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This story was originally published on by Jennifer Gollan. ProPublica Online pharmacies that sell abortion pills are sharing sensitive data with Google and other third parties, which may allow law enforcement to prosecute those who use the medications to , a ProPublica analysis has found. end their pregnancies Using , a nonprofit tech-journalism newsroom, ProPublica ran checks on 11 online pharmacies that sell abortion medication to reveal the web tracking technology they use. a tool created by the Markup Late last year and in early January, ProPublica found web trackers on the sites of at least nine online pharmacies that provide pills by mail: , , , , , , , and . Abortion Ease BestAbortionPill.com PrivacyPillRX PillsOnlineRX Secure Abortion Pills AbortionRx Generic Abortion Pills Abortion Privacy Online Abortion Pill Rx These third-party trackers, including a Google Analytics tool and advertising technologies, collect a host of details about users and feed them to tech behemoth Google, its parent company, Alphabet, and other third parties, such as the online chat provider LiveChat. Those details include the web addresses the users visited, what they clicked on, the search terms they used to find a website, the previous site they visited, their general location and information about the devices they used, such as whether they were on a computer or phone. This information helps websites function and helps tech companies personalize ads. But the nine sites are also sending data to Google that can potentially identify users, ProPublica’s analysis found, including a random number that is unique to a user’s browser, which can then be linked to other collected data. “Why in the world would you do that as a pharmacy website?” said Serge Egelman, research director of the Usable Security and Privacy Group at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. “Ultimately, it’s a pretty dumb thing to do.” Representatives for the nine sites did not respond to requests for comment. All were recommended on the popular website , which provides information about how to get abortion pills by mail, including in states where abortion is illegal. Plan C Plan C acknowledged that it does not have control over these sites or their privacy practices. While many people may assume their health information is legally protected, U.S. privacy law does little to constrain the kind or amount of data that companies such as Google and Facebook can collect from individuals. Tech companies are generally not bound by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA, which limits when certain health care providers and health plans can share a patient’s medical information. Nor does federal law set many limits on how companies can use this data. Law enforcement can obtain people’s data from tech companies such as Google, whose privacy policies say the companies reserve the right to share users’ data with law enforcement. Google , which law enforcement can obtain with probable cause to believe a search is justified. requires a court order or search warrant The company received in the U.S. in 2021, the most recent year available; it does not provide a breakdown of these requests by type, such as how many involved abortion medication. more than 87,000 subpoenas and search warrants In a statement, Steve Ganem, product director of Google Analytics, said: “Any data in Google Analytics is obfuscated and aggregated in a way that prevents it from being used to identify an individual and our policies prohibit customers from sending us data that could be used to identify a user. Google has strict policies against advertising to people based on sensitive information.” Google pledged last year that it would related to people’s visits to abortion and fertility clinics, but the company has not announced any changes since then related to data involving abortion pill providers or how it handles government requests for data. delete location history data A Google spokesperson did not respond when asked whether the company has turned over any data to law enforcement about users of online pharmacies that provide abortion medication or whether it has been asked to do so. “This is problematic and dangerous — both the potential access that law enforcement has to figure out who is violating our new state bans and that we’ve let tech companies know so much about our private lives,” said Anya Prince, a law professor at the University of Iowa who focuses on health privacy. “It shows us how powerful this data is in scary ways.” Medication Abortion Using medications to induce an abortion involves taking two drugs. Mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone, effectively stopping the growth of the pregnancy. Misoprostol, taken a day or two later, helps the uterus contract, emptying it of pregnancy tissue. This drug combination is the most commonly used method of abortion, accounting for in the U.S. more than half of abortions Demand for