Facebook’s advertising preferences are getting more useless by the day. Even a company as dodgy as Google has managed to keep its preference page working.
Over the years I’ve been telling people that they can delete their interests from Facebook if they’re uncomfortable with the targeting, since Facebook gathers these interests even when you have opted out of targeted ads. Now, you can’t. If you’re on the desktop, Facebook just won’t show them to you. You can have this window open for hours for nothing to appear (and yes, I have tried regularly).
Maybe you don’t have any, Jack? You just said you deleted them. Fact: I do have them, except they are only visible on the cellphone—and as usual they’re not that accurate. However, on the cellphone, these cannot be deleted or edited in any way.
I also have a set of different ones if I export my Facebook data, but that’s another story.
And remember when I said I opted out of alcohol ads, yet I still see plenty, especially from Heineken, which has even uploaded my email and private information to Facebook without my permission, and refuses to respond? (I may have to get the Privacy Commissioner to intervene again.) Facebook does say that opting out doesn’t necessarily work. In which case, you have to wonder why on earth the feature is there—regardless of what you toggle, Facebook does what it wants. Even Google doesn’t get this bad.
Remember: Facebook offers you features, but they don’t necessarily work.
And advertisers: Facebook’s audience estimates, by their own admission, have no bearing on the real population, and there is no third-party auditing. Even if you tailor your promotions, there’s no guarantee they’re even reaching the people you want. My interests are certainly incorrect—not that I can do anything about it so you don’t waste your money. Now multiply that by hundreds of millions of users.
An email sent by me on March 27 to the head office of Lumino (the dentists). Link added for readers’ reference. I’ll let you make up your own minds.
Hi Josephine:
How are you?
I hate to bother you once more, as you had done everything you could to resolve the privacy issues I had with Goody’s subcontractor, Global Payments, last year. I was very happy with your professionalism and your actions. I am pleased to see Lumino has since gone with another provider for its loyalty programme.
I regret having to lean on you again.
As you know, I found it very uneasy that I allowed Lumino to have my private cellphone number and last year I made repeated requests to the Terrace branch to not contact me through it any more. I was given assurances that it would not happen again.
I had a hygienist appointment on November 16, which I cancelled via email due to the ‘flu. I was advised that there would be an opening in March 2019, but by this point I already had in mind I would switch dentists, as each Lumino dentist I was assigned to wound up leaving the practice. Therefore, I never replied.
On November 29, I was sent a reminder that I could book in if I clicked a link in the email. I never did.
Imagine my surprise when this week I received an SMS from Lumino accusing me of missing an appointment (that I had never made) and that there I could be charged for it.
This was the first I had ever heard of a March appointment. Back in November, Lumino would send email reminders (for the real appointments) so I really doubt there was anything booked.
It was rudely worded, in my opinion, presuming the customer to be wrong.
Call me intolerant, overly sensitive, or out of touch with modern communication techniques, but it seems the Terrace branch is incapable of following a basic request and now, it has concocted a missed appointment out of thin air.
Besides, I was not even in Wellington on the date concerned, so there was no way I would have made an appointment for it.
After hours spent on the 2018 privacy breach, fielding those scam calls that came [redacted as it’s something I believe to be true but cannot fully back it up without a few affidavits], receiving cellphone calls from Lumino waking me after four hours’ sleep, and getting tired of making the same request at branch level, I have to draw my relationship with Lumino to a close.
Going to the dentist or the hygienist shouldn’t be this hard, but with Lumino on the Terrace, it’s continually stressful.
I wonder if you could arrange to have my records transferred to Real Dentistry, 62 Rongotai Road, Kilbirnie, Wellington, then delete my details from your database. I have asked Real Dentistry to request my records from Lumino on the Terrace.
Thank you,
Yours truly,
Jack
I never got a reply this time, but I think we know what Lumino thinks of all of this as of today. Note: I contacted Josephine from a different email address, so they do have that to counter me with. Still, I thought I was pretty clear above.
I’ve also not received a reply from Heineken. Might have to get the Privacy Commissioner involved in this one, too.
I know most of you won’t care, since people haven’t abandoned Facebook en masse, and Google remains the most frequented site on the web. But I honestly thought New Zealand firms were better than this.
