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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘ethics’
07.04.2022
During February, I received spam from Novuna in the UK, the finance company thatâs a subsidiary of Mitsubishi. It wasnât personally addressed, it was just a general message. I complained via their complaintsâ email, only to have the message bounce back as it wasnât working. However, they did respond on Twitter, unlike less caring companies such as Afterpay, followed up via my company feedback form by their senior marketing manager, Rob Walton.
Rob asked me to send them the spam for their investigation, and, after about seven attempts, they received it (ironically, their own server blocked the message on the grounds of it being spam). I confirmed that although I do have British nationality, I had never resided in the UK or had had any contact with Novuna.
He was as good as his word, and after a few days, came back to me to say Experian, a credit reference agency, had supplied my address to them. He also included a web address so I could get make a âsubject access requestâ from the provider, made sure I was off their email lists, and apologized.
From there, ESB Connect Ltd. also took things seriously. The request came back, and ESB’s CEO, Suz Chaplin, took the time to write a personal email. It turns out that ESB had acquired the details from another company, Datatonomy, who falsely claimed that I had signed up via two websites: Idealo and Great British Offers.
Hereâs the real kicker: it claimed that my name was âMrs Jayne Mooreâ of Liverpool.
Rewind back over 15 years (maybe closer to 20!) and a dodgy spam list doing the rounds in the 2000s saw a lot of messages sent to my email calling me âMrs Jayne Mooreâ. I even have a filter for it in Eudora thatâs been there since the â00s.
Indeed, 10 days prior to Suz getting back to me, I said to Rob: âI do remember one UK-based spam list from the 2000s that had my email address listed against the name âMrs Jayne Mooreâ and those still come. It will be interesting to discover if this is the same source.â
Imagine my surprise to find that a common and badly compiled spam list (obviously my details were erroneously married up with Mrs Mooreâs name, address and date of birth) is still being sold by dodgy parties in the UK, making false claims about sign-ups!
I wrote to Suz: âIt seems you may have unwittingly and innocently purchased a common spammers’ list where such details were mixed up (after all, these people have no qualms) or that you have been duped about the veracity of the opt-ins detailed in your document.â And cheekily, I suggested she should get her money back from Datatonomy.
Suz says she will look into this further as her company prides itself on data integrity. I thanked her, and true to both her and Robâs promises, I havenât received anything like the Novuna spam since. Nor have I seen that many purporting to be from British companies.
I donât know if Datatonomy bought its list from somewhere else, though as I said to Suz, they havenât had great reviews, and itâs suggested online that they purchase from questionable parties. But after a decade and a half, thanks to Rob and Suz, we might have stopped some of the âMrs Jayne Mooreâ spams.
Tags: 2000s, 2022, customer service, England, ethics, privacy, spam, UK
Posted in business, internet, marketing, technology | No Comments »
28.11.2021
Jane Pendry in the UK Tweeted this in response to a Tweet about Amazon, and I had to reply:
Jane helpfully elaborated:
You read correctly: Amazon is just as dodgy as the others I’ve criticized publicly. Just that I hadn’t got around to them on this blog, because there had been a lengthy dialogue and I wanted to get more facts. But above is where I’ve got to so far, and it seems I’m not alone.
Tags: 2010s, 2021, Amazon, Big Tech, crime, customer service, ethics, law, Twitter, UK, USA
Posted in business, globalization, internet, technology, UK, USA | No Comments »
29.09.2021
Lucireâs Instagram is toast (hopefully temporarily, but you never know), since they unilaterally allege without evidence that there was unusual activity. This is utter shite, but itâs just another day in Facebookland where actual spam is tolerated, and legitimate activity is penalized.
Iâve sent through the information they requested with a review promised in 24 hours, but as this is Big Tech, they arenât very good at understanding units of time. So it could be 24 days, weeks or monthsâthis is based on experience.
Reading some more on this, it appears that many people have had their accounts deactivated when they receive such a message, and appealing is the next best option.
That method doesnât work because Instagram requires you to âconfirm your accountâ by logging in, which, of course, is impossible, since thereâs no account to log in to. I donât think these folks think it throughâor they have thought it through and this is a great way to make sure no one ever appeals. A bit like a communist state where it looks like thereâs an appeal process, but you find itâs actually BS.
