Thatâs it for ânet neutrality in the US. The FCC has changed the rules, so their ISPs can throttle certain sitesâ traffic. They can conceivably charge more for Americans visiting certain websites, too. Itâs not a most pessimistic scenario: ISPs have attempted this behaviour before.
Itâs another step in the corporations controlling the internet there. We already have Google biasing itself toward corporate players when it comes to news: never mind that youâre a plucky independent who broke the story, Google News will send that traffic to corporate media.
The changes in the US will allow ISPs to act like cable providers. I reckon it could give them licence to monitor Americansâ traffic as well, including websites that they mightnât want others to know theyâre watching.
As Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, puts it: ‘We’re talking about it being just a human right that my ability to communicate with people on the web, to go to websites I want without being spied on is really, really crucial.’
Of course I have a vested interest in a fair and open internet. But everyone should. Without ânet neutrality, innovators will find it harder to get their creations into the public eye. Small businesses, in particular, will be hurt, because we canât pay to be in the âfast laneâ that ISPs will inevitably create for their favoured corporate partners. In the States, minority and rural communities will likely be hurt.
And while some might delight that certain websites pushing political viewpoints at odds with their own could be throttled, they also have to remember that this can happen to websites that share their own views. If it’s an independent site, it’s likely that it will face limits.
The companies that can afford to be in that âfast laneâ have benefited from ânet neutrality themselves, but are now pulling the ladder up so others canât climb it.
Itâs worth remembering that 80 per cent of Americans support ânet neutralityâthey are, like us, a largely fair-minded people. However, the FCC is comprised of unelected officials. Their ârepresentativesâ in the House and Senate are unlikely, according to articles Iâve read, to support their citizensâ will.
Hereâs more on the subject, at Vox.
Since China censors its internet, we now have two of the biggest countries online giving their residents a limited form of access to online resources.
However, China might censor based on politics but its âGreat Wallâ wonât be as quick to block new websites that do some good in the world. Who knew? China might be better for small businesses trying to get a leg up than the United States.
This means that real innovation, creations that can gain some prominence online, could take place outside the US where, hopefully, we wonât be subjected to similar corporate agenda. (Nevertheless, our own history, where left and right backed the controversial s. 92A of the Copyright Act, suggests our lawmakers can be malleable when money talks.)
These innovations mightnât catch the publicâs imagination in quite the same wayâthe US has historically been important for getting them out there. Today, it got harder for those wonderful start-ups that I got to know over the years. Mix that with the USâs determination to put up trade barriers based on false beliefs about trade balances, weâre in for a less progressive (and I mean that in the vernacular, and not the political sense) ride. âThe rest of the worldâ needs to pull together in this new reality and ensure their subjects still have a fair crack at doing well, breaking through certain partiesâ desire to stunt human progress.
Let Sir Tim have the last word, as he makes the case far more succinctly than I did above: ‘When I invented the web, I didnât have to ask anyone for permission, and neither did Americaâs successful internet entrepreneurs when they started their businesses. To reach its full potential, the internet must remain a permissionless space for creativity, innovation and free expression. In todayâs world, companies canât operate without internet, and access to it is controlled by just a few providers. The FCCâs announcements today [in April 2017] suggest they want to step back and allow concentrated market players to pick winners and losers online. Their talk is all about getting more people connected, but what is the point if your ISP only lets you watch the movies they choose, just like the old days of cable?’
Posts tagged ‘law’
The end of US ânet neutrality: another step toward the corporate internet
11.06.2018Tags: 2017, 2018, censorship, China, copyright, copyright law, corporate abuse, FCC, freedom, Google, innovation, internet, law, New Zealand, politics, power, privacy, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, USA, World Wide Web, ânet neutrality
Posted in business, China, internet, New Zealand, politics, publishing, technology, USA | No Comments »
People are waking up to Wikipediaâs abuses
25.05.2018
Tristan Schmurr/Creative Commons
Welcome to another of my âI told you they were dodgyâ posts. This time, itâs not about Facebook or Google (which, finally, are receiving the coverage that should have been metered out years ago), but Wikipedia.
