on your device.

Some feed reader recommendations

There are a lot of feed readers out there. The recommendations below are independent and not supported by ads or tracking (at time of research!) The list is also focused on those that are quick to set up and use, not reliant on any other software or specific technical skills.

• Feedbin. (For web.) Feedbin is a feed reader service. It’s $5 USD a month (there is a free trial) and works as both a web-based feed reader and a syncing service for other feed reader apps. Feedbin is private by default.
• Lire. (For macOS and iOS.) Lire is a feed reader app that has good screenreader accessibility and works with a range of feed reader services. It’s $19.99 USD on macOS and $6.99 USD on iOS, and is developed by Kunal Sood. Thanks to Jennifer Sutton for the recommendation.
• NetNewsWire. (For macOS and iOS.) NetNewsWire is a free and open feed reader app that works with a range of feed reader services. It’s free (as in no monetary cost) and developed by a team of volunteers.
• NewsBlur. (For web, iOS and Android.) NewsBlur is a feed reader service with apps. It’s freemium, with a limited free account or $36 USD a year. It works as both a web-based feed reader, with its own apps, and as a syncing service for other feed reader apps. Thanks to Orde Saunders for the recommendation.
• BazQux. (For web.) BazQux is a feed reader service. It’s $30 USD a year (there is a free trial) and works as both a web-based feed reader and a syncing service for other feed reader apps. Thanks to Mats Staugaard for the recommendation.
• Flym News Reader. (For Android.) Flym News Reader is a free and open feed reader app. It’s free (as in no monetary cost) and developed by Frédéric Julian, who takes donations for his work. Thanks to Lucas Dondo for the recommendation.
• Wildcard option: Fraidycat. (Firefox and Chrome browser extension.) Fraidycat is a quirky free and open browser extension. It’s free (as in no monetary cost) and is fairly new.

I do not track you. This website does not have analytics, third-party web fonts or social network buttons that track you.

This website uses Site.js which provides me with simple statistics about my website. These statistics tell me:

• how many people visit my website
• my most popular pages
• pages people have tried to visit even though they don’t exist

These statistics don’t tell me anything about the people who visit my website because they don’t track you. They don’t collect any information about you.

“Americans with disabilities should not be an afterthought for tech companies. There is no justification for forcing them to spend extra time and effort to navigate past online ads,” said Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon. And they should be able to easily learn why they were targeted by those ads, just like everyone else.”

…

“Not including legible labels on ads “certainly violates the spirit if not the letter of the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] and raises questions about whether Facebook is engaging in deceptive practices under the FTC Act,” said Blake Reid, a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder who studies accessibility and technology law.

Via Claire Brotherton on Twitter.

“You also deserve to hear these facts from an independent source. We want to investigate the ecosystem of data exploitation, and we don’t think we can do that while shackled to it. And so we make a privacy promise to you, our readers: We will not track you. Unlike many companies, we put your privacy first. We collect the minimum amount of data possible when you visit our site, and we will never monetize this data. We won’t display advertisements on our site, because they too often contain tracking technology. This makes our work more complicated and more expensive—but your privacy is worth it.”

A media organisation that’s leading on privacy. This is SO COOL.

“They’re not really changing underlying tactics [of how they track us], they’re just channeling it all through Google,” [Elizabeth] Renieris told Digital Trends.

…

“At least we knew how cookies worked. Instead, Google will shore up its surveillance power with even less oversight and accountability, black-boxed behind its proprietary technology. Not good news at all.”[— Christopher Chan]

…

This means Google will now have full functional, filled out profiles on every single movement and purchase that every one of its billions of users makes across the internet.

“UK users remain protected by Europe’s strict privacy rules for now, even if their data is legally controlled by a US entity. It does, however, raise the specter of reduced privacy in future if a post-Brexit UK alters its laws to become less privacy-oriented.”

…

“That political context is critical to understanding Google’s decision. This is not the action of a company which believes the UK will secure an adequacy agreement or intends to continue aligning itself with the European data protection framework and its user rights. They are moving fast on that belief, and it’s safe to say they are not engaging in this work out of a concern for UK citizens’ human rights,” said [Heather] Burns.

…

“Google mentioning law enforcement at all in the Reuters announcement was a bit of a red herring, in other words, to distract from the everyday user data at stake,” Burns added.

Every tech policy article needs Heather Burns doing bullshit detection.

“This website uses cookies to make things easier. [Accept and close this message]” is possibly some of the worst consent copy I’ve ever read.

What things? Easier how? Easier for who? Easier for the person who ticked “cookie notice done” off their todo list?

Not really surprising that I couldn’t help my dad with the cryptic crossword when I just referred to knives as “the cutty things.”

“Using the personal data of millions of Americans against their will is certainly alarming. But what’s the difference between the Chinese government stealing all that information and a data broker amassing it legally without user consent and selling it on the open market?”

Via Aral.

“In other words, whenever you visit a number of websites dedicated to mental health to read about depression or take a test, dozens of third-parties may receive this information and bid money to show you a targeted ad. Interestingly, some of these websites seem to include marketing trackers without displaying any ads, meaning they simply allow data collection on their site, which in turn may be used for advanced profiling of their users.

…

It is highly disturbing that we still have to have to say this, but websites dealing with such sensitive topics should not track their users for marketing purposes. Your mental health is not and should never be for sale.”

I went to add this article to the lens, then saw it goes on to recommend our tracker blocker, Better Blocker. Kismet!

“[N]ew research suggests that only 11% of major sites are designing these so-called consent notices to meet the minimum requirements set by law.”

…

“So are design patterns that prevent the user from making an easy and clear privacy decision examples of simply poor design, or are these design patterns intentionally nudging users to share data?” “It has to be intentional because anyone who’s actually read the GDPR in an honest way would know that it’s not right,” says [David] Carroll. “Both the design and the functionality of them are very manipulative in favor of the first- and third-party collectors where possible.”

…

“It’s a design problem,” Carroll says, “but it’s a business model problem first and foremost.”

Related: as Tatiana Mac points out, we need to stop using “dark pattern”. For the practices in this particular article, I prefer “deceptive pattern”, “malicious pattern” or “anti-consent pattern” 🙃

“In hiring, for example, new algorithm-driven tools will identify characteristics shared by a company’s “successful” existing employees, then look for those traits when they evaluate new hires. But as the model treats underrepresented traits as undesired traits to receive less weighting, people with disabilities—like other marginalized groups—risk being excluded as a matter of course.

…

While some have called to fix this data problem by collecting more detailed information about job candidates’ disabilities, further collection raises its own distinct and very real concerns about privacy and discrimination.

These problems exist for others, too: people who have marginalized sexual orientations or nonbinary gender identities, those who fall outside U.S. definitions of race and ethnicity, and for people who are members of multiple, intersecting marginalized communities.”

Save me from financial admin and the incompetent systems that surround it.

In this particular case I’m not referring to capitalism… but also that.

“These teenagers are relying on a sophisticated network of trusted Instagram users to post content from multiple different devices, from multiple different locations.

…

Teens shouldn’t have to go to those lengths to socialize privately on Instagram, said Liz O’Sullivan, technology director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. … ‘I love that the younger generation is thinking along these lines, but it bothers me when we have to come up with these strategies to avoid being tracked,’ O’Sullivan said. ‘She shouldn’t have to have these psyop [psychological operations] networks with multiple people working to hide her identity from Instagram.’”

Been doing some blocking and some fixing…

Better blocking rules update.

Honestly it baffles me how a big site will host all their styles, scripts and images stored on a third-party domain which they do not own or have control over.

This cute dog is a monster. He can open doors and has developed a habit of bursting into the room when you’re sleeping. When I (lovingly) told him he’s a monster, he struck this pose. This is why he always wins and we are very tired.

“They told Motherboard their tool analyzed thousands of datasets from data scandals ranging from the 2015 hack of Experian, to the hacks and breaches that have plagued services from MyHeritage to porn websites. Despite many of these datasets containing “anonymized” data, the students say that identifying actual users wasn’t all that difficult.

…

For example, while one company might only store usernames, passwords, email addresses, and other basic account information, another company may have stored information on your browsing or location data. Independently they may not identify you, but collectively they reveal numerous intimate details even your closest friends and family may not know.

…

The problem is compounded by the fact that the United States still doesn’t have even a basic privacy law for the internet era, thanks in part to relentless lobbying from a cross-industry coalition of corporations eager to keep this profitable status quo intact. As a result, penalties for data breaches and lax security are often too pathetic to drive meaningful change.”

I’ve written a little section on accessibility for the Ethical Design Handbook. I’m really grateful that Trine Falbe asked me, as well as including a section by Aral talking about Small Technology and our Ethical Design Manifesto from the Ind.ie days.

Writing about accessibility as part of a book on ethical design inspired my talk about “Accessible unethical technology” at Accessibility Scotland last year.

To end my section on accessibility, I tried to explain how I fit accessibility into my idea of ethical design, or rather how I think something can be accessible but not ethical. The following is what I wrote. It didn’t make the final edit of the book, but I feel it’s a vital addendum to all my work on accessibility:

Unethical technology discriminates against disabled people

In a book about ethical design, it is important to consider the ethical considerations of accessibility. Choosing to make our technology accessible is in itself an ethical decision. You are deliberately working against ableist discrimination and exclusion. But making our technology inclusive and accessible is not enough if the driving forces behind that technology is unethical.

Earlier in the book, we heard about the unethical collection of people’s data, how it is monetised and used to exploit our needs, habits and desires. Data brokers have built detailed profiles of us based upon this data, which they then share and sell to insurance companies, credit companies, and even governments.

Many disabled people already face social, medical, and governmental discrimination, even before detailed profiles of their information are used against them. It is clear how the exploitation of data about us can lead to further, more damaging and immediate harms, on top of the discrimination that already exists. Disabled people also frequently rely on technology for critical access to information and services, as well as community and support. Our reliance on technology also lessens our freedom to choose to not use it.

We not only have a responsibility to design more inclusive and accessible technology, but to consider the impact our design has outside of its immediate interface. But you’ve bought a book about Ethical Design, so you know that already! And just think, when we design ethical products with accessibility and inclusivity in mind, we can ensure our those products are available to everyone. I can’t wait to see what you make.

You can see my slides and read my talk about “Accessible unethical technology” at Accessibility Scotland last year on Notist and watch the video of the talk with captions and transcript on the Accessibility Scotland website.

You can find out more about the Ethical Design Handbook on the website, and also buy it from Smashing Magazine books.

“The same data set that could be used to build a system to prevent showing trans folks photos from before they started transition could be trivially used and weaponized by an authoritarian state to identify trans people from street cameras,” [Penelope] Phippen says.

With this dystopian future in mind, coupled with the fact that federal agencies like ICE already use facial recognition technology for immigration enforcement, do we even want machine learning to piece together a coherent identity from both pre- and post-transition images?

…

With trans people facing daily harassment simply for existing as ourselves, the stakes seem too high to risk teaching these systems how to recognize us”

This made me think of Tatiana Mac’s brilliant ‘The Banal Binary’ talk at New Adventures conference two weeks ago.

Last week I spoke at New Adventures conference in Nottingham. After the afternoon’s talks, Jeff Veen recorded a panel for his Presentable podcast with the four speakers from that afternoon. You can now listen to the podcast online (and I’m sure you can find it in your podcast apps too).

The other three speakers were Liz Jackson, Florence Okoye and Tatiana Mac and they made this panel a “career” highlight for me. Being onstage with these brilliant people all speaking so clearly and taking no bullshit was epic. (Also three of the most worthwhile speakers I’ve ever seen in both content and delivery, I cannot overstate this enough.)

I was also on Jeff’s podcast a couple of years ago. It feels like forever ago now, and it was nice to meet Jeff (however briefly) in person in Nottingham.

“The data obtained by Motherboard and PCMag includes Google searches, lookups of locations and GPS coordinates on Google Maps, people visiting companies' LinkedIn pages, particular YouTube videos, and people visiting porn websites. It is possible to determine from the collected data what date and time the anonymized user visited YouPorn and PornHub, and in some cases what search term they entered into the porn site and which specific video they watched.”

LK: I read all claims of “anonymised”/“can’t be de-anonymised” with skepticism.

Brexit Day feels nauseating because it’s a milestone for the country in being more openly anti-immigrant and racist. Not to say the EU is necessarily better, or it’s why people voted in the referendum, but it is the effect. And I’m really sorry to those who will feel that effect.

““The kinds of people that are gonna be coerced into downloading [the safety app] are exactly the kind of people that are put most at risk by the data that they’re sharing…”

“In Wonderland, we celebrated the new digital services as free, but now we see that the surveillance capitalists behind those services regard us as the free commodity. We thought that we search Google, but now we understand that Google searches us. We assumed that we use social media to connect, but we learned that connection is how social media uses us. We barely questioned why our new TV or mattress had a privacy policy, but we’ve begun to understand that “privacy” policies are actually surveillance policies.

…

All of these delusions rest on the most treacherous hallucination of them all: the belief that privacy is private. We have imagined that we can choose our degree of privacy with an individual calculation in which a bit of personal information is traded for valued services — a reasonable quid pro quo.

…

The lesson is that privacy is public — it is a collective good that is logically and morally inseparable from the values of human autonomy and self-determination upon which privacy depends and without which a democratic society is unimaginable.”

Days since a Hugo update broke my website: 0

Well I was feeling quite sleepy this morning after a mega day at #naconf yesterday. And then I properly read through all the amazingly kind feedback for my talk, and now I feel like I could run a marathon and punch through all the walls. Thank you thank you thank you ❤️

So cool to finally hear Natalie Kane speak. Learning. So. Much. #naconf

Like, I’d always known how legacy plugins make old websites hard to access, but never even thought of the impact that might have on archiving and preserving cultural works.

Friends at #naconf! I have two books to give away here today. My book, Accessibility For Everyone, and a signed copy of Heydon Pickering’s indispensable Inclusive Components. Do you have a friend that should have these books?

They go to the first person to find me (or dm me if you’re shy/can’t find me, and I’ll find you!)

Ugh to keyboard shortcuts without alternatives. Feels like I only get the tool or character I need after I’ve first accidentally switched windows, closed a tab, taken a screenshot and typed at least three obscure characters I didn’t want.

This post brought to you by how on earth do I get a € again…

FOUR attempts that took me.

Back in the UK 👋

“His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

…

The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.”

When you visit this website, I don’t track you.

You might’ve noticed in the footer of my site, I have a little link (to this post) that says “No tracking.” This is 100% borrowed/inspired by the footer text on Karolina Szczur’s website.

For me, “no tracking” is both a fact and a mission statement. I’m not a fan of tracking. I work on a tracker blocker, been writing about privacy for the last six years, and give whole talks about the harms of tracking on the web. Our work at Small Technology Foundation is all about advocating for and building small technology to protect personhood and democracy in the digital network age.

That means that you will not find any analytics, article limits or cookies on my site. You also won’t find any third-party scripts, content delivery networks or third-party fonts. I won’t let anyone else track you either.

My site is run with Site.js. Site.js provides some stats about visits to my site, but nothing about its visitors. I know how many requests my site has had, it’s top three most popular requests (my RSS feeds), requested but missing pages, and referrers. It’s as much as I need to keep my site running smoothly.

Done some website tweaks. Better grid (thanks to Rachel Andrew’s editorial patterns and Michelle Barker’s clarifying talk at SOTB), bigger type for bigger viewports (love me some fat fonts), reinstating the original nav colours, and some text here and there.

“Fight for the Future is joining other consumer privacy and civil liberties experts and issuing an official product warning encouraging people to not buy Amazon Ring cameras because of the clear threat that they pose to all of our privacy, safety, and security.

For too long, we’ve been sold a false choice between privacy and security. It’s more clear every day that more surveillance does not mean more safety, especially for the most vulnerable. Talk to your family and friends and encourage them to do their research before putting any private company’s surveillance devices on your door or in your home. In the end, companies like Amazon and Google don’t care about keeping our communities safe; they care about making money.”

Continually insisting “Britain isn’t racist” is racist in itself because you’re dismissing and diminishing the lived experiences of non-white people as well as the history (and current policies!) of our incredibly racist country.

One week til New Adventures conference! 🥳

“If the Court agrees with the [Advocate general]’s opinion, then unlawful bulk surveillance schemes, including one operated by the UK, will be reined in.”

An incredibly detailed explanation of why it’s better to self-host Google fonts with a lot of useful advice.

Should you self-host Google Fonts?

Tl;dr Yes, better performance and better privacy.

‘Should you self-host Google Fonts?’

Though I’d disagree that commercial web fonts are expensive. They take a lot of work, and if designed well are well-worth the impact. You’ve just got to treat them as an investment. If bought through Fontspring, you can also get “worry-free” licences without tracking.

“Because both ‘stereotype’ and ‘bias’ are theories of individual perception, our discussions do not adequately prioritize naming and locating the systemic harms of the technologies we build. When we stop overusing the word ‘bias,’ we can begin to use language that has been designed to theorize at the level of structural oppression, both in terms of identifying the scope of the harm and who experiences it.”

“Grindr is sharing detailed personal data with thousands of advertising partners, allowing them to receive information about users’ location, age, gender and sexual orientation…” … “‘Every time you open an app like Grindr, advertisement networks get your GPS location, device identifiers and even the fact that you use a gay dating app,’ said Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems.”

Just over a week til I’m taking my purple self to Nottingham! Really looking forward to giving this talk. Join us there?

Aral has written a detailed blog post about the logistics of moving our app, Better Blocker, to our Irish organisation.

In brief: we have to re-publish the app under Small Technology Foundation, which means anyone who wants to get future updates to the app will have to buy it again. (Though the previous version of the app will still be able to receive updates to the blocking rules.) We will lose years of favourable reviews, high rankings in our category, and a feature on the Safari App Extensions page. It’s immensely frustrating, and we’ve been trying to find a way around it for the last few months. But we can’t. Because we have to play by Apple’s rules. Read all of Aral’s post on his blog.

Blocking rule updates

One of the features that makes Better unique is that we curate our own list of blocking rules. Our focus is on blocking trackers, and we do so based on our principles of ethical design. This means we don’t block non-tracking ads, and when people report sites that break with Better, or have trackers we’ve not blocked yet, we can update our blocking rules accordingly.

Doing this work takes time, and while Aral does most of the work on the apps, I do most of the work on the blocking rules. I investigate every tracker to work out what it’s doing (and what it might do with your personal data!), write the rules, and push the updated block list out to everyone who uses Better. We provide these updates for free, and for a one-off App Store payment, it’s a bargain.

You can read about all our blocking rule updates on the Better news page. And if you do, you’ll notice that the second half of 2019 was slow for me. I was ill a lot last year, and had to prioritise the work that was paying more of the bills. And I felt like a horrible failure to all the people who had bought the apps.

Blocking rules in 2020

But 2020 is a new year, and I’m starting it feeling the best I have in ages. Aral and I have been discussing our options with Better, given that we are also working on other, more long-term, plans to make our work sustainable. We really care about Better being the best it can be for the people who have bought the apps. With this in mind, we’re aiming for less frequent but more regular blocking rule updates. We aim to update the blocking rules every month, running more mass inspections of sites to be more efficient in blocking the most prevalent trackers.

Thank you to our supporters

Finally, thank you to the folks who discovered our work through Better and went on to support us with regulation donations. For years we’ve talked about making Better a subscription-based app, but the development work required has exceeded the potential benefits. Our patrons have effectively supported blocking rule updates for everybody else (alongside the rest of our work), and we really appreciate their generosity.

