Category: Business

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The Price of Privacy

An inkling into the profits that “social” media companies that collect and sell our data was gained from the most recent regulatory filings by Facebook/Meta and SnapChat. Both companies placed a fairly specific dollar value on the revenues they lost ever since Apple made it nearly impossible for these companies to track customers across apps on iPhones and iPads. If $10 billion per quarter is any indication, then perhaps these companies should be paying their users $100 each every quarter for the privilege of tracking them.

The second half of 2021 has not been kind to tech giants that rely on ad targeting thanks to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency policy.

Source: Apple’s Privacy Policy Cost Snap, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube an Estimated $9.85 Billion in Revenue

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How Facebook and Google Fund Global Misinformation: the “Free” Internet is Much too Expensive

The advertising scheme that fuels the profits of the “free” internet giants like Google and Facebook is now used by terrorists to fund their activities.

In thrillers like The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth, the books of John Le Carre, and numerous movies like The French Connection, one learns of the ways in which rogue groups (terrorists, especially) would raise funds: they would rob banks. burglarize rich people, hijack cash transfer trucks, etc. The article below from the MIT Technology Review details how fringe and rogue groups dedicated to disinformation use the Google and Facebook advertising systems to generate revenue for their activities, and this article from the Associated Press details how the same fringe groups–white supremacists in particular–are using cryptocurrencies (1) to receive funds anonymously from people who do not wish it be known that they are racist and (2) to avoid paying financial judgments rendered against them in civil trials. As Shoshana Zuboff has reminded us over and over, regulation is designed to eliminate businesses that threaten the marketplace and erode trust in capitalism. The “free internet” meets both of these criteria, and it must be regulated.

Source: How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world.

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Apple to Governments: Choose Markets over Repression

Apple accused NSO Group, the Israeli surveillance company, of “flagrant” violations of its software, as well as federal and state laws.

Source: Apple Sues Israeli Spyware Maker, Seeking to Block Its Access to iPhones

This is a fascinating case. Will courts allow Apple to stop a surveillance tool that governments clearly love? Will the US government come out in favor of Apple or NSO group?

Without a doubt, NSO group needs to be wiped out of existence because it clearly empowers monsters and dictators against civil rights activists, journalists and citizens outside of their countries’ jurisdictions. The NSO group is indisputably allowing repressive regimes to consolidate their power and even to manipulate international trade. As such, the company must be wiped out of existence, and the Israeli government must be held to account for supporting and protecting the NSO group.

It is a forgone conclusion that Apple will sue the Israeli government, too, once the Israeli government’s role is made clear during discovery. Of course, Apple will have a huge bargaining chip. Apple’s main chip design center is in Hertzliya, Israel. So, the Israeli government must weigh the small revenues and huge influence that NSO Group brings in against the blockbuster investment that Apple is making in the Israeli tech sector and Israel’s economy.

It’s a no brainer. The clear choice is to kill NSO and allow companies and marketplaces to function without illegal influence, but governments tend to act stupidly in such situations. Let’s hope that the US and Israeli governments don’t act like morons.

NSO group HQ in Israel

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No Better Time than Now to Revisit the No Asshole Rule

It has been about 15 years since Robert Sutton, currently at Stanford, published his seminal work on workplace behavior, The No Asshole Rule, detailing how assholes cost companies huge sums of money and make detrimental contributions to the bottom line. He has since followed it up with The Asshole Survival Guide and Good Boss, Bad Boss because, apparently, assholes are exceptionally tenacious at keeping their positions.

This Reddit survey, by way of Gizmodo, reminds us that the no asshole rule must be extended to all personal relationships because being a rude asshole has gained substantial cachet and purchase globally and in American society, in particular, since 2015 for reasons that are obvious to you if you’re not a member of the offending crew.

Please, distribute this widely so that–perhaps, just perhaps–rude people may find the awareness, mindfulness and motivation to exercise tact.

We can dream, no?

Whatever your age, gender, or background, you’ve probably talked like a jerk at least once in your life.

Source: 13 Things Only Assholes Say, According to Reddit

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Cryptocurrencies Must Be Regulated

The greatest vehicle for wreaking havoc is money without provenance. Therefore, terrorists rob banks, drug cartels go to exceptional ends to launder their moniesand billionaires use offshore accounts and onshore vehicles to hide the money trail in order to avoid taxes. Cryptocurrencies are clearly the new vehicle of choice for criminals to obscure their financial. The Associated Press story linked below reveals the horrifying means by which white supremacists are using cryptocurrencies to raise funds and to evade the law. Clearly, the criminal web site the Silk Road, which used cryptocurrencies to mask the identities of the criminals it supported, was not an anomaly but a harbinger of the criminality that is supported by cryptocurrencies.

Cryptocurrencies are legal tender only to criminals. They are exotic commodities to the rest of us. By investing in them, we are supporting an exorbitantly energetically wasteful commodity that supports the vilest criminals. This is almost as bad as investing in Facebook.

