Anticipated in 2018: Lilie James & Location tracking, Googlists complained
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
The ABC published a summary of the Lilie James inquest with a focus on the Location Tracking issues. The coroner hasn't completed their official report yet and these news reports are only summaries of the evidence. (See my previous blog about what people hide from coroners).
In the winter 2017/2018 round of Outreachy, I selected Renata D'Avila from Brazil to be an intern for Debian Debian official announcement and Outreachy project list).
During the application process, we ask each applicant to do a small programming task and submit the results. I was startled to see Renata giving help to the women she was competing against. It turns out that while tech industry diversity programs try to attract interns who are fresh out of university, Renata had already worked as a schoolteacher for a number of years and helping the other women was just part of her nature.
In the middle of the program, Renata published a blog post with the title The right to be included in the conversation. Renata's blog post features a screenshot of Google Maps with lines marked on it showing how Googlists have tracked her movements around Porto Alegre, here it is again, along with some analysis:
Renata's blog opens with a quote from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon that anticipates the prospect of being clubbed to death:
To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, ... then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored.
The ABC report mimics the quote chosen by Renata:
The inquest examining Ms James's death at St Andrew's Cathedral School in 2023, heard she had tried to set boundaries with Thijssen the weekend before.
Creepy. But it gets worse.
The Googlists couldn't stand this. Google is one of the companies that contributes money to these diversity internships. When women are selected for the program, their blog posts are syndicated into various web sites where they are seen by many Google employees and their followers. It was really shocking for them when this blog about how creepy they are suddenly appeared all over the open source eco-system.
Various rumors appeared. They created rumors about "behavior", rumours about "harassment" and rumors about "abuse". They created rumors that I was dating an intern.
They sent threats to Renata, which she didn't tell me about until a few months later. I published some of those communications.
Debian "Community Team" (political police) to Renata, private email of 13 June 2018: Reinforcing positive attitudes and steps that you see in Debian towards women inclusion can also motivate yourself, the other Debian contributors, and possible newcomers, to go on working in that strategy and foster diversity in Debian. This does not mean to avoid criticism or hiding problems, but providing a more accurate vision of how the Brazilian Debian community works towards our common goals.
In other words, we can tell fairy tales but nobody is allowed to speculate about the negative risks associated with location tracking or anything else that comes from Googlists. Because now that it actually happened to a location tracking victim, we can all say I chose the right woman for the internship.
Please watch Renata speaking in this video. They continue spending vast sums of money on "diversity" internships but diversity of thought is not welcome.
Related: the Code of Conduct gaslighting in open-source software hobbyist groups may violate the new coercive control laws too.
Even more scary are the predictions I made when Donald Trump was elected for the first time.
Googlists have spent over US$130,000 to try and discredit me, to stop women telling me stuff and to stop us making predictions that are uncomfortably close to the truth. █
RIP Lilie James
