Smartphone apps track a staggering amount of data about our whereabouts every day. That data has become a hot commodity.
Just the national security implications for this alone should require regulations of these tech companies.
Tag: social media
🎧 ‘The Daily’: What Facebook Knew and Tried to Hide | New York Times
The story of Facebook in the past few years has been that of a company slow to understand how powerful it has become. But an investigation by The New York Times finds that once Facebook’s leaders understood the problems they faced, they sought to conceal them.
🎧 ‘The Daily’: When Facebook Rumors Incite Real Violence | New York Times
A series of damning posts on Facebook has stoked longstanding ethnic tensions in Sri Lanka, setting off a wave of violence largely directed at Muslims. How are false rumors on social media fueling real-world attacks?
On today’s episode:
• Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, who have reported on Sri Lanka for The New York Times.
Background reading:
• Fraudulent claims of a Muslim plot to wipe out Sri Lanka’s Buddhist majority, widely circulated on Facebook and WhatsApp, have led to attacks on mosques and Muslim-owned homes and shops in the country.
• Facebook’s algorithm-driven news feed promotes whatever content draws the most engagement — which tend to be the posts that provoke negative, primal emotions like fear and anger. The platform has allowed misinformation to run rampant in countries with weak institutions and a history of deep social distrust.
🎧 30 and Counting, Episode 5: Leaving Facebook… and replying over email?
Eddie Hinckle from 30andcounting.meIn this episode, I talk about my plans to leave Facebook and how I plan to in some ways replace it with a monthly newsletter. Then I brainstorm about how to receive replies and reactions from it.
Eddie shouldn’t have warned so heavily about the technical nature of this microcast. The general ideas are very clear, it’s their implementation which is likely more technical than some would appreciate.
This reminds me that I ought to get back to working on my own newsletter that I’d started to set up ages ago. It’s certainly an interesting way to target friends and family (who are unlikely to use RSS or readers) with updates outside of the traditional silos.
I’m also reminded that David Shanske is using Postmatic as an email newsletter service and it has functionality built in that allows recipients to reply to emailed updates via email which then posts the comments back to the comment section of the particular posts. Might be worth either checking this out or attempting to replicate this type of functionality? The way Postmatic is doing things is on a more post by post basis however, so it might take some additional work to get things to work properly in a newsletter with multiple stories/posts.
Another option is to add “web actions” into posts for replies. Or perhaps even adding other social context UI into newsletters similar to the way I’ve done in prior posts to allow people to respond via Twitter.
Certainly lots of options and ideas to explore.
🎧 Former Facebook Insider Says Company Cannot Be Trusted To Regulate Itself | NPR
NPR's Ailsa Chang speaks with Sandy Parakilas, who worked as an operations manager on the platform team at Facebook in 2011 and 2012. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Parakilas says Facebook cannot be trusted to regulate itself.
A bit “I-told-you-so” without any indication of how hard he may have fought for better handling of the data, but there were certainly others outside the company decrying their practices at the time.
🎧 Episode 3: Freedom from Facebook | Clevercast
Jonathan LaCour from cleverca.stThis time on clevercast, I discuss my departure from Facebook, including an overview of how I liberated my data from the social giant, and moved it to my own website.
Here are some of the tools that I mention in today’s episode:
Also check out my On This Day page and my Subscribe page, which includes my daily email syndication of my website activity.
There’s a lot going on here and a lot to unpack for such a short episode. This presents an outline at best of what I’m sure was 10 or more hours of work. One day soon, I hope, we’ll have some better automated tools for exporting data from Facebook and doing something actually useful with it.
🎧 Social Bubble Bath | IRL
How technology can create, and can break, our filter bubbles.
We’ve long heard that the ways the web is tailored for each user—how we search, what we’re shown, who we read and follow— reinforces walls between us. Veronica Belmont investigates how social media can create, and can break, our filter bubbles. Megan Phelps-Roper discusses the Westboro Baptist Church, and the bubbles that form both on and offline. B.J. May talks about the bubbles he encountered every day, in his Twitter feed, and tells us how he broke free. Rasmus Nielsen suggests social media isn’t the filter culprit we think it is. And, within the context of a divided America, DeRay McKesson argues that sometimes bubbles are what hold us together.
Show Notes
Read B.J. May’s How 26 Tweets Broke My Filter Bubble.
Grab a cup of coffee and Say Hi From the Other Side.
An interesting take which takes filter bubbles and places them not necessarily just online, but often starting in the real world first and then extending from there.
h/t Kevin Marks
🎧 ‘The Daily’: Questioning the Business of Facebook | The New York Times
Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief, faced a much tougher crowd in his second day of congressional testimony on data privacy. Calls for oversight are growing.
🎧 ‘The Daily’: Congress vs. Mark Zuckerberg | The New York Times
The Facebook chief faced tough questions on the mishandling of data. But a larger, more difficult question hung over his testimony: What is Facebook?
