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Wolfdog has posted Essential tools to make the modern web more bearable, and people have even more recommendations in the thread. Bookmarked so hard. 🔖

The Whisper by Brian Smithson (Old Geordie) (cc by)

Are Siri, Alexa, et al, relaying your private conversations to advertisers? Kadin2048 on why this isn't the case, why the truth is actually more nefarious, and why the distinction matters.

dip dip dip, my blue ship, sailing on the water like a cup and saucer, o-u-t spells out ;-) by *Psyche Delia* (cc by-nc)

Members are now offered a couple of new profile page preference choices: the ability to make their "Contributions" and "Social" fields visible only to logged-in members, and the ability to enter their geographic coordinates without this info being visible. See all the details in this Metatalk post.

Facebook Disc by dannysullivan from this article (cc by)

I place Facebook ads on behalf of my workplace and looking at the ad console has been sort of fascinating to me as an end user in explaining why I see some of the ads I do and how I can stop some of the more obnoxious ones from appearing....

Most [facebook ad targeting] is based off user submitted data (if you don't tell Facebook how old your kids are, they can't serve you ads based on it) but some of it is stuff you wouldn't expect to be used that way. It brought me up short when I realised Facebook could use my submitted location and the submitted locations of my family members to target me as somebody who was isolated from my loved ones. I never saw any ads for the Scientologists or anything, just innocuous stuff, but it still creeped me out a little.