Good morning everyone,

HUGE FEM FRIDAY NEWS: friend and subscriber Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino has a book out. It is about the development of smart homes from a feminist perspective, so in topic could not be more aligned to the Fem Fri project. If that's all you need to know you can buy it here, and if you want to know more you can hear from Alex herself here:

Many new technologies in fact have productised and individualised a communal experience which would have brought with it many social and psychological benefits. I discuss some of the attempts to re-communalise individual home experiences and their failures […] privacy as we consider it now was a long, slow process of shutting out the world from our own lived experience. Sitting alone at home with the television on, browsing on a phone, like so many elderly people (or teenagers) do, is experiencing the world as we wish to see it, without changing ourselves, nor having to adapt or learn.

https://medium.com/@iotwatch/smarter-homes-how-technology-has-changed-your-home-life-an-introduction-5e8306a59a31

I agree with Alex that our current ideas of privacy are newer than we might imagine, but with the caveat that, whilst more people used to know our private information, they were less likely to use that information to plaster our immediate environment with advertising. You know what information is currently considered ripe for weaponising? Periods. Here's an article:

This app wasn’t designed for me. It wasn’t designed for anyone who wants to track their period or general reproductive health. The same is true of almost every menstruation-tracking app: They’re designed for marketers, for men, for hypothetical unborn children, and perhaps weirdest of all, a kind of voluntary surveillance stance.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/13/18079458/menstrual-tracking-surveillance-glow-clue-apple-health

If you would like a period tracking technology that has been designed by a woman (me) for a woman (also me) just reply to this email and I will send on the Excel file I use with instructions. It's one of the best Excel files I have made and is guaranteed free of commercial messaging.

Of course, information about our financial transactions – like information about our bodies – is top of people's list of "things to keep private". So you might want to check your Venmo settings given the incredible human dramas that Do Thi Duc found as a result of their public-by-default settings:

What Do Thi Duc found was a soap opera-worthy set of stories, with a few specifically standing out: There were what seemed to be couples fighting and flirting, sending messages along with payments and requests like “You don’t love me,” and “I’m waiting for the sugar daddy.”[…] “The moment when I went, ‘Wow this is just unbelievable,’ is when I discovered the stories of the lovers,” Do Thi Duc told me in an email. “Just the intimacy of those conversations—this was definitely not mean to be public. But that also applies to all the stories, this information shouldn’t be that easy accessible.”

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5n8wk/public-by-default-venmo-privacy-settings

Happy Friday, secret squirrels,

Alex.