Web extension "Shinigami Eyes" is banned in Norway for GDPR violation
Web extension "Shinigami Eyes" is banned in Norway for GDPR violation
37 comments
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Finally. That thing is a damn privacy risk and is used frequently for revenge because some peopke don't like certain realities others face such as trans men/masc people existing or experiencing hatred.
There is zero accountability from the creators either. It needs to either have the right to be removed permenantly or stop being a thing.
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I've been using Shinigami Eyes for years and it's helped me avoid a lot of content which could've messed up my algorithm or tricked me when I was younger and more susceptible to anti-trans propaganda. I do sometimes question what was marked as pro- or anti-trans; would I agree with that assessment? But I'm not trans, and there is a litany of content online; I do not have to give my time or attention to anyone who is marked anti-trans.
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I think learning critical thinking skills is a much better way to judge content than The Groupthink Machine.
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Yes and no. It's good if people have critical thinking skills yes, but either not everybody does, or they can still be tricked. Block lists etc allow people to avoid harm. So whilst I personally do not like Shinigami Eyes for many reasons, other tools where information is shared on who to block or ignore are useful.
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Probably harvesting users to indoctrinate into ML is my guess.
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WTF does this have anything at all to do with ML?
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I thought it was pretty obvious.
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What?
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Your meaning is unclear for me
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Marxist Leninism.
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Are you an ML?
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37 comments
I checked out the actual extension site to figure out if the extension was pro- or anti-trans (it's pro-), and I actually like the idea for it. It's a local list (bloom filter) that crowd-sources reports on anti- or pro-trans content. I can see why this does violate GDPR, but frankly I think GDPR is too broad in what it covers (and the proof is in them changing PII to PI, because they understood that much of the data covered isn't actually "identifiable").
Shinigami Eyes is weird, because in Death Note, the Shinigami Eyes are a magical bargain in which you give up half of your remaining lifespan to be able to see people's deadnames. The manga is explicit about the fact that the Death Note only accepts names assigned at birth. Light wants to use the Death Note to kill L, but he doesn't know L's deadname, only his identified name, so he can't. So Ryuk offers to make a deal and give him deadname vision.
Also I think intra-community harassment and lateral violence are serious enough issues that crowdsourced shunning is a horribly destructive technology with the potential to ruin lives. Take for example the case of Isabel Fall. She wrote a short story about the US military manipulating people's genders through brainwashing to turn them into living weapons. Because of its provocative title, a lot of people assumed she was mocking trans people and harassed her. Turns out, she was a newly out trans woman publishing queer science fiction as her first experiment into living publicly as herself. It went horribly, she decided to detransition over the harassment. She decided that the world has spoken; she's not allowed to be a woman.
Shinigami Eyes seems to me like a recipe for replicating that situation a hundred times over. People are bad at telling whether other people are transphobes, and I don't trust them to do it right.
This feels like the same argument against whisper networks.
To use this for harassment you'd have to go to some other location... which you could just do anyways. It's crowdsourced, but it's not communal; you don't interact with other users, you aren't a group. Also, you can flag entries as improperly tagged.
It's important to call out transphobia just as any other bigotry, and "someone might get improperly accused of it" is not reason enough to dismantle systems meant to allow people to defend themselves from bigotry that's out there, nor certainly to discourage pointing instances of bigotry out in the first place.
Dogpiling and harassment are their own behaviors to solve for (especially when they're being directed by someone with a platform, as was the case with Isabel).