Musings of a Modern Day Cyberneticist
Deborah Edwards-Onoro (Lireo Designs)Last weekend, my friend Virginia shared her latest blog post on Facebook, about excellent Ada Lovelace Day posters for women in STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math). Go ahead, download them! …
Deborah, if this sort of meta data is your cup of tea, you’re sure to love Kevin Marks’ article Decaying Silos as dead malls.
Documents from a 2015 lawsuit allege that the tech giant’s policies were anticompetitive and misrepresented to the public
John Naughton (memex.naughtons.org)And his solution? Use antitrust law to break up Facebook and Twitter.
That’s not going to solve the problem. And even if it did, Trump would be into his fifth term before break-up was accomplished.
My last post to Facebook was almost a year ago on July 31, 2018, a day before Facebook turned off their API and prevented my website from interacting with their service. Other moral and ethical concerns with Facebook aside, I’ve got what I hope to be a useful method for people’s interactions with my Facebook account to come back to my site. This will let me better own and control my data while still interacting with people “stuck” on this problematic service.
This return post will serve as a test to see if I might return to and occasionally post there again.
this is a kinda crazy, somewhat dangerous, generally inadvisable idea that we almost certainly shouldn't do...at least, not as a public facing service for everyone. @chrisaldrich had the ...
They are lying, says Paul-Olivier Dehaye. They are all lying: Facebook, Tinder and Uber.
Hat tip:
https://t.co/RQTWmr5GqQ #domains19
— Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) June 10, 2019
When former Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes penned a New York Times op-ed calling for the breakup of the platform, he was lauded by anti-corporate politicians and the press. Then came a series of hard questions: how exactly would breaking up Facebook, which owns WhatsApp and Instagram, address free speech concerns? Or help stifle the spread of propaganda on the platform? And how would American regulations affect the majority of Facebook users, who live in the global south? According to Michael Lwin, an American-born antitrust lawyer living in Yangon, Myanmar, US regulators should tread lightly. He and Bob speak about how calls to break up Facebook could have wide ranging unintended consequences, especially outside of the US.
As bad as Facebook is, there are some potential second and multiple-order effects to be careful of when considering breaking them up or heavily regulating them.
Ed and Brian Krassenstein are banned for life after ‘operating multiple fake accounts and purchasing account interactions,’ a Twitter spokesman said.
Sam Biddle (The Intercept)AMONG THE MEGA-CORPORATIONS that surveil you, your cellphone carrier has always been one of the keenest monitors, in constant contact with the one small device you keep on you at almost every moment. A confidential Facebook document reviewed by The Intercept shows that the social network courts carriers, along with phone makers — some 100 different companies in 50 countries — by offering the use of even more surveillance data, pulled straight from your smartphone by Facebook itself.
Offered to select Facebook partners, the data includes not just technical information about Facebook members’ devices and use of Wi-Fi and cellular networks, but also their past locations, interests, and even their social groups. This data is sourced not just from the company’s main iOS and Android apps, but from Instagram and Messenger as well. The data has been used by Facebook partners to assess their standing against competitors, including customers lost to and won from them, but also for more controversial uses like racially targeted ads.
Sam Biddle (The Intercept)>“If Facebook is providing a consumer’s data to be used for the purposes of credit screening by the third party, Facebook would be a credit reporting agency,” Reidenberg explained. “The [FCRA] statute applies when the data ‘is used or expected to be used or collected in whole or in part for the purpose of serving as a factor in establishing the consumer’s eligibility for … credit.'” If Facebook is providing data about you and your friends that eventually ends up in a corporate credit screening operation, “It’s no different from Equifax providing the data to Chase to determine whether or not to issue a credit card to the consumer,” according to Reidenberg. ❧
Sam Biddle (The Intercept)“It sure smells like the prescreening provisions of the FCRA,” Reidenberg told The Intercept. “From a functional point of view, what they’re doing is filtering Facebook users on creditworthiness criteria and potentially escaping the application of the FCRA.” ❧
Sam Biddle (The Intercept)In an initial conversation with a Facebook spokesperson, they stated that the company does “not provide creditworthiness services, nor is that a feature of Actionable Insights.” When asked if Actionable Insights facilitates the targeting of ads on the basis of creditworthiness, the spokesperson replied, “No, there isn’t an instance where this is used.” It’s difficult to reconcile this claim with the fact that Facebook’s own promotional materials tout how Actionable Insights can enable a company to do exactly this. Asked about this apparent inconsistency between what Facebook tells advertising partners and what it told The Intercept, the company declined to discuss the matter on the record, ❧
Sam Biddle (The Intercept)How consumers would be expected to navigate this invisible, unofficial credit-scoring process, given that they’re never informed of its existence, remains an open question. ❧
Alongside these official responses, a loose collective of developers and techno-utopians that calls itself the IndieWeb has been creating another alternative. The movement’s affiliates are developing their own social-media platforms, which they say will preserve what’s good about social media while jettisoning what’s bad. They hope to rebuild social media according to principles that are less corporate and more humane.
Excited to see that the IndieWeb “hobby” I’ve been spending a lot of my time on for the past few years has made it into The New Yorker!
Total number of Mark apologies without effect: 15 years of it Enough of it? Learn about the people fighting against Facebook!
Friggin’ hilarious!
