Tag Archives: Facebook

Doug Casey on the Coming Comfortable Dystopia, Part 2

Posted on April 5, 2018 | Leave a comment

If the US institutes a social credit system like China’s, SLL will start thousands of points in the hole. From Doug Case at caseyresearch.com:

Justin’s note: Yesterday, Doug and I discussed why China’s getting ready to roll out a “social credit system”—and why the U.S. could do something similar. Today, in the second part of our conversation, Doug shares more thoughts on this disturbing trend…

Justin: I imagine that corporate America will also be in favor of a social credit system. After all, it sounds like the ultimate marriage between big business and big government.

Doug: Absolutely. It relates to our recent conversation about Facebook and the other tech giants. The government loves these companies, and they’re hooked up with the government. The Deep State really exists.

I dislike Facebook intensely, and don’t use it. Only idiots do. But you know what’s interesting? I set up my Facebook account years ago; it seemed like a good way for old pals to get back in touch. And in the beginning, I would get friend requests from a lot of strangers—I didn’t know who these people were. But neither did I care. So I said “yes” to just about everyone’s “friend request.”

I probably got around 4,000 Facebook friends. I know almost none of them. But, when I check, I only get about four a month now. I’m not sure why. As I said last time, not only are people suspicious of it, but kids think it’s clunky, dumb, and unhip. And they’re right. Only the NSA, FBI, and CIA actually like Facebook.

Anyway, is the drop-off in friend requests because everyone who wants to be my friend is already my friend on Facebook? I doubt it, because I still get about 50 friend requests every week on LinkedIn. Which I’m also not crazy about, but at least business might come out of it.

Justin: Maybe your Facebook social credit rating has fallen… Or maybe you said something in one of our recent interviews that ticked off Zuckerberg.

Doug: Who knows? It’s a black box to me. But I’m one of those people who won’t fit in well to the brave new world that’s evolving.

To continue reading: Doug Casey on the Coming Comfortable Dystopia, Part 2

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Never mind Facebook, Google is the all-seeing ‘big brother’ you should know about, by RT News

Posted on April 2, 2018 | 2 comments

When it comes to collecting data, Facebook is an amateur compared to pros at Google. From RT news at rt.com:

The Cambridge Analytica scandal put Facebook through the wringer in recent weeks, losing the company $100 billion in stock value and prompting a global debate on internet privacy.

The social media giant was forced to apologize and overhaul its privacy and data sharing practices, but it still remains in the media spotlight and in the crosshairs of the Federal Trade Commission, which says it may be liable for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fines.

But amid all the furor, one monolithic entity has continued to harvest data from billions of people worldwide. The data gathered includes a precise log of your every move and every internet search you’ve ever made, every email you’ve ever sent, your workout routine, your favourite food, and every photo you’ve ever taken. And you have allowed it to happen to yourself, for the sake of better service and more relevant advertising.

Google is a ‘Big Brother’ with capabilities beyond George Orwell’s wildest nightmares. These capabilities are all the more chilling after Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., cut its famous “don’t be evil” line from its code of conduct in 2015.

Everything you’ve ever searched for on any of your devices is recorded and stored by Google. It’s done to better predict your future searches and speed up and streamline your browsing. You can clear your search history, but it only works for that particular device. Google still keeps a record of everything. Click here to see everything you’ve ever searched on a Google device.

The same goes for every app and extension you use. If it’s connected to Google, your data is stored. That means that your Facebook messages are not only farmed out to companies like Cambridge Analytica, Google also has them from the Facebook app you use.

YouTube, which is a Google subsidiary, also stores a history of every video you watch. It will know if you’ve listened to Linkin Park’s ‘In the End’ 3,569 times, or watched hours of flat-earth conspiracy theory videos.