The latest is on a Wikipedia editor called âPhilip Crossâ, a story which Craig Murray has been following on his blog.
Start with this one, where Murray notes that Cross has not had a single day off from editing Wikipedia between August 29, 2013 and May 14, 2018, including Christmas Days.
And this one.
Both note that Cross edits Wikipedia entries on antiwar and antiestablishment figures, making them more negative and stripping away the positive, and concerns raised by other Wikipedia editors amount to naught. Cross is known to be against the UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and has devoted a lot of time to George Galloway’s page. However, he likes right-wing Times columnists Oliver Kamm and Melanie Phillips.
Matt Kennard Tweeted on May 12:
My wikipedia page is full of irrelevant and erroneous info but it is interesting that on the day I tweeted this https://t.co/fKTP7UYgft
'Phillip Cross' decided it was time to spend an hour editing my page https://t.co/OAUGGMfVfD
Probably just one of those freak coincidences ??
— Matt Kennard (@KennardMatt) May 12, 2018
while on May 21, Twitter user Leftworks said:
I'll tell you what @Wikipedia says when editors try to talk about Philip Cross. "Shut up or you'll be blocked." That's what it says.https://t.co/wIbpMwl7n6https://t.co/SCpuUiTo68
— leftworks (@leftworks1) May 21, 2018
In other words, suggesting that someone play by the rules on Wikipedia will get you threatened with a ban from Wikipedia.
Now you get the idea, you can check out Murrayâs subsequent blog posts on the subject:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/emma-barnett-a-classic-philip-cross-wikipedia-operation/
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-cross-msm-promotion-operation-part-3/
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/philip-cross-madness-part-iv/
Whether you believe Philip Cross is one person or not, it highlights what Iâve said on this blog and formerly on Vox in the 2000s: that certain editors can scam their way to the top and not be questioned. I know first-hand that publicly criticizing Wikipedia could get me hate mail, as had happened last decade when I was subjected to days of email abuse from one senior editor based in Canada. That time I merely linked to a piece which talked about the dangers of Wikipedia and how some editors had scammed itâall that editor unwittingly did with her emails was confirm that position (no one says that all scammers are smart) and since then, observing Wikipedia has cemented it. Interestingly, both the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipediaâs remaining co-founder Jimmy Wales are quick to defend Cross, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that âheâ is biased.
Facebookâs idea of using Wikipedia to combat âfake newsâ is about as moronic a decision one can make.
Now that there are voices adding to my own, and on far more serious matters than non-existent cars, I can only hope people will, at the least, treat Wikipedia with caution. If you choose to stop donating to them, I wouldnât blame you.
Tags: 2010s, 2018, abuse, blogosphere, Craig Murray, internet, Jimmy Wales, law, libel, Murdoch Press, politics, publishing, The Times, UK, Wikipedia
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Zuckerberg was either wilfully ignorant or lied during his testimony about ad data collection
17.04.2018
Either Mark Zuckerberg is woefully ignorant of what happens at his company or he lied during his testimony to US lawmakers last week.
As reported by Chris Griffith in the Murdoch Press, Zuckerberg said, âAnyone can turn off and opt out of any data collection for ads, whether they use our services or not.â
Actually, you canât. As proven many times on this blog.
If youâd like to read that earlier post, here it is.
This is still going on in 2018, and confirmed by others.
I canât speak for shadow profiles because I am a Facebook user.
Summary: Facebook will ignore opt-outs done on its own site and at industry sites, and compile ad preferences on you. Been saying it, and proving it, for years.
Tags: 2018, advertising, database, deception, Facebook, internet, law, privacy, social media, social networking, technology, USA, Washington
Posted in business, internet, technology, USA | No Comments »
Cambridge Analytica is merely Facebook’s ‘smaller, less ambitious sibling’
14.04.2018
Beyond all that had gone on with AIQ and Cambridge Analytica, a lot more has come out about Facebookâs practices, things that I always suspected they do, for why else would they collect data on you even after you opted out?
Now, Sam Biddle at The Intercept has written a piece that demonstrates that whatever Cambridge Analytica did, Facebook itself does far, far more, and not just to 87 million people, but all of its users (thatâs either 2,000 million if you believe Facebookâs figures, or around half that if you believe my theories), using its FBLearner Flow program.
