Thanks to my friend Bill Shepherd, I’ve now subscribed to The Ad Contrarian newsletter. Bob Hoffman is one of the few who gets it when it comes to how insignificant the FTC’s Facebook fine is.
Five (American) billion (American) dollars sounds like a lot to you and me, but considering Facebook’s stock rose on the news, they’ve more than covered the fine on the rise alone.
Bob writes: ‘The travesty of this settlement guarantees that no tech company CEO will take consumer privacy or data security seriously. Nothing will change till someone either has to pay personally or go to jail. Paying insignificant fines with corporate money is now an officially established cost of doing business in techland andāwho knows?āa jolly good way to boost share prices.’
There’s something very messed up about this scenario, particularly as some of the US’s authorities are constantly being shown up by the EU (over Google’s monopoly actions) and the UK’s Damian Collins, MP (over the questions being asked of Facebookāunlike US politicians’, his aren’t toothless).
The US SEC, meanwhile, has released its report on Facebook, showing that Facebook knew what was happening with Cambridge Analytica in 2015ā16, and that the company willingly sold user data to the firm. SEC’s Stephanie Avakian noted, ‘As alleged in our complaint, Facebook presented the risk of misuse of user data as hypothetical when they knew user data had in fact been misused.’ You can read the entire action as filed by the SEC here.
Woah this was 12 days before US elections. Facebook employees knew stuff was going on but their DC office appears to have frozen them. Consumers were deceived and harmed through their personal data likely in order to protect Facebook's reputation and share price. pic.twitter.com/rTpSYptVPG
As I have been hashtagging, #Facebooklies. This is standard practice for the firm, as has been evidenced countless times for over a decade. The settlement: US$100 million. Pocket change.
It’s easy to dismiss comedians as, well, comedians, there to tell a joke and to get a laugh out of us. But what if the comedianāsuch as Frankie Boyleāis one of those who sees the state of the world we’re in, and “tells it as it is”? His opinion for The Guardian makes for sobering reading.
Initially, you think this was going to be a laugh-a-minute piece, when he writes, of US president Donald Trump:
You kind of wish heād get therapy, but at this stage itās like hiring a window cleaner for a burning building.
But there are some uncomfortable truths, and it is certainly not slanted against the right, despite the medium:
I donāt really understand commentators who say itās vital not to normalise any of Trumpās actions. They have been normalised for eight years by Barack Obama while many of the same people looked the other way. Banks and corporations writing their own legislation; war by executive order; mass deportations; kill lists: itās all now as normal and American as earthquakes caused by fracked gases being ignited by burning abortion clinics. Of course, there is a moral difference in whether such actions are performed by a Harvard-educated constitutional law professor or a gibbering moron, and the distinction goes in Trumpās favour. Thatās not to say Trump wonāt plumb profound new depths of awfulness, like the disbanding of the environmental protection agency set up by hippy, libtard snowflake Richard Nixon.
When confronted with that, it becomes much clearer why many peopleāand I include American friends of mine who are neither racists nor hicks (sorry to go against the mainstream narrative)āvoted for Trump. If the country’s making some very un-American moves, then why not have someone who claims he can make a clean sweep? Never mind that he had no intention of doing soāit’s a case of swapping one bunch for another while satiating his own egoābut people cling to hope in their own ways. I am no supporter of the main alternative they hadāHillary Clintonāand only wish that Americans had the confidence to support a third party as we do, rather than be told ‘A vote for [Jill or Gary] is a vote for [Donald or Hillary].’ I heard this from both supporters of the right (Clinton) and further right (Trump) there, and it didn’t matter which third-party candidate’s name they inserted.
It’s a reminder that we need to continue forging our own path, and do what is right by usāand it appears our new coalition government has received this message on so many policy fronts in its first 100 days, though with the revised TPPA I wonder sometimes. As Britain is finding out, it’s not that good for your own people to be a vassal of the United States in times like this.
