It’s been a bit of time since the last time I wrote. I wish I could say that’s because I have other stuff in the works to be published, but in all honesty it’s simply because I’ve not bothered to write anything. So today, I thought I’d take a bit of a closer look into why that is, and what’s causing my particular form of writer’s block.
Ah, so you’ve decided my deranged ramblings are worthwhile listening to after all. Well, at the end of the last instalment of Encrypted Pigeons, I had a very healthy de-Googled phone, a bunch of data exports, and absolutely no way to do anything with them. The thing about Google apps is that you actually need to replace them with something. Stands to reason, really…
But I wasn’t going to be put off and return to American Big Tech. Rather than tackling Big Tech specifically, I decided it was the Americans who had to go. Hello Brussels.
My concern at this point wasn’t privacy per se — it was simply is an app British or European, and do I enjoy using it. A few notable cases come to mind with this.
Welcome back to the next part in the series I’m calling “Encrypted Pigeons“. Why? Because it’s a frankly terrible name and I’m sticking with it.
At the end of the last issue, I was talking about my overall experiences with privacy, and how that has changed quite a bit. Roughly six months ago, I had no real understanding of digital privacy, and I was perfectly happy to keep going as I was. My main computer was Windows 11; I messaged everyone on WhatsApp, and practically everything I did backed up onto Google drive in some way or another. Google Photos, Google calendar, Google everywhere.
I was happy with that, because it all worked together quite well. I only had a vague sense that maybe my digital life wasn’t quite in my control.
I’d been quite excited to read this one for a while. It was a Christmas present, and I’d been told that Ursula Le Guin was “the birth of modern fantasy”. Tolkien’s predating her by about a decade aside, it was certainly interesting.
One disclaimer: the edition I read was the original Earthsea quartet of A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, and Tehanu. It did not include the two later books written to finish the series.
I use Google Wallet.
That’s a bit of an issue for me, because I’d quite like to stop using Google’s products.
In Scotland, the country harvests their potatoes — colloquially known as “tatties” — around mid-October. Farming families, looking for more labourers to help them, would often bring their children out of school during the season to help with the harvest.
Eventually, schools became so empty during this period that the schools themselves, who generally received funds based on attendance, were suffering, and complaining to the then Scotch Education Department. Around the 1870s, the Department decided to make the entire period a school holiday, which was quite an effective way of avoiding having to deal with the problem. 🤣
I use Google Wallet.
That annoys me somewhat, because I’d quite like to stop using Google products. Not because Google is necessarily evil, but because I don’t agree with what they do with my data, whether I knowingly hand it over or not. And so far, I’ve managed pretty well to avoid most of Google’s ecosystem.
That’s why I use Proton for my email and my passwords. I self-host my photos, my documents, on Nextcloud. I replaced Google apps on my phone with more open, more privacy-respecting ones. Honestly? It was kind of fun.
So why is it that, when I go into a shop, and put my phone to the card machine, it’s a little Google logo that turns up and takes my payment?
This got me thinking a lot about what “privacy” actually means to most people, particularly today, when so much of the data companies collect is increasingly being fed into AI systems. I’m not especially interested in perfect privacy, I’m not going to ditch every proprietary app, go live in the woods, and communicate with the world through encrypted pigeons. That’s just ridiculous.
What I am interested in though, is understanding just what’s at stake when I click a cookie banner, or open an app. What am I giving to companies, in exchange for the services they provide me?
Today, I finally got around to watching Christopher Nolan’s new(ish) film: The Odyssey. Overall, it wasn’t bad, but there are a few key areas that I would question.
For the avoidance of doubt, and if you hadn’t realised already, this post contains spoilers for the film.
There are twelve months in the year, and each one has a unique and distinctive name. There are some distinct patterns though, linked mostly to history, and specifically the Romans.
Recently, I was telling my family an interesting bit of research I’d found that day, about wartime defences on the Suffolk coast, such as the Sound Mirrors of Dungeness. These are giant concrete structures there from the 1930s, designed to reflect engine motor noises from out at sea into specially tuned microphones. The intention was to hear enemy planes before they arrived to prepare.
Those defences were never used during wartime — radar was invented soon after as a much more accurate system — but the walls are still there after over 90 years.
Anyway, as I was telling my family about this over dinner, the television was on at the same time with Jim Moir in the BBC’s Walking With… series, making his way around the Kentish coast. We weren’t really paying attention to it, but I could see the screen out of the corner of my eye.
As I was telling them about these defences, what should come onto the screen but the very stone walls and parabolic shapes of the Sound Mirrors that I was describing! I was pretty surprised, as was the rest of my family.