I see Google’s going to stop supporting Huawei as a developer. How is this a bad thing?
First, Huawei can still get the public parts of Android, since they’re open-source. Secondly, if they don’t get updates ahead of time, so what? When have western software companies rolled out bug-free updates? Based on my own experience, Chinese cellphone developers make stuff that just works, and I’m inclined to trust them more these days.
Thirdly, no one needs all that Google crap anyway: I always said that if it disappeared overnight, we’d all find replacements within a week. Now Huawei has to—in fact, it already has them.
Anyone who owns a Chinese phone made for the Chinese market already knows that they have their own app stores. Why do you actually need YouTube through an app when you can browse to the website? Maybe Huawei will do a tiny YouTube app that only surfs to their site for those keen on getting into the Google snooping network. Is a Gmail app really a must if you can set up your phone really easily as an email client to pull from Gmail? As to maps, I’ve been using Here Maps since I’ve had my Meizu M2 Note in 2016, and while it isn’t perfect, it’s more than adequate. Recently I found they had maps of the Chatham Islands when the cars’ sat-nav didn’t.
All Huawei really needs to do is roll out its own app store to its western phones with decent enough translations, and make sure it’s updated with the APKs.
I have a better Meizu weather app on my phone than anything I’ve ever found on Google, and I’m sure Huawei has its version. I owned a Huawei phone many years ago, although it was from my telco and I never had it rooted. It came with a suite of battery-draining Google junk, including services that you could switch off only to have them restart; but when I was able to get a Google-free phone, I’ve never looked back. When that phone was replaced, I made sure the next one was Google-free as well.
What’s going to happen is that Google and the US will lose out as Huawei might find itself zooming ahead with a superior app store, and its own developments may outpace the Americans’.
Corporate America may be patting itself on the back, and their president may think he was doing their bidding, but I think they’ll find themselves weakened.
It’s been nearly one week with the new Meizu M6 Note.
It’s the “international” model, which means it’s not Chinese-spec, and there was no way to turn it into a Chinese one.
One observation is that the international one is far buggier than the Chinese one. Either that, or Android 7 is far buggier than Android 5.
For instance, if I leave my old phone as a USB media device, it would stay on that mode. The new one will always change by itself to ‘charge only’, meaning each time I plug it into USB, I now have to waste time doing an extra step.
Secondly, there’s no drive assistant on the new phone, which may have been a Chinese-only feature. I guess they don’t know we have cars outside China.
I’ve mentioned the app shortcomings in an earlier post.
But here’s one that I doubt is related to the Chineseness of my phone: Instagram simply performs better on the old phone than on the new. A Meizu M2 Note on an old Flyme (on top of Android 5) running a version of Instagram that dates back seven or eight months uploads smoother videos than a Meizu M6 Note on the latest Flyme (atop Android 7) running the latest Instagram.
The issue then is: is it the phone, the OS, or the app that’s to blame?
My first clue was my attempts at uploading a haka performed at my primary school. It took nine attempts before Instagram made one publicly visible, a bug going back some time.
When it did upload, I noticed it was clunky as it advanced.
I uploaded it again today on the old phone and there were no issues. It worked first time.
Now, the two are on different aspect ratios so you might think you’re not comparing apples with apples. How about these two videos? Again, Android 7 required repeated attempts before Instagram would make the video public. Things worked fine with the older phone.
Anyone know why it’s far, far worse as the technology gets newer? Like servers, which are much harder to manage now, or banks, where cheques take five to seven times longer to clear than in the 1970s, technology seems to be going backwards at the moment.
Above: If phones were sentient beings, it probably is a bit mean to have the old phone take a photo of its successor.
After a drop to the ground (and by that I mean the hard floor at the local Pak ’n’ Save) produced lines on the screen of my old Meizu M2 Note, I decided to upgrade to the M6 Note. The familiarity of the Flyme interface was one big reason, though it’s only now, after 12 hours of fiddling, that I’m only slightly happy with how it all went.
The experience was quite unlike the previous purchase, which went incredibly smoothly. The trouble seems to stem from Meizu offering a New Zealand-specific version of the M6 Note, model M721L.