the drugs is expected to grow amid reproductive health clinic closures and the enactment of a cascade of state laws banning abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last June. At least 13 states now ban all methods of abortion, including medication abortion, though some allow exceptions for medical emergencies, rape or incest. People who are unable to shoulder the cost of traveling to states where abortion is legal are increasingly turning to online pharmacies to buy abortion pills without prescriptions. The mail-order pills can be taken at home, and they’re generally cheaper than abortion services provided in clinics — about $200 to $470 from online pharmacies, compared to about $500 for a first-trimester abortion conducted in a clinic. Approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2000, mifepristone — the first tablet in the two-step regimen — can be used to help end pregnancies in their first 11 weeks. The agency initially restricted the drug, requiring patients to get it from clinicians in person. Mifepristone became more accessible during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the FDA temporarily relaxed the requirement that people visit providers in person to get the drug. The agency in December 2021, allowing people to obtain abortion medication through the mail after a telemedicine appointment. scrapped the requirement altogether Then, on Jan. 3, the FDA allowing retail pharmacies to dispense mifepristone to people who have prescriptions, potentially expanding access to medication abortion. published new rules But those rules do not help pregnant people in more than a dozen states where abortion bans prevent pharmacies from offering the drug. A week later, Alabama's attorney general said that anyone using abortion pills could be prosecuted under a state law that penalizes people for taking drugs while pregnant — despite the state’s abortion ban, which excludes abortion seekers and penalizes providers instead. He then appeared to back off his statement, saying the law would be used only to target providers. Nineteen states already , meaning people in those states must see a clinician in person or find abortion medication online on their own. Many appear ready to do the latter. ban the prescription of abortion drugs through telehealth After a draft of the Supreme Court’s abortion decision leaked last May, internet . Dozens of people have posted descriptions online of their experiences getting abortion pills, some in restrictive states. search traffic for medication abortion surged One Reddit user on an abortion subgroup in October: “I’m in TX so i ordered through abortion RX. It said it’ll be here soon like 5-6 days. I’m extremely nervous I’m doing this by myself, but I’ve looked and don’t have a lot of time to make a decision. This is the fastest way.” recounted their ordeal A New Legal Era Just two states — Nevada and South Carolina — explicitly outlaw self-managed abortion. But that hasn’t stopped prosecutors in other states from charging people for taking abortion drugs. Prosecutors have as evidence in cases charging people with illegal abortions in several states, including Georgia, Idaho and Indiana. cited online orders of abortion pills And in at least 61 cases from 2000 through 2020 spread across more than half the states in the country, prosecutors for allegedly self-managing abortions or helping someone else to do so, according to a report by If/When/How, a reproductive justice advocacy organization. investigated people or ordered their arrest In most of these cases, people had used medication for their abortions. Those prosecutors interested in criminalizing abortion are aided by state and private surveillance. “This is an entirely new era,” said Ari Waldman, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University. “We’re moving to a modern surveillance state where every website we visit is tracked. We have yet to conceptualize the entire body of laws that could be used to criminalize people getting abortions.” Law enforcement can use people’s behavior when visiting websites that sell abortion pills as evidence to build cases against those suspected of having abortions. Investigations and charges in these cases overwhelmingly stem from reports to law enforcement by health care providers, trusted contacts or the discovery of fetal remains, legal experts say. Once authorities launch an investigation, they can use online searches for abortion pills as part of the evidence. “This information can tell a district attorney that you went to an abortion website and you bought something,” Waldman said. “That might be enough to get a judge to get a warrant to take someone’s computer to search for any evidence related to whatever abortion-related crime they’re being charged with.” This was true even under the more limited abortion restrictions under Roe. For example, in 2017, prosecutors in Mississippi charged Latice Fisher with second-degree murder after she lost her pregnancy at 36 weeks. Prosecutors