​We are VERY hard on facebook.  

And for good reason.  

This organization started because of the Facebook Real Names Policy in early 2013 and to this day we harp on Facebook’s refusal to protect LGBTQ+ people by providing alias names, securing data and information better, not catering to peoples’ privacy, and generally sucking at community anonymity when we ask them to.  

But something changed recently in Mark Zuckerberg’s little scrooge heart (possibly robotic?).

A week ago Zuckerberg published a near 3,200-word blog about a shift from public information social networks to private networks.  And that’s VERY good for all of you. 

In this blog, Zuckerberg admitted to the security problems with his platform and announced he will be pivoting to a security-based social platform that we feel holds a lot of promise for your safety, security, and anonymity on the web.

So in this blog, we’re going to go over his letter to let you know what may or may not be “troubling”.

Now fortunately for you, there is no need to read all 3,200 hundred words of the CEO’s admission of guilt because it’s all pretty technical.  

Zuckerberg starts out by suggesting a few ideas about what the future of the internet will entail and we are VERY proud of him here.  He is championing from here on out:

​That sounds all well and good but how is he going to make the current Facebook Juggernaut of platforms (that run on modern marketing companies abusing customer metadata in surveillance marketing) into a safe privacy first, encrypted network that we feel safe using?  

Right now, according to the Online Data Privacy survey, a whopping 83% of Americans believe that too much of their personal information is being made public without their consent and virtually all of them are worried about that information being stolen or abused.  
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So in my opinion...

It’s too soon to tell when these features will be rolled out, if they’ll be useful, and whether they are going to be made in your interest.  Plenty of politicians submit well-meaning population focused bills to Congress that turn into money-grubbing industry-focused laws and that’s no different for technology.  

​Take your safety security and anonymity into your own hands.  Follow our 5-steps to your anonymity and join our already implemented social communities on known safe platforms:

For today’s blog, I want to introduce you to a person who has no idea they’ve made a massive impact on the closeted LGBTQ+ community.  

She is a very prominent lawyer who has worked for one of the richest men in the world.  She’s an online small business lawyer, and as far as I am aware, she has nothing to do with the queer community.

This woman’s name is Suzanne Dibble.  
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​Before I can tell you about Suzanne, we need to go back to a specific event in LGBTQ+ history:  The Facebook Real Names Policy.

​Fast forward several years and we can see that a vast majority of the distrust against Facebook and literally every other data-mining business including Google and YouTube largely began in these early years of social media between 2010-2014. 

Today we live in a world where it's legal for any company to pigeonhole users into disclosing every aspect of themselves for "marketing based on surveillance" which we call "analytics".  

These are marketing tactics based on stalking every user every second of their life.  I discussed how this works in my previous blog, "Why the Web is Built to Out You, and How You can Avoid it."

​Since the Facebook real names policy and Cambridge Analytica scandals, the small businesses and the marketing industry as a whole has been in the spotlight for abusing surveillance marketing tactics.
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And in this world Suzanne Dibble has made her career navigating small businesses ethically and properly through this gigantic mess of big data farming for marketing purposes.  

When a broad-sweeping set of regulations and laws called the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR passed in the European Union in 2017, marketing companies FLIPPED. 

GDPR severely restricts how the internet uses your user data.  This is the reason every company HAS to inform you cookies are a thing and why. If you don't know what cookies are we made a blog here.

But Suzanne went a step further. 

Suzanne made a businesses that not only allowed businesses to navigate GDPR, but she discussed the future of data protection and the END OF SURVEILLANCE MARKETING!!!

For her, this era of mass data abuse will end.  There is no stopping it. Instead of waiting for hard-fought laws to change businesses, she's making businesses change culturally BEFORE the laws even change at all! 

Every client who takes her advice, will naturally, without knowing it, become a little more closet-friendly. 