Then thereâs another form you can fill in where you tell them itâs a business account thatâs been deactivated, except there, the moment you provide evidence to them, you get an error message, âYou canât use this feature at the momentâ. Apparently even a single attempt at filing their own form is spam. You can click on the link to tell them that youâre not breaching their community standards, but that leads to the usual Facebook menus where no option is the one you want.
So whatâs actually OK with Facebook, Inc.âs community standards? Fake accounts, automation, spam, genocide, misinformation, human trafficking, and terrorism. Itâs why Iâm in two minds about all of this. I lean toward wanting to have the account back because of the work the team has put into it. But if we donât get it back then weâre not in the same company as some of the most despicable people in the world, both on Facebook and inside it. It’s another sign that you cannot trust Big Tech, and they’re certainly not to be relied upon.
Tags: 2021, Big Tech, ethics, Facebook, Instagram, JY&A Media, Lucire, publishing, social media, technical support, technology
Posted in business, internet, marketing, publishing, technology, USA | 4 Comments »
03.10.2020
I was absolutely shocked to learn this is how Gmail works.
As youâll read in the thread, this has been confirmed by other Gmail users.
That should rule out ever using Gmail for secure communications. Not that you should be using a service like that for anything important, but the fact is Gmail has become ubiquitous, and I believe a lot of people donât know any better.
Just imagine being able to receive some emails meant for your rival by signing up to an address that varies from it by a full stop or period.
Secondly, we’ve noticed a large amount of spam where we can trace (via Spamcop) the origins back to Gmail. Oftentimes they have Gmail reply addresses, as in the case of 419 scams (where they may use another ISP or email service with a “sacrificial” address to send them). Why would you risk being among that lot?
Add this to the massive list of shortcomings already detailed here and elsewhere and you have a totally unreliable platform that doesnât really give a toss. They didnât care when they removed my friendâs blog in 2009 and then obstructed any attempt to get it back, until a product manager became involved. They didnât care when their website blacklisting service libelled clean sites in 2013, telling people not to visit them or link to them. And they donât care now.
There really is no reason to use Gmail. Youâll risk your emails going to someone else with a similar address, and youâll be among the company of unethical actors. I can truly say that if Gmail werenât this ubiquitous, and used by so many friends, Iâd just set up a rule on our server and block the lot.
Tags: 2020, ethics, Gmail, Google, internet, Medinge Group, monopoly, privacy, spam, technology, Twitter, USA
Posted in business, internet, technology, USA | 5 Comments »
21.03.2020
Iâll be interested to read the judgement, should it get to that point: Facebook is being sued over allegedly inflating its audience numbers, and COO Sheryl Sandberg and financial officer David Wehner are also named.
The plaintiff alleges that Facebook has known this for years. The suit dates from 2018 but there are new filings from the lawsuit.
Iâve blogged on related topics for the majority of the previous decade, and in 2014 I said that Facebook had a bot âepidemicâ.
Finally another publication has caught on this, namely the Financial Times. The FT notes something that I did on this blog in 2017: âIn some cases, the number cited for potential audience size in certain US states and demographics was actually larger than the population size as recorded in census figures, it claimed.â Its own 2019 investigation found discrepancies in the Facebook Adsâ Manager tool.
The complaint also says that Facebook had not removed fake and duplicate accounts. Lately Iâve found some obvious fake accounts, and reported them, only for Facebook to tell me that thereâs nothing wrong with them. On Instagram, I have hundreds, possibly thousands, of accounts that I reported but remain current. Based on my user experience, the plaintiff is absolutely correct.
Facebook only solves problems it puts its mind to, and all seem to be bolstering its bottom line. This is something it could have solved, and since itâs plagued the site for the good part of a decade, and it continues to, then you have to conclude that thereâs no desire to. And of course there isnât: the more fakes there are, the more page owners have to pay to reach real people.
Over a decade ago, I know that it cost a small business a decent chunk of money to get an independent audit (from memory, we were looking at around NZ$6,000). Facebook doesnât have this excuse, and that tells me it doesn’t want you to know how its ads actually perform.
