The tech revolution — hurting or helping?

Hugh MacLeod

Well that depends on the eye of the beholder, the person who just was trolled, spammed, hacked or they had their private data stolen, because they trusted Facebook or Google or Twitter or Tumblr or Instagram and all of the others who exist and don’t exist yet.

When you have a service, which is free to the user and the prime objective is to get as many eyeballs as possible on the platform, so they can parade it in front of advertisers, you have just created a toxic recipe for disaster.

Why?

Because now the same platform that has billions of users, becomes very attractive to governments at large. Ever wondered why not one single government in the world has taken any serious action against Facebook? Because they all want access to the public data. I have sat through presentations where cyber security professionals can walk all over Facebook in nano-seconds and deliver the kind of intelligence on people they would have only dreamt of years ago. Mark Zuckerberg will be loved and hated always.

Loved because now criminals and charities can get in front of millions. Loved because governments are able to manipulate audiences. Brexit and Trump come to mind and they are the ones that grab the headlines.

If you believe that Facebook can police the millions of users that create bad stuff, the so-called bad actors, think again and again and again. They may tell us they have employed thousands of employees staring at screens, trying to catch the bad actors.

What’s the solution Michael?

It’s so simple, you will be amazed why it has never been done before.

Verification!

Instead of spending millions on having people stare at screens, trying to catch bad people in the act, good luck with that, have them spend the time verifying every single user, whether existing or new and especially the new (hacking) kind.

Everyone should have a verification tick. Governments can do it with all citizens, well most of them anyway, so why can’t these platforms adopt the same approach.

Sure it will slow down the user growth and billions of dollars of income, but it sure would be a guarantee that bad actors would find it much harder to keep adding fake accounts all over the place.

Yeah I know, it will never happen!

Happy scrolling!

@stayingaliveuk

ps. And then I found Yoti and kiwanja on here.

Monopoly

I received this email from Citizens Against Monopoly.
A new story from the New York Times exposes yet another way Mark Zuckerberg has abused user trust to build Facebook into a social-network juggernaut. Facebook secretly “struck agreements allowing phone and other device makers access to vast amounts of its users’ personal information.”

Facebook gave the over 60 companies — including Apple, Blackberry, Samsung, Amazon, and Microsoft — “access to the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent, even after declaring that it would no longer share such information with outsiders.”

The full list of companies isn’t known.

These secret agreements look like clear violations of the 2011 consent decree Facebook signed with the Federal Trade Commission.

Facebook Inc. enjoys social networking market dominance, with strong majorities of Americans using one or a combination of its desktop and mobile products, which now include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.

Relatedly, Facebook holds a dominant market position in online advertising due in part to the unregulated collection of user activities through its social-media and tracking products and through data-sharing agreements with other data aggregators.

Story after story is now revealing that Facebook built that its dominance through repeated violations of user privacy and deliberate negligence — or, as Mark Zuckerberg himself liked to call it, by “moving fast and breaking things.”

As Rep. David Cicilline said, “Sure looks like Zuckerberg lied to Congress about whether users have ‘complete control’ over who sees our data on Facebook.”

The five members of the Federal Trade Commission, which is the part of our government tasked with overseeing Facebook, has the authority and power to make Facebook safe for our democracy. Armed with the 2011 consent decree, the FTC has the immediate power to impose remedies that will break up Facebook’s monopoly power, give us the freedom to communicate across networks, and protect our privacy.

Together, we will make sure that they do.

Read the New York Times story.

Share the news widely.

Thank you,

Citizens Against Monopoly

CAM is a growing movement to protect America’s (and maybe the world’s) economy and democracy from corporate monopolies that undermine opportunity, competition, choice, and freedom of expression.

ps.

Facebook has a fantastic hack for businesses who wish to advertise directly to you (said sarcastically). All they need is either your email address or phone number and upload that list to Facebook. So now you’ve become a laser targeted object of adverts from people or companies you know. By the way this is not a suggestion to go and do this, but I understand this might happen too. It’s to highlight that once you’re on a list, they can do with it what they wish. Now, you can remove yourself from those lists, although it may already be too late, watch the video on how they do this. You need to go to settings in Facebook, select ‘Ads’, 4th items from the bottom to undo all those companies who have you in their list. Enjoy!

[embed]https://youtu.be/6uOdeWJsF10[/embed]

Michael de Groot

Growth

Governments, corporations, nations and investors are obsessed with growth. I know, I know it’s how wealth is created, how jobs exist and the fear that accompanies growth is not to be underestimated.

Every single day, news broadcasters are searching for stories to let us know how well or how bad we are doing with growth in our economy in the country of our residence.

And there’s absolutely nothing you and I can do about growth.

The decision is out of our hands. It totally depends how well the people that sell stuff are doing at creating more great stuff that we think we need, but really we do not.

Scott Galloway professor at NYU describes this brilliantly.
He say that the four horsemen, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google all appeal to different parts of our bodies.
Google appeals to our brain, Facebook to our hearts, Amazon to our stomachs/guts and Apple to our reproductive system.

In the case of growth all these companies are totally obsessed by it and their investors definitely are.

Let’s just take one of those, Amazon. Amazon is growing at an alarming rate and grabbing marketshare, share value and all the products in the world that can be sold via the web. They even own all the logistics now to bring you those products to your front door faster then anyone else.

We likely have 10–100 times more stuff than we actually need in our homes, but we keep buying more stuff and because it can be delivered faster, we are happy to buy more of it. Our stomachs/guts to buy more stuff is growing exponentially each year and Amazon knows this.

Growth might be an obsession in the world economies, but for sure the stuff that you own doesn’t need to grow any larger at all. More than likely you can feed yourself and your family for at least 90 days on all the food that sits in your store cupboards and not feel hungry.

The only growth we need is the growth in our thinking, the growth in our emotional intelligence and the growth in helping out the more unfortunate people in our society who have been dealt a tough hand.

Happy consuming!

Michael de Groot