It’s a good time for crooks of all kinds.

Corporate shenanigans are a growth industry. Not since the days of the robber barons has white collar crime enjoyed such freedom.

OVER THE LAST TWO YEARS, nearly every institution of American life has taken on the unmistakable stench of moral rot.

Tax evasion siphons 10,000 times more money out of the U.S. economy every year than bank robberies. SOURCE: FBI; IRS.

And this clubbiness has human costs. Tax evasion, to pick just one crime concentrated among the wealthy, already siphons up to 10,000 times more money out of the U.S. economy every year than bank robberies. In 2017, researchers estimated that fraud by America’s largest corporations cost Americans up to $360 billion annually between 1996 and 2004.

Tech took a personal hit thanks to Warren Buffet’s partner Charlie Munger and his views on EBITDA, which stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Tech companies love to talk about their “adjusted EBITDA,” because it makes them look profitable — even a financial loser like Uber.

“I don’t like when investment bankers talk about EBITDA, which I call bulls— earnings,” Munger said at a recent company shareholders meeting. “Think of the basic intellectual dishonesty that comes when you start talking about adjusted EBITDA. You’re almost announcing you’re a flake.”

Tech workers aren’t faring well, either, even at the most hallowed companies.

Silicon Valley has often held itself up as a highly evolved ecosystem that defies the usual capital-labor dichotomy — a place where investors, founders, executives and workers are all far too dependent on one another to make anything so crass as class warfare. The recent developments at Google have thrown that egalitarian story into doubt, showing that even in the most rarefied corners of Silicon Valley, the bosses are willing to close ranks and shut down debate when the stakes are high enough. (…)  Workers weren’t just organizing to save the world from Google. They were also organizing to save themselves from Google, where those who didn’t fit the mold of the straight, white, male techie felt they could be too easily marginalized or dismissed.

The rot isn’t just trickling down, it’s a raging torrent. Student cheating is at an all time high across grades and globally is a billion dollar market.

Philemon is part of the global industry of contract cheating in which students around the world use websites to commission their homework assignments. (…)  Lancaster began studying contract cheating more than a decade ago when he noticed one of his own students posting assignments online. “I found one of my students who was putting up my assignment up for tender on an internet site. So, people were bidding different amounts of money to complete that computer programming assignment.”

Let’s hope the handbasket we’re careening down in is well made, so we can survive our trip to Hell and come out the other side in one piece.

Image credit: Newtown grafitti

Hat tip to KG for sending me the white collar crime article.

As we saw yesterday, staying highly skeptical of all cyber-information, from friends/followers through speeches and videos is a necessity these days.

But the question arises,

Where did we get the idea that tech meant progress and that it’s inevitable.

Neither are true, especially the inevitable part.

The tech world loves to claim that technology is like evolution, therefore inevitable.

Technologists’ desire to make a parallel to evolution is flawed at its very foundation. Evolution is driven by random mutation — mistakes, not plans. (…)  Evolution doesn’t patent things or do focus groups. Evolution doesn’t spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to ensure that its plans go unfettered.

What a crock, but people have bought into the mindset.

You can see it playing out in all the smart (hackable) products.

People claim they want the convenience, but that so-called convenience is killing creativity.

Humans make choices.

Tech bosses are human.

And it’s us humans who will pay the price for the supposed inevitability of tech evolution.

Image credit: Charles LeBlanc

Yesterday I commented that no matter how stellar someone’s past performance it wasn’t a guarantee of future performance.

There are very few guarantees in life, but I do know of one thing you can count on.

And that is that the bosses of big tech lie.

They do it with flair, sincerity, a straight face and in writing.

Their devices listen to and share your words with outsiders — outside the company and the country.

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.

It’s not as if your data is unidentifiable (there’s no such thing as “anonymized data”).

And “we care about your privacy” is the biggest lie of all.

Image credit: Mike Mozart

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.

Last week we looked at millennial burnout and it reminded me of a post I did a couple of years ago on how it’s often driven by Silicon Valley pundits who preach the need for relentless hustle, which, to put it politely, is a crock.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

This is a short post, because it contains links to the two biggest Silicon Valley lies.

I realize that lies aren’t nearly the big deal they used to be, but when the source of those lies is the MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) prevalent in a critical piece of US infrastructure the lies take on a life of their own.

They carry so much credibility that their insidious spread is guaranteed.

The first lie is that success requires constant hustle. Whether starting a company or working in an existing one, hustle means giving up everything else — family, friends, recreation, relaxation, whatever, no exceptions — and work 24/7/365 (more if you can figure out how).

