Tag: Internet

Mom, They Are Being Evil Again!!!

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On the heels of Google deciding to cripple ad blockers in their Chrome browser now that they have achieved a monopoly, now Google is rolling out a programming interface that will allow websites to see what programs are installed on your machine, which, among other things, deanonymize users, and possibly reveal a host of other personal data.

But Google wants to accommodate its advertisers, so f%$# the rest of us:

A nascent web API called getInstalledRelatedApps offers a glimpse of why online privacy remains such an uncertain proposition.

In development since 2015, Google has been experimenting with the API since the release of Chrome 59 in 2017. As its name suggests, it is designed to let web apps and sites determine whether a corresponding native app is installed on a user’s device.

The purpose of the API, as described in the proposed specification, sounds laudable. More and more, the docs state, users will have web apps and natives apps from the same source installed on the same device and as the apps’ feature sets converge and overlap, it will become important to be able to distinguish between the two, so users don’t receive two sets of notifications, for example.

But as spec editor and Google engineer Rayan Kanso observed in a discussion of the proposed browser plumbing, the initiative isn’t really about users so much as web and app publishers.

Late last month, after Kanso published notice of Google’s intent to officially support the API in a future version of Chrome, Daniel Bratell, a developer for the Opera browser, asked how this will help users.

“The mobile web already suffers from heavy handed attempts at getting web users to replace web sites with native apps and this mostly looks useful for funneling users from the open web to closed ecosystems,” Bratell said in a developer forum post.

Kanso made clear the primary focus of the proposal isn’t Chrome users.

“Although this isn’t an API that would directly benefit users, it indirectly benefits them through improved web experiences,” Kanso wrote. “We received very positive OT [off-topic] feedback from partners using this API, and the alternative is them using hacks to figure whether their native app is installed.”

………

That’s not say privacy concerns are ignored. On Wednesday, Google engineer Yoav Weiss joined the discussion to express concern about the API’s privacy implications.

“Knowing that specific apps were installed can contain valuable and potentially sensitive information about the user: income level, relationship status, sexual orientation, etc,” Weiss wrote, adding, “The collection of bits of answers to ‘Is app X installed?’ can be a powerful fingerprinting vector.”

………

And in a separate discussion Henri Sivonen, a Mozilla engineer, worried that the API might lead to more attempts to steer users away from the web and toward a native app, something websites like Reddit already try to do.

Google users are not the customer, they are product to be monetized.

Break them up.

Finance Ruins Everything

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Case in point, the orgy of self dealing and corruption that is ICANN’s plans to approve the sale of the .org domain to a hedge fund connected to ICANN executives:

Earlier this month, within the domain name world, there were significant concerns raised upon the news that Internet Society (ISOC), the (perhaps formerly?) well-respected nonprofit that helps “provide leadership in Internet-related standards, education, access, and policy” had agreed to sell off the Public Interest Registry, which is the registry that manages all .org top level domain (TLD) names, to a private equity company called Ethos Capital. Just having a public interest nonprofit selling off a part of its operations to a private equity group would be trouble enough, but the details make the story look much, much worse.

Just a few months ago, ICANN, a different non-profit that is in charge of coordinating and managing the various top level domain namespaces, and figuring out who gets to manage the associated registries (and, which has been subject to years of controversy regarding poor accountability and transparency, along with accusations of self-dealing), had announced that it was eliminating the price caps on the .org TLD. For most of the past decade, the ICANN agreement regarding the .org TLD space had held that .org domains had a maximum top price of $8.25 per year per domain.

ICANN claimed that it was making changes to the .org contract to “better conform” with the base registry agreement that ICANN had with other TLDs, tons of which have come on the market over the past few years. However, seeing as the .org TLD is one of the oldest ones on the web, and which has generally been considered (though, not exclusively) to be used for things like non-profits and community organizations, many people were reasonably concerned about the lifting of the price cap. Indeed, in response to ICANN’s request for comment, the comments went overwhelmingly against the removal of the price cap.