Biddle writes (link in original):
This isnât Facebook showing you Chevy ads because youâve been reading about Ford all week â old hat in the online marketing world â rather Facebook using facts of your life to predict that in the near future, youâre going to get sick of your car. Facebookâs name for this service: âloyalty prediction.â
Spiritually, Facebookâs artificial intelligence advertising has a lot in common with political consultancy Cambridge Analyticaâs controversial âpsychographicâ profiling of voters, which uses mundane consumer demographics (what youâre interested in, where you live) to predict political action. But unlike Cambridge Analytica and its peers, who must content themselves with whatever data they can extract from Facebookâs public interfaces, Facebook is sitting on the motherlode, with unfettered access to staggering databases of behavior and preferences. A 2016 ProPublica report found some 29,000 different criteria for each individual Facebook user âŠ
⊠Cambridge Analytica begins to resemble Facebookâs smaller, less ambitious sibling.
As Iâve said many times, Iâve no problem with Facebook making money, or even using AI for that matter, as long as it does so honestly, and I would hope that people would take as a given that we expect that it does so ethically. If a user (like me) has opted out of ad preferences because I took the time many years ago to check my settings, and return to the page regularly to make sure Facebook hasnât altered them (as it often does), then I expect them to be respected (my investigations show that they arenât). Sure, show me ads to pay the bills, but not ones that are tied to preferences that you collect that I gave you no permission to collect. As far as I know, the ad networks we work with respect these rules if readers had opted out at aboutads.info and the EU equivalent.
Regulating Facebook mightnât be that bad an idea if thereâs no punishment to these guys essentially breaking basic consumer laws (as I know them to be here) as well as the codes of conduct they sign up to with industry bodies in their country. As I said of Google in 2011: if the other 60-plus members of the Network Advertising Initiative can create cookies that respect the rules, why canât Google? Here we are again, except the main player breaking the rules is Facebook, and the data they have on us is far more precise than some Google cookies.
Coming back to Biddleâs story, he sums up the company as a âdata wholesaler, period.â The 29,000 criteria per user claim is very easy to believe for those of us who have popped into Facebook ad preferences and found thousands of items collected about us, even after opting out. We also know that the Facebook data download shows an entirely different set of preferences, which means either the ad preference page is lying or the download is lying. In either case, those preferences are being used, manipulated and sold.
Transparency can help Facebook through this crisis, yet all we saw from CEO Mark Zuckerberg was more obfuscation and feigned ignorance at the Senate and Congress. This exchange last week between Rep. Anna Eshoo of Palo Alto and Zuckerberg was a good example:
Eshoo: It was. Are you willing to change your business model in the interest of protecting individual privacy?
Zuckerberg: Congresswoman, we have made and are continuing to make changes to reduce the amount of data âŠ
Eshoo: No, are you willing to change your business model in the interest of protecting individual privacy?
Zuckerberg: Congresswoman, I’m not sure what that means.
In other words, they want to preserve their business model and keep things exactly as they are, even if they are probably in violation of a 2011 US FTC decree.
The BBC World Service News had carried the hearings but, as far as I know, little made it on to the nightly TV here.
This is either down to the natural news cycle: when Christopher Wylie blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica in The Observer, it was major news, and subsequent follow-ups havenât piqued the news editorsâ interest in the same way. Or, the media were only outraged as it connected to Trump and Brexit, and now that we know itâs exponentially more widespread, it doesnât matter as much.
Thereâs still hope that the social network can be a force for good, if Zuckerberg and co. are actually sincere about it. If Facebook has this technology, why employ it for evil? That may sound a naĂŻve question, but if you genuinely were there to better humankind (and not rate your female Harvard classmates on their looks) and you were sitting on a motherlode of user data, wouldnât you ensure that the platform were used to create greater harmony between people rather than sow discord and spur murder? Wouldnât you refrain from bragging that you have the ability to influence elections? The fact that Facebook doesnât, and continues to see us as units to be milked in the matrix, should worry us a great deal more than an 87 million-user data breach.
