Internet surveillance is driving me back to 1990s computing
The author of the article is moving away from modern computing due to increasing internet surveillance, citing concerns over digital control and the potential for dystopian outcomes. The author's decision was prompted by Facebook's request for a 3D scan of their face to reactivate their account, which they refused. The article highlights various government initiatives and policies that contribute to the growing trend of digital surveillance, including age verification and restrictions on VPNs.
- ▪The UK will bar under-16s from major social platforms from early 2027, requiring adults to verify their age through ID upload or facial scan.
- ▪A study found that Australia's under-16 ban on social media has made no meaningful difference to teenagers' behavior.
- ▪The Canadian parliament is considering a surveillance bill that gives police and intelligence services expanded power to compel telecoms and service providers to identify users and hand over data.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Marcus Coetzee | In Pursuit of Strategic Clarity |
| Canonical URL | https://marcuscoetzee.com/surveillance/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 30 Jun 2026 06:54:27 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-30T07:24:23.532Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-30T07:24:23.532Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | pSIWPHcNNqf9 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Internet surveillance is driving me back to 1990s computing Article on #Personal, #Technology. By Marcus Coetzee, 26 June 2026 A few months ago, Facebook suspended my account and claimed I broke the terms of service. I post about birds, nature and the occasional hillwalking photo, to about fifty friends, roughly once a week, for five years. I also post photos of cups of coffee. When I appealed, Facebook offered to reactivate my account on the condition that it could take a 3D scan of my face. I refused. I would rather lose five years of online interactions than hand my biometric data to a company with Meta’s track record. I find this idea of linking facial scans to social media accounts to be ominous.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Marcus Coetzee | In Pursuit of Strategic Clarity.
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