The walls are closing in around us. All of us. Maybe now is not a good time to keep feeding our information to the machines that oppress us.

I grew up in the 90s. I didn't really get online until the early 00s, but my family always enforced a lot of "stranger danger" kind of stuff, particularly about the internet. In retrospect, some of it was overboard - "your online friends aren't real" is, I think we can all now agree with hindsight, a truly deranged way to put your point - but one very important piece of information I was given on the regular was "never give out personal information." Not "unless absolutely necessary." Not "only so you can sign up to Roblox or whatever the equivalent would have been in the early 00s," not "only if the machine asks you really nicely." Never. In recent years, I fully admit that I have violated this credo. In a world of e-commerce, it's kinda hard to avoid that. I also find it useful if I'm speaking personally to give a rough idea of what country and part of the country I live in. Plus you have all of technology basically able to geolocate you at the drop of a hat because tech executives are a fundamentally evil group of people. I assume they can backtrace your IP to do stuff like find your account with your internet service provider and derive all kinds of vulnerable info from that, not to mention the stuff they get from you using a smartphone to access the internet at all, not to mention just straight-up buying data sold without your consent. At least I don't give out my last name to people who are not sending me mail, I guess.

So maybe I'm not the best person to say this. But people perhaps need to consider dialing it the fuck back when it comes to how much personal information they give out freely just because the machine asks pretty-please. Internet safety education is in the toilet these days. I know people didn't always follow that very well in the first place, but it's the fact that people seemingly aren't even being taught about it anymore that has something crawling up my pant leg a bit here.

There's one version of the non-education in particular that really alarms me, though, more than any - not just people who willingly give up this information, but the stove-touchers who choose to give up more information when they are told not to. Now is when we get relevant to a recent phenomenon: this concerns a web app or website or something like that called Wplace.

Because I didn't really care to participate, I'm a little unclear as to what Wplace is - I think it's people drawing pixel art on a map of the world near where they live akin to the former internet phenomenon r/place, where Reddit users could... draw pixel art on a map of the world. Not my bag, because it can be overwritten, and I'd prefer to do my mediocre pixel art on my own time, where people don't get to see it until I'm done. Or I'm not tempted to write in slogans using the least pixels per letter to leave them still recognizable as letters (a legitimate feat, by the way; not denigrating the low-pixel font). I can write "fuck you, Baltimore" on a map of Maryland offline. Which probably also affects my feelings on the matter: any activity worth doing online is probably more worth doing off. (SPURIOUSLY RELATED: Mortis Ghost's iconic RPG OFF has been remastered and is now available on Steam. Buy it and play it! Though maybe asking you to participate in e-commerce on this post is a... strange choice.)

People started reporting that personal info was being leaked. I forget the exact details, but I remember being confused - downright befuddled, really - by this. What information was this thing taking, anyway? Oh, right, it appears that it was paying for itself by making people buy some kind of premium currency called "droplets" for microtransactions. But also, even aside from that, it would want to know where you live so it can give you a local map, right? So there you are.

There are other reasons to hate Wplace (Zionism; the use of a premium currency to obfuscate the costs of whatever the fuck you use it for; honestly, I presume a large part of the userbase are under-18s, so that's trying to exploit children for financial gain; exploiting other vulnerable communities for financial gain in a similar way to any other gaming microtransaction; transphobia (EDIT 18 AUG: they just sacked another trans mod, even!); just to name ones I can say offhand). But this wasn't the only way this information was being given away; people were posting maps of their local area freely and saying it was where they lived. What made me particularly upset about this, though, was seeing a post on Bluesky asking people not to doxx themselves with Wplace, and seeing multiple people in the quote reposts basically going "fuck you" and posting maps that at least purported to be near where they are. What the hell?! What happened to people? Has this sort of thing truly become so normalized?

Well, yes.

What, were you expecting me to go into anything else here? What more explanation do I need? I could make fun of the prospective "young person putting their whole mental health diagnoses and triggers on a Carrd" (by the way, kids, your DNI Carrds are really only gonna make bad actors know better ways to get under your skin; learn to curate your own internet experience), but where does that get us anyway? There are so many more pernicious things going on here that honestly, this one foolhardy choice by some teenagers is not only the symptoms and not the disease, but it's more akin to looking up one random thing on WebMD and convincing yourself you're going to die in three weeks. Corporations get your information for wildly stupid reasons and then sell it to other companies for a quick buck.

But obviously I'm not here to absolve Wplace or any of its users. I saw a review of Wplace on Backloggs where someone was "disputing" the statements about it being a data-harvesting app by saying, basically, "well, we give all this information to Google and whoever, what does it matter?" I mean, okay, sure, but why make it easier for people to steal sensitive data by continuing to put it in dangerous places for no real gain except a minuscule and brief amount of fun? That guy offering babysitting services is a known predator, why would you let him babysit your child? Why would you trust the face-eating leopards to not eat your face?

Actually, I guess that's what's going on in American politics right now, huh?

It makes me genuinely scared. I don't know any of these peoiple, but like, I'm worried about all of you. You are going to get yourself hurt, and for what? What is actually worth it, especially when the amount of harm that can be caused by that is so great?

We really need to fix this sooner rather than later. This is far bigger than Wplace, but it's been a very popular thing that became the catalyst for me to actually assemble a proper rant instead of just saying the same thing over and over on social media about people needing to cut it out.