YES!ASOCIAL MEDIA INSTATWATFACE!!
greed, manipulation and the
‘security’ target group
creation scam
Friends? YES! “FRIENDS” NO!
Please UNFRIEND me on Facebook!
‘“There are almost no restrictions on what can be collected and how it can be used”, reports the Electronic Frontier Foundation.’
I posted that in early 2012. Some people told me not to be so paranoid. Then came Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations about the NSA, multiple warnings about Facebook as a political tool, and, as if that weren’t enough, all the revelations in spring 2018 about Cambridge Analytica, Aggregate IQ, SCL, unethical access to at least 87 million Facebook users’ data and, as I see it, the rigging of the EU referendum in the UK (‘Brexshit’), as well as of elections in Nigeria, not to mention the USA (see here for documentation).
Earlier Facebook and Twitter issues |
Public and Private | Reasons for this site
Penultimate and ultimate thoughts
Really disturbing Facebook shit, March-April 2018
Far more than 87m Facebook users had data compromised
Facebook and Cambridge Analytica face class action lawsuit
Lawyers in UK and US allege four firms misused personal data of more than
71m people. Facebook could face damages in excess of $70bn. “The
defendants effectively abused the human right to privacy of ordinary Facebook
users and, if that were not enough, then the fruits of that abuse are
alleged to have undermined the democratic process. This case will go some
way to ensure that neither of these things can happen in the future”
(UK lawyer). “Facebook utterly failed in its duty and promise to
secure the personal information of millions of its users, and, when aware
that this … information was aimed against its owners, it failed
to take appropriate action” (US lawyer).
The great British Brexshit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked
A shadowy global operation involving big data, billionaire friends of Trump and the disparate forces of the Leave campaign influenced the result of the EU referendum. As Britain heads to the polls again, is our electoral process still fit for purpose?
Follow the data: legal document links Brexit campaigns to US billionaire
How a confidential legal agreement is at the heart of a web connecting Robert Mercer to Britain’s EU referendum.
50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major
data breach
Facebook Failed to Protect 30 Million Users From Having Their Data Harvested by Trump Campaign
Cambridge Analytica and Facebook accused of misleading MPs over data breach
incl call for Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg to testify before parliamentary committee
Breach
leaves Facebook users wondering: how safe is my data?
Claims that Cambridge Analytica used data to target
voters in US election raises tough questions
No one can pretend Facebook is just harmless fun any more
From its stance on extremist content, to its vast caches of user data, Facebook is a corporation whose power must, finally, be reined in.
Italy’s far-right figure Matteo Salvini explicitly thanked Facebook for contributing to the country’s recent election results.
If ExxonMobil attempted to insert itself into every element of our lives like Facebook, there might be a concerted grassroots movement to curb its influence. So perhaps it’s time to start treating Facebook as the giant multinational corporation it is – especially because people with Facebook profiles aren’t the company’s customers: they are the product it sells to advertisers.
Christopher Wylie: Why I broke the Facebook data story – and what should happen now
The whistleblower at the centre of the Cambridge Analytica storm asks if Britain will now address the hard issues which it has raised.
Facebook says Cambridge Analytica may have gained 37m more users' data [87m in all]
Company reveals up to 87m people may have been affected as Mark Zuckerberg takes responsibility for ‘a huge mistake’
Revealed: graphic video used by Cambridge Analytica to influence Nigerian election
Whistleblower says firm directed AggregateIQ to target voters with Islamophobic video in 2015
Facebook suspends data firm hired by Vote Leave over alleged Cambridge Analytica ties
AggregateIQ, which played a pivotal role in the Brexit campaign, suspended after reports it may have improperly obtained user data
AggregateIQ: the obscure Canadian tech firm and the Brexit data riddle
Eurosceptic pro-Brexit volunteer blows whistle: ‘it was a scam’
“I’m really scared if Britain, the beacon of democracy, can be cheated like that, its people be lied to like that, and if the government can then proceed to take action based on what was entirely a scam.”
