Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse… Fucking republicans. Again.
“Anti-abortion activists have already used location data to send targeted anti-choice ads to women’s phones while they are sitting in abortion clinics,” the senators wrote in the letter. “Anti-abortion politicians in Republican-led states have placed bounties on women who receive abortions and doctors that provide them and even proposed laws that would punish pregnant people for traveling to seek abortions out of state. Anti-abortion prosecutors have used search and message data to criminally charge abortion-seekers.” (Emphasis added) (Huffington Post)
What many don’t realize is web pages and internet apps track what you do and report back to these data aggregators. Internet providers look over your shoulders. Some are facebook itself but many are all sorts of other cookie and tracking companies. There’s thousands of them. Web pages you visit literally spy on you and report. It’s a huge part of facebook’s business model and any page that has a facebook like button (or other services) pays big attention.
Most of the time this is just money hungry greedy business preying on the unsuspecting. “But I like seeing ads that interest me…” But now we are seeing these datasets used to arrest and charge people doing things they thought were in private. Unscrupulous data brokers are tipping the nazis off that you might not be a good obedient citizen.
It’s not perfect protection but goes a long way to stopping trackers - Pie Hole. (https://pi-hole.net)
Pie Hole runs on a Raspberry Pi and becomes a local DNS (domain name service) source. You can also look into DNS services like OpenDNS. These are your first lines of tracking defense. Pie Hole uses community-developed block lists to block known trackers. You can whitelist and blacklist as you see fit. If you don’t know what DNS is or why it and block lists can help, time to learn. Republicans are turning all the tracking and monitoring capabilities of the internet into tools to root out and harass/prosecute the rest of us.
From today’s Huffington Post…
Utterly terrifying. Why would ANY young women want to live in these states if this materializes? Will businesses move out of TX because smart people won’t live under such tyranny? Oh The Irony….