Blake Ross

I can't separate what actually happened from the sensationalizing in the article.

It says the websites had Google cookies and others. OK, anybody using Google Analytics has Google cookies. Anyone using FB plugins has FB cookies. Yes, websites certainly have a lot of cookies these days, and the information inferred by use of these can be in a generic fashion to target and rank ads. That's worthy of scrutiny -- but this isn't what the article is about. What is the evidence of "mental health" being treated in some scary specific way?

The only substantial thing in the article supporting the headline is one charge that a site sent quiz answers to Player.qualifo.com -- which appears to be an unregistered domain.

OK, so what information was sold? When did money change hands? Is there any hard evidence that mental health information was "sold to advertisers", as is claimed in the headline? Or is this just bullshit they made up to get clicks?

For that matter, even if you wanted to do some evil psychographic ad thing, why would anyone sell that info to advertisers? What are they gonna do with it? Like, why hand them the literal data, when you could allow them to just bid on ads that may be targeted/ranked using your painstakingly collected psychographic data (a la Cambridge Analytica)? Why sell cow when you can sell the milk?

The fearmongering and disinformation around adtech and privacy numbs us to legitimately scary things being done that should be covered more.

Makes me think…

They've been led to believe this by a common-sense assumption that police are there to police. The notions of the FBI acting counter to the interest of the public or the FBI lacking the competence to protect the weakened access points they would desire are counter to basic education; people must be taught to think in those lines.

When thinking about politics, remember: most hackers are more paranoid than the average person. A lot more. Because our training tends to show us what damage can be done, and that people will do damage for the hell of it [https://medium.com/@blakeross/mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177a406c775#.2jwcw8jz6]. When the Boston Marathon was bombed, the police put the city on basically a full-panic lockdown to catch two men; a lot of people were okay with this because it made them feel viscerally safer, not because they were trained wrong by a corrupt elite. You disregard the actual state of human nature to assume otherwise, which is probably disadvantageous.

To start off, I used Vanguard and did it all myself, which is a great option (many would say the best). I've since switched to Wealthfront, which is also pretty cool, although some people believe their slightly-higher fees don't buy you anything[1]. I personally disagree!

The general consensus from what I've read on investing is that it's impossible to beat the market consistently, so "professionals" are no more skilled than someone picking out random investment decisions from a hat :) On average, the market as a whole grows, so there's no real reason to try to risk beating it.

The MMM blog covers all of this in great detail, but if you're interested in chatting more about this stuff (or if you want a referral to Wealthfront for reduced fees!), hit me up. My email is [myusername]@gmail.

[1] https://medium.com/@blakeross/wealthfront-silicon-valley-tech-at-wall-street-prices-fdd2e5f54905#.d1ybm8xaq

This is tangentially addressed in one of my favorite articles of all time, talking about the importance of strong encryption without backdoors: https://medium.com/@blakeross/mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177a406c775

The point being, there is no perfect trade off, but that this one is much better than the alternative. In this case, I think most airlines have moved to the incrementally better trade off of ensuring at least two people in the cockpit at all times.