To continue reading: Never mind Facebook, Google is the all-seeing ‘big brother’ you should know about

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Facebook Changes Privacy Tools, Allowing Users To Delete Data, by Tyler Durden

Posted on March 28, 2018 | Leave a comment

SLL has no brief with Facebook’s privacy policies, but one comment seems in order. The Facebook matter blew up a couple of weeks ago, and in response Facebook is making changes to try to appease their customers. Facebook is a private company and it acted quickly. Contrast that with the government, which has been subject to numerous revelations about its data gathering practices the last few years and hasn’t changed a one of them. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Responding to public and political outrage, on Wednesday morning Facebook announced a reorganization of the privacy settings that users and have long criticized as a seeming afterthought, and which will provide for better privacy data control and make it easier for users to find, download and delete data — changes that come as the company remains embroiled in a global scandal over its handling of user data which has sent its stock into a bear market in the past week. 

The changes include a new “Privacy Shortcuts” menu with written explanations of each relevant option; an “Access Your Information” feature that lets users easily delete individual posts and “likes”; and what’s billed as a streamlined way for users to download all the data Facebook has on them. The new layout will also result in a redesigned menu on mobile devices will have all sections in one single place under settings tab; users will also be able to review what’s been shared and deleted. The company also proposes updates to terms of service and data policy.

“It’s time to make our privacy tools easier to find,” Facebook officials say in a blog post Wednesday detailing the changes, which are unlikely to satisfy critics who want major reforms in the way the social media giant handles the data of its more than 2 billion users.

However, the section that will attract the most interest is the following:

Tools to find, download and delete your Facebook data. It’s one thing to have a policy explaining what data we collect and use, but it’s even more useful when people see and manage their own information. Some people want to delete things they’ve shared in the past, while others are just curious about the information Facebook has. So we’re introducing Access Your Information – a secure way for people to access and manage their information, such as posts, reactions, comments, and things you’ve searched for. You can go here to delete anything from your timeline or profile that you no longer want on Facebook.

The tweaks come a week and a half after the revelation that the Donald Trump-aligned political data firm Cambridge Analytica had obtained information on about 50 million U.S. users before the 2016 election. The resulting outrage in the U.S. and Europe has given new life to long-standing complaints that it’s too difficult for Facebook users to control or know who can view their posts, messages, photos, “likes” and other content.

To continue reading: Facebook Changes Privacy Tools, Allowing Users To Delete Data

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Zuckerberg Scrambles To Calm Facebook Employees, by Tyler Durden

Posted on March 25, 2018 | 1 comment

So far, Facebook has done a miserable job explaining its privacy policies and practices to the public or its employees, perhaps because such polices are so apparently lax. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Following a horrendous week of damage control through a choreographed game of MSM softball, Mark Zuckerberg is now trying to calm down Facebook employees in the wake of a massive data harvesting scandal.

A March 18 exposé by The Guardian detailing how 28-year-old programmer Christopher Wylie “made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool” missed its intended Trump-linked target and landed squarely on Facebook’s doorstep, after revelations that Facebook’s Orwellian data collection combined with sloppy oversight of what apps and their creators do with your data has resulted in disturbing violations of privacy.

What’s more – Facebook was helping the Obama Campaign target voters using harvested data, similar to what Cambridge Analytica was doing. Obama’s former campaign director admitted over Twitter that Facebook not only knew of the campaign’s data harvesting to “suck out the whole social graph,” but that they “didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.”

And WikiLeaked emails released during the 2016 election revealed that Facebook COO Cheryl Sandberg really wanted “Hillary to win badly,” after Hillary came over to Sandberg’s house and was “magical with her kids.”

Adding more fuel to the fire is the fact that one of the psychologists who created the data-harvesting app which gathered information on over 50 million Facebook users before selling it to Cambridge Analytica and others works for Facebook.

The co-director of a company that harvested data from tens of millions of Facebook users before selling it to the controversial data analytics firms Cambridge Analytica is currently working for the tech giant as an in-house psychologist.

