Worldly Opinions

FaceBorg – Privacy? How about we talk about the concentration of power?

Fergus Young, , , , , , Leave a comment

To be honest, privacy issues aside, I am significantly far more concerned around our continued almost exclusive reliance on Facebook’s products to communicate with our friends and family and subsequently helping Facebook, a sole for profit entity, gain a very concerning amount of control over our lives collectively.

Facebook Inc. aren’t some benevolent entity, they are a business and their first and foremost mandate ahead of anything else (including a head of wider social concerns) is to ultimately maximise profits to their owners.

Decades on, I desperately struggle to see why more of us aren’t concerned about this. Please, can someone enlighten me as to the faults in my thinking here? Please?

Also, Custom Audiences. I know I am alone in this thinking, But I consider businesses uploading my personal client information as part of a Custom Audience List to Facebook a breach of my privacy. You are effectively giving my personal information over to a 3rd party and that is not OK.

Facebook use that information to their advantage by matching up information as to where I have been, where I have shopped, etc.

We really don’t need to be rewarding nor supporting Facebook’s on going track record of behaviour, and we really don’t need to help support such a company (particularly a for-profit one) taking so much power and subsequently control over our lives.

FaceBorg – Privacy? How about we talk about the concentration of power?

Facebook’s Tentacles – Custom Audience Privacy Issue

Fergus Young2 Comments

Update 17/07/2018: I’d expect I will get a few people rolling their eyes in silence at me, particularly from the AdTech crowd, but I feel strongly enough about the issue that I have decided to start contacting each company appearing in the screenshot to ask them to remove my personal details from any “Custom Audience” Ad campaigns.

I am happy for companies I deal with to add me to their direct mailing list to advise me of any running specials periodically through E-mail, but I am not comfortable with that information subsequently being given to 3rd parties such as Facebook (being a particularly “privacy hostile” entity at that), The less personal information that goes to Facebook the better, I feel they have already become too powerful to our longer term collective detriment, by way of them feasting on our information, particularly given their ongoing business conduct.

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Original post: After having logged into my Facebook account for the first time in a fortnight,  Today I learn that businesses have been uploading their customer contact database to Facebook.  A trawl over the internet reveals that this has apparently been in place since 2013.

A question is whether or not organizations giving their contact list to Facebook constitutes, “Sharing your personal details with a 3rd party”?

Advertisers you’ve interacted with – Who have added their contact list to Facebook. (often unbeknown to the people on their contact list)

Facebook states, “These advertisers are running ads using a contact list they or their partner uploaded that includes info about you. This info was collected by the advertiser or their partner, typically after you shared your email address with them.”

Reading further, it appears more than just your email they can choose to upload. The information that could be included for matching includes things like your Phone number, Birthday, Gender, etc.

If companies are uploading their customer contact lists to Facebook as per Facebook’s Custom Audiences program, in my view, that pretty much lays at least the base, if they have actually chosen to do so, for Facebook to develop the alleged shadow profiles of Non-Facebook users and personally with me at least, this is NOT okay.

They say they drop all the info if there is no match, but after their ongoing antics, who can trust what Facebook Inc. actually says?

Facebook’s Tentacles – Custom Audience Privacy Issue

Internet 2.0, Proprietary, centralized, and locked-in

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

Update 27/06/18 – Facebook reaches 200 USD per share, Too bad we collectively keep rewarding bad behaviour, Thanks for the cap gains though.

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Ironically, have discovered a lot of my time spent surfing the internet in the evenings is for researching about the Internet itself.

For all intents and purposes, It looks like older days of a largely decentralized Internet with inter-operable communication protocols (E-mail, XMPP, RSS) are pretty much going away, replaced by proprietary walled gardens operated by sole businesses for the primary purpose to maximize profits and designed to be sticky (addictive) and lock as many people in as possible so that it’s hard to escape.

Willful ignorance or otherwise, we collectively voted for this. People a decade ago remarked that I was “Oh So pessimistic” to suggest that Facebook would become as ubiquitous and as powerful as they are today. (By the way, Keep the glass, I don’t need it). Just a second while I write another put option on NASDAQ:FB (with the intention to add to my current holdings)

People keep getting outraged at Facebook’s behaviour, yet continues to reward and encourage it by continuing to use their services. While many have pledged to reduce their usage of Facebook (and other services), such actions seem to be nothing more than short lived and amounts to little more than “virtue signalling”, Furthermore, many of those people who say they are leaving Facebook are going on to suggest WhatsApp and Instagram (both owned by Facebook) as to where they will be moving to.  Hold on, let me increase my short put position.

Frankly, a decade ago, I did state that I would prefer to lose my access to the Internet completely rather than submit to Facebook should Facebook happen to take over the Internet to become the Internet. While in truth, it’s still a long way from that, the situation is that the Internet has now become so commercialized with much of it’s power now consolidated into the hands of a few corporate entities.

