Tag: Facebook
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I Would Rather Die Than Let Facebook Monitor My Heart Rate
Written by Victoria Song on Gizmodo.
“I’m well aware that if you want your health data to remain private, smartwatches are certainly risky. But we’re way past that now. These devices can and have saved lives, and despite some early skepticism, wearables aren’t going anywhere. Why pick a smartwatch made by a company whose founder called early users ‘dumb fucks’ for trusting him? Why trust the company that had a full-page temper tantrum in several national newspapers because Apple introduced stronger privacy features? I’ve got two drawers bursting with smartwatches launched in 2020—there are plenty of lesser evils to choose from.”
Read ‘I Would Rather Die Than Let Facebook Monitor My Heart Rate’ on the Gizmodo site.
Tagged with: Facebook, smart watch, surveillance capitalism.
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Facebook Cannot Separate Itself From the Hate It Spreads
Written by Chris Gilliard on OneZero.
“Even a cursory look at Facebook’s “mistakes,” as they refer to them (or “Facebook’s business model” as it is known to most everyone outside of the company), includes redlining users, enabling age discrimination in hiring, offering “Jew haters” as an advertising category, promoting the “boogaloo” movement, fueling genocide in Myanmar, and aiding Duterte’s rise in the Philippines. It’s not so much that the problem of hate on Facebook is new, so much as that each new revelation is met mostly with an apology and a “promise” to do better moving forward. Facebook has been apologizing and promising this way since at least 2007. Yet the “mistakes” continue.”
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“A company whose business model necessitates that it consistently discharge poison into the environment should be dismantled.”
Read ‘Facebook Cannot Separate Itself From the Hate It Spreads’ on the OneZero site.
Tagged with: Facebook, white supremacy, business models.
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Planned Parenthood let Facebook track how often I logged my period
Written by Ruth Reader on Fast Company.
[L]ots of health companies use Facebook to advertise. As my “off Facebook activity” download showed, much of what gets shared with Facebook is indirect information, such as dates and times I visited a website or app, products, or prescriptions I have looked at or purchased, and products I put in a digital shopping cart.
But glued together, these scraps of information create a collage of my overall health, which Facebook can then sell advertisements against. In collecting data about my health behavior and interests, Facebook probably knows more about my health than my doctor.
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At the end of last year, Planned Parenthood decided to stop using Facebook’s mobile software development kit to make ads for its period tracking app Spot On. When I downloaded my off-Facebook data in January, an outdated version of the Spot On app on my phone had recently pinged Facebook’s servers (this stopped once I updated the app).
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The organization decided that it was worth losing access to some of Facebook’s targeting capabilities in exchange for better user privacy in this instance.
Good on Planned Parenthood for doing the right thing and removing the Facebook tracking. But it’s shocking that developers are ignorant to the tracking embedded in these frameworks and libraries.
Read ‘Planned Parenthood let Facebook track how often I logged my period’ on the Fast Company site.
Tagged with: Facebook, tracking, surveillance capitalism.
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Facebook didn’t mark ads as ads for blind people for almost 2 years
Written by Jeremy B. Merrill on Quartz.
“Americans with disabilities should not be an afterthought for tech companies. There is no justification for forcing them to spend extra time and effort to navigate past online ads,” said Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon. And they should be able to easily learn why they were targeted by those ads, just like everyone else.”
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“Not including legible labels on ads “certainly violates the spirit if not the letter of the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] and raises questions about whether Facebook is engaging in deceptive practices under the FTC Act,” said Blake Reid, a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder who studies accessibility and technology law.
Via Claire Brotherton on Twitter.
Read ‘Facebook didn’t mark ads as ads for blind people for almost 2 years’ on the Quartz site.
Tagged with: accessibility, Facebook, adtech.
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Facebook and Google’s pervasive surveillance poses an unprecedented danger to human rights
Written by Amnesty International/Kumi Naidoo on Amnesty International.
