Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- Reuters reports that: Spain's Socialist Party said a coalition deal with the left-wing Podemos party is within reach, meaning acting Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez could be approved by the Parliament next week. Let's hope so.
- Should we be thrilled or terrified at this development?
- I had to smile at the last (very true) sentence . . . Last Sunday a group of chaps and chapettes met in London’s elegant Jermyn Street and set off on what they called “a walk without purpose, a stroll without direction, a civilised amble without destination”. Now, I’ve seen people do this a lot in Valencia. Every evening people get dressed up and mooch along the promenade at a snail’s pace, seemingly going nowhere. And in Spain that makes sense, because have you seen their television shows? I’d far rather climb into a bullfighter costume and walk about in the evening sunshine, looking at all the pretty girls in their thong bikinis and all the pretty boys astride their Vespas than sit at home, watching some trout-faced harridan and a shouty lothario encouraging a studio audience of rural morons to clap along to some mangled old Julio Iglesias hit. Watching people in Spain is a thousand times more rewarding than watching television.
- Having seen many foreigners consulting their phones as they walk through Pontevedra's old quarter, I took a look at Tripadvisor. Where I discovered that the top 3 restaurants for the city were ones I'd never even heard of. Something fishy, surely. My favourites are in the 50-60 range. Apparently they don't pay anything to anyone.
- Which reminds me . . . It was reported last week that traditional bars are losing out to restaurants and fast food places in the city. There's been a reduction of 10% since 2010. I think there's only one 'spit and sawdust bar' left here. I've never seen a woman in it, as I walk past. So, I blame this development on feminism . . .
- Perhaps . . . The threat to French fishermen is Britain’s Brexit bargaining chip . . . A no-deal Brexit would create many losers across the Continent, from German car makers to Italian prosecco producers, but few will be hit as directly as the thousands of French and other European fisherman who have built their livelihoods over the past decades working what, after Britain’s departure from the common fisheries policy, will be the UK’s territorial waters. About 6 times more fish is caught by continental European fishing boats in British waters than vice versa. With some species, the imbalance is even more extreme: 90% of the herring catch of Dutch and Danish fishermen, for example, comes from UK waters.
- If you're on Face.App, you need to read the first article below. Likewise, if you're not.
- Selfie-taking at its logical extreme:-
The Way of the World
- As you might have suspected . . . Medical staff from England’s only children’s gender clinic have gone public for the first time to raise fears about the treatment of youngsters seeking a sex change. Kirsty Entwistle, who was a psychologist at the Gender Identity Development Service until October last year, accused some of its clinicians of misleading patients. She warned they are “making decisions that will have a major impact on children and young people’s bodies and lives . . . without a robust evidence base”.
- Whether it is casinos, skyscrapers or hotels, Donald Trump has always been a gambler. Now he is betting his entire political future on the most corrosive issue in American public life: race.
- When Donald Trump stops shocking, he’s had it. See the second article below.
- Word of the Day: Vendehúmos
- It is one of the oldest — and trickiest — languages in Europe but now a study appears to have found why Welsh can prove so hard to master. The researchers believe that the smaller the community, the more complicated the language.
- The famous 4 humours and 4 elements have been replaced by 4 colour codes for personalities . . . Cool Blue, Pushy Red, Sensitive Yellow, and Patient Green. Possibly just as accurate.
ARTICLES
1. Think FaceApp is bad? Here are 7 other viral apps that could have harvested your data: Mason Boycott-Owen Yolanthe Fawehinmi
FaceApp selfies are everywhere. Unless you've avoided social media for the last 24 hours, you've likely seen them posted online by friends, family and celebrities.
The viral app uses artificial intelligence to modify users' photos, adding wrinkles or subtracting years from their faces.
Harmless fun? Not according to some privacy campaigners. As soon as FaceApp began to go viral, social media users raised a host of concerns about the app.
The UK's data watchdog today said it is "considering" concerns raised about the FaceApp service over potential privacy issues. Meanwhile America’s Democratic National Committee ordered presidential campaigns to delete FaceApp, citing its Russian ownership.