But for some, “hustle” is just a euphemism for extreme workaholism. Gary Vaynerchuk, a.k.a. Gary Vee, an entrepreneur and angel investor who has 1.5 million Twitter followers and a string of best-selling books with titles like “Crush It!,” tells his acolytes they should be working 18 hours a day. Every day. No vacations, no going on dates, no watching TV. “If you want bling bling, if you want to buy the jets?” he asks in one of his motivational speeches. “Work. That’s how you get it.”

Which, as anyone familiar with productivity research knows, is a pile of poop.

The truth is that much of the extra effort these entrepreneurs and their employees are putting in is pointless anyway. Working beyond 56 hours in a week adds little productivity, according to a 2014 report by the Stanford economist John Pencavel. But the point may be less about productivity than about demonstrating commitment and team spirit.

The second lie is that Silicon Valley is special. But Silicon Valley’s special is completely self-serving.

Silicon Valley has a lot of self-interested reasons for preferring to maintain a facade that its culture is special, and that its industry is more innovative, virtuous and productive than every other industry. It serves as a great recruiting tool as the region competes for talent with other industries and areas. It allows insiders to maintain outsize control of their companies. And it is a way to prevent regulators from coming in and regulating Silicon Valley to the extent that it might otherwise seek to do.

Stop drinking the Valley kool-aid. Facebook doesn’t love you, it loves your identifiable personal data, which is slices, dices and sells to all comers.

Google jettisoned its “don’t be evil” motto when it got in the way of revenue generation.

Read the articles.

Share them, tweet them and stop ruining your own life by believing them.

Image credit: Elektor Labs

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.

In truth, parent Facebook lies constantly.

It lies about who/how they share you.

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 lies about stalking you for targeted ads.

“There is no way for people to opt out of using location for ads entirely,” the Facebook spokesperson said told Gizmodo.

It lies about its true purpose — and always has.

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.

It lies about its efforts to stop fake news.

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.

Then there’s Instagram.

Instagram was of even more help to Russian interests in 2016 than Facebook.

“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.

As is the recently released Senate report on Russian disinformation in which Instagram is a star.

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.

In his annual year-end letter, which he published on his Facebook page on Friday, (…) boasting of all that the company had accomplished this year and all the great things it does for its users. “I’m proud of the progress we’ve made.”

Join me tomorrow for a look at the nefarious doing of others and Friday for what you can do to fight back.

Image credit: Marco Paköeningrat

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.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

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.

Flickr image credit: Sean MacEntee

 

Your life.

Profiled in data.

With or without your permission.

Collected and sold to anyone.

Much of it done by your best friend Facebook.

For years.

When Facebook was challenged?

It took a traditional approach.

The next time, leadership denied and denied and denied.

When that didn’t work they again lied and lied and lied.

Then they hired a PR firm that essentially poured gasoline on burning waters.

And while Facebook is clearly the poster child for data misuse, Google, Amazon and Microsoft aren’t exactly on the side of the angels.

Politicians on both sides are weighing in, but, considering the money involved in US-approved corruption, AKA, lobbying, that effort is unlikely to move forward anytime soon.

One question comes to mind.

Is there anything more valuable than data?

The answer is yes.

Talent.

And the talent isn’t happy.

“Increasingly — and especially given the political environment — a key part of this consideration for workers has become the moral and ethical implications of the choices made by their employers, ranging from the treatment of employees or customers to the ethical implications of the projects on which they work. This is especially true given the central role of ‘big tech’ in new fears about information, rights, and privacy and the growing feeling that a lack of oversight in this sector has been harmful.” –Prasanna Tambe, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions

In fact, the hiring luster isn’t just thin, it’s becoming nonexistent.

“Before it was this glorious, magical thing to work there,” said Jazz Singh, 18, also studying computer science. (…) As Facebook has been rocked by scandal after scandal, some young engineers are souring on the company.

“Employees are wising up to the fact that you can have a mission statement on your website, but when you’re looking at how the company creates new products or makes decisions, the correlation between the two is not so tightly aligned,” said David Chie, the head of Palo Alto Staffing, a tech job placement service in Silicon Valley. “Everyone’s having this conversation.”

“They do a lot more due diligence,” said Heather Johnston, Bay Area district president for the tech job staffing agency Robert Half. “Before, candidates were like: ‘Oh, I don’t want to do team interviews. I want a one-and-done.’” Now, she added, job candidates “want to meet the team.”

“They’re not just going to blindly take a company because of the name anymore.”

The criticism by Google employees played out much more publicly.