used her online search history — including a search for how to buy abortion pills online — as evidence. Fisher’s murder charge was eventually dismissed. “We have a private surveillance apparatus that is wide and is largely unregulated,” said Corynne McSherry, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes digital rights. “Now Google knows what you’re searching. This is a real threat. If any third party has your information, it means your data is no longer in your control and it could be sought by law enforcement. This is 100% a worry.” Opting Out Many people aren’t aware of how to opt out of sharing their data. Part of the problem is that when users visit online pharmacies that share users’ information with third parties such as Google, their information can then be shared with law enforcement if allowed by the privacy policies of those third parties. “The mere fact that you’ve used the online pharmacy to buy abortion medication, that info is now collected by Google and it is now subject to the privacy policy of Google such that you have no way of opting out of that, because it’s entirely separate from the website you went to,” Waldman said. Users can install a web browser, such as Brave or Firefox, that offers privacy protections. They can also install browser extensions to block third-party trackers and adjust the privacy settings on their browsers. But these steps . aren’t always foolproof Tech companies can still subvert them using hidden tools that users cannot see, and they likely retain vast troves of data that are beyond users’ control. “Individuals are not going to solve this problem; technical solutions aren’t going to solve this problem,” said Chris Kanich, associate professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “These trillion-dollar companies of the economy aren’t going anywhere. So we need policy solutions.” Congressional lawmakers have spent years discussing a national data privacy standard. The bill that has made the most progress is the . American Data Privacy and Protection Act Introduced last June by a bipartisan group of lawmakers who intended to strengthen consumer data protections, the bill limited companies from using any sensitive data, including precise geolocation information or browsing histories, for targeted advertising or other purposes. Companies would have been required to get consumers’ express consent before sharing sensitive data with third parties. The legislation passed out of its assigned House committee in July. Another bill, the , also introduced last summer, would limit the reproductive health data that companies are allowed to collect, keep and disclose. My Body, My Data Act But neither bill has passed. The My Body, My Data Act had few, if any, Republican supporters. Plus, legislators couldn’t reach an agreement over whether the American Data Privacy and Protection Act should supersede state privacy laws such as the , which provides data privacy protections for consumers in the state. California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 Privacy experts say the most effective way to protect users’ data is for online pharmacies that sell abortion medication to stop collecting and sharing health-related data. Companies selling abortion pills should immediately stop sharing data with Google, said Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Web developers may not have thought they were putting their users at risk by using Google Analytics and other third-party trackers,” Quintin said. “But with the current political climate, all websites, but especially websites with at-risk users, need to consider that helping Google, Facebook and others build up records of user behavior could have a potentially horrific outcome. You can't keep acting like Roe is still the law of the land.” Are You in a State That Banned Abortion? Tell Us How Changes in Medical Care Impact You. Serious medical issues can arise during pregnancies. Our reporters want to understand how policy changes affect intimate medical decisions. Your examples can help. This story has been updated with additional comment from Google provided after publication. Update, Jan. 20, 2023: Photo by on Volodymyr Hryshchenko Unsplash

Online Pharmacies Are Sharing Your Sensitive Data 

