It seems like every business now has its own app, which usually offers remote ordering, as well as discounts. I do my best not to use any of them, because they demand (and transmit to the business) all sorts of private information from my phone. This seems to me like something my phone ought to fix.

Front screen of my phone, showing folders of the apps I use

It ought to be pretty easy on the phone to provide a virtual machine which only passes to an app whatever information the phone owner wants to pass on. For example, you could configure a video loop to provide, if the app wants to turn on the camera, or an audio file to provide if the app wants to turn on the microphone.

You could get quite fancy about things like location, if you wanted to. For example, a fast food app could be provided a random location, but one that was a configurable distance from the fast food restaurant. (I’m imagining that the fast food apps either already do, or soon will, adjust the price based on where you are. For example, if you’re already in the parking lot, they can raise the price, assuming that you’ve already decided to buy from them. They can cut the price if a competitor is closer to your location, to reduce the chance that you’ll stop there instead. The phone could pick a location to maximize your discount, to the extent that people had been able to figure out and share the algorithm.)

These sorts of tweaks would be easy to implement, but there’s no functionality in phones to provide them. It’s as if the manufacturers of the phones want to rat you out to every business with a phone app.

I resist by strictly limiting which apps I install on my phone. But I’d be a lot happier with a virtual machine which would put me in control of what data about me those installed apps could get.

I’m a bit surprised that the billionaires are so blasé about a fascist taking over the government. Yeah, yeah—maybe their taxes will go down. But maybe not—Trump only cares about his taxes, not theirs.

More to the point, don’t they know what’s been happening to the billionaires in China and Russia these past few years?

I don’t get why people are treating Helene like some unpredictable catastrophe, rather than just the way things are now.

I’m like, “Hey, it’s going to be like this all the time from now on—either impending disaster, disaster occurring, trying to rescue people from the disaster, or recovering from disaster—from now on.”

It’s weird that people don’t understand that. I mean, it’s so obvious to me, but people are still treating each new disaster as an unpredictable one-off.

Although some people are getting a clue. Zillow, for example, will now show climate risks for property listings in the US.

This guy has an app for bulk unsubscribing (and text in Section 230 that perhaps protects it).

Personally, I’d like the opposite of what this app is described as doing: I want a plugin to purge my feed of everything except posts by people I follow. (All the rest of that stuff is “objectionable material” as far as I’m concerned.) That would make Facebook usable again, maybe.

… focused on a part of Section 230 that spells out protection for blocking objectionable material online.

Source: NYT

Cory Doctorow points out a key—and helpful to us—aspect of Project 2025:

These are the conflicts that are so central to the priorities of blocs that are so important to the coalition that they must be included, even though that inclusion constitutes a blinking “LOOK AT ME” sign telling us where the right is ready to split apart.

Source: Pluralistic