Category: Privacy

The ever-changing dangers of the ever-changing Internet.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is sometimes heralded as “the ‘Magna Carta’ of the internet.” It was passed in 1996 to provide websites with incentive to delete pornography, but it has since evolved. It is now effectively a shield that websites use to protect them from responsibility for all sorts of activity on their platforms, from illegal gun sales to discriminatory ads.

This week The Markup reporter Sara Harrison examines the U.S. law that enables both the good and the bad of internet speech, and explores how the law might be reformed to meet the new challenges of the ever-changing Internet.

Excellent article.

Zuck. The research. And his decision.

A stunning story in Wall Street Journal on May 26, 2020 reported that an internal study by Facebook’s own researchers in 2018 revealed that the social media company’s algorithms not only did not bring people together, but in fact were driving people apart.

“Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from a 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it warned, Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.”

Many of Facebook’s own experts agreed. Their research showed that:

● extremist groups were growing on Facebook and Facebook’s algorithms were responsible for the growth

● 64% of all extremist groups that join Facebook are due to Facebook’s own “recommendation tools” pushing extremist connections and growth

● a disproportionate amount of the bad behavior (fake news, spam, clickbait inauthentic users) came from a small pool of hyperpartisan users

● in the U.S. Facebook saw a larger infrastructure of accounts and publishers on the far right than on the far left.

That meant that if Facebook adjusted its algorithms to not promote “bad behavior” that would result in disproportionately limiting right wing actors. When that became apparent, Mr. Zuckerberg lost his enthusiasm for changing Facebook’s algorithms to mitigate extremist clicks. Two reasons: (1) he needed right wing support in Washington and didn’t want to alienate the party in power, and (2) reducing clicks was tantamount to leaving money (a lot of money) on the table. Zuckerberg was loath to do either of these things.

The bottom line: Facebook had effectively monetized nastiness, divisiveness, and rage. It paid, and it paid big. And his friend in the White House had just given big companies like Facebook a whopping tax break in 2o17. Zuckerberg didn’t want to do anything to upset the status quo.

The result: Zuckerberg shelved the research. What’s a little divisiveness in the world when there is so much money to be made from it?

Facebook and Its Secret Policies

Below is an article from today’s The New York Times by Shira Ovide who writes the On Tech column for them.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Facebook had studied for two years whether its social network makes people more polarized.

Researchers concluded that it does, and recommended changes to the company’s computerized systems to steer people away from vilifying one another. But the Journal reports that the company’s top executives declined to implement most of the proposed changes.

Fostering open dialogue among people with different viewpoints isn’t easy, and I don’t know if Facebook was right in shelving ideas like creating separate online huddles for parents arguing about vaccinations. But I do want to talk over two nagging questions sparked by this article and others:

Continue reading “Facebook and Its Secret Policies”

In a new era, new challenges and new choices for how we want to live . . .

“The decades of economic injustice and immense concentrations of wealth that we call the Gilded Age succeeded in teaching people how they did not want to live. That knowledge empowered them to bring the Gilded Age to an end, wielding the armaments of progressive legislation and the New Deal. Even now, when we recall the lordly ‘barons’ of the late nineteenth century, we call them ‘robbers.’

 “Surely the Age of Surveillance Capitalism will meet the same fate as it teaches us how we do not want to live. It instructs us in the irreplaceable value of our greatest moral and political achievements by threatening to destroy them It reminds us that shared trust is the only real protection from uncertainty. It demonstrates that power untamed by democracy can only lead to exile and despair.   . . . it is up to us to use our knowledge, to regain our bearings, to stir others to do the same, and to found a new beginning. In the conquest of nature, industrial capitalism’s victims were mute. Those who would try to conquer human nature will find their intended victims full of voice, ready to name danger and defeat it. This book is intended as a contribution to that collective effort.”

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, (Public Affairs, 2019).

Surveillance Capitalism, the definition

Sur-veil-lance Cap-i-tal-ism, n.

1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales; 2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modifications; 3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history; 4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy; 5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth; 6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy; 7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty; 8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above; an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, (Public Affairs, 2019).

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

To help you understand your new world environment, this is essential reading. It can be heavy lifting sometimes. But stick with it. It’s extremely enlightening. And I found it to be a sobering message about the unprecedented challenges we face as citizen of this American democracy, and our new world of global surveillance. Highly recommended.

The necessity of “thinking differently”.

Here are a couple of new articles from the Opinion page of today’s New York Times that are worth our serious consideration. As I’ve mentioned before, if you want to get a good sense for how the Times‘ readership feels about an article, go to their comments section and click on Reader’s Picks. You might be surprised.

Time to Break the Silence on Palestine, Michelle Alexander, which explores an old controversy that doesn’t seem to budge from it’s firmly implanted beginnings. Or does it? The reader’s comments seem to signal a changing perspective on some fronts.

If 5G Is So Important, Why Isn’t It Secure?, Tom Wheeler. We’re at another “new beginning” with the Internet, and as Wheeler points out, we’re about to make the same old mistakes with a great new opportunity.

