A blog about my opinions on everything. Hi there, come on in! The fire’s warm, and I always like having guests. I’m diamondpython00, but I prefer diamond. As the description says, this blog is just an outlet for random opinions I have on just about anything, from politics to video games to whether hot dogs are sandwiches (They’re not). I’d love to get asks about what my opinion is on things, but if you don’t really care what joe random on the internet has to say, I can’t exactly blame you.
I suddenly got why Dr. Venture misunderstands his sons so much: because he’s treating them like they’re him. For Rusty, Dean acting like he wants to do anything else besides super science is a sign that he’s meant for it -because that’s what Rusty did when he was a boy adventurer. Similarly, Hank would be totally fine doing super science or anything else, but because he doesn’t show the disdain for it that Dean does, Rusty thinks Hank doesn’t want it, because if you don’t fight against it, you must not want it, right? I’m thinking of the therapy scene between Rusty and his dad, where he’s told that his negative feelings about his life are from a lack of gratitude. He’s internalized that message and applied it to his parenting - and this is a common pattern for him. Without any frame of reference for moral behavior or for good parenting, he’s backslid into neglectful parenting and immoral behavior. But, despite all that…
“Dean, I promise you that the one who gave birth to you…loves you. Very much.”
I haven’t said it before, but Endwalker is my absolute favorite of the FFXIV expansions, and it might be one of my favorite stories every, thanks to one simple trick.
Endwalker spoilers under the cut.
Endwalker is a story about finding purpose in life. Although despair may raise its head again, as long as we keep sight of our purpose, we won’t be destroyed by it like Hermes was. Like many other stories about finding purpose in life, EW’s answer is that you have to create your own. In any other story, I probably wouldn’t like it as much. I do like that answer, but in many other stories, it feels like a copout - the answer is whatever you want it to be. But in EW, the story tells you that the answer is to make your own purpose… and then it shows you how to do that. While the MSQ shows some of the purposes people find (Sharlayan, Thavnair and Garlemald) EW drives the point home the best with the side content, specifically the allied societies. The journey that the Loporrits and the Omicrons take from listlessness to newfound purpose is a perfect “show don’t tell” of why finding your own purpose is a more complicated journey than just figuring it out. Each one of the NPCs we interact with in these quests has to grapple with themselves, try things out, and even dip back into despair at times, only to eventually reach that self-actualization, and have it materially improve not only themselves, but the world around them. EW, unlike other stories that tell you to find your own purpose, makes me actually BELIEVE that finding that purpose is achievable. God, I love this story so much.
*NOTE: in this case, phobia refers to a very strong irrational fear, not being a little scared of something. if you can handle snakes but they make you nervous, that's not a phobia.
huge thank you to people reblogging and talking about their phobias in the tags. it's genuinely super nice to hear that im not alone in this and im not super irrational for being scared of things. <3
To those of you in fandom: Did a family member buy you the book Fangirl as a present? (link to wikipedia article as a reminder: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fangirl_(novel))
To those of you in fandom: Did a family member buy you the book Fangirl as a present? (link to wikipedia article as a reminder: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fangirl_(novel))
Reason number 2636185372 I love Nerdy Prudes Must Die-
Max is humanized without being absolved of his actions. Maxwell Jägerman was undoubtedly a piece of shit. He was a controlling prick that refused to let anyone have control over their own life, abusing his "friends" and his enemies alike. He took real joy from punishing the people around him when they tried to sidestep his arbitrary rules, enforcing them with the threat of violence. He knows he's physically stronger than everyone around him, and he takes advantage of that. He's 100% eager to fight before considering other options. Even the other jocks are scared of him, because he defaults to beating the hell out of people. (Also note that he's stronger than all of them too. When they do the chest bump Jason falls backwards and has to catch himself, and he knocks Kyle senseless with just one hit, to the point that he has to be carried out by his friends.)
