Data privacy is personal privacyPublished inThe Medium BlogSent as aNewsletter3 min readJust now-- Welcome backIssue #263: fibroids, catfishing, and simmer potsBy Adeline DimondICYMI like I did, last week was Data Privacy Week. It used to be Data Privacy Day, but as Taylor Armerding writes on Medium, the National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA) expanded it to a whole week, probably to get people like me to sit up and take notice. (It now runs from January 27 to January 31.) Amerding explains that data privacy is personal privacy and provides a long but non-exhaustive list of everything data privacy implicates, like your health, age, gender, shopping habits, where you go and how long you stay, whom you hang with, what you wear, where you work, what you earn.One spooky example: every day when I leave my parking garage I wave to Larry, the parking manager. We just wave at each other; we know no one in common, we dont speak, and I dont even have his phone number, but Facebook recently suggested that Larry and I become friends. An article from Wired explains why this may have happened: Facebook once patented proximity sensors to support its people you may know feature. As Amerding writes, we are in the the golden age of surveillance and unfortunately no one is coming to the rescue. Amerding notes that there are no comprehensive international or domestic laws to govern our borderless, online world; instead, we have a jumble of hundreds laws confusing pretty much everyone.Simply put, theres no sheriff in town, so its up to us to protect ourselves. Thats why I was grateful to find this security and privacy checklist by strategic comms lead Laura Ward in Code Like a Girl. (Never doubt a comms professionals ability to guard information.) Ward divides her checklist into three parts: a security checklist, a privacy checklist, and a surveillance checklist.Agree on a family passphrase is under the security checklist, because scammers can now create an AI-version of your loved ones voice (gah), whereas her advice to always select ask app not to track is on the privacy checklist. My favorite piece of advice falls under her surveillance checklist: support independent journalism. Look for the people and voices you trust, she writes, and spend a little money to ensure journalism with a strong independent and investigative focus will continue in the future.Wards checklist is empowering, and like Amerdings piece, its a sobering reminder to stay vigilant. But sometimes its also fun to wallow in the seeming futility of it all. To that end, Ill leave you this gem from the archives: You Do Not Have a Right to Privacy by John DeVore. DeVore laments that weve already lost the battle to keep our thoughts and feelings private, so maybe we should just accept it.There is an eyeball in the sink drain looking up at you, he writes, remembering fondly when he could still burn love poems in the kitchen sink, and no one would know. What else were readingBlack women are diagnosed with fibroids three times as often as white women, and are two to three times as likely to have recurring problems. This matters because, for some, uterine fibroids are painful as hell and chronic pain affects everything. This story from the archives by Lakota Summer is one of several first-person accounts on Medium about the condition. I found myself muttering under my breath in frustration when she revealed that it took a year for her to be approved for fibroid surgery, after being required to go through a gauntlet of other ineffective treatments.On a lighter note, if you have a thing for catfishing stories like I do, Lauren Reeves has written a doozy, told in 51 parts. Start here, but be prepared to cancel all other engagements until you finish. Takeaway: If someone tells you theyre a physicist but does drugs and plays video games all day, they probably arent. Your daily dose of practical wisdomMartha Stewart has directed us to make simmer pots and so we shall make simmer pots. My version: toss some cloves, cinnamon sticks, orange peel, and a bay leaf in a large pot of water and bring to a boil. Your house will smell like inside and outside at the same time.