U.K. Parliament Threatens to Make Mark Zuckerberg Testify
MAY 01, 2018
The House of Commons’ Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee has invited Zuckerberg three times to personally answer questions about the effect of fake news on democracy and data privacy. The committee has been investigating efforts made by Russian actors and Cambridge Analytica affiliate AggregateIQ to influence the Brexit vote. …
In response to the committee’s most recent invitation in March … Facebook instead decided to send CTO [Chief Technical Offer] Mike Schroepfer. U.K. legislators were outraged at Zuckerberg’s refusal to appear, with one member of Parliament calling the decision “cowardly” and another saying it was “absolutely astonishing.”
Schroepfer appeared before the committee last week, though members found a significant portion of his testimony to be unsatisfactory …
Zuckerberg himself testified to the U.S. Congress in April … The CEO avoided making any major gaffes, and shares for the company surged shortly afterward.
Lesson from the Cambridge Analytica Story
If you just used Facebook to post photo’s and blogs your info was safe from Cambridge Analytica.
Clicking through to features like free personality quizes puts you at risk.
General knowledge about the web & software would lead one to suspect that. The story below confirms it.
Cambridge Analytica paid … more than $800,000 in 2014 to create a personality quiz app on Facebook that could harvest data from respondents. About 270,000 users downloaded the app**, but Facebook’s policies then allowed [the personality quiz app] … to also scrape data from those users’ friends, so … [the app] ended up collecting information from millions of accounts. Cambridge Analytica subsequently used that data in its work for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, according to the New York Times.
– Twitter sold data access to academic at center of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Facebook is feeding you mental poison… on purpose.
Link below is to comedy sketch based in fictional bar and includes simulated violence; explains a business model based on feeding conflict, hate, misunderstanding, polarization, and really bad speech and behavior.
Further back in the thread someone commented that any social media software could do such things - of course that is true. The difference wrt proprietary and open-source software is that with open-source anyone (with the technical qualifications) can know what the software is doing.
It’s certainly not good that Facebook doesn’t always work as advertised. However, my approach to Facebook and similar things is to not provide any information that I wouldn’t want to be public.
Of course, different individuals have different privacy expectations, depending on their jobs and other interests. Personally, since I work as an academic at a university my name, photo, and contact details are readily available, so keeping such information off the Internet would be totally impractical - it’s a public-facing job. If I didn’t want that I guess I could have chosen a different career.
I’d like to delete Facebook but in my country it’s at least 70% of the Internet: all the event organizers and small businesses use it.
But I keep sites/apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter out of both my phone and work computer. I have a separate laptop for distracting sites with a 90 minutes daily time limit. Also it’s in another room, so I need to get up from my workplace and intentionally go for distractions instead of accidentally slipping into them on my work computer.
By the way, the newest versions of iOS and Android will add system tools to control the time you are spending in apps. It will be possible to set a daily usage quota.
Safari on iOS will also block ad trackers, including FB’s “Like” buttons.
I very much agree with these sentiments. Sadly, Facebook is the only way I have to keep in contact with some people. Regardless, I only visit the site a few times a week to check in on who’s recently gotten married or had a baby. Aside from that, I do very little posting myself to keep my activity there at a minimum.
I have never had a Facebook account. My local Wat has a Facebook page which I like to visit to see announcements, view photos and videos posted of past events, etc. Whenever I visited the Wat Facebook page in the past there would be a nasty pop-up asking me to either log in to my Facebook account or create one. I could always click where the pop-up said “Not now” and the pop-up would be minimized.
Well, now Facebook is playing hardball (that’s a reference to a baseball metaphor which means that someone is putting on a strong offensive). Tonight when I went to the Wat’s Facebook page, when the pop-up asked me to sign in with Facebook or create a Facebook account, there was no option to click on “Not now.” So the log-in pop-up remains in the center of the screen blocking a large amount of the content on the page. There doesn’t seem to be any way to get the sign-in box to go away.
I am meditating on the impermanence of A) My Wat’s Facebook page; B) the intrusive Facebook sign-in box; C) Facebook and; D) Internet means for connecting with my fellow Buddhist practitioners; not to mention life itself. I am also trying to release my attachments to the Wat’s Facebook page and my irritation with Facebook. Still, I can’t help but note that I am irritated. I just have to accept that my irritation will pass
Perhaps the Wat might have a free webpage on the Internet not controlled by Facebook in the future. Perhaps someone in the Wat would be delighted to make that contribution, for the benefit in their life and for many.
Perhaps your comment might inspire many, too, which might benefit even more lives.
One of my businesses is wedding officiant/celebrant. I’ve always paid close attention to the advice of the gurus of the hub websites that dominate the wedding industry because they collect and analyze huge amounts of data from their customers, brides and grooms who are typically 20-40 years old.
For many years, the main avenue to connect with potential clients has been Facebook, yet I’ve always been unwilling to sell my soul to the devil.
In the last webinar I attended, I found it interesting that the trends are moving away from FB and more to Instagram (another platform I’m avoiding).
@Mat one might have an aversion to heroin or crack. But have an attachment to prescribed medications which sustain life, if one is not yet an arahant.
Perhaps there are other thoughts?
edit: to be fair, perhaps FB is like codeine or oxycontin… perhaps useful in some ways, but addictive, and very prone to abuse by some, and absolutely avoided by some…
Some people love FB and maybe finds it helpful to stay in touch with their loved ones who might live further away to where they live. Perhaps this is all about perceptions. One man’s meat is another man’s poison, and all that!
Perhaps this thread is just a matter of opinion. edit: or expressions of opinions
Yet some research suggests the intimacy of online contacts is ultimately non satisfying, and might even be harmful as it might be non nourishing and could become profoundly disappointing, which might be harmful to those who rely on it. (I am not offering citations, but I think these might be easily found by the convenient search engines among digital academic publications.)
I recognize irony in mentioning this convenience.
Thoughts, some of which are or are shaded by opinions; I try not to be too attached to any at this point. All which is conditioned, ends, AFAIK.
I confess I have just rejoined Facebook, mostly to keep up to date with wider family. Most of my friends aren’t on Facebook, so my Friends list will be quite small.
Perhaps someone in the Wat would be delighted to make that contribution, for the benefit in their life and for many.
I recognize irony in mentioning this convenience.