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.
Did you miss Ryan in December? Blame it on me; I made it sound as if we were taking off all of December (I wish).
OK. It’s no longer December,
so where’s Ryan?
Trying to balance twin three year-olds,
one 18-month-old, a new one due in three weeks, and a demanding day sales job.
He’ll be back as soon he gets things under control — or what passes for control in a situation like this.
PS My platform was upgraded when I wasn’t looking and I don’t know how to use it, so I’m skipping Friday (in preference to pulling out the rest of my hair) and (hopefully) everything will be back to normal by Monday.
It is the beginning of the
year and beginnings are when people tend to reflect and choose.
And maybe change direction.
Not just at the beginning of a
new year, but any beginning — new month, new home, new relationship, new pet,
new job, new boss, new colleague(s), new outfit, new [you name it].
I’m as prone to this as
anyone, although my internal editor, who provides constant commentary — mostly
irreverent, rarely complimentary — on my actions, ideas and thoughts, thinks
requiring a beginning to start something is pretty silly.
When we start something has
little to do with whether we finish it, let alone if it’s a success.
We all know that starting is
easy, especially in comparison to sustaining the effort.
Instead of spending all your energy on the planning, save a good deal for sustaining what you started and staying flexible, so you can address challenges quickly.
I haven’t taken more than a few days off here and there since I started writing this blog in 2006 and that’s a long time.
I’ve also written numerous times that unwired vacations are critical to productivity and creativity.
The unwired part is especially critical — whether they are vacations or staycations.
Thus, from now until January 2 Mapping Company Success will go dark and I’ll indulge my staycation doing all the tuits I haven’t gotten ‘round to, which includes a clean, organized office.
Wow! I’m excited! (No sarcasm, I really am.)
That said, I do want to wish you a very special holiday before I unwire, so I looked for something special to share and I found it.
Something that fully embraces all my ambivalence of the season.
Last year I shared a couple of pretty good Rules at the start of the holiday season.
This year I have another that may ease some of your holiday stress.
Ethel Watts Mumford said, “God gave us our relatives; thank God we can choose our friends.”
The first part is the root of stress for those people who believe that family should be a constant source of all things good. They twist themselves into pretzels to effect that outcome and tear apart their psyches when it doesn’t materialize.
Worse, they completely ignore the second part of the quote, thus losing the sweet solace of good friendships.
Hugh Kingsmill, a contemporary of Mumford, provided the corollary that many need to let go of the stress of missed expectations and embrace the solution.
Friends are God’s apology for relatives.
Enjoy your friends this holiday season and all year ‘round and, if you are lucky, those relatives who also qualify as friends.
Yesterday we revisited why tuit culture is bad for companies and I commented that it even worse when it grabs you personally.
Round tuits are the visual symbol of procrastination, something I have intimate knowledge of and experience with — years ago I was even crowned Queen of procrastination by a delegation of friends and family.
While it is possible to tame the tuits in your life, it’s important to be aware when the ROI changes from positive to negative.
I posted this mantra around my home years ago that helped — Do it when you think about it; Don’t think about doing it.
I forgot to put it back up when I moved 15 years ago and I seem to have backslid badly.
Something else I learned long ago and previously wrote about. It applies to the tuits that sabotage your best efforts of prioritization and it goes like this, why do today what doesn’t need to be done at all?
Back then it referred to so-called busy work, but these days the worst offending tuits that don’t need to be done involve the constant alerts, social media, FOMO, and TMI.
In other words, all the stuff we convince ourselves must be done to keep the sky from falling.
Which it won’t.
Tuits are much like dragons, you can’t slay all of them at once and some don’t need slaying; they can just be ignored.
Some need only a little kick to disable them, as opposed to the concentrated effort required to slay them, and some can even be flipped, making social media stuff into round tuits.
Have they seeped into your personal culture and infected your values?
Tuit culture is insidious; it usually starts with small inconsequential stuff and then quietly spreads.
If not dealt with immediately it can delay projects, impact vendors, damage customer relationships, substantially increase turnover, especially among your best and brightest, and ruin your street rep.
Are you familiar with the warning signs, so you can take action before tuit culture takes root?
Be warned if you notice any of the following:
Small tasks aren’t done on time or just aren’t done.
One or more of your team are slow to respond to requests.
Individuals and teams find ways of bypassing one or more of their members or bosses.
The best antidotes to tuit culture are vigilance, awareness, transparency and open communications.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
For years the media has been proclaiming that the great majority of young people want to be entrepreneurs or work for a startup, as opposed to a larger/older company, because startups were “cool.”
Research suggests entrepreneurial activity has declined among Millennials. The share of people under 30 who own a business has fallen to almost a quarter-century low, according to a 2015 Wall Street Journal analysis of Federal Reserve data. (…) Two years ago, EIG’s president and co-founder, John Lettieri, testified before the U.S. Senate, “Millennials are on track to be the least entrepreneurial generation in recent history.”
What changed?
Maybe they learned that wanting to and doing it are very different. That they will work far harder for themselves, even if they are well-funded, or that startups fail far more often than they succeed (90% vs 10%).
A survey of 1,200 Millennials conducted in 2016 by the Economic Innovation Group found that more Millennials believed they could have a successful career by staying at one company and attempting to climb the ladder than by founding a new one.
But maybe there is something else going on.
Maybe they have figured out that the world doesn’t need another social network / dating app / review site / etc.
Maybe investors have realized that monetizing through ads isn’t a good road to sustainable profitability, considering the push for more European-style privacy.
Or maybe, just maybe, reality has reared its ugly head and they’ve figured out they don’t have enough experience or know enough to create enterprise solutions for real-world needs.
Matt Krisiloff, the former Y Combinator executive, added that the opportunities “to start compelling start-ups,” for college students without industry-specific knowledge, “has vastly shrunk.”
What they found is that the average age of a startup founder is about 41.9 years of age among all startups that hire at least one employee, and among the top 0.1 percent of highest-growth startups, that average age moves up to 45 years old. Those ages are taken from the time of the founding of the company.
Maybe our media-inspired view of entrepreneurs is a reflection of the warped views of Silicon Valley as engendered by VCs.
VCs believe they have “pattern recognition” abilities that they simply don’t have. Instead, they rely on suppositions and stereotypes that don’t match the underlying data on startup success. The same reason why older founders are ignored by the ecosystem is the same reason why women and other minorities struggle in the Valley: It’s really not about what you build, but what you look like while building it.
Maybe the entrepreneurs of the future will look more like our real world in all its diverse, messy glory.
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,
