I've only had a Facebook account for the purpose of using Tinder, mainly because all social media is full of shitbags and therefore dominated by shitbags. Anyway does this mean Zuckerberg knows my sexual history?
Facebook, Amazon etc....
- Thread starter Raoul
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Do they still force you to have Facebook to use Tinder ? I would've thought they did away with that by now.
No.
Exactly my thoughts on it. If people are granting permissions without reading what they're saying yes to that's their own fault. I also agree the data needs to be secure, absolutely.
I just checked my phone, Samsung Galaxy and Facebook is included with a number of Samsung Galaxy apps that by default use you grant access to "SMS, storage, phone and contacts". So just using Facebook, Amazon, Google and others they don't even ask anymore for permission, you implicitly granting access to all that just by first use.
And as the Twitter links show other companies love the opt out policy of collecting data. There is a massive grey-black market selling data as well.
And as the Twitter links show other companies love the opt out policy of collecting data. There is a massive grey-black market selling data as well.
Deleted my facebook account today, not because of the scandal because I've always been aware of it, it just feels like such a waste of time and energy for things that are fed to me by facebook themselves, most of them not "real" to begin with.
But I think I have too much down time now it kinda makes me restless. So weird a thing you hate can still affect you so much.
But I think I have too much down time now it kinda makes me restless. So weird a thing you hate can still affect you so much.
That's only partly true.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/03/terms-of-service-online-contracts-fine-print
T's and C's are designed to be impossibly dense so that companies can legally abuse their consumers' rights. In some cases it is laziness but in most cases it is human brains acting the way they're designed to, and companies with huge financial resources, a wealth of data and a scary understanding of our subconscious responses exploiting that. The system is not designed well for true consumer protection.
The simplest step forward is educating people on the risks associated with the decisions they make and the actions they can take to prevent that. That will only get you part of the way though. We have always needed regulation to tackle systematic issues that individuals don't have the capabilities to deal with themselves. We like to think we're fully aware of what we're doing and why we're doing it but that doesn't fit very well with the evidence. Blaming the individuals is just giving corporations an easy ride. We shouldn't just expect to be exploited.
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Everyone knows and despises this. Problem is what can you do? Even today on my new phone I tried to download my payslip on to the phone because I wanted to attach it to another email (cleanly, not via email forwarding). Just to download the damn thing I was asked to give permission for my docs, contacts, etc, to be shared. I clicked Deny and that was that. So I had to click Accept knowing exactly what was happening. I had to get that payslip out and had no access to a laptop at the time.
If you don't accept your life away you might as well chuck your smart phone and get an old Nokia.
This paragraph is almost entirely at odds with your position regarding Cambridge Analytica’s effect or influence last week.
I don‘t think that‘s true. Educating people for a behaviour they have already deeply internalised is hard besides it‘s not like people have much choice anyway. The simplest step forward is either introduce real choice as in either free service vs data extraction OR paying and no data or even better marginalize the concept of notice & choice (notice & consent) and focus on how the data is used, transparency and redress (broadening the definition of what is harm in the legal sense to intangible damage included).
Edit: tl.dr. the simplest way is fixing the regulation concept.
Don‘t get me wrong education is always nice but it‘s hard. One way that intuitively makes sense imo is the introduction of labels for data extraction like we know from chemicals.
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Only if you interpret it through an agenda-driven lens. They're good at tricking us to do things we shouldn't want to do, like giving away lots of data we shouldn't need to. The companies aren't yet very good at doing much of significance with that, though. Nothing more than they could do a couple of decades ago anyway, in the context of driving real political change. It's just they're doing it in higher volume.
There is lots of scaremongering about the level of influence a set of social media profiles gives a company and from what I can tell, that's utter bollocks. The data gleaned from these kind of things cannot persuade people to change their core beliefs any more than it could a couple of decades ago, and the models built are fundamentally flawed to the point where they're targeting imaginary people.
Don't just take my view of it though...
Aleksandr Kogan said:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43480978
Alexander Nix said:
I'm not saying they aren't trying to exploit us or that we shouldn't be worried. I'm saying the claims of the influence of mined social media at this point are exaggerated to an absurd degree, and they're only being lapped up because news is built on sensationalism and it fits a large portion of the politically active population's current agenda. Plus drama is fun.
I mostly agree - that's kind of what I meant in the following sentences. By simplest I meant it's the easiest step to think of, but ultimately it can only do so much.
Alternatively you can unfollow your friends and pages, which is what I did. It keeps my news feed absolutely quiet, but I can still keep in contact.
You can’t just dismiss that though. The sophistication to it isn’t that it’s a 99.99% accurate technique first time every time method. It’s the sheer relentlessness of the supervised learning model. They produce an advert, publish it, monitor its impact and then make a slight adjustmet. A word, a font, an image, a colour, the time of day, the subject of the image, you name it and it’s treated as a variable.
From there they find the most effective adverts and the findings are applied to future adverts. Thinking back to your argument about the accuracy of the tests you carried out using theirs or similar systems, the point is that it’s data and they will combine the data they owned and used to build their original models with the data they collect from feedback and the methods used to exploit it and the data sets themselves will only become richer and more accurate.
I did unfollow all the pages and most of my friends, but my question is that in your case, what is then on your news feed?
Only the University of California San Francisco page, which has updates on a clinical trial for an implanted kidney device. Other than that, it’s empty. If I want to see anything, I go directly to a friend’s feed. It keeps me disengaged with the shit posting from everyone, but provides a channel for communication should anyone wish to do so. It’s essentially a Myspace.