As I said many times: if a regular person like me can find a maximum of 277 fakes or bots in a single night, then how many are there? Iâm surprised that not more of the mainstream media are talking about this, given that in 2018 Facebook posted an income of US$22,100 million on US$55,800 million of revenue, 98·5 per cent of which came from advertising. Is this one of the biggest cons out there? Hereâs hoping the lawsuit will reveal something. Few seem to care about Facebookâs lies and erosion of their privacy, but maybe they might start caring when they realize they’ve been fleeced.
Tags: 2010s, 2018, 2020, advertising, California, deception, ethics, Facebook, law, Sheryl Sandberg, USA
Posted in business, internet, marketing, technology, USA | 4 Comments »
24.11.2019
What does Tesla do to whistleblowers?
They tell the cops youâre an active shooter.
Apparently, this case about a gentleman called Martin Tripp emerged in 2018 but only today were the police documents released, and are worth reading.
Above: Two of the pages from the Storey County Sheriff’s Office over the false Martin Tripp ‘active shooter’ incident at Tesla.
One could attempt to read it generously in Teslaâs favour but I think youâd be fooling yourself.
Tripp had concerns about waste, and even raised them with Musk. From what I can tell, Musk only engaged Tripp after Tripp had been fired; and it was after that email exchange that the tip was given to police.
Itâs a far cry from the admirable firm I remember, being run by Martin Eberhard. Back then, it was optimistic and transparent. Nowadays it seems a truck prototype canât stand up to scrutiny for 25 minutes, CEO Elon Musk disses one of the Thai cave rescue divers, Vernon Unsworth, calling him âpedo guyâ, and Tweets misleading information that lands him in trouble with the US SEC. As far as I can tell in the Twitter thread above, Musk knew about Trippâenough to speak on the case and be excessively paranoid about him, thinking he could be part of a conspiracy involving oil companies, claiming he committed ‘extensive and damaging sabotage’.
As Bloomberg put it: ‘Many chief executive officers would try to ignore somebody like Tripp. Instead, as accounts from police, former employees, and documents produced by Teslaâs own internal investigation reveal, Musk set out to destroy him.’
Also from Bloomberg:
The security manager at the Gigafactory, an ex-military guy with a high-and-tight haircut named Sean Gouthro, has filed a whistleblower report with the SEC. Gouthro says Teslaâs security operation behaved unethically in its zeal to nail the leaker. Investigators, he claims, hacked into Trippâs phone, had him followed, and misled police about the surveillance. Gouthro says that Tripp didnât sabotage Tesla or hack anything and that Musk knew this and sought to damage his reputation by spreading misinformation.
When Gouthro says Facebook (where he had worked before) is more professional than Tesla, that’s really worrying.
In another case, Jason Blasdell claims that SpaceX, another Musk venture, where he was employed, falsified test documents. When he brought this to his superiorâs attention, he was fired. In Blasdellâs case, two of his managers suggested he would âcome in to work shooting.â His account makes for sobering reading as the legal avenues he had get shut down, one by one.
Google and Facebook might do some terrible things in the market-place, but I donât think Iâve come across this level of vindictiveness against employees further down the food chain from the CEO.
They seem to be mounting as wellâI wouldn’t have known about the two ex-employee cases if not for spotting the Tripp police report Tweets. They both follow a similar pattern of discrediting people with valid concerns, going well beyond any reasonableness. We’re talking about lives and reputations getting destroyed.
It all points to a deep insecurity within these firms, which go beyond the sort of monopolistic, anticompetitive, un-American, anti-innovation behaviours of the usual Big Tech suspects. Yes, Google will go as far as to get your fired, according to Barry Lynn of Citizens Against Monopoly (Google denies it), or it might play silly buggers and seemingly shut down your Adwords account, or blacklist your site by falsely claiming it is infected, hack your Iphone and bypass its ‘Do Not Track’ setting, expose your private information for years, and plain lie about tracking, but I’ve yet to hear them sicking armed police on you and having their staff say you’d be heading to the office shooting. So maybe in this context, Google can say it hasn’t been evil. Well done. Slow clap.
At this rate, it’s Big Tech and the monopolies the US government has fostered that’ll drag down the reputation of ‘Made in the USA’.