Over the last few days, we closed the Ind.ie forum. It had been a fun experiment for 4.5 years, but didn’t really fit our aims to create decentralised technology. We didn’t want to shun other big platforms in favour of creating our own big platform, it would defeat the point!

Looking for Better support?

We’ve tried to cover most topics in depth on Better’s Support page, for anything other Better support questions, feel free to email us at [email protected], or send us a message on our Mastodon or Twitter accounts. (We’ve kept these accounts going for continuity.)

Anonymous support requests

What about anonymous support requests for Better? A few people have used the forum to get anonymous support because they’d rather not use their personal email or social media accounts. Some people have asked me to look into porn and fetish sites to more effectively block trackers, others have their own reasons for wanting privacy. But the forum was actually less anonymous. Signing up for the forum already requires an email address. And as the admin for a Discourse forum, I could access people’s email addresses, IP addresses, and detailed logs of their activity. I can tell you that you can trust me with your information, but I’d rather not have it in the first place. For those wanting to contact us anonymously with support requests, I’d recommend getting a temporary email address. It’s as easy as setting up a forum account anyway.

4.5 years is a long time on the web

Honestly, it’s also miraculous we didn’t close the forum sooner. Of around 4.1k posts, 24% were by me. Most often I was posting links to thought-provoking articles I’d read, which I now post here on my site on my lens. Or information about our Better blocking rule updates, which were always posted on the Better website first. Very few people used our forum for support, usually preferring to send us an email. The forum became just like another social media platform, but one that cost us 120 US dollars per month.

I’m a little bit sad

While the Ind.ie forum was intended to be a multifunctional place for temporary content, I did like the idea of fostering a community. It’s why I started sharing the articles I read, and tried to direct people there to discuss topics in more depth than we could manage on character-limited social media. But one determined person does not a community make. I developed some familiarity with a few repeat forum visitors, and we had the occasional detailed thread. But it was not the nuanced, inclusive and supportive discussion I craved. Nothing was abusive (as moderator, I’d shut things down early if I anticipated chat heading in that direction) but people tend to bring their pet topics, axes to grind, and presumptions of how much knowledge a small woman could possibly possess. Of course I’ve bleated about my desire for connection with likedminded folks before and it seems it’ll remain a frequent whinge for a while longer.

People, not brands

Along with our other work, the forum has been part of a learning process around where our output should live. When we set up Small Technology Foundation, we decided that the definition of Small Technology Foundation is the collection of both Aral and my work. And therefore we’d mostly write and share on our sites and spaces, under our own names, then bring anything relevant to Small Technology Foundation together on the Small Technology Foundation site. There was no point having five different Twitter accounts for the work of two people. In fact, it was ridiculous. We are just two people, not a startup, not a big brand. We certainly don’t need people harbouring brand-sized expectations for us. And, as I mentioned in my post introducing the Lens, we have different perspectives and voices. It’s nice for those voices to be shared in context, rather than delivered as if unified under a confused brand.

I’ll still drift around various communities looking for a comfortable home. I’m increasingly aware that community is found in people, not on a website. But those people still need the means to communicate safely and freely, so we’ll keep working on that.

“Some contend that strong AI may be only decades away, but this focus obscures the reality that “weak” (or “narrow”) AI is already reshaping existing social and political institutions. Algorithmic decision making and decision support systems are currently being deployed in many high-stakes domains, from criminal justice, law enforcement, and employment decisions to credit scoring, school assignment mechanisms, health care, and public benefits eligibility assessments. Never mind the far-off specter of doomsday; AI is already here, working behind the scenes of many of our social systems.

What responsibilities and obligations do we bear for AI’s social consequences in the present—not just in the distant future? To answer this question, we must resist the learned helplessness that has come to see AI development as inevitable. Instead, we should recognize that developing and deploying weak AI involves making consequential choices—choices that demand greater democratic oversight not just from AI developers and designers, but from all members of society.

…

There may be some machine learning systems that should not be deployed in the first place, no matter how much we can optimize them.”

“‘Assume good intent’ is a particularly pernicious positive expectation that will undermine your code of conduct. The implied inverse of this is that not assuming good intent is against the rules.

…

The harm is that telling people to “assume good intent” is a sign that if they come to you with a concern, you will minimize their feelings, police their reactions, and question their perceptions. It tells marginalized people that you don’t see codes of conduct as tools to address systemic discrimination, but as tools to manage personal conflicts without taking power differences into account. Telling people to “assume good intent” sends a message about whose feelings you plan to center when an issue arises in your community.

…

If you want to build a culture of ‘assuming good intent,’ start by assuming good intent in marginalized people.”

“Even if the Silicon Valley tech giant doesn’t plan to use that health and fitness data to show you ads, you can rest assured that Google has plenty of other uses for that data.”

The problem with these tests is twofold. First, parents are testing their children in ways that could have serious implications as they grow older — and they are not old enough to consent. Second, by sharing their children’s genetic information on public websites, parents are forever exposing their personal health data.

…

Dr. Louanne Hudgins, a geneticist at Stanford, cautions parents to consider the long-term privacy of their child’s health information collected through home genetic kits. Their children’s DNA and other health data, she has warned, could be sold to other companies — marketing firms, data brokers, insurance companies — in the same way that social media sites and search engines collect and share data about their users.

…

The sharing of DNA results on open-source genealogy databases to find long-lost relatives poses another privacy risk: When parents share their children’s DNA on these sites, they are effectively sharing it with the world, including with the government and law enforcement investigators.

“Far too often, today’s discrimination was yesterday’s national security or public health necessity. An approach that advocates ubiquitous data collection and protects privacy solely through post-collection use restrictions doesn’t account for that.”

“There is now an enormous amount of work under the rubric of “AI ethics.” To be fair, some of the research is useful and nuanced, especially in the humanities and social sciences. But the majority of well-funded work on “ethical AI” is aligned with the tech lobby’s agenda: to voluntarily or moderately adjust, rather than legally restrict, the deployment of controversial technologies.

…

No defensible claim to “ethics” can sidestep the urgency of legally enforceable restrictions to the deployment of technologies of mass surveillance and systemic violence.”

Keep bookmarking Washington Post articles to read later, only then to be hit with a subscriber doorslam that redirects to their homepage. I do not care enough to find a way around this.

Not (broadly) got a problem with a site wanting subscribers, it’s the implementation. It only accommodates those who are signed up and perpetually logged in on the same browser.

My 2020 is going to start right. (With matching nails!) Thanks Heydon 😊

My family is watching the Freddie Mercury tribute concert back to back with Live In Budapest. That’s the kind of Queen we like to watch on Christmas Day.

Hi trans friends. You deserve equality, recognition, respect and love. And there are loads of us cis British women whose feminism does not exist without you.

The combination of named lines and areas for CSS grid columns is changing my (CSS-writing) life, and Rachel Andrew explains it all so well. Can’t wait to go all-in on subgrid, my stylesheets are going to be so clean ✨

Editorial Design Patterns With CSS Grid And Named Columns by Rachel Andrew on Smashing Magazine

“If I can get my mum to understand this, then I can explain it to anyone…”

turns off podcast. unsubscribes. chucks phone into the sea.

Nottingham! Looking forward to seeing you soon 😊

New Adventures 2020

Was asked if I’d written up my criticisms of a particular movement. And it made me think about why I hadn’t. Sometimes I just have to give myself a break and pick the battles I have the energy to fight back.

Devastated.

Got to keep going and keep fighting. I see all you progressive campaigners and your hard work. I’m really grateful.

Was recommended that I do some “mindfulness/meditation” so I started to look into some of the apps. The privacy policies are, quite frankly, terrifying (and not exactly helping me right now).

I looked at 7 of the most recommended “mindfulness” apps on iOS…

• Some of them collect deeply personal information, though of course they claim it’s not personal/or is de-identified. Including: “how you interact with the app” (these apps are aimed at stressed/anxious people), “your heart rates”, your “mental, physical and emotional status’…
• One privacy policy stated that they may enter into contracts with “mental health providers and health plans or health insurers, including, employer-sponsored health plans” and may collect and share information with their partners.
• Others share your activity on the app with Facebook and Google. Some when you log in with those providers, others just do it by default.

I really feel for those who rely on these apps, because I get it when you’re having to balance your health/affordable forms of care with long-term privacy risks. And their privacy information is hidden away in a policy that no-one else is boring enough to read. It’s not fair.

Most of these apps are paid apps, they have a means to sustain their business. The kind of functionality offered does not require people’s incredibly personal information to be shared anywhere outside of their own devices. There is no excuse.

Please, if anyone knows of a privacy-respecting mindfulness app, let me know! (I’ve no idea what I’m doing with the mindfulness stuff, but will endeavour to keep an open mind.)

I wrote an ode to personal websites for one of my faves, 24ways. Featuring inspiring (and rights-respecting) websites from people whose work I love and respect. Also including a festive sprinkling of Site.js, which is making my development life much easier.

I love the little festive summary they wrote for me:

“Laura Kalbag discusses the gift of personal data we give to Big Tech when we share information on its platforms, and how reviving ye olde personal website can be one way to stay in control of the content we share and the data we leak. Christmas is a time for giving, but know what you’re giving to whom.”

Read It’s Time to Get Personal on 24ways.

“[M]usic streaming platforms are in a unique position within the greater platform economy: they have troves of data related to our emotional states, moods, and feelings. It’s a matter of unprecedented access to our interior lives, which is buffered by the flimsy illusion of privacy.

…

Spotify’s enormous access to mood-based data is a pillar of its value to brands and advertisers, allowing them to target ads on Spotify by moods and emotions. Further, since 2016, Spotify has shared this mood data directly with the world’s biggest marketing and advertising firms.

…

“At Spotify we have a personal relationship with over 191 million people who show us their true colors with zero filter,” reads a current advertising deck. “That’s a lot of authentic engagement with our audience: billions of data points every day across devices! This data fuels Spotify’s streaming intelligence—our secret weapon that gives brands the edge to be relevant in real-time moments.”

…

In Spotify’s world, listening data has become the oil that fuels a monetizable metrics machine, pumping the numbers that lure advertisers to the platform. In a data-driven listening environment, the commodity is no longer music. The commodity is listening. The commodity is users and their moods. The commodity is listening habits as behavioral data. Indeed, what Spotify calls “streaming intelligence” should be understood as surveillance of its users to fuel its own growth and ability to sell mood-and-moment data to brands.

…

What’s in question here isn’t just how Spotify monitors and mines data on our listening in order to use their “audience segments” as a form of currency—but also how it then creates environments more suitable for advertisers through what it recommends, manipulating future listening on the platform.”

Yes Facebook, I’d love to celebrate my friendship with my dead relative!!! Thanks for reminding me!!!

Fuck this hollow engagement-hungry surveillance capitalism.

…

I’ve covered this in many of my talks. I don’t interact on Facebook, I barely login, but I’m privileged that I don’t require it for community/work/family/my kids’ school.

Nowadays you don’t need to login, many sites/apps/shops send your info back to Facebook anyway. You needn’t join because Facebook has shadow profiles provided by your contacts.

We shouldn’t waste time, or distract from the cause of the problem, trying to shame or police people who are on Facebook. That ire should be directed at Facebook.

It should be aimed at regulating and limiting the harms of Facebook. And creating sustainable rights-respecting alternatives to the functions Facebook provides.

“And thus, in the guise of a seemingly innocuous tradeoff (in which the user thinks they’re really getting the benefit), the user accepts being subjected to high-tech corporate surveillance.

Importantly, this is one of the primary ways in which such surveillance gets normalized.

…

High-tech surveillance succeeds by slowly chipping away at the obstacles to its acceptance. It does not start with the total takeover, rather it begins on a smaller scale, presenting itself as harmless and enjoyable. As people steadily grow accustomed to this sort of surveillance, as they come to see themselves as its beneficiaries instead of as its victims, they become open to a little bit more surveillance, and a little bit more surveillance, and a little bit more. This is the steady wearing down of defenses, the slow transformation of corporate creepiness into cultural complacency, that allows rampant high-tech surveillance to progress.”

Another video of me speaking has gone up today! 8 Unbelievable Things You Never Knew About Tracking at ffconf. I felt really lucky to be invited to such a (deservedly) legendary event so tried to cover all the things I always want to say to other devs:

8 Unbelievable Things You Never Knew About Tracking

I’m really grateful for the work the Accessibility Scotland team put into their event and again in making the talks accessible online. I wrote this talk especially for the event, because these are the things that keep me awake at night.

Accessible unethical technology

Starting to dig into the digital copy of Inclusive Components while I eagerly await my print copy. It’s an absolute must-have for anyone building modern interfaces. Buy a copy for your office and thank me (well, thank Heydon Pickering) later 😊

“We need to de-exoticize these users if we are going to genuinely have a healthy global digital culture. They need to be humanized, understood, and kept in mind when designing inclusive platforms. The internet is a critical public resource that is meant for all users—and that includes the world’s poor.”

Lovely little series (from last year) from the lovely Andy Bell. Featuring lots of pet photos, including my best, the one and only Oskar.

Developurrs #006 - Laura Kalbag

“After the 2010 BP oil spill, for example, which killed 11 people and devastated the Gulf of Mexico, no one went to jail. The threat that Mr Runciman cautions against is that AI techniques, like playbooks for escaping corporate liability, will be used with impunity.

Today, pioneering researchers such as Julia Angwin, Virginia Eubanks and Cathy O’Neil reveal how various algorithmic systems calcify oppression, erode human dignity and undermine basic democratic mechanisms like accountability when engineered irresponsibly. Harm need not be deliberate; biased data-sets used to train predictive models also wreak havoc.

…

A central promise of AI is that it enables large-scale automated categorisation… This “promise” becomes a menace when directed at the complexities of everyday life. Careless labels can oppress and do harm when they assert false authority.”

Can’t write anything without it turning into an overdramatic existential crisis. Is that redundant? Why am I even writing this? Who am I to write this? Whyyyyyy?

“The advancement of robotics, AI, and other “futuristic” technologies has ushered in a new era in the ongoing struggle for representation of people with disabilities in large-scale decision-making settings.

…

We need to build a technological future that benefits disabled people without disadvantaging them along the way.

…

Accessible design should not depend on the ability of an able-bodied design team to understand someone else’s experience or foresee problems that they’ve never had. The burden of change should not rest on the user (or in my case, the bystander) and their ability to communicate their issues.

…

A solution that works for most at the expense of another is not enough.”

“Surveillance Giants lays out how the surveillance-based business model of Facebook and Google is inherently incompatible with the right to privacy and poses a systemic threat to a range of other rights including freedom of opinion and expression, freedom of thought, and the right to equality and non-discrimination.

…

The tech giants offer these services to billions without charging users a fee. Instead, individuals pay for the services with their intimate personal data, being constantly tracked across the web and in the physical world as well, for example, through connected devices.

…

The technology behind the internet is not incompatible with our rights, but the business model Facebook and Google have chosen is”

“Because of the subjective nature of emotions, emotional AI is especially prone to bias. For example, one study found that emotional analysis technology assigns more negative emotions to people of certain ethnicities than to others. Consider the ramifications in the workplace, where an algorithm consistently identifying an individual as exhibiting negative emotions might affect career progression.

…

In short, if left unaddressed, conscious or unconscious emotional bias can perpetuate stereotypes and assumptions at an unprecedented scale.”

Got my postal vote polling card today 👍

“By rooting out bias in technology, these Black women engineers, professors and government experts are on the front lines of the civil rights movement of our time.”

“It’s a complete anomaly – a solidly performing, decently priced device that just isn’t suited for anyone because of the privacy concerns and increasingly alarming issues plaguing the social networking site.”

If you were at ffconf on Friday and you missed the link to my slides. They’re on Notist. There’s also all the resources I referenced in my talk.

Ah Brighton, you’re exactly as I remember you. Dark, wet and with terrible mobile signal. Very glad to be back ☺️

Snap this up. Heydon always provides the most practical, well-explained and valuable code snippets. You’ll use them in all your work and your work will be way better for it. I can’t wait to get my copy.

Meet “Inclusive Components”, A New Printed Book By Heydon Pickering

“[T]rue transparency would include information about the tools that differentiate advertising on Facebook from traditional print and television, and in fact make it more dangerous: Can I see if a political advertiser used the custom audience tool, and if so, if my email address was uploaded? Can I see what look-alike audience advertisers are seeking? Can I see a true, verified name of the advertiser in the disclaimer? Can I see if and how your algorithms amplified the ad? If not, the claim that Facebook is simply providing a level playing field for free expression is a myth.

…

Free political speech is core to our democratic principles, and it’s true that social media companies should not be the arbiters of truth. But the only way Facebook or other companies that use our behavioral data to potentially manipulate us through targeted advertising can prevent abuse of their platform to harm our electoral process is to end their most egregious targeting and amplification practices and provide real transparency.

…

We need lawmakers and regulators to help protect our children, our cognitive capabilities, our public square and our democracy by creating guardrails and rules to deal directly with the incentives and business models of these platforms and the societal harms they are causing.”

“While the features that come with smart locks or doorbell cameras offer conveniences for homeowners, they open up concerns about privacy for renters – who might not have signed on for constant surveillance.”

…

“Facial recognition and emerging forms of AI give landlords alarming power to harass rent-stabilized tenants.”

Me… and the boys in my mentions.

“You are building an infrastructure that can be later co-opted in undesirable ways by large multinationals and state surveillance apparatus, and compromised by malicious hackers,” says Dr Michael Veale, a lecturer in digital rights and regulation at UCL Faculty of Laws at University College London.

As I’m approaching my mid-thirties, I thought it was about time I had my first ever professional hair cut… now I feel like a Hollywood person. (Nobody told me how luxurious it feels to have another person wash your hair!)

“This is not about math, but about human social values being superimposed on a mathematical system. The question becomes: Whose values are encoded in the system?”

…

“That trans and gender nonconforming people are excluded from or subjugated to information systems is a phenomenon [Anna Lauren Hoffmann] labels data violence, or ‘Harm inflicted on trans and gender nonconforming people not only by government-run systems, but also the information systems that permeate our everyday social lives.’”

Thanks Accessibility Scotland. I had such a fabulous time. Felt like I got to make the most of listening to some incredible talks, and really appreciate the kind feedback for my talk ☺️ My slides (I know, some went by too fast!) with a transcript-ish are at Accessible unethical technology on Notist.

And you’ll find a full list of all the links I mentioned there on Notist too. (Notist is the best!)

One very large cup of coffee down, I made it to Accessibility Scotland. Now got the whole day to get nervous for my talk, as I’m closing!

“The surveillance dystopia is on the horizon, and companies like Microsoft and Amazon are helping build it. Despite their platitudes of caution and ethics, we’ve seen the consequences of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” ethos. And if we don’t stop the spread of facial recognition, its latest lucrative surveillance product, we’ll soon count our most basic freedoms among the things they’ve broken.”

…

“Company after company in Silicon Valley has been pushing furiously ahead with the development of face-scanning surveillance tools. They see money to be made selling this tech to governments, airlines, and other private businesses. Facing growing concern from the public and lawmakers, the industry has disingenuously asked for “regulation.” This is straight out of Big Tech’s lobbying playbook — asking Congress to pass laws and then swooping in to help write them. By doing so, they hope to avoid the real debate: whether facial recognition surveillance should be allowed at all.”