The cost-per-click or what you pay for each click on your online ads rose last year by and . This is a worrying trend and, as a start-up, growth is your top priority and your marketing budget needs to get you maximum bang for the buck. Often, successful founders and venture capitalists advise startups to have a narrow focus and to try solving a clear identifiable problem for a . Extrapolating this, you could apply your on who you market your product to and how. 9% for ads on Google 19% for those on Amazon small cohort narrow focus Personal experience In my previous role as Head of Growth for a venture-backed menswear direct-to-consumer (D2C) startup in India, I had to find ways to launch a new product with a dramatically low budget: the pandemic had just struck and our anticipated next round of venture funding looked further away than before. So, I had to get creative and figure out cost-effective ways to still launch the product that we had already developed. Our marketing expenses were high because we relied on social media marketing and influencer marketing that were almost entirely in English. Looking into our customer data, I realized that a substantial percentage of our existing customers lived in Indian states that had their own regional languages; for instance, the state of Gujarat has a majority that speaks Gujarati, the local language of the state. About do not count English as their first or second language. Such regional languages don’t receive the same level of attention from digital marketers; this lack of attention meant that there was a lower demand for marketing in such languages, leading to lower costs. Utilizing our analysis of customer data and the target states we then identified, we worked with influencers in those local language to execute our launch. It was a success with revenues from those regions more than doubling in a matter of months. 80% of Indians United States: a case in point Looking at the United States with a similar lens of marketing in a non-English language, the Hispanic people stand out. As of July 2022, the Hispanic population in the United States was estimated at (19.1% of the total population), making them the country’s largest racial or ethnic minority. The Hispanic population between 2010 and 2022, significantly more than the nation’s 8% overall population growth. They also have a , which is 8.8 years less than the overall median age of the overall population. In the recent two decades, there has been a steady increase in affluence amongst Hispanics in the United States. In fact, out of all the affluent subgroups in the United States, Hispanics now represent the largest, with particular growth among the younger generations. Today, , compared to one in fifteen affluent boomers/seniors. So, the Hispanic population has a few traits that make it quite attractive as a target audience for marketers. 63.7 million grew 26% median age of 30 one in five affluent Gen Zs is Hispanic Looking further into how they access the internet, a demonstrates that 32% of U.S Hispanic consumers search the internet in both English and Spanish while a further 16% consumes content solely in Spanish. This is important to note: this means that you can digitally target a significantly attractive audience in a language other than English. Further, because demand for Spanish keywords is lower than that for English keywords in the United States, it is relatively more cost effective to advertise online in Spanish. Valley Family Health, a chain of medical clinics in Los Angeles decided to run an and realized that Spanish keywords’ cost per click was in the range of $0.59 to $2.75 while it would cost more than $6 for English. In addition, of some randomly selected popular keywords shows that some Spanish keywords could cost almost 90% less than those in English. Thus, overall, there is an attractive population that accesses the web in a language besides English and whose advertising cost is considerably lower – all the perfect ingredients for startups and marketers to observe and act on. Google study online campaign a review Things to note if you decide to target the Hispanic population in the United States If you decide to focus on marketing to the Hispanic population in the United States, you should be careful about a few things. A found that Hispanics do not just want brands to speak Spanish but also to speak it with respect and accuracy. In this context, literal translation could be very tricky as those interviewed in Meta’s study indicated that they often see content translated from English to Spanish very poorly and literally. This might be something to be careful about if you use a generative AI or online tool to translate; it might be necessary to have a Spanish speaker either fully translate or review the content translated by an AI tool. The other important insight was that Hispanics want marketing content to be culturally relevant. This would entail using Spanish-speaking actors or culturally relevant humor in marketing materials. Lastly, another (again commissioned by Meta) showed that 79% of Hispanics accessed the Internet on a mobile device – something to keep in mind when you are deciding what format to advertise in. study commissioned by Meta study by IPSOS MediaCT Choosing the less trodden path can be better for your marketing expenses. From my experiences, I can safely say that investing your energies and resources as a start-up on a language that is not spoken by the majority but is still spoken by a large enough population can make a tremendous difference to your growth efforts. In the context of the United States, I believe that the Hispanic population deserves more of your marketing attention. Focusing on them could very well set you up for success.

