Ah, LinkedIn
Your corporate director from 4 jobs ago’s new direct report is proud to announce that his daughter has accepted a prestigious internship.
Yay.
As August and summer in the northern hemisphere draw to a close, Elon Musk's Twitter is making several changes to its platform, including a privacy policy update noting that it plans to begin collecting biometric data and employment information from the people still using the site, if provided. The website's latest privacy …
I became aware of LinkedIn's data mining ages ago, which is why I don't use it. Also substantially cuts down on people contacting me to ask if I'm not interested in enriching them by changing jobs.
I also set up a few fake accounts, and it's interesting to see what kind of people are trying to build 'LinkedIn' capital by trying to become associated with just about anyone - given that my membership of some companies was 100% fictitious the link requests were dead giveaways..
"It's been full of shit since day one."
I used to get people (with names fitting a particular part of the world that wasn't a first world country) sending me requests to join LinkedIn, offers of things I might be interested in doing in countries I'd need to Google to find out where the hell they were).
I contacted LinkedIn to ask if they could stop my email being spammed with this rubbish. They told me that it could be managed if I signed up and created a profile.
I took a third option. I threw together some code to detect if the header said it was from LinkedIn and if it was, bounced the message back to their published support address, and deleted the local copy.
I have no idea how long it took to get resolved or if they ever tried to get in touch. There's no more junk from them (using a different mail system these days), but it's been many years. Whatever, to hell with them.
Musk said over the weekend he considers LinkedIn's "cringe level … so high that I just can't bring myself to use it."
So, as to not be outdone, Muskrat intends to raise Xwatter's cringe level to a level higher than that of this potential competitor.
One could surmise, then, that there is a minimum "cringe level" that a site must maintain for Muskrat to be comfortable to use it.
"I think you will find that Musk has a great deal of expertise in the field of obtaining precious gems by putting something black under extreme pressure. Why, it's the family business."
Annoyingly, it's not possible to upvote this more than once. It is brilliant, subtle, takes a slight degree of background knowledge to get the meaning - well played sir!
Won't stop impersonation. Fake IDs are easy enough to create, especially when you would only be emailing a JPEG of that ID rather than letting them hold a physical ID that might have some anti-counterfeiting measures like holograms.
So it won't stop the fraudsters, but it will compromise privacy for millions when that database of IDs inevitably leaks out from understaffed Xitter (pronounced "shitter")
Now wondering if he realises that not every government uses the same ID as the rest - will we all have to get a US driver's licence if we want to use X (well, I say "want"...)?
He can't be expecting to require anything as standardised as a passport, think what that would do to the existing userbase.
The US has 50 different state driver's licenses, there are also passports, military IDs, government employee IDs, untold thousands of school IDs... Nevermind all the different types once you get outside US borders. They can't expect passports since many US citizens don't have one because they never leave the country (especially the types who really like the rightward tilt Elon has brought to the platform) They can't expect a driver's license / non driver's ID because people who don't drive often don't have one and almost no one under 16 (legal driving age in most states) would have one, so that requirement would almost be a "you must be 16 to use Xitter". So that means they have to accept the school IDs that a 15 year old, or a 20 year old college student in NYC who never learned to drive, would have.
It will obviously be a pretty cursory examination. I would bet they automate it, once they train it on a particular ID type it would be pretty easy for an automated system to extract the necessary info via OCR. Maybe do some sort of half assed image recognition if they ask for a picture of you holding the ID.
That's why I say faking it will be easy. The fake won't need to have the kind of quality that would be required to fool a cop who pulls you over, or even a bartender checking IDs to see if you're old enough to drink. Heck you probably don't even need to make a physical ID, just the image of one you email. And if necessary, use Photoshop or similar to scale and paste over the top of the your real ID in a photo of you "holding the ID".
I haven't looked, but I would be shocked if there are not apps out there (at least on Android) that generate fake IDs.
That's actually a solved problem - provided you're either US based or don't mind your ID leaking to a nation with less ability to protect your privacy than a colander can hold water (or interest in that).
Europe DID have an ID check solution which was entirely contained in Europe (Germany) called 4Stop, but as they were bought in 2022 by US based Jumio I would now not touch them with a barge pole if you're a European user or company as that imported way too many legal bear traps and risks.
Yes, I know there's a new thing to replace Privacy Shield (forgot it's name as I'm pre-coffee), but given the enthusiasm by which companies and dodgy agencies overseas seem to ignore the associated conditions for, well, profit, I do not expect that to survive that long either - the fundamental, unsolved problem is simply that the legal systems of the US and the EU differ too much, and I don't see either change.
Anyway, back to the topic, even IF it was safe to use, I don't see Musk go anywhere near it:
(1) the dodgy people he enables would no longer visit, so he'd have even fewer users
(2) it would cost money, and Twitter X is already deep in the hole, and his *cough* "management" *cough* is only accelerating the decline..
May? Like an alcoholic may have a drink or two?
I've also noticed a serious uptick in user data swapping across the board. I've got blockers and cache clearing out the wazoo and I still see certain things targeted at me from my recent browsing. On completely different websites. This is not coincidence.
Disabling the "blocking" option is one of Musks few good ideas.
You can still "mute", and "blocks" will be converted to "mute". Mute stops you seeing their posts, notifications, or their ability to send you private messages.