…

“There is no time to waste. Authoritarian surveillance programs are always used to target the most vulnerable and marginalized, and facial recognition enables the automation of oppression.”

Good morning Edinburgh. I’ve been awake for far too long, but I found some good coffee and I’m looking forward to Accessibility Scotland tomorrow!

“Unlike gun control, Marlow said, ‘Surveillance is politically palatable, and so they’re pursuing surveillance as a way you can demonstrate action, even though there’s no evidence that it will positively impact the problem.’” … “Some people think that technology is magic, that artificial intelligence will save us,” Vance said. “A lot of the questions and a lot of the privacy concerns haven’t [been] thought of, let alone addressed.” … “For black students, and students with disabilities, who already face a disproportionate amount of harsh disciplinary measures, the introduction of new kinds of surveillance may be especially harmful, privacy experts said.”

“Ubiquitous computing is still a fantasy, but not because the technology isn’t ready. It is. The fantasy is that any system mediating someone’s personal experience of the physical world that uses a modern corporation’s digital infrastructure would be objective or neutral. Humans are data and data is money, and this is the business model of many of the technology firms up to the task of ubiquitous computing.”

Got a Raspberry Pi 3B+ or 4B and want to get a static or dynamic server up and running really really quickly? Aral’s got Site.js working on those tiny creatures: Site.js and Pi

How to tell a true friend: they strip the tracking identifiers and amp junk from a url before sharing it with you.

Related: hours of my life spent trying to find the original url from an amp url is TOO MANY.

“Yes, all markets require a level of privacy in order to operate. You can’t know the political leaning of everyone you buy a sandwich from. Vendors can decide what they do or don’t want to disclose or ask of their customers. But when they do know, they have no obligation to proceed with that business. Activists and tech critics sometimes use the word complicit when talking about companies that look the other way when their inventions are causing harm. Assistive might be more accurate. Providing database and web services—even just email—to a cruel immigration regime assists in the cruelty.”

…

“These companies can do what they want with the software they sell. But they should stop pretending that what they sell is neutral.”

“Note that I haven’t asked: “What’s the impact of technology on society?” That’s the wrong question. Platforms are societies of intertwined people and machines. There is no such thing as “online life” versus “real life.” We give massive ground if we pretend that these companies are simply having an “effect” or “impact” on some separate society.”

“[T]he assertion that technology companies can’t possibly be shaped or restrained with the public’s interest in mind is to argue that they are fundamentally different from any other industry. They’re not.”

…

“There’s a growing chasm between how everyday users feel about the technology around them and how companies decide what to make. And yet, these companies say they have our best interests in mind. We can’t go back, they say. We can’t stop the “natural evolution of technology.” But the “natural evolution of technology” was never a thing to begin with, and it’s time to question what “progress” actually means.”

Ouch. Thanks Apple.

Today I am 33. But Apple has perhaps accurately assessed I am nothing more than “a child with an administrator account.”

Want to make a little chat app? Even me, while very tired and usually not confident in these things, had fun going through the tutorial and getting my own basic chat app going this afternoon. Site.js holds so much promise and I’m very excited about it. Build a simple chat app with Site.js

Thanks Nordic.design! In case my last slide went by too fast, here’s the link to my slides and all the resources.

‘Disruptive Design: Harmful Patterns and Bad Practice’ on Notist

Very last-minute trip to Stockholm for Nordic.design tomorrow. Give me a shout if you’ll be there! https://nordic.design/2019/speakers

I’m sorry this has taken an unreasonably long time, but my slides from State Of The Browser 2019 are finally up on my Notist profile. (I wanted to make sure the slides had a proper transcript—it’s a “tightened” version of what I said on the day.)

https://noti.st/laurakalbag/K0n0Gl/accessibility-for-everyone

And trust me, it needed the tightening. Reading a verbatim transcript of myself speaking has made me hate myself and my gratuitous use of “so” and “the thing is…”

Tories continue to be the absolute worst. Unsurprising that their “Equalities Minister” turns out to be the “Maintaining Inequalities Minister.”

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2019/10/06/trans-liz-truss-gender-recognition-act-mail-on-sunday/

“Out in the wider world, anonymity is no longer guaranteed. Facial recognition gives police and companies the means of identifying and tracking people of interest, while others are free to go about their business. The real question is: who gets that privilege?”

“Seventeen dollars for a smartphone sounds like a great deal, especially for people living in poverty who can barely afford rent.

But there’s a problem: low-cost smartphones are privacy nightmares.”

“The MYA2 also has apps that can’t be updated or deleted, and those apps contain multiple security and privacy flaws. One of those pre-installed apps that can’t be removed, Facebook Lite, gets default permission to track everywhere you go, upload all your contacts, and read your phone’s calendar.”

“While companies like Apple are to be lauded for prioritizing privacy protections, people around the world should not be reliant on tech giants building privacy safeguards for only a population that can afford it.”

Been busy on my blog today. Posts should be turning up here at some point. Importantly, my RSS feed should be behaving better. But if it’s still being a pain in your feed reader, please let me know 😇

“For decades, the overriding objective of American business and government has been to remove friction from the tracking system, by linking networks, by speeding connections, by eliminating barriers. But friction is the only thing that has ever made privacy, let alone obscurity, possible. If there’s no friction, if we can all be profiled instantly and intimately, then there’s nothing to stop any of our neighbors from being targeted — nothing, that is, except our priorities.”

A long, sickening, read.

About a month ago, Aral and I launched Small Technology Foundation. In the frenzied rush to get the site up, and general life chaos that has overwhelmed me since, I’d not managed to write about it until now.

A new name?

It’s important to say that, while Small Technology Foundation is a new name for our organisation, it’s a continuation of the work we were doing as Ind.ie. What started as Irish restrictions preventing us from using the same name as our UK organisation, ended up being an opportunity to find a name that is more descriptive of the work we do, and more memorable. (Not to mention that Ind.ie is pronounced as “Industrial-dot-IE” by some screenreaders, which has always irritated me.)

What is small technology?

Small Technology are everyday tools for everyday people designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits. The opposite of big tech. We’re on a mission to build tools that enable everyone of us to own and control our own place on the Internet.

What is the foundation?

Small Technology Foundation is just the two of us, Aral and me. (And Osky.) The foundation is a collection of our work. We do most of our work together, but also have our own ways of working towards Small Technology Foundation’s goals. (For example, I wrote a book and do a lot of reading which makes up my lens.)

For a long time, I resisted calling myself co-founder, as it brings up visions of startup hustlers and growth obsessives. I was much happier calling myself a designer, and pretending that one day soon I’d be spending 90% of my time designing and building websites again. But, as anyone who runs a not-for-profit organisation knows, keeping even the tiniest organisation running smoothly requires a lot of admin. And as anyone who is trying to make change in this forsaken tech community knows, it requires a lot of energy, communication, and saying the same things over and over again in the hope that someone might listen.

So while I still cherish the few hours I can dedicate to making websites, the grownup title of Co-Founder better fits the variety in my work. (And maybe men in suits will no longer dismiss me at conferences! …jk, of course they’ll still ignore me.)

Not. for. profit.

As with Ind.ie, Small Technology Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation. We’re not in this for the cash. (If you want to make money in the tech industry, you don’t challenge the status quo…) We only pay ourselves what we need to pay our bills and feed the dog.

We’ve only existed to this point with the help of a few kind supporters, but we do have a plan for long-term sustainability If you’re a person with financial means, we’d appreciate your monetary support and we have other (not monetary) ways to support us listed on our “fund us” page. If you’re glad we exist (we hear this a lot! we appreciate it!) please help us continue to exist.

Over the last five years or so, I’ve been sharing links to insightful articles with a critical view of technology. It started as Ind.ie’s weekly roundup email, but I found writing a long summary was taking me too long every week (I’m no journalist!) So the roundups evolved into Ind.ie’s daily Radar, where I’d post daily links, quoting some of the best bits, which I’d also post to @indie on Mastodon and @indie on Twitter.

What’s mine is mine and what’s ours is his

When we started Small Technology Foundation, we decided these links needed a new home. These links have always been my view of what I think is related to our work. That is not to say that Aral disagrees with my perspective, but that both Ind.ie and Small Technology Foundation have always been a collection of mine and Aral’s work. That’s why we blog on our own sites and then share the relevant posts aggregated on the Small Technology Foundation news. Thus it also makes sense for the links I collect to live on my site.

But there’s another reason why me posting as myself is valuable. Unless we specifically say the work I do is done by me, my work is often attributed to Aral. It’s not Aral’s fault. He’s deliberate in attributing my work to me, and continually corrects people who attribute my work to him or our work to him alone. But sometimes even that is not enough. We’ve even had people assuming he co-wrote my book.

A few months ago, we gave our first talk together. We thought it would be fun, getting to give a talk that embodied our combined perspectives and unified talks we’d been giving separately. It was a lovely conference with a focus on inclusivity with a reasonable mixture of speakers and attendees from different backgrounds. But it was the starkest example of how my work, and even my presence, are erased, despite being amongst a broadly progressive community.

We shared the talk as two halves. My half of the talk was strong and, while Aral has had a longer speaking career, combined we gave a really good talk (I didn’t let him down!) However afterwards, multiple speakers referred to “Aral’s talk” in their talks. One then corrected himself, asking the audience to remind him of my name, and then continued to refer to “Aral’s talk.” People flocked to Aral to invite him to speak at their events, they stopped him later to commend him on his talk. I don’t want to be ungrateful to the people who came to speak to me afterwards, and said lovely things about our talk, but they were a kind minority to those crowding Aral. It broke my heart a little bit.

Aral and I know we’re perceived and treated differently in the world. It might have something to do with my looking younger than I am, it might be because I’m often less confident. But it’s likely because I’m a woman. While what I face is nothing compared to those battling racism and ableism in the tech community, I get dealt a fair amount of crap from that community and (not just bad tweets.) We’re not going to fix systemic problems by being clearer in attributing my work to me, in fact we may just make my work easier to ignore as women’s work in the tech community so often is (along with the work of people of colour, and that of people with visible disabilities). But we can do this one thing to stop people attributing my work to somebody else.

(I know… all this in a post about posting links. Trust me, this feels tedious to me too.)

My lens means what’s important to me

As I said, the links on my lens are from my perspective. This means often I include articles that aren’t written from a technologist’s point of view and aren’t focused on design and development. The articles are usually more about politics, society and culture, and where technology fits in. That’s why we (well, Aral) came up with the name, “Laura’s Lens.” (I’m terrible at naming things.) This is a reading list of what I’m using to inform my work at Small Technology Foundation. These are pieces that help me understand topics, connect themes together and learn how to explain key issues. I limit it to one article daily (on weekdays), and I hope you find them as valuable as I do.

Like the lens? Fund us!

Small Technology Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation. All the work I do is part of our effort to advocate for and build small technology to protect personhood and democracy in the digital network age. If you find my work at all valuable (and can afford to do so), I would really appreciate your financial support. Our Small Technology funding page has more information on how you can donate to us, become a patron, and the work that is funded by our supporters.

Our app’s reviews are not reviews of me. Our app’s reviews are not reviews of me. Our app’s reviews are not reviews of me. If I keep telling myself this, maybe reading and replying to reviews will stop making me feel so anxious…

I know, it’s been ages but I did a little blocking rules update. Should be back into the regular schedule again now. ☺️ As ever, if you use Better Blocker and you come across any problematic sites, let me know. I will try to get things fixed/blocked/unblocked.

“Europe’s top court has ruled that pre-checked consent boxes for dropping cookies are not legally valid.

Consent must be obtained prior to storing or accessing non-essential cookies, such as tracking cookies for targeted advertising. Consent cannot be implied or assumed.”

“Sites that have relied upon opting EU users into ad-tracking cookies in the hopes they’ll just click okay to make the cookie banner go away are in for a rude awakening.”

“Perhaps it’s easier to separate the scientist from his science when you’re not, and never will be, affected personally by misogyny and sexism.”

“Unfortunately, many women in STEM are adversely affected by misogynists and sexists when those men are highly regarded and respected within the scientific community. After all, sexual harassment isn’t really about sex — it’s about power.”

“[W]hat’s worth more, the contributions of a lone male genius who assaults and harasses and discriminates against women, or the contributions of a large scientific community unhindered by a misogynistic and unsafe environment?”

The same goes for the tech community… and also for the racist and white supremacist ideologies held within.

“We are often sold a similar bill of goods: big tech companies talk incessantly about how ‘AI’ and digitization will bring a better future. In the present tense, however, putting computers everywhere is bad for most people. It enables advertisers, employers and cops to exercise more control over us – in addition to helping heat the planet.”

“Training models isn’t the only way [machine learning] contributes to the cooking of our planet. It has also stimulated a hunger for data that is probably the single biggest driver of the digitization of everything. Corporations and governments now have an incentive to acquire as much data as possible, because that data, with the help of [machine learning], might yield valuable patterns. It might tell them who to fire, who to arrest, when to perform maintenance on a machine or how to promote a new product.”

A few weeks ago, I chatted to James Jeffrey for a BBC article on Why much of the internet is closed off to blind people. In particular, I spoke to how easy it can be to make a website accessible, and why it should be part of our everyday practice as designers and developers.

“It’s not hard to do, it should just be part of best practice, not an additional line item, just like making sure a website loads quickly is,” says Laura Kalbag, a website designer and author of Accessibility for Everyone.

“It basically just involves HTML coding, which even a blogger can do. If it is a huge website, it might take some time, but the work itself is not complicated.”

She adds it is a myth that making a website accessible makes it ugly, there is no correlation - you can still have snazzy images and graphics.

…

“We treat disabled people as if they are different but that isn’t the case, as digital accessibility affects all of us,” says Ms Kalbag. “If nothing else, you should see it in a selfish way, as one day you will probably need this type of accessibility.”

Read the full article on the BBC website.

“Neighborhoods armed with Ring videos, Flock readers, and NextDoor posts have the power to create networked engines of suspicion, sometimes ill-founded or erroneous, that may embolden residents to take actions they should not.”

“Feeling anxious? Got lucky last night? Having some health issues? Tell Maya and they’ll let Facebook and others know (oh, and they’ll share your diary too!)”

There is a reason why advertisers are so interested in your mood; understanding when a person is in a vulnerable state of mind means you can strategically target them. Knowing when a teenager is feeling low means an advertiser might try and sell them a food supplement that is supposed to make them feel strong and focused. Understanding people’s mood is an entry point for manipulating them. And that is all the more worrying in an age when Facebook is having so much impact on our democracies, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed. Indeed, it is not just advertisers that will want to know how we feel; as elections approach, political parties may want to know if we feel anxious, stressed or excited so that they can adapt their narratives accordingly.

“[E]ven if not lawless, historically, borders have been vulnerable places for human rights—particularly the right to privacy—as border guards extend government intrusion into our private lives with the authority of upholding national security. Now, data collection and artificial intelligence are threatening to turn borders into an underregulated free-for-all.”

This summer/autumn, I’m speaking at conferences in Amsterdam, London and Edinburgh. This year I’ve had mixed experiences with speaking, so I’m being picky about future talks. So I’m looking forward to the following…

Loupe

Amsterdam, 15th August.

Next week I’ll be in Amsterdam to give an introductory talk about accessible and inclusive design at Framer’s Loupe conference.

State Of The Browser

London, 14th September.

In September, I’m reuniting with a bunch of old pals, and hoping to make new ones at London Web Standards’ State Of The Browser 2019. I last spoke at this conference in 2013, and did one of my first ever talks at one of their meetups in 2012. It’s going to be a proper party.

Accessibility Scotland

Edinburgh, 25th October.

In October, I’ll be back to Edinburgh for Accessibility Scotland. I’m really looking forward to this event, as the theme is “accessibility and ethics” (right up my street!) and so far the lineup is fabulous.

My essay in the Smashing Magazine Print edition #1

I almost forgot to share photos of the gorgeous printed Smashing Magazine! Getting all this into 2000 words was a challenge, but I’m happy with the result.

Thank you Rachel Andrew for the opportunity and Owen Gregory for the editing.

You can read more about the magazine (and get a print or digital copy) on the Smashing Magazine site.

My essay in the Smashing Magazine Print edition #1…

Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be on a panel with the other folks who contributed to the new Smashing print magazine on Ethics and Privacy. You can watch it live on YouTube (be aware that Google is tracking you!) at 1pm GMT / 2pm Irish time / 3pm Barcelona time.

I wrote a little essay for Smashing Print #1: Ethics & Privacy titled ‘This One Weird Trick Tells Us Everything About You.’

It covers different types of tracking and how it came to exist, as well as regulation, ethics, and why we need better business models. It was very cathartic to write, and I was grateful for the editorial input of the ever-thoughtful Owen Gregory. Also I’m well pleased to have my thoughts alongside an essay by Trine Falbe and the writing of Heather Burns, people whose work I massively admire.

You can get the magazine in print or as an ebook over on the Smashing Magazine site.

Conf organisers! I wanted to shout out some brilliant speakers I saw at Think About! conference last week. These are fabulous people, accomplished speakers, writing valuable, meaningful and educational talks. You need them on your lineup.

In the order I saw them:

Linda Rising

First I saw Linda Rising. I’ve been in the wrong circles because I hadn’t heard of her work. Hers was the perfect opening keynote, priming our minds and attitudes for the rest of the conference with science, talking about the agile mindset. Blew my mind.

Linda’s website.

Eriol Fox

Next was Eriol Fox. Their insightful talk about diverse representation in design made tricky topics way less intimidating. The way they wove bad examples alongside how to do better was so enlightening. AND they’ve got a great talk proposal ready.

Eriol’s talk proposal: “Effective design for crisis & natural disaster relief in developed and developing countries”. Eriol’s website.

Aly Blenkin

Then I saw Aly Blenkin. Her talk really got into deep thinking around ethics in design, and considering the impact of our work. She showed real processes and approaches for understanding/measuring impact, giving us takeaways we can all use in our work.

Aly’s website.

Ryn Daniels

Next up was Ryn Daniels who made devops accessible to even me while still addressing the topic in depth. Their talk melded stories with examples and lessons learned, looking at both code and humans, on some very big and daunting projects.

Ryn’s website.

Eileen Wagner

I was sad to miss most of Eileen Wagner’s talk, because the tail-end that I caught got me really fired up and inspired. Looking at how to use design to improve security and privacy, I learned so much in that short time from her accessible examples.

Eileen’s website.

Vimla Appadoo

The fabulous closing keynote was Vim Appadoo. Her explanations of the connections between diversity and privilege gave me loads of “aha!” moments, which she set against a vulnerable and fascinating story of her own life and background.

Vim’s website

Legendary conference organisers

Also a massive hats-off to Chrissy Holderbaum, Jakob Holderbaum and Andreas Rosing for putting this immense lineup together. Can’t wait to see what they put together next year.

To privacy activists Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag, we don’t need brain implants to become cyborgs; we’re already jacked in. And we need a Universal Declaration of Cyborg Rights.

Aral and I did an interview with S.C. Stuart of PCMag ahead of our talk together for Think About! in Cologne last week.

Read ‘Like It or Not, We’re Already Cyborgs’ by S.C. Stuart.

“A lot of people think there’s an easy solution, and that the [solution is] for the platforms to ‘do something.’ Social media companies do not have a good history in this arena, and there are so many reasons not to trust these giant companies, why should we trust them to decide what speech is acceptable?”

