Correction: Last Month, We Called Zuckerberg a Moron. We Apologize. In Fact, He and Facebook Are a Fscking Disgrace
This hed is classic El Reg, and it is completely justified: We now know that when Facebook claimed that its bogus VPN app only hit about 5% minors, they really meant 10%.
I feel compelled to invoke the classic sports film Bull Durham, and call them c%$# suckers who suffer the eventual fate of the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
One of the subtexts of internet media has been repeated indications that the phenomenally detailed and extensive date that they use to sell is complete garbage.
It now appears that one of the central tenets of big data, detailed location data, is, “It’s a Ponzi scheme.”
When juxtaposed with things like Facebook’s bogus pivot to video*, I am increasingly convinced that the entire foundation of the modern internet data economy is complete garbage, where voluminous data serves to obscure rather than to reveal:
Advertisers are scrutinizing their data pools more than ever in programmatic advertising. In the latest installment of Confessions, in which we exchange anonymity for honesty, we spoke to an executive at a location data vendor who said most of what those companies sell is fraudulent.
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How much of the location data in the market is fake?
I met with a programmatic leader at one of the agency networks recently who asked my firm to help him verify the location data in the bid stream because they believe up to 80 percent or more of the lat-long data available there is fake. No one has stopped to think about where that data has come from and why a publisher would choose to sell it all to a vendor who is going to build a business on top of their data. What’s actually happening is these ad tech vendors are trying to pad out the limited data they already own with other data sets from competitive vendors or other unknown sources. Most reputable publishers would rather use their data across their own business than sell it to ad tech vendors, as the revenue potential is greater against their own content.Does the data even work?
Who goes into a shop with their phone in-hand looking at a publisher site? That’s not how people behave when they’re shopping. And yet there are location data vendors who are selling data sets of people who are more likely to go into a shop after seeing an ad. Additionally, there are players in market that are pumping exchanges with this fraudulent data to satisfy demand from advertisers who want to know that someone visited their store after seeing an ad.
Am I the only one who thinks that a vigorous (but fair) enforcement of federal and state fraud statutes would have half of Silicon Valley management in the dock?
*Facebook Overestimated Key Video Metric for Two Years (Wall Street Journal)
It appears that Facebook knows when you are ovulating, which is making that old Santa Clause* song a lot less creepy.
Have you noticed that every “mistake” Facebook makes involves them lying to you about what data they are collecting?
It never makes an error where they don’t collect something that they should have.
It’s almost like they are lying motherf%$#ers who have no respect at all for your privacy:
Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend. Other apps know users’ body weight, blood pressure, menstrual cycles or pregnancy status.
Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is being shared with someone else: Facebook Inc.
The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook, according to testing done by The Wall Street Journal. The apps often send the data without any prominent or specific disclosure, the testing showed.
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In the case of apps, the Journal’s testing showed that Facebook software collects data from many apps even if no Facebook account is used to log in and if the end user isn’t a Facebook member.
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Facebook said some of the data sharing uncovered by the Journal’s testing appeared to violate its business terms, which instruct app developers not to send it “health, financial information or other categories of sensitive information.” Facebook said it is telling apps flagged by the Journal to stop sending information its users might regard as sensitive. The company said it may take additional action if the apps don’t comply.
“We require app developers to be clear with their users about the information they are sharing with us,” a Facebook spokeswoman said.
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“This is a big mess,” said Patrick Jackson, Disconnect’s chief technology officer, who analyzed apps on behalf of the Journal. “This is completely independent of the functionality of the app.”
This is not an accident.
Every data breach sells more ads on Facebook for more money. Why should it be a surprise that these “accidents” keep happening?
Facebook has been slurping up user data, lying about it, crying crocodile tears and promising not to do it again, and then doing it again since Mark Zuckerberg was a Harvard undergrad.
They will act irresponsibly until they are compelled to by the courts.
*He knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you’re awake………
This may not sound like a big deal, but it also means that companies like Facebook and Google are liable as well:
The Illinois Supreme Court on Friday upheld consumers’ right to sue companies for collecting data like fingerprint or iris scans without telling them how it will be used — a ruling that could have widespread implications for tech giants like Facebook and Google.