Tags: Big Tech, car industry, corporate culture, defamation, Elon Musk, ethics, Google, law, Nevada, SpaceX, Tesla, USA, whistle-blowing
Posted in business, cars, culture, USA | 1 Comment »
14.09.2019
I know someone else has come across this before, since there’s a page on it here.
The very same thing has begun happening on Autocade, whenever the Facebook link is clicked. I’d love to blame Facebook, but I don’t believe it’s them.
I’ve contacted Sovrn (formerly Viglinks) as the discussion board participants identify them, but ShopStyle may know as it’s their API being used.
Here’s what I asked ShopStyle tonight, but if anyone has an idea, I’d love to hear it.
I do not know your company, but the Facebook link on one of my sites (http://autocade.net) is being altered to https://api.shopstyle.com/action/apiVisitRetailer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fautocade.net&pid=uid7424-7742368-93&pdata=k0jgi6bfn30122110msza whenever someone clicks on it, and they wind up at https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/deals/?ref=affiliate_external&referral_story_type=daily_deals_rakuten.
When I go into the source code on our server, the link is correct. The change is happening elsewhere, and I canât figure out where. From the link and UID Iâve given you, are you able to tell? We do run ads and a Disqus plug-in on our site, as well as a Po.st sharer, if these help narrow down the possibilities.
Iâm sure youâd want to kill the account of whomever is misusing ShopStyleâs APIs to earn referrals.
Here’s the page I wind up on when I click the link. It has no useful content.
I’ll report back if I discover more, as there may be a dodgy ad network out there, or Disqus or Po.st aren’t as honest as they used to be. Disqus is clunky anyway, and once we reach a certain payment threshold, we may remove it from all our sites. Autocade was the one place where comments were really good, so it’ll be a shame to lose it.
PS.: After looking through the inspector, it appears to be Disqus, using Viglinks. One has to turn off affiliate links in the Disqus set-up.
P.PS.: Both ShopStyle and Sovrn were really helpfulâShopStyle’s Rasheka even went so far as to include screenshots and links.
Tags: 2010s, 2019, affiliate programmes, Autocade, Disqus, ethics, Facebook, JY&A Media, publishing, Shopstyle, Sovrn
Posted in business, internet, publishing, technology, USA | No Comments »
22.08.2019
I had a call from a nice gentleman working for Google called Shabhaz today. No, he wasnât about to tell me that I wasnât on the âfirst page of Googleâ: he worked for Google My Business, where they want to verify businesses and suck them into the ecosystem, complete with dashboard and social features.
Iâve always ignored the postcards that come and the one time my curiosity was piqued, the blasted site didnât work anyway. I canât remember the specifics now, but I recall my usual reaction: âWhat Google says and what Google does are entirely different things.â You come to expect it from US Big Tech.
I suppose if you ignore it for enough years, the Big G phones you.
I proceeded to tell Shabhaz all the reasons I hated (actually, thatâs not strong enough a word) his firm, but kept repeating, âIâm not angry at you, only at your employer.â And words to the effect of, âA man has to make a living, so I donât have a problem that you work for them, but this is a firm with highly dubious ethics.â
He did say, âIf I had that experience, Iâd hate them, too,â and I had to correct him and expand on the stories: âItâs not just about my experienceâitâs all the things Google does that violate our privacy, not just mine, but everyoneâs.â
Nevertheless, you canât stay angry at a guy who has had nothing to do with his bossesâ incompetence, greed, avarice and tax avoidance, and is only trying to collect a pay cheque, so I agreed to help him out.
Of course, it didnât work as planned, as updating the address leads to this:
The house has only been there since 1972, and Google Earth has it, but then we all know that Google Earth operates in some kind of parallel universeâparallel to even Google My Business, it seems. One day, I suspect Google will catch up with houses built in the 1970s.
But seriously, with three businesses all linked to my email address (Heaven knows how) I wonder if anyone has ever got any business through Google My Business.
Iâve been on Linkedin longer than most people I know and Iâve never received any work enquiries from it.
And Iâve yet to have anyone tell me that they found my business through Google, so Iâm tempted to delete the listings for Jack Yan & Associates and Lucire from the My Business dashboard.
