From Pine View Farm

Running Naked through the Internet category archive

The Courage of Their Conniptions 0

January 6 Capitol rioters are deleting their “social” media posts.

And it’s not working. Here’s a bit from the AP report.

Erasing digital content isn’t as easy as deleting content from phones, removing social media posts or shutting down accounts. Investigators have been able to retrieve the digital content by requesting it from social media companies, even after accounts are shut down.

Posts made on Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms are recoverable for a certain period of time, and authorities routinely ask those companies to preserve the records until they get court orders to view the posts, said Adam Scott Wandt, a public policy professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who trains law enforcement on cyber-based investigations.

Authorities also have other avenues for investigating whether someone has tried to delete evidence.

Afterthought:

Note the use of the phrase, “delete evidence.”

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Big Brothers 0

Man holding

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Facebook Frolics 0

Rat sits behind a desk labeled

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No Place To Hide, the Clock is TikToking Dept. 0

Bruce Schneier reports that TikTok has changed its terms of service to include a provision that it may now collect biometric data.

One more time, “social” media isn’t.

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It’s All about the Algorithm, Down the Rabid Hole Dept. 0

At Psychology Today Blogs, Sebastian Ocklenburg explores how “fear of missing out,” often referred to as FOMO, sucks people into “social” media and keeps them there. A nugget:

The results show that FOMO and social media use, as well as problems due to social media use, are linked. Since this was a correlative study, no clear statement regarding whether or not FOMO causes social media use can be made.

On the one hand, it could be assumed that people with high FOMO check the social media feeds of their friends and family to not miss out on what happens in their lives.

On the other hand, the association could also go the other way around. If someone constantly checks the social media feeds of other people, they may develop FOMO because they see other people doing all these awesome things all the time. That these pictures often look better than the actual experience was is often ignored.

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Facebook Frolics 0

The Zuckerborg assimilates David Brooks.

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The Disinformation Superhighway Exit Ramp 0

Man enters

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No Place To Hide 0

Title:  They're Watching.  Image:

Click for the original image and the artist’s commentary.

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The Danger Is Not Remote 0

From time to time, I have heard Bob Cesca suggest on his podcast, when discussing some particularly egregious “social” media mischief, that “we are not ready for the internet.”

Now comes psychologist Glenn Geher to say much the same thing, using the slightly more scholarly term of “evolutionary mismatch.” Here’s a bit from his article (emphasis added):

The human mind evolved under conditions that are, in many ways, quite different from the conditions that so many of us find ourselves in today. During the lion’s share of evolutionary history, human communication was exclusively of the face-to-face variety. Remote forms of human communication did not come on the scene until well after agriculture emerged about 10,000 years ago. In terms of organic evolutionary processes, 10,000 years is a blink of an eye. We, you and I, right now, have minds that evolved for ancestral, face-to-face communication.

Our minds did not evolved for large-scale remote communication. In fact, when people communicate with others who have their identities partly or fully concealed, as is so often the case with remote communication, a very general pattern emerges: People behave badly.

Methinks he has a point.

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The Internet of (Untrustworthy) Things 0

Alexa says,

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The Watcher 0

Woman looking at cell phone says,

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While You Watch Your “Smart” TV . . . . 0

. . . . Your “smart” TV is watching you.

Via Harry Shearer.

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The Internet of Things 0

“Smart home” (meaning one where every gadget has a network connection) is an oxymoron.

I can push my coffee maker’s “on” button all by my ownsome, thank you very much.

Via Bruce Schneier.

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Facebook Frolics in These Viral Times 0

Rat:  I don't like the idea of contact tracing and the government tracking ouor movement.  It's intrusic and erodes our right to privacy.  Goat:  You've posted everywhere you've gone for the last three years on Facebook.  Rat:  It's different when I do the eroding.  Goat, looking at phone:  Oh, look.  Phots of everywhere you've ever eaten.

Click to view the original image.

(Broken link fixed.)

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“Smart” Homes, Dumb Home Owners 0

I wouldn’t have one of those “smart speakers” in my home on a bet.

If Big Data wants to spy on me, they can do it the old fashioned way and peer through my windows, but I will damned if I voluntarily invite their monitoring devices into my house. Heck, it’s difficult enough to fend them off in my web browser.

(I learned of this news story because I listen to Le Show and you should to.)

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Lurking from Home 0

El Reg reports on the intrusiveness of the Zoom app, which is trending as more and more persons use it to work from home in these viral times. A snippet:

And he (Doc Searls, who was interviewed for the story–ed.) concluded: “Zoom is in the advertising business, and in the worst end of it: the one that lives off harvested personal data.

“What makes this extra creepy is that Zoom is in a position to gather plenty of personal data, some of it very intimate (for example with a shrink talking to a patient) without anyone in the conversation knowing about it. (Unless, of course, they see an ad somewhere that looks like it was informed by a private conversation on Zoom.)”

Read the rest, then pick up the landline.

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Facebook Frolics 0

“You can’t handle the truth” frolics.

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“Smile, You’re Candid Camera” 0

Yes, you are starring in your own television’s show.

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No Place To Hide 0

Farhad Manjoo points out that it can–is–happening here. A snippet:

In China, the government is building a frightening surveillance dragnet in broad daylight, stitching together facial recognition, fingerprint and other databases into an all-seeing eye aiming to closely watch more than a billion citizens.

(snip)

Indeed, because of a dearth of laws protecting our privacy — and almost no high-profile political discussion about the stakes at hand — Americans are sleepwalking into a future nearly as frightening as the one the Chinese are constructing. I choose the word “sleepwalking” deliberately, because when it comes to digital privacy, a lot of us prefer the comfortable bliss of ignorance. As a result, much of the surveillance engine operates underground — just beyond where many of us dare to look.

Speaking of sleepwalking, I was talking with someone this morning–in person, in fact–who dismissed our own corporate digital surveillance society by saying, “Everyone does it anyway.”

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No Place To Hide 0

At the San Francisco Chronicle, Joseph W. Cotchett note the efforts of Big Data to weasel out from under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Here’s a snippet (emphasis added):

At first glance, the CCPA looks like it is finally wresting control of our private information from these companies and returning it to the users. However, we shouldn’t feel totally empowered yet. Some companies have expressed their intent not to follow the CCPA. It’s been reported that Facebook claims it is not subject to the CCPA because it does not sell information, but instead, “shares” information.* This is typical of the anything-goes attitude of the internet and the power that flows from personal information. This follows a $5 billion penalty and new restrictions on Facebook in July for violating consumer privacy.

Face, we have admitted–nay, invited–these parasites into our most private lives and now, like electronic bed bugs, they have no intention of leaving.

__________________

*A distinction without a distinction, methinks.

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