But ICANN did it anyway.

And, then, just a few months later, the Internet Society sells off the registry to a private equity firm.

And it gets worse. Remember how I mentioned earlier the years-long concerns about ICANN and self-dealing?

Ethos Capital is a new private equity firm lead by Erik Brooks. Brooks was at Abry Partners until earlier this year. Abry Partners acquired Donuts and installed former ICANN President of Global Domains Akram Atallah in the top spot there.

………

Oh, and it gets even worse:

Despite stating that Ethos Capital “understands the intricacies of the domain industry” its founder and CEO Erik Brooks has no experience within that industry. The firm’s website lists only Brooks and one Nora Abusitta-Ouri – who joined the outfit last month as its “chief purpose officer” – as employees.

But there is a common thread between those two and it is Fadi Chehade, a former CEO of ICANN, the organization that oversees the domain-name system and awards the contracts to run internet registries.

………

Oh, and it gets even worse. While Ethos Capital does not list Chehade as an employee, it appears that he started the organization:

………

May 7th, [When Chehade registered the Ethos Capital domain] eh? the timing is notable:

That date is significant because it is one day after ICANN indicated it was planning to approve the lifting of price caps through its public comment summary.

In case you were wonder about the “thread” that ties Brooks, Abusitta-Ouri and the CEO of Public Interest Registry:

The founder of Ethos Capital is Erik Brooks. He left ABRY Partners this year after spending two decades at the investment firm.

Does the name Abry ring a bell? That’s because it’s the company that bought new top level domain name company Donuts last year.

That deal involved Abry Senior Advisor Fadi Chehade. Chehade is the former CEO of ICANN, the group that oversees the domain name industry.

Now we have a twenty year veteran of Abry, who worked on the Donuts deal and was (or still is) a member of Donuts’ board, leaving this year to form a new entity that buys a registry, much like how Abry bought Donuts.

And the CEO of Public Interest Registry is Jon Nevett, one of the founders of Donuts.

Oh, and:

The other person listed on Ethos Capital’s website is Nora Abusitta- Ouri. She worked for Chehadi at ICANN as SVP, Development and Public Responsibility Programs.

In other words, the folks involved here are all very closely connected, and it happened right after ICANN, going against the public’s clearly stated interests, suddenly made the .org domain space much more open to profit exploitation. The whole thing is incredibly sketchy.

………

As more and more anger rose about this whole mess, ISOC is trying to calm the waters
It also insists that the lifting of price caps had absolutely nothing to do with this, and that this wasn’t all planned out in advance, but in September — a claim that almost no one believes. The one “new” fact in this statement is finally admitting what everyone already suspected, that Chehade is associated with Ethos Capital as an “adviser” though it downplays that role and tries to talk up how he advises lots of companies. Thing is, mere “advisers” aren’t usually the people registering the domain names…

Seriously, finance these days is all about looting, and in this case, it is looting a public commons.

FWIW, Ethos is saying that they will be good stewards of the domain, with “Price increases of up to 10 percent,” which means that the price will double every 7 years, if it holds to that promise, which, spoiler, it won’t.

We really need to change tax and bankruptcy laws to shut these motherf%$#ers down.

Election Meddling or Profit Making?

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We know that there was a lot of political posting on the various social media in 2016.

Some was domestic, some was from obscure new nations, most notably Macedonian teens, and various groups in Russia.

Well, an analysis has been published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), about the actual effect on votes, and the answer is very little if any:

Conclusion

Coordinated attempts to create political polarization in the United States by Russia and other foreign governments have become a focus of public concern in recent years. Yet, to our knowledge, no studies have systematically examined whether such campaigns have actually impacted the political attitudes or behaviors of Americans. Analyzing one of the largest known efforts to date using a combination of unique datasets, we found no substantial effects of interacting with Russian IRA accounts on the affective attitudes of Democrats and Republicans who use Twitter frequently toward each other, their opinions about substantive political issues, or their engagement with politics on Twitter in late 2017.