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is a visiting Scholar at , Honorary Associate Lecturer at , CSO at and long time . She kindly shared some of her time to type together. Here is our conversation: Dr. Amber Cazzell Stanford University of Queensland ERA Hacker Noon contributing writer I was reading and came across, It made me think, what is an existing and analogous relationship to human and the AI that human creates? Here are three options: human to child, human to dog, or human to car. David: your recent story “It is inevitable that in mediating social processes, AI must make ethical judgment calls. And it is also clear that AI simply reflects the values inherent in its datasets and imbued by its programmer.” Of those options, I think it’s most like a human to a car. The AI that we create is really a dumb tool, currently with no agency or moral responsibility of its own accord. Still, the tools are ethically relevant as soon as they are used. Is the car used to visit your sick grandma? Or is the car a weapon in a terror attack? Perhaps the car wasn’t being used as a weapon, but did accidentally kill someone in a collision. All these circumstances carry ethical implications. In the case of AI snafus, like Google’s labelling Black Americans “gorillas,” or word2vec propagating gender stereotypes, more often than not our use of the tool is accidentally causing harm. Amber: What’s scary and scandalous about this, is that we internet users continue refueling the cars with our data, but let tech monopolies drive the cars as they please. The dWeb may help AI ethics by putting us users behind the wheel, and letting us make those ethical judgment calls for ourselves. as “The proponents of the so-called decentralised web – or DWeb – want a new, better web where the entire planet’s population can communicate without having to rely on big companies that amass our data for profit and make it easier for governments to conduct surveillance.” To you, what is the dWeb? David: The Guardian defines it Trying to conceptualize the dWeb can really trip people up because it is so simple, that it’s easy to feel like you just don’t “get it,” like you’re missing something. But the reality is that the dWeb is a revisiting of the vintage internet in which the idea was simply to connect a bunch of computers around the globe. Originally, it was personal devices that served as the backbone of the internet. Way back in the day, if I wanted my files to be accessible online, I actually had to be logged online via dialup, so others could access those files from my personal computer. Amber: Fast forward, and we’ve witnessed the rise of server farms to uphold tremendous surveillance capitalism industries. In short, it’s rare that people store their own data and serve their own sites. They simply use Google search, Facebook, LinkedIn, have a Wordpress site, etc. It is true that these services each provided convenience in a way--they offered user experiences that we all enjoyed. The dWeb, however, is about bringing those same conveniences and user interface experiences together with that vintage internet under-the-hood. It’s about turning today’s average online consumer into the average online prosumer: one who creates bandwidth, storage, and computation as their devices connect to the web of everyone else's devices. Why and how would a decentralized internet be more sustainable than our current internet? David: The dWeb is more sustainable because it is more efficient. I mean this both in terms of hardware, and in economic terms. In terms of hardware, imagine if each of the devices that are lying dormant were suddenly to serve us bandwidth and store our files. We’re talking laptops, cell phones, smart fridges, old Xboxes, FitBits, SleepNumber beds (which are extremely disturbing in their surveillance BTW!). If all of these things connected online to serve our browsing and streaming and shopping experiences, their combined power would dwarf the resources of the tech monopolies. So we can add massive storage and computational power to the world, using what we already have lying around. Amber: But the dWeb is also more efficient in terms of economics. If we bring these devices online and encrypt our data such that only the people we want to access it can access it, the internet of things is sufficiently powerful to keep our information (think posts and sites) accessible to the right people even when our devices go offline. There’s no need to keep AWS on hand. Furthermore, since our data is safely encrypted, companies can’t mine it without our explicit permission. It’s a game-changer for tech companies which will have to pivot away from targeting ads. It will force companies to align their long-term incentives with their users in order to find a working business model. And that nonzero collaboration is simply more sustainable. How will dWeb merge social media and the rest of the web? David: It’s important to keep in mind how basic and natural the dWeb is. Amber: This question is sort of like asking, “how will your identity merge with the rest of your interactions in the world?” What is bizarre is not the merging of social media and the rest of the web, but rather the current system which somehow compartmentalizes our identity and relationships into just a handful of sites we call “social media.” Our relationships and our identities are the foundation from which we interact with and interpret the world. It is strange indeed that we need to set up profiles, import photos, and find friends every time we join a new social media site. There