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Others, though, find it disturbing. When a recent Advertising Age column noted the phenomenon, several readers chimed in to voice their displeasure.

she felt even worse when she was hounded recently by ads for a dieting service she had used online. “They are still following me around, and it makes me feel fat,” she said.

stalked by shoes

the technique is raising anew the threat of industry regulation

at there is a commercial surveillance system in place online that is sweeping in scope and raises privacy and civil liberties issues

Mr. Magness, of Zappos, said that consumers may be unnerved because they may feel that they are being tracked from site to site as they browse the Web. To reassure consumers, Zappos, which is using the ads to peddle items like shoes, handbags and women’s underwear, displays a message inside the banner ads that reads, “Why am I seeing these ads?” When users click on it, they are taken to the Web site of Criteo, the advertising technology company behind the Zappos ads, where the ads are explained.

“When you begin to give people a sense of how this is happening, they really don’t like it,”

Professor Turow, who studies digital media and recently testified at a Senate committee hearing on digital advertising, said he had a visceral negative reaction to the ads, even though he understands the technologies behind them. “It seemed so bold,” Professor Turow said. “I was not pleased, frankly.”

For Google, remarketing is a more specific form of behavioral targeting, the practice under which a person who has visited NBA.com, for instance, may be tagged as a basketball fan and later will be shown ads for related merchandise. Behavioral targeting has been hotly debated in Washington, and lawmakers are considering various proposals to regulate it. During the recent Senate hearing, Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, said she found the technique troubling. “I understand that advertising supports the Internet, but I am a little spooked out,” Ms. McCaskill said of behavioral targeting. “This is creepy.”

being stalked by a pair of pants

“I don’t think that exposing all this detailed information you have about the customer is necessary,” said Alan Pearlstein, chief executive of Cross Pixel Media, a digital marketing agency. Mr. Pearlstein says he supports retargeting, but with more subtle ads that, for instance, could offer consumers a discount coupon if they return to an online store. “What is the benefit of freaking customers out?”

Underlining (or highlighting): of major points, of important or forceful statements. Vertical lines at the margin: to emphasize a statement already underlined. Star, asterisk, or other doo-dad at the margin: to be used sparingly, to emphasize the ten or twenty most important statements in the book. (You may want to fold the bottom comer of each page on which you use such marks. It won't hurt the sturdy paper on which most modern books are printed, and you will be able take the book off the shelf at any time and, by opening it at the folded-corner page, refresh your recollection of the book.) Numbers in the margin: to indicate the sequence of points the author makes in developing a single argument. Numbers of other pages in the margin: to indicate where else in the book the author made points relevant to the point marked; to tie up the ideas in a book, which, though they may be separated by many pages, belong together. Circling or highlighting of key words or phrases. Writing in the margin, or at the top or bottom of the page, for the sake of: recording questions (and perhaps answers) which a passage raised in your mind; reducing a complicated discussion to a simple statement; recording the sequence of major points right through the books. I use the end-papers at the back of the book to make a personal index of the author's points in the order of their appearance.

you may say that this business of marking books is going to slow up your reading. It probably will. That's one of the reasons for doing it

Some things should be read quickly and effortlessly and some should be read slowly and even laboriously.

Why is marking up a book indispensable to reading? First, it keeps you awake. (And I don't mean merely conscious; I mean awake.) In the second place; reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The marked book is usually the thought-through book. Finally, writing helps you remember the thoughts you had, or the thoughts the author expressed.

One two-letter word cannot possibly hold all of the varied experiences of data, specifically those of the people are at the most immediate risk: visible minorities, LGBTQ+ people, indigenous communities, the elderly, the disabled, displaced migrants, the incarcerated

At least twenty-six states allow the FBI to perform facial recognition searches against their databases of images from drivers licenses and state IDs, despite the fact that the FBI’s own reports have indicated that facial recognition is less accurate for black people. Black people, already at a higher risk of arrest and incarceration than other Americans, feel these data systems in a much different way than I do

last week, the Department of Justice passed a brief to the Supreme Court arguing that sex discrimination protections do not extend to transgender people. If this ruling were to be supported, it would immediately put trans women and men at more risk than others from the surveillant data technologies that are becoming more and more common in the workplace. Trans people will be put in distinct danger — a reality that is lost when they are folded neatly into a communal we

I looked at the list of speakers for the conference in Brussels to get an idea of the particular we of Cook’s audience, which included Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai and the King of Spain. Of the presenters, 57% were men and 83% where white. Only 4 of the 132 people on stage were black.

another we that Tim Cook necessarily speaks on the behalf of: privileged men in tech. This we includes Mark and Sundar; it includes 60% of Silicon Valley and 91% of its equity. It is this we who have reaped the most benefit from Big Data and carried the least risk, all while occupying the most time on stage

Here’s a more urgent question for us, one that doesn’t ask what we want but instead what they need:How can this new data world be made safer for the people who are facing real risks, right now?