If the goal is profit, then one will preach to the converted, particularly on the right-wing, because that is where the money is.

Of course, teasing out politics and profit are always problematic.

Google Is More Evil Than You Think

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It turns out that Google has been deceiving us about the level of human intervention of their search results:

Google, and its parent company Alphabet, has its metaphorical fingers in a hundred different lucrative pies. To untold millions of users, though, “to Google” something has become a synonym for “search,” the company’s original business—a business that is now under investigation as more details about its inner workings come to light.

A coalition of attorneys general investigating Google’s practices is expanding its probe to include the company’s search business, CNBC reports while citing people familiar with the matter.

………

Google’s decades-long dominance in the search market may not be quite as organic as the company has alluded, according to The Wall Street Journal, which published a lengthy report today delving into the way Google’s black-box search process actually works.

Google’s increasingly hands-on approach to search results, which has taken a sharp upturn since 2016, “marks a shift from its founding philosophy of ‘organizing the world’s information’ to one that is far more active in deciding how that information should appear,” the WSJ writes.

Some of that manipulation comes from very human hands, sources told the paper in more than 100 interviews. Employees and contractors have “evaluated” search results for effectiveness and quality, among other factors, and promoted certain results to the top of the virtual heap as a result.

One former contractor the WSJ spoke with described down-voting any search results that read like a “how-to manual” for queries relating to suicide until the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline came up as the top result. According to the contractor, Google soon after put out a message to the contracting firm that the Lifeline should be marked as the top result for all searches relating to suicide so that the company algorithms would adjust to consider it the top result.

Or in another instance, sources told the WSJ, employees made a conscious choice for how to handle anti-vax messaging:

………

The company has since maintained an internal blacklist of terms that are not allowed to appear in autocomplete, organic search, or Google News, the sources told the WSJ, even though company leadership has said publicly, including to Congress, that the company does not use blacklists or whitelists to influence its results.

The modern blacklist reportedly includes not only spam sites, which get de-indexed from search, but also the type of misinformation sites that are endemic to Facebook (or, for that matter, Google’s own YouTube).

We already know that algorithms tend to reinforce, rather than mitigate, human bias and bigotry.

Now we know that there are discrete human fingers on the scales.

This is why we need real antitrust enforcement.

Speaking of Rich People Who Should Be in Jail………

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Note that this is Facebook’s case, and so the best possible case.  The reality is probably rather stark.

In news that should surprise no one who, it turns out that Facebook is aggressively promoting fake accounts.

Given that their business is selling ads to all of its accounts, this means that Facebook is actually something akin to a Ponzi scheme:

At first glance, Amy Dowd’s Facebook account appears perfectly normal. There is a smiling profile picture of a young woman surrounded by autumnal leaves and the date that she began a new job at Southeast Missouri State University. But look more closely and things begin to seem strange. Unlike most 29 year olds, Amy has no friends, no interests and no photos. The only thing she has written is a gushing review of a US haulage company. “Fake account,” replied one user. They were right.

 This Amy Dowd does not exist. Her account is a fake bought by the Financial Times as part of an investigation into the millions of bogus accounts littering the social media network in spite of efforts to better verify users.

 The proliferation of phoney identities has reached a record high. That is a problem for a company that trumpets user growth — considered a barometer of health by investors — while receiving criticism for failing to prevent the spread of false information by third parties.

 Facebook’s own estimates suggest duplicate accounts represent approximately 11 per cent of monthly active users while fake versions make up another 5 per cent. Others claim the total is higher. Yet Facebook continues to promote its user base as an incredible 2.45bn per month — close to one-third of the global population.

How about a meaningful investigation of fraud among Silicon Valley firms?

Showing these guys that they are not above the law would produce a noticeable benefit for society.

ISPs Lie

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The latest controversy over internet technology is browsers implementing DNS over HTTPS, which would prevent ISPs from tracking their users browser habits, and selling that information to 3rd parties.

Mozilla is claiming, with a lot of justification, that ISPs lied when lobbying against this technology:

Mozilla is urging Congress to reject the broadband industry’s lobbying campaign against encrypted DNS in Firefox and Chrome.

