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Good Stories are Powerful Lifelines.

Fine. We're Proud of You Zuck - Wary, but Proud

3/12/2019

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It's just a picture of Mark Zuckerberg.Zuckerberg emoting. Credit to NBC.
​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”.

A quick summary of his Blog

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:
  1. Private interactions between people without any “eyes” on your conversation,
  2. Encrypted Data so no “eyes” are watching the mail process in the first place,
  3. Temporary & Secure Data Storage so they’re not holding info longer than needed,
  4. Safety for everyone involved as they interact on the platform and,
  5. Platform Inter-operability that rolls these changes out to every platform they own.
As for why he has changed his views on the future of social media,
We’ve super-cut all the parts that are important to you in a way that makes sense*:
(also check the P.S for more below!)

“I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today's open platforms. Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally, which is why we build social networks. [...] But people should be comfortable being themselves, and should not have to worry about what they share coming back to hurt them later. ” [...] Now, with all the ways people also want to interact privately, there's also an opportunity to build a simpler platform that's focused on privacy first.

[...]  Frankly, we [Facebook] don’t currently have a strong reputation for building protective privacy services, and we've historically focused on tools for more open sharing. [...] There is also a growing concern among some that technology may be centralizing power in the hands of governments and companies like ours.

​[...] But in WhatsApp, for example, our team is obsessed with creating an intimate environment in every aspect of the product. [...] I believe we should be working towards a world where people can speak privately and live freely knowing that their information will only be seen by who they want to see it and won't all stick around forever.​"
 ~ Mark Zuckerberg; Wed. March 6th

​So can we trust him?

Picture: Read the full infographic at: http://onlineprivacydata.com/Read the full infographic at: http://onlineprivacydata.com/
​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.  
​
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.  

So we suggest

​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:
Picture: 5 easy ways to stay safe on the internet Link: https://www.rescqu.net/blog/5-easy-steps-to-stay-safe-anonymous-on-the-internet
Protect yourself Online
Picture: sign up for our anonymous weekly digest!
Get our Anonymous Weekly Digest
Picture: Sign up for our Private Whisper Community!
Join our Whisper Group
Picture: Samantha with Suzanne Dibble

Samantha V Logan

Samantha is the Executive Director of RESCQU.NET as well as a full-stack digital marketer.  She struggles with both of these roles as her primary job asks her to collect  as much information as the internet will allow, while she also actively fights that surveillance marketing for you here at RESCQU.NET.  

Samantha's Bio
View my profile on LinkedIn

*​P.S: We C/P'd some interesting quotes from his blog below:


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Announcing This Year's Unsung Internet Hero Award  |  Shh, she has no idea!

3/6/2019

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Picture: Samantha V Logan with Suzanne Dibble at Traffic & Conversion Summit 2019Suzanne Dibble (left) and me (fangirling) at Traffic & Conversion Summit 2019 in San Diego.
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.  
​
​Before I can tell you about Suzanne, we need to go back to a specific event in LGBTQ+ history:  The Facebook Real Names Policy.


Some Back Story:

​See, way back in 2013 Facebook had been collecting all of our data on an epic scale. 

Everyone was. This was the same for Google, YouTube, Twitter, and every other website because your data was insanely useful for advertising.  It got so bad that a small little-known site called 
Ello.Co was started to change the way we view ads as a public.  

Then Facebook made a major mistake.  

To prevent fake accounts, and to ensure that their data always included “real” and “reliable” information on each person with an account (to sell ads more easily), Facebook took a step to ensure that no "fake names" could be used on the platform.

​To implement this policy, Facebook made an algorithm that decided what a name looked like, and made a new rule that stated you could report accounts that had “fake names” or names that were not attached to a real person.  Once flagged the algorithm would either shut down the account, throw the doors wide open on its privacy, or worse - ask for legal documents to prove the name.  
Picture
The real names policy effectively crowd-sourced account deletion to the masses, and the masses then unfairly targeted people with “odd” (ethnic) names and LGBTQ+ people who they just simply didn’t like. 

Needless to say, it It affected minorities heavily.  

​Entire swathes of the LGBTQ+ community were dead-named, accounts trans people were previously using as other identities were deleted, people ended up homeless, and 
Trans Lifeline, The Trevor Project, and other emergency LGBTQ+ organizations reported record suicide calls. 

"The masses unfairly targeted people with “odd” names and LGBTQ+ people who they just simply didn’t like.  It affected minorities heavily. "
Entire families and lives were ruined because Facebook wanted to stalk more accurately.

