Four short links: 3 March 2020
Privacy, HTTP Proxies, Covid-19 and Remote Work, and Tech Writing
- Facebook’s Incomplete Download Your Data (Privacy International) — Despite Facebook claim, “Download Your Information” doesn’t provide users with a list of all advertisers who uploaded a list with their personal data. As a user, this means you can’t exercise your rights under GDPR because you don’t know which companies have uploaded data to Facebook. Information provided about the advertisers is also very limited (just a name and no contact details), preventing users from effectively exercising their rights. Recently announced Off-Facebook feature comes with similar issues, giving little insight into how advertisers collect your personal data and how to prevent such data collection. (via Bruce Schneier)
- Proxy Verifier — an HTTP replay tool designed to verify the behavior of HTTP proxies. It builds a verifier-client binary and a verifier-server binary which each read a set of YAML or JSON files that specify the HTTP traffic for the two to exchange. Open source from Yahoo.
- Stripe’s Covid-19 Company Plan — great time to be a remote working consultant, although I’m sure nobody with entrenched on-site culture wants to hear what’s involved to enable long-term sustainable useful remote work (i.e., change your crappy practices that favor in-office staff, move comms to a slower channel for people who aren’t online all at once because they’re visiting the doctor, etc.).
- Google’s Tech-Writing Course — This collection of courses and learning resources aims to improve your technical documentation. Learn how to plan and author technical documents.
