Our mascot for this posting is the White Peacock butterfly, often seen in the woodlands in South Florida. After the Monarchs and the Zebras, these are the most common butterflies in my neighborhood.
How Facebook Targets Ads to YOU
If you have any doubt when you use sites like Facebook (and others) at no monetary cost to yourself, that you are definitely not their "customer," you must visit https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/08/19/98-personal-data-points-that-facebook-uses-to-target-ads-to-you/?utm_term=.e8bdf79387db (This is a link you can click on.) It is an frightening piece which comes from The Washington Post.
Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook, and Susan Sandberg, the brains behind running it.
YOU are their merchandise which they are selling to others. At best, it results in advertisements being directed to you, based on what they know about you and have sold to the advertisers. At worst, it can dig into portions of you existence which you might not want to share with those to whom Facebook might sell it. And that, I fear, can include government agencies. Read the article. It might cause you to exercise greater care when you go online.
Jack Lippman
Should the Government Regulate Data?
BloombergBusinessWeek devoted a full issue to one single article in June of 2015 when they published Paul Ford's essay on what "coding," the nuts and bolts of the data revolution, was all about. When it comes to data, this man knows the score. And when he addresses the challenge to your privacy posed by the internet, he is about as knowledgeable an authority that one can find!A few weeks ago, BloombergBusinessweek published the following article by him, the reading of which is vitally important to all Americans. All of us are in great danger. Read why Paul Ford strongly feels that way and why this is included in this blog posting.
JL
Silicon Valley Has Failed to Protect Our Data. Here’s How to Fix It
It’s time for a digital protection agency. It’s
clear ethics don’t scale, and it’s not just Facebook’s problem.
By
Paul Ford
March 21, 2018, 5:01 AM
EDT
Over
and over in the last 20 years we’ve watched low-cost or free internet
communications platforms spring from the good intentions or social curiosity of
tech folk. We’ve watched as these platforms expanded in power and significance,
selling their influence to advertisers. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google—they grew so
fast. One day they’re a lovable new way to see kid pix, next thing you know
they’re reconfiguring democracy, governance, and business.
Facebook’s recent debacle is illustrative. It turns out that the
company let a researcher spider through its social network to gather
information on 50 million people. Then the Steve Bannon-affiliated, Robert
Mercer-backed U.K. data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica used
that data to target likely Trump voters. Facebook responded that, no, this was
not a “breach.” OK, sure, let’s not call it a breach. It’s how things were
designed to work. That’s the problem.
For years we’ve been talking and thinking about social networks
as interesting tools to model and understand human dynamics. But it’s no longer
academic—Facebook has reached a scale where it’s not a model of society as much
as an engine of culture. A researcher gained legitimate access to the platform
and then just ... kept going, and Cambridge
Analytica ended up with those 50 million profiles. The “hack” was a
true judo move that used the very nature of the platform against itself—like if
you gave MacGyver a phone book and he somehow made it into a bomb.
What’s been unfolding for a while now is a rolling catastrophe
so obvious we forget it’s happening. Private data are spilling out of banks, credit-rating providers, email providers,
and social networks and
ending up everywhere.
So this is an era of breaches and violations and stolen
identities. Big companies can react nimbly when they fear regulation is
actually on the horizon—for example, Google, Facebook, and Twitter have agreed
to share data with researchers who are tracking disinformation, the result of
a European Union commission on
fake news. But for the most part we’re dealing with global entities
that own the means whereby politicians garner votes, have vast access to
capital to fund lobbying efforts, and are constitutionally certain of their own
moral cause. That their platforms are used for awful ends is just a side effect
on the way to global transparency, and shame on us for not seeing that.
So are we doomed to let them take our data or that of our loved
ones and then to watch as that same data is used against us or shared by
hackers? Yes, frankly. We’re doomed. Equifax Inc. sure
won’t save us. Do we trust Congress to bring change? Do we trust Congress to
plug in a phone charger? I’ll be overjoyed to find out I’m wrong. In the
meantime, turn on two-factor authentication everywhere (ideally using a
hardware dongle like a YubiKey), invest in
a password manager, and hold on tight.
The word “leak” is right. Our sense of control over our own
destinies is being challenged by these leaks. Giant internet platforms are
poisoning the commons. They’ve automated it. Take a non-Facebook case: YouTube.
It has users who love conspiracy videos, and YouTube takes that love as a sign
that more and more people would love those videos, too. Love all around! In
February an ex-employee tweeted: “The algorithm I worked on at Google
recommended [InfoWars personality and lunatic conspiracy-theory purveyor] Alex
Jones’ videos more than 15,000,000,000 times, to some of the most vulnerable
people in the nation.”
The head of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, recently told a crowd at
SXSW that YouTube would start posting Wikipedia’s explanatory text next to
conspiracy videos (like those calling a teen who survived the Parkland, Fla.,
shooting a “crisis actor”). Google apparently didn’t tell Wikipedia about this
plan.
The activist and internet entrepreneur Maciej Ceglowski once
described big data as “a bunch of radioactive, toxic sludge that we don’t know
how to handle.” Maybe we should think about Google and Facebook as the new
polluters. Their imperative is to grow! They create jobs! They pay taxes, sort
of! In the meantime, they’re dumping trillions of units of toxic brain poison
into our public-thinking reservoir. Then they mop it up with Wikipedia or send
out a message that reads, “We take your privacy seriously.”
Given that the federal government is currently one angry man
with nuclear weapons and a Twitter account, and that it’s futile to expect
reform or self-regulation from internet giants, I’d like to propose something
that will seem impossible but I would argue isn’t: Let’s make a digital
Environmental Protection Agency. Call it the Digital Protection Agency. Its job
would be to clean up toxic data spills, educate the public, and calibrate and
levy fines.