The solution? Focus on your own doorstep and do what you can with your own government. I won’t quote Boyle’s words here since I’d rather you click through and The Guardian can earn some money from ad revenue (at least from those of us who aren’t using ad blockers), but it’s a good a solution as any.
This is BS. You can remove all you like (mine has tended to be completely blank for most of 2016) but in the last few days, Facebook has been repopulating this page. This is despite my having Facebook interest-based ads switched off. Thereās actually no need, then, for Facebook to keep these, and many of them are inaccurate anyway. Yet various advertising bodies, of which Facebook is a member, are too scared to investigate.
Here’s my ads’ preferences’ page on June 14. I had been keeping an eye on this, and keeping it clear since March 2016.
Even as late as October 25, 2016, there were very few things in there. While Facebook shouldn’t be collecting this data, at least it allowed me to delete itāas it claims you can. And no, I’ve never heard of Mandy Capristo.
Regularly since November 27, 2016, Facebook has repopulated this page, putting all deleted preferences back. This was how it looked on November 28. Within hours Facebook would repopulate it, so any deleting is useless.
Not only has Facebook repopulated the page, by today it’s added even more preferences. I’ve been through five rounds of repopulation now.
More BS (links and a lot of comments here and here). Thereās plenty of evidence to show that Facebookās so-called detection systems target certain accounts. A computer identified as having malware, necessitating a user to download their so-called anti-malware products, still works for other users, who arenāt confronted with the same prompts. Companies like Kaspersky clam up and even delete comments when you begin asking them about the programs Facebook gets you to download. Once downloaded, they canāt even be found in your installed programsā list: they are hidden. No one in the tech press wants to cover this. Scared? Weāve our theory about why they want to slow down some users, and thereās some suggestion that you can ignore the warnings and log into Facebook several days laterāthe same thing that has happened to users in the past whose Facebook accounts have become faulty due to their database issues. Coincidence?
āWeāre also testing a new tool that will let people provide more information about their circumstances if they are asked to verify their name. People can let us know they have a special circumstance, and then give us more information about their unique situation.ā
There have been instances of the drag community, for instance, whose accounts have simply vanished with no means of defending themselves and giving Facebook those circumstances. Facebook claimed that the above applied to the US only in December 2015. However, in 2014, Chris Cox of Facebook wrote, āOur policy has never been to require everyone on Facebook to use their legal name.ā Try telling that to the people who have lost their accounts and never given a chance to give their side of the story.
Facebook has 1Ā·79 billion monthly active users.
While I canāt counter this myself, thereās plenty of evidence to show that the site has problems with spammers and bots. If you run a large enough group, thereās a good chance that the majority of new members in your queue are not human. Therefore, you might not actually be reaching the number of people you want in Facebookās calculations. Since the ad preferences have some very strange information on users, Iām not that convinced about the accuracy of targeting anyway. Facebook is complicit in spam by supporting click farms, according to Veritasium.
Deloitte has published a report on the increasing corruption in Australia and New Zealand, which Fairfax’s Stuff website reported on today.
Its opening paragraph: ‘An increase in bribery and corruption tarnishing New Zealand’s ethical image may be due to an influx of migrants from countries where such practices are normal.’
The problem: I’m struggling to find any such link in Deloitte’s report.
The article paraphrases Deloitte’s Ian Tuke perhaps to justify that opening paragraph: ‘Tuke said one working theory explaining the rise was the influx of migrants from countries such as China, which are in the red zone on Transparency International’s index of perceived corruption,’ but otherwise, the report makes no such connection.
The real culprit, based on my own reading of the report, is the lack of knowledge by Australians and New Zealanders over what is acceptable under our laws.
Yet again I see the Chinese become a far bigger target of blame than the source suggests, when we should be cleaning our own doorstep first.
The Deloitte report acknowledges that there is indeed a high level of corruption in China, Indonesia, India and other countries, making this a big warning for those of us who choose to extend our businesses there. It’s not migration to New Zealand that’s an issue: it’s our choosing to go into these countries with our own operations.