The thing is, I donât want to read your reviews about my businesses on Google. I donât want to risk getting piled on by unethical actors, which totally can happen in this day and age. If you want to reach us, thereâs a good contact form with all the addresses on our sites.
So whatâs the prognosis out there? Since I actually donât use the site except as a last resort, and have little desire to, your experience far outweighs mine.
On a related note, this also made me wonder about competence.
Iâve never given my permission to be in the Yellow Pages. And the fact that Lucire does screen printing is news to me. Who makes up this bullshit and tries to pass it off as authoritative?
A Tweet to them is so far unanswered, so I may get in touch with them to have this listing removed. This one I can answer: since Iâve never been in the Yellow Pages, I can say, hand on heart, that Iâve never had any business from them. By the looks of it, theyâll never send me anything relevant anyway.
In summary, today’s thought about Google:
PS.: Yellow has deleted our entry (done within hours of my complaint).
Tags: 2019, Aotearoa, business, ethics, Google, New Zealand, privacy
Posted in business, internet, New Zealand, Wellington | 2 Comments »
21.04.2019
As Iâve often said, itâs wise to keep an eye on your Facebook ad preferencesâ page. Even if youâve opted out of Facebook targeting, Facebook will still keep compiling information on you. I see no other purpose for this other than to target you with advertising, contrary to what you expect.
Facebook also tells you which companies have uploaded their marketing lists to them, and this has been very interesting reading. A load of US politicians whom I have never heard of somehow have this information, and todayâs crop is no different.
Iâve written to Old Mout Cider, which I was surprised to find is part of the Dutch conglomerate Heineken NV, and await an answer, but the biggie here has to be Ăber.
Many years ago, I tried the app but could never get it to work. Neither could my partner. Then we started hearing from Susan Fowler and Pando Daily, and that helped confirm that we would never support the company.
Basically, Ăber would never let me log in, saying I had exhausted my password attempts after the grand total of one, despite sending a password reset link. My partner could log in but we could never figure anything out beyond that (it had credit card details she had never entered and said we lived next door).
Concerned about this, I went to Ăberâs website to request deletion of my personal details, but this was the screen I got.
Now, either Big Tech One is lying or Big Tech Two is lying.
To its credit, Ăber New Zealand responded very quickly on Twitter (on Good Friday, no less) and said it would look into it. Within minutes it was able to confirm that I do not have an account there (presumably it was deleted with a lack of use, or maybe I went and did it back when they wouldnât let me log in?) and my email address doesnât appear anywhere.
Therefore, we can likely again conclude that Facebook lies and we have to bring into question its advertising preferencesâ management page.
We already know Facebook has lied to advertisers about the number of people it can reach (namely that it exceeds the number of people alive in certain demographics), that there is a discrepancy between what it reports in the preferences and what a full download of personal data reveals, so I have to wonder what the deception is here.
Is it allowing these advertisers to reach us even when (as Ăber claims) they have no information on us? (Heinekenâs response will seal the deal when they get back to me after Easter.) In that case, it will be very hard for Facebook to argue that we have given them consent to do this.
Heineken, incidentally, is a major advertiser on Instagram, as I see their advertisements even after opting out of all alcohol advertising on the Facebook ad preferencesâ page (as instructed by Instagram). When we establish contact next week, I will be more than happy to tell them this. Who knows? While I doubt they will cease advertising on the platforms on my say-so, sometimes you have to plant the seed so that they are aware their ads are not being filtered out from those people who do not want to see booze promoted in their feeds.
Tags: 2019, ethics, Facebook, Heineken, law, privacy, software, Ăber, USA
Posted in branding, business, culture, internet, marketing, media, New Zealand, technology, USA | No Comments »
21.02.2019
Nest/Creative Commons
Weâve been here countless times before since last decade. Funny how many of these âerrorsâ Google has, and funny how they only admit to these âerrorsâ after they get busted. How many more âerrorsâ are there?
The link that Grady features is here.
Just how many times do I need to remind people that this is “business as usual” for Google?
If I lied to you this often, and spied on you through different gadgets, wouldn’t you stop trusting me? So why trust Google?
Hat tip to Vincent Wright.
Tags: 2019, deception, ethics, Google, law, privacy, technology, USA
Posted in internet, technology, USA | 1 Comment »
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