Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Metadata: The Digital Fingerprint You Had No Idea Is Attached To Every Photo You Take

In a day and age where everyone is walking around carrying a portable GPS/supercomputer in their pockets, it should be of no surprise that location data can help track you at almost any given point in the day.

But while this may be semi-expected, one way in which people may not know they’re offering up information is through photographs.

Such was the topic of a new BBC report, which delved into exactly how much information people are offering up with their photo metadata – the digital “fingerprint” that’s attached to every digital photo you take.

Metadata became a national issue when comparisons of two photographs of former President Trump at Walter Reed Medical Center were scrutinized closely to try and determine whether they were staged or not, BBC notes. Metadata also led to authorities being able to detain John McAfee in 2012, after a photograph’s location data revealed he was in Guatemala at the time.

This data “automatically and parasitically burrows itself into every photo you take,” BBC notes. And while it’s not impossible to get rid of, most people don’t even realize that it’s there before widely sharing their photographs on social media. And while some platforms remove sensitive information, like where a photo was taken, others don’t.

The tool has become useful for police investigations, who often use it to place criminals at a scene. But the data can clearly be a slippery slope and be used for nefarious purposes, as well.

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Government Minister Says People Should “Call Out” Others For Hugging Their Loved Ones

A government minister appeared on morning television to urge Brits to “call out” others if they were seen engaging “in an odd way,” such as hugging their loved ones.

Yes, really.

Nigel Huddleston, the UK’s minister for tourism and sport, made the remarks during an interview spot on BBC Breakfast.

“Despite the temptation, please don’t risk the health of your loved ones by actually hugging them,” said Huddleston, before going on to suggest that people should intervene if they witness such dreadful behavior.

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The Fact That Americans Think Biden Has Changed Things Shows How Narrative Rules Our World

Nothing of significance has changed since Trump left office, apart from the narratives about how much things have changed.

The wars are still going. Washington is still the hub of an oligarchic globe-spanning empire. Americans are still being impoverished and propagandized into political impotence by an unfathomably wealthy plutocracy. Sanctions are still squeezing people to death in Venezuela, Syria, Iran and North Korea. The world’s worst mass atrocity is still continuing in Yemen. The kids are still in cages. Authoritarian creep continues to metastasize. All the old abuses roll on completely uninterrupted, along the same trajectories they were on before.

If you were to take the entire US-centralized power structure and assess its overall behavior as a whole, you would find that the actual behavioral changes amount to the tiniest fraction of a single percentile of the total. If you’d just been analyzing the raw data without looking at the news stories, you’d see that the money, troops, weapons and resources have continued to move in more or less the same ways after January 20th as they were moving before.

What has changed is the narratives, the stories that Americans are being fed by those who are responsible for controlling the way people think, act, organize, and vote. If you are a Democrat, you have been hearing that the country is now a thousand percent better without the Orange Menace in charge. If you are a Republican, you’ve been hearing that it’s a thousand percent worse. In reality, in terms of the overall operation of the empire both domestically and internationally, hardly anything of significance has changed apart from the narrative overlay.

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