Joseph Chancellor was one of two founding directors of Global Science Research (GSR), the company that harvested Facebook data using a personality app under the guise of academic research and later shared the data with Cambridge Analytica. –The Guardian

To continue reading: Zuckerberg Scrambles To Calm Facebook Employees

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10 Social Media Networks to Use Instead of Facebook, by Jake Anderson

Posted on March 24, 2018 | Leave a comment

Here’s a nifty list for anyone who wants to unhook from the Facebook octopus, communicate with friends and relatives, and preserve their privacy. From Jake Anderson at theantimedia.org:

The salient facts of the new Cambridge Analytica scandal are bad, and the optics are even worse for Facebook, which is already facing multiple battles both in legal courts and the court of public opinion. But this really is just the spilled pot of a long-boiling problem: growing discomfort within our citizen-consumer class over predatory data mining and the unaccountable shadow agencies and corporations being given access to our private lives via social networks. Big Brother has been privatized, and it may turn out to be far more dangerous than anything George Orwell predicted.

Typically, Facebook has been able to duck, dodge, juke, and jive its way out of such entanglements because of the sheer ubiquity of social media in our daily lives, the market value of the company, and its ability to manipulate public opinion. But this time is different. The company hit the politicized buzzsaw of the 2016 election, which is still grinding and sparking from accusations concerning the use of Facebook to spread propaganda (which in reality, of course, is nothing new). In other words, “Facebook’ is appearing in more and more paragraphs containing “Russia,” and in today’s climate, that is worse than a decade of privacy violations.

In Facebook’s meteoric rise, it flew too close to Trump on the wings of pilfered data.

With the #DeleteFacebook hashtag trending on social media and the Big Five — Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook — growing more untrustworthy by the day, we may soon see a sea change in public sentiment toward another relevant trend with incredible momentum: peer-to-peer, blockchain-based tech apps; tools that do not harvest user data and are not part of a monopolistic predator class of Silicon Valley tech elites hobnobbing with Washington policymakers. The masses may finally be ready to adopt the ethos of decentralized social media in their lives.

To continue reading: 10 Social Media Networks to Use Instead of Facebook

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Breaching the Public Trust – Facebook is the Beginning, by Tom Luongo

Posted on March 24, 2018 | Leave a comment

People may be tiring of being the social media companies’ “product.” From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

Last night I was chatting with a friend while waiting for my daughter. She told me her phone now informs her when her bills are due.  Now, that may not seem like a big deal, but it is when you realize that she never told her phone to do that.

Her phone is scanning her emails and letting her know her when her electric bill is due.

I told her Google likely pushed down an update which she agreed to without realizing it (or getting the opportunity to opt-out of) which authorized them to not only scan her inbox but set up alerts for her.

She was angry about it, and rightfully so.

This is why I don’t use any of the Google apps on my Android phone.  Outlook for email, Opera for my browser.  Office for my productivity apps.  It was a conscious choice.  I moved to Android under protest because Microsoft willfully destroyed Windows Phone.

I know it’s not much better, but at least Microsoft appreciates my business, now, for the first time in their miserable existence.

And I wasn’t willing to shell out $600+ for a comparable iPhone.  Pennywise and pound-foolish, I know, but no one’s perfect.

As a hardware-savvy guy I know when software is over-burdening hardware and why.

And I can tell you the data harvesting on my phone was so out of control by Facebook and Google that it became nigh unusable on wake-up.  Upwards of a minute or two would go by before the phone was usable because so much data was being harvested off it before it would deign to allow me to use it.

I will switch to the iPhone when I can justify the money.

Once I deleted Facebook and all its crap from my phone, it miraculously became almost functional again.  I could answer calls as they came in.  I could reply to texts and approve blog comments/pingbacks.

I will never reinstall Facebook on any device I own.

