Wow.
Facebook has been secretly deleting messages sent on Messenger by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook claims it did nothing wrong, but it demonstrates a double-standard with regard to how the company see privacy.
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.
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’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.
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.
h/t to @vboykis
Dear Mark,
Thank you for writing me that letter in the New York Times recently. I wrote you one, too.Sincerely,
(mostly former) Facebook User 752461218193242https://t.co/P0JbAXXn43— Vicki Boykis (@vboykis) March 30, 2018
After years of letting algorithms make up our minds for us, the time is right to go back to basics.
So what was missing from Wired’s coverage? More details on what has changed in the space in the past several years. There’s been a big movement afoot in the IndieWeb community which has been espousing a simpler and more DRY (don’t repeat yourself) version of feeds using simple semantic microformats markup like h-feed. There’s also been the emergence of JSON feed in the past year which many of the major feed readers already support.
On the front of people leaving Facebook (and their black box algorithmic monster that determines what you read rather than you making an implicit choice), they might have mentioned people who are looking for readers through which they can also use their own domains and websites where they own and maintain their own data for interaction. I’ve written about this in more depth last year: Feed reader revolution.
One of the more bleeding edge developments which I think is going to drastically change the landscape in the coming years for developers, feed readers, and the internet consumption space is the evolving Microsub spec which is being spearheaded by a group of projects known as the Aperture microsub server and the Together and Indigenous clients which already use it. Microsub is going to abstract away many of the technical hurdles that make it far more difficult to build a full-fledged feed reader. I have a feeling it’s going to level a lot of the playing field to allow a Cambrian explosion of readers and social related software to better leverage more easily reading content on the web without relying on third party black box services which people have been learning they cannot fully trust anymore. Aaron Parecki has done an excellent job of laying out some parts of it in Building an IndieWeb Reader as well as in recent episodes of his Percolator microcast. This lower hurdle is going to result in fewer people needing to rely solely on the biggest feed readers like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for both consuming content and posting their own content. The easier it becomes for people to use other readers to consume content from almost anywhere on the web, the less a monopoly the social networks will have on our lives.
I truly hope Wired circles around and gives some of these ideas additional follow up coverage in the coming months. They owe it to their readership to expand their coverage from what we all knew five years ago. If they want to go a step or two further, they might compare the web we had 15 years ago to some of the new and emerging open web technologies that are starting to take hold today.
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
I am tired of listening to comments on Facebook, mentioning it’s already too late or no point now or the platform is too valuable. We need to stop this. We are conveying to owners & other parties involved that don’t worry. It doesn’t matter how bad you screw up. You own us.
I have a real problem. I HATE FACEBOOK, what they are doing with our data, how they control access to information and news for millions of people, and the fact that they've insinuated themselves into every aspect of our lives.
So I'm inclined to walk away from it entirely.
But....
There's real information on here that I need, about people I care about, about things going on in my communities, and keeping connected with folks who've been part of my life over the years.
So, what to do?
There’s lots more I could advise doing, but if you’re only using Facebook for reading content you want to get out of Facebook, then lock the whole thing down as best as you can (privacywise) and then use https://facebook-atom.appspot.com/ to suck the data you want out as a feed and pipe it into a feed reader.
You can unsubscribe or unfollow folks to limit your feeds to the bare minimum. The atom feed the appspot tool gives you will be everything and it will be reverse chronological. Good feed readers like Feed.ly and Inoreader will allow you to filter out posts you don’t want to see using a variety of keyword filters.
If you need specific help in setting it up or the instructions are unclear, let me know; I’m happy to help.
If you want to set up and run your own custom private system/server for close family, I can make some suggestions for doing that too.
It never occurred to me that people would be blaming @oauth_2 for the Facebook mess. Friendly reminder that OAuth is what lets you control *which* parts of your Facebook data apps get access to, and what lets you revoke that access, which you can do here: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications
There’s a lot of puffery rhetoric here to make Google look more like an arriving hero, but I’d recommend taking with more than a few grains of salt.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish what’s true (and not true) online.
we’re committing $300 million toward meeting these goals.
I’m curious what their internal projections are for ROI?
People come to Google looking for information they can trust, and that information often comes from the reporting of journalists and news organizations around the world.
Heavy hit in light of the Facebook data scandal this week on top of accusations about fake news spreading.
That’s why it’s so important to us that we help you drive sustainable revenue and businesses.
Compared to Facebook which just uses your content to drive you out of business like it did for Funny or Die.
Reference: How Facebook is Killing Comedy
we drove 10 billion clicks a month to publishers’ websites for free.
Really free? Or was this served against ads in search?
We worked with the industry to launch the open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages Project to improve the mobile web
There was some collaborative outreach, but AMP is really a Google-driven spec without significant outside input.
See also: http://ampletter.org/
We’re now in the early stages of testing a “Propensity to Subscribe” signal based on machine learning models in DoubleClick to make it easier for publishers to recognize potential subscribers, and to present them the right offer at the right time.
Interestingly the technology here isn’t that different than the Facebook Data that Cambridge Analytica was using, the difference is that they’re not using it to directly impact politics, but to drive sales. Does this mean they’re more “ethical”?
With AMP Stories, which is now in beta, publishers can combine the speed of AMP with the rich, immersive storytelling of the open web.
Is this sentence’s structure explicitly saying that AMP is not “open web”?!