Why didn’t I buy it from a Chinese vendor like last time (when there were no New Zealand retailers)? It seems that all the Ebay vendors were selling global editions of the phone, too, so for the sake of a few dollars, I wanted the support of a local vendor. If there wasn’t much difference between a global phone and a Kiwi one, should it matter? After all, this phone is on Flyme 6·1·4·1G (G for global), and according to one page on the Meizu forums, all I needed to do was download a Chinese Flyme OS patch and it should upgrade and change accordingly.
Problem no. 1: it doesn’t work. It might have worked for one user, but every patch I tried (and they take nearly two hours to download from Meizu’s website) ended with a ‘Firmware corrupt’ (if you were lucky to even get an error message) despite the ZIP files all verifying correctly.
Resigned with the fact I could not turn the M6 Note into a Chinese one, I had to root it to remove the Google bollocks.
Problem no. 2: Meizu has taken away the easy access to rooting the phone. This method does not work, either, at least not this model. After about six hours, I stumbled on the solution: you can follow the above method but switch your phone to Easy Mode first.
Once rooted, I began removing anything Google, for reasons followers of this blog know well.
After downloading the familiar apps, I did encounter some issues. First, the Chinese app store and the global one have different software. Weibo is an international version, for instance. The default music and video apps are much crappier for export, missing the Chinese content (which sometimes included international TV series), and going straight to the local directories.
We do live in an age where the Chinese versions of software can be better than the western ones. Indeed, it was during my experimenting with my previous Meizu phone that I discovered that Chinese designers were creating more visually pleasing and user-friendly apps than their occidental counterparts, at least among the programs I needed.
While there’s obviously a jump up in terms of speed (I bought the 64 Gbyte version) images seem to render duller on the screen.
Then there were the usual problems of photo and music directories from the transferred SD card not appearing in order, which isn’t uncommon.
While I’ve yet to give the phone the acid test (daily use, taking photos and videos), I haven’t really been wowed by the experience of setting up. It was far easier in 2016, with better results. It’s going to be a useful phone, and I thank Charlotte at PB Technologies Wellington for her advice, but if I had the time, I would have waited till a friend went to China and asked them to bring a Google-free one back.
PS., December 4: Solution to getting the Chinese version of Weibo: since my old phone wasn’t completely dead (and will remain in service as long as the screen holds up), I went to its App Store, which is Chinese, got the URL for Weibo there (through sharing it), visited it on a browser on my new phone, and installed from there.
It appears my friend Justin was spot on: I probably was part of a test group trialling longer Instagram videos since April.
Today, Instagram announced that people could upload 10-minute videos, and an hour for those with big followings. This news article (hat tip to Cachalot Sang on Twitter) says there’ll be a new app called IGTV, although I’ve always just uploaded mine via regular Instagram. I haven’t cracked nine minutes yet, but I’ve uploaded videos in the high eights. Regular Instagram seemed to balk at doing anything too large. Also bear in mind—arguably from someone who has had more experience of this than anyone in Instagram-land—that these uploads take ages and can sometimes fail.
Don’t be disappointed if your views are low, since Instagram only counts full views. I have videos still saying they have had zero views, yet I have likes and, in some cases, comments. Not everyone’s going to sit back and watch these in full.
I had noticed that in the last week, my videos, all of which are over a minute, have successfully uploaded—up from the one in two ratio that I experienced when Instagram first gave me the ability to upload videos longer than one minute in April. No wonder, if the official announcement was made today: they probably began allowing all the big ones through.
As the one user (that I know of) who has publicly been uploading videos of over a minute for nearly two months, welcome to the club. I hope you’ll enjoy it.
Since Flyme 6.2 for the Meizu M2 Note, Meizu has ceased providing automatic updates of its OS to rooted phones. There are a lot of pages and YouTube videos about unrooting, and after finding that none were relevant, I’d like to add to the din with what worked for me.
Meizu’s own instruction to go to the Flyme website is right. Head there, grab the relevant update.zip from their downloads (in my case, it was the simplified Chinese one), and put it into the root directory of your internal storage.
However, clicking on the update file from the default file manager brings up a dialogue, saying you can only update if you tick the box permitting the process to delete all your data. Don’t do it.
