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Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
61–70 of 240 posts
Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, sentiance is super creepy.
I was recruited to work there, since they are from my local neighborhood I know them some time already. They have a history of analyzing data with financial support from Samsung. They are a smart bunch, don't have bad intentions towards people. That being said, their goal is indeed ... Well not something I value personally. But they are all good guys that are eager to make an amazingly powerful product. I agree that…
>they are all good guys that are eager to make an amazingly powerful product
Lovely. They are also devoid of vision and ethics about the likely results of their actions. In short, they fail to consider the saying:
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions".
Have they even considered the question: Which of their targets would EVER sign-up for their service?
Who are their customers, and why would they pay for the service? The only plausible reason to pay Sentiance is to understand a target's behavior at a fine-grained level in order to insert a stimulus to get them to do something they would otherwise not do willingly. (or a stalker, to assault them).
So, they are making a wonderfully powerful tool to enable strangers to change a target's behavior without permission. Yet they are not bright enough to avoid putting a "sign up" popup on their website in a way that interrupts their own video.
They will enable someone to cause serious damage to our world. Please get a message to them that they need to stop and shut down.
If they want to build something REALLY powerful, they should pivot to building something to allow us to DETECT & PREVENT other software on our phones/computers from doing what they are now trying to do.
I'd pay for that, and I'm not the only one.
Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
#63How convenient for Facebook that large dubious data collection practices like this are exposed only two months before the European GDPR privacy law comes into effect.
Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
#64I 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…
You can deactivate your FB account and still use Messenger (and hence keep your contacts). You would lose Groups and Events though
Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
#65“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…
Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
#66> Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please.
And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil".
Well, yes, companies are evil. They don't work for you; they either sell something to you, that is usually bad for you (why else would you want it), or take something from you, that they can then sell to somebody else.
> Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution.
Of course it is. It's the only solution. If you think Facebook's management care about anything else except the number of active users, you're crazy. The only way to have them change their ways (maybe) is to make that number go down. It's also good for you, like drinking water instead of soda.
Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
#67Seeking advice: how do I tell friends and family about the negative aspects of Facebook without coming across as all “I don’t even own a TV” or “meat is murder”? Is that even possible?
It's not only Facebook though.
If you look for a restaurant at Google it will show you a link to that restaurant's website, opening hours, etc. but also: how popular the place is at any time, and how much time people spend there. All thanks to tracking phones.
In case of Google you can disable that in the phone's settings (and trust that opt-out works), but you can't really do that with your phone operator. Or with the apps that do the same but don't brag about it.
To answer your question directly: I showed a search result page to my friends, and showed them how to disable location tracking. Some were terrified, but - sadly - most of them didn't and don't mind being tracked.
Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
#68I 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…
You can deactivate your FB account and still use Messenger (and hence keep your contacts). You would lose Groups and Events though
You'd still have to go give up your phone number. In the end, you might give up your FB profile but you've not quite achieved the objective of giving up your FB profile.
Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
#69“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…
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
Just because you can do something, does not mean that you should do it.
People must apply the same creativity, intelligence, and forethought as they apply to designing & building of their technology to considering the consequences of it's existence and use.
And then take appropriate actions to prevent bad consequences and/or misuse. This must include some decisions to not build it in the first place.
Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
#70> Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please. And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil". Well, yes, companies are evil. They don't work for you…
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