supply and demand
Mon Apr 9 23:00:00 EDT 2018[US] Senator Bill Nelson, D-Fla., met with [Mark Zuckerberg] the Facebook CEO for more than an hour on Monday ahead of Zuckerberg's Capitol Hill testimony Tuesday and Wednesday.Nelson: "Because if we don't do something now none of us will have any privacy anymore."
Here's the thing: No one's making us use social media. No one's making us share our personal data.
But ask: "What is the platform's business model?" Am I the customer, or the product? (The user, or the used.)
If other people can grant their apps access to your data, you are not in control of your privacy. And if some of your Facebook-friends are app-happy nitwits, this is not a safe place for your personal information. You don't know what apps the nitwits are using, and they don't know (or even care) who's behind those apps, where the data goes, and how it's used.
I now question all those quizzes I used to do on LJ:Are those personality tests going into my credit-risk scores?
Education-level tests matching me up with advertisers?
Dialect tests figuring out where I grew up, to match against older data?
How many of those things were sharing my cookies to connect their dots? Who was really behind them all?
What are on-line dating sites doing with our very personal data?
It's all fun and games - until it goes into faceless algorithms that make decisions about our lives that we don't even know about....
Tue 4/10/2018 7:04 PM
I heard a little of the Zuckerberg/Facebook hearings on the radio this afternoon. The main points I got were (1) they're getting better at identifying the garbage, and (2) getting better at identifying the sources of garbage and blocking their accounts.
And (3) this will be an escalating arms race, because the bad actors want to keep exploiting social media.
Why isn't anyone addressing the demand side of the problem? There's a lot of stupid users who want to believe this stuff. Why can't we educate people better. Why aren't people thinking about what they read, and realizing some of it doesn't make sense? (>>Comet Ping-Pong<<) Sometimes none of it makes sense. Yet they gobble it up, and go off attacking the windmills.
We (not just the in US, but other countries too) have a serious problem with people who don't accept reality. People who don't want to accept reality. People who reject facts that conflict with their world view.
Just because it's on the Internet doesn't mean it's true.
Just because it's in a book doesn't mean it's true either.
It's a lot like spam - iff no one responded to spam, it would die out because it's ineffective, and a waste of the spammers' time.
If the real fake-news sources on social media were ignored - or ridiculed - no one would pay them, and they'd give up (and look for some other easy buck).
Or drugs - if people had "happy lives" - whatever that might mean - most of them wouldn't care to use drugs. No demand, no profit for supplying.
There's still the fundamental purpose of Facebook: a means to find out your interests (and other information about you), and use that to direct "relevant" advertising at you. Perhaps Facebook is not where you should want to be to begin with?
Tuesday 23:04NPR: Facebook will examine tens of thousands of apps that have had access to excessive data.
How can they "examine tens of thousands of apps"? What company has the staff to do that? Skilled staff to examine - and understand - other people's code?Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois:
Mr. Zuckerberg, would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night?
Zuckerberg: Uhh... no.
If you messaged anyone this week, would you share with us the names of the people you've messaged?
Zuckerberg: Senator, no, I would probably choose not to do that publicly here.
I think that may be what this is all about. Your right to privacy, the limits of your right to privacy, and how much you'd give away, in modern America, in the name of "connecting people around the world."
Sen. John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota:
Mr. Zuckerberg, in many ways, you and the company you've created, the story you've created, represent the American dream. Many are incredibly inspired by what you've done. It's up to you, to ensure that dream doesn't become a privacy nightmare, for the scores of people that use Facebook.
Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana:
Here's what everybody's been trying to tell you today, and I say this gently: your user agreement sucks. The purpose of that user agreement is to cover Facebook's rear end, it's not to inform your users about their rights. Now you know that, and I know that. I'm going to suggest to you that you go back home and rewrite it.
(I quoted Louisiana Senator Kennedy a few weeks ago about (1) a dog dying in an airline overhead bin and (2) gun control.)