BRUSSELS (AP) — The Daily Stormer website advocates for the purity of the white race, posts hate-filled, conspiratorial screeds against Blacks, Jews and women and has helped inspire at least three racially motivated murders.

Source: Far-right cryptocurrency follows ideology across borders

 

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The FAANG Wars Escalate

The war between Apple and Microsoft on one side, and Amazon, Facebook and Google on the other officially started in September of last year, and they just escalated with Apple’s release of iOS 14.5. Apple’s declaration that it will end app tracking–the practice of allowing the developer of one mobile phone application to be able to use your mobile device to track your activity in other applications you use on the mobile phone and to correlate your activity with your browsing habits on your computer and phone–is a major pillar of the business model of companies like Facebook and Google who collect this information in order to target ads at you specifically.

The practice goes much further, however. Both companies build “psychographical” profiles of users with such tracking information and use these models to control what each user sees. App tracking is thus one of the many elements of control through which Google and Facebook control the total user experience: they tailor the content they place before you in order to elicit the emotional response that will trigger you to click the ads they have included in the content they place before you. This is why, for example, Google is estimated to collect 20 times as much data as Apple does. It sounds sinister, and it is. (In the case of Amazon, this information is used to display search results that will maximize Amazon’s profit on the sale, not the value for the customer.)

Continue reading “The FAANG Wars Escalate”
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Applying a Band-Aid to a Mortal Wound

Source: WhatsApp imposes even stricter limits on message forwarding

The speed with which social media have been hijacked by malicious forces to achieve ghastly ends is disconcerting. WhatsApp alone has been used to instigate lynchings in India and possibly a genocide in Burma. It is a sign of Facebook’s profound cowardice that it is acting only when a pandemic that affects the entire world–especially Facebook’s country of incorporation, the United States–is in full effect. Even so, the measures they are taking are much too paltry compared to the challenge to be of any use or effect. The quote below from WhatsApp constitutes the epitome of cynicism, the apogee of hypocrisy: after destroying truth, aiding the incitement of genocide and empowering propaganda machines, FaceBook is making a trivial gesture that effects little change beyond the actor making the statement below.

Caveat emptor! If you are getting your news from WhatsApp or Facebook, you are likely an ignoramus.

“We believe it’s important to slow the spread of these messages down to keep WhatsApp a place for personal conversation,” the company added.

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Universal Healthcare is Risk Reduction

www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-10/germany-and-coronavirus

As the asinine, primordial debate about whether universal healthcare is “socialism” or “capitalism” continues in the United States, it is important to emphasize the fact that it reduces risk to the economy and to the live of people who create the economy. Let’s be as cynical as we can possible get. If the only purpose people serve is to be participants in the marketplace, then health care reduces the risks that contagion like COVID-19 poses to the marketplace, to the economy. Germany seems to get it. Will the US?

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FAANG Go to War

Apple was the instigator, and the fire has been fueled by two explosive books about Facebook’s abhorrent behavior–‘Zucked by Roger McNamee–and about the exploitative nature of the free internet in general–Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier. The battle lines have been drawn, and Apple and Microsoft are unofficially allied against Google, Facebook, especially, and, to a lesser extent, Amazon. Let’s examine this battle two ways: idealistically and cynically.

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Wasted Energy

Cut Back on Emails If You Want to Fight Global Warming

Searching the mountain of emails accumulated in your Gmail—or another email—box does not consume much energy, but if hundreds of millions of people are doing so billions of times daily, then the all of that energy adds up to a measurable sum that happens to be gargantuan, as the Bloomberg News article linked above demonstrates.

This is another hallmark of our age of excess. In the era of 9600 baud modems and text-based internet, the average user needed to exercise much consideration in replying because he or she needed to make all compositions thoughtful, relevant and brief in order to justify the time and cost it takes to transmit the message. One actually expected a response in those days, too, so you wanted to make the email considerate enough to elicit a response.

In the era of broadband, the graphical internet has inundated users with an unbounded deluge of emails that cannot be managed by any human. Consequently, large corporations have devised brilliant algorithms to help us manage the deluge of unwanted emails. We marvel and consume the convenience without every asking ourselves if it’s worth resorting to these brilliant algorithms in order to organize shit we never care to read. To make matters worse, wading through all this shit to get to the few emails that are worth reading is now consuming so much energy. We have managed excess very, very poorly.

It’s time to take the pledge, then, to use the “unsubscribe” button at the bottom of unwanted emails. If you want your mailbox to be relevant again, unsubscribe from all email lists, stop subscribing to new email lists–especially the commercial ones like Banana Republic, who sends out 10 emails a day–and start using an email client on your computer. Stop using the web interface to email services. This way you preserve your sanity and the earth. You turn the vicious cycle (get more mail, get lost in your mailbox, use sorting algorithms, get more mail) cycle into a virtuous one (get less mail, read and reply to relevant emails, unsubscribe from irrelevant emails, get less mail). You stop wasting the grid’s energy and your own.