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.

For years I’ve written about the lie/cheat/steal attitude of social media sites, such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, the list goes on and on. This post is only a year old, but I thought it could use some updating. What I can tell you today is that nothing has improved, in fact it has gotten much worse — as you’ll see over the next two days.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

you ever been to a post-holiday potluck? As the name implies, it’s held within two days of any holiday that involves food, with a capital F, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas and, of course, Easter. Our group has only three rules, the food must be leftovers, conversation must be interesting and phones must be turned off. They are always great parties, with amazing food, and Monday’s was no exception.

The unexpected happened when a few of them came down on me for a recent post terming Mark Zukerberg a hypocrite. They said that it wasn’t Facebook’s or Google’s fault a few bad actors were abusing the sites and causing problems. They went on to say that the companies were doing their best and that I should cut them some slack.

Rather than arguing my personal opinions I said I would provide some third party info that I couldn’t quote off the top of my head and then whoever was interested could get together and argue the subject over a bottle or two of wine.

I did ask them to think about one item that stuck in my mind.

How quickly would they provide the location and routine of their kids to the world at large and the perverts who inhabit it? That’s exactly what GPS-tagged photos do.

I thought the info would be of interest to other readers, so I’m sharing it here.

Facebook actively facilitates scammers.

The Berlin conference was hosted by an online forum called Stack That Money, but a newcomer could be forgiven for wondering if it was somehow sponsored by Facebook Inc. Saleswomen from the company held court onstage, introducing speakers and moderating panel discussions. After the show, Facebook representatives flew to Ibiza on a plane rented by Stack That Money to party with some of the top affiliates.

Granted anonymity, affiliates were happy to detail their tricks. They told me that Facebook had revolutionized scamming. The company built tools with its trove of user data (…) Affiliates hijacked them. Facebook’s targeting algorithm is so powerful, they said, they don’t need to identify suckers themselves—Facebook does it automatically. And they boasted that Russia’s dezinformatsiya agents were using tactics their community had pioneered.

Scraping Android.

Android owners were displeased to discover that Facebook had been scraping their text-message and phone-call metadata, in some cases for years, an operation hidden in the fine print of a user agreement clause until Ars Technica reported. Facebook was quick to defend the practice as entirely aboveboard—small comfort to those who are beginning to realize that, because Facebook is a free service, they and their data are by necessity the products.

I’m not just picking on Facebook, Amazon and Google are right there with it.

Digital eavesdropping

Amazon and Google, the leading sellers of such devices, say the assistants record and process audio only after users trigger them by pushing a button or uttering a phrase like “Hey, Alexa” or “O.K., Google.” But each company has filed patent applications, many of them still under consideration, that outline an array of possibilities for how devices like these could monitor more of what users say and do. That information could then be used to identify a person’s desires or interests, which could be mined for ads and product recommendations. (…) Facebook, in fact, had planned to unveil its new internet-connected home products at a developer conference in May, according to Bloomberg News, which reported that the company had scuttled that idea partly in response to the recent fallout.

Zukerberg’s ego knows no bounds.

Zuckerberg, positioning himself as the benevolent ruler of a state-like entity, counters that everything is going to be fine—because ultimately he controls Facebook.

There are dozens more, but you can use search as well as I.

What can you do?

Thank Firefox for a simple containerized solution to Facebook’s tracking (stalking) you while surfing.

Facebook is (supposedly) making it easier to manage your privacy settings.

There are additional things you can do.

How to delete Facebook, but save your content.

The bad news is that even if you are willing to spend the effort, you can’t really delete yourself from social media.

All this has caused a rupture in techdom.

I could go on almost forever, but if you’re interested you’ll have no trouble finding more.

Image credit: weisunc

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

Your life as lived in the real world with real people and real relationships.

As Arianna Huffington said,

What we’ve discovered is that technology might be great at delivering what we want in the moment, but it’s less great at giving us what we need over the long term.

The biggest step forward in the world of technology in 2018 was the realisation that we have to set boundaries in our relationship with technology to protect our humanity. (…) It was the year we realised that the consequences of allowing technology into every aspect of our lives aren’t all positive.

If, after all Zuckerberg’s lies and shenanigans you actually decide to delete Facebook from your life, you need to remember that it owns Instagram and WhatsApp, so they would need to go, too. If that works for you, here are two explanations of what to do. The first explains how to delete all three, the second focuses on Facebook.

You can take a less drastic approach than full deletion, yet give yourself far more control, by leaving the apps on your laptop, but deleting them from your phone (except for some Samsung models). They’ll still be there, but you’ll need to make a conscious choice to check them instead of responding like Pavlov’s dog to the notifications.

If even that is too much, start by turning off notifications.

You will be surprised at the difference it makes.