This Policy created 2 things:

First: 
It created a mass exodus of LGBTQ+ people from Facebook's platform and they flocked to "anti-social networks" like Whisper and the previously aforementioned Ello.Co. 
(We have communities on both BTW!)
Join our Whisper group!
And Second: 
It created a massive rift of trust between Facebook’s use of data, their moral integrity, and whether its public could trust them which ultimately lead to the Cambridge Analytica Scandal and scrutiny for all other platforms.
Follow us on Ello!
​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."

Enter Suzanne Dibble...

Picture: Suzanne actively teaches businesses the danger of surveillance marketing.Suzanne actively teaches businesses the danger of surveillance marketing.
​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.
​
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.

PictureHere's your Trophy! wait....Well, we'll make one when we have money!
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".
​
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


Picture

Samantha V Logan

Samantha is a full-stack marketer and the Executive Director of RESCQU.NET.  Her experiences in marketing allow her to keep closeted and stealth LGBTQ+ people safe by working to combat the more nefarious aspects of marketing in her communities and on RESCQU.NET's site.

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Why Knowing How to Find Resources is More Vital Than Ever

11/20/2018

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Picture: 4 in 10 lgbt youth (42%) say that community in which they live is not accepting of LGBT people ~human rights watch (https://www.hrc.org/youth-report/view-and-share-statistics)
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. 

So why does this matter?

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.
Now, there are three types of resources for information.
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.

How this works in LGBTQ+ Communities

The problem that LGBTQ+ folks face is a blatant lack of resources about identity.

There are medical, social, and legal questions, among others that people can’t find answers to in a simple google search. There isn’t really a good way to “google” a feeling.

Attempting to do so can also be dangerous.  Our blog on safe internet browsing practices explains how dangerous it can be to find high-quality resources if you are stealth/closeted and share a computer with not-so-friendly people.

While this problem affects everyone, LGBTQ+ youth are at an extreme disadvantage. So let’s talk about resources in the context of youth.

Example: ​Youth Access to LGBTQ+ Resources 

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.   
Picture: Anti-LGBT: States that have laws restricting teachers and staff from talking about LGBT issues at school:  Caption: Sources: Human Rights Watch | Lambda Legal
Sources: Human Rights Watch | Lambda Legal
​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. 
As an immediate resource, might we suggest the Queer Sex Ed podcast?!"
​Without proper curriculum in place for youth to learn about different identities that may apply to them, we end up in one of several places. The darkest of these places is self-harm and suicide.  

Take these resources which offer rare but insightful data on how a lack of resources affect youth:

​“The prevalence of having attempted suicide was higher among gay, lesbian, and bisexual students (29.4%) than heterosexual students (6.4%) and not sure students (13.7%) and higher among not sure students (13.7%) than heterosexual students (6.4%)." ~ CDC.GOV [link] 
“30 percent of transgender youth report a history of at least one suicide attempt, and nearly 42 percent report a history of self-injury, such as cutting."
~cincinattichildrens.org [link] 

Why finding Quality Resources is VITAL

​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. 


Check out our impressive LGBTQ resource database which has vetted primary and secondary sources for your needs. And if you’d need some 1-on-1 support finding resources, check out our online support groups!

About the Author: Erin Tschudi

Erin is the volunteer with the largest tenure here at RESCQU.NET because it allows her to keep connected with the LGBT+ community.  As a bi woman who is soon to be getting married to her future husband she feels deeply for the community and wants to keep that connection.  So she works to train our volunteers, welcome our new community members, and keep the wheels turning.
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Let's Discuss Cookies!

11/6/2018

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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.  
Since the new Law passed you've probably been seeing several popups on different sites: https://www.cookiebot.com/en/gdpr-cookies/
Since the new law passed you've probably been seeing warning like these on several sites.

Let’s start with the basics - What are Cookies?

​ 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.
A beautiful infographic from Vertical Measures describes this more in-depth: https://www.verticalmeasures.com/blog/digital-marketing/cookies-a-guide-to-understanding-data-driven-morsels/
For those who want to know more, here's a beautiful Infographic from vertical measures!
​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.

Is there an easy way to 'see' the cookie?

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.

Yikes! What do I do?

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.

Yeah, but how???

Picture
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 :)

"Why are these invasive cookies a thing in the first place?!?"

Why the internet is built to out you

About the Author: Jerry P


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