The unanimous ruling came in a lawsuit filed against Six Flags Entertainment Corp. by the family of a teenager whose fingerprint data was collected in 2014 when he bought a season pass to Great America, the company’s Gurnee amusement park. The lawsuit alleged violation of the 2008 Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, which has gained attention as biometric data are increasingly used for tasks such as tagging photos on social media and clocking in at work.
The law requires companies collecting information such as facial, fingerprint and iris scans to obtain prior consent from consumers or employees, detailing how they’ll use the data and how long the records will be kept. It also allows private citizens to sue, while other states let only the attorney general bring a lawsuit.
Here’s why Facebook and Google care.
The Illinois Supreme Court on Friday ruled unanimously against Six Flags Entertainment Corp. in a lawsuit filed by the family of a teenager whose fingerprint data was collected in 2014 when he bought a season pass. (Mark Kodiak Ukena/Lake County News-Sun)
Ally MarottiContact ReporterChicago Tribune
Privacy PolicyThe Illinois Supreme Court on Friday upheld consumers’ right to sue companies for collecting data like fingerprint or iris scans without telling them how it will be used — a ruling that could have widespread implications for tech giants like Facebook and Google.
The unanimous ruling came in a lawsuit filed against Six Flags Entertainment Corp. by the family of a teenager whose fingerprint data was collected in 2014 when he bought a season pass to Great America, the company’s Gurnee amusement park. The lawsuit alleged violation of the 2008 Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, which has gained attention as biometric data are increasingly used for tasks such as tagging photos on social media and clocking in at work.
The law requires companies collecting information such as facial, fingerprint and iris scans to obtain prior consent from consumers or employees, detailing how they’ll use the data and how long the records will be kept. It also allows private citizens to sue, while other states let only the attorney general bring a lawsuit.
The opinion, which overturns an appeals court ruling in favor of Six Flags, has the potential to effect biometrics lawsuits playing out in courtrooms across the country. Defendants in those cases, including Facebook, have argued that individuals shouldn’t have the right to sue if no real damage occurred after they handed over their biometric information. But the state Supreme Court ruled that violation of the law is damage enough.
“This is no mere ‘technicality,’ ” as the appellate court suggested, Chief Justice Lloyd Karmeier wrote in the opinion. “The injury is real and significant.”
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The Illinois law is one of the strictest in the nation and has turned the state into a hotbed of lawsuits over alleged misuses of biometric data. Privacy experts say protecting that type of information is critical because, unlike a credit card or bank account number, it’s permanent.
Besides Facebook, companies across a wide range of industries — from other tech giants such as Google, Snapchat and Shutterfly to Chicago-based United Airlines, grocery company Roundy’s and InterContinental Hotels’ Kimpton chain — have faced allegations in Illinois involving improper use of biometrics.
Indeed.
There was already one bill being mooted to emasculate the Illinois law, and I expect to see more of that, along with federal court challenges, because, after all, there is money to be made and campaign donations to be made.
Sorry #DeleteFacebook, you never stood a chance.
Yesterday Bloomberg reported that the scandal-beset social media behemoth has inked an unknown number of agreements with Android smartphone makers, mobile carriers and OSes around the world to not only pre-load Facebook’s eponymous app on hardware but render the software undeleteable; a permanent feature of your device, whether you like how the company’s app can track your every move and digital action or not.
Bloomberg spoke to a U.S. owner of a Samsung Galaxy S8 who, after reading forum discussions about Samsung devices, found his own pre-loaded Facebook app could not be removed. It could only be “disabled,” with no explanation available to him as to what exactly that meant.
It means that your privacy is toast.
A Facebook spokesperson told Bloomberg that a disabled permanent app doesn’t continue collecting data or sending information back to the company, but declined to specify exactly how many such pre-install deals Facebook has globally.
How many times has Facebook promised this, and has been found to be lying through teeth?
OK, too tough. You run out of fingers, and toes.
How many times has Facebook promised this, and has been found to be lying through teeth ……… THIS YEAR?
Seriously, I highly recommend rooting your phone.
This Wired story about personal data collection has 32 trackers on it. pic.twitter.com/ZqXJE3uR0C— Nu Wexler (@wexler) December 29, 2018
The whole internet business model is f%$#ed up and sh%$.
The good folks at El Reg make a very good point about how Facebook’s recent problems may pose an existential threat, because, “No one likes a lying asshole.”