One of the concerns highlighted was how FaceApp is able to use photos created on the service. But this isn't the first time that app companies have come under fire for harvesting data from their users.
Earlier this month a report presented at the Federal Trade Commission's PrivacyCon, found that over 1,000 Android apps were subverting users privacy request in order to harvest their information.
This came after a report by researchers at the University of Oxford found that 90 per cent of free apps on Google Play store regularly shared data with the parent company, Alphabet.
Here’s a rundown of some of the apps which have been causing a stir:
TikTok
Since 2017, TikTok has been a popular social media video app available for iOS and Android devices that allows its users to create and share 'homemade' lip-sync, comedy and talent videos. The app is owned and created by Chinese tech giant ByteDance who also acquired Musical.ly in 2018.
TikTok has been heavily scrutinised and investigated over how it protects its users' privacy, particularly as they focus on growing a young user base.
Earlier this month, the UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham told a Digital, Culture, Media & Sport Committee that the app is facing a UK data privacy investigation for potentially violating GDPR regulations over how it handles the privacy and safety of younger users.
The Information Commissioner told the committee that an investigation into TikTok had been active since February.
She said: “We’re looking at the messaging system, which is completely open, we’re looking at the kind of videos that are collected and shared by children online. We do have an active investigation into TikTok right now, so watch this space.”
In a statement TikTok said: “We cooperate with organizations such as the ICO to provide relevant information about our product to support their work. Ensuring data protection principles are upheld as a top priority for TikTok.”
Meitu
Meitu’s “magic photo editor” app is very popular in China and other Asian countries. The Xiamen-based “beauty cam” app, released in 2008, now also transforms selfies into a anime-style characters.
Its common for photo apps to ask users for permission to access certain parts of their phone to properly function, such as the camera roll, the internet and phone storage.
However, last year 100 apps including Meitu was accused by the China Consumers Association (CCA) of violating user privacy and “widespread instances of alleged excessive collection or use of personal information”. The report said the app was “over-collecting identifiable biological information, financial information”.
In response, Meitu issued an official statement saying: "Meitu DOES NOT sell user data in any form”.
In hopes to better explain how it does use permissions and manages user data, Meitu said that their “sole purpose for collecting the data is to optimize app performance, its effects and features and to better understand our consumer engagement with in-app advertisements.”
Meitu highlights that because their headquarters are in China “many of the services provided by app stores for tracking are blocked”. But, the app “uses a combination of third-party and in-house data tracking systems” that ensures user data is tracked consistently.
This includes MAC addresses and IMEI numbers, LAN IP, SIM card country codes, GPS and network locations, phone carrier information and a third-party push notification service called Getui. They stress that data received from these offsite servers are “sent ONLY to Meitu.”
Snapchat’s privacy policy, updated in 2018 to comply with GDPR regulations, says that Snapchat takes your name and the name of all of your contacts on your phone, as well as your photos, after users are prompted for permission.
In addition to this, the app can collect information about your browsing history, via cookies. Even after deleting the app Snapchat will retain certain information for what it describes as ‘a limited period of time’.
Snapchat said that their basic messages, Snaps (pictures and videos) and Chats (messages) are deleted from their servers once they’re opened or expired.
In addition, after requesting the deletion of your account, all data is deleted, except for some basic information needed for security or legal requirements.
In 2015 the company was prompted to comment on it’s data sharing policy after fears that they retained the rights to use your photos or likeness and share them, even for commercial or advertising use with any of their partners.
Snapchat clarified that “we continue to delete them from our servers as soon as they're read, we could not—and do not—share them with advertisers or business partners."
However this is not the case for publishing pictures and videos to a public story. This means that content has licence for other people, such as news organisations, to use.
Grindr
In April last year, Grindr, the dating and hook-up app for gay, bi, trans and queer people, was found to have shared information about users location and HIV status with other companies.
The app gave users the option of sharing their HIV status and their when they were last tested.
The app, which was founded in 2009 by Nearby Buddy Finder, LLC, came under fire for sharing the data with both Apptimize and Localytics.
After announcing it would stop sharing HIV information they said that it was “industry practice” and their decision was for platform-optimization purposes to share data with third parties.
