Being outspoken means you're canceled - but it won't last.
I was invited on Isaac Simpson's podcast The Carousel, because I am outspoken and Tired of Explaining Reality to Fuckwits, and we spoke at length about good ads, bad ads, having stalkers, taking back control of your privacy and data, and how you can protect yourself in a world gone a tad mad. Direct link to the episode here.
Now, I obviously know what people think about my opinions, and I am aware that people in the advertising industry both avoid me and secretly reach out to me for these because there are a lot more women who share this opinion than you might currently be aware of. I didn't expect to become the poster child of radical feminism in advertising and privacy-protecting tech, but here we are. I suppose it was destined to happen as my mother wrote for Ms. Magazine in the 1970s and worked at companies like Memorex, Ericsson, and CompuFocus in the 80s so becoming a feminist nerd-child was sort of in my mother's milk.
I do take privacy very seriously after the many different instances, some of which I explained on this podcast, of being stalked and threatened, which is still an ongoing issue. The issue with the Chinese being upset about some ads on Adland is well known and has been written up in the trade press, but that incident also taught me how completely powerless a Swedish citizen, living (and registered as living in) Sweden is about keeping their home address and other information from public view. I have since then encountered worse situations and people which I won't detail further, but suffice it to say they made me radically change how I share on social media. A harmless image share may leak your GPS information in the Exif data, and simple things like mirrors, reflections in your glasses, and windows can reveal more than you would like. Always have your phone settings clear Exif data before sharing an image, and consider sharing a lot less. Every app that you have and use, and probably have to have, and have to use because you work in advertising, has the ability to spy on your every word and move even when your phone is off. This is why I like tools like the Säkra purse, which allows me to keep meetings only between the parties as I can slide everyone's phones into the Faraday cage inside it and it doesn't look like the Faraday cage bags that a prepper like Mel Gibson's character in conspiracy theory would have. His whole apartment was a Faraday cage with a bonus built-in killswitch in case the police arrived.
This is also why I have my "cloud" in my own house, as I like to be able to share photos and music and whatnot with my entire family but I don't trust Google, or anyone else, and I really don't like the monthly bills for those services.
So, on the topic of home cloud systems, here are a few you might want to look at.
If you're a content creator and need to share raw edits in a secure fashion Synology has several alternatives.
If you just want to have photos on your phone and share them with your family and friends, Nextcloud has an open-source app, Lychee is a mature self-hosted photo management tool that works a lot like Flickr, and Piwigo is another self-hosted tool that has batch management and multi-user features so this can be useful for work teams as well. Ownphotos is a self-hosted alternative to Google photos which may require a little bit more technical skill to install, but it has the interesting features of object detection, face training and event-based album generation. All you need is to set up your own machine at home, you don't want to risk all of your data in some server co-lo just because an automatic bill wasn't paid. It's time to normalize NAS over external drives or the public cloud. For the budget conscious, look at QNAP TS-233, for people with a lot of data to back up and share there are options like Synology DiskStation DS920 or the Synology 5-bay DiskStation DS1522+ which can grow with you. I also quite like the Linkstation 220 as it has built-in Torrent, the QNap TS-251 A for the sleek look and remote control, dual-core 1.6GHz Intel Celeron CPU and 4GB of RAM for hardware transcoding media files as well as the ability to run many apps including the Plex media server. The world is your oyster full of NAS alternatives in all price ranges now, so isn't it time that you make the switch?
Here is the Youtube link too.