The Facebook Dilemma

The following is from an NPR Frontline notice I received as a subscriber. I know I’ve got a lot of posts recently hammering Facebook, but it seems that finally a lot of people are waking up to the platform’s dangers. There are good things about FB, undeniably. But nothing is ALL good. Facebook’s dark side has been at work far too long without any questioning from anyone. Now the time for asking questions has come. And it’s long overdue. 

The promise of Facebook was to create a more open and connected world. But from the company’s failure to protect millions of users’ data, to the proliferation of so-called “fake news” and disinformation in the U.S.and across the world, mounting crises have raised the question: How has Facebook’s historic success as a social network brought about real-world harm?

With Facebook under continued scrutiny, we’re releasing the newest installment of The FRONTLINE Transparency Project: An interactive version of our acclaimed, two-hour investigation, The Facebook Dilemma, that allows you to experience the film in a different way and explore extended, in-depth, on-the-record interviews with nearly 30 sources from the making of the documentary.

Those sources include 13 current or former Facebook employees — all speaking on the record. Among them are: 

What they and the other Facebook insiders we interviewed have to say constitutes one of the most in-depth collections to date of what it’s like inside Facebook. And, our interactive enables you to click, see, save, and share scores of key quotes from sources like these in their original context – and to share direct links to any quote within an extended interview by highlighting the text.

In addition to Facebook insiders, this new installment of The FRONTLINE Transparency Project includes extended interviews with other key figures, including: President Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale, who says, “I mean, it’s kind of like a gift” of recent changes to Facebook’s political advertising policies; and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who tells us, “I think there does need to besome oversight of what’s out there on social media.”

This project is the latest example of FRONTLINE’s ongoing commitment to journalistic transparency, and is an interactive window into how the company has handled challenges over the years — as well as into how our documentary itself took shape. We’re opening up our reporting, and making the source material that goes into building our journalism not just available, but easily navigable and sharable.

We hope you’ll check out the interactive version of The FacebookDilemma today — and tell us what you think. Send a note to frontline@pbs.org to share your feedback.

Thank you for exploring our journalism .

A Common Sense Website and Movement

I recently came across this website (Freedom From Facebook) and looked into its mission and organizers. I think it’s a worthy organization to pay attention to if you’re concerned at all about your data on the Internet. Don’t take your privacy for granted. It’s YOUR data Facebook is monetizing, and we need to be informed about what they’re harvesting, and how they’re using it. How else can we judge if the trade-off is worth it?

Also, you should go to this page on the website for a step-by-step guide for getting the maximum privacy from your Facebook use. You don’t have to give them everything!

By the way, the New York Times has been doing an admirable job of exposing the egregious misuse of power by Facebook.

How the “ruling class” frame their assets to the rest of us.

We’re all familiar now with Mark Zuckerberg’s unceasing and hypocritical paen to the sacred interactions of loyal Face Book users, and how their interactions on his platform will make their lives so much better. Well, I recently came across the following tweet, it’s origin long-lost to repetition, that gives the lie to Zuck’s magnanimity:

“‘Community’ is a hell of a euphemism for his database.”

For further reading on this subject of “the ruling class”, here’s an article/transcript of a podcast interview with Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.

The CRISIS of Election Security

As the midterms approach, America’s electronic voting systems are more vulnerable than ever. Why isn’t anyone trying to fix them?

I suggest you read this excellent article in today’s (2018-09-30) New York Times. In light of the Russian meddling in our 2016 Presidential elections, this issue–the security of our voting process–which I’m sure most of us have taken for granted for all of our lives, is more important now than ever. In fact taking just about anything for granted has become a very costly habit in this second decade of the 21st Century.

The author of the article, Kim Zetter, has covered cybersecurity for more than a decade. She is the author of “Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon.”

I urge you to read this article. Faith in the integrity of our voting process is imperative if we want to live under a truly democratic government.

“You have no privacy . . . get over it.”

These words spoken by Scott McNealy, the founder and CEO of Sun Microsystems, way back in 1999, open an article by Sue Halpern in the new issue of the New York Review of Books, in which she reviews four new books on privacy.

The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America
by Sarah E. Igo
Harvard University Press, 569 pp., $35.00

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech
by Cyrus Farivar
Melville House, 281 pp., $27.99

Beyond Abortion: Roe v. Wade and the Battle for Privacy
by Mary Ziegler
Harvard University Press, 383 pp., $45.00

Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies
by Woodrow Hartzog
Harvard University Press, 366 pp., $35.00

Because every intimate aspect of our lives is being collected and absorbed and processed and monetized by the digital services that have become essential to our modern lives, the issue of our privacy will continue to be increasingly important to us. As we learn the dangers of the digital media we’ve embraced, hastily, greedily, and without fully understanding it,  we are only now realizing how much of ourselves we have freely given to them, often in return for nothing more than amusement.

Halpern says, “A survey recently published in The Atlantic found that ‘78.8 percent of people said they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the privacy of their information on social media, and 82.2 percent said they self-censor on social media.’”

Read this article, and the books Halpern discusses. Surveillance tech owns us. Only by understanding what we’ve done to ourselves through ignorance and unquestioning gullibility, can we hope to correct our mistakes