Anyway, I’ve decided to gradually reduce my use of the Internet in general and should the consolidation of power continue, will probably end up using the Internet rather comparatively sparingly — Keeping any use personally during my own time to Administrative stuff and the keeping in touch with closer Family and friends (using self hosted services where possible) while completely cutting to the bone any superfluous usage such as casual surfing of forums and especially surfing the Internet to research… well, about the Internet.

 

Internet 2.0, Proprietary, centralized, and locked-in

Motivations for setting up my own personal homepage

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

As mentioned in my Facebook Notice, I had elected to build my own personal homepage for staying in touch with Friends and Family as opposed to relying on Facebook. In short, I prefer staying with decentralized inter-operable web protocols and standards (particularly those that allow me to self-host) where practical as it offers me more freedom and control over my own personal web presence.

While It is acknowledged utilizing proprietary platforms that are singularly owned and operated by sole for profit business entities have their near term benefits (many such platforms are Free of charge), they aren’t “neutral” mediums and are typically run with the natural focus of maximizing profits, ahead of the best of interest of their users or the wider world at large. (Engineering their products to be as sticky as possible, to keep people on their platforms for longer in order to serve advertising, locking them in so that it’s difficult to leave and consequentially, with an increased tendency to cause addiction in quite a few people).

Proprietary platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat are structured in contrast to say inter-operable protocols like regular E-mail where you have a choice of providers. A user on their choice of provider can E-mail another user on a different provider. No one provider controls the protocol.

It is worth highlighting that the more we use, rely, and pressure others to use these proprietary platforms (by way of the network effect), the more powerful these entities will naturally become. In the case of Facebook, it’s already large and still ever increasing influence and power in our lives (be it through through Facebook Original, Instagram, WhatsApp), I see as potentially detrimental thing to us in the longer term in the sense of…

“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely”

Personally, I desperately struggle to see how so much power concentrated in the hands of any given single entity, especially a “for-profit” one, could ever be considered as a good thing for us in the longer run. While Facebook certainly isn’t alone in trying to get their mittens on everything we do online, there is a concern within me that should we allow the general trend to continue, (along side the gradual erosion of Civic Responsibility) we could see an erosion in our own individual self determination as we collectively cede ever increasingly control and power over our lives to such (non-democratic) business entities whom are ultimately answerable only to their owners and stockholders.

If you wish to visit the possibility of using alternatives mediums to stay in contact with friends and family, please see “Keeping in contact with loved ones” where I’ve listed out what I’ve done and the recommended stepping stones to reduce reliance on centralized, proprietary and commercially run services.

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Disclosure

As of February 2017 (About a year ago as of writing this), I am now a direct shareholder in NASDAQ:FB. The reality is I don’t think we Netizens are going to realize the longer term implications of where we are headed anytime soon. I do recall people seven years ago rebuked me as being “so pessimistic” for even suggesting that Facebook would become as powerful and ubiquitous as they are now. People are saying Facebook is dying and while that may now be true in North America for their original main name sake platform, many of those same people go on to suggest Instagram and WhatsApp (both Owned by Facebook), along with Snapchat (whom personally I consider as equally as obnoxious) as examples as to where everyone is now flocking to.

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Fergus Young
www.nui.nz

 

Motivations for setting up my own personal homepage

TradeMe – Not necessarily the cheapest place

Fergus Young2 Comments

First, here is something that I mildly found amusing…

Go on TradeMe, tell everyone how you really feel about Facebook…

As an aside, I don’t know about their business model anymore. I can’t say that buying from (or should it be through) them is necessarily the cheapest. While there are still bargains to be had, I have noticed that private individual sellers simply wishing to moved pre-loved goods on are getting fewer and fewer as years go by as they continue to get displaced on the listings pages by International Sellers or otherwise local drop-shippers, who often flood TradeMe with listings at asking prices higher than NZ RRP (Recommended Retail Pricing)… Continue reading “TradeMe – Not necessarily the cheapest place” →

TradeMe – Not necessarily the cheapest place

Branding Effects + Roadblocks to Web Decentralization

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(This post is a sort of a lead in from my previous post about Meetup.com)

Anecdotally, it seems the majority of groups which have left the Meetup.com platform have moved their group to Facebook. Branding I’ve come to realize is at play here with Facebook’s seemingly relentless march to take control as much of the web as humanely possible.

While I’ve found many people announce that they “Hate” Facebook saying it’s crap, to them, it’s a familiar sort of ‘Crap’, people subconsciously lean to Familiar because Familiar is “Safe”. Another words… “Better the Devil you know than the Devil you don’t”.

