Melania Trump made an extraordinary declaration in an eagerly awaited memoir to be published a month from election day: she is a passionate supporter of a woman’s right to control her own body – including the right to abortion.

“It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” the Republican nominee’s wife writes, amid a campaign in which Donald Trump’s threats to women’s reproductive rights have played a central role.

“Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes.

“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body. I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”

It seems possible that Brave are building Brave Pro, which looks like its a subscription based service of some kind. A note on the Android implementation of the project reads (GitHub link):

"Implement the required runtime changes (profile settings, chrome flags, group policies, etc.) with the appropriate values that enable the Brave Pro experience. Using Brave in this mode with its default settings and making changes to the Brave Pro defaults require an active paid subscription.

When the browser has no active credentials for Brave Pro, the panel UI will promote the service and include the initial payment CTA. When credentials are present the panel UI will include the appropriate toggles for making changes to the default settings."

It also links to a private Google Doc.

in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn't use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing "hundreds of pages of Facebook documents," reported that Facebook "gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages."

Surprising? No. Appalling? Yes.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/10361406

"Speaking to Russian TV in an on-camera interview on Wednesday, Mr Putin said Mr Biden's leadership would be better for Russia because he was a "more experienced person, he is predictable, he is a politician of the old formation"."

A week or so ago, a blog post was posted in this Community calling out Mullvad for using GMail as their email provider. Wasn't the greatest blog post in the world and didn't approach Mullvad for comment or explanation. Anyway, looks like Mullvad heard about it and responded.

"Protesters who wear masks could face arrest, up to a month in jail and a £1,000 fine under proposed measures that human rights campaigners claim are pandering to “culture war nonsense”.

Police in England and Wales will be given the power to arrest people if they are wearing face coverings at specific demonstrations, the Home Office has said."

Been a bad 18 months or so for privacy in the UK. Online Safety Bill passed, the right to take strike action curtailed, people in receipt of benefits (including disabled people) will soon (as from 2025) have their bank accounts open to the government, the right to protest curtailed and now this.

" three researchers have crafted a long-sought version of private information retrieval and extended it to build a more general privacy strategy. The work, which received a Best Paper Award in June 2023 at the annual Symposium on Theory of Computing, topples a major theoretical barrier on the way to a truly private search."

From their Masto acct:

"It’s almost #DataPrivacyWeek - vote now for your favorite data privacy tools in this 1-minute survey! "

It's not solely about the fediverse, but it is mentioned.

The link goes to this users Mastodon post on the subject. I'm going to copy part of the text of his post without having to post the Threads post they were shown. Click through if you want to see for yourself, avoid if such things are upsetting to you.

"This was a post promoted to me from within Instagram to try and get me to use threads. Ill say that again: this is the promotional content shown to non-threads users as an inducement to join threads."

If you do click through to the Mastodon thread, you'll see several other people confirming they've seen the same or similar posts promoting Threads.

I've said the same thing in comments to other Threads related posts in this community but I'm going to say it again; didn't we create and use fediverse software like Mastodon, Lemmy, PixelFed etc in large part to escape the constant hate-baiting and algorithmic manipulation of companies like Meta? Why are so many in the fediverse prepared to throw their fellow fediverse users under the bus by exposing them to a company and a set of users who not only say these things and not only allow them to be said but actually use them as a promotional tool to encourage more people onto Threads?

If Threads was a fediverse instance, it would've been defederated from by just about everyone by now. Why are some people bending over backwards to give Meta a free pass?

'Wait and see' I hear people say. I can already see.