“News organizations have multiple and sometimes conflicting incentives that might affect how they present the local police blotter. A company that sells security-optimized doorbells has only  one  incentive: emphasizing that  the world is a scary place, and you need to buy our products to protect you.”

Don’t want to move. Just finished cutting the grass and he’s come to snuggle up next to me… and mid-flop.

“Ever AI promises prospective military clients that it can ‘enhance surveillance capabilities’ and ‘identify and act on threats.’ It offers law enforcement the ability to identify faces in body-cam recordings or live video feeds.”

“Once facial recognition and other AI becomes pervasive—and in the absence of serious enforceable laws that can put guardrails on the technology—we will be unprotected, and as such will be subjected to any purpose to which the government or business wants to put our identities and locations. This is where greed, profit, and power come into play as motivators.”

“Today’s data providers can receive information from almost every imaginable part of your life: your activity on the internet, the places you visit, the stores you walk through, the things you buy, the things you like, who your friends are, the places your friends go, the things your friends do, and on and on.”

“The poor experience these two extremes — hypervisibility and invisibility — while often lacking the agency or resources to challenge unfair outcomes. For instance, they may be unfairly targeted by predictive policing tools designed with biased training data or unfairly excluded from hiring algorithms that scour social media networks to make determinations about potential candidates. In this increasingly complex ecosystem of “networked privacy harms,” one-size-fits-all privacy solutions will not serve all communities equally. Efforts to create a more ethical technology sector must take the unique experiences of vulnerable and marginalized users into account.”

“Facebook is not looking to protect me or any other person of color or any other marginalized citizen who are being attacked by hate speech,” [Carolyn Wysinger] says. “We get trolls all the time. People who troll your page and say hateful things. But nobody is looking to protect us from it. They are just looking to protect their bottom line.”

“Ireland’s failure to safeguard huge stores of personal information looms larger now that the country is the primary regulator responsible for protecting the health information, email addresses, financial records, relationship status, search histories and friend lists for hundreds of millions of Americans, Europeans and other users around the globe.”

“Despite its vows to beef up its threadbare regulatory apparatus, Ireland has a long history of catering to the very companies it is supposed to oversee…”

“33 of the 36 apps shared information that could give advertisers or data analytics companies insights into people’s digital behavior. And a few shared very sensitive information, like health diary entries, self reports about substance use, and usernames.”

“Potentially advertisers could use this to compromise someone’s privacy and sway their treatment decisions…”

“Obscurity bridges this privacy gap with the idea that the parts of our lives that are hard or unlikely to be found or understood are relatively safe. It is a combination of the privacy you have in public and the privacy you have in groups. Obscurity is a barrier that can shield you from government, corporate and social snoops. And until lawmakers, corporate leaders and citizens embrace obscurity and move to protect it, your freedom and opportunities to flourish will be in jeopardy.”

“This enables governments and companies to construct profiles of them, using these highly sensitive details to make inferences or predictions that may or may not be accurate. Increasingly, profiles are being used to make or inform consequential decisions, from credit scoring, to hiring, to policing.”

Insightful and horrifying:

‘Women suffer needless pain because almost everything is designed for men’

“Technology companies have for years responded to court orders for specific users’ information. The new warrants go further, suggesting possible suspects and witnesses in the absence of other clues. Often, Google employees said, the company responds to a single warrant with location information on dozens or hundreds of devices.”

“The technique illustrates a phenomenon privacy advocates have long referred to as the “if you build it, they will come” principle — anytime a technology company creates a system that could be used in surveillance, law enforcement inevitably comes knocking. Sensorvault, according to Google employees, includes detailed location records involving at least hundreds of millions of devices worldwide and dating back nearly a decade.”

When I found out that Lisa Maria Martin was writing a book about information architecture, I was really excited. Ever since I was lucky enough to have Lisa Maria edit my book, I’ve wanted to learn more from this insightful and kind person. During the writing and editing process, my book was loooong, accidentally repetitive, and the structure mostly just a bunch of text in the order it exited my brain. The other wonderful editors helped me flesh out ideas, communicate them clearly and ensured they were technically correct. Lisa Maria gave the book its final shape and structure. She took text I found unwieldy and hard to understand as a whole, and put it in an order that made sense to a reader. Needless to say, I learned a lot from her, and the opportunity to learn more, and how I could apply her kind of thinking to projects I work on every day (websites!) meant I read Everyday Information Architecture as soon as I could get my hands on it.

And this book does not disappoint.

Much like other A Book Apart books, Everyday Information Architecture took me a couple of hours to read. Within fifteen minutes, I was already reorganising our organisation’s website in my head (whilst simultaneously learning I need to steady my excitement a little, and make sure the reorganisation works for all the content…) The book works through thinking in systems, analysing existing systems, and using that analysis to better organise websites to fit the needs of the site’s visitors and the organisation’s goals. If, like me, you get a kick out of designing a system so that everything has its place, you’ll rejoice at Lisa Maria’s spreadsheets and her advice on making masses of content more maintainable. If the idea of drowning in content terrifies you, this book will throw you a life ring and help you feel more in control again. Lisa Maria’s advice is practical, flexible, and uses examples of a variety of sites making it easier to understand how to apply her processes to your own work.

Everyday Information Architecture is also a fun read underscored with a serious message about the impact categorisation can have on people and society. You don’t necessarily expect a book about web work to be enjoyable, but Lisa Maria has a warm and really funny way with words that makes the book absorbing and easy to read. And the message is clear: we can use an understanding of information architecture to make a site easier to use, more inclusive and more accessible, but we must also understand the impact of our decisions extends well beyond the pixels, code and copy.

“Information isn’t neutral; neither are the choices we make about how to present it, structure it, write it, juxtapose it, or classify it. Every design decision makes an impact; it’s just a question of whether we can stand up and own that impact.” —Lisa Maria Martin, Everyday Information Architecture

You should buy Everyday Information Architecture, it’s out today in paperback and ebook. You won’t regret it!

“A recent study led by researchers at Northeastern University and the University of Southern California shows that, given a large group of people who might be eligible to see an advertisement, Facebook will pick among them based on its own profit-maximizing calculations, sometimes serving ads to audiences that are skewed heavily by race and gender.”

“An ad system that is designed to maximize clicks, and to maximize profits for Facebook, will naturally reinforce these social inequities and so serve as a barrier to equal opportunity.”

“Facebook is seeking yet again to apportion blame for its failures elsewhere - this time on governments for failing to regulate. Yet Facebook continually obstructs regulatory reform with its powerful lobbying capabilities, appeals against regulatory judgments and then investigates its critics.”

Blimey, imore.com has a cool (not cool) 100 trackers on its homepage.

Got our EORI number, so by the UK government’s standards, I’m as prepared for no deal as I need to be… 😑

Given that Apple have just removed Do Not Track from Safari because it was being used for tracking via “fingerprinting”, the decision to add trackability for assistive tech is baffling.

Léonie Watson wrote very clearly on this specific issue years ago: Thoughts on screen reader detection.

I’m so angry and want to write more about this, but I also want to get a Better update out today (going to try to smash those trackers before they get to you.) In short:

TRACKING IS BAD and invasive. Consent dialogs are not good enough for consent, let alone opt-out options. Discrimination based on tracking impacts marginalised and vulnerable people first and most. Yet 99% of the web is complicit in it. Go check yourselves. I regularly post links about the impact of tracking on the Ind.ie Radar if you want more background.

“Privacy for marginalized populations has never been, and will never be an abstract. Being surveilled, whether by private actors, or the state, is often the gateway to very tangible harms–violence in the form of police brutality, incarceration, or deportation. And there can be more subliminal, insidious impacts, too.”

“The idea that surveillance would be used as an assignment on those with no options for consent speaks to how broken our ideas about consent have become, trivializing what to many people is a life and death matter of their lived existence.”

Looking forward to Think About! conference. It’s designed to be properly inclusive, has some great-sounding talks in the lineup, and me and Aral are doing our first ever keynote together. Only a couple of weeks left on “regular bird” tickets: Think About! conference

“Of ‘special concern’ is that, by cross-referencing such data to the vast trove of personally-identifying information Google also holds from services like Gmail, Android apps, and Search, Google can ‘easily associate web activity with the identities of real people’, the report warns.”

The best bookmarks I saved in Week 12, 2019.

Tech is not neutral

Canary in a Coal Mine: How Tech Provides Platforms for Hate

By Tatiana Mac on A List Apart

“We, by way of our platforms, give agency and credence to these acts of violence, then pilfer profits from them. Tech is a money-making accomplice to these hate crimes.”

Article: Canary in a Coal Mine: How Tech Provides Platforms for Hate

Trading privacy for survival is another tax on the poor

By Ciara Byrne on Fast Company

“Personal data is used to deny low-income people access to resources or opportunities, but it’s also used to target them with predatory marketing for payday loans or even straight-up scams.”

Article: Trading privacy for survival is another tax on the poor

How the tragic death of Do Not Track ruined the web for everyone

By Glenn Fleishman on Fast Company

“the prospect of federal legislation brought ad players to the table. But when that legislation didn’t materialize, “the prolonged negotiations in fact proved useful to the industry to create the illusion of a voluntary self-regulatory process, seemingly preempting the need for regulation.”

Article: How the tragic death of Do Not Track ruined the web for everyone

State websites are aiding a disgraceful silent surveillance

By Karlin Lillington on the Irish Times

“Of “special concern” is that, by cross-referencing such data to the vast trove of personally-identifying information Google also holds from services like Gmail, Android apps, and Search, Google can “easily associate web activity with the identities of real people”, the report warns.”

Article: State websites are aiding a disgraceful silent surveillance

Facebook Says It Will Use AI to Police Revenge Porn, but It Won’t Fully Explain How

By Melanie Ehrenkranz on Gizmodo

“How will this detection technology be able to discern a lingerie photo that someone uploads confidently of themselves versus a photo of a woman in lingerie that was taken in private by a former partner who is now vindictively posting it across his social media pages? Or, how will this new detection tech be able to differentiate revenge porn from a nude work of art or a historically significant photo?”

Article: Facebook Says It Will Use AI to Police Revenge Porn, but It Won’t Fully Explain How

We need to do better

About the HTML Epidemic, WebAIM “Million” Report, and Teach Access

By Dennis Lembrée on Web Axe

“This is obviously a huge problem that must be addressed. What can we do to help resolve this HTML epidemic?

Digital accessibility must be considered when hiring and training employees. Accessibility must be considered when creating a web-based product. Accessibility must be a part of ongoing training for web professionals. Accessibility needs to be taught in education.”

Article: About the HTML Epidemic, WebAIM “Million” Report, and Teach Access

“We, by way of our platforms, give agency and credence to these acts of violence, then pilfer profits from them. Tech is a money-making accomplice to these hate crimes.”

Can’t wait to read Everyday Information Architecture and learn more from Lisa Maria Martin. If you work in anything that touches the web, this book will be indispensable. Pre-order it now!

Everyday Information Architecture by Lisa Maria Martin from A Book Apart

“We, by way of our platforms, give agency and credence to these acts of violence, then pilfer profits from them. Tech is a money-making accomplice to these hate crimes.”

Tatiana Mac writes so clearly and powerfully, also giving us real guidance for action. Stop what you’re doing and read this:

Canary in a Coal Mine: How Tech Provides Platforms for Hate

“Personal data is used to deny low-income people access to resources or opportunities, but it’s also used to target them with predatory marketing for payday loans or even straight-up scams.”

“ Undocumented immigrants, day laborers, homeless people, and those with criminal convictions suffer from another data extreme: living beyond the reach of the data collection systems needed to thrive in society, they gain so much “privacy” that they become increasingly invisible. Living in this surveillance gap can be as damaging as living under constant surveillance, and is often a reaction to it.”

“the prospect of federal legislation brought ad players to the table. But when that legislation didn’t materialize, “the prolonged negotiations in fact proved useful to the industry to create the illusion of a voluntary self-regulatory process, seemingly preempting the need for regulation.”

The best bookmarks I saved in Week 11, 2019.

Prejudice

A new study finds a potential risk with self-driving cars: failure to detect dark-skinned pedestrians

By Sigal Samuel on Vox

“The list of concerns about self-driving cars just got longer.

In addition to worrying about how safe they are, how they’d handle tricky moral trade-offs on the road, and how they might make traffic worse, we also need to worry about how they could harm people of color.”

Article: A new study finds a potential risk with self-driving cars: failure to detect dark-skinned pedestrians

Reclaiming privacy: a feminist manifesto

On Privacy International

“So, what does privacy have to do with this? This question calls for another question: whose privacy are we fighting for when we say we defend the right to privacy? Talking about privacy in the abstract – as if we all benefit from the same rights, as if we are all equal – means taking the risk of defending the rights of only the most privileged ones in society – with privilege coming in different forms from having a voice to be heard to socio-economic status.”

Article: Reclaiming privacy: a feminist manifesto

“London-based angry feminists over 30”: why we need to talk about the sexism of online ad profiling

By Eva Blum-Dumontet on New Statesman

“We need to be clear that a data driven world – where artificial intelligence makes decision based on simplistic profiles about us – isn’t going to solve prejudices: it’s going to perpetuate them.”

Article: “London-based angry feminists over 30”: why we need to talk about the sexism of online ad profiling

These gaffes expose British politics’ real issue with race

By Gary Younge on The Guardian

“Racism is not about politeness – it’s about power. What is truly worrying about these blunders is that they have let the mask slip to reveal a political class that, at best, does not understand the racial dynamics of the country in which it operates and, at worst, is deeply hostile to them.”

Article: These gaffes expose British politics’ real issue with race

The gender wars of household chores: a feminist comic

By Emma on The Guardian

“The French comic artist Emma illustrates the concept of the ‘mental load’. When a man expects his partner to ask him to do things, he is viewing her as the manager of their household chores”

Comic: The gender wars of household chores: a feminist comic

Tech’s systemic issues

Mark Zuckerberg discovers privacy

By Taylor Hatmaker on Techcrunch

“But can Facebook reform its 15-year legacy as devourer of all things private with a single sweeping, underedited screed from its copycat visionary and dark-pattern technocrat? Fuck no, of course it can’t.”

Mark Zuckerberg discovers privacy

Why beating your phone addiction may come at a cost

By Oscar Schwartz on The Guardian

“as this burgeoning movement becomes an industry, some worry that the “wellness” approach and its emphasis on personal responsibility is whitewashing deeper structural issues within the tech industry.”

Article: Why beating your phone addiction may come at a cost

And responsive images…

Planning for Responsive Images

By Chris Nwamba on CSS Tricks

“This article aims at affording simple yet effective guidelines for setting up responsive images and layouts in light of the many—and potentially confusing—options available.”

Article: Planning for Responsive Images

“As for forcing the big companies to provide access to their customers' data troves to other companies, we urge significant caution. Personal data is not just any other economic asset. Privacy and the protection of personal data are fundamental human rights.”

“as this burgeoning movement becomes an industry, some worry that the “wellness” approach and its emphasis on personal responsibility is whitewashing deeper structural issues within the tech industry.”

I’m sick of playing weekly whack-a-mole with nasty trackers on popular sites. If a site is trying this hard to invade our privacy & extract our personal information, we should stop visiting them, regulate them as malware, shut them down, and fire everyone responsible into the sun.

THIS is the rallying cry I needed on a Monday morning…

“But if we are going to talk about smashing patriarchy and dismantling systems of oppression (as we should!), we need to understand the role of surveillance and data exploitation in perpetuating and enhancing those systems”

Privacy International: Reclaiming privacy: a feminist manifesto

“So, what does privacy have to do with this? This question calls for another question: whose privacy are we fighting for when we say we defend the right to privacy? Talking about privacy in the abstract – as if we all benefit from the same rights, as if we are all equal – means taking the risk of defending the rights of only the most privileged ones in society – with privilege coming in different forms from having a voice to be heard to socio-economic status.”

“The list of concerns about self-driving cars just got longer. 

In addition to worrying about how safe they are, how they’d handle tricky moral trade-offs on the road, and how they might make traffic worse, we also need to worry about how they could harm people of color. 

If you’re a person with dark skin, you may be more likely than your white friends to get hit by a self-driving car, according to a new study out of the Georgia Institute of Technology. That’s because automated vehicles may be better at detecting pedestrians with lighter skin tones.”

But can Facebook reform its 15-year legacy as devourer of all things private with a single sweeping, underedited screed from its copycat visionary and dark-pattern technocrat?

Fuck no, of course it can’t.”

On Zuckerberg’s “privacy” announcement yesterday, I’ve only found one article in my RSS feed this morning worth reading… 🔥

Zuckerberg discovers privacy

The best bookmarks I saved in Week 10, 2019.

Our data is used against us

Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information

By Steven Melendez AND Alex Pasternack on Fast Company

“Apart from the dangers of merely collecting and storing all that data, detailed (and often erroneous) consumer profiles can lead to race or income-based discrimination, in a high-tech version of redlining.”

Article: Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information

Don’t look now: why you should be worried about machines reading your emotions

By Oscar Schwartz on The Guardian

“According to Meredith Whittaker, co-director of the New York University-based research institute AI Now, building machine learning applications based on Ekman’s outdated science is not just bad practice, it translates to real social harms.”

Article: Don’t look now: why you should be worried about machines reading your emotions

Revealed: Facebook’s global lobbying against data privacy laws

By Carole Cadwalladr and Duncan Campbell on The Guardian

“The documents… reveal a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU.”

Article: Revealed: Facebook’s global lobbying against data privacy laws

Privacy complaints received by tech giants’ favorite EU watchdog up more than 2x since GDPR

By Natasha Lomas on Techcrunch

“‘The phenomenon that is the GDPR has demonstrated one thing above all else: people’s interest in and appetite for understanding and controlling use of their personal data is anything but a reflection of apathy and fatalism,’ writes Helen Dixon, Ireland’s commissioner for data protection.”

Article: Privacy complaints received by tech giants’ favorite EU watchdog up more than 2x since GDPR

Nearly Half Of All ‘AI Startups’ Are Cashing In On Hype

By Parmy Olson on Forbes

“Startups that are labelled as being in the field of artificial intelligence attract 15% to 50% more in their funding rounds than other technology startups…”

Article: Nearly Half Of All ‘AI Startups’ Are Cashing In On Hype

The real reason why Facebook and Google won’t change

By Shoshana Zuboff on Fast Company

“These histories illustrate Facebook’s radical indifference, my term for the formal relationship between surveillance capitalists and their users. Facebook doesn’t care about disinformation, or mental health, or any of the other issues on Zuckerberg’s list of resolutions. Users are not customers, nor are they ‘the product.’ They are merely free sources of raw material.”

Article: The real reason why Facebook and Google won’t change

Understanding privilege

Violence is not the only way LGBT+ people are ‘erased’

By Eva Wiseman on The Guardian

“We can start with these stories, of preachers and beatings, but then we must widen our lens. To the covert message of assimilation that comes from assumed heterosexuality. From the lack of diverse representation in politics and on film, to what conversion therapy might look like in a time and place unruled by religion, where legislation around equality is outrunning the attitudes we see in schools and on the streets.”

Article: Violence is not the only way LGBT+ people are ‘erased’

To My Fellow White Others

By Chase Strangio on The Progressive

“Our duty as white people who are Othered in society is to name the ways in which our discrimination, our hurt, our alienation, does not erase the power we simultaneously hold, and to watch for the ways it also serves white supremacy.”