How might a digital EPA function? Well, it could do some of the
work that individuals do today. For example, the website of Australian security
expert Troy Hunt, haveibeenpwned.com (“pwned”
is how elite, or “l33t,” hackers, or “hax0rs,” spell “owned”), keeps track of
nearly 5 billion hacked accounts. You give it your email, and it tells you if
you’ve been found in a data breach. A federal agency could and should do that
work, not just one very smart Australian—and it could do even better, because
it would have a framework for legally exploring, copying, and dealing with
illegally obtained information. Yes, we’d probably have to pay Booz Allen or
Accenture or whatever about $120 million to get the same work done that Troy
Hunt does on his own, but that’s the nature of government contracting, and we
can only change one thing at a time.
When it comes to toxic data spills, it’s hard to know just how
exposed you are. Literally all of us have been hacked—hard and a lot and mostly
behind our backs. At least we could start to understand how bad it is. We could
teach high school students to check the DPA site, to manage their own breaches.
You’d go to the website to get good information about recovering from identity
theft or a new social security number (we should also get rid of social
security numbers as identification, but that’s another subject). It would have
the forms you need to restore your identity, assert that you’d been hacked, and
protect yourself. A nice thing for a government to do.
Let’s keep going! Imagine ranking banks and services by the
number of data breaches they’ve experienced. Or a national standard for
disclosure of how our private information is shared. (These ideas have been
floated before in lots of different forms; the point is, how nice would it be
if there was one government agency insisting on it in the same way that we have
nutrition labels and calorie counts on our packaged foods?) The Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau was headed in this direction—if it can survive the current
maelstrom, maybe its mandate could be expanded.
So: Lots of helpful information, plenty of infographics, a way
to track just how badly you’ve been screwed, and, ideally, some teeth—the
DPA needs to be able to impose fines. I’m sure there’d be some fuss and
opposition, but, come on. The giants have so much money it would hardly matter.
And consider this from their perspective: How much better will it be to have
your lawyers negotiate with the DPA’s lawyers instead of being hauled before
Congress every time someone blows a whistle on your breaches?
The EPA’s budget is more than $8 billion, a little on the high
side for the digital version. You could pull this off with $15 million or $20
million for tech infrastructure and to support a team—four engineers to build
the platform, some designers, and then a few dozen graphic artists to make the
charts and tables. Add on $2 billion for management and lawyers, and you’ve got
yourself a federal agency.
I know that when you think of a Superfund site, you think of bad
things, like piles of dead wildlife or stretches of fenced-off,
chemical-infused land or hospital wings filled with poisoned families. No one
thinks about all the great chemicals that get produced, or the amazing consumer
products we all enjoy. Nobody sets out to destroy the environment; they just
want to make synthetic fibers or produce industrial chemicals. The same goes
for our giant tech platforms. Facebook never expected to be an engine that
destroys America. Lots of nice people work there. Twitter didn’t expect to
become the megaphone of despots and white nationalists. But the simple
principles of “more communication is better” and “let’s build community” and
“we take your privacy seriously” didn’t stand a chance under the pressure of
hypergrowth and unbelievable wealth creation.
Unfortunately, ethics don’t scale as well as systems. We’ve
poisoned ourselves, and more than a little. Given the money and power at stake,
it’s going to be hard to get everyone to admit we’re sick. But we owe
ourselves—and, cliché though it may be, we owe our children—to be more
pragmatic about treating the symptoms.
Paul
Ford is the Co-founder of Postlight, a digital platform and product shop in
NYC. He is on Twitter at @ftrain and email
at paul.ford@postlight.com.
The Power of the National Rifle Association
Are you aware that gun manufacturers are the only major industry in America that has immunity from facing lawsuits? Congress granted gun makers this power in 2005, which consequently left families who lost children in mass shootings, like Sandy Hook and Parkland, without any way of holding these corporations accountable. Some of their firearms are designed specifically with the power to inflict mass damage, and yet the law says you can’t hold them responsible for making, marketing and selling them. This is one example of the power the NRA has over our legislators.
Another is the law in Florida
preventing local government from passing laws regulating firearms. Doing so can result in substantial fines to
the local government and removal from office of its elected officials. This is another example of the power the NRA
has over our legislators.
Neither you nor I gave them this power. It comes from the concerted effort of its over five million members putting pressure on legislators through its paid lobbyists. They donate money to candidates too but that is not as significant as the lobbying. Elected officials know that without the votes of NRA members, they might be voted out of office, so they figuratively kiss their butts when it comes to issues concerning reducing gun violence.
They hang their hats on a gross misinterpretation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution which has been supported, at least insofar as hand guns are concerned, by a Supreme Court which accepted a warped interpretation of the Second Amendment in 2008, reversing the more literal interpretation which had been followed for at least 210 years! History will paint the hands of these Supreme Court Justices in the blood of those murdered by weapons which have no business being in the hands of anyone other than the military.
The NRA believes that even minimal steps to reduce gun violence will start a slide down a "slippery slope" which will remove guns from all private citizens. So they oppose all reform! Really, there are people in this country, in and out of the NRA, who fear that the existence of our government, or any government for that matter, is a danger to individual freedom. Hence, they want to be able to have guns to oppose the government, should the need ever arise. This is really what it is all about, and if a few dozen kids get gunned down every year by deranged individuals, that is the price America must pay to prevent its government from taking away their freedoms. That is what opposition to gun legislation is really all about. These people are sick.
JL
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