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%.
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.
If someone claimed they were your friend, but constantly lied to you, used you, stole from you, and vouched for con artists would you still trust them?
Would you invite them into
your home and introduce them to your friends?
You probably already have.
The ‘someone’ is Facebook in
all its forms, subsidiaries and partners.
Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages. (…) The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.
It should not come as a surprise that Facebook — a giant, for-profit company whose early employees reportedly ended staff meetings by chanting “domination!” — would act in its own interests.
Current and former fact-checkers for Facebook have slammed the company in interviews with The Guardian, saying it cared more about “crisis PR” than actually combatting the spread of fake news.
Do you think Sheryl
Sandberg’s a role model? If so, think
again.
A report from The New York Times shows that, while Sandberg was building her global brand, she was using aggressive and underhanded tactics at Facebook. As the company faced increasing criticism and pressure (…) she embraced a strategy to suppress information about Facebook’s problems, discredit its critics, and deflect blame onto its competitors.
What about companies owned by
Facebook?
WhatsApp is a major child pornography platform.WhatsApp has become a platform for users to “openly” share pictures and videos of child pornography, the Financial Times reports. (…) WhatsApp only has 300 employees to monitor its 1.5 billion users globally.
“Instagram was a significant front in the IRA’s [Russian Internet Research Agency] influence operation, something that Facebook executives appear to have avoided mentioning in Congressional testimony …”
It has far more harassment
and bullying, than Facebook — in spite of its so-called “kindness”
initiative” Read the stories, they are a real eye-opener.
Zukerberg not only lies, he
is expert at turning
a blind eye on the headline-generating happenings and focusing on all the marvelous
accomplishments in 2017.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Lying isn’t new, but it is certainly in the ascendancy. It doesn’t matter what media you follow, not a day goes by without a story about someone in a position of trust lying — whether politician, corporate chief, religious leader, friend, relative, or someone else. It is important to remember that few, if any, see their actions as problematic.
Lying and cheating are common occurrences and recent research shows that, contrary to popular wisdom (wishful thinking?), they do not make people feel badly.
In an interview, Dan Ariely, a leading behavioral economist at Duke and author of The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves, made two comments that especially caught my eye for both their perception and accuracy.
“I have had lots of discussions with big cheaters — insider trading, accounting fraud, people who have sold games in the NBA, doping in sports. With one exception, all of them were stories of slippery slopes.”
“When you are in the midst of it, you are in a very, very different mindset…. You are not a psychopath, and you are not cheating. You are doing what everybody else is doing.”
Slippery slopes, indeed.
KG’s comment after reading the interview brings forth another salient point.
It is my belief no person ever quite understands their own artful dodges used to escape from the often grim shadow of self-knowledge.
Long before lying became the issue it is today, Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924) had a great response.
The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.
The problem with this solution is that it requires self-awareness, personal effort, determination and grit.
All of which, if there is no financial reward, are in short supply these days.
I had something else planned for today, but two things, took precedence.
First, I had coffee with some guys and they started in about how overblown the whole “he touched me” thing had gotten. There were five of them, two said it had been blown up by the media, two thought the women had a point and the fifth said it was all feminist crap from a bunch of man-haters.
I accidentally spilled my coffee on him (it really was an accident; I choked on the sip I was taking when he said that and spilled it), which broke up the party.
So I came home, looked at some news articles and found one that was so relevant I had to share it with you.
For the project, titled “The Dress for Respect,” researchers built a dress embedded with sensor technology that tracked touch and pressure. The information was then relayed to a visual system so that researchers could essentially track harassment in real time. (…) In just under four hours, the women are touched a combined 157 times.
Leaders in all industries need to stand up and say that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated. Future emerging leaders in companies need to know that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated and a spotlight will be shined when it does.
I was going to comment, mentioning what happens when a power is toppled, but LaVonne Reimer (fourth comment) beat me to it.
She cited the story of Mike Cagney, who was fired from online lending company Social Finance last September after an investigation by the board of over accusations of sexual misconduct and lying.
Powerful men getting fired for harassment and/or sexual misconduct is all too common these days, but that wasn’t Reimer’s or my point.
Yet just months after Mr. Cagney departed SoFi, two venture capitalists who had been on the company’s board and knew many details of his actions invested $17 million in his new start-up, called Figure. Since then, Mr. Cagney has raised another $41 million from others for the lending start-up, which will open soon.
Suster’s idea that “Leaders in all industries need to stand up and say that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated.” means nothing as long as there are no real consequences.
Obviously, losing their jobs did not equate to losing their power.
And it’s the power that matters, not the job — because there is always another job.
To Facebook, the world is not made up of individuals, but of connections between them. The billions of Facebook accounts belong not to “people” but to “users,” collections of data points connected to other collections of data points on a vast Social Network, to be targeted and monetized by computer programs.