And for that, Suzanne Dibble, Lawyer extraordinaire, is helping to end a dangerous era for LGBTQ+ people, People of Color, and virtually every other net-citizen.  

So I would like to nominate right now,  Suzanne Dibble for the just now invented, totally should be real, “RESCQU.NET Unsung Internet Improvement Hero Award".
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From the bottom of my heart, thank you.  It was amazing to meet you. And I hope you read this.  Keep doing your work in amazing and fantastic ways.  

​~ Samantha

Credible resources are important. This is always the case. Believe me, I’m an English teacher. 

Unfortunately, credible resources are not exactly simple. 

Some topics have a wealth of resources which create a variety of conflicting opinions you have to tease through. Other issues have a small pool of resources to pick from causing you to lose out on valuable, silenced perspectives. 

Especially where the LGBT+ minority is concerned. 

When it comes to your identity, having a variety of resources, opinions, and people to learn from is vital, but can give you more misinformation. And on the other hand, you cannot, or at least should not, tailor yourself to fit a smaller pool of resources that could be incorrect.

So in this blog, we’re going to teach you how to identify credible information, and deal with the regrettably low amount of information out there for LGBTQ+ people.

1. Primary sources are fist-hand accounts of individual stories. are necessary because they are the easiest to empathize with. 

They’re people telling you stories about who they are. They can come from friends, family, or even some random blogger, but their stories are raw and authentic to themselves. 

2. Secondary sources like articles, reviews, and academic papers, break down the stories, identify trends among similar stories, and provide validation to a single person’s or group’s experience.

3. Tertiary resources like Wikipedia pages, textbooks and encyclopedias zoom out and compile all of the first-person data, and reviews to present it in a bigger format.  Conflicting stories can be put together to establish the pros and cons.  They can more reliably illustrate the complexity of situations. They make it easier to access and to trust.

They are out in the world, discovering themselves for the first time, and want help but they're not getting it. 

The map below lists all of the states with “no promo homo” laws. While the name sounds hilarious, the intentions are more nefarious.

These “no promo homo” laws silence students and teachers from talking about LGBTQ+ issues.   

​They prevent critical information from being taught to LGBTQ youth. 

And sadly, This only records policy.  Not Culture.  This information is not being taught in tons of grey states either. 

These laws directly impact students’ health and well-being. The red states showed actively suppress LGBTQ sex education.  If you, a student or a parent of an LGBT+ student, find yourself in want or need of better sex education, you’ll have to find better resources. 

​Despite these studies being crucial resources necessary for schools to provide to suicidal youth, they were, unfortunately, tricky to find.

And it’s not going to get any easier.

The Census Bureau, our nation’s primary source for data, announced in March of 2017, that it would not include LGBTQ questions on the 2020 census.

After reading the Planned 2020 census, the only whisper of sexuality I found was in the “relationship to housemates section,” So LGBTQ+ people would have to be married to and/or living with a same-sex partner to count as LGBTQ if they even report their marriage, to begin with. There is no mention of gender identity. 

This may be looking pretty grim for you if you are an LGBTQ-identified person searching for resources.  But we at RESCQU NET are working on it. 

Sorry for the click-bait.  It's not the food kind.  But, this is important so keep reading! 

​You’ve probably heard the term “cookie” thrown around while browsing the Internet. Recently, there’s been a big change to these “cookies.”  And that change is vital to your net-safety. 

When you go to a website, a new European Law called GDPR now requires companies to inform you that it uses these "cookies"to track some of the things you do on their site (and afterward).

So we’re going to briefly discuss in this blog, what a cookie is when they can infringe on your privacy and then we’ll show you how to avoid the dangerous ones.  

​ The term originated as a “computer nerd” expression describing a set of data that is sent from a site’s server to your computer, and that comes back unchanged, called a “magic cookie.”

Technically speaking, the cookies saved to your web browser create a dictionary of all kinds of information related to you; what you’ve browsed and information that helps web pages give you a better experience on their sites. Websites use cookies for all kinds of things, and not all of them are bad.  Indeed marketers use them to make website advertising a kinder place for you.