Increasingly, we are seeing people looking for ways out of Facebook, and this is why:
Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: Facebook, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and its COO Sheryl Sandberg, and its public relations people, and its engineers have lied. They have lied repeatedly. They have lied exhaustively. They have lied so much they’ve lost track of their lies, and then lied about them.
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By any measure, Facebook as an organization has knowingly, willingly, purposefully, and repeatedly lied. And two reports this week demonstrate that the depth of its lying was even worse than we previously imagined.
Before we dig into the lies, though, it’s worth asking the question: why? Why has the corporation got itself into this position, and why does it have to be dragged kicking and screaming, time and again, to confront what it already knows to be true?
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Mark Zuckerberg knows that all too well, and as internal emails handed over to the British Parliament and then published make clear, the top tier of Facebook was highly focused on that question of existential dread: how do we avoid becoming the next MySpace, Geocities, Google Plus, or Friendster?
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And the answer was the smart one: make yourself a part of the digital ecosystem. Yes, Facebook was completely reliant on its users, but everyone else wanted those users, too, and while it had them, the corporation needed to make sure it became enmeshed in as many other systems as possible.
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Facebook started cutting shadier and shadier deals to protect its bottom line. Its policy people started developing language that carefully skirted around reality; and its lawyers began working on semantic workarounds so that the Silicon Valley titan could make what looked like firm and unequivocal statements on privacy and data control, but in fact allowed things to continue on exactly as they had. What was being shared was not always completely clear.
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Well, you can do all that, and still Facebook will know where you are and sell that information to others.
To which the natural question is: how? Well, we have what we believe to be the technical answer. But the real answer is: because it lies. Because that information is valuable to it. Because that information forms the basis of mutually reinforcing data-sharing agreements with all the companies that could one day kill Facebook by simply shrugging their shoulders.
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What Zuckerberg didn’t factor into his strategic masterstroke, however, was one critical detail: no one likes a liar. And when you lie repeatedly, to people’s faces, you go from liar to lying asshole. And lying asshole is enough to make people delete your app.
And to think, only a year ago, people were mooting Mark Zuckerberg as a presidential candidate.
These documents have now been released to the public, and it is not pretty.
First, rather unsurprisingly, we have copious evidence of anti-competitive behavior, and second, it is now clwar that Facebook was a willing co-conspirator with Cambridge Analytica:
Facebook Inc. wielded user data like a bargaining chip, providing access when that sharing might encourage people to spend more time on the social network — and imposing strict limits on partners in cases where it saw a potential competitive threat, emails show.
A trove of internal correspondence, published online Wednesday by U.K. lawmakers, provides a look into the ways Facebook executives, including Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, treated information posted by users like a commodity that could be harnessed in service of business goals. Apps were invited to use Facebook’s network to grow, as long as that increased usage of Facebook. Certain competitors, in a list reviewed by Zuckerberg himself, were not allowed to use Facebook’s tools and data without his personal sign-off.
In early 2013, Twitter Inc. launched the Vine video-sharing service, which drew on a Facebook tool that let Vine users connect to their Facebook friends. Alerted to the possible competitive threat by an engineer who recommended cutting off Vine’s access to Facebook data, Zuckerberg replied succinctly: “Yup, go for it.”
In other cases Zuckerberg eloquently espoused the value of giving software developers more access to user data in hopes that it would result in applications that, in turn, would encourage people to do more on Facebook. “We’re trying to enable people to share everything they want, and to do it on Facebook,” Zuckerberg wrote in a November 2012 email. “Sometimes the best way to enable people to share something is to have a developer build a special purpose app or network for that type of content and to make that app social by having Facebook plug into it. However, that may be good for the world but it’s not good for us unless people also share back to Facebook and that content increases the value of our network.”
The emails were released by a committee of U.K. lawmakers investigating social media’s role in the spread of fake news. They provide more insight into how Facebook achieved its dominance of social media, and how it thought about the value of users’ data, which users provide to the company for free. Facebook, which runs a network of more than 2 billion people globally, has been interrogated by regulators about the reaches of its power, and the effect of that control on user privacy, the spread of misinformation, and global elections.
Lawmakers obtained the documents after compelling the founder of U.S. company Six4Three to hand them over during a business trip to London, despite the fact that they were under seal in a California court case.
