Much propaganda messaging relies on showing us only a limited view of a story. Our quick acting thinking (Kahneman’s System 1 thinking style) jumps to a conclusion based on what we see, and usually fails to consider that there might be more to the story. Hence, this form of propaganda is “What you see is all there is”. Here is the example that went viral on social media. Here on Twitter, this video clip has been viewed over 3 million…
Software developers scan hundreds of millions of emails of users who sign up for email-based services. Disclosures are often buried in user agreements. Source: Tech’s ‘Dirty Secret’: The App Developers Sifting Through Your Gmail – WSJ They also let employees of those companies personally read your email: this is “common practice”. As already suggested on this blog, they data mine the hell of our emails, logging your purchases, financial records, travel records and more. For companies that want data for…
Facebook (and Youtube and Twitter) have conducted a global experiment on human populations without consent of the guinea pigs by analyzing our “Likes”. Facebook’s digital model of us is more accurate than our own understanding of ourselves. Computers need evaluate as few as 100 Likes to make a judgement more effective than a human. Analyzing just 300 Likes enables the model to know more about the subject than does the subject’s spouse. Computer models achieve “peak” accuracy when more than…
Facebook … conducted research about exploiting posts by kids as young as 14 to show how its algorithms could help advertisers pinpoint emotionally vulnerable moments for the purpose of targeted ads. Source: Facebook able to target emotionally vulnerable teens for ads | CSO Online Facebook research showed how to identify young people who felt “worthless”, “stupid”, “anxious” and so on, based on their Facebook usage, and researched how this could be used to target them for advertising. Facebook does not…
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…
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…