Settlement for Australian users impacted by Cambridge Analytica incident

What Facebook did was not about some genius move where they got university students to sign up; it was about making it seem as if your customers are not who they actually are, and by exploiting the market contrary to how it’s supposed to work. Facebook is not the only one who did it, but they are perhaps the first ones who did it for social media and at such scale.

The bright idea of the free market—customers pay for things they get value from, which helps more of these things to exist—is turned on its head and inside out when the product customers pay for is people paying for things while those people are misled into thinking they are being provided a “free product”.

Any value the end user gets from the system is purely incidental. If it is harmful to the end user long-term, that is orthogonal to the bottom line. The company is not incentivized to provide the end user any value, the company is not interested in helping the end user succeed and prosper—rather, the company is incentivized to not let the end user leave in bulk (that would hurt the actual paying customers, that is the advertisers, and the bottom line) and to keep their eyes on the non-product for as long as possible (if riling them up by algorithmically chosen triggering posts works for that purpose, great).

This fosters monopolies, infects capitalism, and when it becomes the default engine of human interaction it infects society.

I am vehemently against it, but no matter which party you choose to vote for, the result has been the same.

I've known this for years, and I suspect like many who find out -- you look for some. Especially ones you had as a kid, that you haven't thought of for years.

Point is, after that you start to look for relatives. Just in case they didn't realise. And while I did not find a person I thought was a relative, they did have the same last name.

So I Googled a bit, found their relative, and called.

The guy started yelling at me first thing. Telling me to go to blazes, and so forth. I just said "YOU contact them, I don't want any part of it! I just hate the idea of $1M sitting in a dormant account!"

Nope. From the sound of the screaming and blathering on the other end of the line, this guy had been beset by endless scammers calling. Repeatedly. All the time. Trying to "do all the work" for 10%, this sort of thing.

Still his response was incredibly over the top. Didn't start off with "I am NOT interested", but instead with screaming. How many calls per month, per week?

Per day?!