Like ‘McDonalds’ is to fast food, People may criticize their food as ‘plastic’, but yet keep coming back to it because there is some psychological guarantee that it will be the same ‘Plastic’ food they they know of. Take this, if you landed in a new country, would you try some unfamiliar food outlet selling unfamiliar food or head straight towards the Big illuminated ‘M’?  This is something that came to my mind when I was setting up a Test Instance of Oxwall and is something us Decentralization / Open web advocates are going to need to consider.

 

Branding Effects + Roadblocks to Web Decentralization

Facebook Causes depression?

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They say Facebook causes depression. For me, it’s probably not the “Comparing yourself with others” / F.O.M.O (Fear of Missing out) trigger that I keep seeing exhorted in the media (in the lightest way possible, that aspect of Facebook has probably had the opposite effect),

What has instead perhaps “dampened my mood” is seeing the world’s masses getting deeply hooked and dare I say addicted to the platform owned by a corporate juggernaut (which we are collectively responsible for becoming a juggernaut, by virtue of joining the platform and getting our friends to join courtesy of the “network effect”) intent on eating up the entire Internet and irreversibly integrating itself into many people’s lives.

I really struggle to see this as a good thing for us collectively in the longer run. I question our decision to rely on a sole proprietary platform for keeping in touch with friends and family. I continually freak out about how much power over our lives we are collectively handing over to be concentrated into the hands of a single for-profit entity such as Facebook, especially so given their past and present behavior. Have people forgotten about “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”?

I’ve referred to Facebook as “Face-borg” for this reason. It is really the Web’s version of Startrek’s Borg collective, relentlessly assimilating everything in it’s path.

Facebook Causes depression?

Are Chemtrails still a thing?

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

I don’t know what it is, I didn’t realize “Chemtrails” (from commercial passenger jets) were still a wide spread concern. After checking my Facebook messages (as I do every few days), I let curiosity get the better of me and clicked on one of the seemingly random suggestions which Facebook often show on the side of their web interface, then came across this post. I have to admit, at first, I thought it was either a prank, joke or sarcasm and it took me awhile to sink in that some of the people were actually serious about the issue.

It was probably more the numbers of people whom were subscribing to the Chemtrail theory, and the resultant “group think” which threw me off the most (and led me to go find the nearest brick wall). After further casing the corridors of the face-borg cube, found that the Chemtrail thing was actually quite well subscribed to across the confined of the ‘borg cube and to a lesser extent, beyond into the wider general Internet.  I don’t what is driving it, is this the filter bubble / echo chamber thing that many critics of Facebook mention?

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External link(s)…

Are Chemtrails still a thing?

Keeping in contact with friends and Family at home and abroad

Fergus Young

The often used line for people who sometimes quite vigorously defend (their use of) Facebook is that “It helps me keep in contact with Friends and Family far away (or overseas)!”…

Here’s the kicker, People I firmly feel were already freely doing that across the Wider general Internet way before the likes of MySpace and Facebook ever came on the scene.

Many people had their own Personal Homepages (at their ISP, colleges or elsewhere) or Personal Blogs and people would find each other by way of any number of search engines of the time, go to their page and flick them an email or sign their ‘guestbook’. (I know I have reconnected with many people I’ve lost contact with this way.),

RSS and ATOM standards were common place where people could subscribe to each other’s blogs or web pages, using any number of RSS readers and be able to keep abreast with articles from multiple sources, be it from their friends’ blogs, News media publication, or elsewhere in one place, (very much, I feel, in the same way how Facebook’s “newsfeed” operates today, but with far more granular control over what you wish to see than the Facebook newsfeed of today ever offered).

Another often used excuse for relying on facebook is “How can I share my photos with my family and friends overseas?”, Facebook is hardly the only medium or tool to do this. Again, your own blog could fill the same role with NUI.NZ as being my living example.

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It’s worth remembering that Facebook as a communication medium is entirely controlled by a single corporation whose natural overarching focus is to maximize profits for their shareholders and is not an inter-operable communication protocol with several (typically competing) providers like how Email is structured.

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If some people are serious about reducing their reliance on Facebook, are concerned as I am about the increasingly centralization of power to a few for-profit run silos, and are in favour of supporting open inter-operable web standards, I would kindly suggest that a regular Blog could fill that role as the first stepping stone.

Setting up your own personal blog I strongly feel needn’t be solely the domain of I.T. geeks. There are now blogging services which make it easy to get started as it is signing up for a Facebook Account.

There are several different blogging platforms, including B2Evoluation, WordPress, and many others. WordPress as a blogging platform seems fairly okay in my opinion… if you want a quick start, then suggest as an initial starting point signing up for a free account at wordpress.com at least as a stepping stone to get you on your way (it is very easy to sign up, as easy as it is to sign up for Facebook or any other social network).