The Internet providers’ fight against this privacy feature raises questions about how they use broadband customers’ Web-browsing data, Mozilla wrote in a letter sent today to the chairs and ranking members of three House of Representatives committees. Mozilla also said that Internet providers have been giving inaccurate information to lawmakers and urged Congress to “publicly probe current ISP data collection and use policies.”

DNS over HTTPS helps keep eavesdroppers from seeing what DNS lookups your browser is making. This can make it more difficult for ISPs or other third parties to monitor what websites you visit.

“Unsurprisingly, our work on DoH [DNS over HTTPS] has prompted a campaign to forestall these privacy and security protections, as demonstrated by the recent letter to Congress from major telecommunications associations. That letter contained a number of factual inaccuracies,” Mozilla Senior Director of Trust and Security Marshall Erwin wrote.

This part of Erwin’s letter referred to an Ars article in which we examined the ISPs’ claims, which center largely around Google’s plans for Chrome. The broadband industry claimed that Google plans to automatically switch Chrome users to its own DNS service, but that’s not what Google says it is doing. Google’s publicly announced plan is to “check if the user’s current DNS provider is among a list of DoH-compatible providers, and upgrade to the equivalent DoH service from the same provider.” If the user-selected DNS service is not on that list, Chrome would make no changes for that user.

………

In addition to the broadband-industry letter to Congress, Comcast has been giving members of Congress a lobbying presentation that claims the encrypted-DNS plan would “centraliz[e] a majority of worldwide DNS data with Google” and “give one provider control of Internet traffic routing and vast amounts of new data about consumers and competitors.” Comcast and other ISPs are urging Congress to intervene.

But a number of the arguments ISPs made to lawmakers are “premised on a plan that doesn’t exist,” Erwin told Ars last week, referring to the ISPs’ claims about Google.

………

Mozilla’s letter to Congress said the ISP lobbying against encrypted DNS amounts to telecom associations “explicitly arguing that ISPs need to be in a position to collect and monetize users’ data. This is inconsistent with arguments made just two years earlier regarding whether privacy rules were needed to govern ISP data use.”

………

Web users are tracked by Google, Facebook, and other advertising companies, of course. ISPs, though, have “privileged access” to users’ browsing histories because they act as the gateway to the Internet, Erwin said to Ars.

There is already “remarkably sophisticated micro-targeting across the Web,” and “we don’t want to see that business model duplicated in the middle of the network,” he said. “We think it’s just a mistake to use DNS for those purposes.”

………

Mozilla has established specific policy requirements that DNS providers have to meet to earn a spot in Firefox’s encrypted-DNS program. For example, DNS resolvers must delete data that could identify users within 24 hours and only use that data “for the purpose of operating the service.” Providers also “must not retain, sell, or transfer to any third party (except as may be required by law) any personal information, IP addresses or other user identifiers, or user query patterns from the DNS queries sent from the Firefox browser.”

Do you really trust COMCAST to protect your privacy when their profits depend on NOT protecting your privacy?

I know that I don’t.

Tweet of the Year

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Taavi Kotka , former CIO of Estonia, on the low £100m price tag for being the most tech-savvy government in the world: “If you don’t use Accenture or McKinsey, you’d be amazed at what you can get done.”

— Philip Salter (@Philip_Salter) November 4, 2019

The point is a valid one.

The fixation that governments have on outsourcing and consultants serves primarily to increase cost and to reduce effectiveness of government programs.

Just look at the Obamacare website.

I Want This Phone Charger

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An artist and programmer has come up with a charger that generates a flood of false information to thwart the attempts of the various internet giants to track you:

Martin Nadal, an artist and coder based in Linz, Austria, has created FANGo, a “defense weapon against surveillance capitalism” that is disguised as a mobile phone charger.