More than 20,000 employees and contractors walked out of Google’s offices around the world Thursday, Nov. 1, organizers said. The group is protesting sexual harassment, misconduct, lack of transparency, and a non-inclusive workplace culture.

So.

Perhaps “we, the people” will have more force in the corporate world than it does elsewhere.

Image credit: Image credit: Marco Paköeningrat

 

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.

Experts, Congress, pundits, media and plain people are (more or less) up in arms about the quantity, prevalence and effect of fake news. The upshot for many is the realization that the companies behind the apps can’t be trusted. In reality, they never could be, whether from carelessness, sloppy work or just not giving a damn — the “move fast and break things” attitude made popular by Facebook, and, to be fair, public apathy.

And although trust levels are at an all time low, join me Wednesday for a look at how they are still being handed the keys to the kingdom.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

When I was in college, I remember discussing a newspaper story with my aunts. I remember saying that I didn’t believe something and my aunts saying that if something wasn’t true it would not be in the paper.

They really believed that, because in the world they grew up and lived in it was mostly was true.

Fast forward to today and you find the same attitude being applied to the information supplied by the tech they use.

They don’t question the stuff supplied by various apps, especially if it’s from known vendors.

Vendors such as MaxMind.

Maxmind identifies IP addresses, matches them to a map and sells that data to advertisers.

Trouble is, accuracy isn’t their strong point.

Back in 2002, when it started in this business, Fusion reports, MaxMind made a decision. If its tech couldn’t tell where, exactly, in the US, an IP address was located, it would instead return a default set of coordinates very near the geographic center of the country — coordinates that happen to coincide with Taylor’s front yard.

Taylor is the unfortunate owner of a farm that sits on one of those catch-all co-ordinates.

And although the info isn’t supposed to be used to identify specific addresses, surprise, surprise, that’s exactly how people do use it, law enforcement included.

The farm’s 82-year-old owner, Joyce Taylor, and her tenants have been subject to FBI visits, IRS collectors, ambulances, threats, and the release of private information online, she told Fusion.

As bad as that is, at least the Taylor’s still have their home, unlike the two families who are homeless because a contractor assumed Google maps was correct, so he didn’t check the demolition addresses.

Unbelievable.
Unbelievable that they accepted the tech without checking.
Unbelievable that they first called it a minor mistake.
Unbelievable that the owners aren’t suing.

Image credit: Terry Johnston

 

Social media is quick to strike if a company doesn’t live by its values, whether a Silicon Valley darling or a startup in China.

At least it does when it comes to sex, harassment, drugs, and the like.

However, social media is great at turning a blind eye to the lying actions of the giants — kind of a specialized “too big to…”

To understand the true impact of the lying, one has to recognize that the major difference between the US and other countries is that the US legalized corruption under the term “lobbying.”

Anyone who follows the news knows that companies and individuals hire or employ lobbyists to sway politicians to approve/disapprove new legislation.

The lies I’m referring to are most blatantly from Facebook, but the others aren’t far behind.

It boils down to a “say what they want to hear, but do as you please” attitude.

You can see this playing out in California where millions are being raised specifically to kill, or at the least seriously defang, California’s nascent privacy law.

In addition to Facebook, Google, AT&T, Microsoft, Amazon, Verizon, and the California New Car Dealers Association have each contributed six figure donations to the Chamber account set up to defeat CCPA. Uber, the Data & Marketing Association, Cox Communications, and the Interactive Advertising Bureau have each contributed $50,000 to the account, according to disclosures.

They consider it bad enough in Europe, where the population has the temerity to think they not only own their personal data, but should control its usage.

Do that in California, which could lead to other states and, eventually, the country?

How dare them.

And how dare Americans for thinking they should have the same rights.

Who the hell do they think they are?

Image credit: Kevin Hale

There’s an old saying that stuff comes in threes.

A couple of months ago I wrote Privacy Dies as Facebook Lies.

Today I read a new article regarding Facebook’s data-sharing policies with so-called “service providers,” AKA, hardware partners.

Facebook has reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers — including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung (…) to expand its reach and let device makers offer customers popular features of the social network, such as messaging, “like” buttons and address books. (…)

Some device partners can retrieve Facebook users’ relationship status, religion, political leaning and upcoming events, among other data. Tests by The Times showed that the partners requested and received data in the same way other third parties did.

Facebook’s view that the device makers are not outsiders lets the partners go even further, The Times found: They can obtain data about a user’s Facebook friends, even those who have denied Facebook permission to share information with any third parties. (…)

Last Friday KG sent me this image.

Considering the three together made me wonder.

Is Facebook a wolf or a pig?

Or both.

Image credit: Internet meme