genAI companies are now buying up rare and antique books so they can scan them and use them to train their AI. then they're destroying the books afterward.
AI companies are quietly obtaining rare books, ingesting their contents, and then destroying them -- even if they're exceedingly rare.
they've had to face settlements against stealing from current authors, so they'll just go for the old books now. they're also doing this so they have the only copies of rare books.
they're taking water, power, natural resources for their data centers. they steal. they're book burning, essentially. i'm just so angry, i'm at a loss right now.
âso this week my town made the news forââ nope
âthereâs a restaurant two miles from my house calledââ nope
âtoday I learned [celeb] went to my high schoolââ nope nope nope nope nope
these are all real posts Iâve seen on the internet that allowed me to identify a userâs hometown instantly. if itâs a small town, thatâs doubly dangerous, because a bad actor could trace you just by a unique first name or selfie you once posted. in an age where doxxing and stalking are some of the worst Iâve ever seen it, you HAVE to think twice about what youâre posting online.
i once saw a 13-year old post an image they noted as being âa few miles from their house.â it had a theater in the shot with a unique enough name to be local. one google maps search, now everyone knew not only what city they lived in, but the possible neighborhoods in that radius too. and they had a HUGE followingâŠwho all knew this was a 13-year-old child.
so yeah. not to sound like a 90s internet safety PSAâŠbut Iâm gonna be that PSA for a minute.
if youâre posting an image, there is NO need to say that you live there. you could just be traveling. âsaw this in Montanaâ is better than âsaw this by my house!â
before you post about a venue, especially a restaurant or small store, check and see if itâs localâCRUCIALLY if it has only one or two locations. people might travel to arenas or convention centers, but theyâre far less likely to be traveling to Bartlebyâs Fish and Chips. if itâs an anecdote and you still live nearby, you can honestly just leave the name out entirely.
if youâre sharing a news story, it can just be a story you found and wanted to share. you donât have to clarify âit happened in my town,â because even if you donât mention your town name, an easily-googled news article will.
if youâre seeing a concert or meeting a celebrity on a tour thatâs stopped locally, wait until theyâve hit a few more venues before you post about it, or at the very least wait until you get home. this is honestly a smart move for any event you attend: unless youâre marketing yourself, thereâs no need to advertise your location in real time.
check your selfie backgrounds for anything identifying. this includes city names on venues, school names, street signs, and house numbers.
this stuff is flexible if you no longer live in your hometown, or if your city is particularly big, but thereâs STILL no reason to tie yourself to your school, your workplace, or your street. you can call it paranoid, but as someone whoâs seen my friends get literal death threats over fictional characters before, the last thing I want is someone willing to act on those threats finding out where they live.
I decided to make a post with plenty of petitions against the surveillance of the Internet from plenty of different places. Don't hesitate to reblog with petitions I didn't put, be they from your country or not. Let's make a long chain of action.
Worldwide
Governments are walling off the open internet. We are a global movement opposing restrictions, and building a better internet.
United States
All of the bad internet bills. One website.
KOSA is a censorship bill that wonât make kids safe. Instead, it'll put all internet users at risk, especially youth. If you believe in a fr
Change.org: Stop KOSA
Europe
Learn about the EU Chat Control proposal and contact your representatives to protect digital privacy and encryption.
As of the first of August, the script isn't updated so I'm providing with a new script based on the script present on Chat Control and the words of one of the petitions (don't worry I got the autorisation of the latter) that you can send during the month of August:
(Beginning of script)
Dear member of the European Parliament,
I am writing to urge you to oppose all the regulations that will permanently allow the mass indiscriminate scanning of all European's messages especially "Chat Control 2.0" for numerous reasons:
1. It destroys the privacy of 450 millions of European citizens. This isn't targeted scanning, an IA will have access to all the private texts and all the photos any citizen will send to their family, to their friends, to anyone.
2. The IA is unreliable at best. It has already been known for flagging vacation photos and discussions between teenagers, the very people this measure is meant to protect, and sending those to the authorities.
3. It doesn't protect the children. Quite the contrary, if they know their every words are being read and potentially sent to the authorities, they might seize talking about taboo topics like rape.
Worst, if they don't know about sexual harassment, how can they even defend themselves against it. It is impossible to defend people by making them ignorant.
4. It would flood the authorities with false positives and drown them in mountains of conversations and photos that are irrelevant to child rape.
5. It wouldn't work. The pedocriminals don't use the sites where honest people go. They will simply continue their practices unbothered on insecure platforms and therefore be unaffected by this measure.
6. The non-permanent measure has been passed in an anti-democratic way with the measure being a rewrite of a law rejected by the Parliament, treated as a second reading (so only a majority of MEPs could stop it), just before summer break. This wasn't a fair vote and agreeing to a permanent regulation would show that democracy isn't an important value anymore.
For all those reasons, we need to fight back and we need to defend real measures against child abusers, we have to push back against surveillance measures that will affect everyone, especially the children and future adults.
This fight starts with you as our shield against these unfair, ineffective and dangerous measures that will do more harm than good.
Yours sincerely,
[Your name]
[Your address]
[Optional: profession / background, e.g. âsoftware engineerâ, âparent of two childrenâ, etc.]
