Facebook Says Very Little on Privacy of Messenger Rooms

Those policies, and the few specifics Facebook has given publicly about Messenger Rooms, leave unanswered important questions about how the company handles the metadata around video calls…

No surprises there, then.

The Facebook “data policy,” which the company spokesperson repeatedly pointed me to as the firm’s canonical document for questions of information collection, is mostly built from vastly generalized statements (“We collect information about how you use our Products”) punctuated by slightly narrowed examples (“such as the types of content you view or engage with”). The word “include” or “includes” appears 10 times in the data policy, “for example” 19 times, and “such as” 30 times.

The leopard never changes its spots…

Changed our business email hosting provider over the weekend. A fairly straightforward process other than changing the MX records. Used the live chat support to find out what they need to be changed to. It took nearly an hour for them to do it.

Maybe there was a genuine reason for why it took so long but anyway. Got it sorted eventually. And the new system is a lot easier to manage.

Been getting into using Drafts a lot more of late. Scripting is beyond me at the moment but I am making a lot of basic actions to automate stuff I do.

Like drafting a post for this blog. One action emails the draft to WordPress, saves a copy to Dropbox and opens Safari on my WordPress login so that I can open the post and do any final edits before publishing.

Think this will be one subscription app that really earns its keep.

Thoughts have not come easily for the last few days. A flatness in my mind, probably induced in part by a lack of sleep, which in turn is brought on by the short nights and hayfever.

Having finally developed a sense of stability around The Situation for the moment, a kind of ennui has settled in. Not a frame of mind I particularly go for.

This is neither thoroughly unpleasant nor very enjoyable.

Nonetheless, a relaxing weekend meant I caught up on some reading. Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book that has long been on the list.

A nice bit where a discussion around photographing the prairie occurs. Or the difficulties thereof.

You need a three-hundred-and-sixty degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it’s just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it’s gone.

Put me in mind of our trip through Canada back in 2002. Driving west through Alberta with the prairie all around. The sight of the Rockies appearing on the horizon stretching as far as you could see in either direction.

Took photos. That never did it justice.

We try to squeeze every sight, sound and experience into a box, a frame, a screen. But some just won’t fit.

I should finish reading Susan Sontag’s On Photography. Started it about a decade ago but never finished it for some complicated reason.

Naomi Klein, writing about how big tech plans to profit from the pandemic, acknowledges that:

technology is most certainly a key part of how we must protect public health in the coming months and years.

However, she goes on to ask these vital questions about our relationship with tech:

..will that technology be subject to the disciplines of democracy and public oversight, or will it be rolled out in state-of-exception frenzy, without asking critical questions that will shape our lives for decades to come? Questions such as these, for instance: if we are indeed seeing how critical digital connectivity is in times of crisis, should these networks, and our data, really be in the hands of private players such as Google, Amazon and Apple? If public funds are paying for so much of it, should the public also own and control it? If the internet is essential for so much in our lives, as it clearly is, should it be treated as a nonprofit public utility?