Massachusetts residents: support the Massachusetts Location Shield Act.

Here is what I gave as my personalized message:

I urge you to support the Location Shield Act — but, as described in the articles I have seen, it has loopholes that may make it fail to achieve its laudable purpose.

It would block the most obvious and usual way for states persecuting abortion patients (and those who help them) to get the data, but there are various others ways which they will not take long to think of. For instance, companies could be "persuaded" to "give away" the data. (States have ways to persuade them — think of what Governor DeMentis has tried with Disney. Most companies won't resist as Disney has.) States could also get the data by subpoena.

I suggest forbidding requiring entities that collect location data in Massachusetts to distribute that data to any entity under any basis, outside of a small list of exceptions such as subpoenas from federal courts or certain specially authorized Massachusetts courts.

This may call for requiring those entities to keep the data inside Massachusetts, stored in ways that Massachusetts law can reliably govern.

Those entities often store their personal data — including location data — on computers belonging to cloudy businesses which don't deal directly with those entities' clients: for instance, Amazon AWS. Persecuting states could get the data by subpoena directly from those businesses. That requirement proposed above about where and how to store the location data could address this loophole too.

The full solution to the danger of massive surveillance of people's movements is to _prohibit collection of location data_. Massive surveillance, of which tracking people's movements is an example, is the foundation of tyranny. Phones should not track people, and when a business asks where you are, it should have to be content with whatever answer you choose give it. You do not owe a business a truthful answer to whatever question it may ask you!

Buses, trains, taxis, cars, and payments systems often track people's movements. We should put a stop to that too. My associates are working on a software system for paying stores and internet subscriptions without identifying yourself — see taler.net for more information.

Ending massive surveillance is a big job and will take time, but a strengthened Location Shield Act could be an exemplary first step.

Everyone: call on WMO and NOAA to name climate disasters after fossil fuel companies.

Several Palestinian militias are based in Jenin. Israel is systematically bombing them with drone attacks.

Possible Palestinian fighters are referred to as "suspected" whatever. Israeli soldiers who fight are never "suspected" of anything.

*Israel’s far-right government fans the flames of vigilante settler violence.*

A lawsuit accused the developers of ChatGPT of "stealing" people's personal data to train the system.

The article does not say how the company obtained that data. Security measures should have prevented that — how come they did not? Is it possible that the company got permission to use that data from other companies that had collected it?

Using the data can be wrong, but the fundamental wrong is collecting it at all.