Tags: 2018, advertising, consumer behaviour, Facebook, industry, law, Mark Zuckerberg, marketing, media, online advertising, politics, privacy, targeting, The Observer, UK, USA
Posted in business, internet, marketing, media, politics, technology, UK, USA | No Comments »
Turned alcohol ads off in Facebook? Did you honestly think they’d respect that?
10.04.2018Steve Wozniak has quit Facebook, and apparently was surprised at the advertising preferences that the company had built up on him. Like me, Woz had been deleting the ad preferences and advertisers one at a time. Now, if Woz is surprised, then it shows you how serious it is. As I noted in my last post, Facebook even lies about those: on the public ad preferences page it might show none, in the big Facebook data dump it shows some. I believe it might even lie to advertisers about our activity.
Hereâs something else I can tell you first-hand. When you see ads on Instagram, a Facebook subsidiary, they claim that the preferences are controlled within Facebook.
Inside the ad preferences, all alcohol ads are turned off. Guess what appeared in my Instagram? An ad for Heineken.
Unless Heineken has launched a non-alcoholic beer under that brand, then Facebook has lied once again.
Facebook’s ad preferences mean nothing. I saw a beer ad in Instagram, then checked my Facebook ad preferences, which Instagram claims control what ads I see. That’s a load of old bollocks (i.e. business as usual at Facebook Inc.).
And remember, throughout all of this, I had already opted out of ad customization on another Facebook page, so thereâs no reason for Facebook to compile anything on me. Yet, regardless of that setting, it will compile and compile. It will even repopulate, with thousands of preferences, freshly deleted pages.
Now we know that thereâs a possibility, if you werenât clued up about your privacy settings, that these preferences were sold to others. The latest revelation is that CubeYou had sold user data also gathered under the guise of âacademic researchâ. Remember, Facebook knew about the Cambridge Analytica leak in 2015 and sought to bury the story. The new CubeYou story proves that that was not isolated. But then, if you go back through what I have been writing in this blog for a good part of this decade, you really wouldnât be surprised about any of this. In fact, you can probably make an educated guess and say that this was normal practice at Facebook: have money, will sell. Even President Duterte of the Philippines benefited from these practices, with 1·2 million Filipinos’ data harvested, and the list goes on. In New Zealand, Facebook has said that up to 63,714 Kiwis’ profiles were harvested. And now, it appears there’s even a link with US businessman Peter Thiel, who gained New Zealand residency after spending less than 1 per cent of the time required here, and whose companies, as defence contractors, have received millions of dollars of New Zealand taxpayer funds.
Thanks to Facebook, governments have a lot on us, something Edward Snowden has been saying for years. The difference in the 2000s and 2010s is, thanks to digital narcissism, we’re the ones willingly providing this information, while Facebook milks it for all it’s worth, before its enriched CEO pretends to play victim, and his people try to use legal means to shut down the negative media stories.
PS., April 14: If you thought the above was isolated, you’d be quite wrong:
@Instagram @Facebook What part of 'hide permanently' all alcohol ads do you not understand? Oh, thatâs right, you donât give a toss about user preferences and opt-outs. Hope you get done badly by your government. pic.twitter.com/58OVLd1Veo
— Jack Yan çç”æ© (@jackyan) April 14, 2018
Tags: 2016, 2018, advertising, Facebook, law, New Zealand, Philippines, politics, privacy, USA
Posted in business, internet, marketing, media, New Zealand, politics, technology, USA | 2 Comments »
Facebook’s ad preferences’ page and user archive tell totally different stories about their tracking
28.03.2018I decided thereâd be no harm getting that Facebook archive since I was no longer using it. And while I didnât see phone logs as Dylan McKay did (I only had the app for about a month or so in 2012), what I did find was entirely in line with the privacy breaches I had been accusing Facebook of for years.
It relates to the Facebook ad preferences. In December 2016, I filed a complaint with the US Better Business Bureau over the fact that Facebook continued to compile data on your advertising preferences even after you opted out. During 2016, Facebook repopulated all my preferences not once, but multiple times, and I found a direct link between one of the advertisements it displayed in my feed and the recompiled preferences. This was the âsmoking gunâ the BBB asked me to find, though I never heard back from them.