Don’t ignore the fact that tech is addictive and can take over your life in the same way as alcohol or drugs. And just like alcohol and drugs there are support groups and rehab centers for tech addiction. Even if you don’t believe you are actually addicted, check it out; it’s always better to be safe than sorry.

If instead you just want to take much more control, here are some links that can help you make conscious choices.

Use Location History Visualizer to gain a better understanding of what Google’s location tracking means to you. And understand that Apple isn’t immune.

One humongous thing you can do to shrink your online footprint is to switch from Google to Startpage.com. The lack of ads makes a huge difference in the quality of your browsing.

And take a close look at this infographic on how to make yourself invisible on the net.

Invest in a VPN; I have Avast’s, since I also use their virus software and consider the small annual charge to be one of the best investments I’ve made.

Here’s one on stopping robocalls on both iPhone and Android.

You don’t have to do it all at once, but you do need to think through tech’s effects on your life and your relationships and then go from there.

PS This just in. Amazon’s Ring, along with dozens of other IoT devices are famous for their laz security.

Beginning in 2016, according to one source, Ring provided its Ukraine-based research and development team virtually unfettered access to a folder on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service that contained every video created by every Ring camera around the world. (…)  The Information, which has aggressively covered Ring’s security lapses, reported on these practices last month.

So before you buy one stop and think, “would I want whatever this device learns about me and my family shared across the strangers and media?” If the answer is “no” then you should probably skip it.

Nefarious encompasses much of what’s wrong with the prime goal of social media companies — hook users.

I love the word ‘nefarious’; in case you aren’t familiar with it synonyms include, evil, wicked, rotten, treacherous, villainous, and many more.

Hook them and sell them.

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%.

Then there are phones — and third party apps.

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.

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

 

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

 

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

During the dark ages of the 1970s, 80s and into the 90s people who refrained from drinking soda, living on fast food and cooked for themselves, instead of relying on the convenience of processed foods, were disparaged.

I know, because I was one of them. We were called “health food nuts.”

That changed with the advent of research into sugar, the value of veggies and a more general understanding that health wasn’t an accident, but a personal responsibility based on your own choices.

In the 1980s the World Wide Web became ubiquitous and existing bulletin board systems, such as AOL, migrated to the web. The dot com boom saw the birth and growth of social media communities that were free — and everybody loves free.

The contemporary internet was built on a bargain: Show us who you really are and the digital world will be free to search or share.

People detailed their interests and obsessions on Facebook and Google, generating a river of data that could be collected and harnessed for advertising. The companies became very rich. Users seemed happy. Privacy was deemed obsolete, like bloodletting and milkmen.

That bargain led to a new kind of nut.

“Privacy nuts;” I’m one of those, too.

As with health food nuts, privacy nuts were pooh-poohed as Luddites, anti-progressive, alarmist party-poopers.

But as they say, that was then and this is now.

Most people, no matter how they access their news, are aware of the stunning breaches in Facebook’s security, especially the current Cambridge Analytica fiasco.

That also seemed to wake people up to what the privacy nuts have been warning about all along.

Zuckerberg, of course, claims he supports the privacy law Congress is considering, but covertly Facebook is lobbying against it, so his statement that he would offer EU controls globally is highly unlikely.

Never forget that for Facebook it’s all about money.

The power of the company’s ad platform comes from the ability it gives politicians, brands, real estate agents, nonprofits and others to precisely target people on its social networks.

Of course, it’s not just Facebook.

And while Congress runs hearings and the public freaks out Zuck, as he is called, still seems to believe that it’s not Facebook’s fault and what happened should be excused because the his vision is for it to be a force for good.

but change is unlikely to happen, since greed still rules.

After two days of questioning by American lawmakers, Facebook’s share price rose more than 5%—mostly on the first day of Zuckerberg’s testimony—boosting the tech company’s market value by more than $24 billion.

Finally, NEWYORKMAG.COM provided commentary from people who are far closer to both Zukerberg and Facebook. The interviews are a real wakeup call (if you still need one).

A Propaganda Engine ‘Unlike Any in History’: Q&A With Early Facebook Investor

A conversation with early Facebook investor Roger McNamee on propaganda, early warning signs, and why outrage is so addictive.

• Former Facebook manager Sandy Parakilas on privacy, addiction, and why Facebook must “dramatically” change its business model.

• Former Facebook designer Soleio Cuervo on Facebook’s commitment to users, what the media gets wrong, and why regulation is unnecessary.

• Former Zuckerberg speechwriter Kate Losse on how the Facebook founder thinks and what is hardest for him to wrap his mind around.

• Former Facebook product manager Antonio Garcia Martinez on the “sociopathic scene” of Silicon Valley and Mark Zuckerberg’s “disingenuous and strange” reaction to the election.