is no analogous process to this when we go to a party, arrive at work, or travel to a new destination. Our selves, and our memories and connections with others just show up with us. They are a fundamental part of us. We can’t leave home without them. The dWeb, likewise, means that each person is their own person and their own nexus of relationships--no need to log in, to create accounts, or to describe themselves. And this comes with a lot of cool perks that aren’t talked about much. In the real world, who we are and who we spend time with impacts more than who we share pictures and life updates with. Who we are and who we spend time with impacts our very worldviews. The dWeb is about so much more than privacy. It’s about pushing questions of “truth” and "fairness" back into the hands of average internet users, such that they and their trusted peers decipher the veracity of a news article, or choose how algorithms function and make decisions (in search, ads, health care, what have you). Twitter, an approximately , made waves by announcing the hiring of a to decentralize social media… I think the significant reaction to this 00.1% shift in their labor force either shows; a) users are now aware that social media is too centralized, and/or b) my newsfeeds’ are too bubbled and it really wasn’t big news. Twitter is brave to consider making “decentralized internet standard, like SMTP (email protocol)” but it has a chance to make the company itself less valuable. It’s funny to think about being a large enough company where 00.1% bets of resources are hedges against disruption by building the disruptor yourself. How do you think a decentralized social network would actually function? David: 5k person company 5 person team called BlueSky I think this is a savvy move for Twitter--although they aren’t pouring enough resources into it. In reality, they stand to make more money than before if they are able to become the first big mover of dWeb social media protocols. Although they cannot mine data in a decentralized setting (except for users who choose to share their keys with Twitter), they can make a boatload of money by pivoting to charge for bandwidth provision (sort of like a telecom company). Amber: In terms of look and feel, I imagine that at first decentralized social networks will look and feel nearly identical to their centralized versions. This has been the pattern so far for companies we work with like (decentralized YouTube) and (decentralized Reddit). As time goes on, and the alignment of incentives becomes old-hat, I expect social media, and the “rest” of the dWeb that its baked into, will begin to look notably different. dTube notabug Specifically, we will see more and more confidence intervals accompanying things like identities (is this the real Elon Musk?) and news articles (is this fake news?). These confidence intervals will be unique to each person, based on their social networks and their own specified settings online. Data mining will be done on a personal level, such that each person’s dWeb presence is calculating insights and making decisions on the basis of their own prior data, and the data of others who have shared with them (i.e. movie recommendations based on similar watch histories among friends rather than strangers). Advertising models will be flipped on their heads--such that users advertise to companies, rather than companies advertising to users. Audits of common protocols will be taken for granted, such that running a Google search will return not only results based on your own web of trust, but also information about how your search results would look different as you adopted larger or smaller pools of trust. Those are some of the things we would regularly see and interact with. All these changes would lead to shifts in ethical conversations about the internet, too. Privacy, for instance, would be a much smaller issue than it currently is, since data would be private by default. Conversations about algorithmic fairness would shift as well. Instead of us relying on one or two search algorithms as a whole, on the dWeb, we will choose which algorithms we want to rely on, and those algorithms will work within the parameters of our social networks to automate decisions. This means that users wield a lot of moral responsibility--what sorts of speech and images will they allow themselves to be exposed to? If they live in a particularly sexist bubble of the country, are they going to expand their webs of trust to counteract that bias? Are they okay consuming and sharing content which is protected by IP law, now that that government doesn’t have a way to know? It terms of algorithmic bias, do you think forcing social networks to go open source could have a larger impact than trying to have other decentralized social networks reach critical mass from the ground up?  