Grindr’s chief technology officer, Scott Chen said: “Grindr has never, nor will we ever sell personally identifiable user information – especially information regarding HIV status or last test date – to third parties or advertisers,”
“as a company that serves the LGBTQ community, we understand the sensitivities around HIV status disclosure”, but said Grindr was a “public forum” and “if you choose to include this information in your profile, the information will also become public”.
Onavo (Facebook VPN)
Late year the Facebook-owned app Onavo, which provided a free secure VPN service, was pulled from the iOS app store after violating Apple’s rules.
The Israeli company, taken over by Facebook in 2013 provided customers with a VPN where it directed web traffic from the user’s smartphone.
This VPN was used to provide statistics where you could monitor your smartphone usage.
Tens of millions of people had downloaded the app which, despite being billed as a way to keep your data safe and private, the app in fact harvested data for the social media giant.
A Facebook spokesperson said: “We were always clear when people downloaded Onavo about the information that it collected and how it was used. As a developer on Apple's platform we follow the rules they've put in place.”
Shutterfly
Shutterfly, another photo-editing app, was allegedly caught gathering GPS coordinates from photos, sharing the harvested data with its own servers.
According to research presented at the Federal Trade Commission's PrivacyCon in late June, this was found to be happening even when users declined to give the app permission to access their location data.
The study said: “We observed that the Shutterfly app (com.shutterfly) sends precise geolocation data to its own server without holding a location permission. Instead, it sent photo metadata from the photo library, which included the phone’s precise location in its exchangeable image file format (EXIF) data.”
A Shutterfly spokesperson said: “If the user allows their images to be tagged with metadata, including geolocation, that information is included with the photos that are either uploaded to the Shutterfly app, or accessed locally on the user’s phone with their express permission.
“Like many photo services, Shutterfly uses this data to enhance the user experience with features such as categorization and personalized product suggestions, all in accordance with Shutterfly’s privacy policy as well as the Android developer agreement.”
Sarahah
Sarahah is a once-popular social media app which was used for giving ‘constructive feedback’ anonymously.
Founded in 2016, it quickly rose in popularity with 14 million users in August 2017, after topping the app charts in several countries such as America, Australia, Ireland, and the UK.
The app raised eyebrows after it was found uploading users' contact books, despite doubts over why the data would required for the app's function.
The founder of the Saudi app, Zain al-Abidin Tawfiq, said the data was uploaded “for a planned ‘find your friends’ feature” that was “delayed due to a technical issue.”
Since last year, the app was removed from the Apple and Google stores after accusations that it has been facilitating bullying.
Yet, as of writing, the app is currently available on Google Play.
2. When Donald Trump stops shocking, he’s had it: Justin Webb
The president’s inflammatory tweets about the Squad are catnip to his supporters
There is only one book you need to read about Donald Trump’s America. It came out this year. It’s called Dignity. It’s an essay written around a series of pictures of the souls America has left to rot. Sitting, standing, staring out. Sometimes defiant, sometimes drug-addled and confused, always human.
Chris Arnade, the author, is a former Wall Street trader who became a photographer, touring broken small-town America and chronicling “American carnage”, as Trump called it in an inauguration speech that mystified most Americans. Even George W Bush, no head-in-the-clouds intellectual, reportedly turned to Hillary Clinton after it and muttered: “That was some weird shit.”
Well, this is what Trump was talking about. These are his people. American carnage does exist: apart from Trump, who knew?
Arnade’s book is not about race. It does not seek to justify the kind of attitude that led to the racist tweets about “the Squad” of non-white, left-wing Democratic congresswomen or the silence of the president last Wednesday when a crowd screamed, “Send her back!” in response to a mention of Ilhan Omar, a congresswoman of Somali heritage. It does not excuse any of that.
Yet it tells us all, if we are truly interested, why this president has any support. And why that support will endure. And it’s not principally about economic hardship. It’s not about the wall with Mexico.
Dignity is about dignity. There are black faces in it and brown ones. But the white folk stand out. First, because of their anger and, second, because they see Trump as their man. Arnade was in a bar in Ohio as that Trump inauguration speech came up on the television. People were mildly interested and then, he writes, “as the bar fills up others are unabashed in their views, celebratory, giddy to have Trump addressing their concerns and talking their language.