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Damian Collins, head of the committee that released the documents, says the emails show that Facebook shut off access to data required by competing apps and conducted global surveys of the usage of mobile apps by customers possibly without their knowledge. He also said that a change to Facebook’s Android app policy that resulted in call and message data being recorded was deliberately made difficult for users to know about. He explained his rationale for releasing the emails in a tweet:
We don’t feel we have had straight answers from Facebook on these important issues, which is why we are releasing the documents.— Damian Collins (@DamianCollins) December 5, 2018
This is why you don’t f%$# with a parliamentary investigation when you run a multi-national corporation.
They will find a way to f%$# you.
I’m really not surprised at the revelations, though.
A cursory look at his history reveals that he’s a dishonest, narcissistic, and amoral rat-bastard.
This is just more of the same.
Facebook allows you to download all your data to your computer.
Lately, there have been so many people doing this that the hardware has been overwhelmed, and so the downloads are very slow.
As near as I can figure out, the only reason to download your data is if you are planning to delete your Facebook account.
Starting in 2010, Facebook started giving users the option to download their Facebook data, the collection of posts, photos, friends and even previous locations that Facebook has collected from you over the years.
Until this spring, when Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal became public, a lot of people didn’t even know that this data download was an option. There’s probably a good reason for that: Downloading your user Facebook data is the kind of thing you might do right as you’re deleting your Facebook account altogether. Facebook even prompts users to do this on the “Permanently Delete Account” screen.
So it’s interesting, then, that there are a lot of people trying to download their data from Facebook this month. So many, in fact, that it’s causing delays on Facebook’s end as the company tries to fulfill all those data requests.
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Not all download requests are from users preparing to delete their accounts, of course, though it’s certainly a common process. We also don’t know much about how common download requests actually are. How many people normally request their data? Is this spike in traffic rare? How does it compare to previous spikes? Facebook wouldn’t say.
The timing is interesting, though. It’s been one week since the New York Times published a bombshell report about how Facebook’s top executives handled the fallout of the 2016 presidential election, during which Russian trolls used the service to try and sow discord among voters. The NYT story led to a lot of other negative press for the company in the week since, and more calls for people to delete Facebook.
Why do I have the sense that Mark Zuckerberg right now is clenched so tight that he is mainlining fiber supplements.
Heh.
BTW, the procedure for downloading Facebook data is pretty straightforward:
There has been a ruling involving a small French advertising firm which could completely reshape online advertising.
Basically, the court ruled that consent to collect information could not be passed onto third parties though a contract under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations.
If this stands, it will completely reshape internet advertising, IMNSHO for the better:
A ruling in late October against a little-known French adtech firm that popped up on the national data watchdog’s website earlier this month is causing ripples of excitement to run through privacy watchers in Europe who believe it signals the beginning of the end for creepy online ads.
The excitement is palpable.
Impressively so, given the dry CNIL decision against mobile “demand side platform” Vectaury was only published in the regulator’s native dense French legalese.
Here is the bombshell though: Consent through the @IABEurope framework is inherently invalid. Not because of a technical detail. Not because of an implementation aspect that could be fixed. No.
You cannot pass consent to another controller through a contractual relationship. BOOM pic.twitter.com/xMlNHJTKwl— Robin Berjon (@robinberjon) November 16, 2018
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In plainer English, this is being interpreted by data experts as the regulator stating that consent to processing personal data cannot be gained through a framework arrangement which bundles a number of uses behind a single “I agree” button that, when clicked, passes consent to partners via a contractual relationship.
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The firm was harvesting a bunch of personal data (including people’s location and device IDs) on its partners’ mobile users via an SDK embedded in their apps, and receiving bids for these users’ eyeballs via another standard piece of the programmatic advertising pipe — ad exchanges and supply side platforms — which also get passed personal data so they can broadcast it widely via the online ad world’s real-time bidding (RTB) system. That’s to solicit potential advertisers’ bids for the attention of the individual app user… The wider the personal data gets spread, the more potential ad bids.
That scale is how programmatic works. It also looks horrible from a GDPR “privacy by design and default” standpoint.
This cuts to the core of the current advertising model, and Google and Facebook’s current dominance of online advertising.
It should get very interesting.
Employers in the UK are looking at chipping their employees.
Of course, we know employees have only the best interest at heat for their workers, but I’m thinking about marketing radio blocking gloves to these folks:
Britain’s biggest employer organisation and main trade union body have sounded the alarm over the prospect of British companies implanting staff with microchips to improve security.
