Battening down the hatches

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In something of a digression from my children’s book project, I spent the day removing anything on my work and art websites that contained references to trackers. I checked my websites for cookies and Javascript such as google analytics and google font servers that might be seen as trackers.

The two articles below give good reasons for dumping Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Twitter, and they show ways to start regaining the privacy that many of us have unwittingly given to the Surveillance Economy.

I haven’t extracted myself from the sticky web of the privacy thieves yet. I’m not even close. I eagerly grabbed up the free goodies that Google and Facebook were dealing. Two years ago I deleted my Facebook account, and today I began to disentangle myself further. To start with, I deleted 8 Instagram accounts today. I don’t fool myself that the “Account Deleted” message means that my data was really deleted. I expect that Zuckerberg and his creepy cronies never actually delete accounts.

Another big surveillance dealer is Google. I have many “free” Google email accounts that I’ve created over the years. It takes time to deal with those. The number of emails I’ve sent from that account is mind-boggling. I’m sure Google scraped every word of every message. But it’s important to get started pulling off Googles tentacles, one by one. To get started I’ve got a new email account at disroot.org.

And now, back to drawing. Here’s my custom Facebook Free badge.

Facebook Free, basecamp.com, privacy