I feel all of that very strongly. But at the same time? He's like... A full person. Big things can be revealed when a character thinks they're alone, and although him going through the Waylan place shows him being a prick as expected, it also shows him being scared. It seems to me like he's a very fearful person. Scared of ghosts, skeletons, judgement from his dad, even those cheap costumes seem to genuinely freak him out before he forces himself to get a grip (which just means getting aggressive). Or look at how he interacts with Grace. It's easy to assume he's just being manipulative, but there's never a point where it seems like Max is particularly skilled at emotional manipulation. It seems to me like he actually, genuinely likes her in a weird way. He's an ass, but he totally brightens up when he talks to her. He thinks she's funny, he seems a little bit awkward during conversation with her, he doesn't like people picking on her.
"She's such a prude!"
"Yeah, isn't she great?"
I'm sure part of it is that he just wants to get in her pants, but that doesn't seem to be the only factor here. He wants to carry her books, he wants to cuddle, he doesn't see her prudiness as an obstacle the way you would expect an asshole like him would. It seems to be part of the reason he likes her at all. It's not a healthy or respectful dynamic, but it is bizarrely genuine.
The characterization in this show is just so good y'all
One line I haven’t seen talked about much that is relevant to this is in Literal Monster when Max says “Don’t need no one to tell me/High school will be my peak/So I’m willing to take advantage”. Coupled with his reaction to the prank, his comments about his dad, and his interactions with the rest of the school, a picture starts to form of a kid who has been told his whole life that he’s going nowhere. At the Waylon Place, we get a glimpse of what Max could have been if he had the right influences in life. Treated with something vaguely resembling respect, he returns it, and notes that he was probably wrong about these guys. And then he dies, thinking that they betrayed him, and the rest of the show happens because he’s so obsessed with his social order that it lasts into the afterlife. Max is a literal monster, but he’s very much a manmade one, and that makes him very interesting.
1. It’s not entirely unlike Elidibus to attract strays, but this, Emet-Selch thinks, is a bit more troublesome than usual. (Or: Instead of keeping him hidden in some bolthole, Elidibus literally just brings Unukalhai home. All the other Ascians are equal parts curious and unhelpful in the raising of a child. Halmarut always has candy in her pockets. Fandaniel should definitely not be left alone with younglings. Emet-Selch gives terrible parenting advice on purpose. It’s probably for the best that formless aether beings don’t technically need to be fed.)
2. That very self-indulgent WoL/Sidurgu one where the WoL gets a place in the new Ishgard residential district and can’t help but think that a house would be a much better spot to raise Rielle than a bar. Convincing Sid to move is actually the easy part; the real problem is that the idea of living with Sidurgu sounded much less nerve-wracking in theory than it’s proving in practice–just how long can the WoL keep this “roommate” thing up without giving away their massive crush on their fellow Dark Knight? (Unbeknownst to the WoL, of course, Sidurgu is going through the exact same crisis. The domesticity is real and the mutual pining is painful. Rielle has seen dodos with more self-awareness.)
3. Captain Jacke, out of a very stupid sense of propriety, gets it in his head to mentor Oboro on the in-and-outs of Eorzean dashing roguery. He’s determined to teach the lad to woo the dimberest of morts–purely to free himself from the secondhand embarrassment of any more cringe-worthy courting attempts, of course, and not–thank you!!–because the Stray and Underfoot put a mint of gil on Jacke not knowing a thing about wooing the fairer sex himself… Meanwhile, Karasu Redbeak, whose thoughts on Oboro are much closer to proprietary, has determined that this simply will not do. Oboro’s pathetic bumbling is his greatest charm point, after all; turning him into something resembling socially competent? Out of the question! But when Jacke discovers that all his attempts to set Oboro up are being foiled from the shadows, misplaced pride turns the matter into an all-out Rogue versus Ninja skill war… that somehow, quite obnoxiously, goes right over Oboro’s head.
