Help, I’m trapped in Facebook’s Absurd Pseudonym Purgatory
TWO WEEKS AGO, Facebook locked me out of my profile. My photos and friends are gone, my profile vanished without a trace.
Tim Cook: Silicon Valley’s most successful companies are selling you out
Apple CEO Tim Cook has made no secret of his disdain for online services that ask you to trade highly personal data for convenience — a trade that describes most big advertising-supported technology companies. But last night, in some of his strongest comments to date, Cook said the erosion of privacy represents a threat to the American way of life. Cook spoke at a dinner in Washington, DC, hosted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which honored him as a “champion of freedom” for his leadership at Apple.
“Our privacy is being attacked on multiple fronts,” Cook said in a speech that he delivered remotely, according to EPIC. “I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.”
Apple boss Tim Cook hits out at Facebook and Google
Apple chief Tim Cook has made a thinly veiled attack on Facebook and Google for “gobbling up” users’ personal data.
In a speech, he said people should not have to “make trade-offs between privacy and security”.
While not naming Facebook and Google explicitly, he attacked companies that “built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency”.
Rights activists Privacy International told the BBC it had some scepticism about Mr Cook’s comments.
“It is encouraging to see Apple making the claim that they collect less information on us than their competitors,” Privacy International’s technologist Dr Richard Tynan said.
“However, we have yet to see verifiable evidence of the implementation of these claims with regard to their hardware, firmware, software or online services.
“It is crucial that our devices do not betray us.”
Stalking Your Friends with Facebook Messenger
At Facebook’s request I have again deactivated the *official* version of the extension. Furthermore, Facebook has deactivated location sharing from the desktop webpage so the extension will not work. However, it seems locations are still being shared on the mobile app and sharing is still enabled by default.
Israel, Gaza, War & Data – The Art of Personalizing Propaganda
The better we get at modeling user preferences, the more accurately we construct recommendation engines that fully capture user attention. In a way, we are building personalized propaganda engines that feeds users content which makes them feel good and throws away the uncomfortable bits. We used to be able to hold media accountable for misinforming the public. Now we only have ourselves to blame.
Why I make my kids read privacy policies
It’s like teaching them to look both ways before crossing the street. Reading privacy policies for apps is about learning basic safety tips in the Internet Age and gives parents an opportunity to teach kids about responsibility and self awareness on the Web.
Facebook study says it’s your fault, not theirs, if your feed is all like-minded friends
Is Facebook an echo chamber? Does the social network help us create filter bubbles, through which we’re only exposed to content and opinions that are like our own? According to the company, not really.
In new study published today in the journal Science, Facebook claims that it’s mostly humans, not its News Feed ranking algorithm, that are at fault for making their feeds ideologically consistent.
“While News Feed surfaces content that is slightly more aligned with an individual’s own ideology (based on that person’s actions on Facebook), who they friend and what content they click on are more consequential than the News Feed ranking in terms of how much diverse content they encounter,” according to Facebook’s Data Science page.
Twitter Data Portraits
Lexigraphs I is the first visualization from the Data Portraits series. Micro-blog authors use mobile text messaging or web interfaces to post short answers to the question What are you doing?, creating a stream-of-consciousness account of their daily encounters, musings, plans and actions. Using salient words from an individual’s postings, we visualize the topical and temporal patterns to create a portrait of the author.
Facebook Is Eating the Internet
The state of the media in 2015 begins and ends with the tech giant.
Facebook, it seems, is unstoppable. The social publishing site, just 11 years old, is now the dominant force in American media. It drives a quarter of all web traffic. In turn, Facebook sucks up a huge portion of ad revenue—the money that keeps news organizations running—and holds an enormous captive audience.
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