I decided there’d be no harm getting that Facebook archive since I was no longer using it. And while I didn’t 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 […]
Month: March 2018
Business as usual at Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg comes forth, tells us nothing we didn’t already know
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 didn’t already know about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Secondly, he avoided […]
Is the death of expertise tied to the Anglosphere?
Foreign and Commonwealth Office Boris Johnson: usually a talented delivery, but with conflicting substance. I spotted The Death of Expertise at Unity Books, but I wonder if the subject is as simple as the review of the book suggests. There’s a lot out there about anti-intellectualism, and we know it’s not an exclusively […]
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Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: the signs were there for years, if one only looked
Facebook’s 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 […]
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A quick read from Prof Stephen Hawking in Wired UK
The late Prof Stephen Hawking’s interview with Condé Nast’s Wired UK is excellent, and a quick read. For those following me on the duopoly of Facebook and Google, here’s what the professor had to say: I worry about the control that big corporations have over information. The danger is we get into the situation that […]
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It can’t be that hard to rank media meritoriously, if only the big players had the will
US Department of Defense Keen to be seen as the establishment, and that means working with the military–industrial complex, Google is making software to help the Pentagon analyse drone footage, and not everyone’s happy with this development. The World Economic Forum’s ‘This is the future of the internet’ makes for interesting reading. It’s […]
Has Facebook stopped forcing its “malware scanner” on to users after being busted by Wired?
Since Louise Matsakis’s story on Facebook’s 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) Wired’s getting the hits, which I don’t mind, considering they are the only tech media who had the cojones to talk […]
Happy birthday: Autocade turns 10
Above: Autocade can be hard work—and sometimes you have to put up less exciting vehicles, like the 2001–7 Chrysler Town & Country, for it to be a useful resource. March 8, 2018 marks 10 years of Autocade. I’ve told the story before on this blog and elsewhere, about how the site came to be—annoyed […]
Facebook overestimates and underestimates reach depending on the story it wants to tell
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 […]
It’s as though Statistics New Zealand set up this year’s census to fail
You have to wonder if the online census this year has been intentionally bad so that the powers that be can call it a flop and use it as an excuse to delay online voting, thereby disenfranchising younger voters. It’s the Sunday before the census and I await my access code: none was delivered, […]
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