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Category: Facebook

Meta Under the Microscope

Meta Under the Microscope

Image by A3DigitalStudio from Pixabay

The social networks love kids. That especially seems to be the case with Meta nee Facebook, with its many social platforms. The company has a long history of engaging children – the more the merrier and cha-ching!

Just how engaging and by what methods is at long last coming under scrutiny. How Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Failed Children on Safety, States Say, the New York Times reported. The C.E.O. and his team drove Meta’s efforts to capture young users and misled the public about the risks, lawsuits by state attorneys general say. That’s not exactly a news flash, but then again, it’s the New York Times – all the news that’s fit to print…eventually.

There were more than a dozen lawsuits filed since last year by the attorneys general of 45 states and the District of Columbia, the Times reported. “The states accuse Meta of unfairly ensnaring teenagers and children on Instagram and Facebook while deceiving the public about the hazards. Read More...

Tik Tok, Tik Tok, Tik Tok

Tik Tok, Tik Tok, Tik Tok

Image by Benjamin Zocholl from Pixabay

Due to the purported national security concerns posed by China-based ByteDance’s ownership of Tik Tok, the video sharing app which is used by around 170 million Americans and more than a billion people globally is in the spotlight. Congress is attempting to pass a law requiring that ByteDance divest itself of its interest in the company.

The ban would go into effect in six months.

“These countries have blocked or restricted it (Britain, EU, Canada, India, New Zealand, Afghanistan and Pakistan and note – primarily on government-issued devices),” the Washington Post reported. “The federal government already bans TikTok on government-owned devices.” Read More...

Aileen Lee’s Look at the Unicorn Club, Ten Years After She Coined the Term

Aileen Lee’s Look at the Unicorn Club, Ten Years After She Coined the Term

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

It was Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures who coined the term ‘unicorn.’ Now she has taken a fresh look: Welcome Back to the Unicorn Club, 10 Years Later. A lot changes in ten years, especially in tech.

As Lee observed, ten years ago, the majority of unicorns were consumer focused. Now, the pendulum has swung hard to enterprise, and the herd is about to be thinned – for now -, as many a so-called unicorn is a ‘papercorn.’ Capital efficiency has dropped precipitously, Silicon Valley is no longer the unicorn hub (“The Bay Area is still the largest unicorn pasture, but lost a lot of ground”). She also predicts that AI will be a superunicorn.

Facebook was the standout beast in 2013, but our question is, how good is a unicorn’s eyesight? One would think or at least hope that unicorns are visionaries in some way (preferably in a good way), but the two terms are hardly interchangeable. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs certainly was that square peg in the round hole who was crazy enough to think that he could change the world – in a good way – and he did. The iPod, the iPhone. The NeXt cube, that changed computers forever. Jobs was no doubt a visionary, and a design genius. Read More...

The 23 Memorable People & ‘Peccadillos’ of ’23 – Part One

The 23 Memorable People & ‘Peccadillos’ of ’23 – Part One

Image by Rosy / Bad Homburg / Germany from Pixabay

Remember all the dumb things you did when you were 23 and thought you knew everything? No, the year wasn’t all bad. Then again, when you were 23, you had your moments, too…

We’ve made our list and checked it twice, so without further ado, the people and peccadillos of the year that’s coming to an end, but the real question is, in many cases, when – and where – does it stop?

  1. Sam Bankman-Fried. He held our attention for quite a spell, as tales of his exploits were revealed: defrauding investors left and right and spending money like it grew on trees. Which it did for him: shake the tree and there were even more funds in the FTX coffers. The one-time crypto king believed that his true strength was in his hair and that those carefully unkempt locks made all the difference in his meteoric rise. Maybe they did for a spell, but speaking of locks, fraud is fraud and the former wunderkind is heading to prison for an even longer spell.
  2. The new cryminal class. SBF tops long list of crypto hot shots facing legal reckoning. “His case was far from the first — or last — time that crypto founders and executives found themselves in legal hot water related to their digital-asset activities,” the Toronto Sun pointed out. There was also Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon; Alex Mashinsky, the former chief executive of Celsius Network; Su Zhu, co-founder of the bankrupt Three Arrows Capital hedge fund and Thomas Smith, Kyle Nagy, and Braden Karony — the people behind the crypto token SafeMoon, who were accused by federal prosecutors of using millions in investors’ funds to buy luxury homes and McClaren sports cars. When you can live that large is so short an amount of time, chances are there’s a small cell in your future.

