Privacy policies are bogus and reading all of them would take about 30 days per year

Privacy policies are bogus and reading all of them would take about 30 days per year

The reality is that the incentives of a privacy policy are to not use it to keep your info private. In fact, the incentives are to make a privacy policy as permissive as possible. Because the only time you get in trouble is not if you fail to protect someone’s privacy… but if you violate your own privacy policy. So companies have the incentive to write a privacy policy that is as permissive to the company as possible, so that…

Read More Read More

Purpose of Facebook’s “tag people in photos” is to train their automatic photo recognizer

Purpose of Facebook’s “tag people in photos” is to train their automatic photo recognizer

Facebook has a feature that allows you to tag friends in photos. They encourage you to click on the individual in the photo and then “tag” their user name. This helps Facebook build an image library from multiple angles and perspectives. This data is processed by Facebook to create their automatic facial recognition software. Facebook claims it can accurately identify people’s faces in photos – literally among billions of photos in the world and that it can do this in…

Read More Read More

Your smart phone apps are primarily to spy on you

Your smart phone apps are primarily to spy on you

Location smart SDKs, embedded into publisher apps, have transformed the way in which location data is obtained. It has allowed brands to extract pure, first party, data giving them access to the most accurate form of location data. …. The location signals your device send say a lot about your behaviours and interests. Understanding a user’s behaviour based on the places they have been and routines they follow can be far more valuable to a brand than simply their online…

Read More Read More

Facebook provided Cambridge Analytica/Kogan with “57 billion friendship” links

Facebook provided Cambridge Analytica/Kogan with “57 billion friendship” links

Two of Facebook’s own data scientists worked with Kogan between 2013 and 2015, according to the paper. As part of the research, which was separate from Kogan’s work for Cambridge Analytica, Facebook provided Kogan with data on 57 billion Facebook friendships, according to the paper. …. Facebook then provided the authors with data “on every friendship formed in 2011 in every country in the world at the national aggregate level.” The data set included a total of 57,457,192,520 friendships, according…

Read More Read More

Why did I not see the Trump ads on Facebook?

Why did I not see the Trump ads on Facebook?

We may never know why I only saw left wing propaganda on Facebook in 2016, since Facebook is so secretive about what they do with our data. But I now have a working hypothesis as to what happened. In the 2nd half of 2016 and especially in the fall of 2016 prior to the election, my Facebook news feed was filled with political propaganda, essentially all of it “left wing” propaganda, especially propaganda posters from fake news services such as…

Read More Read More

Facebook and Instagram apps are used to track your location

Facebook and Instagram apps are used to track your location

Facebook and Instagram apps, routinely installed on smart phones, collect your location information and log it with Facebook. In fact, 49 out of 93 apps on my Android device have the Location permission set to ON (I have since turned several of them to OFF). Source: Three ways social media is tracking you – Business Insider More evidence that the sole business of social media is surveillance spying and propaganda messaging.

Computer science largely devoid of ethics

Computer science largely devoid of ethics

True. What many are only just now discovering about social media (or what you might have known if you’d be reading this web site for a while) is the serious problems manifested by social media, particularly Facebook. As Zunger notes in further comments, software development has not suffered the consequences of massive systemic failures like what we are seeing with Facebook. Other fields, like civil and mechanical engineering did, long ago (think bridge and building collapses), which led to professional…

Read More Read More

Store “Loyalty Cards” are combined with social media data to log your purchase habits

Store “Loyalty Cards” are combined with social media data to log your purchase habits

Stores use your loyalty card to identify you and all of your purchases. Your purchase transactions are then sold to other marketing companies. This data, in turn, can and is matched to your Facebook account and other online data using the phone number that you gave to the store and to Facebook or Google. Source: Loyalty Cards are used to spy on  your purchases, and not just with the vendor | Coldstreams The matching operation uses the phone number you…

Read More Read More

“Americascrumblinginfrastructure” meme. Again.

“Americascrumblinginfrastructure” meme. Again.

I’m so old, I remember 10 weeks ago when a brand new locomotive leading the inaugural run of a brand new train on a brand new rail line crashed – on its first run, and many people blamed that on “Americascrumblinginfracture” (that really is one word you know!) Today, another tragedy with the collapse of a brand new bridge still under construction. This of course is blamed on “Americascrumblinginfracture“. I wonder if Crumblingthinkingskills might be a problem. These Twitter posts show the…

Read More Read More