Overview
I love data, but I am highly skeptical of centralized databases of any kind. I don’t like it when groups of people make lists of other people they want to monitor. I don’t like it when private corporations do it, I don’t like it when rogue militias do it, I don’t like it when state agencies do it. Yet, it’s in the nature of institutions and systems that they only exist insofar as they can draw boundaries between themselves and the outside world to be defined, modeled, and controlled. Data and surveillance are key ingredients for institutions seeking to construct a predictive model that enhances their ability to monitor their influence and control.
On a personal level, I am constantly torn between the desire to collect data to detect patterns and the desire to preserve privacy and anonymity for maximal freedoms. I don’t include any tracking mechanisms on this site to collect your data aside from what Cloudflare tells me as the hosting service for these pages. I can see unique visitors, total page requests, geographic distribution, and some other adjacent surface metrics, but nothing that gives me a clue about who you actually are or what you do once you leave my site. Some people think that’s excessive paranoia, and they might be right, but on the other hand, most of us aren’t aware of most security issues that exist in the technology we use. I record the ones I’m aware of here.
Also, many of these breaches involve class action lawsuits, so get that bread, friends.