It would be foolhardy, however, for an article in the business section to tell Kiwis to stop exporting.
But equally foolhardy is shifting the blame for a problem that New Zealand really needs to tackleāand which we are more than capable of tackling.
The fact is: if we Kiwis were so clean, weād uphold our own standards, regardless of what foreign practices were. Our political leaders also wouldn’t confuse the issue with, say, what happened at Oravida.
When faced with a choice of paying a kickback or not in the mid-2000s when dealing in eastern Europe, our people chose to stay cleanāand we lost a lot of money in the process.
To me they did the right thing, and I credit less my own intervention and more the culture we had instilled.
Hong Kong cleaned up its act in the 1970s with the ICAC, and I have said for decades (since the Labour asset sales of the 1980s) that New Zealand would do well in following such an example. Why havenāt we?
Perhaps if we stopped shifting the blame and followed the recommendations in the Deloitte report, including shifting corporate cultures and instigating more rigorous checks, we can restore our top ranking in those Transparency International reports. But this has to be our choice, not a case where we are blaming migrants, for which there is little support in this very reasonable report.
Simpsons fans should be able to connect the above scene with the post below.
I’m sure some of you watched the al-Jazeera English documentary this week on the Boeing 787, and how there are safety concerns over the models built in South Carolina. In summary, ‘Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit and reporter Will Jordan investigate Boeing’s 787 “Dreamliner”, finding some workers with quality concerns, alleging drug use and fearing to fly the plane they build.’ Even if you don’t watch the full 48 minutes, the links on the page make for interesting reading.
I’m not usually one to take a TV programme at face value, but I admit this one piqued my interest. Enough for me to Tweet Air New Zealand last night to ask them their thoughts and the airline responded this morning:
Safety is paramount and non-negotiable at Air NZ. We remain completely confident of the safety and reliability of the 787-9.
which does sound a bit like a press release. Hackneyed? Yes, and totally unlike the human face that Air New Zealand generally takes with its Twitter account.
Call me cheeky, but I responded with:
Thatās what BOAC said about the De Havilland Comet. Will you check into these new allegations about the Hillbilly 787s?
(I accept that that was not a good term to use and I apologize for it) and added later:
Can you guys at least watch the doco or confirm to me that someone senior enough has, and then convey your thoughts?
The documentary was quite damning about the 787s, and the US system failing consumers these days (just think about GM), I think I’ve every right to be worried. Air New Zealand, even more so. When whistle-blowers like John Woods are fired, something is rotten. If consumers don’t trust ‘Made in USA’ any more, then we need to be assured that we’re getting the best planes made by the best workersāand traditionally, those workers are the Washington state ones.
Surely there are parallels here. Here’s what happened to GM quality manager Courtland Kelley:
It described employees passing the buck and committees falling back on the āGM nodāāwhen everyone in a meeting agrees that something should happen, and no one actually does it ā¦
Kelley had sued GM in 2003, alleging that the company had dragged its feet addressing dangers in its cars and trucks. Even though he lost, Kelley thought that by blowing the whistle heād done the right thing and paved the way for other GMers to speak up. Now he saw that heād had the opposite impact: His loss, and the way his career had stalled afterward, taught others at the company to stay quiet ā¦
Kelley had been the head of a nationwide GM inspection program and then the quality manager for the Cobaltās predecessor, the Cavalier. He found flaws and reported them, over and over, and repeatedly found his colleaguesā and supervisorsā responses wanting. He thought they were more concerned with maintaining their bureaucracies and avoiding expensive recalls than with stopping the sale of dangerous cars. Eventually, Kelley threatened to take his concerns to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Frustrated with the limited scope of a recall of sport-utility vehicles in 2002, he sued GM under a Michigan whistle-blower law. GM denied wrongdoing, and the case was dismissed on procedural grounds.
and what happened to Woods (who also lost against Boeing and its team of lawyers):
There was some animosity between quality and production. I would bring up a quality concern and they would say, well, that’s not helpful to production.