On his page introducing the device, Nadal explains that the inside of the charger hides a micro controller that takes control of an Android smartphone by accessing the operating system’s Debug Mode. The device then makes queries and interacts with pages on Google, Amazon, YouTube, and other sites “in order to deceive data brokers in their data capture process.” It works similar to a fake Apple lightning cable, now mass-produced, that hijacks your device once connected.

Tools to frustrate tracking attempts by advertisers or data brokers are not new—AdNauseam is a plugin that clicks on all ads, while TrackmeNot does random searches on different search engines. Such projects, however, exclusively focus on desktops and web browsers. “Today we interact with the internet from the mobile mostly,” Nadal told Motherboard in an email. “We also use applications, where there is no possibility of using these plugins that hinder the monitoring making the user helpless.”

The device’s name is an acronym for Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, who represent some of the most profitable companies in the world. Nadal, however, sees them as the engines of surveillance capitalism, a theorization of contemporary capitalism by Susanna Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor emeritus.

………

Nadal is working on adding new features that might take such poisoning even further, using techniques such as geolocation spoofing. “[W]hile my phone is quietly charging at home, the data brokers think that I am walking or dining in another part of the city or world,” he said.

I love it.

Rule #1 Of Zuckerberg Statements

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Zuck lies.

Rule 2: See Rule 1.

Case in point, Zuckerberg’s claim that Facebook was inspired by Iraq war protests, which was almost immediately contradicted by a Congressman from Harvard who was among its first users:

Like most college campuses in early 2003, Harvard University was atwitter over one issue in particular: the imminent Iraq invasion. The Bush administration’s push to overthrow Saddam Hussein was debated and picked over in dorm rooms, argued about in lecture halls, and scrutinized in term papers.

Mark Zuckerberg was paying attention. So was future lawmaker Ruben Gallego, watching the debate unfold as he activated to go to war. In contrast, Zuckerberg was nine months away from creating a website where students could vote on the attractiveness of women on campus. It was an idea that eventually led to Facebook.

On Thursday, Zuckerberg — under scrutiny for how misinformation is harnessed and is now protected by Facebook — bridged the debate over Iraq and the nexus of his company, even at one point suggesting the social network could have stopped the war entirely.

“I remember feeling that if more people had a voice to share their experiences, maybe things would have gone differently,” Zuckerberg said at Georgetown University. “Those early years shaped my belief that giving everyone a voice empowers the powerless and pushes society to be better over time.”

Gallego blasted Zuckerberg’s recollection as an attempt to redraw the company’s image as altruistic in the face of growing scrutiny, as it defends its decision to allow lies in political ads.

“He’s rewriting history so it gives him an excuse to regulate himself,” Rep. Gallego (D-Ariz.) told The Washington Post on Tuesday. “It’s false. It’s completely false.”

Some bits of Zuckerberg’s recollection were telling, said Gallego, who claims to be one of the first 2,000 users of Facebook, which in its earliest iterations was open only to Harvard students.

With the possible exception of Google, I don’t think that there is a major tech firm that has been founded in the past 25 years that is not corrupt at its core, and Mark Zuckerberg makes them look like angels.

The World’s Smallest Violin Playing Just for You

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The court ruling on the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality was a mixed bag.

On one hand, it approved the appeal, but on the other hand it noted that because the FCC’s repeal was predicated on reclassifying ISPs as an Information service, the FCC lacked the authority to preempt state regulation, which means that the net neutrality regulations passed in California and a dozen other states will go into effect,

So Ajit Pai has a major case of butt-hurt, and I am amused:

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai may have belatedly concluded that federal regulation of broadband would be better for businesses than letting all 50 US states regulate Internet access.

Speaking at the WSJ Tech Live conference yesterday, Pai said that “a uniform, well-established set of regulations” is preferable to states regulating broadband individually. “[Pai] said allowing states and local governments to pass their own laws regulating Internet services, which inherently cross state lines, creates market uncertainty,” according to CNET.

………

But Pai’s FCC overstepped its authority when it issued that blanket order to preempt any and all current and future state regulation of net neutrality, a panel of judges at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled this month. The judges’ reasoning was simple: Pai’s FCC lost the power to stop all state laws when it abandoned its own regulatory authority.