(…)
There are certain things you do not in good conscience do to humans. To data, you can do whatever you like.
(…)
Facebook needs to learn to think for itself. Its own security officer, Alex Stamos, said as much in his departing memo, also acquired by BuzzFeed. “We need to be willing to pick sides when there are clear moral or humanitarian issues,” he writes. That is what Eichmann never did.
You might think I am overstating Facebook’s power, but make no mistake, kids are driven to suicide and lives are destroyed.
Hitler committed his atrocities in the name of racial purity.
Zukerberg allows his version in the name of capitalism.
The last few days we’ve been talking various aspects and effects of respect, but one of the most important to business is its effect on creativity and innovation (they’re not the same thing), although we touched on it when talking about the drawbacks of a “nice” culture.
The opposite of respect is disrespect and if it permeates a culture you can count on four things.
From this perspective, “misfits” are valuable to companies. They don’t quite fit into a specific team. They’re always challenging why the company does what it does. They’re rebellious. They’re independent. They can seem counterproductive to everything that a manager needs to achieve—to maintain order.
But those are the people that are going to change the game on how your company innovates.
As a boss, culture is your responsibility. You can’t afford to assume that your boss or their boss will make the right choices.
No matter the scope, within your organization it’s your choice.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
When I wrote this a decade ago it resulted in a comment and my response, which are included today. The reason I included my response is because, in these days of bad examples, lower self-control and less personal responsibility the responsibility of leaders is even greater. As you will see in tomorrow’s post.
My focus isn’t meant to be just race or gender issues, but on the attitude that I’m/we’re-right-so-you-should-do/think-our-way-or-else. It’s not the ‘we’re right/you’re wrong’ that bothers me, but the ‘do-it-our-way-or-else’ that shows the intolerance for what it really is.
During my adult life (I missed being a Boomer by a hair) I’ve watched as hate and intolerance spread across the country masked by religion, a façade of political correctness or a mea culpa that is supposed to make everything OK, but doesn’t.
Various business, political, religious and community leaders give passionate, fiery talks to their followers and then express surprise and dismay when some of those same followers steal trade secrets, plant bombs, and kill individuals—whose only error was following their own beliefs.
No longer are we all entitled to the pursuit of happiness if our happiness offends someone next door or living at the other end of the country.
I remember Ann Rand saying in an interview that she believed that she had the right to be totally selfish, where upon the interviewer said that would give her freedom to kill. Rand said absolutely not, in fact the reverse was true, since her selfishness couldn’t take away anyone else’s right to be selfish. That about sums up my attitude
I just wish there were fewer followers for all the Ellsworth Toohey types in today’s world.
Kathy Says:
I don’t know if you can blame abstract entities such as leadership business or religion or politics for the actions of individuals. I’m tempted to put the blame on the person taking the action. There is a big difference between hearing someone talk and acting on the content of the talk. We hear people talk persuasively all the time about the importance of saving for retirement or flossing our teeth or using sunscreen, and many, many people who’ve heard these persuasive speeches do none of the above. So, I’d say, no matter what people are saying to me, in the newspaper, on TV or over coffee, if I take the action, I’m responsible for the result. I always had the choice.
Miki Saxon Says:
Kathy, I agree that it is the responsibility of followers to think, but we live in an age where many people have opted out of thinking, and merely follow the lead of any person with whom they are comfortable (see the 9 post on followers) For that reason I do hold the leaders, who aren’t abstract, and incite their followers through passionate rhetoric responsible for the outcome. I think they are responsible for the results of their comments.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Privileged is different than entitled. Entitled mindsets believe the world owes them, whereas privileged is often unconscious — a matter of birth. Not necessarily born to great wealth, but being born with fewer challenges, such as white instead of black, brown, yellow, red, or any combination thereof; male, instead of female. Interested/knowledgeable parents. Average-to-good schools. Etc.
Most don’t see themselves as privileged, like Rick, in the story below.
If you’re an outsider, or even an insider prone to objectivity, Silicon Valley’s culture is a mess.
When I said as much to “Rick” his response caught me off guard — although it shouldn’t have.
“I wish they would just give it a rest. I am sick and tired of all the crap about wealth inequality, lack of diversity and privacy rights. That stuff is not my responsibility. I’ve worked hard and deserve my success; nobody went out of their way to help me. I’m sure not privileged and I figure if I can do it so can they.”
I’ve heard this before, but it still leaves me speechless.
Rick is white, nice looking, middle class family, raised around Palo Alto, graduated from UC Berkeley; his dad worked for Intel.
Yet he doesn’t see himself as privileged.
Over the years I’ve known thousands of Ricks.
And therein lies the true problem.
Because it’s hard to change that which doesn’t exist.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
