Privacy

Teen Mental Health App Sent Kid's Data Straight to (cue red menace) TikTok

Ahem....

was leaking data about who visited the website to TikTok, Meta, Snap, and other social media companies

I'm no Sinophobe, I do think there's a point to be made about social media data harvesting and mainlining it to ANY government, and that the CCP is definitely not a government I would trust with open access to all my digital doings. That headline is patently fucking ridiculous click-bait fear mongering, there's numerous US politicians on record saying that privacy concerns have nothing to do with their torch and pitchfork agenda re:TikTok, and the line I quoted above is in the first 1-3 paragraphs. The reality is that corporate/government owned social media has only a few uses:

• mass collection of data for surveillance, profiling individuals for profit or
• as the ProPublica piece on the NSSF and Cambridge Analytics VoteGun operation highlights, manipulation of people through profiling to push political agendas and tamper with elections

I'll edit this with a link to the article in a few minutes.

Edit: https://www.propublica.org/article/guns-lobbying-cambridge-analytica-nssf-privacy-elections

We are calling websites "apps" now?

Seriously, I know it's tempting because most of us have no other options available, but please - be careful when you trust your mental health to one of these "drive through" therapists (if they even are that, I remember a story a little while ago about how the apps don't actually vet the therapists and their credentials, and I'm also certain that a bunch of them are now simply AI. As well as, of course, their being for profit and having access to your most personal and sensitive data and information), especially if you have an actual mental health illness and or are otherwise neurodiverse. Believe me when I tell you that in some cases no therapy is better than bad therapy (that doesn't mean you stop looking for the right kind of help, but settling for the wrong kind can do a lot of damage both short and long term).