As of 2018, knowing that Facebook will not respect your opt-outs, just as Google failed to do in 2011 (and potentially for two years before that), I visited the ad preferencesâ page (here’s the link to yours, if you use Facebook and are logged in) regularly to keep it empty. What the download showed was very damning: Facebook has preferences compiled on me that do not appear on its ad preferencesâ page.
Below are two screen shots, one of Facebookâs ad preferencesâ page, and what is recorded in the archive. This is a direct violation of not only what the BBB says is one of its principles, it is a violation of the code advertisers subscribe to in industry bodies like the Network Advertising Initiative.
Above: Facebook’s own advertising preferences’ page, yet its user archive records something entirely different.
The archive is also interesting in claiming what ads I have supposedly interacted with. The ad preferencesâ page says I have only clicked on an ad from my Alma Mater, St Markâs Church School. The download says otherwise, recording clicks but not describing which device. However, I can categorically state that the downloaded record is 100 per cent false. I have not only never clicked on those ads (in either Facebook or on Instagram), I have not heard of some of these organizations. It is tempting, therefore, to conclude that if this is Facebookâs record of my activity, then it is misrepresenting click activity to advertisers, which I regard as extremely dishonest. We already know Facebook lies about users that ads can reach. Even if you donât take my word for it, then you must ask yourself why the Facebook page and the Facebook download tell two very different stories. Which is right?
It’s the same story when it comes to which advertisers I have interacted with. The second list, in the user archive, is 100 per cent false. Has Facebook lied to advertisers over click activity?
This is not the end of it. As to which advertisers have my contact information, the ad preferencesâ page say none. The download, however, says Spotify (which I have never used or downloaded), Shutterstock (whose site I have been on) and Emirates (and I am on their email list, but separately from Facebook). Again, why the two different records? And why has Facebook passed on this information to three advertisers without my consent?
Once again, when it comes to who has my contact information, Facebook tells me one story on an easily accessible page, and another one inside my user data archive. Which is true?
While most people will be less shocked by these revelationsâI realize most are quite happy for Google et al to track them around the place and feed them content to confirm their own biasesâit is still a violation of trust and the principles that Facebook itself has signed up to.
Itâs another case of âI told you soâ: something that I suspected, found some evidence for, and found even more evidence for today.
Like the malware scanner, the subject of my blog post in 2016 and Louise Matsakisâs exposĂ© in Wired last month, Facebook needs to come clean on why it compiles data on users who have used its own settings to opt out, why it lies to users over what those preferences are, and why it may lie to advertisers about user click activity.
We know the answer is money. As I said in December 2016, I have no problem with Facebook making money. I just ask, as I do with any venture, that it does so honestly. Right now, even with all the data it has on us, it appears Facebook canât even do that right.
Tags: 2016, 2018, advertising, deception, Facebook, law, privacy, social media, social networking
Posted in business, internet, marketing, technology, USA | 2 Comments »
Business as usual at Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg comes forth, tells us nothing we didn’t already know
22.03.2018
Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg came out and made a statement on Facebook that had no apology (though he gave a personal one later on CNN) and, at a time when people demanded transparency, he continued with opaqueness.
First, he told us nothing we didnât already know about the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Secondly, he avoided the most pressing points.
No mention that Facebook had covered this up for two years. No explanation of why he failed to answer journalists about this for two years. No explanation on why Facebook tried to gag the story in The Observer by threatening legal action. No mention that it had failed, by law, to report a data breach that it knew about.
From the clips I saw on CNN, Zuckerberg claims he wants to restrict access to developers, and he still doesnât know if there are other Cambridge Analyticas out there. Nothing about Facebook gathering more and more data on you and using it improperly themselves, which has actually been an ongoing issue. From the clips online provided by CNN, it wasn’t a hard-hitting interview, with the journalist going very easy on the milliardaire in what amounted to a puff piece. I really hope there was more meat than what we were shown, given how much ammo there is.
The site has countless more failings, including its bots and its bugs, but Iâve mentioned them before.