“Surveillance Giants lays out how the surveillance-based business model of Facebook and Google is inherently incompatible with the right to privacy and poses a systemic threat to a range of other rights including freedom of opinion and expression, freedom of thought, and the right to equality and non-discrimination.
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The tech giants offer these services to billions without charging users a fee. Instead, individuals pay for the services with their intimate personal data, being constantly tracked across the web and in the physical world as well, for example, through connected devices.
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The technology behind the internet is not incompatible with our rights, but the business model Facebook and Google have chosen is”
Tagged with: Facebook, Google, human rights.
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No one should buy the Facebook Portal TV
Written by Megan Wollerton on CNET.
“It’s a complete anomaly – a solidly performing, decently priced device that just isn’t suited for anyone because of the privacy concerns and increasingly alarming issues plaguing the social networking site.”
Read ‘No one should buy the Facebook Portal TV’ on the CNET site.
Tagged with: Facebook, surveillance capitalism, privacy.
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I worked on political ads at Facebook. They profit by manipulating us.
Written by Yaël Eisenstat on The Washington Post.
“[T]rue transparency would include information about the tools that differentiate advertising on Facebook from traditional print and television, and in fact make it more dangerous: Can I see if a political advertiser used the custom audience tool, and if so, if my email address was uploaded? Can I see what look-alike audience advertisers are seeking? Can I see a true, verified name of the advertiser in the disclaimer? Can I see if and how your algorithms amplified the ad? If not, the claim that Facebook is simply providing a level playing field for free expression is a myth.
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Free political speech is core to our democratic principles, and it’s true that social media companies should not be the arbiters of truth. But the only way Facebook or other companies that use our behavioral data to potentially manipulate us through targeted advertising can prevent abuse of their platform to harm our electoral process is to end their most egregious targeting and amplification practices and provide real transparency.
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We need lawmakers and regulators to help protect our children, our cognitive capabilities, our public square and our democracy by creating guardrails and rules to deal directly with the incentives and business models of these platforms and the societal harms they are causing.”
Tagged with: Facebook, business models, democracy.
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No Body's Business But Mine: How Menstruation Apps Are Sharing Your Data
Written by Privacy International on Privacy International.
“Feeling anxious? Got lucky last night? Having some health issues? Tell Maya and they’ll let Facebook and others know (oh, and they’ll share your diary too!)”
There is a reason why advertisers are so interested in your mood; understanding when a person is in a vulnerable state of mind means you can strategically target them. Knowing when a teenager is feeling low means an advertiser might try and sell them a food supplement that is supposed to make them feel strong and focused. Understanding people’s mood is an entry point for manipulating them. And that is all the more worrying in an age when Facebook is having so much impact on our democracies, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed. Indeed, it is not just advertisers that will want to know how we feel; as elections approach, political parties may want to know if we feel anxious, stressed or excited so that they can adapt their narratives accordingly.
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Facebook while black: Users call it getting ‘Zucked,’ say talking about racism is censored as hate speech
Written by Jessica Guynn on USA Today.
“Facebook is not looking to protect me or any other person of color or any other marginalized citizen who are being attacked by hate speech,” [Carolyn Wysinger] says. “We get trolls all the time. People who troll your page and say hateful things. But nobody is looking to protect us from it. They are just looking to protect their bottom line.”
Tagged with: racism, censorship, Facebook.
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How Big Tech’s cozy relationship with Ireland threatens data privacy around the world
Written by Nicholas Vinocur on Politico.
“Ireland’s failure to safeguard huge stores of personal information looms larger now that the country is the primary regulator responsible for protecting the health information, email addresses, financial records, relationship status, search histories and friend lists for hundreds of millions of Americans, Europeans and other users around the globe.”
“Despite its vows to beef up its threadbare regulatory apparatus, Ireland has a long history of catering to the very companies it is supposed to oversee…”
Tagged with: Facebook, regulation, Ireland.