Please Don’t Take Chances with Stalkerware

Please Don’t Take Chances with Stalkerware

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

Let me repeat what I’ve said before. If you are in an abusive situation and your partner has had access to your phone, leave it behind. If you suspect any of your devices had these tools installed, do not take any chances with them. Yes, getting a new phone and changing all of your passwords will be a pain in the ass. It will suck to set up a new email and change the default email address for all of your online accounts.

It still beats getting tracked down by a violent ex-partner. Do not make light of this. This is life and death stuff. Trying to remove stalker ware incorrectly might kill people. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. Don’t take the chance.

Linked – Social Media Is Dying
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Linked – Social Media Is Dying

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

While I would love to end this with a condemnation of venture capitalists and hedge fund managers, I think it’s important to point out that many of us are complicit. Fund managers seeking the best short-term profits for their investments run funds whose shareholders include most of us. When we log in and look at our IRA or 401(k) accounts, we look for how much the value has increased, not what makes the most sense for society. Our account balance looks a little nicer when a company lays off 10,000 employees and the stock price increases.

It’s all entwined. To paraphrase Michael Corleone – “We’re all part of the same hypocrisy.”

Linked – Why public chats are better than direct messages

Linked – Why public chats are better than direct messages

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

But, here it the real world, this doesn’t always work out very well. You really need the culture to be one where everyone is used to working asynchronously and checking the public channel for chances to help out the team. It sounds like that is both the expectation and the reality at this company but for a lot of us the reality is very different. Posting something in a public channel where no one gets a notification that a message is being posted generally means no one sees it. So we go back to using private channels or tagging people in the public channel in order so that we purposefully interrupt them. We haven’t developed a culture where asynchronous communication works and I suspect it’s because we don’t really want it. We want people to respond to us now. We don’t trust them to get back later and, to be fair, we don’t give our peers reason to trust us because we spend all of our time putting out fires and frequently forget to get back to people.

In many cases, it’s a humblebrag. “Oh I saw your message but then I got involved in important things because I’m an important person and never got back to you”.

Linked: Don’t Forget to Name Your ‘Digital Executor’

Linked: Don’t Forget to Name Your ‘Digital Executor’

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

As we head into the metaverse, or whatever the cool kids are calling it this week, this is only going to become more complex and more necessary. It won’t just be a social media profile and photos, it’ll be an entire identity in the crypto-blockchain space that will not be accessible to someone else without the appropriate transfer. Don’t leave it to chance. Your family is going to be dealing with enough.

Linked: Facebook Cooperated With Law Enforcement in an Abortion Case. Did it Have a Choice?
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Linked: Facebook Cooperated With Law Enforcement in an Abortion Case. Did it Have a Choice?

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

However, the article below goes on to note that Meta has options. It could create hurdles, it could delay and fight it. Neither of those would likely make much difference in the grand scheme.

Eva Galperin from the EFF, though, offers the best solution. She points out that tech companies can’t turn over what they don’t have.

It’s the collection. It’s the lack of end-to-end encryption. It’s all the information they keep about all of us forever. If they didn’t do that, it wouldn’t exist to be turned over.

They made a choice, and anyone using their services to communicate private information made theirs.

Linked: Remote Work Helped Meta Achieve Diversity Goals Years Ahead of Schedule
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Linked: Remote Work Helped Meta Achieve Diversity Goals Years Ahead of Schedule

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about in the industries I have worked in has been this idea that remote and asynchronous work is something that makes it less likely that the only people we can hire are the ones who are both willing and able to dedicate their entire days to be in the office and also willing to jump in and do more work at any hour of the day and weekends. That eliminates a whole bunch of people from even applying, especially women with kids, neurodiverse and disabled candidates, and underrepresented groups without a large presence in the area where your office happens to be. (When you start a company in Silicon Valley, Seattle, Austin, or some other “hot” area, your candidate pool is limited to the people who live there now or are willing to move immediately.)