On several occasions, I would go check out these repairs while they were being done and after. There are inspection points all throughout the repair process where an inspector is supposed to come over and check something and mark it down that he checked it.
You’re never supposed to go past an operation that’s not checked off. I would see a defect and I’ll look at the inspection sheet and there was no note of it, and I know in the specifications that all anomalies, even small anomalies, are supposed to be recorded in the inspection.
So I would bring an inspector over and show it to him and say, “Could you please note this down in your inspection?” And they say okay, so I’d walk away. Then I’d come back later that day or the next day and it’s still not noted.
So then I would go mention it to the supervisor and go back another couple of days and still not noted. It became very frustrating on several occasions, to the point where people were angry at me for bringing it up.
If we cannot trust the NHTSA over GM, can we really trust the FAA?
As a New Zealander, I would like our national airline to assure us that we’re not getting lemons, and just how we can be sure that we’re not the guinea pigs for testing the planes like those early Comet passengers were.
The spirit of Gene Hunt is alive and well in the Greater Manchester Police, in the form of Sgt David Kehoe.
Arresting someone over drink driving when he has neither drunk nor driven reminds me of The Professionals episode, ‘In the Public Interest’, about a corrupt police force in an unnamed English city outside London.
The only thing is: that was fiction. This was fact.
So, IGas Energy plc, you may frack away. The British Government and the Met have your back.
Dr Steven Peers was the cameraman and citizen journalist who was arrested. CPS did not have sufficient evidence to proceed with a prosecution. I wonder why.
He is now planning to bring a civil claim against the GMP for ‘wrongful arrest, false imprisonment and assault,’ according to the Manchester Evening News, which appears to be the only mainstream media outlet I could find that covered this incident.
Another report claimed that the GMP never received a complaint from Dr Peers, though how are we supposed to believe any statement from this force? The video has gone viral, and globalāand if Operation Weeting and the inquiry into police standards were insufficient to give the Met a bad name, then this surely will.
What next? Legislation to make protests against oil companies illegal?
No, that would be daft. It would totally be against the ideas of free speech, human rights and international law.No democracy would be that stupid.
The news that should have us all worried is: the derivatives market contains $700trn of these debts yet to implode. Global GDP stands at $69Ā·4trn a year. This means that (primarily) Wall Street and the City of London have run up phantom paper debts of more than ten times of the annual earnings of the entire planet.
It brings me back to one of the first things we ever wrote in the Medingemanifesto: ‘Finance is broken.’ Attempting to value companies using shares or financial statements can be a mugs’ gameāand that was in 2002, before the market became so improbable.
If only we knew how much worse things would get. And we thought, in the immediate post-9-11 period, that we would be learning the lesson about a Dow that was well overvalued. History has shown that we didn’t. And the most recent recession hasn’t corrected things: we’re still sitting on a time bomb.
We wrote in the manifesto, ‘We believe money is a poor snapshot of human value. Brands, however, create value. The branding industry is about creating value for our customers. It makes more sense to measure the ingredients of branding and relationships.’
It’s an ideal, and one with its own problems, too. But I know that part of the finance industry has failed us through its greed. I’m not too certain how their deeds and those of these British forgers differ, creating “wealth” backed by nothing.
One last post on this topic for now, since this entry is pertinent for a complete picture of what is happening with the Google malware bot.
Let’s just say for argument’s sake that I’m wrong, and the combined minds of the Google hive are right. An entire company of boffins must be smarter than a guy who doesn’t use automated teller machines, right? So, according to Google, our ad server linked to a location at bjskosherbaskets.com, which distributed malware on April 6. The difference is: we know our server’s been clean since April 6, and Google refuses to see this. Let’s buy into this fantasy and that we still link to this very dangerous, malware-distributing website via our ad server.
So what about this website at bjskosherbaskets.com itself? What does Google say about them?
You can try Googling for this site yourself, and you might see this:
It exists, but McAfee SiteAdvisor (in my case) gives it a red X.