Image credit: Marco Paköeningrat

Have you ever been to a post-holiday potluck? As the name implies, it’s held within two days of any holiday that involves food, with a capital F, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas and, of course, Easter. Our group has only three rules, the food must be leftovers, conversation must be interesting and phones must be turned off. They are always great parties, with amazing food, and Monday’s was no exception.

The unexpected happened when a few of them came down on me for a recent post terming Mark Zukerberg a hypocrite. They said that it wasn’t Facebook’s or Google’s fault a few bad actors were abusing the sites and causing problems. They went on to say that the companies were doing their best and that I should cut them some slack.

Rather than arguing my personal opinions I said I would provide some third party info that I couldn’t quote off the top of my head and then whoever was interested could get together and argue the subject over a bottle or two of wine.

I did ask them to think about one item that stuck in my mind.

How quickly would they provide the location and routine of their kids to the world at large and the perverts who inhabit it? That’s exactly what GPS-tagged photos do.

I thought the info would be of interest to other readers, so I’m sharing it here.

Facebook actively facilitates scammers.

The Berlin conference was hosted by an online forum called Stack That Money, but a newcomer could be forgiven for wondering if it was somehow sponsored by Facebook Inc. Saleswomen from the company held court onstage, introducing speakers and moderating panel discussions. After the show, Facebook representatives flew to Ibiza on a plane rented by Stack That Money to party with some of the top affiliates.

Granted anonymity, affiliates were happy to detail their tricks. They told me that Facebook had revolutionized scamming. The company built tools with its trove of user data (…) Affiliates hijacked them. Facebook’s targeting algorithm is so powerful, they said, they don’t need to identify suckers themselves—Facebook does it automatically. And they boasted that Russia’s dezinformatsiya agents were using tactics their community had pioneered.

Scraping Android.

Android owners were displeased to discover that Facebook had been scraping their text-message and phone-call metadata, in some cases for years, an operation hidden in the fine print of a user agreement clause until Ars Technica reported. Facebook was quick to defend the practice as entirely aboveboard—small comfort to those who are beginning to realize that, because Facebook is a free service, they and their data are by necessity the products.

I’m not just picking on Facebook, Amazon and Google are right there with it.

Digital eavesdropping

Amazon and Google, the leading sellers of such devices, say the assistants record and process audio only after users trigger them by pushing a button or uttering a phrase like “Hey, Alexa” or “O.K., Google.” But each company has filed patent applications, many of them still under consideration, that outline an array of possibilities for how devices like these could monitor more of what users say and do. That information could then be used to identify a person’s desires or interests, which could be mined for ads and product recommendations. (…) Facebook, in fact, had planned to unveil its new internet-connected home products at a developer conference in May, according to Bloomberg News, which reported that the company had scuttled that idea partly in response to the recent fallout.

Zukerberg’s ego knows no bounds.

Zuckerberg, positioning himself as the benevolent ruler of a state-like entity, counters that everything is going to be fine—because ultimately he controls Facebook.

There are dozens more, but you can use search as well as I.

What can you do?

Thank Firefox for a simple containerized solution to Facebook’s tracking (stalking) you while surfing.

Facebook is (supposedly) making it easier to manage your privacy settings.

There are additional things you can do.

How to delete Facebook, but save your content.

The bad news is that even if you are willing to spend the effort, you can’t really delete yourself from social media.

All this has caused a rupture in techdom.

I could go on almost forever, but if you’re interested you’ll have no trouble finding more.

Image credit: weisunc

From religious leaders to politicians; corporate titans to everyday folks; glitterati to moguls; intelligentsia to idiots; there seems to be no action that elicits societal condemnation, let alone punishment, for anyone except getting caught.

That’s right, getting caught.

If a societal no-no, first vehemently deny it and/or claim you didn’t realize anybody actually minded. If that doesn’t work, apologize profusely using language that changes the focus from what you did and who you hurt to you, i.e., how sad you are for them and how your big sister broke your GI Joe when you were a kid, so it’s not really your fault.

Another approach is to buy their silence, but if that doesn’t work, you can claim that the devil led you astray, you were weak, but you’ve preyed a lot, God forgave you and so should those you mislead/hurt.

Enterprise and Internet companies emote about how important user privacy is and how hard they try to protect it every time they’re hacked or their hands are caught in the cookie jar.

Worse, repercussions of serious criminal actions, especially murder, are relativity easy to avoid as long as you’re white and well-healed — or in law enforcement.

It used to be that people talked of someone having a “strong moral compass.” I suppose many still do, but that’s not worth much when “true north” is portable, shifting with the trends on social media and shoved around by rigid ideologies.

Image credit: Tim Cigelske