I agree they're only going to get better, but I'm inclined to agree with the guy who produced the model that it is more likely to harm than hurt. Nix is a bullshit merchant but it is entirely possible they just stopped using it once the inaccuracy of it was exposed. That's a separate thing to the ad testing you're talking about. The model was something built to target people - they claimed they had however many thousands of data points on everyone in the US. Utter bollocks. It's cool that their model could reasonably generate that much data but it'll be rubbish data. That's the first stage.
The second stage is the high volume ad production and ad testing. That is something that is relatively new and it does make a difference, I agree. But they were doing that pre-social media with more or less the same techniques. Online advertising produces largely the same wealth of data. Dynamic, personalised advertising which uses 1000s of different variations to resonate with different people in different moments will have some impact but it's hard to quantify how much. And ultimately it needs that model to work to target the right people with the right things. Thankfully they don't yet know enough about most of us to target that accurately. They are getting there though. That said, legislation like GDPR will help move things in the other direction. Hopefully.
So today I discovered you can't actually delete Facebook off your phone, I've never used Facebook and my only profile on there was created by my wife years ago in a bit to get me on there, it was also deactivated a few years ago seeing as I didn't use it and my Wife also grew tired of the shite on there and also deactivated hers. So here we are with all this news about them collecting data I thought, you know what, im just gonna delete it off my phone completely. Nope, all you can do is 'force stop' (Does this mean it was still even running is some capacity despite me never using it on my current phone) and there's also an option to 'disable app' but no option there to delete it permanently.
That only happens on Samsung phones iirc. I could delete it on my Nexus and older iPhones before.
I'm on a Sony Xperia, it must come as a baked in app that you just cant delete.
Yeah some phones have that as bloatware. Samsung has it because it used facebook authentication for VR apps, at least that's their reasoning. Not sure why Sony does.
Did you actually delete it or just soft delete ?
Was a soft delete. Let's be honest here I'm not that strong. In all seriousness, all my friends and family from overseas are on it, I want a way to communicate when I need it sometimes.
That's generally what I do as well. Turn it off (soft delete), which takes all of 15 seconds to do and then occasionally turn it back on for a weekend or so if I feel the urge get in touch with anyone. But as you say, once you've reconnected with old friends from a long time ago, its difficult to make the final move to hard delete your account for fear of permanently losing touch with them. Therefore the 90/10 soft delete solution works best for me, and since I never post images, articles, or any other content any more, I'm not bothered about them collecting any data.
Amazon is a pretty evil company. They have put thousands of business out of business by selling stuff with prices that no one else can. In fact, Amazon has always been in the red, but their stocks value increases simply cause they are killing the competition.
They represent everything which is wrong with capitalism. Btw, I use them a lot.
Wal-Mart 2.0.
I agree with all of this, but I'm just pointing out that Trump is chasing a white whale here. They've not created a monopoly.
The problem with Amazon from a competition point of view is their monopsony in various sectors I think.
I really don’t see what makes them evil tbh. This is the cornerstone of innovation. Markets are always disrupted when you bring the solution to people rather than people having to go to the solution. Yes there are countless little stores that have gone out of business, but no business has the inherent right to survive. Economies evolve and in the evolution jobs are lost in some areas and gained in another. Are Netflix evil because they put Blockbuster out of business?
I would probably recommend not picking a fight with the CIA and FBI simultaneously either but, eh, what do I know...?
That reads like a punch line.
Agree though in general. On paper, they're not a great company but I do use them an awful lot.
It is exploiting the bizarre nature of capitalism. They sell goods with losses, but are fine cause as long as their competitions die (and here I am talking more for the small shops rather than ebay or Alibaba) their stocks go up.
Nothing wrong with selling cheaper goods.
For as long as trading has existed, people buy stuff cheaper than they sell. For amazon that isn't the case, they can sell stuff cheaper than they have bought as long as their stock value goes up. And their stock value goes up while they grow.
For almost every quarter of their existence they have reported losses, but now are almost becoming the richest company in the world, and their CEO has become the richest man in the planet. While tens of thousands of businesses go out cause it is totally impossible to compete against them.
Don't businesses simply open up storefronts within Amazon ?
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Obviously if you take over the market by innovation then that is fair enough but Amazon also accumulates a lot of market power through M&A which imo should be regulated. There should be regulation for the other parts too, those they gained through instrinsic growth (innovation) because there is no competition keeping them in check.
We might need another thread here but why is this evil?
Its not a new thing for a business to provide something at a loss or even for free. There is a great example in the book/movie Molly's Game about this guy who attended these high stakes poker games and was losing 100-200K every time. So Molly called him aside and said he was the worst poker player and she wanted to kick him out of the game for his own good. But he convinced her to let him stay in the game. Then they found out while he was losing a few hundred thousand every week, he was gaining clients for his hedge fund that were worth tens of millions so he was making more money in the end than he was losing in the game.
So really Amazon is a technology and logistics company. The products they offer us cheap is not their actual business, which is technological logistics innovation. They have absolutely innovated commercial (possibly even military) logistics over the last 20 years. And their technology is so cutting edge the CIA chose to partner with them for the CIA's new 600M data center. Amazon's true business is really just technological logistics and communications innovation.
Key difference here was that Roosevelt was smart.
I think it's bit like ebay. You are usually given a choice which company to buy it from. Whether it be new or otherwise. In any case Amazon will see a chunk of that of course.