4. The Eorzean high school manga AU but it’s Sanson and Guydelot. Guydelot Thildonnet, resident guitar playing, leather pants wearing, class ditching bard punk realizes he is exactly one more behavior strike away from being expelled from high school for good–he can finally free himself from the incessant boredom of being forced to, ugh, get an education. A normal delinquent might just light a trash can on fire, but Guydelot was always the kind to make a scene. If you want to wash out in a blaze of glory, there’s only one surefire way to do it: pick a fight with your high school’s beloved Golden Boy. (Unfortunately for Guydelot, his school’s golden boy is one Sanson Smythe, who–out of the misguided goodness of his heart–talks the principal out of expelling Guydelot… and into giving them both, heavens forfend, community service together. This is about to be the best worst 250 hours of Guydelot’s life.)
5. Is it weird to ask your new (and only) school friend to help you set up your English teacher with your perpetually single father? Yes. Is Ryne going to ask Gaia anyway? Also yes. This is important. Thancred is lonely. (Well, probably. It seems like he should be, anyway.) And their teacher is really nice! It has to work out; Ryne knows it will! Only, well… Playing matchmaker is hard, but do you know what’s even harder? Sorta-kinda-maybe starting to like-like the friend you roped into playing matchmaker with you. (That cutesy Ryne/Gaia one where the matchmakers turn out to be the best match, with an added bonus of [insert your favorite Thancred ship here] on the side!)
6. (Quick, before Endwalker crushes my wildest dreams…) Fandaniel discovers that Zenos’s personal boundaries are absolutely inexplicable, and while the Garlean prince is prickly as a cactuar about the strangest things, he’s also completely blasé about acts that would unsettle virtually every other normal being on the star. Why not? the Sundered Ascian thinks. Why shouldn’t I do whatever amuses me now that dusty old Elidibus is gone? So, since it somehow doesn’t get him immediately cleaved in two, Fandaniel combs Zenos’s hair and helps undo his armor, drapes himself over the throne and the prince both, sleeps in Zenos’s bed… Nothing ever comes of it, of course, except sometimes when he’s trying his hardest to think about nothing and the whorls of his fingers recall the feel of other misshapen braids, the plate of other armor, the sound of different voices whispering in dreams, 12,000 endless years of other ghosts embraced by other monsters… (Holds up queerplatonic aroace Zenos and Fandaniel. I just think they’re neat!)
7. In the middle of an incredibly serious political summit related to the fate of the very star, attended by the heads of state of every free territory south of Garlemald, Cid Garlond discovers that at least three quarters of Eorzea’s leaders genuinely believe that he is married to Nero tol Scaeva. After the initial shock of horror, Cid Garlond experiences… an even greater shock of horror, because if you fondly bicker with a man, and joint-own a masterworks enterprise with a man, and invent time travel with a man, and adopt a sentient chocobo with a man, and drink from the man’s coffee mug because his coffee just tastes better, and increasingly often grab the wrong toothbrush and smallclothes because you live with the man–you might actually be married to that man. (Or: Nero tol Scaeva has literally been counting, to the bell, the exact amount of time it will take Cid nan Garlond to realize they’ve settled down easily into the rest of their lives.)
8. “The little ones won’t listen to a bloody thing I say! Always in the way, no matter how many times I threaten to turn them into slippers–” Tiamat, whose children, even in the early days, couldn’t be counted on all four paws, gives a long, commiserating hum. “Have you tried,” she suggests in very serious Dravanian, “just roaring at them?” And “Yes,” Estinien hisses, in a better impression of a tea kettle than a dragon. (Or: The one where Estinien realizes belatedly that, at least as far as the Dravanians are concerned, the dragoon has inherited not only Nidhogg’s power, but also his brood. Fury be damned, if he finds another baby dragon asleep in his boot, he is going to restart the Dragonsong War.)
Yup, those are definitely the persona 5 characters Akira and Akechi. I know pretty much nothing about bungo stray dogs, but I do know from mutuals that the bsd blorbos are like enemies? or something? which makes the dynamic here very similar. The inherent homoeroticism of having a personal rivalry ig
URGENT: 🚨🚨EARN IT ACT IS BACK IN THE SENATE 🚨🚨 TUMBLR’S NSFW BAN HITTING THE ENTIRE INTERNET THIS SUMMER 2023
April 28, 2023
I’m so sorry for the long post but please please please pay attention and spread this
What is the EARN IT Act?