[This entry was originally posted as https://syntonic-comma.dreamwidth.org/973507.html on Dreamwidth (where there are
comments).]
Here's the thing: No one's making us use social media. No one's making us share our personal data.
But ask: "What is the platform's business model?" Am I the customer, or the product? (The user, or the used.)
If other people can grant their apps access to your data, you are not in control of your privacy. And if some of your Facebook-friends are app-happy nitwits, this is not a safe place for your personal information. You don't know what apps the nitwits are using, and they don't know (or even care) who's behind those apps, where the data goes, and how it's used.
I now question all those quizzes I used to do on LJ:Are those personality tests going into my credit-risk scores?
Education-level tests matching me up with advertisers?
Dialect tests figuring out where I grew up, to match against older data?
How many of those things were sharing my cookies to connect their dots? Who was really behind them all?
What are on-line dating sites doing with our very personal data?
It's all fun and games - until it goes into faceless algorithms that make decisions about our lives that we don't even know about....
Tue 4/10/2018 7:04 PM
I heard a little of the Zuckerberg/Facebook hearings on the radio this afternoon. The main points I got were (1) they're getting better at identifying the garbage, and (2) getting better at identifying the sources of garbage and blocking their accounts.
And (3) this will be an escalating arms race, because the bad actors want to keep exploiting social media.
Why isn't anyone addressing the demand side of the problem? There's a lot of stupid users who want to believe this stuff. Why can't we educate people better. Why aren't people thinking about what they read, and realizing some of it doesn't make sense? (>>Comet Ping-Pong<<) Sometimes none of it makes sense. Yet they gobble it up, and go off attacking the windmills.
We (not just the in US, but other countries too) have a serious problem with people who don't accept reality. People who don't want to accept reality. People who reject facts that conflict with their world view.
Just because it's on the Internet doesn't mean it's true.
Just because it's in a book doesn't mean it's true either.
It's a lot like spam - iff no one responded to spam, it would die out because it's ineffective, and a waste of the spammers' time.
If the real fake-news sources on social media were ignored - or ridiculed - no one would pay them, and they'd give up (and look for some other easy buck).
Or drugs - if people had "happy lives" - whatever that might mean - most of them wouldn't care to use drugs. No demand, no profit for supplying.
There's still the fundamental purpose of Facebook: a means to find out your interests (and other information about you), and use that to direct "relevant" advertising at you. Perhaps Facebook is not where you should want to be to begin with?
Tuesday 23:04NPR: Facebook will examine tens of thousands of apps that have had access to excessive data.
How can they "examine tens of thousands of apps"? What company has the staff to do that? Skilled staff to examine - and understand - other people's code?Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois:
Mr. Zuckerberg, would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night?
Zuckerberg: Uhh... no.
If you messaged anyone this week, would you share with us the names of the people you've messaged?
Zuckerberg: Senator, no, I would probably choose not to do that publicly here.
I think that may be what this is all about. Your right to privacy, the limits of your right to privacy, and how much you'd give away, in modern America, in the name of "connecting people around the world."
Sen. John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota:
Mr. Zuckerberg, in many ways, you and the company you've created, the story you've created, represent the American dream. Many are incredibly inspired by what you've done. It's up to you, to ensure that dream doesn't become a privacy nightmare, for the scores of people that use Facebook.
Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana:
Here's what everybody's been trying to tell you today, and I say this gently: your user agreement sucks. The purpose of that user agreement is to cover Facebook's rear end, it's not to inform your users about their rights. Now you know that, and I know that. I'm going to suggest to you that you go back home and rewrite it.
(I quoted Louisiana Senator Kennedy a few weeks ago about (1) a dog dying in an airline overhead bin and (2) gun control.)
[This entry was originally posted as https://syntonic-comma.dreamwidth.org/973507.html on Dreamwidth (where there are
comments).]