The only thing extra that "block" adds is stopping the user read YOUR posts, but on an unauthenticated system where anyone can create extra accounts, or even browse without logging in, that's useless, and just provides a false sense of security to those less knowledgeable of how things work.
As it stands, if you REALLY want to restrict someone from seeing your posts (and this ignores people cut/pasting, or screenshots etc.) you need to restrict the tweet to your followers - that is this case now, and would be the case without the "block" function.
Thanks for the reply.
No, it doesn't affect private messages - they are still "blocked" - in fact, unless you've set it liberally, private messages are enabled for followers only by default already.
So, I repeat, to the obvious "security experts" on here who downvoted without replying, why is replacing block with mute an issue, when mute basically does exactly the same thing, but without the pretence of actually blocking someone?
> Biometric data would be extracted from images shared with X, the platform said.
"X regrets we can not verify your account as you do not have the little piggy eyes and heavy eyebrow ridges we expect of our users. Plus it looks like you actually have a real forehead."
I *so* want to see the Pentagon access control in Monsters vs Aliens implemented..
:)
I still have my Twitter account, mainly because to delete it requires effort on my part, so it sits there, occupying some of his hard disk space. As soon as he requires some of my cash or some of my data to keep using it, I'll finally cross the threshold and dump the account, assuming he doesn't dump it first.
My initial knee-jerk reaction to that line was "lol, it's really not".
A brief Google search session seems to bear that out. Depending on what source you look at, Twitter has something like 350 to 450 million monthly active users. Assuming they are all genuine (stop giggling in the back there), that's somewhere between 1/18th and 1/23rd of the global population (approx 8 billion) - hardly an address book.
Even compared to other social media users, it doesn't stack up. Facebook apparently (by the likewise medium of a quick Google search) has about 3 billion monthly active users - 3 eighths of the world population (again, assuming all are genuine).
Musk's dreams and fantasies of a Chinese style portal/hub of services creeps some people right out.
Who would trust a petulant boy-child with such control over their life?
Don't answer that, I already know that billions of "free-thinking" people are just _waiting_ to kneel in subservience like the Chinese do to Xi, right? The rest of us just have it all wrong...
"In analyzing each image uploaded to Twitter to determine whether it contains nudity, Twitter actively collects, captures and/or otherwise obtains; stores; and/or makes use of the biometric identifiers and biometric information of any individual included in each photo," the suit alleges, in violation of Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act.
X makes clear in its new privacy policy that such data will only be collected with user consent,
Ok, let's assume some xithead takes my picture and posts it on xitter. There is no bloody way to get consent from the individual on the picture, user consent has sweet fanny adams to do with that!
Bah. Eejit.
They will have the consent of the user - who may even be the copyright holder - but nobody has ever said anything about the consent of the individuals who appear in the picture.
Can you think of any of these social media thingies that ever said anything other than asking the consent of their user, aka the uploader?
Remember all the fuss about Facebook, when they first allowed anyone to upload photos and then tag all the faces shown?
Whether or not this will satisfy Illinois is another matter, but Elon Says "You did read the T&Cs, 'cos you clicked that you did."
Or, better yet, implied consent because the Ts&Cs changed since your "read" and ticked them? Personally, I find changes to Ts&Cs are just more "dark patterns" in that they are humungously large and the change announcement invariably just leads you to the entire document. Since you have to tick a box to agree to them, they should be forced to record the exact date and time of that action and then when changes are announced, only show what changed with the option to read the whole thing again if you choose. At least that way you have a little more information by being able to see the changes and not have to memorise a 400 page document so can try to identify the very few but possibly game-changing differences.
I note that the financial services watchdog in the UK has done so in that if there are changes to my banks Ts&Cs, they send a letter/email stating only the changes, marked by paragraph and clause numbers and stating exactly what has changed, so it is possible.
I used to work with a woman who's children expressly forbid her from posting any pictures of their children on Facebook (or any social media). She went ahead, and did it anyway. Yes, she's one of those Facebook drones.
Here children got very angry, and she was complaining to everyone in the office, trying to justify her actions. She made comments like "what's wrong with these people".
I told her in front of the whole office: "If they were my kids, you would never see your grandchildren again, for a stunt like that". I went on: "They expressly forbid you from posting pictures on social media, and you did it anyway. And, now you have the nerve to complain? What the hell is wrong with YOU".
This woman was a real piece of work...
I've often considered copywriting my name (when referring to me) as well as my image, just so I can go after them should my image or my name (when referring to me) is found on these sites. Would make for intereating case law, especially since celebrities have already paved the way here.
He didn't xeet, he tweeted a tweet. When they start serving all their content from x domains and not twitter domains then maybe it's time to start calling it X. Currently X is just a graphic on twitter.com, while other content is served from twimg.com. There's no X in either of those domains.
He's super rich and he can do what he likes.
We don't all have to go along with him.
《analyzing each image uploaded to Twitter to determine whether it contains nudity,》
Analyzing images to detect pictures of unclothed humans presumably.
Would Botticelli's Nascita di Venere (The Birth of Venus) trigger the filter I wonder? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Birth_of_Venus_detail_-_Venus.jpg
Posting any image of a renaissance painting featuring putti would probably be flagged a child exploitation material.
I have to wonder what the "features" that must be exposed to trigger the nudity filter. Two whole nipples and a flash of pudenta? Seems a bit like strip poker.
The whole Xitty cesspit is probably best avoided.