The EARN IT Act (s. 1207) has been roundly condemned by nearly every major LGBTQ+ advocacy and human rights organization in the country.
This is the third time the Senate has been trying to force this through, and I talked about it last year. It is a bill that claims "protects children and victims against CSAM" by creating an unelected and politically appointed national commission of law enforcement specialists to dictate "best practices" that websites all across the nation will be forced to follow. (Keep in mind, most websites in the world are created in the US, so this has global ramifications). These "best practices" would include killing encryption so that any law enforcement can scan and see every single message, dm, photo, cloud storage, data, and any website you have every so much as glanced at. Contrary to popular belief, no they actually can't already do that. These "best practices" also create new laws for "removing CSAM" online, leading to mass censorship of non-CSAM content like what happened to tumblr. Keep in mind that groups like NCOSE, an anti-LGBT hate group, will be allowed on this commission. If websites don't follow these best practices, they lose their Section 230 protections, leading to mass censorship either way.
Section 230 is foundational to modern online communications. It's the entire reason social media exists. It grants legal protection to users and websites, and says that websites aren't responsible for what users upload online unless it's criminal. Without Section 230, websites are at the mercy of whatever bullshit regulatory laws any and every US state passes. Imagine if Texas and Florida were allowed to say what you can and can't publish and access online. That is what will happen if EARN IT passes. (For context, Trump wanted to get rid of Section 230 because he knew it would lead to mass govt surveillance and censorship of minorities online.)
This is really not a drill. Anyone who makes or consume anything “adult” and LGBT online has to be prepared to fight Sen. Blumenthal’s EARN IT Act, brought back from the grave by a bipartisan consensus to destroy Section 230.
If this bill passes, we’re going to see most, if not all, adult content and accounts removed from mainstream platforms. This will include anything related to LGBT content, including SFW fanfiction, for example. Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, Tumblr, all of them will be completely gutted of anything related to LGBT content, abortion healthcare, resources for victims of any type of abuse, etc. It is a right-wing fascists wet dream, which is why NCOSE is behind this bill and why another name for this bill is named in reference to NCOSE.
NCOSE used to be named Morality in Media, and has rebranded into an "anti-trafficking" organization. They are a hate group that has made millions off of being "against trafficking" while helping almost no victims and pushing for homophobic laws globally. They have successfully pushing the idea that any form of sexual expression, including talking about HEALTH, leads to sex trafficking. That's how SESTA passed. Their goal is to eliminate all sex, anything gay, and everything that goes against their idea of ‘God’ from the internet and hyper disney-fy and sanitize it. This is a highly coordinated attack on multiple fronts.
The EARN IT Act will lead to mass online censorship and surveillance. Platforms will be forced to scan their users’ communications and censor all sex-related content, including sex education, literally anything lgbt, transgender or non-binary education and support systems, aything related to abortion, and sex worker communication according to the ACLU. All this in the name of “protecting kids” and “fighting CSAM”, both of which the bill does nothing of the sort. In fact it makes fighting CSEM even harder.
EARN IT will open the way for politicians to define the category of “pornography" as they — or the lobbies that fund them — please. The same way that right-wing groups have successfully banned books about race and LGBT, are banning trans people from existing, all under the guise of protecting children from "grooming and exploitation", is how they will successfully censor the internet.
As long as state legislatures can tie in "fighting CSAM" to their bullshit laws, they can use EARN IT to censor and surveill whatever they want.
This is already a nightmare enough. But the bill also DESTROYS ENCRYPTION, you know, the thing protecting literally anyone or any govt entity from going into your private messages and emails and anything on your devices and spying on you.
This bill is going to finish what FOSTA/SESTA started. And that should terrify you.