“That everyone hates Trump makes them more confident, further cementing the feeling that they are members of an exclusive club . . . A man yells, ‘You get them, Donald. They been getting us for ever!’”
It seems grotesque to wonder whether what looks like Trump’s overt and dangerous racism might be a political course of action, a strategy. But that is where we are.
The word “strategy” is perhaps too strong. But there is something there that is more than chaos. It’s a political street wisdom that lets him understand that if he stands still, if he moderates, if he seems to have bought into the old centre-ground decencies of America, then he loses his base.
That is the closest it gets to strategy. But it is more than just thrashing around. The more outrageous he is, the more egregious, the more his men (yep, mainly men) will almost certainly back him to the hilt. Another interviewee tells Arnade that Trump talks “shit that if I said I would get into trouble. But the man is rich, so he can say what he wants.” He says this admiringly.
Footage aired by NBC last week showed Trump patting the bottom of a woman at a party in the 1990s with the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. Modest, gentle America thought the footage looked awful. I reckon it will have boosted his appeal in Johnstown, Ohio.
I wonder whether sometimes his fans close their eyes and imagine themselves spending a day in Trump’s shoes, in Mar-a-Lago rather than the White House. And whether, bluntly, that’s enough. No policy matters. It’s about the man sticking it to the vast left-wing conspiracy (to misquote Hillary Clinton) that keeps telling them they are dirt. Their misery is transcended through Trump.
That’s the positive side. More sinister is the sense that was captured in a much discussed piece by Adam Serwer in The Atlantic magazine last year. It was entitled “The cruelty is the point”.
Serwer wrote: “Taking joy in . . . suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomisation of modern life.”
The cruelty is the point: the Trump project is dead without it.
To which there is a cold, hard piece of counter-narrative when it comes to getting re-elected. Is he a fit person to be doing the job? A poll for USA Today in the aftermath of the tweets suggests quite striking certainty: 65% said the tweets about the Squad were racist; 59% of all respondents called them “un-American”.
Has the man of whom people have been asking, “Has he gone too far?” since for ever finally gone too far? After all, the Squad is much more of a thorn in the side of the Democratic Party than the Republicans. These women have a range of opinions, most of which do not appeal to mainstream America. Omar has campaigned for the right to boycott Israel; many American Jews think that is a sign of her racial animus towards them — she wants them to have no state where they are safe. She also described the events of September 11, 2001 as “some people did something”, which was a careless use of language, to put it mildly.
You can see all too well why Trump wants the Democrats to own her; less easily why he might go so far as to make her a victim.
So no strategy is itself a strategy. He must carry on towards — well, what?
Here Greek mythology can help. Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist who has written favourably about Trump. Well, up to a point. He admires him, but he thinks he’s going down. He compares the president — seriously — to Ajax, as imagined by Sophocles: “Ajax’s soliloquies about a rigged system and the lack of recognition accorded his undeniable accomplishments is Trumpian to the core,” wrote Hanson, having already stated: “Tragic heroes are often unstable loners. They are aloof by preference and because of society’s understandable unease with them.”
If Trump as hero makes you queasy, try the Steve Bannon take. The man who helped to make Trump now talks him down, most recently to Michael Wolff in his second book about the presidency, Siege.
Bannon is asked by a friend how the Trump presidency ends. “Well, he won’t go out classy,” replied Bannon. “If you think about it, American history doesn’t have many unseemly moments. Even bad guys, looking at the end, take their medicine. Even [Richard] Nixon was classy and smart when it became obvious the game was up.
“This is not going to be like that. This is going to be very . . . unseemly.”
This is where we are after a week that many ordinary Americans have found deeply distressing. A man is in the Oval Office who is unlike anyone who has been there before. He has strengths. He says and does things that seem to many Americans like common sense. But then, just when they relax, he is Trump. He will not change. If they want him gone, they will have to act next November. In that bar in Ohio, where they watched the inauguration, they will shrug and sigh: they knew their man would burn out. There was no other way.
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