Browsed by
Category: Privacy

The Buck Stops Where?

The Buck Stops Where?

Comments 0 Comment

Tech has always been lax about security, while the average consumer has been socialized more or less to a plug and play environment. Plug in the (non-IoT) iron, plug in the (non-IoT) fridge – they work. If there’s a problem, and the warranty is still in effect, the manufacturer or retailer steps in. The problem is generally resolved.

Just his week, a indignant father reported that the voice from our Nest camera threatened to steal our baby. Worse, he Googled ‘Nest + camera + hacked’ and found out that this happens frequently. As the Mercury News reported, “Nest, which was designed to keep intruders out of people’s homes, effectively allowed hackers to get in.” Read More...

Unicorn, Shmoonicorn. Is It a Fantasy?

Unicorn, Shmoonicorn. Is It a Fantasy?

Comments 0 Comment
Image by Julieta Mascarella from Pixabay

If we noticed anything this week, it was that it may be time to rethink unicorns and hockey stick growth. We know what investors look for: TAM (Total Addressable Market) and it had better be big, as it’s all about ROI.

WeWork is planning their IPO, and after years of expansion and so-called hockey stick growth, the cracks are showing. Business Insider laid out The history of WeWork’s meteoric valuation rise — and fall, including “the coworking startup’s governance, real estate holdings, succession plan, employee retention, and questionable patent purchases have spooked potential investors. WeWork has amended its SEC filings twice already to address several of those concerns, but it might not be enough.

“According to a Reuters report, WeWork will target a $10 billion valuation for its IPO, drastically lower than the $47 billion valuation it last fetched in private markets. A $10 billion public valuation would be only slightly above the total amount of funding WeWork has taken in as a private company: about $8.39 billion since 2011, according to Pitchbook data.” Read More...

FakesBook (It’s Not At All What You Think)

FakesBook (It’s Not At All What You Think)

Comments 0 Comment

If you’re not yet aware of DeepFakes – hyper-realistic manipulations of digital imagery that can alter images so effectively that it’s largely impossible to tell real from fake – time to pay attention. The technology – and the problem – is escalating quickly.

According to Futurism, A Spy Used a Deepfake Photo to Infiltrate LinkedIn Networks. “Many of Jones’ connections told the AP that they were initially suspicious of the profile but accepted anyway.” We personally never accept a LinkedIn invitation from anyone whom we don’t know or haven’t met. The platform is about connecting with people to build your network of contacts for professional or business purposes. Why would you accept an arbitrary invitation? Yet people have argued with us that the more connections you have, the better. No better time than now to disagree. Read More...

Overdue: The Internet Declaration of Independence

Overdue: The Internet Declaration of Independence

Comments 0 Comment
Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

The U.S. just celebrated Independence Day, when we pause to take stock of what the founders fought for: liberty and justice for the citizenry, which were not necessarily granted to them in the countries from whence they’d come.

There are always fireworks.

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger recently published his proposed Declaration of Digital Independence, and it’s a must-read. “Humanity has been contemptuously used by vast digital empires. Thus it is now necessary to replace these empires with decentralized networks of independent individuals, as in the first decades of the Internet,” he begins, and he does delineate the many abuses of the tech oligarchs, including: Read More...

Libra. In Facebook We Trust?

Libra. In Facebook We Trust?

Comments 0 Comment

Facebook announced the soon-to-debut of Libra, its new cryptocurrency, last week, saying that it hoped to bring billions of the unbanked into the digital economy, providing them with basic financial services through their cellphones, eerily echoing Facebook’s original mission to bring the world closer together with its social platform, in case you missed the irony.

We all know how that worked out. Read More...

As the FAANG Founders Turn – On Each Other

As the FAANG Founders Turn – On Each Other

Comments 0 Comment
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

You have to give Mark Zuckerberg credit. Love him or hate him, he does act very deliberately, even if you might believe that it is with malice aforethought.

Netflix founder and CEO Reid Hastings resigned from the Facebook board this past week. Peggy Alford, currently senior vice president of Core Markets for PayPal, will be nominated to join the board of directors and become its first black member, but there’s a clear case of missing the forest through the trees here.

Facebook is reportedly spending $1 billion on producing original content. When Hastings joined the board in 2011, he said that he had been trying to figure out how to integrate Facebook and make Netflix more social, so getting on the board was a good deal, according to Business Insider. Read More...

Beware Big Companies ASKING to be Regulated

Beware Big Companies ASKING to be Regulated

Comments 0 Comment

In a seeming change of heart, Mark Zuckerberg backs stronger Internet privacy and election laws: ‘We need a more active role for governments’, he said, and no, there wasn’t a sudden rip in the universe. Zuckerberg penned an opinion piece in the Washington Post entitled The internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas, which are harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.

The editorial, no doubt, comes on the heels of the attention that Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon have been getting from Congress and various Presidential candidates, and as a result of the recent announcement that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube execs face jail and multi-billion pound fines over terror videos. “Australia could become the first country to introduce prison terms and fines if firms fail to speedily remove terror videos like the Christchurch massacre live-stream,” reports The Sun. Read More...

Watch Where the Puck Is Going, Not Where It Has Been

Watch Where the Puck Is Going, Not Where It Has Been

Comments 0 Comment

The World Wide Web turned 30 this past week. Web creator Tim Berners-Lee marked the occasion by noting that the web is now dysfunctional with ‘perverse’ incentives, while Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems to have marked it by announcing Facebook’s new pivot to privacy. Trust us, he did not suddenly have a come to Jesus moment. The only pivot here in his manifesto is away from Facebook’s current town square format into one focused more on the ability to have private messages among people and groups, which is the way that Facebook users had been going anyway.

“I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever. This is the future I hope we will help bring about,” said Zuckerberg in his manifesto. Read More...

Surveillance Capitalism: We Are Definitely the Product

Surveillance Capitalism: We Are Definitely the Product

Comments 1 comment

The tech cartel has been labeled many things. “Attention Merchants” being one of them. In her new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff has designated a new category for them: Surveillance Capitalists. “Surveillance capitalism,” she writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data.

The Business of the Internet

“When the security expert Bruce Schneier wrote that “surveillance is the business model of the internet,” The Guardian reports, “he was really only hinting at the reality that Zuboff has now illuminated. The combination of state surveillance and its capitalist counterpart means that digital technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two groups: the watchers (invisible, unknown and unaccountable) and the watched. This has profound consequences for democracy because asymmetry of knowledge translates into asymmetries of power. But whereas most democratic societies have at least some degree of oversight of state surveillance, we currently have almost no regulatory oversight of its privatised counterpart. This is intolerable.” Read More...