Years ago, we removed the Facebook widgets from Lucire’s pages. Last year, there were Instagram’s and Twitter’s turns, after each of those platforms locked us out (though later we regained access, and in Twitter’s case we issued a veiled threat to their lawyers). Last night, it was Disqus’s turn as we removed the commenting […]
Tag: privacy
Facebook saves private medical information despite saying it gets scrubbed
As embedding from Mastodon is not working tonight, I’ll copy and paste Per Axbom’s post: Nice bit of reporting from Swedish Radio. They built an online fake pharmacy and activated Facebook advertising tools. Thousands of simulated visits to the pharmacy were made each day, and the reporters could see all the sensitive, personal information being […]
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Pirate sites, content mills and splogs exist because of Google
In chatting to Alexandra Wolfe on Mastodon about the previous post, I had to draw a sombre conclusion. If it weren’t for Google, there’d be no incentive to do content mills or splogs. I replied: ‘People really are that stupid, and itʼs all thanks to Google. Google doesn’t care about ad fraud, and anyone can […]
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More evidence that contextual advertising is better than creepy, programmatic behavioural ads
Cory Doctorow posted a link to his collection of links at Pluralistic for August 5, 2020. The first one’s heading piqued my interest: ‘Contextual ads can save media’. It’s worth having a read, especially about the BS behind behavioural advertising (i.e. surveillance advertising) and the ‘real-time bidding’ that so many ad networks have been trying […]
Musings for today: back on Facebook, untracked ads, Autocade rankings
It’d be unfair if I didn’t note that I managed to see a ‘Create post’ button today on Lucire’s Facebook page for the first time in weeks. I went crazy manually linking everything that was missed between April 25 and today. Maybe I got it back as it would look even worse for Facebook, which […]
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A dodgy 2000s’ UK spam list is still doing the rounds in 2022, pretending to be legit
During February, I received spam from Novuna in the UK, the finance company that’s a subsidiary of Mitsubishi. It wasn’t personally addressed, it was just a general message. I complained via their complaints’ email, only to have the message bounce back as it wasn’t working. However, they did respond on Twitter, unlike less caring […]
Facebook: the year in review
If you’d rather not read every Facebook entry I made on my blog this year, here’s a helpful video by Simon Caine on all the shitty things they’ve done over 2021. As we still have a couple of weeks of 2021 left to go, I’m betting they will still do something shitty that deserves to […]
Xiaomi’s tiny idiosyncracies
There were a few surprises switching to Xiaomi. First up, it asked me to do a voice identification by saying these four words, 小爱同學. Only thing is, it doesn’t understand Cantonese. The default weather app was able to give me details based on exactly where I am (location service turned on, and I […]
Some surprises on day one with the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 5G
Top: Decent enough specs for the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 5G. Above: Very respectable download speeds (in the header) as the phone updates 71 apps. My Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 5G is here, and it’s proved better than the reviews suggested. First up, kudos to the seller, YouGeek on Aliexpress, who not only […]
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Let’s do some maths on Facebook’s user numbers
Bear with me on some maths here. Facebook says it will delete a milliard ‘faceprints’. In The Guardian: ‘Facebook will delete the “faceprints” of more than a[n American] billion people after announcing that it is shutting down its facial recognition system due to the “many concerns” about using the technology.’ We know that […]
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