“Working at Google or Facebook seemed like the coolest thing ever my freshman year, because you’d get paid a ton of money but it was socially responsible,” said Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, 21, a senior at the University of Michigan. “It was like a utopian workplace.”
Now, he said, “there’s more hesitation about the moral qualities of these jobs. It’s like how people look at Wall Street.”
“It felt like in my freshman year Google, Palantir and Facebook were these shiny places everyone wanted to be. It was like, ‘Wow, you work at Facebook. You must be really smart,’” said Ms. Dogru, 23. “Now if a classmate tells me they’re joining Palantir or Facebook, there’s an awkward gap where they feel like they have to justify themselves.”
Audrey Steinkamp, a 19-year-old sophomore at Yale, which sends about 10 percent of each graduating class into tech, said that taking a job in Silicon Valley is seen as “selling out,” no different from the economics majors going into consulting who are “lovingly and not-so-lovingly called ‘snakes.’”
“The work you do at a place like Facebook could be harmful at a much larger scale than an investment bank,” Ms. Dogru said. “It’s in the pockets of millions of people, and it’s a source of news for millions of people. It’s working at a scary scale.”
Oops, seems that the moral considerations of where to work are of much more importance for both college and grad students.
Agriculture is supposed to be a market “ripe for disruption,” including tractors that do everything except scratch your back.
Instead they are searching out tractors made in the 1970s and 80s that are more profitable to use.
Tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s are some of the hottest items in farm auctions across the Midwest these days — and it’s not because they’re antiques.
Cost-conscious farmers are looking for bargains, and tractors from that era are well-built and totally functional, and aren’t as complicated or expensive to repair as more recent models that run on sophisticated software.
And it’s the “sophisticated software” they don’t want.
But tractors from the 1970s and 1980s aren’t so dramatically different from tractors produced in the 2000s, other than the irksome software, and at a time when farmers are struggling financially, older tractors can make a lot of business sense.
Both are good news.
Constricting the worker pipeline at one end and a user rebellion at the other are two of the few things that can act as Daniel to tech’s Goliath.
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.
Since this was written in 2012 things have gotten much worse, with deep fakes, audio and video, fake news and misinformation in general added to everything described in the post. Caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) is more true now and more important than ever before.
Do you look for peer reviews, such as those on Yelp, Amazon and most consumer sites, before buying the product, visiting the restaurant or booking the hotel?
Before the Internet we asked our friends and checked critics’ comments in newspapers and magazines, in order to increase the odds for a favorable experience.
“The wheels of online commerce run on positive reviews,” said Bing Liu, a data-mining expert at the University of Illinois, Chicago (…) Mr. Liu estimates that about one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake.
Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet.
Do rankings based on the number of followers people have influence your trust level or opinion of them? But how do you know they are real?
And it’s not just ego-driven blogger types. Celebrities, politicians, start-ups, aspiring rock stars, reality show hopefuls — anyone who might benefit from having a larger social media footprint — are known to have bought large blocks of Twitter followers.
Are you impressed when someone’s Facebook wall is filled with beautiful people?
His idea, he said, was “to turn cyberlosers into social-networking magnets” by providing fictitious postings from attractive people. The postings are written by the client or by Mr. Walker and his employees, who base the messages on the client’s requests.
If having to choose between being a chump and a cynic isn’t up your alley, perhaps the best advice when it comes to reviews, followers and friends is ‘buyer beware’ and ‘if it seems to good to be true it probably is’.
Last week we saw how the best places to work rankings change — Google was number one for six straight years, now it’s number eight, while Facebook dropped to seventh place.
People change too. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who was named the world’s most reputable CEO in 2018, didn’t even make the top 10 this year.
Friends and family often aren’t aware of the most current news about a company and even when they are they may minimize it, especially if the company is hot or an icon.
This isn’t just about Google; Facebook, Amazon or dozens of others that are just as problematical.
Hot startups encourage you to jump in without due diligence. WeWork may seem like an extreme example, but it’s not as uncommon as you might think — remember Theranos, Uber and Zenefits.
It’s about how fast things change, both the big stuff and the little stuff, all the stuff that underlies culture and trust, which can and should affect your decisions.
Because it’s your career, your life and, corny as it may sound, your soul.
Although no immediate action was taken against Apple or Amazon— which both have been found to also listen in on their users — the commissioner’s report “invited” the companies “swiftly review” their policies and procedures.
Apple says,“all reviewers are under the obligation to adhere to Apple’s strict confidentiality requirements,” but we all know that people blab.
The Terms of Service (TOS) go beyond straight lies by being opaque and obfuscated. Their rules and meaning are a constantly moving target that even the NYT can’t figure out
The Times reported 46 of the accounts to Instagram, the site responded within 24 hours that none violated its rules, without explaining why.
The accounts were scams using scraped images of innocent US military personnel to get money from innocent US citizens.
While fraud has proliferated on Facebook for years, those running the military romance scams are taking on not only one of the world’s most influential companies, but also the most powerful military — and succeeding.
Apparently fraud doesn’t violate the TOS.
But why should it, since violence, hate speech and bullying don’t.
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.