It’s not mutually exclusive. But if I were trying to solve the problem of why is this in my newsfeed right now? I think reading how the existing code functions in laymen’s terms could be a more straightforward route to identifying algorithmic bias. David: I think that open-sourcing a code base is a step in the right direction. Still, just because the code is open-sourced doesn’t mean that the problems will indeed be fixed. Facebook, Google, Amazon--they all have their own agendas and interests to serve, so it is unlikely that they will immediately hop to correcting unfair algorithms in their systems. And their network effects are so large that people aren’t going to shift to a better codebase version overnight. Amber: More importantly, though, fairness in AI is an intractable problem, because ideas about what is fair vary widely. As , ideas of what is fair are algorithmically incompatible. It is akin to the tradeoff between distributive versus procedural justice. I’ve written before What is more fair: men and women must meet the same algorithmic decision thresholds? Or the algorithm’s predictive performance must be equal for men and women? You can’t have both. The dWeb takes a moral stance on this. It says: each person gets to choose which definition of fairness to implement, and under which circumstances. Open-sourcing Facebook and Google doesn’t accomplish that. What are future digital inflection points that when you see them live, you’ll think, “oh of course the web is decentralized now”? David: When Steve Jobs pushed the idea of a personal computer, people didn’t understand why anyone but corporations would need them. They already had typewriters and filing cabinets. The same thing is happening now with platforms. People don’t really understand why we’d want to be our own Twitter or Reddit, when we’ve already got a one-size-fits-all version we connect to via telecom monopolies. Amber: We are past the personal computing digital inflection point now, though I am not sure exactly where that inflection point happened. I presume that we’ll look back on the centralized web similarly--wondering why so few people saw the value of personal sovereignty--and all the personalized data science, privacy, algorithmic control, and truth-deciphering that goes with it. I’m of the mindset that personalized ads based on browsing history will decline in the long-term as privacy improves and users are treated with more decency. At Hacker Noon, we place based on relevancy to content (it’s a less creepy approach imho). I also believe people will always have a propensity against paywalls. So the future of advertising… how could a decentralized web be better for advertising? David: sponsors It’s fascinating to think about advertising on the dWeb. Shifts in advertising will most likely happen gradually. As data becomes more private, I think we’ll see content-relevant advertising like Hacker Noon’s increase again. Over the long term, however, the dWeb will likely flip advertising on its head--such that people are advertising their needs and desires to companies. For instance, a person who wishes to get in better shape may choose to share this fact publicly (in essence, advertise this goal to the world), and allow gyms, sporting leagues, and sporting goods stores to advertise products that nudge them in the right direction (and perhaps even get paid a small fee for receiving those ads). So instead of ads being targeted in a predatory way, we’ll target ourselves for ads by opting into ones we’ve chosen to aid us toward our goals rather than luring us into impulse buys. Amber: Very cool to think about users collecting your own referral fees for when they become leads for various goods and services. If you could make one thing about how the internet works illegal, what would it be? For reference, mine would be banning no reply email addresses. David: Amber: I would make it illegal for a corporation to take any action that they disallow their users from taking. For instance, a ruled that it was okay for people to scrape public-facing data off LinkedIn websites. I think this is progress, but needs to be taken further, and applied across all platforms. Currently, if you scrape data from social networks, they send a cease-and-desist letter claiming that you are violating terms of “authorized access.” The penalties for this sort of a ToS violation can be extremely high, including hefty fines and jail time in some cases. And yet, corporations seem to be able to scrape our data with ease and no apologies. I can’t remember the last time Google got my permission to scrape my personal website and add it to their search engine’s repository--can you? Why can’t I scrape “their” data, which is really “our” data? It’s a mechanism of monopoly maintenance. And, indeed, social media giants have sued multiple competitors out of business over just this issue. This sort of a double-standard should be illegal. recent court case with LinkedIn What are actionable and simple ways to be a more responsible internet user? David: This depends entirely on one’s ethical framework. My bias is that, while people are sometimes unsavory, I think humanity is on the whole good and should be autonomous. I also believe that information wants to be free. This optimism leads me to favor actions that support the dWeb, open-source software/hardware, and accessibility. Right now, many dWeb projects are clunky, slow, or inconvenient. Still, it’s easy to talk about the projects, and to support them. Tweet about BlueSky to spread awareness for dWeb perks and demand. Consider supporting dWeb projects on Patreon. As the projects get more palatable, try switching over so that some of these dWeb projects can get their numbers up and find venture capital. Some current decentralized social media platforms we work with are d.tube, notabug.io, and . In digital protest, find and use projects that encrypt data sent through centralized platforms (like the experiments we've done with and ), such that these centralized platforms get co-opted to the dWeb from the inside out. This has been most successful so far in dWeb-enthusiast subgroups of a couple hundred or so, who encrypt all data sent through a group page on centralized platforms. Start one! Amber: iris.to party.lol maskbook

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