 

To continue reading: Breaching the Public Trust – Facebook is the Beginning

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Should Facebook and Google Pay Users When They Sell Data Collected from Users? by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on March 23, 2018 | Leave a comment

The mechanics of the social media companies paying users for their data are daunting, but it’s an intriguing idea. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Let’s imagine a model in which the marketers of data distribute some of their immense profits to the users who created and thus “own” the data being sold for a premium.
It’s not exactly news that Facebook, Google and other “free” services reap billions of dollars in profits by selling data mined/collected from their millions of users. As we know, If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold, also phrased as if the service is free, you are the product.
Correspondent GFB recently asked, why aren’t Facebook et al. sharing a slice of the profits reaped from users’ data with the users who create the data?Given the enormous data processing capabilities of these tech giants, it’s certainly not a technical issue to credit each user a micro-payment when the data they create and thus “own” (since the creator of any digital product is by rights the owner of that product, including data sold to marketers) is sold.
Is the presumption that the collector of users’ data “own” that data via the collection process false, legally and ethically? Teams of attorneys may well be employed to support this claim on legal grounds, but what about the ethics of this data-mining of the many to profit the few with the means to collect and sell the data harvested from users?
Now that the ethical foundation of all these tech giants has been revealed to be nothing but shifting sand, it’s a line of inquiry worth pursuing. In some ways it parallels the situation in biomedicine: if a private-sector corporation harvests a particular genetic variation from an individual, do they “own” the variation because they detected it, or does the individual whose tissue/blood was harvested retain some ownership?
We need to differentiate sites and services that 1) do not collect data from users and 2) sell display advertising seen equally by all users (i.e. the traditional media model) and sites and services that 1) collect data from users as their “business model” / reason to exist and 2) sell marketing/advertising for a premium because it’s targeted to individual users.
The difference between these two models is obvious: one is “broadcast” available equally to users and advertisers alike. The other is “targeted marketing” based on data harvested from individual users.

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Facebook, Uber and the end of the Great American Tech Delusion, by SPENGLER

Posted on March 23, 2018 | Leave a comment

America has been propelled by science and technology, but the hype, especially the financial hype, always outruns the reality. From SPENGLER at atimes.com:

We’ve been there before, in the crash of the dot-com bubble of 2000, when we believed that downloading pop music and porn would drive the economy of the future. We’ve done it again: We made another tech bubble on the premise that Americans would write the apps and Asians would make the hardware, and the miracle of connectivity would bring the world together in Mark Zuckerberg’s utopian vision. Internet community and Artificial Intelligence were the two blasts of hot air that inflated the bubble. Social media as a substitute for actual human interaction and computation as a substitute for human thought were going to waft us into the future.

Yesterday’s double crash of these delusions was the sort of irony that makes one intimate the hand of God in human history.

The crown jewel of Artificial Intelligence shattered when Uber’s autonomous SUV ran over Ms. Elaine Herzberg at the corner of Curry and Mill Street in Tempe, Arizona. And the concept of Internet community vaporized when news reports alleged that Cambridge Analytica improperly retained Facebook profiles of 50 million users. Facebook promptly lost 7% of its stock market value in yesterday’s trading, and other big tech names fell by 3% to 4%.

All the hype in the world can’t stand up to the ugly fact of a dead human body on the road. A few skeptics, including the distinguished physicist and venture capitalist Dr. Henry Kressel, have warned that AI in general and self-driving cars, in particular, are mainly hype. As Kressel wrote last year in Asia Times:

In a well-controlled environment (like driving on a track), the computer can be expected to respond to situations consistent with programmed information. The problematic situations are the accidental ones when something happens on the track that requires a quick response different from the programmed actions. This is where the awareness and quick response of a human driver come into play and where the response of a computer making the decisions is quite another matter. And this is the skill that differentiates race-car drivers from the rest of us – and computers from all of us.

To continue reading: Facebook, Uber and the end of the Great American Tech Delusion

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The Only Reason We’re Examining Facebook’s Sleazy Behavior Is Because Trump Won, by Michael Krieger

Posted on March 22, 2018 | Leave a comment

To his credit, Michael Krieger has been warning of the dangers of social media for a long time. From Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

Trust me, there’s nobody more thrilled to see Facebook’s unethical and abusive practices finally getting the attention they deserve from mass media and members of the public who simply didn’t want to hear about it previously. I’ve written multiple articles over the years warning people about the platform (links at the end), but these mostly fell on deaf ears.

