Running Naked through the Internet category archive

Warning: Language.

And, in other news of running naked through the internet,

The ad network (Facebook–ed.) is testing a feature in its Android app that will scan a user’s recent images for photos that look like their friends. If it spots a match, it’ll ask if the photos should be shared with other people in them.

The feature is being tested on Australian users first, with iOS to arrive by the end of the week, and if they don’t grab pitchforks and torches, The Social NetworkTM threatens promises to take it to the US soon.

The pic-scanning isn’t restricted to photos you’ve already uploaded to Facebook – the app scans your phone’s photo collection for new images, and will raise a dialogue asking if you want to post it to your friends.

More larcenous frolics.

Remember folks, the internet is a public place. You can get your pocket picked there just as surely as you can get it picked in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

Larcenous frolics.

Support the EFF. Click the link on the sidebar, over there.——>

Leonard Pitts, Jr., laments the end of privacy (and of common sense).

In my local rag, Tom Allen recounts when he realized that we do indeed live in the naked city.

. . . as a friend and I prepared to leave a restaurant after lunch, he swiped the screen on his cell phone to check something. Unprompted, the phone informed him that he was about a five-minute drive from work. He’d never programmed anything about work into his phone; it had just noted the location where he seemed to be spending his weekdays and filed the information away in its electro-brain.

Why have I been unable to get the 1980s hit, “I Always Feel Like…Somebody’s Watching Me,” out of my head?

Follow the link and read the rest, especially the bit about his conversation with a Mad Man friend of his in the con artist advertising biz.

In my local rag, Elizabeth Simpson describes what happened when she changed her profile picture on the Zuckerborg:

. . . after letting my hair go its natural shade, which – who knew – turns out to be white. I was going for a salt-and-pepper look, but you don’t get to choose.

Sooner or later, I had to align my social media profile with the real me.

(snip)

Suddenly Olay anti-aging ads were popping up.

More tales of tracking cookies at the link.

In related news, Jeffrey Gillespie muses on the self-deception of “social networking.” Here’s a snippet:

In the decade and a half since the start of the 21st century, social media has become so versatile and pervasive that it has compelled the entire Western population to believe that the best way to find an authentic voice is to create a platform in cyberspace that supports only two things — shareholder value and advertising revenue. Instead of using our access to endless information as a true tool for evolution, we have become slaves to our own narcissistic tendencies; a clan of update-happy zombies, taking endless selfies and communicating in pictures instead of words, like cavemen scribbling on walls. It seems clear that for the time being, at least, the machines have won.

Via Job’s Anger.

Testing the TOS.

A class action lawsuit over alleged breaches of EU privacy law, mass surveillance and involvement in the NSA’s Prism snooping programme has been filed against Facebook in Vienna.

The lawsuit, which was officially filed in a Vienna court on Thursday, is being spearheaded by 27-year-old Austrian law graduate and privacy campaigner Max Schrems.

(snip)

The case has been brought against Facebook’s European headquarters in Dublin, which registers all accounts outside the US and Canada, accounting for approximately 80% of Facebook’s 1.35 billion users.

Schrems was able to file his action against the Irish subsidiary in a civil court in Vienna because he claims Facebook is in breach of European law on users’ data.

Wonder whether this will go anywhere?

As far as Google is concerned, the sequence may have been a random clip from the inner webs, but the man in the clip is not amused. Indeed, according to the story, he did not know that the clip existed until he saw it on his telly vision.

Timothy Werner of Norfolk filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Google, claiming the multinational corporation behind the popular Internet search engine and Android operating system used his likeness without his consent to sell smartphones.

The lawsuit said the ODU adjunct professor and Norfolk city employee “in no way placed himself in a position such that it could be reasonably anticipated that he would be featured as comic relief in a national television commercial for one of the world’s largest corporations.”

I am not a lawyer (TM), but Google may not have many legs to stand on.