Bzachman
Shared posts
Cell Carriers May Sell Your Location & Browsing History, Here’s How to Opt Out
Cellular carriers in the USA are looking to start selling customer usage data to third parties and marketers, according to TechCrunch. This is being done in an effort labeled as ‘personalization’ and using some other boring and friendly sounding descriptions. Though the information is supposedly aggregate and anonymous, it still may include fairly personal details like what apps you use, your location data, and web browsing history, and other bits of info that privacy conscious individuals probably don’t want to share with the outside world.
Fortunately, it’s fairly easy for users to opt out of these efforts through the major US carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile:
- AT&T customers can opt out here
- Verizon customers can opt out by visiting this website and looking under “Manage Privacy Settings”, or by calling this phone number 1-800-333-9956
- Sprint customers can opt out here
- T-Mobile customers can adjust settings at this website, or call 1-800-937-8997, and opt out of individual cookies through this third party site
In most cases it only takes a moment to opt-out, though you will have to log into your account and opt out per phone number, or call and speak with a representative and specifically ask not to be included in the data sharing. If you’re not too excited about the idea of your cell provider selling some of your personal data, even if anonymized, it’s probably worth spending the minute or so to opt out.
Thanks to TechCrunch for pointing this out, and for providing the various opt-out links.
Know the Secret Costco Price Codes to Save Even More Money
The price signs at Costco will clue you in to the best deals and help you save even more money at the warehouse store.
    
|
The real reason Google wants to kill RSS
RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. It allows anyone, large or small, to build something new and disrupt anyone else they’d like because nobody has to fly six salespeople out first to work out a partnership with anyone else’s salespeople.
That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. “Sunset” it. “Clean it up.” “Retire” it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.
Well, fuck them, and fuck that.
Lockdown [marco.org]
|
|
Weekly update: June 24-30
Good news everyone. It looks like we can finally show some result of what we have been doing for the last couple of months, namely our mobile API. We have been running it on our test server for a week, gathered some initial feedback from several awesome mobile developers, and we think it’s now ready to be tested by the general public.
What does it mean to you? It means that there is now technical possibility to use The Old Reader with your favorite RSS app.
You can already try The Old Reader in Feeddler – free version already supports it, and the Pro version should get updated any time soon. Kudos to Che-Bin Liu for being extremely helpful in testing the API and getting Feeddler integrated so fast.
The documentation for the API is available in a separate github repo. It’s not the best piece of docs we’ve ever seen, but it seems to cover the basic use cases. You are welcome to improve it, just send us a pull request with your adjustments. Please note that even though you can use API both via http and https, we highly encourage you to use https for security reasons.
If you find any bugs or feel that something is not working as expected, please feel free to create a github issue or contact us at api@theoldreader.com.
And last, but not least, spread the word. Let the developer of your favorite RSS app know about The Old Reader API, and ask them to get integrated. We would really like to see more and more apps working with the site bringing native mobile experience to the users of all platforms.
(poster generated by The Keep Calm-O-Matic)