I’ve written before that Alphabet has no scruples about how its various parts make money as long as they do.

YouTube is the most obvious proof.

It wasn’t until major brands pulled their ads that YouTube cleaned up a tiny bit of its act.

YouTube has previously been forced to make major changes because of advertiser backlash. In 2017, hundreds of brands pulled their advertising from YouTube after The Times reported their ads were appearing next to extremist videos. Dubbed the “YouTube Adpocalypse,” the mass boycott cost YouTube’s parent company, Google, an estimated $750 million, a note from analysts at Nomura Instinet said at the time.

When a “soft-core pedophile ring” was exposed last February YouTube disabled comments on most videos featuring kids, but only because big advertisers walked.

More recently, in spite of concerns over breeches of child privacy, brands have stayed steady and YouTube has done nothing to change.

Nor will it.

Because YOU don’t matter

YOU are a user.

Content providers are users.

As Forrester analyst Renee Murphy says,

“Users are the product, not the customer.”

Brands are the customer.

And the customer is always right.

Image credit: Joegoauk Goa

Poking through  13+ 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.

We all have visual prejudices that have nothing to do with race, ethnicity, gender anything obvious. It’s important to know your own or you can’t hear past them. I worked hard to be aware of mine. I had no choice, because, back when I was a recruiter, I occasionally met my candidates. I vividly remember two of them, because if I had met them before I presented them and set up interviews I wouldn’t have, which would have cost me dearly, since both were hired (different companies). Why not? Because they both hit my visual prejudices.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Discrimination comes in many forms.

All of them are grounded in stupidity, but it’s age and appearance that I want to focus on today.

Layoffs are always a time when age is in the limelight, but this time it’s working in reverse.

“The share of older Americans who have jobs has risen during the recession, while the share of younger Americans with jobs has plunged.”

It seems that at least parts of corporate America have learned to see past the obvious.

“…employees whom companies have invested in most and who have “demonstrated track records…tend to be more experienced and are often older.””

So some companies have discovered that years of experience have substantial value when it comes to the success of the company.

But what about appearance? How much is hearing influenced by how someone looks at first take?

What better venue in which to consider this than the original British version of American Idol where the contestants are mostly young, generally good-looking and always bust their tails to make an impression.

How well do you think a slightly frumpy-looking 47 year old woman would fare under the scathing tongue of Simon Fuller?

How much do you think talent would offset the obvious visual assumptions made by both the judges and the audience?

Watch the judges and audience reaction carefully before Susan Boyle performs and how quickly it changes when she starts singing (embedding is disabled on this video); check out some of the more than 50 thousand comments.

Think about what happens when a “Susan” comes to interview; how well do you hear past her (or his) appearance?

Then come back and share your thoughts with us.

PS For a fascinating look at Susan read this article in the NY Times.

Image credit: cwsillero on sxc.hu

Yesterday you met the founder of a tech company that voluntarily shut down because its app was being abused.

Google, however, is playing its standard game of privacy announcements that sound great, but…

Users can now opt-in to have their location data automatically deleted from Google every three or every 18 months, depending on their preference.

The catch, of course, is the timeframe. If you bother deleting your info daily or weekly, as do many people, especially from their kids phones, Google’s offer of three or 18 months isn’t very attractive.

That’s plenty of time for the data to migrate.

Win-win for Google.

Makes them sound as if they are doing something big for your privacy, without actually costing them anything.

Guess that’s the difference between a company with a real conscience and one with a good feel for PR.

Image credit: Joakim Jardenbergerg

Sounds like an oxymoron.

The world knows about tech’s love affair with, and misuse of, personal data. The continual ignoring, minimizing and excusing of hate speech, revenge porn, fake news, bullying, etc.

Then there is its totally irrational attitude/belief that people will be kind and good to each other online no matter what they are like in the real world.

Given the prevailing attitude, would a hot tech startup have a conscience?

So would a founder, a self-described “technology enthusiast,” create an AI app that went viral and then shut it down because of the way it was being used?

DeepNude was built on Pix2Pix, an open-source algorithm used for “image-to-image translation.” the app can create a naked image from any picture of a woman with just a couple of clicks. Revenge porn activists said the app was “absolutely terrifying.”

As to the above question, the answer is “yes.”

The DeepNude team was horrified, believing “the probability that people will misuse it is too high.”

“We don’t want to make money this way. Surely some copies of DeepNude will be shared on the web, but we don’t want to be the ones who sell it,” DeepNude wrote in a tweet. “The world is not yet ready for DeepNude.”

—deepnudeapp (@deepnudeapp) June 27, 2019

Pix2Pix was developed by a team of scientists, who now believe the industry needs to do better and not just release their work to the world at large.

“We have seen some wonderful uses of our work, by doctors, artists, cartographers, musicians, and more,” the MIT professor Phillip Isola, who helped create Pix2Pix, told Business Insider in an email. “We as a scientific community should engage in serious discussion on how best to move our field forward while putting reasonable safeguards in place to better ensure that we can benefit from the positive use-cases while mitigating abuse.”

One can only hope that the scientific community does, indeed, find a way to do good while avoiding the worst of the negative fallout from discoveries.

And hats off to the DeepNude team.

It’s really inspiring to see such a concrete example of doing the right thing, with no shilly-shallying or dancing around the decision.

But I do wonder what would have happened if either the developers or the scientists were beholden  to investors.

Image credit: deepnudeapp via Twitter

Poking through  13+ 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.

Six years since I wrote this and it’s only gotten worse. More time spent on social media, more time spent staring at a screen as the world goes by. But if people don’t reengage soon, the world they knew will no longer exist.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

I had just finished unloading my cart at Home Depot the other day when a woman pulled up with her two young sons; when I offered her my cart she shook her head and kept walking.

There was a time when she might have offered to take the cart, but those times seem a part of the past.

Instead, she kept walking, talked to her sons and answered her cell phone.

Is the world really shrinking or is it just a narrowing of interactions and less interest in what’s around us in real-time?

The more distracted we become, and the more emphasis we place on speed at the expense of depth, the less likely and able we are to care.

Everyone wants his parent’s, or friend’s, or partner’s undivided attention — even if many of us, especially children, are getting used to far less. Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

Each step “forward” has made it easier, just a little, to avoid the emotional work of being present, to convey information rather than humanity.

As usual, I am out of step.

I take back the carts, function beautifully sans cell/smartphone, pay attention to the humans in my orbit and love real-world interactions.

Digging in the dirt, conversation and reading (mostly cozy mystery fiction) are my favorite “time wasters;” no Facebook, Twitter or Candy Crush (my sister’s addiction).

I prefer to be connected to a few in the real world than connected to dozens (hundreds?) in the cyber world.

In short, I want to continue to pay attention and be present for whatever time I have left on this planet, whether decades or days.

Flickr image credit: Enzo Varriale