Sheesh. It seems as if most of the articles I link to and the resulting posts are all focused on fixing or avoiding negative stuff. So this week I wanted to focus on positives, whether quotes, like the ones below, or other positive news. Enjoy and, hopefully, smile.
Together, these five disparate thoughts pack enough wisdom to live from youth to old age and never go wrong.
“Friendship is an undervalued resource. The consistent message of these studies is that friends make your life better.” –Karen A. Roberto, director of the center for gerontology at Virginia Tech (I wonder if all those friends at Facebook and Twitter count?)
“Never let your ego get so close to your positions that when your position goes, your ego goes with it.” –Admiral H. G. Rickover (I call it ego merge and it’s a definite no-no.)
“That’s what keeps life moving forward, focusing on what we can do, rather than getting caught up in what we can’t.” –Trisha Meili, The Central Park Jogger (Words of wisdom from a woman who knows.)
“Small Minds Talk About Others, Mediocre Minds Talk About Themselves, Great Minds Talk About Ideas.” –Eleanor Roosevelt (Which do you have?)
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” –John Milton, Paradise Lost (True when Milton wrote it and just as true now.)
Every day when I look through the headlines there’s always another story about Facebook, Google, or another tech company abusing their users and offering the same old platitudes about how important user privacy is to them or being investigated/fined by the Feds, European Union and some other country.
Ho-hum, business as usual.
There is still a certain amount of choice about using Facebook, Google-Android, various apps, and smart products, such as Samsung’s smart TV, all of which can be hacked. And while it takes effort, to some extent you can protect yourself and your privacy.
But even Facebook and Google’s efforts to dominate pale in comparison, as do the dreams of power of every despot, politico, religious zealot, or military organization, to the future Amazon sees for itself.
Amazon’s incredible, sophisticated systems are no longer being used just to serve up good deals, fast delivery times, or cheap web storage. Its big data capabilities are now the tool of police forces, and maybe soon the military. In the corporate world, Amazon is positioning itself to be the “brains” behind just about everything.
Add to that Amazon’s belief that they have no responsibility in how their tech is used.
Rekognition, Amazon’s facial recognition software is a good example.
Civil rights groups have called it “perhaps the most dangerous surveillance technology ever developed”, and called for Amazon to stop selling it to government agencies, particularly police forces. City supervisors in San Francisco banned its use, saying the software is not only intrusive, but biased – it’s better at recognising white people than black and Asian people. (…) Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, doesn’t feel it’s Amazon’s responsibility to make sure Rekognition is used accurately or ethically.
Writing in the New York Times last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai argued that it is “vital for companies to give people clear, individual choices around how their data is used.” Like all Times opinion pieces, his editorial included multiple Google tracking scripts served without the reader’s knowledge or consent. Had he wanted to, Mr. Pichai could have learned down to the second when a particular reader had read his assurance that Google “stayed focused on the products and features that make privacy a reality.”
Writing in a similar vein in the Washington Post this March, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for Congress to pass privacy laws modeled on the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). That editorial was served to readers with a similar bouquet of non-consensual tracking scripts that violated both the letter and spirit of the law Mr. Zuckerberg wants Congress to enact.
An Ovia spokeswoman said the company does not sell aggregate data for advertising purposes. But women who use Ovia must consent to its 6,000-word “terms of use,” which grant the company a “royalty-free, perpetual, and irrevocable license, throughout the universe” to “utilize and exploit” their de-identified personal information for scientific research and “external and internal marketing purposes.” Ovia may also “sell, lease or lend aggregated Personal Information to third parties,” the document adds.
Good grief. As any search will tell you “de-identified” is a joke, since it’s no big deal to put a name to so-called anonymous data.
By now you should know that tech talks privacy, but walks data collection.
That means it’s up to you to do what you can, starting with always adjusting all default privacy settings.
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.
This post and the quote from the FTC dates back to 2015. Nothing on the government side has changed; the Feds are still investigating and Congress is still talking. And as we saw in last weeks posts the company executives are more arrogant and their actions are much worse. One can only hope that the US government will follow in the footsteps of European countries and rein them in.
Entrepreneurs are notorious for ignoring security — black hat hackers are a myth — until something bad happens, which, sooner or later, always does.
They go their merry way, tying all manner of things to the internet, even contraceptives and cars, and inventing search engines like Shodan to find them, with nary a thought or worry about hacking.
Concerns are pooh-poohed by the digerati and those voicing them are considered Luddites, anti-progress or worse.
“Any device that is connected to the Internet is at risk of being hijacked,” said Ms. Ramirez, who added that the large number of Internet-connected devices would “increase the number of access points” for hackers.
Interesting when you think about the millions of baby monitors, fitness trackers, glucose monitors, thermostats and dozens of other common items available and the hundreds being dreamed up daily by both startups and enterprise.
She also confronted tech’s (led by Google and Facebook) self-serving attitude towards collecting and keeping huge amounts of personal data that was (supposedly) the basis of future innovation.
“I question the notion that we must put sensitive consumer data at risk on the off chance a company might someday discover a valuable use for the information.”
At least someone in a responsible position has finally voiced these concerns — but whether or not she can do anything against tech’s growing political clout/money/lobbying power remains to be seen.
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,