Even though Meizu has a section in the security settings to let you root the phone, there’s no equivalent page to unroot it. Once rooted, the original page giving you the warning about warranties, etc. doesn’t show up again. All you see is a page telling you what programs have root access. And there’s really no point getting SudoSU or other packages if you’re unsure of what to do.
The solution is so deceptively simple that I’m surprised it can’t be easily found online. I can’t even see it on the Meizu forums. Here’s the low-down so you don’t have to spend hours trying to locate it.
1. Switch off your phone.
2. Switch it back on pressing both the power and volume buttons, then let go when the Meizu logotype appears. (I had to do this twice but I got there.) This puts the phone into recovery mode.
3. You’re then given two options: one to clear your data and the other to upgrade. Since you’ve already got update.zip in the root directory, select the upgrade option. Don’t wipe your data.
That’s it. No unrooting, no extra downloads.
I’m now running Flyme 6.3 for the Chinese edition of my phone.
I have to hand it to Meizu for making the process work pretty well. Unlike some other companies, these OS updates actually work out of the box. It’s just a shame there are more hoops to jump compared with Flyme 5 or even 6.1.
Above: We boarded the Norwegian Jewel yesterday—then my other half got a cruise-themed video on YouTube.
Hat tip to Punkscience for this one.
My other half and I noted that her YouTube gave her a cruise-themed video from 2013 after we boarded the Norwegian Jewel yesterday for a visit. Punkscience found this article in The Guardian (originally reported by Quartz), where Google admitted that it had been tracking Android users even when their location services were turned off. The company said it would cease to do so this month.
It’s just like Google getting busted (by me) on ignoring users’ opt-outs from customized ads, something it allegedly ceased to do when the NAI confronted them with my findings.
It’s just like Google getting busted by the Murdoch Press on hacking Iphones that had the ‘Do not track’ preference switched on, something it coincidentally ceased to do when The Wall Street Journal published its story.
There is no difference between these three incidents in 2011, 2012 and 2017. Google will breach your privacy settings: a leopard does not change its spots.
Now you know why I bought my cellphone from a Chinese vendor.
Speaking of big tech firms breaching your privacy, Ian56 found this link.
It’s why I refuse to download the Facebook app—and here’s one experiment that suggests Facebook listens in on your conversations through it.
A couple, with no cats, decided they would talk about cat food within earshot of their phone. They claim they had not searched for the term or posted about it on social media. Soon after, Facebook began serving them cat food ads.
We already know that Facebook collects advertising preferences on users even when they have switched off their ad customization, just like at Google between 2009 and 2011.
Now it appears they will gather that information by any means necessary.
This may be only one experiment, so we can’t claim it’s absolute proof, and we can’t rule out coincidence, but everything else about Facebook’s desperation to get user preferences and inflate its user numbers makes me believe that the company is doing this.
Facebook claims it can do that when you approve their app to be loaded on your phone, so the company has protected itself far better than Google on this.
Personally, I access Facebook through Firefox and cannot understand why one would need the app. If there is a speed advantage, is it worth it?
This sort of stuff has been going on for years—much of it documented on this blog—so it beggars belief that these firms are still so well regarded by the public in brand surveys. I’m not sure that in the real world we would approve of firms that plant a human spy inside your home to monitor your every word to report back to their superiors, so why do we love firms that do this to us digitally? I mean, I never heard that the KGB or Stasi were among the most-loved brands in their countries of origin.
I’m really impressed with Meizu’s latest Flyme OS upgrades. I didn’t know that they were there, but then I have a lot of my notifications turned off. After discovering there was one, I went from my existing 4.5 (I had already upgraded once since I bought the phone) to 5.1, and everything worked fine. There was another sub-version upgrade the same night. US software vendors could learn a lot from this Chinese company.
It wasn’t perfect (I made some notes on my Tumblr) but it was a darn sight better than some of the upgrades I’ve had on Mac and Windows. I accept there is less to go wrong with cellphones, but I’ve heard many a complaint from IOS users about their upgrades. The phone feels faster, and after a bit of exploring through the menus, I’ve turned off resource-hogging notifications and data-sucking settings. I stand by my earlier review of my Meizu M2 Note—if they keep up this level of reliability, and can remain Google-free, I’d happily buy from them again.