Painful to listen to how inept the questions were. How exactly do these people represent us? Was there no preparation at all? Even reading a few front page articles in the past two weeks would have better prepped them for questions than what we got.
🎧 This Week in Google 452 The Mormon Bartender Problem | TWiT.TV
Mr. Zuck Goes to Washington
Hosted by Leo Laporte, Stacey Higginbotham
Guests: Mike Elgan, Kevin Marks
Mark Zuckerberg answers Congress' questions. Is YouTube for kids? Google Photos automatically generates cat videos. Alexa for Business. Questionable fireplace placement.
- Kevin's Stuff: indieweb.org
- Stacey's Things: Nest Hello and Are We Already Living in Virtual Reality?
- Mike's Joint: Taskade
The discussion about the Facebook hearings in congress makes me feel a tad better, but still they’re very unsettling, and they’re on a relatively simple and easy topic.
🎧 This Week in Google 451 B055man69 | TWiT.TV
Shooting at YouTube Headquarters. Facebook's continuing kerfuffle. Apple snags Google's AI head. Chromebooks on school buses. Cheaper Pixel 3 on the way - but not for you. Trump vs. Amazon. Security breaches here, security breaches there, even in our underwear. Don't leave your pepperoni on the hotel balcony.
🎧 ‘The Daily’: Can Facebook Be Fixed? | The New York Times
Five days after details about Cambridge Analytica were made public, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, broke his silence on his company’s role in the data breach.
Minutes after posting a statement on Facebook, he spoke with The New York Times.
On today’s episode:
• Kevin Roose, a business columnist for The Times.
Background reading:
• Facebook, in crisis over the Cambridge Analytica data breach, vows to bolster security and privacy.
• A transcript of Mr. Zuckerberg’s conversation with Mr. Roose and another Times reporter, Sheera Frenkel.
I think Roose humanizes Zuckerberg a bit too much in his discussion of his interview. Facebook has some of the best and brightest engineering talent and a multi-billion dollar war chest. They’ve known about their pending problem for quite a while now and should have long since begun building a remedy. The plain truth is that they’ve actively chosen not to. Worse, even with the swirling problems in the public consciousness, they’re not actively doing anything much to fix things after-the-fact other than paying it some lip service. If Zuckerberg is as seemingly naive as Roose suggests, he needs to be removed from his position.
I’m coming much closer to calling it quits on Facebook. I’ve outlined a plan for extracting myself and just need to begin implementation. I’ve even got a potential scalable plan for family/friends who would like to leave as well.
I actually feel like my remaining on the platform is subsidizing keeping many third world people on it, and the way Facebook has been and is operating in many other countries it becomes a moral issue which is forcing me to actively seek to leave it.
🎧 ‘The Daily’: The Data Harvesters” | The New York Times
A young Canadian data expert came up with a plan to harvest people’s personal data off Facebook, and to use that information to influence their voting.
On today’s episode:
• Matthew Rosenberg, a New York Times reporter in Washington.
Background reading:
• Consultants for the Trump campaign exploited the Facebook data of 50 million people.
• Cambridge Analytica offered to entrap politicians through seduction or bribery.
• How researchers use Facebook “likes” to sway your thinking.
A fantastic overview of the background for the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica story.
🎧 This Week in Google 449 Grackles, Nuthatches, and Swifts, Oh My! | TWiT.TV
Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Google News Initiative will fight fake journalism. Uber self-driving car not at fault for killing pedestrian. Congress passes SESTSA/FOSTA. The city that banned bitcoin mining.
- Jeff's Number: Amazon is #2
- Stacey's Thing: Alexa Kids Court
- Leo's Tool: Samsung My BP Lab
🎧 This Week in Tech 656 A Camel With Your Name on It | TWiT.TV
Social media and kids, Google fiber fail, 5G dreams, and more. Surprise: young people use social more than the oldsters. Some of them even use Vero. Samsung Galaxy S9 takes top marks for display and camera. Google Fiber didn't go quite as planned. Feds in your iPhone? It's more likely than you think. Amazon buys Ring, can now see and hear everything. US vs Microsoft II: The Revenge of the Irish. GitHub gets gotten by the biggest DDoS EVER.
There’s a great conversation in this episode about open platforms and why they’re important. The basic conversation starts around 12m19s, but really gets going at 16 minutes in and continues through to about 26:30. It includes some great examples of text messaging, social media companies, reservation systems and how they work either for the good or the bad based on how open or closed they are. It becomes a textbook set of cases for why the IndieWeb movement is important.
For those interested in just this short 10 minute section you can listen below on this bookmarked version of the audio:
Another interesting sub-segment is at 17:13 where Dwight Silverman comments that he knows many people who’ve removed social apps from their cell phones, including Leo Laporte. I’ve done this nearly a year ago and recently Dries Buytaert mentioned he’s done it as well. There’s also a recent article by Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times that he’s done something similar with solid results. For a list of people who’ve gone further, check out this list of silo-quits.