“[I]n any area where the Commission lacks the authority to regulate, it equally lacks the power to preempt state law,” the judges’ ruling said.

The only thing that would make this better would be to see Pai frog marched out of the FCC offices in handcuffs.

Don’t Worry About the Russians Messing with the Elections

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been hosting informal talks and small, off-the-record dinners with conservative journalists, commentators and at least one Republican lawmaker in recent months to talk about issues like free speech and discuss partnerships.

The dinners, which began in July, are part of Zuckerberg’s broader effort to cultivate friends on the right amid outrage by President Donald Trump and his allies over alleged “bias” against conservatives at Facebook and other major social media companies. “I’m under no illusions that he’s a conservative but I think he does care about some of our concerns,” said one person familiar with the gatherings, which multiple sources have confirmed.

News of the outreach is likely to further fuel suspicions on the left that Zuckerberg is trying to appease the White House and stay out of Trump’s crosshairs. The president threatened to sue Facebook and Google in June and has in the past pressured the Justice Department to take action against his perceived foes.

“The discussion in Silicon Valley is that Zuckerberg is very concerned about the Justice Department, under Bill Barr, bringing an enforcement action to break up the company,” said one cybersecurity researcher and former government official based in Silicon Valley. “So the fear is that Zuckerberg is trying to appease the Trump administration by not cracking down on right-wing propaganda.”

If you aren’t worried about Mark Zuckerberg rat-f%$#ing the elections to cover his own ass, and his own fortune, you are either terminally stupid, comatose, or a liar.

This is, after all, the business that promulgated genocide and ethnic violence in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Kenya, South Sudan, etc. for a few bucks.

If We Enforced the Law, Half of San Jose Would be in Jail

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I am referring, or course to the recent revelations that Twitter collected users phone numbers for 2 factor authentication and then sold them to advertisers.

The Silicon Valley business models are increasingly indistinguishable from fraud and various forms or racketeering:

When some users provided Twitter with their phone number to make their account more secure, the company used this information for advertising purposes, according to a blog post from Twitter published on Tuesday.

This isn’t the first time that a large social network has taken information explicitly meant for the purposes of security, and then quietly or accidentally use it for something else entirely. Facebook did something similar with phone numbers provided by users for two-factor authentication, the company confirmed last year.

“We recently discovered that when you provided an email address or phone number for safety or security purposes (for example, two-factor authentication) this data may have inadvertently been used for advertising purposes, specifically in our Tailored Audiences and Partner Audiences advertising system,” Twitter’s announcement reads.

In short, when an advertiser using Twitter uploaded their own marketing list of email addresses or phone numbers, Twitter may have matched the list to people on Twitter “based on the email or phone number the Twitter account holder provided for safety and security purposes,” the post adds.

“This was an error and we apologize,” it read.

This wasn’t error, it was greed and a disdain for their users, who are, after all, not customers, but the protect that they sell to their customers, the advertisers.

About F%$#ing Time

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The Supreme Court has ruled that blind people can sue businesses for having websites that are inaccessible to the disabled.

This is good for 2 reasons.

The first is that it’s a place of business, and places of business are required to be accessible to the disabled. There should be no get out of jail card for, “Because………Inernet.”

The second is that if they offer alternate websites that are disability friendly, these will be far less likely to be orgies of poorly written JavaScript that take 5 minutes to load.

The Supreme Court cleared the way Monday for blind people to sue Domino’s Pizza and other retailers if their websites are not accessible.

In a potentially far-reaching move, the justices turned down an appeal from Domino’s and let stand a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling holding that the Americans With Disabilities Act protects access not just to restaurants and stores but also to the websites and apps of those businesses.

Guillermo Robles, who is blind, filed suit in Los Angeles three years ago and complained he had been unable to order a pizza online because the Domino’s website lacked the software that would allow him to communicate. He cited the ADA, which guarantees to people with a disability “full and equal enjoyment of the goods and services … of any place of public accommodations.”

