F*c*b**k announced today that the personal data of most of its two billion users has been scraped — that is harvested, stolen, collected, aggregated, collated, probably sold, used, and otherwise misused by outside parties.
This scraping has been done by what they call “malicious actors” or “bad actors.” That is, identity thieves and their ilk.
But the truth is that the real bad actor here is F*c*b**k. Their site was set up to enable this. They did nothing to prevent it and everything to make it possible. It was built in to the way FB did business.
Then they tried to bury the news.
Then they tried to justify themselves by saying that all that happy, happy work of connecting all the people in the world meant that … well, you know, they’d missed a detail or two. But it was allllll in a great cause, really, truly.
After all, according to The Big Zuck, FB did you the YUGE favor of giving you everything free, unlike those eeeeeevil companies like Apple that charge for their products.
It was pure altruism in action. (“Just don’t look over here at the billions I’m making from selling your data to good actors,” sez The Zuck.)
Yeah, Ayn Rand could have told you all about that kind of altruism.
“One piece of data Facebook said it would stop collecting was the time of phone calls, a response to outrage from users of Facebook’s messenger service who discovered that allowing Facebook to access their phone contact list was giving the company access to their call logs.”
Dear Lord….. I don’t even know where to begin with this………
““The more we learn, the clearer it is that this was an avalanche of privacy violations that strike at the core of one of our most precious American values – the right to privacy,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who serves on the Senate Commerce Committee, which has called on Zuckerberg to testify at a hearing next week.”
That’s rich. Say whatever bad thing you want about Zuckerberg, he never forced anybody to sign up for a Facebook account. Unlike, say, the IRS, SSA, the census bureau, …
And yet, they tried to prevent connecting all the people in the world. I sent friend requests to everyone I knew from online back when I first started using FB, and I started getting nasty warnings from FB asking if I really personally KNOW this person in real life, and if not, “No friend request for you!”
And in more unsurprising FB news:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5578619/Facebook-scans-contents-private-Messenger-texts.html
The are scanning your “private” messages, both with automation and with humans, and censoring those that don’t meet their “community standards.”
Why private messages should have to meet “community” standards, I can’t begin to say.
Sometimes (shudder) white males think they have a right to speak. Speech they believe is private is particularly insidious and must be monitored and controlled. For the children.
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-facebook-public-profile-information-that-could-be-scraped-2018-4
More info on what was scraped and how. Also a bit on how to protect yourself — though protecting your privacy and being on FB is … well …
“Sometimes (shudder) white males think they have a right to speak.”
Ah well. We shall soon eliminate that problem. At the source.
“Sometimes (shudder) white males think they have a right to speak.”
White is the new Black.
And in other news, Microsoft has announced they’ve gone full batshit big brother crazy: http://boston.cbslocal.com/2018/03/27/microsoft-ban-offensive-language-xbox-skype-office-account/
jc2k — We’ve been talking about this over at the Cabal. It appears to be Microsoft’s response to the SESTA/FOSTA federal law that shifts new liabilities onto Internet providers.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/what-is-sesta-fosta-bill/
The law is supposed to help prevent sex trafficking, but it’s really working to prevent free speech. We’ll be seeing a lot more moves like the one Microsoft made.
This is why I use fake names online. Several fake names. Fake birth dates. Fake hometowns. Fake family members.
I’m a little curious what happens when someone tries to get a loan with a stolen fake identity.
“Got A Cough? We’ll Cough it Up!” (Monitization is key).
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/05/facebook-building-8-explored-data-sharing-agreement-with-hospitals.html
Holeeee cr*p. Is there anything these villains won’t stoop to?
There’s no such thing as anonymized data, really. But FB’s intention to pry data out of hospitals for the express purpose of matching it up with information on FB users is virtually criminal, not to mention scurvy, scurrilous, arrogant, patronizing, nosy, and several dozen other adjectives of utter contempt.