Google and other online advertising platforms engage in disturbing privacy violations through the categories they use to target internet users, according to a new filing that reveals just how creepy this data collection can get.

Google and other online ad companies use intimate personal information like political beliefs, religion, sexual orientation, and even diseases and disabilities to target users for advertising, according to new evidence filed by digital rights organizations in Poland, Ireland and the UK. Their complaint takes aim at real-time bidding (RTB), online ad auctions in which highly sensitive information about users gleaned from their browsing history is traded by thousands of third-party companies which use these behavioral profiles to target ads.

“Incontinence,” “special needs kids,” and “gay life” are just a few of the categories on the Internet Advertising Bureau’s list that could infringe on Article 9 of the GDPR, the EU privacy law which bars the use of such sensitive data without explicit consent from users. Since most internet users have no idea these tags are being attached to them, let alone bought and sold by companies they’ve never heard of, this kind of invasive profiling clearly runs afoul of the law, the group says.

https://www.rt.com/news/450013-google-ad-tracking-gdpr/

Millions of Instagram users across the world have been left in the dark after a sudden outage took the service offline.

Reports of Instagram being inaccessible began arriving at 7:20 pm Eastern time in the US, but the outage map is showing failures in both Americas, Europe and Australia, according to the website DownDetector.

https://www.rt.com/news/450007-instagram-down-outage-worldwide/

A Sundance documentary ostensibly about the 1961 plane crash which killed then UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold, contains explosive claims of a conspiracy to spread HIV among South Africa’s black population.

Directed by controversial Danish journalist, filmmaker, and provocateur Mads Brügger, ‘Cold Case Hammarskjold,’ debuted Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival.

It details an investigation into the largely unsolved death of Swedish diplomat and former UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, whose DC-6 plane crashed near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (modern Zambia). Initial investigations identified the cause as pilot error or mere mechanical fault, though doubts have persisted in the 50+ years since the crash.

Throughout the course of the new documentary, Brügger and his team investigate a white militia, the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR). According to documents the filmmakers uncovered, the group operated with support from the CIA and British Intelligence and orchestrated the 1961 plane crash which killed Hammarskjold. The documentarians eventually encounter and interview a man named Alexander Jones who is allegedly a former member of the group.

https://www.rt.com/news/449988-weaponized-hiv-sundance-documentary-conspiracy/