EU referendum won through fraud, whistleblower tells MPs
MPs to question senior figures in Cambridge Analytica scandal
“I’m so tired of making excuses for old white men... There’s a much wider story that I think needs to be told about how people can protect themselves, and their own data.”
Former Cambridge Analytica exec says she wants the lies to stop
Asked why she has decided to speak out, Kaiser
flares: “Why should we make excuses for these people? Why? I’m
so tired of making excuses for old white men. Fucking hell.”
Facebook told me it would act swiftly on data misuse – in 2015 (!)
“While I was tracing Cambridge Analytica’s activities, Facebook was portraying the 2016 election as a big commercial opportunity”...
'Utterly horrifying': ex-Facebook insider says covert data harvesting was routine
Sandy Parakilas: “They treated it [Russia’s 2017 attempt to sway the presidential election] like a PR exercise... They seemed to be entirely focused on limiting their liability and exposure rather than helping the country address a national security issue.” The Guardian summarises: “Parakilas decided to go public with his concerns, writing an opinion article in the New York Times that said Facebook could not be trusted to regulate itself. Since then, Parakilas has become an adviser to the Center for Humane Technology, which is run by Tristan Harris, a former Google employee turned whistleblower on the industry.”
Cambridge Analytica boasts of dirty tricks to swing elections
Video: bosses tell undercover reporters how honey
traps, spies and fake news, as well as big data and psychographics, have
been used to help political clients in Argentina, Nigeria, Brazil, Malaysia,
etc., as well as, of course, in the thoroughly corrupt UK and USA. I’ve
uploaded this report to my site in case it’s taken down again from
YouTube, etc.
Earlier Facebook and Twitter issues
 |
I have no “friends” because I prefer real FRIENDS. |
|---|
Cyber-corporations claim they know who my friends are. Bollocks. I have no ‘friends’ because the reality behind having ‘friends’ in their system of ‘social networking’ is for me and those ‘friends’ to provide, free of charge, the vultures of corporate sales departments with yet another personally tailored and neatly defined target group. That’s a no-brainer for capitalists wanting to make money out of us but no good at all for me or my (real) friends.
No service is ever free: you always have to pay some way or other. I prefer to pay up front for the service I need.
I'm sick of consumerism's propaganda pedlars pestering me to part with my cash for the benefit of the company they're working for. They say the product or service is on OFFER [not SALE], that I will SAVE [not SPEND], that I will WIN [not LOSE], that there's CASH BACK [money coming IN, not going OUT], that I’m getting something (that I probably neither want nor need) FOR FREE, that prices have been SLASHED to AS LITTLE AS 9.99, etc. They seem to take me for a moron.
I don’t want anyone who visits this site to be exposed, directly or indirectly, to the evil and infantile machinations of ‘advertising’. That’s why I pay for this site out of my own pocket and why I don’t do ‘social networking’ on line. I can make what I like and dislike public, as I’m doing here. I’ve chosen to do that even though (or maybe because) US government bodies access this site on a regular basis. I’ve already been refused entry to the USA for having been a member of the communist party and I would not let myself be intimidated if I were subjected to other measures taken in the interests of “freedom”.
Anyhow, if you want to tell me what you had for breakfast or to find out what I’m doing, why not contact me as a human being. Don’t piss against a public cyber-lamppost for any old surfing spy dog to sniff. If you’re a friend you’ll already have my phone numbers and email address anyhow. If you don’t, I probably won’t want to know what you had for breakfast or whether you like or dislike Adam and Kelly.
I apologise for the consumerist propaganda you’ll find alongside some of my videos that are still on YouTube. When I started uploading to YouTube in 2005 the facility was not stricken with the plague of ‘advertising’. In 2012 I wrote to Google/YouTube asking if I could pay to stop this commercial blight from being associated with what I produce. No reply so far (January 2018). So much for the integrity of what I create and so much for freedom of choice, even if I offer to pay for such basic liberties. No way, apparently. So now the majority of my edutainment videos are accessible on my site or posted on Vimeo. Boycott YouTube and amazon.uk if you can! Advertising sucks (1). Say it again! Advertising sucks (2).