UK firm BioTeq, which offers the implants to businesses and individuals, has already fitted 150 implants in the UK.
The tiny chips, implanted in the flesh between the thumb and forefinger, are similar to those for pets. They enable people to open their front door, access their office or start their car with a wave of their hand, and can also store medical data.
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The TUC [Trades Union Congress] is worried that staff could be coerced into being microchipped. Its general secretary Frances O’Grady said: “We know workers are already concerned that some employers are using tech to control and micromanage, whittling away their staff’s right to privacy.
“Microchipping would give bosses even more power and control over their workers. There are obvious risks involved, and employers must not brush them aside, or pressure staff into being chipped.”
This goes hand in hand with the plethora of surveillance cameras that make the UK the most surveilld society in the world.
This is creepy beyond belief.
No, I am not talking about the joke asking what one calls, “500 lawyers lying on the bottom of the ocean,” but rather the proposal by proposal by Senator Ron Wyden to throw tech execs in jail for violating our privacy.
Fines are just a cost of doing business, but if Zuckerberg or Page, or Brin or Pichai spend 24 (or 240) months behind bars, there will be a deterrent effect:
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has introduced a comprehensive new privacy bill he claims will finally address the lack of meaningful privacy protections for American consumers.
Wyden says his Consumer Data Protection Act is a direct response to the ocean of privacy scandals that have plagued the internet for the better part of the last decade.
The Senator’s proposal would dramatically beef up Federal Trade Commission authority and funding to crack down on privacy violations, let consumers opt out of having their sensitive personal data collected and sold, and impose harsh new penalties on a massive data monetization industry that has for years claimed that self-regulation is all that’s necessary to protect consumer privacy.
Wyden’s bill proposes that companies whose revenue exceeds $1 billion per year—or warehouse data on more than 50 million consumers or consumer devices—submit “annual data protection reports” to the government detailing all steps taken to protect the security and privacy of consumers’ personal information.
The proposed legislation would also levy penalties up to 20 years in prison and $5 million in fines for executives who knowingly mislead the FTC in these reports. The FTC’s authority over such matters is currently limited—one of the reasons telecom giants have been eager to move oversight of their industry from the Federal Communications Commission to the FTC.
It does not have a snow-ball’s chance in hell of passing, but putting prison on the table is the only way to reign these guys in.
Facebook Warned Wall Street That It’s Going to Spend a Lot of Money Fixing Problems That Can Never Be Fixed
Truth be told, I do think that many of these problems can be fixed, but since any meaningful action would involve the systematic dismemberment of Facebook, they ain’t the ones to do it.
It turns out that GM has been secretly spying on its customers’ radio listening habits:
On September 12th, GM’s director of global digital transformation Saejin Park gave a presentation to the Association of National Advertisers in which he described how the company had secretly gathered data on the radio-listening habits of 90,000 GM owners in LA and Chicago for three months in 2017, tracking what stations they listened to and for how long, and where they were at the time; this data was covertly exfiltrated from the cars by means of their built-in wifi.
The company says it never sold this data, but the presentation to the advertising execs was clearly designed to elicit bids for it. Toyota has promised not to gather and sell telematics data, but GM seems poised to create a market in data gathered by your car, which can listen to you, follow you, take pictures of you and your surroundings, and even gather data on which passengers are in the car at different times by tracking Bluetooth beacons from mobile devices.
This is unbelievably creepy, and the fact that no one is going to jail over this is even worse.
Google is spending a lot of time on its “Smart City” project in Toronot, but it appears rather likely that their promises of respecting resident privacy is a sham, since privacy expert Ann Cavoukian has abruptly resigned from the project, and issued a scathing letter stating that her concerns are being ignored:
Ontario’s former privacy commissioner has resigned from her consulting role at a company that is preparing to build a high-tech community at Toronto’s waterfront, citing concerns that a privacy framework she developed is being overlooked.
Ann Cavoukian resigned from her role from Google sister company Sidewalk Labs on Friday to “make a strong statement” she told Global News.
“I felt I had no choice because I had been told by Sidewalk Labs that all of the data collected will be de-identified at source,” she said.
But last Thursday, at a meeting, she said she found out that wasn’t the case with the company, which invested $40 million to develop technology for a downtown Toronto smart city project.
