
F8 ?
More like one big F-U !
Facebook on Tuesday kicked off its F8 developer conference in San Jose, California, only one month after dialing back the data available to developers and after nixing rumored plans to debut a smart speaker housing an AI assistant. The platform clampdown followed revelations earlier this year about Cambridge Analytica, a data …
"Hello, we're Facebook, and we've decided to use an abbreviation for our name that, coincidentally, is pronounced 'fate'. Have we mentioned that we're run by megalomaniacs?"
(Obviously the correct abbreviation would be f6k, by analogy with i18n and the like. Then we could write things like "that's f6k'd up" and "oh, you've been f6k'd".)
Facebook keeps talking like the privacy and security threat is from outside entities, and can be solved with greater vigilance. That's delusional. The biggest threat to privacy and security is from Facebook itself, and I haven't seen even a single initiative from them to address that.
The biggest threat to privacy and security is a bunch of users sharing everything about their daily life - where they are, what, where and when they eat, shop, run, cycle, holiday, etc. - with a bunch of other users whom they call friends, even though they have never met them and don't know what they look like. They clearly don't care about their, or their contacts', privacy - or if they do, and they are thinking rationally, they are trading it for the utility of the free app. If they cared about privacy and security they'd stop publishing their lives online.
I've never used FB. I know what my friends look like, and, unless it's pretty f*****g spectacular, I don't care what they had for tea tonight or what they bought on Amazon. If they want to get in touch with me then they either have to wait till I see them in the pub (preferred), phone, SMS or mail me - and it seems to work OK.
"The biggest threat to privacy and security is a bunch of users sharing everything about their daily life"
Well, sure, but that's a bit different. Everyone has the right to choose for themselves what level of privacy and security they desire.
The problem when it comes to Facebook is that FB users don't really understand how invasive Facebook itself is. That's the main thing I fault FB for. They should be putting up a big red warning on their page about what's happening to all that data.
one that can get me a whole lot of snatch nevermind...
On a related note, maybe this is Zuck just reacting to the tendency of millenials to do EVERYTHING via a 'phone app'. Next will be a plethora of safe-sex adaptors, one type for each of the "8 genders". With a USB micro-B adaptor for your phone. It will re-define the meaning of the words "data slurp".
coat, please.
Facebook absolutely cares about making money from your privacy.
Easy to fix. STOP COLLECTING ANYTHING. Just do ads like newspapers, magazines, TV and billboards. The so called targeting is mostly just fake snake oil to convince advertisers to use the platform.
Also independent audits. Figures for views, clicks and users are only Facebook's claim. No proper independent auditing. Frankly not believable. They were caught out on videos.
especially now, with the "dating app" concept. So it harvests your personal info based likes, dislikes, and visits+interaction with web pages and links related to ANYTHING with the 'F' icon and tracking script+cookies+whatever-else
"they" determine FOR you who is compatible, thus potentially doing a kind of 'genetic engineering' on the human race. In a few generations, EVERYONE is programmed to do what Faece-bitch manipulates them into doing, thus LOCKING IN the dependency on "Big Faece-bitch" running every aspect of your life, tracking your every moment on or off-line, and so on.
"Big Brother" was a typo, along with "1984".
(that's my new conspiracy theory)
Good conspiracy theory there.... I'm just not sure how much is theory and how much is reality though. Hell, even a non-FB user is tracked any more. I'll know if the conspiracy is out of the genie bottle if I suddenly get emails about "perfect matches". At which point... I'm thinking I'll nuke the computer and move to the woods. It'll be too late to nuke it from space.
"Big Brother" was a typo, along with "1984".
Well, you're right about the latter. Orwell insisted on spelling the title out (Nineteen Eighty-Four), because he thought that would help make it clear that it wasn't a prediction about a particular year, just a near-future speculation. Publishers, unfortunately, were more interested in helping generations of gormless students identify the novel on the shelf.
More to the point: As any number of people have pointed out, in the European-style democracies our present era has more in common with dystopias-by-consent like the one Huxley portrayed in Brave New World than Orwell's autocratic regimes. (Of course some other countries, or conditions for particular populations in many countries, are decidedly more on the Orwellian side.) Most people seem quite eager to participate in their own surveillance.
And any number of people have mulled over why that's the case, from the Frankfort School (Benjamin, Adorno, et alia), to the Post-Structuralists (particularly later Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and their followers), to politically-minded Lacanian theorists like Zizek, to any number of political scientists, philosophers of politics, psychologists, economists, etc. But it all comes down, more or less, to the observation that in general people receive psychological rewards for yielding control and privacy.1
And persuasion is much more economically efficient than compulsion. That's why capitalism beat slavery, as Eric Williams explained.2
1Substantive rewards are just proxies for psychological rewards - people care about goods because they make them feel good.)
