471–480 of 662 posts
My extended family is "well distributed", living in three different countries around the world. Facebook has been an essential tool for keeping in touch and keeping track. What do I tell them all to use instead? Migrating to anything else, even if we all agreed, would be a huge pain.
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So you’re saying they believed in privacy strongly but believed in getting rich more. Got it. Nothing wrong with that. I’d do the same.
Your beliefs are not as important as obligations which you got yourself into. If you want to act on your own accord and don't compromise, then maintain 100% ownership of your company. When you're managing a company that doesn't belong to you completely anymore, you're obliged to act in the best interest of your shareholders.
So if you’re going to criticize capitalism, you should criticize it as an institution.
I wonder if the Americans freaking out about this whole foreign influence thing have any idea what their nation has done to other countries' (both democracies and otherwise). What's happened here is a complete joke in comparison, and everyone is losing their head. Do people have any idea what the modern world has been like?
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I don't put that much data out, but I don't mind being profiled. I like being suggested music that I'm susceptible to like based on other people. I think it's fine if one can infer out of my lifestyle that I would be interested in x or warn for risks of y. What is wrong with it ? I'm probably no statistical anomaly, I don't mind being part of some artificial cluster somewhere, helping having a more accurate portrayal…
I was talking to my daughter about that yesterday. Suppose Facebook knows your interests, taste in music, where you live, what good you like, etc. A political campaign could use that information to tell you that their local candidate shares your interests, lived in the same town, loves the same music, supports the same charity or whatever overlaps with your profile, while knowingly avoiding telling you about things y…
That's also the general recipe for avoiding echo chambers: don't be lazy, and go a little out of your way to find things out.
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> People didn't give one iota of a fuck when the Snowden revelations came out because they just assumed that it was the case already. It's more complex than that. The tracking and surveillance are not visible to the average person. Point your camera at someone in a coffee shop or bar and take their picture. They'll be coming over to ask you why you took their photo. The fact that the coffee shop or bar is brimming wi…
>The fact that the coffee shop or bar is brimming with overhead cameras is completely lost on them because it is mostly invisible With the coffee shop, it makes sense; the cameras in retail are expected to only be used for review, when some event occurs. No one expects it to be used for data mining and behavioral analysis purposes. And even if it were, the expectation is that this would be for academic purposes; that…
But you’re probably right that most people don’t think this is happening but only expect the stream is only flashing on a screen in front of a guard in real time and stored on a tape temporarily.
I don't get what changed? We've knows Facebook tracks everything, we've known Google does the same thing. If you've ever developed anything in messenger even today, it's amazing how much information is given. We know all these sites track everything you do outside of Facebook too. Everyone has been trying to get them to stop, we know it's illegal to build a profile on someone but Facebook gets around that by building…
This is all ignoring the fact that President Obama used almost the same Facebook app analytics tactics to win his campaign (albeit less deceptively).
Regardless of why it is getting attention now, let's be optimistic that the dangers of the silicon valley surveillance apparatus are starting to seep into the public consciousness. I for one would welcome a changing attitude towards how we view and sell our private information to these companies.
If we use Twitter to announce that people should #deletefacebook, what social network do we use in the event that it becomes necessary to #deletetwitter?
It's the wrong question. Social networks are nothing more than a reflection of our society. Blaming Facebook and Twitter is easy but the hard part is dealing with the polarisation in politics, the intransingence of Russia, the inability of people to know who to trust and what is real or not and the slow disintegration of our institutions. The real question is how do you fix society ?
"We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
Dr. King, Beyond Vietnam (1967)
http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentse...
For several years, I've been pontificating the somewhat abstract idea that a software app will one day hack the human psyche on a massive scale. And by "hack", I mean to do us harm by tapping into the same pleasure mechanisms as addictive drugs. It never occurred to me until today that perhaps Facebook is this app.
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People are fucking okay with their data being in public. They even fucking post any slight event in their lives.
Facebook exploits "bugs" in the human psyche, such as our need to avoid feeling lonely (by sharing intimate details of our life) is far more compelling than any abstract fear of "big brother". That is until big brother is Donald Trump, then suddenly the fear is no longer abstract.
Small quip: the need for social interaction/emotional support is a human trait not a "bug". A bug would imply that this need is somehow undesirable/irrational, but that's just not correct.