“Sidewalk said while they would commit to doing it, the other parties involved in these new entities they’ve created…they couldn’t make them do it,” she said.
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Former Blackberry co-CEO Jim Balsillie called the project “a colonizing experiment in surveillance capitalism.”
………“Your personal information, your privacy is critical. It is not just a fundamental human right. It forms the foundation of our freedom,” Cavoukian said.
Google is evil, and it, and Facebook, and the rest of the Silicon snake oil sales men who try to make their money off of your personal data, need to be regulated aggressively.
Google discovered that its programming tools for Google+ allowed advertisers and programmers to access private data.
They sat on this information for months, and then, when threatened with exposure announced that they will be shuttering Google Plus:
Google exposed the private details of almost 500,000 Google+ users and then opted not to report the lapse, in part out of concern disclosure would trigger regulatory scrutiny and reputational damage, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, citing people briefed on the matter and documents that discussed it. Shortly after the article was published, Google said it would close the Google+ social networking service to consumers.
The exposure was the result of a flaw in programming interfaces Google made available to developers of applications that interacted with users’ Google+ profiles, Google officials said in a post published after the WSJ report. From 2015 to March 2018, the APIs made it possible for developers to view profile information not marked as public, including full names, email addresses, birth dates, gender, profile photos, places lived, occupation, and relationship status. Data exposed didn’t include Google+ posts, messages, Google account data, phone numbers, or G Suite content. Some of the users affected included paying G Suite users.
Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai knew of the glitch and the decision not to publicly disclose it, the WSJ reported. Based on a two-week test designed to measure the impact of the API bugs before they were fixed, Google analysts believe that data for 496,951 users was improperly exposed. According to the report:
Google: That whole, “Don’t be evil,” thing is, “inoperative.”
BTW, I am aware of the irony present in my using a Google blogging platform, and (barely) monetizing said blog on Google™ Adsense™.
Facebook just applied for a patent to use secret television signals to turn on your phone’s microphone:
You may have seen the ads that Facebook has been running on TV in a full-court press to apologize for abusing users privacy. They’re embarrassing. And, it turns out, they may be a sign of things to come. Based on a recently published patent application, Facebook could one day use ads on television to further violate your privacy once you’ve forgotten about all those other times.
First spotted by Metro, the patent is titled “broadcast content view analysis based on ambient audio recording.” (PDF) It describes a system in which an “ambient audio fingerprint or signature” that’s inaudible to the human ear could be embedded in broadcast content like a TV ad. When a hypothetical user is watching this ad, the audio fingerprint could trigger their smartphone or another device to turn on its microphone, begin recording audio and transmit data about it to Facebook.
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Everything in the patent is written in legalese and is a bit vague about what happens to the audio data. One example scenario imagines that various ambient audio would be eliminated and the content playing on the broadcast would be identified. Data would be collected about the user’s proximity to the audio. Then, the identifying information, time, and identity of the Facebook user would be sent to the social media company for further processing.
In addition to all the data users voluntarily give up, and the incidental data it collects through techniques like browser fingerprinting, Facebook would use this audio information to figure out which ads are most effective. For example, if a user walked away from the TV or changed the channel as soon as the ad began to play, it might consider the ad ineffective or on a subject the user doesn’t find interesting. If the user stays where they are and the audio is loud and clear, Facebook could compare that seeming effective ad with your other data to make better suggestions for its advertising clients.
Facebook’s level of evil is beginning to resemble that of a Bond villain.
Mark Zuckerberg is a lying bastard.
Rule number two of Facebook is: See Rule One.
Case in point, WhatsApp, where the founders have walked away from Facebook to a personal cost of over a billion dollars after determining that Mark Zuckerberg had lied to them about preserving user privacy:
The Wall Street Journal published a bombshell story on Tuesday about what reporters Kirsten Grind and Deepa Seetharaman call “the messy, expensive split between Facebook and WhatsApp’s founders.” The dishy piece makes for great reading. (Do the multibillionaire founders of global communications platforms make time to grouse at each other about who gets to pick out office chairs? Yes. Yes, they do.) Behind the dishiness, however, is a very important story that pretty much clears up any doubt as to whether Mark Zuckerberg is a trustworthy man who keeps his promises—or a profit-obsessed machine who’s much stronger on greed than he is on morals.
