Just checked out Qobuz. It offers me albums to buy. I try to listen to them, but it wants me to login. Nope. Moving on to one of the many places where I can listen without doing that.
Asking for a login before allowing preview of an album is like asking people for ID before they can access listening posts in a record store. Choosing stick over carrot implies the login is to improve *their* experience, not mine, by subjecting me to more DataFarming.
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A reminder;
For as long as the majority of kiwis do our social networking and access media via DataFarming platforms, owned and controlled by US technofascists, our democracy will be distorted by the effects of those platforms. So any kiwi who cares about the independence of our country, and our freedom to be self-governing - as a whole, as communities and as citizens - needs to start caring about digital sovereignty.
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A reminder;
For as long as the majority of kiwis do our social networking and access media via DataFarming platforms, owned and controlled by US technofascists, our democracy will be distorted by the effects of those platforms. So any kiwi who cares about the independence of our country, and our freedom to be self-governing - as a whole, as communities and as citizens - needs to start caring about digital sovereignty.
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Remind me again why developers are still hosting Free Code development on GritHub?
"With GitHub, it takes the form of disregarding the terms of free software licenses. In the process, they built a tool which facilitates the large-scale laundering of free software into non-free software by their customers, who GitHub offers plausible deniability through an inscrutable algorithm."
#DrewDevault, 2022
"But I discovered that Github is now pushing it even more in that direction: a feed full of random projects and people I don鈥檛 care about, notifications to get me to 'discover' new projects and 'follow' new persons. They don鈥檛 even try to pretend to be a professional platform anymore. It鈥檚 a pure attention-grabbing personal data extorting social networks."
@ploum, 2023
"If you disagree with any of the policies, you may terminate your agreement with us at any time by discontinuing use of our services and deleting your Discord account."
Email about changes to Discord's ToS, 2025
In plain terms, you can like it or leave. But at the same time, they'll do anything they can to make it hard to leave. This is what dictatorship looks like.
Yes, my tongue is firmly in my cheek. Yes, this is kind of a rickroll to get people who think they support age verification to expose themselves to the counterarguments. Sue me ; )
"You could imagine somebody creating one of these viral-type apps, or social media platforms, or confession platforms, solely just to gather data."
#TaylorLorenz, 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A-dTz5FsXA
Easily. I mean, this is the standard business justification for creating an online service, and has been well over a decade.
Remember Cambridge Analytica weren't doing anything fringe. That was Business-As-Usual for FarceBook data use.
Every project that leaves GritHub for good is another measurable dent in the network effects of an enshittified, proprietary platform. Now owned by one of the oldest #DataFarming corporations, who were the earliest enemies of groups working for people's software rights and freedoms.
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Anyone who encounters me here regularly, or has read my writing, will have noticed me using variations of the neologism "#DataFarming". This recent piece by @kboyd sums up exactly what I mean by this term;
https://whateverthing.com/blog/2025/07/20/the-future-is-dumb/
Well, I finally got around to evaluating the #ManageMyHealth portal;
https://managemyhealth.co.nz/about-us/
When my GP suggested I sign up with it, I presumed it was a public service offered by Te Whatu Ora, like My Health Record;
https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/health-services-and-programmes/digital-health/my-health-record
So what do I think of Manage My Health? Not impressed. This is a privately-owned, for-profit digital platform, that I can't be certain isn't #DataFarming patients who sign up with it.
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"When people started calling my personal mobile number with questions about a voluntary organisation I'm involved with, I was confused: we weren't sharing that number. It turns out that Google had decided to take the number I used to verify my identity for Google Business some years prior and start putting it in Google Search results. WTF, Google?"
@dan, 2025
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In case anyone is looking for evidence of why the 'we value your privacy' promises of proprietary platforms are inherently empty, and can't be trusted ...
"Meta servers download every shared file in Facebook Messenger and Instagram DM in full鈥攅ven if it鈥檚 gigabytes in size ... Meta insisted it wasn鈥檛 a bug. When we published videos demonstrating the issue, they asked YouTube to take them down."
https://mastodon.social/@mysk/114859726176255816
The first half of this made more sympathetic to ZuckerBorg's position. Which made me puke into the back of my mouth as soon as I noticed it, but that's how unimpressive I found their discussion.
"Legacy media" is DOGE phrase. Huh? This was already a descriptive term for pre-digital media during Occupy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/podcasts/hardfork-meta-zuck-o3.html
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#podcasts #NYTimes #Platforner #HardFork #FreedomOfExpression
They even throw out the old 'it's only censorship when states do it'. Sigh.
Any institution with large scale gatekeeping power over communication can censor. But more to the point, there are plenty of examples of #DataFarming platforms suppressing speech on behalf of states (eg Christchurch Call, WeChat). So this hair-splitting sophistry is not at all convincing.
There are so many substantial criticisms of Meta now, that they're kind of praising them with faint criticism.
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I've hit the final season of Parks and Rec, first broadcast in 2015. It features an unsubtle parody of DataFarming tech corporations, in the form of Gryzzl;
https://parksandrecreation.fandom.com/wiki/Gryzzl
Right now it's feeling like an artifact of a simpler time.
In the classic H.G. Wells novel The Time Machine, the time-hopping protagonist meets the Eloi, who live in a state of childish innocence. Everything they need is provided by invisible machinery. Maintained by the subterranean Morlocks, who eat the Eloi like farmed animals.
This is a wonderful metaphor for what hyperscale datacentres turned much of the net into.
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A mistrust of apps is not a bad thing. The majority of them exist only to exploit their access to your device for DataFarming purposes (see my recent post about ZipoApps).
That's why I'm so fussy about installing phone apps only from F-Droid. Where they've been rebuilt from source code and checked for spyware, which they either remove, or at least flag (eg if the app is tethered to a DataFarming remote service).