Senator Blumenthal (Same guy who said ‘Facebook should ban finsta’) pushed this bill all of 2020, literally every activist (There were more than half a million signatures on this site opposing this act!) pushed hard to stop this bill. Now he brings it back, doesn’t show the text of the bill until hours later, and it’s WORSE. Instead of fixing literally anything in the bill that might actually protect kids online, Bluemnthal is hoping to fast track this and shove it through, hoping to get little media attention other than propaganda of “protecting kids” to support this shitty legislation that will harm kids. Blumental doesn't care about protecting anyone, and only wants his name in headlines.
It will make CSAM much much worse.
One of the many reasons this bill is so dangerous: It totally misunderstands how Section 230 works, and in doing so (as with FOSTA) it is likely to make the very real problem of CSAM worse, not better. Section 230 gives companies the flexibility to try different approaches to dealing with various content moderation challenges. It allows for greater and greater experimentation and adjustments as they learn what works – without fear of liability for any “failure.” Removing Section 230 protections does the opposite. It says if you do anything, you may face crippling legal liability. This actually makes companies less willing to do anything that involves trying to seek out, take down, and report CSAM because of the greatly increased liability that comes with admitting that there is CSAM on your platform to search for and deal with. This liability would allow anyone for any reason to sue any platform they want, suing smaller ones out of existence. Look at what is happening right now with book bans across the nation with far right groups. This is going to happen to the internet if this bill passes.
(Remember, the state department released a report in December 2021 recommending that the government crack down on “obscenity” as hard the Reagan Administration did. If this bill passes, it could easily go way beyond shit red states are currently trying. It is a goldmine for the fascist right that is currently in the middle of banning every book that talks about race and sexuality across the US.)
The reason these bills keep showing up is because there is this false lie spread by organizations like NCOSE that platforms do nothing about CSEM online. However, platforms are already liable for child sexual exploitation under federal law. Tech companies sent more than 45 million+ instances of CSAM to the DOJ in 2019 alone, most of which they declined to investigate. This shows that platforms are actually doing everything in their power already to stop CSEM by following already existing laws. The Earn It Act includes zero resources for proven investigation or prevention programs. If Senator Bluementhal actually cared about protecting youth, why wouldn’t he include anything to actually protect them in his shitty horrible bill? EARN IT is actually likely to make prosecuting child molesters more difficult since evidence collected this way likely violates the Fourth Amendment and would be inadmissible in court.
I don’t know why so many Senators are eager to cosponsor the “make child pornography worse” bill, but here we are.
HOW TO FIGHT BACK
EARN IT Act was introduced just two weeks ago and is already being fast-tracked. It will be marked up the week of May 1st and head to the Senate floor immediately after. If there is no loud and consistent opposition, it will be law by JUNE! Most bills never go to markup, so this means they are putting pressure to move this through. There are already 20 co-sponsors, a fifth of the entire Senate. This is an uphill battle and it is very much all hands on deck.
CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES.
This website takes you to your Senator / House members contact info. EMAIL, MESSAGE, SEND LETTERS, CALL CALL CALL CALL CALL. Calling is the BEST way to get a message through. Get your family and friends to send calls too. This is literally the end of free speech online.
(202) 224-3121 connects you to the congressional hotline. Here is a call script if you don't know what to say. Call them every day. Even on the weekends, leaving voicemails are fine.
2. Sign these petitions!
Link to Petition 1
Link to Petition 2
3. SPREAD THE WORD ONLINE
If you have any social media, spread this online. One of the best ways we fought back against this last year was MASSIVE spread online. Tiktok, reddit, twitter, discord, whatever means you have at least mention it. We could see most social media die out by this fall if we don't fight back.
Here is a linktree with more information on this bill including a masterpost of articles, the links to petitions, and the call script.
DISCORD LINK IF YOU WANT TO HELP FIGHT IT
TLDR: The EARN IT Act will lead to online censorship of any and all adult & lgbt content across the entire internet, open the floodgates to mass surveillance the likes which we haven’t seen before, lead to much more CSEM being distributed online, and destroy encryption. Call 202-224-3121 to connect to your house and senate representative and tell them to VOTE NO on this bill that does not protect anyone and harms everyone.