Article: To My Fellow White Others

Accessibility toolkit

Semantics to Screen Readers

By Melanie Richards on A List Apart

“If you make websites, you may have tested your sites with a screen reader. But how do these and other assistive programs actually access your content? What information do they use?”

Article: Semantics to Screen Readers

Tips to Create an Accessible and Contrasted Color Palette

By Stéphanie Walter

“Let’s be clear from the start: color contrast will concern every one of you users. Everybody struggles at some point with issues linked to lack of contrast in interfaces and websites, color blind or not.”

Article: Tips to Create an Accessible and Contrasted Color Palette

“By buying or licensing data or scraping public records, third-party data companies can assemble thousands of attributes each for billions of people… These days, if you use a smartphone or a credit card, it’s not difficult for a company to determine if you’ve just gone through a break-up, if you’re pregnant or trying to lose weight, whether you’re an extrovert, what medicine you take, where you’ve been, and even how you swipe and tap on your smartphone.

All that information can be used to create profiles of you—think of them as virtual, possibly erroneous versions of you—that can be used to target you with ads, classify the riskiness of your lifestyle, or help determine your eligibility for a job. Like the companies themselves, the risks can be hard to see. Apart from the dangers of merely collecting and storing all that data, detailed (and often erroneous) consumer profiles can lead to race or income-based discrimination, in a high-tech version of redlining.)”

Facebook’s lobbying against pro-privacy regulation is awful. Using Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In as an attempt to bond with commissioners who are women is a-whole-nother-level icky.

Facebook asked George Osborne to influence EU data protection law

“The documents… reveal a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU.”

Also worth reading the longer article on Computer Weekly.

Thissssss 🔥

Dear Tech Company

“‘The phenomenon that is the [GDPR] has demonstrated one thing above all else: people’s interest in and appetite for understanding and controlling use of their personal data is anything but a reflection of apathy and fatalism,’ writes Helen Dixon, Ireland’s commissioner for data protection.”

“These histories illustrate Facebook’s radical indifference, my term for the formal relationship between surveillance capitalists and their users. Facebook doesn’t care about disinformation, or mental health, or any of the other issues on Zuckerberg’s list of resolutions. Users are not customers, nor are they ‘the product.’ They are merely free sources of raw material.”

I wish tech journalism would find more diversity in the experts whose opinions they quote. I want to hear from experts who understand and represent the needs and concerns of people from marginalised groups. (And I couldn’t care less about what yet another startup CEO farts out.)

They’re making a Discovery spinoff about Section 31 starring the Philippa Georgiou character? YES PLEASE.

“The white Other still benefits from white supremacy. We face discrimination, trauma, pain, violence, exclusion, but it is not the goal of our societal structures. It is more often a product of it.”

To My Fellow White Others, Chase Strangio on The Progressive

In the last year, I’ve had two notably bad experiences with mic fittings when speaking at conferences. Nowadays most events have a Code of Conduct, but I’ve found them to be largely unenforced, with some of the worst conduct coming from organisers or people working for the event.

Skip the background, get straight to how to fit a microphone to a person without making them feel uncomfortable.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted on Twitter and Mastodon looking for advice for tech teams on how to fit a mic and behave appropriately:

Recently I had another bad experience with a person fitting my mic at a conf where I was speaking. Can anyone recommend good resources on appropriate behaviour for conf tech teams?

(If I’m going to blog about it, I’d like to link to legit advice from people who know their stuff!)‬

Unfortunately, without explicit descriptions of what happened, a few people made their own assumptions. Perhaps I don’t know how wireless microphones work and how they should be fitted. Or I am a diva who refuses to fit a microphone to herself. Or I don’t know how to use verbal and physical language to deter men from touching me inappropriately. Let me describe the two particular scenarios that happened to me.

Scenario one was a panel where I needed a lapel mic (small mic attached to a clip) fitted to the chest of my shirt. It’s easy to clip a lapel mic to a shirt because there are gaps between buttons where you can clip the mic, and the buttons ensure it doesn’t ride up or slip down. Then you have to find a place to clip/hide the wireless receiver (often referred to as a ‘mic pack’) and all the cable that runs between the mic and the receiver. It’s usually easiest to attach the mic pack to a waistband or belt or put it a back pocket. Then you can hide the cable under your clothes so it doesn’t look messy or get caught or tangled while you’re speaking.

On this occasion, the tech person clipped the lapel mic to my shirt, then put their hand down the inside of my shirt to feed the mic pack and cable to the back of my body.

Scenario two was a talk where I needed a head mic, a small mic that sits alongside the face, attached with hooks over the ears and around the back of the head. As with the lapel mic, you have to attach the mic pack to something and hide the cables. I was wearing a dress with tights underneath, and I knew this meant it was slightly trickier to attach the mic pack. Still, I was prepared to fit it to the waistband at the back of my tights.

I discussed the fitting with the tech person who promptly lifted the back of my dress to start putting the mic pack on the waistband of my tights. They also did the same thing again when I went to remove the mic after my talk.

On both occasions I assured the tech person I knew how to fit a microphone, and was willing to put the microphone where they needed, based on their advice. I’ve used microphones enough times to know the basics, but also understand that they’re the experts and know what will produce the best sound quality. Both times, when I was uncomfortable with the way they touched me, I quickly moved, taking the mic pack away from them, to do it myself.

I don’t think either of these people had ulterior motives, they weren’t trying to harass me. But both incidents made me incredibly uncomfortable. I don’t expect to be touched, or to have my clothes moved or removed, by a stranger without my permission or at least prior warning.

It would be easy to consider me overly sensitive or insecure to react in such a way in these scenarios. But honestly, having strangers touch you like this can really throw you, especially if you’re already feeling tense and unsure of yourself. I don’t want to be touched up by a stranger before waltzing on stage! Both times I didn’t make a fuss (though I had every right to do so) but instead told the organisers later. Mostly because I was about to give a talk and take part in a panel. I was already nervous and my mind was occupied with doing the best job I could for the event. I didn’t need to be worrying about what just happened on top of everything else. I’m usually nervous and awkward for the first few minutes of an event, it takes me time to warm up and be comfortable in front of people. These experiences amplified that tense nervousness and the feeling I was not in control.

And I didn’t need to be made to feel this way. It wasn’t appropriate behaviour that considered my feelings. These were both events staffed with professional tech teams. They weren’t even volunteers or people who hadn’t fitted microphones before. And importantly, this doesn’t happen at every event where I speak. For better or worse, I’m the kind of conflict-averse person that’ll put up with a lot of slights before I comment. I can imagine experiences like this could completely alienate women and other marginalised people who are new to speaking.

We need to conduct ourselves in an inclusive and considerate manner to attract (and not deter!) more speakers to spaces where their voices are desperately needed.

How to fit a microphone to a person without making them feel uncomfortable

I asked for advice on Twitter and Mastodon because couldn’t find any useful or relevant guidance on how to fit a microphone to a person without making them feel uncomfortable. Is this because it’s considered common sense? Is it because professionals have their own policies? I’ve no idea, but given that many conference organisers are folks who don’t have a background in event management, maybe some basic guidance would be useful.

Adam Markon kindly shared his protocol when he used to work in TV production for sports:

1. demonstrate on ourselves where we need everything to go and explain how the mic itself works if they don’t know
2. ask if they’re comfortable doing it themselves or if they need help with any steps
3. if they need help at any point be very clear about where your hands will be and what you’re trying to do

This really covers all the basics. Personally I don’t require someone of the same gender to fit my microphone (understandably this would make some people feel more comfortable.) I’m even fine with being touched by a person fitting a microphone, just as long as they ask first and warn me what they’re doing to do. Karen Reilly recommended this interesting forum thread on etiquette for fitting mics. There’s so much valuable advice in there too (along with some odd suggestions like wearing gloves!)

If you’re a conference organiser reading this, I’d really appreciate you briefing your tech team on fitting microphones. Even if they’re a professional team where you assume they know what they’re doing. I’d consider it a vital part of enforcing a code of conduct, and a way to show you really care about the experience of your speakers. Little things make a difference.

Thanks to Aral for his proof-reading eye.

I’m not committing to a weekly anything! Incidentally, here’s the best bookmarks I saved in Week 9, 2019.

Silicon Valley Darkness

If you used to read my Ind.ie roundups or you follow @[email protected] on Mastodon and @indie on Twitter (I post lots of links there!), you’ll know I’ve always got something to populate this category. I am not your breathless startup cheerleader. Links this week feature lights being shone on the darkness of Facebook and Google, and UK and EU regulators trying (and often failing) to rein in the Silicon Valley monsters.

You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook.

By Sam Schechner and Mark Secada on The Wall Street Journal.

“The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook”

Article: You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook.

Nest Secure had a secret microphone, can now be a Google Assistant

By Ms. Smith on CSO

“If your IoT device secretly contained a microphone, which was previously undocumented, would you be happy when the device maker announced an over-the-air update that can enable the microphone for virtual assistant voice functionality? That’s what happened with the security alarm system Nest Secure.”

Article: Nest Secure had a secret microphone, can now be a Google Assistant

Facebook labelled ‘digital gangsters’ by report on fake news

By David Pegg on The Guardian

Labour moved quickly to endorse the committee’s findings, with the party’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, announcing: “Labour agrees with the committee’s ultimate conclusion – the era of self-regulation for tech companies must end immediately.

“We need new independent regulation with a tough powers and sanctions regime to curb the worst excesses of surveillance capitalism and the forces trying to use technology to subvert our democracy.”

Article: Facebook labelled ‘digital gangsters’ by report on fake news

Why a focus on “fake news” and Facebook misses the internet’s real problems - and solutions

By Jennifer Cobbe on Open Democracy

“The biggest oversight… is in diagnosing disinformation as essentially a problem with Facebook, rather than a systemic issue emerging in part from the pollution of online spaces by the business model that Facebook shares with others: the surveillance and modification of human behaviour for profit.”

Article: Why a focus on “fake news” and Facebook misses the internet’s real problems - and solutions

Even the IAB warned adtech risks EU privacy rules

By Natasha Lomas on Techcrunch

“The IAB is certainly seeking to deploy pro-privacy arguments to try to dilute Europeans’ privacy rights.”

Article: Even the IAB warned adtech risks EU privacy rules

The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America

By Casey Newton on The Verge

“That people don’t know there are human beings doing this work is, of course, by design. Facebook would rather talk about its advancements in artificial intelligence, and dangle the prospect that its reliance on human moderators will decline over time.

But given the limits of the technology, and the infinite varieties of human speech, such a day appears to be very far away. In the meantime, the call center model of content moderation is taking an ugly toll on many of its workers.”

Article: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America

CSS for good and evil

I like the trajectory of this post, looking at how CSS is employed to thwart blocking technologies, then to how the same CSS could be used in a positive manner, all wrapped in accessibility concerns.

Letters

By Chris Coyier on CSS Tricks.

‘It just feels so rude, doesn’t it? Like a user specifically installs technology onto their computer in order to exert some control over what they allow onto their computers and into their eyeballs. And they are saying, “No, we do not respect that choice. We are going to fight your technology with our technology and force feed this stuff onto your computer and your eyeballs.” Doesn’t sit right.’

Article: Letters

Being a woman

Over the last decade I’ve gone from being wilfully ignorant of how women are treated to being frustrated by it on a daily basis. The last week gave me horror and horrified delight from two bookmarks.

The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes

By Caroline Criado-Perez on The Guardian.

“Crash-test dummies based on the ‘average’ male are just one example of design that forgets about women – and puts lives at risk”

Article: The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes

The Reply Guy Constitution

By Emlyn Crenshaw on McSweeney’s.

“Section 2 – The Comment. Our replies to all tweets shall fall into one of the following categories: unsolicited advice, explanation, contrarian comment, request for research to be done on Our behalf, improvement upon the joke, and/or sucketh upping. When We cannot think of a proper reply to the tweet in question, a .gif of minimal relevance shall suffice. Above all, no woman shall be excluded from Our familiar and chummy tone.”

Funny: The Reply Guy Constitution

Light relief

Ending on something nice… ten years ago, my pal and then-flatmate Scott Coello made this animation for a dog I loved. His work on it features heavily in my memory of our last year at university, and likely includes some of my junk mail. The animation is so good, adorable, and really stands the test of time.

She Farted And Created The World

By Scott Coello on Vimeo.

Video: She Farted And Created The World

“That people don’t know there are human beings doing this work is, of course, by design. Facebook would rather talk about its advancements in artificial intelligence, and dangle the prospect that its reliance on human moderators will decline over time.

But given the limits of the technology, and the infinite varieties of human speech, such a day appears to be very far away. In the meantime, the call center model of content moderation is taking an ugly toll on many of its workers.”

“The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook…”

“At the heart of the issue is an analytics tool Facebook offers developers, which allows them to see statistics about their users’ activities—and to target those users with Facebook ads.”

I’ve always known seating, tables, phones and lecterns weren’t built for me, but didn’t realise my car isn’t designed for me to drive and, because of that, could easily kill me.

The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes

So far my 30s have been about embracing stuff I missed out on in my teens and early 20s because I thought it was “too girly” and “cliché.” Turns out wearing pink, listening to pop and doing facemasks is just fun.‬

“The IAB is certainly seeking to deploy pro-privacy arguments to try to dilute Europeans’ privacy rights.

Despite its own claimed reservations about there being no technical fix to get consent for programmatic trading under GDPR, the IAB nonetheless went on to launch a technical mechanism for managing — and, it claimed — complying with GDPR consent requirements in April 2018, when it urged the industry to use its GDPR ‘Consent & Transparency Framework.’”

This is why an IAB membership badge is a big red flag for me when checking if a third-party service is a tracker.

“If your IoT device secretly contained a microphone, which was previously undocumented, would you be happy when the device maker announced an over-the-air update that can enable the microphone for virtual assistant voice functionality? That’s what happened with the security alarm system Nest Secure.”

I wish more sites focused on cool dev would do this, telling you about fun and shiny new things but also specifically mentioning the caveats for accessibility and how they might be addressed.

Colorful Typographic Experiments on CSS Tricks

“The biggest oversight… is in diagnosing disinformation as essentially a problem with Facebook, rather than a systemic issue emerging in part from the pollution of online spaces by the business model that Facebook shares with others: the surveillance and modification of human behaviour for profit.”

Sorry to folks subscribing to my Notes and Photos on RSS. You’ll have just got a big dump of posts from the last couple of months. It turns out updating these things manually, then being ill, is less than ideal…

“Facebook deliberately broke privacy and competition law and should urgently be subject to statutory regulation, according to a devastating parliamentary report denouncing the company and its executives as ‘digital gangsters’.”

“‘While consumers are legally expected or presumed to read their contracts, businesses are not required to write readable ones. This asymmetry—and its potential consequences—puzzled us,’ wrote co-author Samuel Becher, a law professor at Victoria University of Wellington”

Why waste time on social media, I’m going to go outside and shriek into the wind instead.‬

Give me strength to deal with the men (sorry men, it’s always men) who read something I’ve written and reply with instructions I didn’t need nor asked for.

“How can we explain what is going on here? One possibility is that startup nation advocates pushed hard to ratify the plan as soon as possible, because of its contribution to innovation; these advocates view considerations of privacy as obstacles.”

I’m late to the party, but this article by Eric Bailey contains so much good and clearly-written advice on browser defaults that benefit our web experience and have a big impact on accessibility. Bookmarking it for future reference and to win arguments!

Paint the Picture, Not the Frame: How Browsers Provide Everything Users Need by Eric Bailey

“The EU’s updated privacy framework, GDPR, requires consent to be specific, informed and freely given. That standard supports challenges to Facebook’s (still fixed) entry ‘price’ to its social services. To play you still have to agree to hand over your personal data so it can sell your attention to advertisers. But legal experts contend that’s neither privacy by design nor default.”

“So there are now two lines of legal attack — antitrust and privacy law — threatening Facebook (and indeed other adtech companies’) surveillance-based business model across Europe.” “…the German FCO decision against Facebook hints at an alternative way forward for regulating the dominance of digital monopolies: Structural remedies that focus on controlling access to data which can be relatively swiftly configured and applied.”

“Facebook will no longer be allowed to force its users to agree to the practically unrestricted collection and assigning of non-Facebook data to their Facebook user accounts…”

“If Facebook loses the appeal, then Germany will become a grand experiment in whether the surveillance economy is actually essential to the operation of social media. Other Europeans and Americans may demand they are given the same option.”

I don’t think it is possible to find an MP with a more disgustingly regressive parliamentary record than Christopher Chope. His constituents should be ashamed of electing him.

Christopher Chope’s Wikipedia page

“Almost every internet browser has an option in its privacy settings called “Do Not Track,” which, if you turn it on, sends an invisible request on your behalf to all the websites you visit telling them not to track you. It’s been around for years, but as Gizmodo recently reported, it doesn’t do anything because almost no websites actually honor the request not to be tracked because the government never forced them to comply with it.”

“For that story, we asked all the browser-providing companies why they still had the option, given that it could mislead users into thinking it was actually protecting their privacy.”

“Data is powerful and can inform on us in unexpected ways. Companies learn all about you, but also all about your friends who haven’t signed up for these services.”

I can understand journalists not having the ability to effect change in a publication’s dodgy practices and funding model.

But this article is written by “The Editorial Board.”

Last time we checked for Better, nytimes.com was loading 29 third-party trackers.

There is nothing less reassuring than the HMRC’s updates on Brexit.

No wait! There is something less reassuring… the HMRC’s “Prepare your business for the UK leaving the EU” tool. Where you answer 7 questions and it gives you a long list of vague and unhelpful information.

(Not a fault of the tool so much as it being impossible to provide clear information about an unclear situation.)

Last Friday afternoon, I had a lovely chat with Liz Elcoate about ethics, inclusivity and accessibility in design and branding. That chat is now available as Episode 4 of Liz’s podcast, The Elastic Brand.

Too often, designers feel like they’re operating on the whims of their clients or employers, implementing design in a superficial manner, not able to have an impact. We discuss how that doesn’t have to be the case, and how we hope our insecurities are making us better people and designers!

Listen to Episode 4 of The Elastic Brand podcast on the podcast website.

The new Skunk Anansie live album is immense and is bringing back brilliant memories of joyful gigs ❤️‬

I’ve discovered how to survive a hellishly busy Stansted airport: glass of champagne, blasting Mogwai in my earphones, and writing up some thoughts on blockchain.

Started reading Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism on my flight. It is 🔥🔥 terrifying 🔥.‬

I’ve put my slides from yesterday’s talk, ‘People might actually use this’ online with accompanying text. It’s not a transcript, but when the video is up, I’ll post it (with captions) so you can get a real idea of how inarticulate I am in person.

People might actually use this, a presentation by Laura Kalbag

If you care about the people joining the web community, please read this. Access is incredibly important, we need more technology shaped by folks who don’t come from privilege. (And tools and frameworks not determined by people with ulterior motives.)

HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points by Rachel Andrew

Whenever I’m at a conference’s diversity panel, I can’t help but feel we’re sitting here begging to be included. The power dynamic is already against us, and it’s tiring always having to make arguments from a position of perceived inferiority.

I’ve made it, I’ve finally been called an SJW on Reddit.

Ah crypto = cryptocurrencies. cons = conferences.

Still, this one is a truly original comic genius.

Meritocracy is not a “cool governance model.” It’s a model that values and reinforces privilege. #aracon

Amazing.

Panel question “How do we ensure we’re not just creating new elites in the people who understand blockchain…?” Panellists: silence.