1 GB/S for $60/Month

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A new community broadband network went live in Fort Collins, Colorado recently offering locals there gigabit fiber speeds for $60 a month with no caps, restrictions, or hidden fees. The network launch comes years after telecom giants like Comcast worked tirelessly to crush the effort. Voters approved the effort as part of a November 2017 ballot initiative, despite the telecom industry spending nearly $1 million on misleading ads to try and derail the effort. A study (pdf) by the Institute for Local Reliance estimated that actual competition in the town was likely to cost Comcast between $5.4 million and $22.8 million each year.

Unlike private operations, the Fort Collins Connexion network pledges to adhere to net neutrality. The folks behind the network told Ars Technica the goal is to offer faster broadband to the lion’s share of the city within the next few years:

………

The telecom sector simply loves trying to insist that community-run broadband is an inevitable taxpayer boondoggle. But such efforts are just like any other proposal and depend greatly on the quality of the business plan. And the industry likes to ignore the fact that such efforts would not be happening in the first place if American consumers weren’t outraged by the high prices, slow speeds, and terrible customer service the industry is known for. All symptoms of the limited competition industry apologists are usually very quick to pretend aren’t real problems (because when quarterly returns are all that matter to you, they aren’t).

The business model of Comcast, and Charter, and Verizon, etc. is to extract monopoly rents.

Providing better service, or serving customers, is simply not a part of their model.

Cuck Fomcast.

Rule 1 of Facebook: Facebook Lies

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Rule 2 of Facebook is see rule 1.

They lied about not doing location tracking on their users:

Facebook has been caught bending the truth again – only this time it has been forced to out itself.

For years the antisocial media giant has claimed it doesn’t track your location, insisting to suspicious reporters and privacy advocates that its addicts “have full control over their data,” and that it does not gather or sell that data unless those users agree to it.

No one believed it. So, when it (and Google) were hit with lawsuits trying to get to the bottom of the issue, Facebook followed its well-worn path to avoiding scrutiny: it changed its settings and pushed out carefully worded explanations that sounded an awful lot like it wasn’t tracking you anymore. But it was. Because location data is valuable.

Then, late on Monday, Facebook emitted a blog post in which it kindly offered to help users “understand updates” to their “device’s location settings.”

………

You may have missed the critical part amid the glowing testimony so we’ll repeat it: “… use precise location even when you’re not using the app…”

Huh, fancy that. It sounds an awful lot like tracking. After all, why would you want Facebook to know your precise location at all times, even when you’re not using its app? And didn’t Facebook promise it wasn’t doing that?

………

Well, yes it did, and it was being economical with the truth. But perhaps the bigger question is: why now? Why has Facebook decided to come clean all of a sudden? Is it because of the newly announced antitrust and privacy investigations into tech giants? Well, yes, in a roundabout way.

Surprisingly, in a moment of almost honesty which must have felt quite strange for Facebook’s execs, the web giant actually explains why it has stopped pretending it doesn’t track users: because soon it won’t be able to keep up the pretense.

“Android and iOS have released new versions of their operating systems, which include updates to how you can view and manage your location,” the blog post reveals.

That’s right, under pressure from lawmakers and users, both Google and Apple have added new privacy features to their upcoming mobile operating systems – Android and iOS – that will make it impossible for Facebook to hide its tracking activity.

So, Facebook is admitting that they lied only because continuing to lie is completely impossible.

F%$# Zuck.  Better yet, how about a serious investigation of allegation of fraud regarding false users and ad sales?

Tweet of the Day

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And the award for “Best Use of the Distracted Boyfriend” meme goes to:

In my intro stats class today, I told students the median is a ”resistant” measure of a distribution’s center & is often preferred to the mean in the case of salary data, etc. I jokingly referenced this meme and in the 15 mins’ break they had, a student created this MASTERPIECE! pic.twitter.com/TScgnV8dye

— Anna J. Egalite (@annaegalite) August 27, 2019