Category: oliverwjones

Who really wants Facebook to capture data from our stylish Ray-Bans®? They’re currently recruiting developers and scientists to evaluate, manipulate, and dream about uses for ‘immersive’ data: data captured from a third party perspective. These videos, images, and sound watch what you’re doing and hopefully give some very smart people the ability to predict what you’ll do next. These same smart people will be asking questions (benchmarks) defined by Facebook.

• What happened when? (eg: “Where did I leave my keys?”)
• What am I likely to do next? (eg: “Wait, you’ve already added salt to this recipe”)
• What am I doing? (eg: “Teach me how to play the drums”)
• Who said what when? (eg: “What was the main topic during class?”)
• Who is interacting with whom? (eg: “Help me better hear the person talking to me at this noisy restaurant”)

Am I the only one, that thinks this is worse than creepy? I’d like to add one more benchmark: Why would I trust those watching me? (eg: “Sell my data so that I can better decide which brand of soy sauce to put in my noodles.”)

I saw this on the BBC, here.

The recent 60minutes interview with Frances Haugen, a former data scientist at Facebook has the media classes in a bit of a frenzy. They’re tripping over themselves and repeating what we already know: “Facebook over and over again has shown it chooses profit over safety.” Haugen has lined up testimony in front of Congress, and triggered another cycle of investigative reporting. Fine, that’s good, right? But haven’t we seen this before? Remember Cambridge Analytica? It’s starting to remind me of “Climate Change”. Facebook is the boogey man and we should reduce your carbon footprint! Jan 6 was Facebook’s fault not that other guys… A weekend in the capital for a CEO lashing sounds fun. Seriously, it’s all kind of like a traveling circus.

We’re all responsible for not caring about our data enough to pay for a trustworthy service. Can someone just say that? Why are these products free??? Homer Simpson says it best…

Since the stir about Apple’s invasive and hypocritical promotion of personal privacy, these stories about scanning cloud data for material which is deemed inappropriate, keep popping up. More and more users start to wonder: what exactly is happening to all my images, emails, pdfs, search traffic, etc. That’s a good thing. The pervasive sense that “I have nothing to hide, who cares.” serves these services well and persists.

It’s not coincidental that the options for keeping your data off of Microsoft, Google, Apple or Amazon’s public cloud servers are almost non-existant and any solution you find is complicated to set-up. But still… What options do you have if you don’t like the idea of backing up your data to Apple, Microsoft, Google or Amazon? One option would be to build your own private cloud server. It’s relatively complicated and expensive though over time and considering you probably pay multiple providers, it’s not as expensive as it may appear. Another is to use a hybrid approach, and keep your data locally, use these services at a minimum – maybe only the free limited data plans – and store your archives on a hard drive in the top drawer.

Remember when local storage was the only option? And who knows one day the internet might just not be available.

The article that got me thinking again about this is here.

There’s a great piece in the New York Times about Facebook’s tangle with it’s semi-independent data analytics tool, CrowdTangle. That tool was generating data which was driving some really bad press during the presidential election cycle. CrowdTangle is used by researchers, marketers, and journalists to evaluate and measure the engagement of specific Facebook content.

Unfortunately (for Facebook), with a crafty little approach, Kevin Rose was able to demonstrate that the far-right was being extremely successful distributing it’s message across the platform. Obviously Facebook executives were sensitive to this message… Check out the article.

The FBI has just releases a new public service campaign in New York. It’s hit the press pretty well, but gamers are wondering why it took so long. Tonia Hastings (not her real name) has been harassed for years by creeps on the internet while plugged in to her favourite MMORPG platform. “I always choose a male avatar and fake profile photo when I play for real.” Tonia deals with unwanted advances and rude comments if she chooses to appear ‘female’ on these platforms. “It’s a great thing, they’re launching this campaign, but weren’t they aware of this problem 10 years ago?” It’s time to inform the parents. You’ve probably seen the press, but here’s a good youtube video for more information.

If you’re a Google Cloud customer, like we are, you’ve received updated information on the Google Subprocessors list… So what might that be? And what might a Google Subprocessor do? Well, according to Google, third-party subprocessors:

“perform limited activities in connection with the Google Cloud Platform Services. The table shows what activity each entity performs and indicates if an entity is only relevant to a specific Service or Region. More information about each activity is provided directly below. This explains the limited processing of Customer Data the entity is authorized to perform.“

We should be giving them credit for this disclosure, but the size of the list gave me pause. We would have liked to copy them here for your reading pleasure, but the list is simply too long. You should go to this link, it’ll give you a small idea of who and where the organisations that handle your Google data reside.

That’s only the start… Then there’s Google Group Subprocessors, and of course the Subprocessors for Cloud Identity Services.

Happy Reading.

Bipartisan rancour. It’s almost pleasant to watch. Whether it’s a Democrat complaining about mis-information or a Republican throwing hypocritical barbs about censorship, Washington is the circus to see. Big Tech has been dancing and the politicians have been playing ring master. My favourite bits though, are inside the tent of mirrors.

