Long story short: keep Amazon from connecting your smart devices to a larger network, tell our SEC to mandate more transparency for shareholders, tell New York state legislators to ban facial recognition technology, tell our EPA to enact vigorous clean car standards, tell insurance corporations to cut ties with coal, and tell federal regulators to keep corporations from siphoning public water. The following paragraphs contain email/petition tools for each of these alerts. Good hunting!
First things first: The Guardian reports that Amazon customers have less than a week now to opt out of its plan to turn all the "smart" devices in your house into a giant "mesh network" called Amazon Sidewalk, which, as you might imagine, would raise significant privacy and spying concerns. Maybe you don't want your Alexa to be on the same network as your neighbor's Ring, amirite? Per the article, if you have an Alexa or Ring app, you need to disable Sidewalk in that app's settings, but you only have until June 8 (that's this coming Tuesday) to do so, so you might as well get to it.
Public Citizen helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to tell corporations to be honest with their shareholders, especially in re its actions (or lack thereof) on climate change and workers' rights. Shareholders care about that stuff, after all, and how do I know? Because if you have a pension plan through your employer, you may well be a shareholder! And you have opinions on how you want your money invested. I mean, not everyone's all "just make me the most money"; even those of us who fear poverty in our old age still don't want to destroy the planet or hurt people just to avoid it. And our SEC does work for shareholders, who are also taxpayers, so let's tell them to do the right thing.
Sum of Us helps you tell New York state legislators to ban facial recognition technology there. Because it's bad at its job and can't tell Black people apart any more than your Trumphole uncle can -- and also the state of New York has nearly 20 million residents, making it the third most-populous state after California and Texas, so if New York bans it, facial recognition corporations will have a tougher time working around it, and thus you'll see less of it elsewhere as well. Which is a good thing! The last thing you want in your life is to be hauled away to jail because some POS software thinks you committed a crime. Just ask Nijeer Parks.
Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous clean car standards possible. The Obama EPA enacted fairly strong standards that helped good Americans spend less on gas and pollute less, but the Trump EPA couldn't wait to undo them, because Obama. Now the Biden EPA gets its chance to undo the Trump EPA's actions, but they'll still need to hear from us, in numbers that can't be denied. I mean that: government agencies can't simply ignore public comments, and where they defy the public, they have to come up with good reasons, lest they get smacked down in court. Hey, it happened routinely to the Trump Administration.
Public Citizen helps you tell big insurance corporations like Lloyds of London, AIG, and Tokio Marine to stop insuring and investing in coal plants. Two dozen other big insurance corporations have washed their hands of coal recently, and for good reason: why insure an industry that's dying, that is actually more expensive, over the life of their plants, than solar and wind are now? I guess Lloyds et al think energy's more reliable if you can churn the ground to get it -- like they've never heard of, you know, battery storage! That means we got to bring out the Big Stick of Bad PR, which makes all corporations run in fear. (Of course, we have to keep wielding it, or they'll come out of hiding and do the wrong thing again.)
Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to stop BlueTriton from siphoning water out of the San Bernardino National Forest in California. Since California is in a drought, as it often is in summertime, and drought doesn't just mean thirst and agricultural hell, but also wildfires all over the state -- so letting private corporations take water that belongs to the people isn't the smartest idea, is it? Just so happens BlueTriton -- apparently aspiring to be the "new Nestlé," in Sum of Us's words -- has already ignored water regulators' efforts to stop them. It's like they don't understand that those regulators work for us. Thus it's time to flex our power.
Comments