Hi Berlin. You’re cold. And I forgot how much people smoke here.

Nearly a year ago I gave a talk at Webstock, and was really pleased with it. It brings together my work on accessibility/inclusivity and ethics. This week, I finally put the slides online in a lovely readable format. (You can find the video there too.)

Sabotaging Our Future Selves, a presentation by Laura Kalbag

(Thanks to Notist for making it really easy to upload slides and convert them into something more accessible.)

If you find human rights in tech an overwhelming topic/don’t know where to start, I really recommend David Meyers’s Connected Rights newsletter.

It’s easy to read, and David’s recent use of “positively homeopathic fine” made me spit coffee down myself.

Connected Rights

Google is not your friend.

And if you only optimise your sites for Chrome, and don’t test in other browsers, you are not just a lazy developer, but also complicit in exposing people to tracking.

Update: Two days since I posted this tweet and I’ve learned developers are way more defensive about being called lazy than they are about being complicit in tracking 😬

Just misread a thing about ssh tips as “shh tips” and yeah I think some people could do with those tips too.

We are seeing more and more organisations starting to talk about ethical design. Unfortunately I suspect this has less to do with caring about the impact of unethical design on society, democracy and the environment, and more to do with organisations attempting to distance themselves from similar businesses who are finding it impossible to continue to disguise their toxicity.

Last night I spoke on a panel in London on “Designing For Tomorrow”, put on by Spotify Design. It was a fun chat, and we started to scratch the surface of some interesting ideas, but thirty-five minutes wasn’t enough time to dig down into a more substantial discussion. These are some thoughts I wanted to expand upon, and others that have been bouncing around my head since last night.

Ethical design is not superficial. It is not a trend, a fad, a framework, a library, or a marketing ploy. To truly commit to ethical design, we need to embrace a complete change of approach, method, and outcome in our work. And expect to ask, and answer, really difficult questions.

What do I mean by ethical design? The potential harms we can cause, and ways in which we can be complicit, varies between industries. In the tech industry, we’re generally getting better at making products functional, convenient and reliable. We’ve even improving at considering the experience of our products for those using them.

But we’re terrible at respecting people’s human rights with these products. We build products that are usable, even fun to use, but we consistently abuse or ignore people’s rights to privacy and security. We build products that exclude and exploit vulnerable people, and people from marginalised groups. We build products that centralise and concentrate power for a few CEO dictator-kings, taking ownership and control of people’s personal information and the content they create to express themselves. This isn’t something we can solve by saying “I care about ethics.” We have to actually do something.

Dilution

Can you be an ethical cog in an unethical machine? Can you be an ethical individual working for an unethical employer? Given the state of the world, and the absolute state of capitalism, it’s arguable that any attempt at being ethical is being an ethical individual in an unethical system. But that doesn’t mean our attempts are always futile, or that we have no control over the impact we can effect. I think it’s about dilution.

In a small team, you may be able to build ethical design processes, and work with an ethical approach, but if your employer’s business model is fundamentally unethical (for example they’re one of the many businesses exploiting people’s personal information for financial gain, also known as surveillance capitalists) your impact is both diluted and limited.

The less agency you have, the less ability you have to change an organisation’s funding model or business goals, the less impact you have. If you’re responsible for one component in a system, you are not going to steer the direction of a product or business, no matter how good or persuasive you are.

With every decision you cannot control, your efforts will be seriously diluted. At best, you’re having some impact on the outlook and work of those around you. But “guerilla” tactics can only get you so far.

At worse, you are providing the superficial appearance of ethics, adding positive reputation to a business that does not deserve it. At worse, you are luring more people into using an unethical product because you’ve disguised it as something more ethical, you’ve given it legitimacy.

Be uncomfortable

Ethics are not something you can try on to see if they make you look good. As I said last night on the panel, being ethical is not comfortable. It is living in a state of continually questioning what you are doing and the rationale behind your decisions. It is learning, iterating, and adapting to do the best you can in a given situation. It is being the person who asks the awkward questions and doesn’t follow orders to keep the peace. It is not going to make you rich or popular.

We should embrace being uncomfortable. We live in a political and social hellscape. The majority of us have no job security, we can’t afford houses and we can’t afford to have families. Many of us can’t even afford healthcare. None of this is comfortable, so we may as well do something to change that for our futures, and for future generations.

There’s no point wasting time pretending to be ethical when we could spend that time learning to have a real impact. If you aren’t able to do that with your current employer, find another, ethical employer. Last night folks laughed when Matt summed up my point as “quit your jobs,” but I mean it. Why are we stagnating in positions where we have no agency, are not valued, and are damaging the world around us? The only way we can have an impact is if we seek out the positions where we can do our best work.

Ethical design is not superficial.

(East) Londoners! I’m on a panel about ethics in design on Monday night. Come say hello if you’re going to be there. Tickets are free, but it looks like you’ll want to be there nice and early to get a seat!

Spotify Design and It’s Nice That team up for event taking a close look at ethics in design

Starting 2019 with the flu has been less than ideal. I’m terrible at resting so keep making myself worse. Promise I will get back to commitments/updates for Better as soon as I can.

Well pleased to be included in this lineup. Loads of good advice from Strong Feelings to take into 2019. (If you don’t already listen to the podcast, you should! Katel and Sara are true beacons of light in a dark industry.)

Make things change: 9 moods for 2019—These nine lessons from women entrepreneurs, authors, and activists will get you hyped for 2019—and keep you feeling steady, no matter what the year throws at you.

My first yearly roundup since my 2015 roundup. I’ve blogged over the last three years, so I needn’t summarise the last three years. Just 2018. My initial thoughts on 2018 were “I’ve not done enough.” But, actually, thinking back on it, I shouldn’t be so hard on myself.

Skip to photos

One of the reasons I felt behind on work was because of how much travelling I’ve done. We started the year in Ghent, working on the Indienet initiative. Working with the folks in Ghent, and travelling for conferences really dominated the first few of months of 2018.

In March, we moved from Malmö in Sweden to Cork in Ireland. And over 2018, we settled in far quicker than we did in Malmö. Being closer to the UK meant I returned more often to see my family, and it was easier for us to return to North East England for my grandfather’s funeral in November. Travelling is still utterly exhausting, I’ll never be good at it. But I’ve been learning better not to plan too much and burn out too hard with each trip.

The second half of 2018 was dominated by Better. Ahead of our releasing redesigned apps for iOS and macOS in September, I stepped up my work on Better’s blocking rules to try to publish new rules every couple of weeks (which ended up being fairly all-encompassing). This resulted in a lot of ranting and griping on social media whenever I had to block another awful tracker, or work my way around a site’s unethical attempts to block blockers. But it did give me more insight into how trackers work, how the businesses behind them operate, and how an extraordinary number of developers deploy prototyping code to live sites.

I don’t set New Year goals anymore. Just going to try to keep on keeping on. Trying to be better and trying to do better. (Pun not intended!)

Photos time!

Photos

This article is really informative and helpful. (My feminism tries to be intersectional, trans-inclusive, and perpetually attempting to be less ignorant.)

Meet The Feminist Academics Championing Trans Rights

Day after day of greatness from 24 Accessibility. Today, Eric Bailey explaining accessibility of web components in a clear, thorough (yet concise) way. Also there’s an audio version!

Web components still need to be accessible

Just saw yet another insightful and popular tweet by a woman where the replies are filled with men trying to improve upon what she is saying or make room for themselves.

Stop it. Just stop it. If you agree with a person’s perspective, retweet it! It doesn’t have to be about you.

I’m not saying don’t reply. But don’t bother if:

• you’re just repeating their point back at them
• your reply can be summed up as “yes I think so too” (this sounds as pompous on the internet as it does in person)

I’m so tired of participating in the tech industry being an endurance test in fragile masculinity.

“Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.

The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.”

This is another in a series of winter catch-up posts.

In August, we released the Accessibility For Everyone audiobook, and did a big promotional push at the end of September, on the paperback’s first birthday.

Now the third quarter of the year is well over, I have some statistics on the audiobook sales.

In its first two months, before the push, we sold 96 audiobooks. Whether that’s a high or low number really depends on your expectations. I’m really pleased! The audiobook accounted for 19% of all sales (paperback, ebook, audiobook) for those two months. The audiobook was new, and the other formats had been out for a year, so that percentage will probably drop over the following months. But overall, making the audiobook version for 96+ people was definitely worthwhile.

You know I’m not in it to make money, but I was fortunate that my brother Sam had the expertise and generosity to produce the audiobook for me, so it was not an expensive undertaking. Much like making an ebook, many of us already own the tech equipment (computer, ok-quality microphone) required for producing an audiobook, it just requires some dedicated time.

The audiobook was planned all the way back in my original book proposal, it makes perfect sense to produce an audiobook for a book about accessibility. Still, I hope other authors in the web community see the relative success of this audiobook, and consider it as a format for their books too!

You can buy the Accessibility For Everyone audiobook on Audible.

I don’t necessarily agree with the conclusion of this article, ‘“Owning your data” will not save you from data capitalism’ but I think it makes a few particularly useful points:

• “Owning” your own data can imply the ability/desire to sell it. It shouldn’t.
• It’s not just information about us as individuals that is valuable, the connective and meta data conveying our relationships to others is arguably more valuable.
• Plenty of data about us can be inferred without data specifically about us (see above.)
• Consent is impossible when you do not know how your data can be used against you.

Perhaps saying “owning and controlling your own data” (a phrase we use a lot at Ind.ie) is misleading. We use it because, right now, corporations do own and control data about us, and so it makes sense that the inverse is that we (individuals) own and control that data. Maybe the emphasis should be on control. Maybe there are better words.

https://boingboing.net/2018/12/17/sui-generis-regimes.html

“It doesn’t matter how sophisticated your algorithms are, when you treat pregnancy as an advertising event, an opportunity to be monetized, you will get situations like this. When your engineers consist largely of twentysomething dudes, you will get situations like this. When you think about your users as data-points rather than thinking, feeling, complex human beings, you will get situations like this.”

This is the first in a series of winter catch-up posts.

I’ve been a listener and fan of the No, You Go podcast since their first episode at the beginning of the year. So I was giddy and nervous (and flattered!) when Katel invited me to be their guest.

Despite having known and worked with Katel (CEO of A Book Apart, published my book) and Sara (was editor of A List Apart when I had a column there), I was jittery on the day of recording. Admittedly, I’d just worked through a weekend and was exhausted, but they’re also intimidatingly brilliant people. But my jitters didn’t matter, Katel and Sara were encouraging and kind, the recording was fun, and it felt really great to be talking to two people I really respect. And we covered a particularly tricky topic:

Writing a book is hard. Writing a book as a woman in tech is even harder. So what happens when some mansplainer comes along to rain on your well-earned parade? Laura Kalbag tells us about how she found the courage to write, why listening to women reminds her of what’s important, and how she keeps her cool even in the face of jerks.

You can listen to the podcast or read the transcript on their website. As of last week, No, You Go has been renamed Strong Feelings, so if you want to subscribe and listen to more of their episodes (you should!), you’ll want to search for Strong Feelings in your podcast app’s directory.

Endless practical advice coming from 24accessibility this year. Just read ‘I Threw Away my Mouse’ (inspired by Laura Carvajal) by Manuel Matuzović and it has so many examples of common issues and best-practice corrections for keyboard navigation.

https://www.24a11y.com/2018/i-threw-away-my-mouse/

This time of year is great for my RSS reader. 24accessibility 24ways and Notist are especially fab.

This time of year is great for my RSS reader. 24accessibility 24ways and Notist are especially fab.

Because I’ve been living under a social media rock, I didn’t realise there was an update to Heydon Pickering’s Inclusive Components book. Inclusive modal dialogs! (Useful after all the whinging I’ve done about modals lately…)

Only €18, you should treat yourself:

http://book.inclusive-components.design

“In Fidzup’s case, complying with GDPR has had a major impact on its business because offering a genuine choice means it’s not always able to obtain consent.”

Fascinating to see what is a genuinely GDPR-compliant consent flow. Hopefully the complexity of which will make businesses see the collection of people’s data as risky and expensive.

Over the last few months, I’d become embarrassed to share my blog posts, particularly image-heavy posts, as I was handling responsive images so badly. The images were all huge and it was my only big barrier in web performance (no tracking here!). With an archive of blog posts going back nearly a decade, it was going to be a big job to get my whole site working consistently, but I had an inkling I might be able to do it with Hugo’s Image Processing.

Over the last few weeks, iteratively and clumsily, I’ve developed a system that works for me:

For writing content:

• My content is written in markdown, using shortcodes that mirror the HTML output as closely as possible.
• Images live in the same folder as their post (in page bundles).
• Every image can be used alone, wrapped in a figure with a figcaption, and/or wrapped in a link. Multiple images can be used inside one figure.
• Every image has alt text, even if it’s used outside of its post.

For responsiveness:

• Each image is resized into multiple sizes by Hugo, and included in the srcset list for the img.
• Images grouped in figures can be arranged in a responsive grid.

For maintainability:

• An example of the shortcode is included by default with every new post. Because I have a terrible memory, and I can only keep updating my blog if it’s really easy to do so.

Responsive images

Edit: I learned loads about srcset and responsive images from Mat Marquis’s wonderful book, Image Performance. Eric Portis’s thorough Srcset and sizes post also helped me understand the basics with loads of examples.

Hugo page bundles

Hugo’s page bundles are a way to structure your Hugo content hierarchy. Page bundles are useful as they enable you to group resources (such as images) with a post without having to include them in that post’s front matter. You could just include a shortcode in the post (or outside the post) that says “grab all the images that match these criteria.”

Resources with a type of image can also be processed by Hugo’s Image Processing. Processing is what enabled me to generate multiple image sizes from one original image. So I had to ensure all my posts used the page bundle content hierarchy.

It took a long time to get my head around page bundles. The Hugo documentation can be abstract as it tries to cover as many use cases as possible. (The brevity of the Hugo documentation can also be infuriating, and if one more person tells me that it’s “open to pull requests,” I will scream.) My understanding on page bundles boils down to this:

• if a file is called _index.md, it is considered the index of a section/kind, and so uses the list.html template.
• if a file is called index.md, it is considered the index of a page/post, and so uses the single.html template.

So, to put my blog posts in page bundle hierarchy, where their images could be used as resources, I had to restructure them to match the following pattern:

/processing-responsive-images-with-hugo
- index.md
- screenshot.jpg
- screenshot2.jpg

If you name your page _index.md, the images will not register as page resources, the image processing will not work. I lost an hour to that, I hope you don’t!

As my blog posts were all previously in a WordPress-style hierarchy that had been hurriedly refactored into Hugo, my blog posts were named processing-responsive-images-with-hugo.md, and all images were held in date-based folders inside the /static folder. Cue a lot of RegEx, a renaming script kindly written for me by Aral, and a lot of time manually moving images around until running hugo server -D no long spat out errors.

Shortcodes

Caveat: I’m relatively new to Hugo, Go, and the templating language (I don’t know what it’s called). My code may not be pretty, but it works! If you have any suggestions for improvement, I’d appreciate them.

Images

In a post, I can include an image in the markdown using the img shortcode:

{{< img src="theonion.jpg" alt="Screenshot of the Onion homepage" >}}

This will output the final HTML, resizing theonion.jpg into three sizes, 500px wide, 800px wide, and 1200px wide. For browsers that do not support the srcset attribute, the src is set to one of the middle-sized images (hopefully not too big too load or too small to look ok.) The sizes attribute has a sensible default for images that fill most of/the whole width of the viewport, but this can be overridden in the shortcode:

<img sizes="(min-width: 35em) 1200px, 100vw" 
  srcset="/you-wont-believe-what-happens-next/006_…_472240_500x0_resize_q100_gaussian.jpg 500w, /you-wont-believe-what-happens-next/006_…_472240_800x0_resize_q100_gaussian.jpg 800w, /you-wont-believe-what-happens-next/006_…_472240_1200x0_resize_q100_gaussian.jpg 1200w" src="/you-wont-believe-what-happens-next/006_…_472240_1200x0_resize_q100_gaussian.jpg" 
  alt="Screenshot of the Onion homepage">

See this image example in action on my post ‘Digital Assistants, Facebook Quizzes, And Fake News! You Won’t Believe What Happens Next’.

Using the shortcode code:

layouts/shortcodes/img.html:

{{/* get file that matches the filename as specified as src="" in shortcode */}}
{{ $src := .Page.Resources.GetMatch (printf "*%s*" (.Get "src")) }}

{{/* set image sizes, these are hardcoded for now, x dictates that images are resized to this width */}}

{{ $tinyw := default "500x" }}
{{ $smallw := default "800x" }}
{{ $mediumw := default "1200x" }}
{{ $largew := default "1500x" }}

{{/* resize the src image to the given sizes */}}

{{ .Scratch.Set "tiny" ($src.Resize $tinyw) }}
{{ .Scratch.Set "small" ($src.Resize $smallw) }}
{{ .Scratch.Set "medium" ($src.Resize $mediumw) }}
{{ .Scratch.Set "large" ($src.Resize $largew) }}

{{/* add the processed images to the scratch */}}

{{ $tiny := .Scratch.Get "tiny" }}
{{ $small := .Scratch.Get "small" }}
{{ $medium := .Scratch.Get "medium" }}
{{ $large := .Scratch.Get "large" }}

{{/* only use images smaller than or equal to the src (original) image size, as Hugo will upscale small images */}}
{{/* set the sizes attribute to (min-width: 35em) 1200px, 100vw unless overridden in shortcode */}}

<img 
  {{ with .Get "sizes" }}sizes='{{.}}'{{ else }}sizes="(min-width: 35em) 1200px, 100vw"{{ end }}
  srcset='
  {{ if ge $src.Width "500" }}
    {{ with $tiny.RelPermalink }}{{.}} 500w{{ end }}
  {{ end }}
  {{ if ge $src.Width "800" }}
    {{ with $small.RelPermalink }}, {{.}} 800w{{ end }}
  {{ end }}
  {{ if ge $src.Width "1200" }}
    {{ with $medium.RelPermalink }}, {{.}} 1200w{{ end }}
  {{ end }}
  {{ if ge $src.Width "1500" }}
    {{ with $large.RelPermalink }}, {{.}} 1500w {{ end }}
  {{ end }}'
  {{ if .Get (print $medium) }}
    src="{{ $medium.RelPermalink }}" 
  {{ else }}
    src="{{ $src.RelPermalink }}" 
  {{ end }}
  {{ with .Get "alt" }}alt="{{.}}"{{ else }}alt=""{{ end >}}

Reading the comments above, you might notice that Hugo will upscale small images, so if your original image is only 1200px wide, it will still generate a blurry mess at 1500px wide. My solution was to include the images in the srcset list only if they were narrower than the original width.

Figures

In a post, I can include one or more images wrapped in a figure using the figure shortcode:

{{< figure class="grid two" figcaption="Inevitable" >}}
  {{< img src="osky-1.jpg" alt="Selfie of me and Oskar the huskamute, he’s looking at me." >}}
  {{< img src="osky-2.jpg" alt="Selfie of me and Oskar the huskamute, he’s licking my face." >}}
{{< /figure >}}

This uses the img shortcode, and wraps it in the figure shortcode, just as you would with the <img> and <figure> elements in the HTML. The figcaption is included in the figure shortcode though (this wouldn’t work in HTML!) I may adjust that part of the shortcode to behave more like the <figure> HTML in the future.

