In her new book, Ijeoma Oluo breaks down the origins and the devastating legacy of the mediocre white male in America. I

I think that it is very easy for us, even in our efforts toward liberation, to define our goals based on what White men said is desirable. You know, I think we would manage without White men. I think we would be okay.,His ashes were loaded on the Lunar Prospector, a rocket which launched on the 6th of January 1998 with the goal of reaching the South pole of the Moon. Eugene Shoemaker’s ashes were inside a special polycarbonate capsule produced by a company called Celestis that was actually specializing in sending dead people to space but never onto the Moon. The outside of the capsule was marked with his name, his date of birth, and date of death as well as a picture of him training astronauts in a geology field trip (the same picture you can see above).,Maybe your family member wouldn’t normally buy a watch that tells Google when they’re asleep or a doorbell that helps them inform on their neighbors. But during this brief window each year, you can make a whole variety of fraught privacy decisions for them through gift-giving! They’ll be forced to live with your privacy choices or risk offending you by returning your thoughtful, pricey gadget to the Amazon warehouse from whence it came.,That device exists, and it’s called the Fitbit Sense ($329.95). Don’t get me wrong, I love my Fitbit Sense. It’s a great health tracker. But as the Mozilla Foundation shares in a recent report, “Google is in the process of buying Fitbit,” which means that all the “sensitive data Fitbit collects may soon be owned by Google, a company that likes to have as much data on people as possible.”,Buying a loved one a fitness gadget is dubious from the start — just ask Peloton. But what about buying them a device that records every step they take, the instant they fall asleep each night, their skin temperature, their stress levels, and their heart health and dutifully reports that data to Google on a daily basis?,If you need help choosing between the most egregious privacy-snubbing gadgets of 2020, look no further. Here is Debugger’s guide to the best holiday gifts that invade your loved ones’ privacy (with a little guidance from our friends at the Mozilla Foundation).,Video doorbells are the perfect tool to help your loved one snoop on their Amazon delivery guy or gather “evidence” for their next ranty Nextdoor post about kids taking too much Halloween candy. Those uses are at least relatively benign. But some video doorbells offer consumers the option to take their surveillance activities much further — and in more dangerous directions.,If so, you can help them bring a little slice of the panopticon home by getting them a video doorbell. Popular models include the Hello from Google Nest ($229), the Arlo ($149), and Amazon’s Ring 3 ($199). All video doorbells work by using an onboard camera to monitor activity at a user’s door. The Hello streams video to Google’s cloud 24/7, while the Arlo and Ring 3 record and send video clips when they detect motion.,Is your loved one a film and literature buff? Did they enjoy the cerebral 2006 drama The Lives of Others, about the East German Stasi? Or George Orwell’s classic novel 1984?,Ring, for example, partners with 1,300 police agencies nationwide that can freely request video from users’ doorbells. At one time, Ring provided the agencies with a helpful color-coded map showing the location of every Ring user in their jurisdiction. (This has since been withdrawn.) Some agencies have reportedly worked with neighborhood watch groups to provide free cameras, encouraging users to aim the cameras in order to monitor neighbors’ activities. This allows for crowdsourced surveillance at the scale of a whole town.,You love your friends and family. Really, you do. But if your gadget choice allowed a soulless megacorporation to siphon up their personal data to feed its ever-churning grist mill of profit, maybe you’d be okay with that. Or perhaps you’d enjoy the option of remotely flying a surveillance drone around their home — or activating the camera on their smart assistant by “dropping in” without their immediate consent.,A History of Mediocre White Men (and How They Get Ahead) Author Ijeoma Oluo dissects the issue in new book ‘Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America’zora.medium.com,Google may already know, for example, that your family member loves burgers. If their Fitbit Sense tells Google that they’re stressed out today, could Google use that knowledge and its ad network to push them toward a juicy, tasty, comforting burger for lunch? Probably. If Google did this, would your family member care? That’s a harder question.,A History of Mediocre White Men (and How They Get Ahead) Author Ijeoma Oluo dissects the issue in new book ‘Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America’zora.medium.com,Ring users can also manually flag people on their camera feed as an “unknown visitor” (Ring pivoted away from the term “suspicious person,” likely because it was being used for racial profiling), reporting their presence and sharing their image to neighbors and the police.