You’d have to be living on another planet not to be aware of the isht pulled by Facebook. Where do I start?

With the fact that Facebook is getting fined for storing millions of passwords in plain text or that they “unintentionally” uploaded a million and a half new member email contacts? Or that user data, such as friends, relationships and photos, was used to reward partners and fight rivals? Or might it bother you more to know that your posts, photos, updates, etc., whether public or private, are labeled and categorized by hand by outsourced works in India? Nastier is Facebook sharing/selling your data to cell phone carriers.

Offered to select Facebook partners, the data includes not just technical information about Facebook members’ devices and use of Wi-Fi and cellular networks, but also their past locations, interests, and even their social groups. This data is sourced not just from the company’s main iOS and Android apps, but from Instagram and Messenger as well. The data has been used by Facebook partners to assess their standing against competitors, including customers lost to and won from them, but also for more controversial uses like racially targeted ads.

Facebook owns Instagram, so it should come as no surprise that the private phone numbers and email addresses of millions of celebrities and influencers were scraped by a partner company.

Then there is Google, which dumps location data from millions of devices, not just Android, into a database called Sensorvault and makes it available for search to law enforcement, among others. On May 7 Google claimed it had found privacy religion, but on CNBC reported that Gmail tracks and saves every digital receipt, not just things, but services and, of course Amazon. Enterprise G Suite customers don’t fare much better. Their user passwords were kept un-encrypted on an internal server for years. Not hacked, but still…

YouTube is in constant trouble for the way it interprets its constantly changing Terms Of Service.

The list for all go on and on.

The European Union is far ahead of the US in terms of privacy, anticompetitive actions, etc., but US consumers are finally waking up. So-called Big Tech is no longer popular politically and the Justice Department is opening an antitrust investigation of Google (Europe already fined it nearly 3 billion in 2017 for anticompetitive actions).

Can Facebook be far behind?

A bit more next week.

Image credit: MySign AG

As promised yesterday, I’m updating the “don’t trust them, they lie” list (in mostly alphabetical order) with new links to the nefarious doings of your favorite “can’t live without ‘em” companies.

First up: Amazon. Anyone who has bought from Amazon is aware of how it uses your buying data to suggest additional purchases, as do all ecommerce sites. And there have been multiple stories about Alexa listening and responding even when it’s supposedly not on. But did you know that those supposedly anonymous recordings are discussed for amusement in Amazon employee chatrooms?

On a far more serious note, Ring, the video doorbell company Amazon acquired, is teaming up with police departments to offer free or discounted smart doorbells. And although it supposedly goes against Ring’s own policy, some of those PDs are adding to the terms of service the right to look at the saved video footage sans subpoena.

Sadly, Apple is on the nefarious list, in spite of it’s famous “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone” philosophy. But, as with other companies, the facts are more complicated — the thieves are in the apps.

More tomorrow.

Image credit: MySign AG

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If 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.”

Now it looks like their ardor is what’s cool, as in cooled off.

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.”

Maybe they aren’t all looking for a safe harbor in the next downturn (there aren’t any), but for the experience that will ground their startup in their 40s, 50s and beyond.

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.

And a final “maybe.”

Maybe there is room to hope.

Image credit: HikingArtist

The other day I was thinking about downloading an ad blocker, because the auto-video ads make me crazy.

But even before I read about the Washington Post blocking people with ad blockers from reading their articles I decided not to.

Why?

Because I know that, as the saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

“Many people already receive our journalism for free online, with digital advertising paying only a portion of the cost. Without income via subscriptions or advertising, we are unable to deliver the journalism that people coming to our site expect from us.”

No one expects to get a free car or for even Amazon to give away books, but when it comes to content on the Internet they cry, “That’s different!”

Copyrights are suddenly meaningless and any effort to generate revenue to pay for the creative talent, technology and other expenses required pollutes the experience.

Even sites that are built on user-generated content have expenses.

You deserve to be paid for your work and your company deserves to generate revenue to pay you — and so do they.

Think about that before you block ads or complain about pay walls.

Flickr image credit: Jason Tester

My wired friends (which is 90% of them) rag me for my resistance to being wired and periodic rants about privacy, which is so last century.

They tell me that it all makes life better; I tell them what they are full of.

Two recent pieces of information gave me great ammunition to refute their “makes it better” claim.

The first involves Reddit and its creep factor (it could just as easily be Pinterest, Instagram or Tumblr).

Reddit has come under fire for harboring a forum that encourages people to covertly photograph women on the street and upload the images to the site for others to ogle and comment on.

Posted anonymously, of course.

And, of course, those who posted the objectionable pictures, often of underage girls, were extremely upset when they were outed.

These actions, in turn, prompted an outcry from those who felt that they should be able to retain their own anonymity while posting photographs of women without their consent.

Reddit uses the ever popular “Freedom of Speech” defense for not doing anything, but, as Zeynep Tufekci, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill says it doesn’t qualify.

“…those running Reddit are twisting the logic behind that notion because the free speech referenced in this case refers to images of women, often underage girls, taken without their consent, and passed around for pleasure.”

I’m glad I’m beyond the age anyone would bother with my picture.

90% of the 90% mentioned earlier own iPhones, on which they tend to wax lyrical with little to no provocation and immediately upgrade when a new version is launched.

So when I read the Slate article about the new iPhone 5’s default tracking function I gleefully sent it on.

You weren’t imagining things. Apple’s new iOS 6 does, indeed, come with a default setting that tracks your activity, gathering a constant stream of personal data. Apple’s advertising arm, iAd, uses that data to create a targeted, personal ad campaign based on your recent Googling…

The tracking function isn’t just on the iPhone 5, but applies to anything that uses iOS6, like the iPod touch or iPad.

But at least Apple provides a way to turn the feature off (instructions in the article).

If having your cellphone track everything you do in order to send you targeted ads is supposed to improve life then I prefer my life to remain unimproved.

My friends and I will continue to disagree, but I can honestly say I am one happy dinosaur.

Flickr image credit: InfoMofo