Iâm unimpressed and for once, the market agreed, with shares dipping 2·7 per cent after Zuckerbergâs first comments in the wake of the scandal.
However, CNN Money thinks Cambridge Analytica is an anomaly, even when Facebookâs own boss says they are still to âmake sureâ whether there are other firms out there in the same boat. âWeâre going to go now and investigate every app that has access to a large amount of information.â In other words, it hasnât been done, and yet Facebook knew about this since 2015.
In other words, the world is seeing what I and others have talked about for years: Facebook is irresponsible, it does nothing till itâs embarrassed into it, and it collects a lot of data on you even after youâve opted out of certain features on their site.
Not a lot has changed since 2009, when he gave this interview with the BBC. Say one thing, do another.
Tags: 2018, BBC, CNN, Facebook, hypocrisy, law, media, politics, privacy, scandal, social media, social networking, technology, The Guardian, transparency, TV, USA
Posted in business, internet, media, politics, technology, TV, UK, USA | No Comments »
Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: the signs were there for years, if one only looked
20.03.2018
Facebookâs woes over Cambridge Analytica have only prompted one reaction from me: I told you so. While I never seized upon this example, bravely revealed to us by whistleblower Christopher Wylie and reported by Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison of The Guardian, Facebook has shown itself to be callous about private data, mining preferences even after users have opted out, as I have proved on more than one occasion on this blog. They donât care what your preferences are, and for a long time changed them quietly when you werenât looking.
And itâs nothing new: in October 2010, Emily Steel wrote, in The Wall Street Journal, about a data firm called Rapleaf that harvested Facebook information to target political advertisements (hat tip here to Jack Martin Leith).
Facebook knew of a data breach years ago and failed to report it as required under law. The firm never acts, as we have seen, when everyday people complain. It only acts when it faces potential bad press, such as finally ceasing, after nearly five years, its forced malware downloads after I tipped off Wiredâs Louise Matsakis about them earlier this year. Soon after Louiseâs article went live, the malware downloads ceased.
Like all these problems, if the stick isnât big enough, Facebook will just hope things go away, or complain, as it did today, that itâs the victim. Sorry, youâre not. Youâve been complicit more than once, and violating user privacy, as I have charged on this blog many times, is part of your business practice.
In this environment, I am also not surprised that US$37,000 million has been wiped off Facebookâs value and CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw his net worth decline by US$5,000 million.
Those who kept buying Facebook shares, I would argue, were unreasonably optimistic. The writing surely was on the wall in January at the very latest (though I would have said it was much earlier myself), when I wrote, âAll these things should have been sending signals to the investor community a long time ago, and as weâve discussed at Medinge Group for many years, companies would be more accurately valued if we examined their contribution to humanity, and measuring the ingredients of branding and relationships with people. Sooner or later, the truth will out, and finance will follow what brand already knew. Facebookâs record on this front, especially when you consider how we at Medinge value brands and a companyâs promise-keeping, has been astonishingly poor. People do not trust Facebook, and in my book: no trust means poor brand equity.â
This sounds like my going back to my very first Medinge meeting in 2002, when we concluded, at the end of the conference, three simple words: âFinance is broken.â Itâs not a useful measure of a company, certainly not the human relationships that exist within. But brand has been giving us this heads-up for a long time: if you canât trust a company, then it follows that its brand equity is reduced. That means its overall value is reduced. And time after time, finance follows what brand already knew. Even those who tolerate dishonestyâand millions doâwill find it easy to depart from a product or service along with the rest of the mob. Thereâs less and less for them to justify staying with it. The reasons get worn down one by one: Iâm here because of my kidsâtill the kids depart; Iâm here because of my friendsâtill the friends depart. If you don’t create transparency, you risk someone knocking back the wall.
We always knew Facebookâs user numbers were bogus, considering how many bots there are on the system. It would be more when people wanted to buy advertising, and it would be less when US government panels charged with investigating Facebook were asking awkward questions. I would love to know how many people are really on there, and the truth probably lies between the two extremes. Facebook probably should revise its claimed numbers down by 50 per cent.