By the time you’ve finished the WSJ piece, only two options seem possible: Either Zuckerberg is a liar, or he’s a liar with absolutely no concept of the sunk-cost fallacy. ………
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WhatsApp wasn’t an easy acquisition for Zuckerberg, because the two apps have very different founding principles. Koum, who grew up in Ukraine, believes deeply in privacy; Zuckerberg thinks that the more open and connected we are, the happier we all become. And so in order to acquire WhatsApp, Zuckerberg not only had to pay a lot of money and give up a board seat to Koum; he also had to make a lot of promises. Some of those promises were even enshrined in the acquisition agreement: If Facebook imposed “monetization initiatives” like advertising onto WhatsApp, its founders’ shares would vest immediately, and they could leave without suffering any kind of financial penalty.
Thus did WhatsApp retain exactly the independence that it had been promised—until it didn’t.
Today, it seems inevitable not only that advertising will make it onto WhatsApp, but also that the advertising in question will be targeted—which is to say that when you use the app, Facebook will know exactly who you are, where you live, and what kind of products you might be interested in buying. It’s a complete repudiation of WhatsApp’s founding principles, and makes a mockery of its end-to-end encryption.
What’s more, WhatsApp’s two founders both left hundreds of millions of dollars on the table, so keen were they to leave Facebook’s ad-friendly walls. (It turns out that their contractual right to being paid out in full would require them to sue for the money, and, according to the Journal, neither of them had the appetite for that.) Brian Acton resigned in September; Koum stayed on until the end of April. In leaving before November of this year, Acton gave up some $900 million; Koum gave up about $400 million. You need to be really unhappy at work if you’re willing to quit a job that’s effectively paying you some $60 million per month, and from which you basically can’t be fired.………
The only real question is: Did Zuckerberg know that he would break his promise as the words were coming out of his mouth, or was he talked into breaking his promise by Sandberg and other executives looking covetously at WhatsApp’s unmonetized user base? Either way, he has clearly failed a key leadership test. One more reason for him to go.
Felix Salmon, the author, is being far too charitable: Mark Zuckerberg is a liar, and he has been since his Harvard days.
No other founder of a similarly successful tech company has been as frequently sued or as frequently accused of dishonest and deceptive business practices, and no CEO has been caught out in a lie, and had to apologize as frequently.
This is not something that was driven by, “Sandberg and other executives.”
As the saying goes, a fish rots from the head.
As for his assertion that this is a reason for Facebook to dump him, the truth is that his lack of morals, when juxtaposed with is programmer bro affect, is actually his super power.
Security Stingray phone stalker tech used near White House, SS7 abused to steal US citizens’ data – just Friday things
Second worst stingray in history
(RIP Steve Irwin)
There is a certain class of joke where you laugh, and at the same time, make you feel ashamed for laughing.
This is just such a joke.
With digital traps in hospitals, there’s no need for personal injury lawyers to chase ambulances these days.
Law firms are using geofencing in hospital emergency rooms to target advertisements to patients’ mobile devices as they seek medical care, according to Philadelphia public radio station WHYY. Geofencing can essentially create a digital perimeter around certain locations and target location-aware devices within the borders of those locations. Patients who unwittingly jump that digital fence may see targeted ads for more than a month, and on multiple devices, the outlet notes.
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Last year, Healey’s office barred a digital firm from using geofencing in healthcare settings in the state after the firm was hired by a Christian pregnancy counseling and adoption agency to use digital perimeters to target ads to anyone who entered reproductive health facilities, including Planned Parenthood clinics. The goal was to make sure “abortion-minded women” saw certain ads on their mobile devices as they sat in waiting rooms. The ads had text such as “Pregnancy Help” or “You Have Choices,” which, if clicked, would direct them to information about abortion alternatives.
Healey equated the move to digital harassment and successfully claimed that it violated the state’s consumer protection act.
Still, the use of geofencing in hospitals for marketing is not necessarily illegal overall, and law firms and marketing agencies remain eager to put up their fences. Healthcare-related geo-targeting is occurring across the country, including in Tennessee and California. Bill Kakis, who runs the New York-based marketing firm Tell All Digital, told WHYY it was one of the fastest-growing parts of his business. He was recently hired by personal injury law firms in the Philadelphia area to target patients, for instance.
There are two obvious conclusions about this, and they are that the new European privacy regulations, the GPDR has two problems, it’s not strong enough, and that it is not here.