Other Nefarious Companies
by Miki SaxonNefarious encompasses much of what’s wrong with the prime goal of social media companies — hook users.
I love the word ‘nefarious’; in case you aren’t familiar with it synonyms include, evil, wicked, rotten, treacherous, villainous, and many more.
Hook them and sell them.
Users bear some of the responsibility, but it’s difficult to say no to something that’s not just socially acceptable, but necessary, in spite of it having the addictive power of heroin.
Sure, social media companies need to police their platforms much better, but users need to use their brains when sourcing services.
Assuming information offered by service providers, such as plastic surgeons, on sites like Snapchat and Instagram is truthful, reliable and vetted is just plain stupid.
“I’ve had my before and after photos stolen—used by other doctors as if they’re their own work. I’ve had my own video content—even sometimes with me in it—used by other people,” said Dr. Devgan.
In fact, a 2017 study found that when searching one day’s worth of Instagram posts using popular hashtags—only 18% of top posts were authored by board-certified surgeons, and medical doctors who are not board certified made up another 26%.
Then there are phones — and third party apps.
A friend and I were sitting at a bar, iPhones in pockets, discussing our recent trips in Japan (…) The very next day, we both received pop-up ads on Facebook about cheap return flights to Tokyo.
(…) data you provide is only processed within your own phone. This might not seem a cause for alarm, but any third party applications you have on your phone—like Facebook for example—still have access to this “non-triggered” data. And whether or not they use this data is really up to them.
Google freely admits it reads your Gmail and Android constantly harvests data; all in the name of providing a “more relevant marketing experience.”
Amazon’s Alexa keeps having security problems that are shrugged off as minor ‘oops’, but they aren’t minor when they happen to you.
Google suffers from similar problems, as does every smart product you add to your home.
There’s a lot more, but you can find it faster than I can add it to this post.
The lesson to learn is that privacy and security start with you, because believing that the companies supplying the product/service give a damn flies in the face of the daily increase of evidence to the contrary.