Notesday

In wasted dollars

Our species began to get civilized when it invented clothing: the original privacy tech. But that was in the natural world. In the digital one, we are still naked, and privacy is just a promise you get from "consent" (cookie notice) agreements and settings. It's a fail. Example: the GDPR Privacy Monitor examined 97,000 websites and found that— 

55% displayed no consent (cookie choice) banner80.4% continued tracking after the user clicked reject68% activate third-party tracking before the user has given consent66.6% set cookies before consent

And the consent management platform (CMP) business weighs in at $4.1 billion.

We now return to hiss

WMEX/1510, which in its heyday was Boston's main top 40 music station, has signed off for a final time. The station had a cursed transmitter history you can read about at the opening link. When I lived in Arlington, Mass from 2007 to 2013, the transmitter was nearby in Belmont, using four towers in a parking lot in an industrial part of town. It was 50,000 watts at the time. Killer signal, but a doomed site. I shot it in 2008. Here's the photo album. In the late Teens, after a period of silence, it moved to the 1260 AM site (built for what was then WNAC) on a tidal swamp south of town. Then only 10,000 watts and just 100 watts at night, it operated as an oldies station. I shot that site too, from an airplane on approach to Logan in 2011. 

What we're watching is the slo-mo heart failure of the AM broadcast band. Knowing that, I like to document what was there before it's gone. 

In case there is a reason

This piece (first of three in a series) about Zoom' privacy practices was written more than six years ago, and I haven't revisited the topic since then. But I thought it might be worth bringing up.

You can deal with the identity piece at IIW

I just learned that Reverse Alignment is a thing. It addresses—

Large, coordinated investments in the human and institutional side of the AI transformation. They span identity, privacy, markets, governance, work, and knowledge. They share an architecture, and they share a method. No single sector can deliver any one of them alone.

We found a clubhouse!

Reason: Kids Are Using NPR Podcast Comments as Secret Group Chats.