Backlit Privacy Statement
This site is hosted on Neocities, whose data-handling disclosure can be found in the platform's main Privacy Policy.
As a separate entity, the administrator of this individual site does not implement tracking technologies, or any other third party resources, including analytics routines, remote fonts, sharing and social media widgets, remote pixels, ad-tech, and content delivery networks.
Read article →Search 101: How to Find the Lost Web
"Privacy activists have a heightened sense of the way censorship works hand in hand with surveillance to build the classic picture of Nineteen Eighty-Four. And when we know a search engine is capable of giving us accurate, relevant results, but doesn't, we realise we're seeing a form of censorship."
Google's lost the internet. You might have seen a few complaints. Whether they've come courtesy of anons in the underbelly of the Fediverse, or a viral soundbyte from Edward Snowden, a growing catalogue of gripes is asserting that web search is no longer fit for purpose. Well, unless web search's purpose is to detect capitalism. In which case thumbs up. The search engines are better than ever at that. They now surface ecommerce, ad-tech, and affiliate-pumped listicle hell so reliably that we barely even need to enter a search term.
But the internet we used to know and love, brimming with offbeat gems from passionate authors... That's gone missing. And with it, the humour. The imagination. The individuality... Maybe we've just forgotten how to use a search engine?...
Read article →About Backlit
"This has long gone past "but we're just interested in your shopping preferences". This is now about controlling the world."
It's become commonplace for online privacy advice to read like a marketing pitch for alternative services or products... "Use GNU/Linux instead of Windows, Mastodon instead of Twitter, DuckDuckGo instead of Google search, Tutanota instead of Outlook/Gmail, Firefox instead of Chrome..." and so on.
If only gaining freedom from the cyber age's glut of megalomanic corporations were that simple.
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