Once you outgrow WordPress.com and/or you get sick of the adverts, you can then fairly easily move off on to your own self hosted WordPress blog at any web host of your choice once you’re ready.

What ever blogging platform you eventually get going with (Preferably an open source one that allows you to self-host in the future if not now), you can simply post links on your social media profiles (Faceborg, Google+, etc) back to your blog / homepage and have your blog / homepage as your main (web identity) hub and point of presence on the Internet in which to syndicate / share your content from. Much like what I do with on my own Faceborg Profile.

Keeping in contact with friends and Family at home and abroad

Celebrity Worship and The Widening Wealth Gap

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The following appeared in NZ Herald’s letter to the editor dated 3rd November 2016

Obscene deal

Wow, this $142 million deal is great for Steven Adams and I congratulate him. I guess he will now be a contender for the Halberg Awards? No doubt there will be in a movie about him one day, too. A script writer’s dream. One of 14 children from at Rotorua to a super star in the US. Not only will this deal do wonders for basketball in this country but it will help put New Zealand on the map in USA perhaps?
Sadly, though, this deal also highlights all that is wrong in the world and especially in America. Let’s be honest and say it like it really is. Is “obscene” the right word or is “absurd” a better description? For any sports person to be paid $820,000 an hour for bouncing a basketball around a court is just ludicrous. To think the top surgeons who are saving people’s lives are getting a fraction of this is the real obscenity. Only in America.

Glen Stanton, Mairangi Bay.

To be brutally blunt, While I echo much of sentiments expressed in this letter (Except the “Only in America” bit), the scenario is perhaps only going to get more pronounced as time goes on.

It’s really our own collective / combined actions (as commoners) that ball games players are getting the figures they do. Aside from the Rags to Riches / Fooled by randomness story. The feeling I get on the street is that the majority are generally hungry for Entertainment, Distractions, Escapism and Vicarious living, while perhaps ignoring  more pressing issues affecting the world in general, and the longer term implications of our actions ultimately on ourselves as individuals in the long run.

Bread and circuses I call it.  Only this time, we’re falling head over heels to pay the entertainment elite (for lack of a better term) to perhaps distract us, and help us escape from the realities of living our otherwise meagre lives and in a perverse kind of way, further deepening the divide.  The rich get richer as a result of the majority’s demand for diversions and we get even more desperate to escape or engage in some vicarious living further entrenching and accelerating the transfer of power from the Ourselves as commoners to the few.

Have to admit, I struggle to understand the level at the public’s fascination and obsession of some Public figures, may be my Celebrity Worship brain circuitry is fried, also gone is my ability to live vicariously. The ability was there when I was young, so not sure when It went, but goes at least some way to explaining why I am having trouble understanding mass psychology and why masses do what they do at times.

I may regard highly, the abilities of a given public figure, but frankly, unable to conjure up any sort of implied relationship (faux or otherwise) with them, unless I’ve met them in person, shook hands and engaged in a conversation with the said person.  Otherwise, it’s this… I don’t know them personally and they don’t know me. Having had a cursory trawl through the Internet, it looks like there is even a test for Celebrity Worship Syndrome [PDF here] to which I confess, I’m very perplexed at the level at which this is occurring at… Have we ceased thinking?

 

Celebrity Worship and The Widening Wealth Gap

Faceborg

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28th October 2016 – Have had to finally capitulate amid much (quite heated and “shouty”) protestation at my lack thereof and get assimilated by faceborg as detailed in this article.

Original post below. My views on facebook still firmly stand…

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In answer to a fairly regular query I receive: “Why aren’t you on facebook?”

While facebook as a platform may be considered the best thing since sliced bread to many, I have to admit, I disagree with how the sole company behind the platform has behaved on several counts and have elected not to support them nor their behaviour by staying off of their platform.

May be if “facebook” as a medium was instead a de-centralised and inter-operable  communication standard (with a choice of providers, much like we have with Email) rather than a proprietary medium control by a single for-profit motivated entity (whose natural motivations are profits ahead of any concern for their users and the world at large), then perhaps, I would indeed see myself using “facebook”.

I will also mention that I am particularly uncomfortable (actually to be honest, “Alarmed” would be more accurate) about how we collectively appear to be handing (by virtue of providing them our personal data) over so much power and control over our our lives, and the Internet in general to a single for-profit corporation such as facebook.  I often do wonder whether or not any one has stopped to think whether so much power over our personal data, the internet and ultimately our lives in general concentrated in the hands of a single profit orientated entity is really a good idea for us collectively in the long run?

There is this long held saying that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, have we all forgotten about this somehow?

It is for these reasons (and several others) why I prefer (and have chosen) to maintain my own homepage  as opposed to handing over personal data to the likes of facebook whom I have little trust in as a custodian of such data.

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See also…

Faceborg