Epic’s battle, Spotify suing in Europe, and Match’s $500 Million per year pay to play Apple tax, Tile getting boxed out while a new AirTag was released just this week. (Economist’s are going to write books about Apple’s controlled ecosystem, hopefully as a warning.) Each dancing pony is better than the last! And the ringmaster’s are smiling while nodding their heads. One of these days this App Store madness is going to come crashing down.

Is there any technical reason you can’t sell apps on a platform other than Apple’s? Of course not…

No later than this morning, we had an app rejected because a link on our app, which opens a browser to our site, displays a Windows and Android download link. Seriously? No! They call it “meta data” and this “meta data” was against their store policy. A link to our web site… Dance pony, dance!

For the App Store uninitiated it’s hard to fathom just how much control Apple has over our products, how much revenue they generate from our hard work, and how their platform can determine the success or failure of ‘our’ products.

If you like a good circus and want to, just for a second, eliminate that sick feeling that comes when you have no other option, keep an eye on this spectacle.

Here’s another place to start.

Here’s a hard truth for parents: Big Tech knows more about your kids than you do. 

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter and so many more are vacuuming up countless bits of digital information about users. The details, when aggregated, paint a portrait of each person online that ordinary humans are unable to put together themselves.

These organizations may not know more about your kids’ personality than you do. But if  your children are online, the people behind the websites they visit know an astonishing amount about their interests, taste, relationships and the things they desire and want to buy.

That’s true if your children have their own smartphone, tablet or laptop computer, but it even applies to information about your kids that you put online yourself. Across platforms and with no regard to the age of the users, Big Tech is tracking you.

What Big Tech Knows and How

As the Associated Press put it, “The companies gather vast data on what users read and like and leverage it to help advertisers target their messages to the individuals they want to reach.” For context, Facebook earned 99% of its money from ads in the previous year and Google’s corporate parent Alphabet saw 85% of revenue from ads, per the AP. 

Meanwhile, Amazon records the details of not only each product you purchase, but also about what items you browsed for and compared before making a decision. If your kids are shopping online, Amazon has all that information about them, too. Though you and your family bear the cost, it’s a windfall for Amazon. AP noted that Amazon uses the user data it collects to boost the value of its ads. Ad sales revenue surpassed $10 billion in 2018 representing more than twice the earnings from the previous year (the latest statistics available). There is a huge financial incentive for Big Tech to know more about your kids than you.

In addition to boosting advertising and marketing for goods and services, the information collected by Big Tech about you and your family can include a whole range of other sensitive details. Think political affiliation, sexual preference and detailed geographical updates about where you live, work and vacation.

No Age Restrictions on Tracking

Big Tech companies track your whereabouts based on details from your smartphone as you are out and about. They know how old you are and where you spend time (shopping malls, churches, bars, and so on) to learn about demographics in your area and to target you even more precisely. If your kids have smartphones, Big Tech is tracking them in the same way. There are no age restrictions when it comes to tracking.

The information is used to predict as well as influence what you might be most interested in buying or which candidate you seem to favor for elected office. All the while, you’re presented with advertisements and “news” is fed to you in a curated, tailor-made experience.

Remember that it’s not just kids’ own online activity that Big Tech is tracking. These companies are also gathering information about the products that parents just like you are buying for their kids. They record what programs parents enroll their children in, what movies they watch and the photos that parents post online. All of this data is valuable to advertisers, which is why they take such pains to collect it on a massive scale.

What You Can Do

What are concerned parents to do under these circumstances? Part of your New Year’s resolutions could be to sit down and have a family discussion about the negative consequences that come from revealing so much information about ourselves.

The goal should be to emphasize security online and to protect your privacy from those who have no business snooping around your personal information. 

Take steps to limit companies tracking  you. Delete cookies when closing a web browser. Restricting how many personal details are posted online. Ask yourself if it’s really worth it to reveal your information to a new company by signing in using your Facebook credentials.

Maybe you’ll be less inclined to give up information to Big Brother when you consider just how much technology companies stand to benefit while you have so much to lose.

Reprinted with permission from Privacy Parent.

If the New York Times starts to get it, so do a lot of other people. This article is one of the best explanations of why you need a private browser, and why you need to stop drinking the Chrome, Safari, Edge Kool aid. If You Care About Privacy, It’s Time to Try a New Web Browser. Our only criticism would be that they’ve left out the best private browser on the market, Datacappy. But according to Brian X. Chen, we’ve reached an inflection point in digital privacy. Let’s hope he’s right!

All the press and the REpress about this $5Billion lawsuit against Google makes me realise how far Google has gone down the rabbit hole. Google’s legal team are juggling a few of these Billion dollar suits. Around the world. A normal days work… Guess where your advertising dollars are going.

What makes me really curious though is, who chose the name? Seriously. That guy/girl/other hit a home run. If you call your product incognito, does it mean you’re private? The judges are asking the same question but sit safely on the side of, ‘you didn’t clearly disclose…’. And why would they? And Google of course says, ‘yes, we did, look!’

Besides the hefty number being bantered around, the only real interest in this little spat, is that maybe now, a few more users will become aware that ‘incognito’, is not really what they think it is.