Well, spoiler free, but I have just finished The Owl House finale, Watching and Dreaming. Wow, what a good ending to the show! I was excited and nervous for this day to come, but here we are. The end of an era, if you’ll forgive the overly sentimental phrasing. A big thank you to the entire team behind The Owl House for giving us such a fantastic show, and one that so many people, myself included, saw themselves in. I doubt any of the team will see this, but just in case you do, give yourself a big pat on the back from me - you’ve created something beautiful. As for me, I’m sad to see it go of course, and I mourn the fact that season 3 had to be cut short, but I’m so glad I could experience this show. The Owl House meant something to me - weirdos stick together is basically the story of my life, and seeing that on screen, a show telling me it was okay to be weird because people will still accept you, was helpful in ways that I’m not sure I can fully express. Thank you Owl House. It’s been great.
oh I also also went down a minor rabbit hole yesterday reading about this catholic nonprofit that essentially used advertising data tied to hookup apps to out several gay priests, which is super interesting to me both as an affronted homo and someone with one foot in the world of programmatic bullshit, so I'm tempted to share some links on here but I feel like I'd need to include a lot of disclaimers and explainers lest this get twisted into some kind of "advertisers know literally everything about you" hysteria because it's really not like that at all, believe it or not. the privacy implications are still significant (i.e., bad) but I think the crazier takeaway is how there's just so much data being fed through these systems (billions of ad impressions! every single day!) that trying to leverage any of it in a life-ruining way is only possible under an extremely specific and increasingly unlikely set of circumstances. my first thought was to compare it to finding a needle in a haystack but I think it's actually more like combing through a landfill to piece together a shredded credit card statement.
in 2021, a high-ranking priest in the US conference of catholic bishops (or USCCB) named jeffrey burrill was outed as gay and forced to resign. the USCCB said they had obtained (1) proof that he was using grindr and (2) location data tying burrill's movement to several gay bars. they did not explain how the hell they figured this out, only that the information was obtained from a data vendor and spanned several month-long periods between 2018 and 2020.
a couple key notes here about data vendors/brokers: it's not uncommon for advertising exchanges to scrape together a bunch of junk data and sell it to random third parties. it's usually demographic data for audience-sorting purposes—and even the demographics themselves are generally predictions based on behavior, like how I look up enough arthritis-related keywords that google thinks I'm a senior citizen.
which is to say that them accessing data from a broker isn't hard to believe, but absolutely nothing in that dataset would come close to the kind of smoking-gun proof that gets a priest fired for visiting gay bars. this isn't like a phone book full of names and addresses, it's billions of rows of data each saying that publisher <abc> sold an ad through exchange <xyz> in auction number <00000> at <$X> price to a device with <list of generally anonymous characteristics>.
(truly sensitive info can and does get sold to data brokers, but it's not the norm, and it's usually sold by publishers rather than by ad exchanges. in your average bid request, there's not really even a standardized way to include much more demographic info than some basic age/gender stuff and the device's estimated location—nor are any of these data points strictly required.)
(I've already lost the plot here, but if you're curious, almost all programmatic advertising uses a protocol called the OpenRTB API. if you're curious what exactly gets passed through these real-time bids, you can read the API reference in its entirety, although god only knows why they chose to stick it all in a fucking PDF.)
anyway. also in 2021, an ex-adtech guy read this news, rightfully was like "okay but how the hell did they actually figure that out" and then wrote a detailed substack post speculating exactly how the USCCB might've been able to pull this shit off. the technical explanations here are what I find the most interesting (worth reading the whole thing imo, but I'll give a condensed version below); however, he poses a very salient and completely unanswered question (emphasis mine):
None of this requires ninja-level technology or skills, but it’s way beyond the level of the Googling around or spreadsheet hacking of your average normie conspiracy-theorist or journalist. Particularly if the hacker had done all this analysis for several targets over years of time; that’s a considerable amount of work and expense (this data certainly isn’t free, and they bought a lot of it). Somebody wanted Burrill and possibly others to go down. That’s the real mystery in this story: Who? Why?