Biometrics collection is certainly growing. Read More...

Speaking of Terrorism, Let’s Talk About Tech

Speaking of Terrorism, Let’s Talk About Tech

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Given the present situation in the Middle East, it’s not easy to write about something like, say, the FEMA emergency broadcasting system test alert that we all experienced October 4, like it or not, and attention does need to be paid there – coming!

The invasion by Hamas into Israel and the attacks and wholesale murder and/or kidnappings of innocent civilians was amoral, to put it mildly. The world is gobsmacked, no matter which side you’re on, and since we opine on tech rather than politics, there is very much a lesson here for us all in tech overreach.

Huh? Read More...

He’s Baa-aack!

He’s Baa-aack!

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

Meta – the company formerly known as Facebook – has gone all in on the metaverse and judging from this past week’s press conference where Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg showcased his latest and greatest, it looks like this time, it might just have legs. Pun intended, of course, for those of us who remember his past iteration of the space and the legless floating torsos.

Now he’s back, like a bad penny, and in case you missed it, here is Everything Revealed in 10 Minutes, including “the launch of 28 chatbots (conversational agents), which supposedly have their own personalities and have been specially designed for younger users. These include Victor, a so-called triathlete who can motivate “you to be your best self”, and Sally, the “free-spirited friend who’ll tell you when to take a deep breath,” France24 reported.

“Meta sees these as “fun” artificial intelligence,” the piece continues. “Others…feel that this latest technological development could mark the first step towards creating “the most dangerous artefacts in human history”, to quote from American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett’s essay about “counterfeit people.” Read More...

Hanging by a Thread: A Double Entendre?

Hanging by a Thread: A Double Entendre?

 Unless you’ve been under a rock – or unplugged due to an extended Independence Day holiday – you do know that Meta has released ‘Twitter killer’ Threads. Thirty million people signed on Day One, and it’s easy to join. No special invite required. No early adopter wait list. All you need is an Instagram account and click on the icon. You’re in!

Ah, but can you just as easily get out?

Long answer: no.  Not without deleting your Instagram account and even then, who knows what data capture threads Meta has left behind. Read More...

Technology’s Marks of Evil?

Technology’s Marks of Evil?

Image by Alexa from Pixabay

What is it with that name and the need to control? Or manipulate. We refer to the Mar(c)(k)s Andreessen and Zuckerberg, respectively.

Although the spellings may be different to deceive the clueless.

Marc Andreessen, who a while back explained Why Software Is Eating the World, is now instructing us on Why AI Will Save The World. Mind you, in his earlier a16Z blog post, while he was right about how technology would take over, he didn’t bother to mention what we’d have to surrender for the privilege: our privacy and all our personal information. Read More...

On Apples, Oranges and Mangos: An End of Summer Compote

On Apples, Oranges and Mangos: An End of Summer Compote

This week is the last hurrah of summer, so something different this time: a look at what’s been happening in Big Tech at large, primarily with  a number of the FAANG companies – Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google, for those playing the home version – or more appropriately now MAANG, since Facebook is now Meta – and for our purposes here, MAANGO, as we’re including Oracle and some information that recently came to light. Plus, mangos are very much a summer fruit, after all.

Oracle

Speaking of just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water (not!):  Class-Action Lawsuit Accuses Oracle of Tracking 5 Billion People. “Oracle stands accused of collecting detailed dossiers on 5 billion people, with the information gathered including names, home addresses, emails, purchases online and in the real world, physical movements in the real world, income, interests and political views, and a detailed account of online activity,” PC Mag reported.

“This claim is backed up by a video on the ICCL website(Opens in a new window) of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison describing how the company’s real-time machine learning system collects this information and confirms the 5 billion profiles stored in the “Oracle Data Cloud.” The profiles are referred to as a “Consumers Identity Graph.”” Read More...

The Demise of Tech’s Boy Band Founders

The Demise of Tech’s Boy Band Founders

Photo by Mubariz Mehdizadeh on Unsplash

We also like to call them the Boys of Summer – those unicorn tech super founders, that is.

As the New York Times noted, The Boy Bosses of Silicon Valley Are on Their Way Out, dismounting their unicorns and heading for the hills, with their largesse in tow and never mind the layoffs and loss of shareholder value that they’ve left in their wake.

  Read More...