That’s just the way things go. All sorts of horrible behaviors can continue for a very long time before the corporate media and general public come around to caring. You typically need some sort of external event to change mass psychology. In this case, that event was Trump winning the election.

The more I read about the recent Facebook scandal, it’s clear this sort of thing’s been going on for a very long time. The major difference is this time the data mining was used by campaign consultants of the person who wasn’t supposed to win. Donald Trump.

To get a sense of what I mean, let’s take a look at some excerpts from a deeply troubling article recently published at the Guardian, ‘Utterly Horrifying’: Ex-Facebook Insider Says Covert Data Harvesting Was Routine:

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users are likely to have had their private information harvested by companies that exploited the same terms as the firm that collected data and passed it on to Cambridge Analytica, according to a new whistleblower.

Sandy Parakilas, the platform operations manager at Facebook responsible for policing data breaches by third-party software developers between 2011 and 2012, told the Guardian he warned senior executives at the company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach…

Parakilas, whose job was to investigate data breaches by developers similar to the one later suspected of Global Science Research, which harvested tens of millions of Facebook profiles and provided the data to Cambridge Analytica, said the slew of recent disclosures had left him disappointed with his superiors for not heeding his warnings.

“It has been painful watching,” he said, “because I know that they could have prevented it”…

To continue reading: The Only Reason We’re Examining Facebook’s Sleazy Behavior Is Because Trump Won

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Hillary Clinton, Not Donald Trump or Cambridge Analytica, Is Gaslighting America, by Nick Gillespie

Posted on March 22, 2018 | 1 comment

Donald Trump’s campaign may have used Facebook in 2016 as effectively as Barack Obama’s campaign used it 2012. Suddenly, Facebook poses a threat to democracy and the electoral process. It didn’t back in 2012, of course, at least if you’re a Democrat. From Nick Gillespie at reason.com:

The election of Donald Trump hasn’t just brought a poorly mannered reality TV star into the Oval Office and our newsfeeds. It has also popularized the concept of gaslighting, or tricking rational people into thinking they’re insane. The phrase is a reference to a 1944 movie in which Charles Boyer tries to convince his young bride, played by Ingrid Bergman, that she’s nuts so he can cover up a murder and search for jewels hidden in the house they share (the house’s gas lamps flicker due to Boyer’s late-night searches, hence the title).

Go Google “Donald Trump is gaslighting America” and you’ll find a constantly growing list of stories from outlets ranging from CNN to Teen Vogue to Vanity Fair to Refinery 29. The common thread is some variation on the theme that Trump’s brazen lies, misstatements, and rhetorical sleights of hand are designed to drive us all batshit crazy by contradicting what we plainly see happening to the United States of America. At rock bottom, Trump’s detractors believe there is simply no way that he could have legitimately won the 2016 election, especially against Hillary Clinton, of whom President Obama said, “I don’t think that there’s ever been someone so qualified to hold this office.”

Yet it’s not Donald Trump who is gaslighting us, but Hillary Clinton, whose complete and utter refusal to take responsibility for her loss is at the heart of what’s so weird about contemporary America. You read it here first: Trump is the effect and not the cause of the ongoing mudslide that is the daily news. Ever since about 11 p.m. ET on November 8, 2016, Clinton and her allies in the media have worked overtime to provide increasingly fanciful explanations for her failure to beat the least-credible candidate ever in American history. Sometimes the apologias are conscious, sometimes not, but nobody really wants to accept what happened (in fact, even Trump himself couldn’t believe it for a while, which helps explain why his transition was so incompetent). The result is a non-stop barrage of stories, some more credible than others, that Trump’s win was the result of some sort of sinister machination that has undermined our democracy. Following from this interpretation every aspect of his behavior, from his bro-ing out with Vladimir Putin to his indifferent spelling and capitalization while tweeting, is just one more sign that we are living in a world gone stark, raving mad.

To continue reading: Hillary Clinton, Not Donald Trump or Cambridge Analytica, Is Gaslighting America

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