point that won't make sense until later: in the middle of 2021, apple rolled out iOS v14.5, which among other things made the IDFA ("identifier for advertisers") something that users have to opt into rather than something that's enabled by default. android followed suit not long after and let users choose to opt out of the android equivalent.
another brief tangent: an IDFA is a unique alphanumeric string associated with a particular physical device. the string itself contains exactly zero identifying information (other than, technically, specifying whether you're on an android or iOS device because each ecosystem uses slightly different identifiers)—this is useful since in-app environments don't use cookies. it lets advertisers figure out that user #12345678 who viewed an ad in their mobile browser is the same user #12345678 who viewed an ad in candy crush.
in 2022, I guess burrill was able to find work again, so that's nice.
in 2023, wapo did some digging and found out that the group behind burrill's outing is a colorado-based nonprofit called "catholic laity and clergy for renewal." among the revelations:
the nonprofit's stated goal is "to 'empower the church to carry out its mission' by giving bishops 'evidence-based resources' with which to identify weaknesses in how they train priests." what this amounts to is basically just spying.
burrill almost certainly wasn't the only guy they were spying on, although it's unclear at this point if the nonprofit's actions got anyone else outed or fired.
the nonprofit has spent at least $4 million dollars so far, although it's also unclear exactly much of that was spent on buying brokered data versus like... idk, anything else you'd use to spy on priests?
the ex-adtech guy's "but how the hell did they do that" speculation was pretty much exactly correct.
the technology
the ex-adtech guy's substack post explains everything beautifully, so I don't just wanna reiterate everything he's already said. however, I do worry that some of the finer points might be lost on anyone who isn't already familiar with the architecture underpinning everything.
first, a very brief programmatic explainer:
when you load a webpage that's coded to contain an ad, the publisher (owner of the webpage where the ad will be shown) puts the ad inventory (fancy term for "ad space with no ad in it yet") up for sale on a real-time auction marketplace. this announcement that an auction is about to occur is called a bid request.
the bid request follows a particular protocol called the OpenRTB protocol (remember that earlier tangent?); it's both a trigger for an auction to occur and an object that itself contains data about (1) the type of inventory being sold and (2) the user to whom the ad will be displayed—though not much data at all. page 15 of this PDF outlines what a standard BidRequest object looks like.
this is not a form of user data per se, but one of the fields in the BidRequest object is the name/ID of the publisher where the ad is being served. which makes sense
this BidRequest object is sent out to various ad exchanges who buy and sell ads on behalf of brands. brands can bid on the ad inventory being offered; whoever makes the highest offer, naturally, wins.
the winning brand gets to display their ad creative (fancy term for "the banner or video or whatever") on the page that you loaded.
this whole process takes roughly 100 milliseconds, give or take—so fast that you probably didn't even realize that the ad wasn't preselected when you loaded the page.
two important things to internalize here: (1) the BidRequest object contains a very, very small amount of data about each user and device who triggered a bid request, and (2) the BidRequest object gets sent to a lot of parties, not just the one who wins the auction; this is one way that data can trickle up to third-party data brokers.
you with me still? take a breather if you need to.
so. if you're a catholic nonprofit with four million dollars to burn, you can buy huge bundles of data from random parties who get their hands on it. this data is mostly full of random numbers that aren't useful outside of specific contexts.
but remember my other tangent about the IDFA? the unique identifier that's assigned to mobile devices? you can use the IDFA to determine that X number of bid requests across Y number of apps happened on the same device—it won't tell you who owns the device, just that all of the bid requests came from The Same Guy. (there's some other info you can scrape together there, like what operating system the device in question is running, but most of it isn't especially juicy imo.) you'll also see the date and time that each bid request occurred.
except I sort of lied, because there is one more elephant in the room: location data.
check out page 29 of this PDF. the Geo object included in each BidRequest includes some basic location data about the user/device at the time of the bid request, and it's actually pretty fuzzy: you can include the latitude and longitude if you're confident they're accurate, but they're not often accurate, so a lot of time you're just getting the city/state/zip. (on one hand, creepy, but on the other hand, the picture we've put together so far is still just "One Guy in boston has an iphone and he uses both candy crush and google chrome.")
