Tootfinder

An Empirical Inquiry into Surveillance Capitalism: Web Tracking
Nils Bonfils
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07454 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07454

An Empirical Inquiry into Surveillance Capitalism: Web Tracking
The modern web is increasingly characterized by the pervasiveness of Surveillance Capitalism. This investigation employs an empirical approach to examine this phenomenon through the web tracking practices of major tech companies -- specifically Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) -- and their relation to financial performance indicators. Using longitudinal data from WhoTracks.Me spanning from 2017 to 2025 and publicly accessible SEC filings, this paper analyzes patterns and t…

Fascism is once again rising across the world, creeping in through surveillance capitalism, mass data harvesting, chat control laws, UK-style age verification, and endless new tools of digital censorship presented as safety.
Freedoms vanish piece by piece through biometric borders, predictive policing, restrictions on protest, voter suppression, book bans, and the relentless spread of authoritarian policies disguised as order. What seemed impossible a decade ago is now routine.
T…

Me: "hey, any interest in switching this [SMS thread] over to Signal?"
Other class parent: "I would prefer not to add another service I'm not currently using. But we could do WhatsApp."
🙄
we fucking deserve the surveillance capitalism that we have

I’ve been checking out the secureblue project recently, and it’s actually pretty interesting.
I’ll admit, online privacy feels like a straight-up meme in today’s world of surveillance capitalism, but secureblue is pushing out some genuinely unique projects that are absolutely worth looking into.
From what I can tell, secureblue feels a lot like the desktop version of GrapheneOS, taking that same security-focused foundation and bringing it into the Linux desktop space in a meaningful way.
#secureblue #GrapheneOS #Linux #SurveillanceCapitalism #Capitalism #Surveillance #FreeSoftware #Privacy

Do We Need Subsidiarity in Software?
Louisa Conwill, Megan Levis Scheirer, Walter Scheirer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13466 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.1346…

Do We Need Subsidiarity in Software?
Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that promotes human dignity and resists over-centralization by balancing personal autonomy with intervention from higher authorities only when necessary. Thus it is a relevant, but not previously explored, critical lens for discerning the tradeoffs between complete user control of software and surrendering control to "big tech" for convenience, as is common in surveillance capitalism. Our study explores data privacy through the lens of subsidia…