I’ve also included CSS that uses the grid and two class names to lay out the images to make better use of the available space. This will output the following HTML, similar to the previous example, but with an extra figure around it:

<figure class="grid two">
  <img sizes="(min-width: 35em) 1200px, 100vw" srcset="
  /photos/5/osky-1_…_500x0_resize_q100_gaussian.jpg 500w, /photos/5/osky-1_…_800x0_resize_q100_gaussian.jpg 800w" src="/photos/5/osky-1_…_1200x0_resize_q100_gaussian.jpg" 
  alt="Selfie of me and Oskar the huskamute, he’s looking at me.">
  <img sizes="(min-width: 35em) 1200px, 100vw" srcset="/photos/5/osky-2_…_500x0_resize_q100_gaussian.jpg 500w, /photos/5/osky-2_…_800x0_resize_q100_gaussian.jpg 800w"   
  src="/photos/5/osky-2_…_1200x0_resize_q100_gaussian.jpg" 
  alt="Selfie of me and Oskar the huskamute, he’s licking my face.">
  <figcaption>
    <p>Inevitable</p>
  </figcaption>
</figure>

See this image example in action on a photo post.

Using the shortcode code:

layouts/shortcodes/figure.html:

<figure {{ with .Get "class" }}class="{{.}}"{{ end >}}
  {{.Inner}}
    <figcaption>
      <p>{{ .Get "figcaption" }}</p>
  </figcaption>
</figure>

This shortcode is much simpler than the default Hugo figure.html shortcode because I’m fairly sure I use figures consistently on my site.

Linked images

Previously, I had a strange setup where, if I wanted an image to link to elsewhere, I would wrap the shortcode in a markdown link:

[{{< img etc >}}](https://website.com)

Nesting that many brackets makes it way too easy to make typos, so I just made a quick little shortcode for links. It will work with anything, not just images, but is ideal for wrapping around other shortcodes:

{{< link href="https://theonion.com" >}}
  {{< img src="theonion.jpg" alt="Screenshot of the Onion homepage" >}}
{{< /link >}}

Using this shortcode layouts/shortcodes/link.html:

<a {{ with .Get "href" }}href="{{.}}"{{ end >}}
  {{.Inner}}
</a>

I could’ve called the shortcode “a” to be more consistent with HTML, but with my forgetful future self in mind, I thought link to be more memorable.

Archetypes

Even though these shortcodes are (mostly) consistent with their HTML output, I have a terrible memory for shortcodes, acronyms, and any type of code that doesn’t follow a memorable pattern. To save myself the time copy-pasting the shortcodes every time I write a new post, I added little placeholder shortcodes to the archetypes for each post type. So my archetypes/post.md file looks a little like this:

---
title: "{{ replace .TranslationBaseName "-" " " | title }}"
date: {{ .Date }}
draft: true

bodyClasses: "blog"
---

Post text<!--more-->

{{< figure figcaption="caption text" >}}

  {{< img src="filenameX" alt="alt text" >}}

{{< /figure >}}

Handling galleries

One of the great features when using image processing in page bundles is that you can grab the images outside of the post for a gallery. It’s what I’m doing for my Photos page.

Each photo list page gets all the photo posts, and then uses my summary-photo.html partial to render each image. I needed the images in the photo gallery to display differently from a blog post. There’s no need to load massive images in for small thumbnails. I also wanted the photos arranged in a grid, so I used image processing to resize and crop the images the fill the desired space:

<li class="post photo-post">
  <a href="{{.Permalink}}">
    <img
      {{ with .Resources }}
        {{ with .GetMatch "{*.*,*.jpg,*.png,*.jpeg}" }}
        {{ $photo := .Fill "600x600" }}
        {{ with $photo }}
          src='{{ .Permalink }}'  
        {{ end }}
      {{ end }}
    {{ end }}
    alt="{{ .Params.imagealt }}"/>
  </a>
</li>

This code just grabs the first image associated with each photo post. But there’s a problem with only grabbing an image: there’s no alternative text (alt attribute) associated with that image file alone.

Making the gallery more accessible

This is where the alt="{{ .Params.imagealt }}" comes in. For each photo post, it checks the post’s front matter for some alternative text. Going back to my earlier example, the first image in the figure looks like this:

{{< img src="osky-1.jpg" alt="Selfie of me and Oskar the huskamute, he’s looking at me." >}}

So all I need to do is duplicate that alt text in the front matter of that post. The whole post looks something like this:

---
title: 20 July 2018 21:28 IST
date: 2018-07-20T21:28:23+01:00
tags: ["oskar"]
aliases:
  - /photos/2018/07/20/21/28/index.md
bodyClasses: "social notes latest"
colourTheme: "colours-008"
altText: "Selfie of me and Oskar the huskamute, he’s licking my face."
---

{{< figure class="grid two" figcaption="Inevitable" >}}
  {{< img src="osky-1" alt="Selfie of me and Oskar the huskamute, he’s looking at me." >}}
  {{< img src="osky-2" alt="Selfie of me and Oskar the huskamute, he’s licking my face." >}}
{{< /figure >}}

In the future, I could probably find a way to automate this, rather than creating the repetition. But for now, my images are that bit more accessible, and that’s the important thing!

I hope documenting all of this will help someone else. I’m sorry my code examples aren’t very pretty, and I’ve not yet got all the dashes in to wrangle the whitespace in Go. Just before this post was published, I also got social media meta images in the <head> of my pages generating at the right sizes, so let me know if that might be a useful snippet to blog too!

(Big thank you to @jonathanulco on GitHub for sending me a pull request with the alt="" fallback for decorative images/images without alternative text. And to Caleb Jasik for pointing me to the fix for Hugo versions 0.59.0+.)

“At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information, The Times found. Several of those businesses claim to track up to 200 million mobile devices in the United States”

“The files also spotlight several issues of concern relating to privacy and data protection law, with internal documents raising fresh questions over how or even whether (in the case of Facebook’s whitelisting agreements with certain developers) it obtained consent from users to process their personal data.”

“The emails provide an uncommon window into the thinking of Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives as they sought revenue streams amid an industry-shaking shift from desktop to mobile computing. Executives considered charging developers fees to gain access to user data – something Facebook now claims it would never do – and discussed other schemes to leverage the company’s scale and vast troves of user data into revenue. At one point, Zuckerberg mused about how Facebook could mimic financial institutions as an “informational bank” whose assets were user’s personal information rather than money.”

Read Aral’s Twitter thread about the emails.

“Google is processing incredibly detailed and extensive personal data without proper legal grounds, and the data has been acquired through manipulation techniques,” said Gro Mette Moen, acting head of the Norwegian Consumer Council’s digital services unit in a statement.

“When we carry our phones, Google is recording where we go, down to which floor we are on and how we are moving. This can be combined with other information about us, such as what we search for, and what websites we visit. Such information can in turn be used for things such as targeted advertising meant to affect us when we are receptive or vulnerable.”

“Facebook is accused of undermining democratic institutions, but its CEO fails to face up to MPs at a hearing in London.”

Al Jazeera Inside Story featuring @aral.

“The city is literally built to collect data about its residents and visitors, which Cavoukian was clear-eyed about when she signed on to be an adviser. She’s worried about Sidewalk using all these cameras and sensors to track people on an individual level, to create real-life versions of the personal profiles Google already uses to track people online. Without anonymization, she said, a single person’s activities could be connected across multiple sources and varying databases to track his movements over the course of the day.”

“The systems depend on black-box algorithms that give little detail about how they reduced the complexities of a person’s inner life into a calculation of virtue or harm. And even as Predictim’s technology influences parents’ thinking, it remains entirely unproven, largely unexplained and vulnerable to quiet biases over how an appropriate babysitter should share, look and speak.”

“The language of these patents makes it clear that Google is acutely aware of the powers of inference it has already, even without cameras, by augmenting speakers to recognize the noises you make as you move around the house.”

“LinkedIn processed the email addresses of 18 million non-members and targeted them with advertising on Facebook without permission, an audit by the [Irish] Data Protection Commissioner has found.”

“this is being interpreted by data experts as the regulator stating that consent to processing personal data cannot be gained through a framework arrangement which bundles a number of uses behind a single “I agree” button that, when clicked, passes consent to partners via a contractual relationship.”

“What gives you this right, and why weren’t we asked about this before you and Summit invaded our privacy in this way?”

“‘The world is being rebuilt by companies and governments so that they can exploit data. Without urgent and continuous action, data will be used in ways that people cannot now even imagine, to define and manipulate our lives without us beginning to understand why or being able to effectively fight back,’ said Frederike Kaltheuner, who heads up Privacy International’s data exploitation program.”

“As evidence accumulated that Facebook’s power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg stumbled. Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view. At critical moments over the last three years, they were distracted by personal projects, and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives.”

“Now that Streams is a Google product itself, that promise appears to have been broken, says privacy researcher Julia Powles: ‘Making this about semantics is a sleight of hand. DeepMind said it would never connect Streams with Google. The whole Streams app is now a Google product. That is an atrocious breach of trust, for an already beleaguered product.’”

“Ads are the traditional funding source for social platforms; they take users' personal data and serve it to advertisers who want their ads to reach a specific audience. This virtually ensures a fundamentally exploitative business model based on surveillance, says Laura Kalbag, a designer and the co-founder of digital justice not-for-profit Ind.ie.”

“these tests show that compliance with the feature is entirely voluntary, meaning a tool that Facebook introduced to increase trust in advertising can also be used as a vector for misinformation, and another way bad actors can game Facebook’s platform.”

“Today, we have a new set of robber barons, running digital monopolies and again receiving disproportionate benefits from the disruption brought about by new technology. History tells us we will need to regulate their monopolies just as we regulated previous monopolies.”

It’s another one of those very-quotable articles.

“Kinsa sells its data to other companies under the name Kinsa Insights. While Mr. Singh declined to share the names of other customers, citing confidentiality agreements, he said other companies had used the data to target advertising.”

“I can just think of how cigarette and alcohol companies could use strategies like this, or other industries that could really have more harmful effects on people,” [Christine Bannan, the consumer protection counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center] said.

On Saturday evening, I had a lovely chat with Jenell Pizarro, Brian Hinton and Frederick Philip Von Weiss for their Thunder Nerds podcast. You can watch the video or listen to the audio on the Thunder Nerds site.

After seeing their impressive previous guest list, and listening to a couple of their recent shows, I was excited to chat to such friendly and enthusiastic folks. We covered a whole lot of topics, including privacy, business models and accessibility. I always worry that I ramble a bit on podcasts like this, but Jenell, Brian and Frederick were very kind and held a fun discussion.

I’ll definitely be listening to their back catalogue, and keeping an ear out for their new guests in the future.

“In this opinion piece, activist Aral Balkan says we’re living in a world where data companies have become factory farms for human beings.”

Aral recorded this video with BBC Ideas back in July. It gives a brief introduction to surveillance capitalism, complete with animation.

“To observers, these might seem like easily avoidable errors, but to Facebook, whose very identity and foundational mandate is the instinctual drive to amass personal data, they make perfect sense.”

“What is at stake here isn’t privacy, the right not to be observed. It’s how companies can use our data to invisibly shunt us in directions that may benefit them more than us.”

“Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn’t hand over at all, but that was collected from other people’s contact books, a hidden layer of details Facebook has about you that I’ve come to call “shadow contact information.”

“Google Inc. told lawmakers it continues to allow other companies to scan and share data from Gmail accounts… The company also disclosed that app developers generally are free to share the data with others”

It’s been one whole year since my book, Accessibility For Everyone, came out in paperback and ebook.

Did you read it? Did it help you make more accessible websites? If you didn’t read it yet (or even want to read it again…!) you can always listen to the audiobook on Audible. The whole book takes less than an afternoon…

“At the end of the day, I sold my company,” Acton says. “I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day.”

A fascinating read that doesn’t exactly paint Acton as a hero (he’s a billionaire—he’s got more money than he could ever possibly need, he never really criticises Facebook) but does show Facebook’s ruthless greed.

“Notably, these protections won’t do privacy-conscious consumers any good while they’re logged into Facebook, but it will help to protect them from the social network’s ever-expanding grasp while they’re logged out.”

Turns out that VoiceOver pronounces my surname correctly, so I’m going to use that next time a human being keeps mispronouncing my name even though I told them how.

Caroline Wilson Palow, General Counsel at Privacy International, said:

“Today’s judgment rightly criticises the UK’s bulk interception regime for giving far too much leeway to the intelligence agencies to choose who to spy on and when. It confirms that just because it is technically feasible to intercept all of our personal communications, it does not mean that it is lawful to do so.

The judgment also rightly recognises that collecting communications data - the who, what, and where of our communications - is as intrusive as collecting the content. This is a significant and important enhancement of our privacy protections.”

When you’re rubbish at 3D modelling software but want to get some vaguely realistic shading on your icon design…

Veeeery windy on the Cork coast today. Hoping we don’t all blow away.

“Since Feedbin is 100% funded by paying customers, I can focus solely on making the best product possible without compromises. Therefore, Feedbin can be private by default.”

“Today’s EU copyright vote went about as badly as could be feared: MEPs approved articles 11 and 13, meaning that unless member states push back (and good luck with that), it will likely become illegal to link to an article using the headline for that article, and all but the smallest websites will need to install upload filters to weed out copyright-protected content.”

No wonder David Meyer sounds exasperated in this week’s Connected Rights newsletter. Lots of sensible suggestions, and a vital read if you’re in the EU/EU-adjacent.

How to fix the Copyright Directive lobbying disaster

Want to know about accessibility testing? Eric Bailey has got you covered. This is going to be my new go-to and share-about.

The Importance Of Manual Accessibility Testing

“She should lower expectations and declare that there is nothing Facebook can do to exterminate all the pests. With 2.2 billion profiles in more than 100 languages, even a small error rate can wreak havoc. With algorithms amplifying content that generates passionate responses, the crazy conspiratorial stuff will always rocket around Facebook faster and farther than the thoughtful condolence or the cute pictures of golden retrievers. And with that powerful advertising system, Facebook will always be the platform of choice for dishonest or hateful parties.”

“Civil liberties advocates say they are alarmed by the NYPD’s secrecy in helping to develop a program with the potential capacity for mass racial profiling.”

“Civil liberties advocates contend that New Yorkers should have been made aware of the potential use of their physical data for a private company’s development of surveillance technology.”

“While the rhetoric is sharp, the specifics are vague.”

“Creating so-called backdoors in applications and services to enable communications interception capabilities for law enforcement has persistently been criticised by cryptography and security experts as dangerous for decades now.”

“Despite the criticism and concerns that backdoors in Western equipment and services could be exploited and abused by totalitarian regimes elsewhere in the world, the Five-Eyes countries have pursued interception capabilities, saying not having these would undermine the rule of law.”

As it has been said before, a backdoor is just another door. You either have encryption or you don’t. There is no halfway.

This post is a follow-up to What’s wrong with Twitter?.

You can read this post en français on the Framasoft blog.

Mastodon started out as a microblogging platform similar to Twitter, but has evolved with more features that show an ethical, progressive and inclusive focus. Instead of tweets, your posts on Mastodon are called toots.

Jump to:

• Why use Mastodon and not another new social network?
• How to use Mastodon
• My instance-of-one
• How to set up an instance-of-one
• But but but
• Join me there!

Why use Mastodon and not another new social network?

Now you know why I’m moving away from Twitter, you probably have a vague idea of what I’m looking for in a social network. Mastodon is unique for a few reasons:

Mastodon is federated

“Mastodon isn’t just a website, it is a federation—think Star Trek. Thousands of independent communities running Mastodon form a coherent network, where while every planet is different, being part of one is being part of the whole.”

Federation means there are lots of different communities running the Mastodon software, but every individual in each community can talk to each other using Mastodon too. Each domain where Mastodon is being run is referred to as an “instance.”

Federation vs centralisation

In my post about Twitter, I mentioned “because we are using the platforms of big corporations, we hand the responsibility for decisions on how to handle abuse over to corporate control.” That way the power is held by an individual or small group of people is a form of centralisation.

There are different ways centralisation is manifested across the web, but for platforms like Twitter, centralisation means the platform is run on a server owned and controlled by that corporation. So to use Twitter, you have to go to Twitter.com, or use a service or app that communicates directly with Twitter.com. This means that Twitter has absolute control over its software, how people use it, and the profile and behavioural data about those people too. Aral explains this by saying these platforms are not like parks, but like shopping malls. You can enter freely, meet your friends there, have conversations and buy stuff, but you are subject to their rules. They can monitor you with surveillance cameras, they can surround you with advertising, and they can kick you out if they don’t like what you’re saying or doing.

The opposite of centralisation is decentralisation. One decentralising alternative to publishing on Twitter is posting your little status updates to your blog, like I do with my Notes. That way I own and control my own content. (Within the bounds of my web host.) If everyone posted their status updates to their blogs, but goes to read each other’s blogs, that would be a decentralised network.

But posting status updates to a blog misses the social element of social networks. We don’t just use social networks to shout into the void, we use them to share experiences with each other. Aral and I are working on ways for us to do this with our personal sites, but we’re not there yet. And that’s where federation comes in.

I have my own Mastodon instance, mastodon.laurakalbag.com where it’s just me (and Oskar). This is referred to as an “instance-of-one.” It’s hosted on my own domain, so I own and control everything I post on there, but because I have the Mastodon installed on there, I can see what other people post on their Mastodon instances, and reply to them with mentions, or favourite and boost (like retweet) their toots, even though they are on different instances. It’s like having my own Twitter which can talk to other Twitters, where I make the rules.

Mastodon is ethical

You can tell a lot about Mastodon’s approach from the Join Mastodon homepage:

“Mastodon is free, open-source software that anyone can install on a server.”

Mastodon is free and open, which is why we can have our own instances with our own rules. It also means that if Eugen Rochko, who makes Mastodon, went in a direction that people didn’t like, we (dependent on our capabilities) can fork it, and make our own version.

“Using a suit of standard protocols, Mastodon servers can exchange information with each other, allowing users to interact seamlessly… Thanks to standard protocols, the network is not limited to Mastodon servers. If better software comes along, it can continue with the same social graph.”

Mastodon uses standard protocols, which means that you can federate with Mastodon even if you are not using Mastodon yourself. This means you’re not locked into Mastodon, as it is interoperable, but also that other technology can work with your toots in the future.

“There is no advertising, monetizing, or venture capital. Your donations directly support full-time development of the project.”

This is a big deal. Mastodon is funded by donations, not advertising or any other nefarious way to monetise your information, and not by venture capital. This means there’s no board of directors who will decide that they need to start doing stuff to monetise you to get a return on their investment, or for “growth.” It does mean that we are dependent on the good will and generosity of Eugen. But, as I mentioned above, because Mastodon is free and open, if Eugen somehow becomes a monster (it seems unlikely), we can fork Mastodon and make a different version that works for us.

Mastodon is inclusive

One of the biggest issues with Twitter is the moderation (or lack thereof) of harassment and abuse. Cage The Mastodon is a post by Eugen which explains how Mastodon is designed to prevent harassment where possible, and give you tools to ensures your timeline, and your replies, are only what you want to see.

“Mastodon comes with effective anti-abuse tools to help protect yourself. Thanks to the network’s spread out and independent nature there are more moderators who you can approach for personal help, and servers with strict codes of conduct.”