grindr's whole schtick requires accurate location data, so let's assume the latitude and longitude data for grindr bid requests is accurate enough to include in our bid requests.
let's put all that together, then:
we can sift through billions of rows of data and chunk them into distinct users based on each user's distinct IDFA.
for any given user, we can look at the information from each bid request and see the names/IDs of the app where the inventory was offered. (in other words, was the user's device trying to display an ad in candy crush? in tiktok? in grindr?)
in most cases, for any given user, we can see the location data of each bid request. (of the bid requests triggered in grindr, where was the user?)
for any given user, we can see the timestamp of each bid request. (of the bid requests triggered in grindr at this date and time, what date and time did they occur?)
so if we're really, really inclined to put all this together (and let me stress how infrequently anyone would ever do this), we'd know that One Guy was using grindr in X location at Y time/date. we don't know this guy's legal name, or his grindr username, or his email address, or where he lives, or what he does for a living, or whether he's gay, although we do know that he uses grindr so that might be a freebie.
and this, THIS is why the catholic nonprofit's whole shit is so goddamn diabolical—their whole operation hinged on knowing burrill's real-life location with extreme precision
I'll let mr. substack take over here (again, emphasis mine):
As reported, Burrill is a diocesan priest in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Where is he every Sunday morning around 10:30 a.m.? Giving mass at St. James the Greater Catholic Church on 11th Street is where (or at one of a few Catholic churches). Sure, if we were to draw a circle a couple hundred meters wide around St. James, and tally up the unique set of IDs that appear there on Sunday mornings, we’d turn up hundreds. But which one is always there, month after month?
Modern databases allow easy construction of geo-based queries of the form: “find all rows with data within x meters of this lat/long, and from 9 to 11 a.m. on Sundays”. Also, who’s always at whatever rectory Eau Claire diocesan priests reside in, plus whatever public occasions or conferences a senior cleric such as Burrill would surely attend? The geo data can be massive and noisy, but as with any noisy signal, average over enough data and the signal starts coming through. The attacker probably had to look at years of data to unambiguously narrow this down. This attack was long in the making, and took months (at least) to pull off.
TL;DR: a catholic nonprofit was able to out a gay priest because they sifted through a metric fuckton of ad data to pinpoint any devices that (1) triggered bid requests to display ads on grindr or other hookup apps and (2) followed an extremely specific location pattern that the nonprofit could corroborate against the movement of any priests whose locations they were manually tracking.
which is creepy as hell, but also worth noting that it only worked because they already had tabs on him in the real world and an enormous amount of time and money.
the takeaways
the amount of information flowing through the programmatic advertising ecosystem (and then continuing to flow to third-party data brokers) is staggering.
there's a reason ads (and their related data) are bought and sold in aggregate—individual data points are neither very valuable nor very useful in all but the most extreme cases. the sheer quantity of data is enough to guarantee you relative anonymity in all but the most insane edge cases.
that said, our collective privacy matters. the risk to me as an individual may be negligible, but this data is still valuable (and potentially risky) at scale... hence why the third-party data market is so huge.
despite my knowledge of programmatic advertising in general, I'm not actually well-versed enough in the whole third-party brokers situation to really a specific takeaway. I do think there's a clear fucking lack of regulation, with all the requisite concerns that brings, especially since third-party data isn't a requirement for the programmatic ecosystem to function the way it's supposed to.
now that the IDFA is (somewhat) obsolete, this is no longer a reliable method of outing gay priests. if the gay priest in question had opted out of IDFA tracking, I wouldn't say it'd be impossible to pull this off, but it would certainly be easier and more cost effective to just like, plant a spycam in his little starched collar.
here's a guide on how to disable IDFA on your android or iOS device. I should stress that the risks of not opting out are minimal, unless someone with a multimillion dollar budget and an intimate knowledge of your day-to-day location is hellbent on fucking you over specifically, but you know. doesn't hurt.
try to stay out of the crosshairs of american catholic nonprofits.
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