Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours
Benjamin Mako Hill:
For almost 15 years, I have run my own email server which I use for all of my non-work correspondence. I do so to keep autonomy, control, and privacy over my email and so that no big company has copies of all of my personal email. [...]
Despite the fact that I spend hundreds of dollars a year and hours of work to host my own email server, Google has about half of my personal email! Last year, Google delivered 57% of the emails in my inbox that I replied to. They have delivered more than a third of all the email I've replied to every year since 2006 and more than half since 2010. On the upside, there is some indication that the proportion is going down. So far this year, only 51% of the emails I've replied to arrived from Google. [...]
I've broken down the proportions of emails I received that come from Google in the graph below for all email (top) and for emails I have replied to (bottom). In the graphs, the size of the dots represents the total number of emails counted to make that proportion.
The numbers are higher than I imagined and reflect somewhat depressing news. They show how it's complicated to think about privacy and autonomy for communication between parties. I'm not sure what to do except encourage others to consider, in the wake of the Snowden revelations and everything else, whether you really want Google to have all your email. And half of mine.
Tags: big brother, conspiracies, corporations, doomed, mail, security, www
Legal System Fails Again: No Charges for Trucker Who Killed Amelie
"Deadly negligence by a professional driver is still okay in the eyes of the law here in San Francisco."The truck driver who hit and killed Amelie Le Moullac on her bike at Folsom and Sixth Streets last August will face no charges from District Attorney George Gascón, despite surveillance video showing the driver at fault in the incident.
Gilberto Alcantar, the truck driver, is shown making an unsafe right turn in the bike lane in the video found by an SF Bicycle Coalition staffer. SFPD investigators initially claimed they could find no such video, and initially blamed Le Moullac for her own death. SFPD Chief Greg Suhr later apologized for the botched investigation, as well as the behavior of the sergeant who purposefully blocked a bike lane at a rally for safer streets in her honor. Suhr declared that the video evidence showed the fault was mainly with the driver, but DA Gascón says prosecutors can't make an adequate case to file charges. [...]
"After reviewing the evidence that we have, looking at the video of the incident, it's really hard for this grieving family to understand how a driver can do what he did without receiving even a slap on the wrist for a minor violation of the vehicle code," Liberty said.
"There is no issue about what happened. The video is clear, from what I understand -- he made an unlawful turn across the bike lane," said Shaana Rahman, an attorney who represents pedestrian and bicyclist victims in civil court. "It's not all the time that you get such a clear piece of evidence in cases, either civil or criminal. There aren't videos for every bike accident that happens -- and here we have one."
As frustrating as the lack of charges in this case may be, it's par for the course when it comes to holding drivers accountable for killing people biking and walking. As the Center for Investigative Reporting found last year, 60 percent of the 238 drivers who killed pedestrians in the Bay Area between 2007 and 2011 were found to be at fault or suspected of a crime but faced no criminal charges, and those who did usually only faced a slap on the wrist. Drivers tend not to be charged unless they were drunk or fled the scene.
jwz mixtape 140
Please enjoy jwz mixtape 140. I felt like making an audio-only mixtape this time. I haven't done that in five years.
This will self-destruct in two weeks.
If you open it in Safari, it's not seekable, but if you copy the URL and open it in iTunes, it's seekable and has per-track metadata. (Which I guess means that <previously> is no longer entirely true.)
Our irregularly programmed schedule will return next week.
Tags: computers, firstperson, mac, mixtape, mpegs, music, webcasting
Current Music: as noted
