👓 Thanks to Facebook, Your Cellphone Company Is Watching You More Closely Than Ever | The Intercept

Read Thanks to Facebook, your cellphone company is watching you more closely than ever by Sam BiddleSam 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.

📑 Thanks to Facebook, Your Cellphone Company Is Watching You More Closely Than Ever | The Intercept

Annotated Thanks to Facebook, Your Cellphone Company Is Watching You More Closely Than Ever by Sam BiddleSam 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.”  

📑 Thanks to Facebook, Your Cellphone Company Is Watching You More Closely Than Ever | The Intercept

Annotated Thanks to Facebook, Your Cellphone Company Is Watching You More Closely Than Ever by Sam BiddleSam 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,  

📑 Thanks to Facebook, Your Cellphone Company Is Watching You More Closely Than Ever | The Intercept

Annotated Thanks to Facebook, Your Cellphone Company Is Watching You More Closely Than Ever by Sam BiddleSam 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.  

📑 Thanks to Facebook, Your Cellphone Company Is Watching You More Closely Than Ever | The Intercept

Annotated Thanks to Facebook, Your Cellphone Company Is Watching You More Closely Than Ever by Sam BiddleSam Biddle (The Intercept)
But these lookalike audiences aren’t just potential new customers — they can also be used to exclude unwanted customers in the future, creating a sort of ad targeting demographic blacklist.  

🎧 Episode 011 – Surveillance Capitalism and Digital Redlining | Media and the End of the World Podcast

Listened to Episode 011 – Surveillance Capitalism and Digital Redlining by Adam Croom and Ralph Beliveau from Media and the End of the World Podcast

We are joined by Chris Gilliard, Professor of English at Macomb Community College. His scholarship concentrates on privacy, institutional tech policy, digital redlining, and the re-inventions of discriminatory practices through data mining and algorithmic decision-making, especially as these apply to college students. He is currently developing a project that looks at how popular misunderstandings of mathematical concepts create the illusions of fairness and objectivity in student analytics, predictive policing, and hiring practices. Follow him on Twitter at @hypervisible.

Show Notes

An interesting episode on surveillance capitalism and redlining.

I’m a bit surprised to find that I’ve been blocked by Chris Gilliard (@hypervisible) on Twitter. I hope I haven’t done or said anything in particular to have offended him. More likely I may have been put on a block list to which he’s subscribed?? Just not sure. I’ll have to follow him from another account as I’m really interested in his research particularly as it applies to fixing these areas within the edtech space and applications using IndieWeb principles. I think this may be the first instance that I’ve gone to someone’s account to notice that I’ve been blocked.

👓 The Most Measured Person in Tech Is Running the Most Chaotic Place on the Internet | New York Times

Read The Most Measured Person in Tech Is Running the Most Chaotic Place on the Internet (New York Times)
YouTube’s C.E.O. spends her days contemplating condoms and bestiality, talking advertisers off the ledge and managing a property the size of Netflix.

📑 YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant

Annotated YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant by Mark Bergen (Bloomberg)
A 2015 clip about vaccination from iHealthTube.com, a “natural health” YouTube channel, is one of the videos that now sports a small gray box.  
Does this box appear on the video itself? Apparently not…

Examples:

But nothing on the embedded versions:

A screengrab of what this looks like for those that don’t want to be “infected” by the algorithmic act of visiting these YouTube pages:
YouTube video on vaccinations with a gray block below it giving a link to some factual information on Wikipedia

🎧 How President Trump’s Angry Tweets Can Ripple Across Social Media | NPR

Listened to How President Trump's Angry Tweets Can Ripple Across Social Media by Tim MakTim Mak from NPR

When Trump posts a mean tweet, how does it make its way across social media into the American consciousness? Researchers crunched the numbers to see if his negative tweets were shared more often.

This news segment references some interesting sounding research groups who are working in social media, emotional contagion, and sentiment analysis.

📑 YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant

Annotated YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant by Mark Bergen (Bloomberg)
YouTube doesn’t give an exact recipe for virality. But in the race to one billion hours, a formula emerged: Outrage equals attention.  
Talk radio has had this formula for years and they’ve almost had to use it to drive any listenership as people left radio for television and other media.

I can still remember the different “loudness” level of talk between Bill O’Reilly’s primetime show on Fox News and the louder level on his radio show.

📑 YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant

Annotated YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant by Mark Bergen (Bloomberg)
When Wojcicki took over, in 2014, YouTube was a third of the way to the goal, she recalled in investor John Doerr’s 2018 book Measure What Matters.“They thought it would break the internet! But it seemed to me that such a clear and measurable objective would energize people, and I cheered them on,” Wojcicki told Doerr. “The billion hours of daily watch time gave our tech people a North Star.” By October, 2016, YouTube hit its goal.  
Obviously they took the easy route. You may need to measure what matters, but getting to that goal by any means necessary or using indefensible shortcuts is the fallacy here. They could have had that North Star, but it’s the means they used by which to reach it that were wrong.

This is another great example of tech ignoring basic ethics to get to a monetary goal. (Another good one is Marc Zuckerberg’s “connecting people” mantra when what he should be is “connecting people for good” or “creating positive connections”.

📑 YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant

Annotated YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant by Mark Bergen (Bloomberg)
Somewhere along the last decade, he added, YouTube prioritized chasing profits over the safety of its users. “We may have been hemorrhaging money,” he said. “But at least dogs riding skateboards never killed anyone.”  

📑 YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant

Annotated YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant by Mark Bergen (Bloomberg)
The conundrum isn’t just that videos questioning the moon landing or the efficacy of vaccines are on YouTube. The massive “library,” generated by users with little editorial oversight, is bound to have untrue nonsense. Instead, YouTube’s problem is that it allows the nonsense to flourish. And, in some cases, through its powerful artificial intelligence system, it even provides the fuel that lets it spread.  
This is a great summation of the issue.

👓 Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa | Bloomberg

Read Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa by Matt Day , Giles Turner , and Natalia Drozdiak (Bloomberg)
A global team reviews audio clips in an effort to help the voice-activated assistant respond to commands.

🎧 The Daily: Silicon Valley’s Military Dilemma | New York Times

Listened to The Daily: Silicon Valley’s Military Dilemma from New York Times

Should Big Tech partner with the Pentagon? We examine a cautionary tale.

Some great history and questions about ethics here.

I’m surprised that for it’s share of profits that Down didn’t spin off the napalm division to some defense contractor?

Of course some tech companies are already weaponizing their own products against people. What about those ethical issues.