Itâs a very simplified analysisâof course brand equity is made up of far more than trustâand doubters will point to the fact Facebookâs stock had been rising through 2017.
But, as I said, finance follows brand, and Facebook is fairly under assault from many quarters. It has ignored many problems for over a decade, its culture borne of arrogance, and you can only do this for so long before people wise up. In the Trump era, with the US ever more divided, there were political forces that even Facebook could not ignore. Zuckerberg wonât be poor, and Facebook, Inc. has plenty of assets, so theyâre not going away. But Facebook, as we know it, isnât the darling that it was a decade ago, and what we are seeing, and what I have been talking about for years, are just the tip of the iceberg.
Tags: 2010, 2018, advertising, brand equity, branding, corporate culture, deception, ethics, Facebook, Jack Martin Leith, journalism, law, Medinge Group, Murdoch Press, newspaper, politics, social media, social networking, technology, The Guardian, transparency, trust, USA
Posted in branding, business, culture, internet, leadership, media, politics, technology, UK, USA | 4 Comments »
Has Facebook stopped forcing its “malware scanner” on to users after being busted by Wired?
10.03.2018
Since Louise Matsakisâs story on Facebookâs malware scanner came out in Wired, the number of hits to my pieces about my experience has dwindled.
This can mean one of two things: (a) Wiredâs getting the hits, which I donât mind, considering they are the only tech media who had the cohones to talk about it; (b) Facebook, after being busted by the mainstream media, has stopped falsely accusing its users of having malware on their systems.
Certainly on Twitter, although Twitter has broken its search function recently, far fewer Tweets with Facebook malware appear in a search.
Of the two, (b) is more likely, because in previous circumstances, Facebook has only backed down after being embarrassed by the media, or after they receive a threat that could land them in an embarrassing situation.
That includes the times it kicked off drag queens and kings, only to have them fight back with the mediaâs help; or leave porn and kiddie porn up, till theyâre threatened with reports to the authorities.
Otherwise, they ignore youâas they have done with users who have complained about the malware scanner for four years.
Itâs not unlike Google, who only stopped hacking Iphones in 2012 after The Wall Street Journal busted them for doing so, or only changed their cookie policies to be in line with their own claims after I busted them in 2011 to the Network Advertising Initiative for lying.
These firms do have too much power because the law means nothing to them, but embarrassment in the court of public opinion does.
After Louise’s article came out, Bloomberg did a story on it, as did one independent media outlet.
So while a very small part of me isnât thrilled that my hits on this blog have dropped, Iâm actually far more pleased to know far fewer people are being lied to by Facebook about having malware on their systems. Iâm also happy that tens of thousands, maybe even millions, arenât wasting their time downloading and running a fake scanner which sends their private data to Facebook.
Itâs also interesting how quickly Facebook switched off their fake-warning system, within days of Louiseâs article.
It wasnât as quick as Google switching off their Iphone privacy circumventing after the WSJ (same day) but the speed at which Facebook ceased telling people they have malware does suggest that those warnings were, as I said all along, fake. Louise asked the right questions and none of Facebookâs answers made sense.
Facebook has plenty more misdeeds, and, in time, I am sure the tech media will get to them.
It may find that despite its wealth, on a lot of things it actually needs to play by the very rules it claims to follow. And that means no more forced downloads of software that send your private data to them.
Tags: 2018, Condé Nast, Facebook, Google, law, mainstream media, media, privacy, publishing, USA, Wired
Posted in business, culture, internet, media, publishing, technology, USA | 3 Comments »
Facebook overestimates and underestimates reach depending on the story it wants to tell
04.03.2018
Funny, isn’t it? Last year, Facebook was busted for claiming that in some demographics, their ads could reach more people than there were people. When it comes to the US’s Russia probe, they claim their ads reached far, far fewer people: they initially claimed they reached 10 million, but Jonathan Albright, a researcher at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, found that they had in fact reached hundreds of millions.
Facebook: fudging since 2004.
Tags: 2016, 2017, 2018, advertising, ethics, Facebook, law, Russia, social media, USA
Posted in business, internet, marketing, politics, USA | 4 Comments »