If you click through, you’ll get this advisory from Google:
Oh dear, you mean it’s still infected? Tell me more, Google.
Um, nothing.
That’s right. Nothing is wrong with this website. It’s been clean since April 7. Yet Google still blocks this now-clean site and anyone who used to link to it. Even though we cleared the hack and don’t link to it any more, Google still insists that we do, and that we’re guilty for doing so. Even if we were still linking to it, and there’s nothing there that’s malicious, then too bad. I feel for the webmaster of this site, because they’ve done all they canāyet Google blocks them as well, 19 days after its own bot said it last picked up any issues.
The notion that Google takes five to seven hours to reclassify a site is clean is bollocks. This is running on nearly three weeks and Google is penalizing an innocent website. Even we don’t dare link all our sites back to our ad server, which actually harms the small businesses we feed through it. (Not to mention my own campaign ads! Though some of you might say that’s a good thing.)
I know we can turn off these advisories, but I doubt many will. I haven’t, because of FUD: what if I come across a site that really is infected?
The house of G continues to have the ānet by the short and curlies. And the sites that really are malwareāGoogle’s Iphone hack via Doubleclick, for exampleāare clean according to the company, of course.
Since Google has spent 2013 targeting other ad networks (Netseer in one case, Isocket in another, and our ad server in the most recent case), could this be its online ad division trying to get a bigger slice of the pie? Accuse the competition of spreading malware, but always deem your own to be cleanāeven when it isn’t. Then it can try to dominate.
We already know it spied on users who opted out of advertising preferences, until it was busted by yours truly, and there was the spying on Iphone users last year that I mentioned above. It’s hard to put all this down to Google being a nice servant of the internet, when it took effort to program these spying mechanisms in. Having been busted on both, it’s desperate to continue growing its online advertising’s invasiveness. By accusing everyone else of malwareāIsocket, for instance, is still puzzled by what caused it to be blacklisted along with “guilt by association” publishers who used its networkāthen online publishers might think Google’s the only game in town.
It isn’t, and I hope it never will be.
I wasn’t too far off the mark with my last post. It’s not unlikely that what was placed into our site by hacking during the small hours of Saturday morning was Google Adsense code: here’s an article entitled, ‘Google AdSense Potential Source of Malware’ at Resources for Life.
While ours was more serious, because it involved hacking, Google’s openness and the lack of quality control by its partners (and by itself?) for its Adsense system is still problematic.
It’s the age-old problem: you want to be more open, but with that comes a flood of less than scrupulous folks who take advantage of it.
What jumped out at the Resources page was this:
How it Happens. Hackers write malicious program code into the ads. Maybe they submit legitimate code initially then change it for malicious code. Either way, those ads eventually get served up on your site. Either the ad javascript itself, or the places it takes your site visitors, or fake messages making your site visitor think their computer is infected. These ads violate the Federal Trade Commission laws on false advertising, but since everyoneās making money of[f] it, nobody complains.
Well, not everyone’s making money. The publisher’s site gets blacklisted and it takes days for that to be lifted, so the earnings go down. Who gains? The hackers and Google.
There’s something to be said sometimes about closing things off, especially if they are subject to abuse. The cited article dates from 2012, and a linked forum has posts going back to 2011, so these issues have gone on for some time. The latter makes for sobering reading, with quotations such as:
I recently was getting a daily notice where users were randomly getting malware warnings popping up on their browser when on my site. I shut off all Google Adsense and this immediately stopped.
I was too having a similar problem. Just the difference was that, the suspected cause was malicious Analytics Code. As soon as I removed, the entire problem was solved. Google must look into this as soon as possible.
I’ve reported this to them and posted in their help forums but they have been non responsive. It is definitely being delivered through Adsense and I suspect their ‘trusted 3rd party’ network.
The other ad networks we deal with have done a better job with screening. Of the main ones we dealt with, I can only think of an incident back in 2007, with some fake Careerbuilder ads. Maybe we should turn the clock backāor the ad networks should insist that we not deal with certain parties.
