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

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.

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

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

A Critical Reminder of How Far Humans Can Go

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen provides a great summary of the means by which Jews and minorities were executed by Nazi squads in his tour de force book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Although concentration camps receive the lion’s share of shrift and attention in popular accounts of the Holocaust, Goldhagen reminds the reader repeatedly that the method of choice during the holocaust was the bullet. Execution at gunpoint was the fastest, cheapest and, consequently, the most prevalent means by which victims were executed by Nazi murder squads. The practice was so prevalent and enormous that archeological discoveries serve as reminders and documentation of the practice. Mass graves were, of course, a deliberate strategy employed to prevent discovery and the erection of any memorial. The responsibility has thus fallen on the shoulders of physical anthropologists (i.e., archeologists) to uncover the details of history’s greatest crime. At a time when hate groups are organized, armed and dedicated to this outcome, it is important to remember the price of silence.

The Polish team who discovered the Nazi era mass grave in Poland.

Bullets, wedding rings pinpoint World War II execution grounds

Source: Archaeologists unearth Nazi-era massacre in Poland’s ‘Death Valley’

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

 

On Data Harvesting: Be Extremely Afraid

Source: Google Bans Location Data Firm Funded by Former Saudi Intelligence Head

A prime example of how easily compromising information may be obtained from SafeGraph is this preprint from Northwestern University and Boston University in which the authors used data from SafeGraph to follow people who attended the Sturgis, South Dakota, motorcycle rally from the rally to their respective home towns and measured whether these rally attendees ended up increasing covid-19 incidence in their home towns. In other words, they attempted to measure the degree to which Sturgis was a national super spreader event, not just a local one. The authors acknowledge SafeGraph for providing the data gratis, and cleverly sidestep the shocking revelation that such data is available for purchase to anyone. Though the data provided to the investigators was anonymous, it is highly likely that SafeGraph can identify every single person in the data set. What SafeGraph knows about the general populace is disturbing.

More disturbing is the revelation that SafeGraph is partly owned and controlled by Saudi interests because it places a digital surveillance apparatus with global reach under the control of a regime that has used such surveillance to intimidate or to kill political dissidents. Though it’s comforting that Google has decided to halt the stream of data it provides to SafeGraph, it is, nevertheless, this outcome must be perceived as a clarion call for action, not an occasion to breathe a sigh of relief. The revelation that even Google–an entity that exists to exploit its users’ data–finds SafeGraph’s business disquieting serves as ample warning that data collection and dissemination need to be regulated. Google’s action against SafeGraph is definitive proof that the dystopian society of total government surveillance is within reach through the overt and willing collusion between government and industry. In Western democracies, the government side of this collusion can be influenced, but willingness among the populace is waning because the cacophony of disinformation blasted by “social media” has drowned out reason. Failure in bringing democratic governments to restrain reprobate companies like NSO Group will empower governments to surveil everyone and to eliminate those who oppose autocratic regimes. This failure invites total chaos. This is, unfortunately, a precipice we may have already crossed.

SafeGraph sells smartphone location data to essentially anyone. Google banned the company in June.

Vice Motherboard

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”

Cherry Blossoms and Global Warming

It is astonishing that records of when cherry trees bloom in Japan goes as far back as the ninth century. It is more astonishing that they agree with every other measure of global warming, down to the onset about 200 years ago with the start of the industrial revolution. With this much confidence in the measurement, why is there so much hesitation to act?

Records of the peak of the Japanese cherry tree blooms data back 1200 years, surprisingly, and demonstrate yet again that plant has changed since the start of the industrial revolution.

The early peak is thought to be linked to climate change as spring temperatures rise.

Source: Japan’s cherry blossom ‘earliest peak since 812’

Pink seesaws at US-Mexico

The elegance with which a symbol of division and incipient racism is shattered by a favorite children’s playground toy is truly staggering. The design award is well earned.

The installation allowed children to play together from both sides of the US-Mexico border.

Source: Pink seesaws at US-Mexico wall win design award – BBC News