“The act of listening has greater ethical potential than speaking” — Julietta Singh

There are very real consequences from a white supremacist holding the highest office in the land. There are very real consequences to Trump using the bully pulpit to foster hate on the basis of almost every human characteristic, be it race, faith, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, immigration status, gender, or class

The policies of the Trump administration cannot be divorced from the rhetoric of the Trump administration. The rhetoric and the policies are both driven by xenophobia, Islamaphobia, misogyny and white supremacy. And if the government is going to treat diverse and marginalized communities as subhuman so will everyone else

We have to be prepared for much worse from the Trump administration because this is what he has said that he would do all along. It is naïve and foolish of us to think that he is not going to follow through on his promises.

It is dystopic. I have met with survivors who have been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder. One survivor, Tanya Gersh, described to me how she rarely says hello to strangers and is not as gregarious and outgoing as she used to be. She described to me how after she was viciously trolled by white supremacists in Whitefish, Montana. There were something like 700 forms of communication such as emails, social media messages, voice mails. She told me she had to have a conversation with her ten year old about the Holocaust and how every Jewish parent struggles with when to have that conversation with their children about anti-Semitism. Hate crimes that target individuals send a community wide message that its members are not welcome. This undermines feelings of safety and security. It is  called "vicarious trauma." For example the vandalism and arson of house of worship, the targeting of organizations, student groups, campus communities or even state sponsored forms of hate are also designed to terrorize whole communities and groups of people. We also know that hate literally kills people by making communities physically and emotionally sick.

There are many victims of hate crimes who out of fear remain silent. Hate crimes are very underreported in America. The stats do not capture the scale of the problem.

The War on Terror must stop as well because I don’t think you can separate what the United States does abroad with what it does to its own people — especially nonwhites, Muslims, and other marginalized and discriminated against communities. Justice also involves archiving this moment, documenting what survivors and their communities have experienced

there is no one size fits all answer. It should ultimately be determined by the survivors. In my book there are survivors  who forgave the aggressors and culprits in open court and elsewhere because they don’t believe that prison is the answer. There are others who felt otherwise. But overwhelmingly the survivors that I met are open to reconciliation so long as there is accountability

"The use of facial recognition in schools creates an unprecedented level of surveillance and scrutiny," says John Cusick, a fellow at the Legal Defense Fund. "It can exacerbate racial disparities in terms of how schools are enforcing disciplinary codes and monitoring their students."

The school would ask adults, not kids, to register their faces with the SAFR system. After they registered, they’d be able to enter the school by smiling at a camera at the front gate. (Smiling tells the software that it’s looking at a live person and not, for instance, a photograph). If the system recognizes the person, the gates automatically unlock

The software can predict a person's age and gender, enabling schools to turn off access for people below a certain age. But Glaser notes that if other schools want to register students going forward, they can

There are no guidelines about how long the facial data gets stored, how it’s used, or whether people need to opt in to be tracked.

Schools could, for instance, use facial recognition technology to monitor who's associating with whom and discipline students differently as a result. "It could criminalize friendships," says Cusick of the Legal Defense Fund.

SAFR boasts a 99.8 percent overall accuracy rating, based on a test, created by the University of Massachusetts, that vets facial recognition systems. But Glaser says the company hasn’t tested whether the tool is as good at recognizing black and brown faces as it is at recognizing white ones. RealNetworks deliberately opted not to have the software proactively predict ethnicity, the way it predicts age and gender, for fear of it being used for racial profiling. Still, testing the tool's accuracy among different demographics is key. Research has shown that many top facial recognition tools are particularly bad at recognizing black women

"It's tempting to say there's a technological solution, that we're going to find the dangerous people, and we're going to stop them," she says. "But I do think a large part of that is grasping at straws."

The epistemic crisis Trump has accelerated is now morphing into a full-fledged crisis of democracy.

As Voltaire famously put it: “Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.”

The right, in all its organs, from social media to television to the president, is telling a well-worn, consistent story: Opposition from the left and Democrats is fraudulent, illegitimate, a foreign-funded conspiracy against the traditional white American way of life.

Having two versions of reality constantly clashing in public is cognitively and emotionally exhausting. To an average person following the news, the haze of charge and countercharge is overwhelming. And that is precisely what every autocrat wants.

every aspiring tyrant in modern history has made the independent media his first target

Then they go after the courts, the security services, and the military. Once they have a large base of support that will believe whatever they proclaim, follow them anywhere, support them in anything — it doesn’t have to be a majority, just an intense, activated minority — they can, practically speaking, get away with anything.