Social Media/Big Data

Getting Ready To Fight Big Data

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This is your ghillie suit for taking the fight to the Masters of the Universe.

From the Business Insider, “This photo shows that even Mark Zuckerberg is paranoid about his privacy.”

But the photo has taken new meaning after Zuckerberg apologized on Wednesday for a scandal in which British data company Cambridge Analytica, which has ties to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, illicitly obtained information from as many as 50 million Facebook profiles by abusing Facebook’s data-sharing features.

From the Instagram photo, it’s clear that Zuckerberg takes his own personal privacy very seriously.

Google After “Don’t Be Evil”

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If you are a conservative wondering what happened to your web traffic and search engine ranking, this probably doesn’t come as a surprise.  From ZDNet, “Google erases ‘Don’t be evil’ from code of conduct after 18 years“.

As spotted by Gizmodo, the phrase was dropped from the preface of Google’s code of conduct in late April or early May.

Until then, ‘Don’t be evil’ were the first words of the opening and closing sentences of Google’s code of conduct and have been part of it since 2000.

“The Google Code of Conduct is one of the ways we put ‘Don’t be evil’ into practice. It’s built around the recognition that everything we do in connection with our work at Google will be, and should be, measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct.”

Poof! Google disappeared the concept of not being evil.  Now they just have “[a high bar] for practical as well as aspirational reasons.”  I’m not so sure that is very reassuring.

Do Be Like The Hummingbird and Leave Your Smartphone Behind

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From Vice, “Your Phone Is Listening and it’s Not Paranoia.”

It seemed like just a spooky coincidence, but then everyone seems to have a story about their smartphone listening to them. So is this just paranoia, or are our smartphones actually listening?

According to Dr. Peter Henway—The senior security consultant for cybersecurity firm Asterix, and former lecturer and researcher at Edith Cowan University—the short answer is yes, but perhaps in a way that’s not as diabolical as it sounds.

Seals and Crofts – “Hummingbird”

Facebook’s Peeping ‘Zucks’

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For anyone who watched Mark Zuckerberg’s Congressional Hearing appearances, it’s clear that Mark is clearly, well…. different.  But this latest, Mr. Zuckerberg?  Jeez!!  The Forbes headline says it all, “Facebook Wants Your Nude Photos; What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”

In a bid to wrap up the race for the Tin Ear of the Year Award before June 1, Facebook has begun asking its 2.2 billion users to discreetly share their indiscreet nude photos with the company. The plan, they say, is to train Facebook to block the images you don’t ever want on Facebook, in cases such as revenge porn.

Mr. Zuckerberg Goes To Washington (Final Update)

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It does appear that the “Interweb” and the “Brotherhood of the Facebook” do work in strange and mysterious ways.  If not for cached backup copies and screenshots, one would never know the subtleties of the “Zuckerberg Effect“.  In the “Mr. Zuckerberg Goes To Washington” series, I chronicled the apparent Facebook censorship of a less than flattering image of Mark Zuckerman – not a horrible image, but we shall say that he had some ‘eye issues’.

Facebook, upon being informed about their said abridgment of certain First Amendment rights, actually did something.  Changes were made to remove the “safe image” placeholders and the original images restored.

I will stress, however, that what to do to get changes from Facebook is a mystery with no clear path. Stumbling into the method of seeking corrections will not work for any of us in the future. Facebook has too much at stake to be accused of censorship, and the people it serves do not need to be censored.

Making it simpler to get corrections, and then informing when said corrections have been made, is a must.

BTW:  I’m going to use the original ‘offending’ image for the featured image of this post–any guesses as to whether this is really the Final Update to this series?

**The Zuckerberg Effect – In Social Networking Chaos Theory, the Zuckerberg Effect is the systematic obfuscation of data, images, concepts, beliefs, or behavior contrary to current sensitivities of the Technology ‘Masters of the Universe’ with the goal of making uncounted small incremental changes in the state of a deterministic nonlinear system called Freedom resulting in a transition to a state of Systemic Linear Control by elite Opinion Leaders.

Mr. Zuckerberg Goes To Washington (Update-2)

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It does appear, based on the test in “Mr. Zuckerberg Goes To Washington (Updated) that Facebook does, indeed, censor posts critical of Mr. Zuckerberg. Here’s the results.

Even after an obvious warning that a censorship test was being conducted, Facebook replaced the satirical meme image of Mark Zuckerberg with a “safe image” placeholder.

Final conclusions aside, in this instance Facebook could not be trusted to be a fair broker of the news. How many occurrences should it take before Facebook forfeits the trust that has been placed in it to be able to operate free of Government Regulations? Not so many, I think….

Mr. Zuckerberg Goes To Washington (Updated)

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In case you missed Mr. Zuckerberg’s 2 days of Congressional Hearing testimony – “I’ll have my team get back to you on that, Congressman….” Update:  an anecdotal test to determine if Mark Zuckerberg, or his “team” are so sensitive to criticism that they substitute ‘safe images’ for images, shall we say, that are critical of Zuckerberg.

This is the original Featured image from the post.

This is the image Mr. Zuckerman’s Facebook AI/Censors used to replaced the original post’s ‘Featured Image”.

This is the Screenshot of the resultant Facebook post. Here is a link to the original ThePublicEditor.com post.

And this is a Screenshot of the resultant Twitter post. Apparently, Twitter founder, Mr. Jack Dorsey, has fewer sensibilities regarding ‘memeing’ Mark Zuckerberg’s image than Facebook does.

Now we will test whether the “Safe Image” used was by ‘accident’ or by ‘design’.