41–50 of 240 posts
It's worth looking through Zenyep Tufekci's other op-eds [1] and her fantastic book "Twitter and Teargass" [2]. A lot of her analysis borders on prescient. She's someone to pay attention to. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/column/zeynep-tufekci [2] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300215120/twitter-and-te...
Agreed. TED talk was good too. https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...
I wish quite badly that the benefit of deactivating FB would outweigh the inconvenience, but FB has become such a mainstay that I'd lose touch with lots of people I really have no other way of contacting. I could say "good riddance," if there is no other way to contact them then perhaps they are not important enough to my life, but that's just not true. Or what about all the local forums (FB groups) in my city that h…
Also, lots of people seem to be unaware of that you can delete your Facebook account. They don't have a link to the delete page from settings menu though. It's here: https://facebook.com/account/delete
I think it's time to finally close the FB account, move on to Firefox and disable 3rd party trackers and start using VPN routinely.
But careful with the VPNs. They are leaking and selling data too. Can't find the article at this moment, but there was on HN not long ago.
Assuming data needs to be recorded in the first place to make the products work better, what's ethically better, open access or closed? Is it better for a few big tech companies to wield so much power with their troves of user data, or is it better to distribute it across numerous companies/governments who can be even more unscrupulous (e.g. Cambridge Analytica, Russia)?
EDIT: even now, with full benefit of hindsight, should Facebook allow accessing friend lists with user permission (would lead to more cases of abuse by third-party apps), or not (would perpetuate their walled garden and monopoly on social media)?
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked Facebook and Google are not evil. They are made up of ordinary people with ordinary likes, dislikes, biases, histories, failings. Those people don't have to be evil or wrong or even misguided to give rise to this situation. No matter how much th…
I don't buy the claim that everyone just wants more money above all else and you seem to agree if you're claiming that people can "push back, HARD". We all have the capacity to place ethics above money. Never questioning the impact of your actions--especially when it affects the lives of millions--and simply doing what greed dictates, is indeed a form of malevolence, or "evil"... the 20th century is a testament to that.
Furthermore, if a company's leadership is filled to the brim with these unethical and greedy people, I believe it's acceptable to call the company evil as well.
Tech just needs to stop building tech for tech's sake and start thinking deeply about humans... and holding each other accountable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Legally, I cannot collect any data and keep the source. So I do strip all the possible identification, until someone's effort to pin point to any personal data becomes economically unfeasible. I also tend to store as little as possible raw data and in some cases, I do data scrambling, where the data as in values is not important for the engine. A demand to forget has to show that I have data on that person. Without t…
> I do strip all the possible identification "Anonymizing" data is a myth; stripped or hashed columns can usually be recovered by correlating the remaining data with other data sets. > until someone's effort to pin point to any personal data becomes economically unfeasible. Which admits that the data probably is recoverable, just "economically infeasible". Do you have proof of that claim? Unfeasible for who? In gener…
There is no other data set to correlate. Simply all the external context data is not recorded anywhere. Not even in logs. Unless some higher agency is going to hack some network driver to pick up the tcpip source, etc, I don't see how the data could be associated with datetime and location. This is why I was talking about "economically infeasible".
Data scrambling doesn't mean hashing. Sorry, here you are wrong. It's a on-the-fly frequency/timedomain scrambling, means someone has to physically, again, access a server and pick up from the memory the algorithm. And no marketing department, all research here!
The other stuff, I wound't reply, but let me asure you, there is no law circumventing. We are open and if someone can pinpoint of some personal data, there is no issue removing it.
when talking about Cambridge Analytica we should also discuss Palantir from 5 years ago: https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-06/mysterious... Palantir ‘wields as much real-world power as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, but unlike them, Palantir operates so far under the radar, it is special ops.’ https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/is-pal... Yes, that's the same Thiel who i…
Wow, sentiance is super creepy.
It's interesting that we have 2 big scandals in tech right now: one with Uber's self-driving car killing a pedestrian, and the other with Facebook revealing too much data about users and their friends to third-party apps. With Uber, we're asking for data (telemetry leading up to the accident) to be recorded and access to be more open. With Facebook, we're asking for access to be more closed; ironic that we usually cr…
I wish quite badly that the benefit of deactivating FB would outweigh the inconvenience, but FB has become such a mainstay that I'd lose touch with lots of people I really have no other way of contacting. I could say "good riddance," if there is no other way to contact them then perhaps they are not important enough to my life, but that's just not true. Or what about all the local forums (FB groups) in my city that h…
If you haven’t already, I encourage you to try without it for 30 days: if you truly can’t find a way around it, fine, check it every second day. You might be surprised how unimportant it ends up being
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked Facebook and Google are not evil. They are made up of ordinary people with ordinary likes, dislikes, biases, histories, failings. Those people don't have to be evil or wrong or even misguided to give rise to this situation. No matter how much th…
> Facebook and Google are not evil. [...] Everyone's economic incentive is to make more money. I don't buy the claim that everyone just wants more money above all else and you seem to agree if you're claiming that people can "push back, HARD ". We all have the capacity to place ethics above money. Never questioning the impact of your actions--especially when it affects the lives of millions--and simply doing what gre…
I think that's fair. My point was that Facebook and Google and others don't have to be evil to give rise to this situation, economics just does. That, of course, doesn't mean they aren't.
Furthermore, a company's leadership swearing up and down that they "aren't evil" does mean a hill of beans if they give rise to evil through their own economic actions.