Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

The company for which I do online article editing has taken what was previously an active, stimulating and helpful copy editor forum and redesigned it into a maze of sub-sites, rendering them user hostile and essentially now worthless. Very few folks are posting.

So a group of copy editors started a private Facebook group and invited me to join. I had previously cut loose from the data-mining FB bastards. However, since interaction with my fellow copy editors is essentially no longer available on the company website, I reluctantly decided to accept.

I logged into the group and wrote a short greeting. When I hit the "send" button, I was confronted with a pop-up that asked me to verify my account by providing either my mobile phone number or credit card information.

I notified the editor who invited me that there's no way I would provide FB with that information. This is new since I last used FB. I guess FB, despite its statements to the contrary, continues to not give a shit about privacy.

George Orwell never tires of dancing in his grace.

When I do my online article editing, one of my tasks is to ensure that articles fall within specific word count ranges.

In Firefox, I use the "Word Count Plus" extension for that purpose. I thought I'd try doing some editing work in Google's Chrome browser, so I looked for a similar extension designed for Chrome. I found one, but there's no way I'd consider installing it.

The distance from Google's once "do no evil" philosophy to this is inestimable:



I'll give Google this: At least it's now up-front about its data mining.