A review of nl hafta by harshit, deb and arpit

I’m a somewhat recent subscriber and have become a huge fan of NL Hafta and all your other podcasts. I’m just writing in with a short response to one of the emails you received on Hafta 165

and the subsequent discussion you guys had regarding Facebook listening in on you through your phone’s microphone. Though the Facebook app has access to your phone’s microphone, on both

Android and iOS, you can revoke the said access and continue using the app. In any case, it is now a well-established fact that Facebook does not use the microphone to collect data about you

to target ads, it does, however, use some very shady techniques to know very intimate details about you, which is why people get mistaken into believing that Facebook has been listening in.

One of these techniques is Facebook Pixel, which is an invisible pixel that Facebook has on partner websites constantly sending back data regarding your activity, so your sojourns across

the internet are all under the watchful eye of Facebook, even when you don’t know it. Anyway, keep up the great work! Paying to keep news free, ————————————————— I am a regular listener and

subscriber of NL. I have an issue bothering me. Would love the NL team to weigh in on this. Premise – Cambridge Analytica is being blamed for all the political brainwashing using data. I was

wondering if it was data or people who are responsible for letting themselves into being brainwashed. Contention – We, liberals, always talk about liberty and letting all ideas, opinions to

be widely discussed. We want to allow it. That’s what we stand for. We consider educated human beings to be superior enough to see what is real and what is fake. No true liberal would like

any content to be banned or controlled (excluding violence or anything extreme against humanity etc.) However, consider this biased content being fed to us by data manipulation on FB etc.

Again, I specify that I am talking about ideological, belief or faith-related content and not violence, or inhuman [actions]. Should liberals regulate and control that? Should we even try

to? Isn’t this against the values of liberalism? Shouldn’t it exist? But human beings should be able to differentiate the good from the bad. If we start controlling the content etc. being

fearful of how it will impact fellow people isn’t it subconsciously supporting a kind of censorship and assuming my neighbours are lesser? Worldwide this reinforcement of bias is working,

even in countries that are rich, developed and filled with educated people (considering India still has a long way to go, since masses are not well-educated). Why are educated people getting

biased by such narrow thoughts? I wonder. Would be good to have you guys discuss and share your views. Keep up the good work, so that you can steal more of my money 😀 —————————————————

Subscriber for almost a year now and a huge fan of your work! I am writing for the first time in response to the Hafta team’s reaction to Nishant Shrivastava‘s email in Hafta 165 regarding

data mining done by apps on your phones to provide you with advertisements and collect your data. A slightly long email (340 words) as I feel compelled to share this information with the

Hafta team. I hope you get a chance to read this. Apps on your cell phones constantly track your activity from tracking your messages to accessing your photos, microphone, location, health

data, and the list never ends. I work in this field and am extremely cautious (paranoid) about access to my data for the apps installed on my phone. I don’t even use Google for my searches

and work with DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine. I would like to point to an instance where I was talking to my sister about a clothing brand, and the advertisement appeared on her

Instagram minutes later — because the microphone on her phone caught it. I would like to make a few suggestions to the team on the subject: Check the privacy settings on your phone, which

apps have access to your location, calls, messages, photos, microphone, etc and reconsider all the permissions you have granted. Revoke all the ones which aren’t absolutely necessary. Check

your personal Google and Facebook accounts to see all the apps that have access to your information because you signed in with your account. Revoke access to old apps and services, which you

don’t use anymore. Use a password manager to set up strong ambiguous passwords for all your accounts so the passwords are not easy to decrypt. I would suggest LastPass and RememBear — these

services are free with good features that will help you set up strong passwords. I am happy to point out more resources if the Hafta team would like that. With that, I end my rant. Thank

you for reading the email.