I hope Google greedy-guts (Google own YouTube) will consider joining the real world after making such arrogant fools of themselves in the great ogooglebar event! All respect and power to Ann Cederberg and Svenska språkrådet for standing up to the corporate bullies of Google’s legal team. Länge leve det humanistiska Sverige! Åt helvete med den kapitalistiska arrogansen! =Long live the humanist [parts of] Sweden! To hell with capitalist arrogance!
Public and private spheres (´pointless babble´)
In 2009 I Googled |+facebook +"I had for breakfast"|: about 1,200,000 hits. The equivalent result for MySpace was 600,000. Here are some other search results documenting the riveting content of social networking sites:
Hits : |Search string|
----------------------------
14,500: |+facebook +"Bob is an idiot"|
>½ million: |+MySpace +"I like sex"|
>½ million: |+facebook +"my favourite" OR "my favorite"|
>2¼ million: |+facebook +"I go to sleep"
>4 million: |+facebook +"my boy friend"|
>4½ million: |+facebook +"my girl friend"|
>7 million: |+myspace +"I hate"|
>22 million: |+myspace +"I really like"|
A helluva lot of personal details and opinion, here, most of them belonging clearly to the private, sometimes even intimate, sphere. This vast amount of private personalia is strewn all over the internet, just like all those ill-concealed yet strongly emphasised private parts plastered on billboards all over the cityscape. I don’t see why we should have to be exposed to it, even less why we ourselves would want to put the private parts of our own lives on public display.
I don’t want to know what someone I’ve never heard of had for breakfast, nor if they like or dislike celebrity X, nor what they look like in their underwear or in the nude. The web is, like it or not, a public space allowing comparatively democratic access to anyone wanting to take part in the global public forum it provides. This is my personal opinion about a public issue, not an exposé of my private parts or foibles. How can exposing your private foibles on line be considered substantially different from walking down town with your private parts on display? And how can it ever be of interest to 99.9999999% of internet users?
I think it’s sad and ironic that so many individuals using online ‘social’ networking seem to believe that the things of least interest to a general public are those they should publicise. It’s a crazy upside-down world in which the overriding mode of public presentation of human beings is one of decontextualised and desocialised individual subjectivities. The opportunity of online networking to organise and to make the world a better place seems to be the exception rather than the rule in the world of TwitFaced FaceTwits. Thank goodness this old man's glum view does not apply to thousands of other blogs and sites out there in cyberspace.
How many people really care about what I ‘like’? Not many, apart from capitalists targetting my tastes and foibles so they can sell me, and the friends they hijack through me, stuff that none of us have asked to know about. I don’t see why I should let marketing departments or the NSA hijack relationships of shared values between friends. Do you? Or do you only have ‘friends’ because you have no friends?
Asocial media: “friends” or friends of yours?
Why I stopped tweeting altogether
“Twitter collects personally identifiable information about its users and shares it with third parties. The service reserves the right to sell this information as an asset”...
“[A]dvertisers can target users based on their history of tweets and may quote tweets in ads directed specifically to the user”. (Source: Wikipedia entry referring to Twitter Privacy Policy, ‘Advertisers watch your every Tweet’, and ‘Twitter Vulnerability´).
Twitter also stores your tweets so they can be accessed and analysed by the NSA. How cute IS the lickle blue birdie-wordie? Squawk...
2015-07-05 I reluctantly signed up for Twitter to see if it could reduce stress and information overkill. It didn’t help. It made my life more stressful. I abandoned Twitter again after a year’s trial.
Philip Tagg
(Huddersfield, 2010-07-30, upd. 2010-09-09, 2010-12-12, 2011-12-09, 2011-12-15, 2012-12-19, 2013-04-03, 2013-11-17, 2015-06-11, 2015-07-06; Liverpool 2020-20-09; 2022-02-21),