Of course, Mastodon is not perfect—this constructive criticism by Nolan Lawson covers some of the biggest issues and potential approaches—but Mastodon prioritises anti-abuse tools, and folks working on Mastodon prioritise design decisions that favour safety. For example, you cannot just search for a keyword on Mastodon. This means people looking to start a fight or a pile-on can’t just go searching for ammunition in other people’s toots. If you do want keywords in your toots to be searchable, you can use hashtags, which are searchable.

Another of my favourite features of Mastodon is that you can provide alternative text descriptions for images a as default without the option being hidden in an “Accessibility” menu.

How to use Mastodon

I’m not an expert, and my use of Mastodon is still in its infancy. Here are a list of great How-To guides by people who know Mastodon far better than me:

• An Increasingly Less-Brief Guide to Mastodon by @joyeusenoelle—Simply-written guide following a Frequently-Asked-Questions format. Useful if you want to find an answer to a specific question.
• Toot How-to: Intro to Mastodon by Ginny McQueen—Covers all the introductory basics to Mastodon with an eye on keeping yourself safe.
• What is Mastodon and why is it better than Twitter by Nolan Lawson—A detailed introduction to Mastodon and some of its history.
• Cage The Mastodon by Eugen Rochko—“An overview of features for dealing with abuse and harassment” which also explains the design decisions behind Mastodon.
• How Does Mastodon Work? By Kev Quirk—Introduces Mastodon with comparisons to Twitter, in case that makes it easier to understand.
• Mastodon Post Privacy—A toot explaining who can see what when you toot on Mastodon with various settings.
• The Definitive List—A handy of apps and web clients for using with Mastodon, beyond the default interface. It also has other useful stuff listed, such as cross-posting tools.

Join a small instance, or get your own

If you’re interested in Mastodon, you will have to pick an instance you want to join, or set up your own. I’m an advocate for instances-of-one in most cases, but if you just want to dip your toes in, or have bad experiences being harassed on social media elsewhere, I recommend you join a small instance with a Code of Conduct that suits you.

Most people join mastodon.social (I did) first. You should not join mastodon.social. It is the largest English-language instance run by the developers of Mastodon, including Eugen Rochko (also known as @gargron.) They have a No-Nazis policy and seem to care a great deal. However, mastodon.social has a lot of people using it. When I last checked, it was just short of 230,000 people. This means there’s a lot of pressure on the moderators, and on the server, and it really defeats the federated design if everyone joins the same instance. Remember, you can easily communicate with a person on any other Mastodon instance. If people are nagging you to join their instance, and it’s not for the superior Code of Conduct and moderation, I would question their motives.

Be aware that an instance’s admin can read your direct messages. Also the admin of the instance that the person you are messaging belongs to. This is because your private messages are not end-to-end encrypted. While I don’t think this is catastrophic to Mastodon (it’s exactly the same with your messages on Twitter, Facebook, Slack etc.), it’s a reminder that you really need to be able to trust the admin for your instance. Also if you want truly secure and private messaging, you should always use a dedicated messenger with end-to-end encrypted messaging, such as Wire.

Why doesn’t Ind.ie have an instance we can join?

A few people have encouraged Aral and I to start our own instance. We won’t do this because:

1. Most importantly: decentralisation is our goal. We don’t want to be responsible for owning and controlling your content, even if you trust us with it. (You shouldn’t!)
2. Also, we would be lousy moderators. Moderators should be trained and have relevant experience. They are the first defence against harassment and abuse. Moderators must be fair arbiters in disagreements, and enforce their Code of Conduct. That is a full-time job, and I believe it can only be effective on small instances.

My instance-of-one

I first joined Mastodon.social in late 2016. While I was fairly active on the @Better and @Indie accounts, my own account was very quiet. Mastodon.social was already fairly big, and I wanted to have my own instance, and not invest too much of my time in an account that would eventually cease to exist.

But I didn’t want to host and maintain a Mastodon instance by myself. It’s big and complex software, and I am not a big and complex backend developer or sysadmin. Also I just don’t have time for learning the skills required, or even keeping up-to-date with new releases and security updates.

So when Masto.host, a webhost for “fully managed Mastodon hosting” was recommended to me, I knew this was what I needed to make the leap into hosting my own instance.

Why set up an instance-of-one?

Everything I post is under my control on my server. I can guarantee that my Mastodon instance won’t start profiling me, or posting ads, or inviting Nazis to tea, because I am the boss of my instance. I have access to all my content for all time, and only my web host or Internet Service Provider can block my access (as with any self-hosted site.) And all blocking and filtering rules are under my control—you can block and filter what you want as an individual on another person’s instance, but you have no say in who/what they block and filter for the whole instance.

You can also make custom emoji for your own Mastodon instance that every other instance can see and/or share.

Why not set up an instance-of-one?

In a previous post about levels of decentralisation being beyond my means, I looked at the privilege that make us able, or unable, to embrace owning and controlling our own content. The same goes for social networking, particularly in terms of safety. Sometimes we don’t want to, or can’t, moderate our own social network.

I am a privileged person because I can deal with the low-level harassment I get. This is not a marker of my mental fortitude, it’s just the worst I get is creepy dudes coming on to me in my DMs, and some people slagging off our work at Ind.ie in an non-constructive and/or hurtful manner. It is not endless, it is manageable through conventional blocking and muting tools. (I’m also a fan of the pre-emptive block, but that is a post for another day.) I’ve not (yet?!) been the victim of a pile-on, targeted harassment, or more explicit abuse.

But many folks are the victims of this type of harassment and abuse, and they cannot be expected to maintain their own instances. Because in order to be able to effectively block, mute and moderate bad people and things, you have to see those bad people and things.

In the same way that I believe government should provide safety nets for society’s vulnerable and marginalised people, the web should too provide safety nets for the web’s vulnerable and marginalised people. I see small moderated instances as these safety nets. Ideally I reckon you should know your instance admin in person. Instances should be akin to families (with good relationships) or small clubs in the offline world. In those situations you may have someone who represents the group as a leader when required, but it’s an otherwise flat hierarchy.

Knowing good people who have your back is something of a privilege, so perhaps taking a word-of-mouth recommendation for a small instance from a person you know could suffice. I’ve not been in this position, so take my suggestions with a pinch of salt, I just want to emphasise the potential for negative repercussions when deciding who can control your online social life. (Take heed from those who have faced repercussions of Twitter or Facebook deciding how much racist abuse is ok or what is their real name.)

How to set up an instance-of-one

If, like me, you are not great with sysadmin, or just don’t have the time to maintain your own Mastodon instance, I recommend Masto.host. At Masto.host, Hugo Gameiro does the installation and hosting of small Mastodon instances for €5 a month. The process goes something like this:

1. Buy a domain name (if you don’t already have one you want to use)
2. Sign up for Masto.host and let Masto.host (Hugo) know the domain name you want to use. I’ve set mine up at mastodon.laurakalbag.com which is quite long, but it’s very clear that it is my Mastodon instance just from the name.
3. Set DNS settings. Masto.host then sends you a couple of changes that you need to make to your domain’s DNS settings. Most domain name providers will have a page where you can do this. Then let Masto.host know you’ve made those changes.
4. Create your Mastodon account. Masto.host will install your Mastodon instance. You will then get an email asking you to create your Mastodon account. Create the Mastodon account for your admin. Then let Masto.host know that is your chosen admin account. Masto.host will then grant your admin account those privileges.
5. Make your Mastodon instance what you want it to be. Once you have admin privileges, you can customise your Mastodon instance however you like. You probably want to start by closing registration to others (Settings > Administration > Site Settings.)

The whole process with Masto.host took around an hour for me. But bear in mind that this is a process that requires some manual intervention, so it could take longer. Masto.host is run by a single real human (Hugo), not a faceless corporation, who needs to sleep, eat, have a life, and maintain other instances, so if you do sign up for Masto.host, please be kind and polite!

But but but

Whenever you start to recommend an alternative social network, people will have their reasons for telling you why it is not for them. That’s fine. As long as the criticism is warranted. As Blaine Cook summarised well on Twitter…

“While I’ve been thinking about and working on this problem since the very beginnings of Twitter, I haven’t had much success at addressing these problems. Nor has anyone else.

These are hard problems. Facile criticism of earnest efforts isn’t going to get us anywhere.

Which isn’t to say criticism isn’t warranted. There are many legitimate issues. But if the argument defaults to “so we should all just continue to hang out on and moan about Twitter” it seriously undercuts the legitimacy of any criticism.” —Blaine Cook on Twitter.

Still, there are some arguments worth quickly covering:

All my friends/cool people/interesting discussions are on Twitter…

Were all your friends, the cool people, and the interesting discussions on Twitter when you joined? Treat Mastodon as a chance to start afresh, find new people to follow, maybe even take the opportunity to follow a more diverse group of people…! You can cross-post across Twitter and Mastodon if you must. (Just don’t cross-post retweets or @replies, it looks ugly and unreadable.)

I subscribe to accounts and lists on Twitter using RSS with Feedbin, so I can still keep an eye on Twitter while weaning myself off.

I don’t have the time to join another social network

Even setting up my own instance only took an hour. Joining an existing instance takes less than 30 seconds once you’ve decided which instance to join. Instances.social can help you find a small instance that works for you. Make sure you read their Code of Conduct!

Join me there!

If you read this post and sign up for Mastodon, toot me! I’ll be happy to follow you and answer any questions you have about Mastodon or running your own instance (or boost them when I don’t know the answer!)

Mastodon may not be our final destination as a social network, it might be a stopgap along the way. But it is a genuine alternative to what already exists. We’re currently stuck with platforms that amplify our society’s systemic issues (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia) because we don’t have alternatives. We can’t escape these platforms because they’ve become our new social infrastructure. We’ve got to try out alternatives to see what sticks, and as folks who work with the web day-to-day, we should take responsibility for finding safe technology we can share with our loved ones.

Part 2 of a series on Social Networks

• Part 1: What’s wrong with Twitter?

You can read this post en français on the Framasoft blog.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a quick note mentioning I now have my own Mastodon instance. But first things first: why?

My aim is to use Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter. While Mastodon is not equivalent to Twitter, many of its features are similar. And I’m looking for an alternative to Twitter because Twitter is not good for me.

Sometimes I assume me saying “Twitter is not good for me” is self-explanatory, but it’s not a universally-held opinion. It’s worth explaining in a little more detail:

Surveillance capitalism

In short, what is wrong with Twitter is surveillance capitalism. If you’re not already familiar with the term, surveillance capitalism is the business model of mainstream technology. The technology tracks us, watching what we do—that’s the surveillance bit. And then uses that information to better sell to us, often through “relevant” advertising—that’s the capitalism bit. For clarity and brevity, Aral calls it “people farming.”

On social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, we are generally aware that the ads we see fund the service that we use. However we are less aware of how algorithms affect which posts we see in our social network feeds, and what information is used to feed those algorithms. And how those algorithms, and the interface around it, are designed to manipulate us to interact with the service. We are broadly unaware of how most technology uses tracking, and their own algorithms, to addict us and manipulate our behaviour in a manner that is financially beneficial to them.

If this all sounds far-fetched, have a look at my blog version of my talk on ‘Digital Assistants, Facebook Quizzes, And Fake News! You Won’t Believe What Happens Next’.

What is wrong with Twitter… specifically?

Twitter’s business model of surveillance capitalism has an impact on every decision Twitter makes. Twitter rewards abusive behaviour on its algorithmic timeline because controversy drives “engagement.” Twitter builds cults of celebrity (be it around individuals or memes) because more people will signup to a platform to stay updated and prevent FOMO.

Twitter’s algorithm means Twitter decides what you see

Much like Facebook before it, Twitter’s decision to use algorithms to dictate what you see in your feed, rather than showing posts in a chronological order, means you can’t rely on the feed to show you the posts of the people you follow. (The workaround against the algorithmic feed is using Lists, but for that reason, I suspect Twitter will do away with the Lists feature at some point…)

You do not know if your tweets are being seen, or if you are seeing your friends tweets, because you have no insight into this algorithm. It appears that the algorithm favours popular and/or viral users and tweets, which then makes virality the ultimate aspiration for the seasoned social networker, on top of the very visible follower counts. (I’m not judging… I often decide if a person is worth following based on their follower count, don’t you?)

Twitter actually encourages abuse

Twitter lets abuse and harassment continue because engagement thrives on controversy. Dog-piling? That’s engagement! Women and people from marginalised groups being harassed off Twitter? But all those trolls are so engaging! What’s one woman leaving when the controversy will result in more people tweeting, or even signing up to have their say about the controversy? Why should Twitter, Inc. care about people when numbers is all that matters to the investors, and they’re the ones who keep the lights on? All social network corporations have to do is maintain the delicate balance of not making everybody so angry and alienated that they all leave. And given that so many of these folks are so “engaged” in Twitter (is this a good point to mention that “engagement” is probably just a euphemism for “addiction”?), they’re hard-pressed to leave. I am. Aren’t you?

If Twitter were to stick to a strict abuse and harassment policy, there would be fewer tweets. If Twitter were to give us adequate tools to moderate our own Twitter feeds, @replies, and messages, it would likely impact what the algorithm chooses to show us, affecting Twitter’s business which monetises what it prioritises on the algorithmic feed.

Twitter does not adequately deal with abuse

Moderating abuse is not easy. Deciding on what constitutes abuse, and how to appropriately deal with it, is an issue with every publishing platform and social network. They’re also systemic issues faced by local communities and legal systems. Which are usually handled (still often inadequately) by those communities and legal systems. But we have to be aware that technology amplifies these issues, by making it easier to target an individual and sustain an attack anonymously. And because we are using the platforms of big corporations, we hand the responsibility for decisions on how to handle abuse over to corporate control.

The staff at tech corporations should not be the people who decide what constitutes free speech and censorship on what has become our global social infrastructure. People who have financial interests in the outcome should not be able to make decisions about our rights, and what constitutes free speech.

Nuances

Of course there are also nuanced situations and design decisions around the algorithmic feed and the handling of harassment and abuse that are not primarily to serve surveillance capitalism. It could be that there are individuals working at the corporation who have benevolent intentions. (I have met some, I don’t doubt it!)

But because Twitter’s business model is focused around extracting information from people, design decisions that serve the business model will always be prioritised. Instances of benevolent behaviour are exceptions, not proving a pattern of “actually caring after all.” Such instances of kindness are unfortunately executed, or (to be generous) co-opted, to improve public relations.

Understanding my use

When asking myself honestly about why I still use Twitter, there are reasons and there are excuses. All my reasons are probably excuses, it depends how generous I am feeling towards myself on any given day. I am caught in a vortex of my beliefs vs my vanity.

Twitter is where I get news

Twitter is the first place I go for world and local news. It’s hard to find a news outlet that covers the current affairs and issues I care about without also publishing clickbait, listicles and SEO-driven junk. Unfortunately this is largely because web advertising (most of which is surveillance-based) is the business model of news publishing. So I curate my news by following a few news outlets and a lot of individual journalists.

There is a workaround: following Twitter accounts and lists on Feedbin, alongside the other RSS feeds I follow. All the tweets without the algorithm or apps attempting to manipulate your behaviour.

This is a temporary workaround as Twitter may find a way to ban this type of use. (Maybe we can move to RSS as our primary publishing means by then?) And obviously it won’t either help nor solve the issue of news media being reliant on surveillance capitalism as a business model.

Followers

Quite a few folks in the web industry have built up a big following on Twitter, and that’s hard to leave behind. (Mine is relatively small but big enough to flatter me on a bad day.) The nice way of looking at it is that you feel a responsibility to the people who followed you to keep up with industry news, and that you have a platform and reach to promote the issues you care about.

The cynical way to look at is would anyone truly notice if I stopped tweeting? I am one in a sea of many. Has a follower count just become another way to stroke my own ego, and prove my worth to myself because I’m hooked on the dopamine kick of a notification telling me that someone thinks I’m worth that tiny-click-of-a-button that is following? Maybe following me isn’t the joyous experience I smugly tell myself it is. There is no workaround for this except simultaneously self-improving and becoming less self-obsessed. As a millennial in a society driven by capitalism, I wish myself luck.

Friendships

Despite the follower/following model of Twitter, I do have friends on Twitter. I’ve gone on about online friendship before. I’ve made friends on Twitter, and I use it to keep up with people I know in person. I want to see how my friends are doing, what they are doing, and what they care about. I also want share small talk and meaningless nonsense with strangers, sharing in our experiences until we can become friends.

The workaround: Mastodon. A far-from-perfect but well-intentioned social network. In my next blog post, I’ll explain why (for now at least) it is the Twitter alternative for me.

Part 1 of a series on Social Networks

• Part 2: What is Mastodon and why should I use it?

“Granted anonymity, affiliates were happy to detail their tricks. They told me that Facebook had revolutionized scamming. The company built tools with its trove of user data that made it the go-to platform for big brands. Affiliates hijacked them. Facebook’s targeting algorithm is so powerful, they said, they don’t need to identify suckers themselves—Facebook does it automatically. And they boasted that Russia’s dezinformatsiya agents were using tactics their community had pioneered.”

A long and very quotable read.

“Affiliates say Facebook has sent mixed signals over the years. Their accounts would get banned, but company salespeople would also come to their meetups and parties and encourage them to buy more ads. Two former Facebook employees who worked in the Toronto sales office said it was common knowledge there that some of their best clients were affiliates who used deception.”

“In a sense, affiliate scammers are much like Cambridge Analytica. Because Facebook is so effective at vacuuming up people and information about them, anyone who lacks scruples and knows how to access the system can begin to wreak havoc or earn money at astonishing scale.”

“But affiliates, he continued, aren’t really to blame. They’re just taking advantage of opportunities created by large corporations in a capitalistic system built around persuading people to buy things they don’t need.”

This morning I made an :indieHeart: custom emoji for Mastodon. Here are some things I learned.

The :indieHeart: shortcode in action…

• Firstly, you need to have admin access to your instance to add custom emoji. (Another reason to get your own instance!) If you don’t have admin access, you could probably politely ask your instance’s admin to add your emoji to the instance’s list.
• You need to be able to tell what the emoji is at 20x20 pixels, as this is the standard size it’s displayed on the Mastodon web view.
• The emoji could be displayed on any colour background as different Mastodon themes have different coloured backgrounds. If you’re looking for compatibility with the (current) default Mastodon themes, check your emoji graphic with these hex colours as backgrounds: #1F232B, #282C37, #D9E1E8, #E6EBF0, #FFFFFF.
• Make the bounding box square, even if your graphic is tall and narrow. It looks like some apps might render all emoji as the same height and width, so this will avoid your emoji looking stretched or squashed.
• The 50KB limit for emoji files is fairly high for a simple shape, so you can afford to scale your image up to be pretty big (the indieHeart is 520x520px) so it looks sharp on screens with a higher resolution.
• Thickening lines in the graphic will make them look better when the emoji is scaled down very small, as it will increase the contrast and visibility of the lines, particularly on higher resolution screens where fine lines can appear very thin.
• You need to post a toot with the emoji shortcode in it on your own instance before it becomes available to copy by other instances.

Lastly, but importantly: the macOS screenreader VoiceOver reads “indie underscore heart, image” for :indie_heart: and “indie heart, image” for :indieHeart:.

So while word_word or wordword seems to be the standard for multiple-word emoji on Mastodon, using camel case is probably more accessible.

“the deal, which has not been previously reported, could raise broader privacy concerns about how much consumer data technology companies like Google quietly absorb.”