But, you can think of cookies as a collection of membership cards.

When you navigate to a site, it provides you a cookie that says “I’ve been here and am interested in these things.”  The sites then request them back from your browser to verify who you are, what you’re on the site for and then they custom-tailor their information for you based on the cookies you have.

​For example...
When you log in to your bank’s website, the site will “start a session” for you and that session is tracked with a cookie. This cookie cannot be accessed by other websites, but when you log into your bank again, there's no need to provide a password because the cookie already "verified" you.  This cookie is helpful.

But when you browse a shopping website and click on an item, many shopping websites will track that item in a “recently viewed” area of the shopping site by giving you a cookie that tracks what items you’ve viewed. This one could be used to out you.

After leaving that shopping site, you may also notice that same item shows up in an advertisement on another website because it requested your “Amazon Products” cookie. That’s where things start to feel a little unsettling for most people.

Frankly speaking, No. There's not really an easy way.

But there are two ways if you're willing to do it. (If not, skip to what you can do to prevent cookies).

1. "View Page Info" 
​In Firefox, you can see if a website is using cookies by right-clicking any inactive part of a web page (for example, away from all the links and pictures) and select “View Page Info.” 

This provides a dizzying amount of information. We’ll likely discuss this view in a later 201 blog, but at least some of it will probably make sense to you. 

If you look under the “Security” tab, you’ll find things like the website identity, how many times your browser thinks you’ve visited the site, and whether it uses cookies or not. 

At this point, you can clear the cookies just for the site you’re on if you want. This is a "reasonably" simple way to see if cookies are in use on the site you’re looking at, but it's really not ley-person friendly.

2. The Storage Inspector
You can also see all of the cookies your browser has recorded in Firefox using SHIFT-F9 to bring up the “Storage Inspector.” From there, you’ll see a menu on the left for different ways the site can store information. One of those is “Cookies.” If you expand and highlight the site you’re interested in, the grid will then contain all the cookies that are currently active for the site.

What you're probably going to be most interested in are the “Name” and “Value” fields.

Clicking on a cookie record will bring up the details, but to get a good look at a cookie, you have to expand the “Data” window on the right side of the SHIFT-F9 window.

For Example:  Using the Wikipedia Cookie Page
Just to give you a little taste of what you might find, I tried the Wikipedia cookie page. And, guess what? 

It saved the location I’m browsing the page from in a cookie called “GeoIP.”

Why does Wikipedia need to know where I am to provide the information I requested??? 

See how this works? Imagine if you’ve been doing personal research at the library, and you log in to a site you’re using. That site may put your location data in a cookie. Some cookies stick around – so later another website you visit can capture that cookie. So, now, two websites can figure out that you’ve visited this other site from the library.

1 - Clear Your Cookies!
Make it a regular practice to clear your cookies before you move onto or away from sites you don’t want people to know you’re on. 

This does delete helpful cookies like session logins but we feel it’s worth the inconvenience.

2 - Use Private Browsing Modes
Another approach is to use the incognito mode available in most browsers when doing personal research on LGBTQ+ related things.  Be sure to start a new incognito session every time you want to go to a new page (easier said than done). 

To do this, you can copy the link you want to go to next by right-clicking on the link and selecting something like “Copy Link Address.” After you’ve copied the link, you can close your incognito session and start a new one.  Then copy that link in the new incognito session. 

This prevents the sites from talking to each other through your browser.

Here’s more information on how to view and delete cookies on the top used browsers:

1. How do I see and control cookies in my web browser?
2. More on the Firefox Storage Inspector.
3. Get to know how different cookies work using this awesome Infographic!

The “View Page Info” feature in Firefox is relatively unique to that browser and can really help you just get to know some of the basic things that are going on when you browse websites – knowledge is power :)