Sacramento, CA nurse fired for her social media comments
Social media posts that draw ire of others are an emerging workplace issue. Source: Kaiser Roseville nurse out after Stephon Clark post | The Sacramento Bee
How media manipulates your interpretation of a news story
Nearly every story on Facebook this week has featured this Getty Images photo of Zuckerberg looking contrite: The photo first appeared in the press in about May of 2017. In other words, this photo is about one year old. The media has deliberately selected an old photo of Zuckerberg to make it look like he is contrite and feeling badly about the current predicament of Facebook. This assertion, however, is made up entirely by fiction writers in the media. We…
Proctor and Gamble decided in 2016 that targeted #Facebook advertising did not work #DeleteFacebook
If targeted advertising does not work, then the only remaining business for Facebook is spying on people: Targeting to super-specific audiences was expensive but didn’t result in a big difference to its business, P&G CMO Marc Pritchard told The Wall Street Journal. The company, whose massive portfolio of household brands includes Tide and Crest, had experimented with Facebook’s most sophisticated targeting tools, which allow advertisers to reach a narrowly defined audience. Source: Why P&G Decided Facebook Ad Targeting Wasn’t Worth…
Privacy policies are bogus and reading all of them would take about 30 days per year
The reality is that the incentives of a privacy policy are to not use it to keep your info private. In fact, the incentives are to make a privacy policy as permissive as possible. Because the only time you get in trouble is not if you fail to protect someone’s privacy… but if you violate your own privacy policy. So companies have the incentive to write a privacy policy that is as permissive to the company as possible, so that…
Purpose of Facebook’s “tag people in photos” is to train their automatic photo recognizer
Facebook has a feature that allows you to tag friends in photos. They encourage you to click on the individual in the photo and then “tag” their user name. This helps Facebook build an image library from multiple angles and perspectives. This data is processed by Facebook to create their automatic facial recognition software. Facebook claims it can accurately identify people’s faces in photos – literally among billions of photos in the world and that it can do this in…
Your smart phone apps are primarily to spy on you
Location smart SDKs, embedded into publisher apps, have transformed the way in which location data is obtained. It has allowed brands to extract pure, first party, data giving them access to the most accurate form of location data. …. The location signals your device send say a lot about your behaviours and interests. Understanding a user’s behaviour based on the places they have been and routines they follow can be far more valuable to a brand than simply their online…
Facebook provided Cambridge Analytica/Kogan with “57 billion friendship” links
Two of Facebook’s own data scientists worked with Kogan between 2013 and 2015, according to the paper. As part of the research, which was separate from Kogan’s work for Cambridge Analytica, Facebook provided Kogan with data on 57 billion Facebook friendships, according to the paper. …. Facebook then provided the authors with data “on every friendship formed in 2011 in every country in the world at the national aggregate level.” The data set included a total of 57,457,192,520 friendships, according…
Why did I not see the Trump ads on Facebook?
We may never know why I only saw left wing propaganda on Facebook in 2016, since Facebook is so secretive about what they do with our data. But I now have a working hypothesis as to what happened. In the 2nd half of 2016 and especially in the fall of 2016 prior to the election, my Facebook news feed was filled with political propaganda, essentially all of it “left wing” propaganda, especially propaganda posters from fake news services such as…
Facebook and Instagram apps are used to track your location
Facebook and Instagram apps, routinely installed on smart phones, collect your location information and log it with Facebook. In fact, 49 out of 93 apps on my Android device have the Location permission set to ON (I have since turned several of them to OFF). Source: Three ways social media is tracking you – Business Insider More evidence that the sole business of social media is surveillance spying and propaganda messaging.
Computer science largely devoid of ethics
True. What many are only just now discovering about social media (or what you might have known if you’d be reading this web site for a while) is the serious problems manifested by social media, particularly Facebook. As Zunger notes in further comments, software development has not suffered the consequences of massive systemic failures like what we are seeing with Facebook. Other fields, like civil and mechanical engineering did, long ago (think bridge and building collapses), which led to professional…