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Category: Social Media

Purpose of Facebook’s “tag people in photos” is to train their automatic photo recognizer

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…

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Your smart phone apps are primarily to spy on you

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…

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Facebook provided Cambridge Analytica/Kogan with “57 billion friendship” links

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…

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Why did I not see the Trump ads on Facebook?

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…

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Facebook and Instagram apps are used to track your location

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.

Store “Loyalty Cards” are combined with social media data to log your purchase habits

Store “Loyalty Cards” are combined with social media data to log your purchase habits

Stores use your loyalty card to identify you and all of your purchases. Your purchase transactions are then sold to other marketing companies. This data, in turn, can and is matched to your Facebook account and other online data using the phone number that you gave to the store and to Facebook or Google. Source: Loyalty Cards are used to spy on  your purchases, and not just with the vendor | Coldstreams The matching operation uses the phone number you…

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I’m so old, I remember writing about fake news in 2014 :) #fakenews

I’m so old, I remember writing about fake news in 2014 :) #fakenews

Social media, confirmation bias and its use in marketing #FakeNews #Propaganda #SocialMedia (I originally posted this on my tech blog, May 24, 2014, about 2 1/2 years before “fake news” became a popular meme. Since then, social media has become a friction-less platform for the spread of propaganda, fake news, and worse.) Confirmation bias occurs when we tend to give weight to information that supports our beliefs and to ignore or discard information that opposes our beliefs. There are several studies…

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Youtube’s recommendation algorithm pushes people to watch ever more extreme content

Youtube’s recommendation algorithm pushes people to watch ever more extreme content

“Soon I noticed something peculiar. YouTube started to recommend and “autoplay” videos for me that featured white supremacist rants, Holocaust denials and other disturbing content. … What we are witnessing is the computational exploitation of a natural human desire…. YouTube leads viewers down a rabbit hole of extremism, while Google racks up the ad sales.”   Regardless of topic, Youtube’s recommendation algorithm  recommends videos containing more extreme versions of whatever it is you just watched. This makes sense from a…

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Protests seldom about “object of the protest” but about the protestors?

Protests seldom about “object of the protest” but about the protestors?

Protestors shut down a speaker at an event that is local to where I live. I am not familiar with the speaker or the protestors and their issues but I found this description of interest: Protests are seldom really about the object of the protest. They are about the protesters, who seek attention for their organizations, their causes, their ideologies, and themselves. And they are about achieving a certain kind of emotional release, bordering on frenzy. The scheduled talk by…

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