Out Of Scope - #15

How to get your mom off Facebook - or not

Happy Sunday everyone!

I got this email from a recruiter this week. I love when jobs show their red flags before you even interview. Saves us all some time!

Emily Kager @EmilyKager

No

How to advocate for privacy + security without losing friends and family

It feels like almost every tech company is trying to collect as much data about us as they possibly can and so it can also feel like a minefield to keep ourselves and our loved ones protected. As tech workers, we can do some things on the job like advocating for less data collected for our features, good data management practices, and conservative defaults for new features/settings. In our tech circles, we can call out companies for bad behavior and help advocate for new policies to protect user privacy. But when discussing with our friends and family, how we approach these discussions can be tricky. Some thoughts.

1. Be sympathetic to their usage. People are very unlikely to do things that will be isolating from their friends/family/culture. For example, “you should delete all your Facebook products” is not so easy if that’s their primary way of keeping in touch with family. 

2. People are more likely to do the right thing if the right thing is easy. Help them with easy baby steps like setting up or giving them guidance to use password managers, 2FA, or to change their basic privacy settings in app or in system settings.

3. Meet them where they are. If they are always losing their phone maybe they aren’t a great candidate for 2FA and forcing it will make their life more difficult. But on the other hand, if they can only remember 1 password, maybe a password manager is perfect for them.

4. You can’t force people to care. A lot of things in the world feel on fire right now and their online privacy + security might not feel top priority. Sometimes the best you can do is share tips and information with them in a nonjudgemental or fear-mongering way and hope some of it sticks. We all have our own risk tolerances and shaming people will hurt more than it helps.

ICYMI

I love tech origin stories

Dan McKinley @mcfunley

I’ve been sitting on a weird epic ramble about Etsy homepages from the middle 2000’s for the better part of 15 years now so I figured I would write it up as a thread 1/

It’s true. Source: frontend engineer.

Siva @sivalabs

There was a 2 hour discussion(debate) in backend team whether we should return HTTP Status Code 400 or 422 for a scenario. Meanwhile, frontend team: if(statusCode >= 400 && statusCode < 500) { //oops } #backend #frontend

Solid advice.

Timothée Keyes @timothykeyes

i get a lot of DMs asking me if i’d recommend learning R or python for data analysis. my advice: don’t learn either! just give up

That’s all folks! Catch ya later!