2Though CLR James claims he gave Williams the idea.
Article: "Facebook briefly went a bit nuts and asked people under every single post if said text or image was 'hate speech.'"
Let's mark everything that we disagree with as "Hate Speech", on BOTH sides of the political isle, just ot make sure that the entire process is obfuscated into non-existence. [well, P.C. tries to do that with everything said by conservatives already... so time for some 'tit for tat' I say]
there won't be any chance of accidentally matching a Trump voter and Hillary voter!
It's sad to realize that there is truth in those words. I can understand it being desirable to keep passionate supporters of either one apart, but as voters people get just a binary choice (OK maybe there are other options but generally it's either one devil or the other), and so a difference in voting is not necessarily a significant difference in outlook.
We don't really need any more division in society, but I guess that's where we're headed.
Of course, a dating app will help to reduce them... <G>
Anyway "ten of thousands"? I guess they are in the order of tens of millions, if not hundreds.
But the adding of this kind feature means new registrations are slowing down, so they have to resort to scraping the barrel, luring in the most desperate people.
That's one advantage of living in space, facebook probably won't run on the ancient hardened processors (the best of them appears to be a PowerPC board) used out there*.
*For a while at least, until some utter Rimmer codes a Facebook client in assembler - at which point it'll be hunt the facehugger.
So whilst Facebook has lots of issues around privacy (and, frankly it's whole business model as a free content ad network) I actually think Facebook Dating could be quite interesting.
Given they have more data on their users than most other places, their systems will "know" you, your behaviours and interests better than, say Match.com or OKstupid (although the latter's tech is quite impressive).
In particular, they gather data about you which you don't specifically supply so what you might think of as "subconscious" data from your browsing habits.
Whilst trust is a massive issue here, for me the really interesting thing is: how is their algorithmic approach going to work? Could they do this with AI?
Having tried most forms of digital dating, I find the real world much more interesting but I will be fascinated to see how this pans out.
Seriously?
It will be no different to any other popular dating app, especially considering it will be used by die hard Social Media addicts that only care about apearances...
In other words, it will be men pay to use and swipe right to everyone, and the women swipe right to the guys with the best paying jobs....
Dear The Register,
If you are to continue writing about Facebook, Twitter et al., and how they abuse privacy, could you please remove the social media buttons (aka ‘data gatherers’) from your site. Otherwise it appears that you are just spouting outraged hot air, and if I want to read that, there’s the Daily Mail and Evening Standard sites ready and waiting.
"Inspect Element" suggests the SM buttons are just images with ordinary links, not the "recommended" Facebook et al scripts the privacy scrapers offer. That's fine as you don't have to click on them. I also used to use "NoScript", but now on desktop and mobile I use uMatrix. Probably more effective than AV software on 3rd party scripts exploiting zero-day vulns too.
I still remember when Google mocked dating sites years ago, where a female user created a single, trustful profile, while a male user created ten wildly different fake ones... but I assume Zuckerberg is fine with that, he will boast about the 12 billion users FB now has... just, about 90% will be men. The others, female bots. Did he bought Ashley Madison data and developers?
"We need to take a broader view of our responsibility," he said. "It's not enough to just build powerful tools. We need to make sure they're used for good."
'We should have taken a much broader view of our responsibilities', he should have said.
'It's not enough to have built powerful tools. We should have thought it through and considered the consequences for our users, not only our clients.'
But of course he didn't give a rat's arse until it looked as though it would cost him money.
FB : Dear ******* Bloggs, following your recent visit to the local STD clinic and diagnosis, commiserations by the way, we have found potential matches for you that also attended with similar results. See, you have something in common.
We have kindly provided targeted adverts for pharmaceutical products that may alleviate your symptoms.
And may we suggest a soundtrack? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnM3Iq977JU
Or
FB : Dear ******* Bloggs, if you really are that sadistic bastard that your many posts would suggest you are, then here are a number of matches that recently tested clear.
FB (aka 'The Zuck') seems to be deliberately ignoring the opinions of at least a proportion of us.
This is just another attempt at obfuscation.
Zuck must have been taking lessons on how to generate its own version of reality which is totally divorced from reality. in other words, their own RDF.
Perhaps he needs a spell in the Tower to make him see the real world.