Hi, I’m Phil Nelson, a writer, developer, and audio-visual maker of stuff. I have been making stuff online for over 25 years. I run RetroStrange and Set Side B. Good to see you.
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Just in case you needed more reasons that Facebook is a morally corrupt drain on our entire society, Gizmodo went deep and forced FB to admit to this practice (after they denied it several times).
If you’re still working at Facebook…. why? Is the money that good?
Zeynep Tufekci with some strong medicine, for Wired:
In 2003, one year before Facebook was founded, a website called Facemash began nonconsensually scraping pictures of students at Harvard from the school’s intranet and asking users to rate their hotness. Obviously, it caused an outcry. The website’s developer quickly proffered an apology. “I hope you understand, this is not how I meant for things to go, and I apologize for any harm done as a result of my neglect to consider how quickly the site would spread and its consequences thereafter,” wrote a young Mark Zuckerberg. “I definitely see how my intentions could be seen in the wrong light.”
I’ve been seeing the meme version of this passed around these past few days, and it’s sort of incredible how many people think it’s a joke. Nope. Facebook was started by a horny Zuckerberg and his gross dorm friends to rate the “hotness” of their female classmates.
Zeynep Tufekc, for the New York Times:
Mr. Grewal is right: This wasn’t a breach in the technical sense. It is something even more troubling: an all-too-natural consequence of Facebook’s business model, which involves having people go to the site for social interaction, only to be quietly subjected to an enormous level of surveillance. The results of that surveillance are used to fuel a sophisticated and opaque system for narrowly targeting advertisements and other wares to Facebook’s users.
People are finally starting to catch on that Facebook’s value proposition (“Tell us everything about you, all the time, so we can help get dictators elected around the world”) is pretty weak.
When Mark Zuckerberg was asked if Facebook had influenced the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, the founder and CEO dismissed the notion that the site even had such power as “crazy.” It was a disingenuous remark. Facebook’s website had an entire section devoted to touting the “success stories” of political campaigns that used the social network to influence electoral outcomes. That page, however, is now gone, even as the 2018 congressional primaries get underway.
‘ol Zuck just can’t stop lying.
[Facebook lies to your friends and says you “liked” pages that you haven’t if their advertisers pay them enough.][link]
[link]: https://plus.google.com/+MikeElgan/posts/eDTgkQTuvXA “Mike Elgan – Google+ – Facebook abuses users, lies for money. A giant ad took…”
Today I made a [series][first] of [seemingly][second] [innocuous][third], though slightly filthy, joke tweets based on a vaginal rejuvenation cream being sold in India.
[The Facebook thread][fb] (I have Twitter set to auto-post to Facebook) for the [third tweet][second] now has over 118,000 comments and 5,500 likes, and the comment threat is INSANE. This appears to have affected the posts of many, many people. The user who appears to be posting the majority of the comments (mostly replying with the single letter “r”) is identified as “Rahmi Özgündüz”, but that name (and the photo on the profile) belong to a [Turkish soccer player][turk]. It’s possible he/she/it started this, but without more info it’s hard to say. Could just be a regular ‘ol database ID bug.
This has got to be the problem of the day for some poor Facebook engineer. Sorry, dude. Or lady.
Update: [Ben Garvey][bg] has the idea that somehow a post ID has been duplicated across several different FB posts, which is making all of the comments be piled into one big thread. Sounds about right to me.
Update Two: The responses, at least the ones in a language I speak, are hilarious. They range from [incredulous][incred], to [indignant][indignant] to [pleas for sanity to the uncaring universe][pleas].
[turk]: http://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/en/rahmi-oezguenduez/profil/spieler_104716.html “Rahmi Özgündüz”
[incred]: https://www.facebook.com/philnelson/posts/2231777543?comment_id=23556252&offset=0&total_comments=119429 ” Incredulity”
[pleas]: https://www.facebook.com/philnelson/posts/2231777543?comment_id=23555037&offset=28&total_comments=119295 “Plea for sanity”
[indignant]: https://www.facebook.com/philnelson/posts/2231777543?comment_id=23555049&offset=0&total_comments=119267 “Indignant response”
[fb]: https://www.facebook.com/philnelson/posts/2231777543 “Facebook thread for the tweet”
[first]: https://twitter.com/philnelson/status/240487313161990144 “First tweet”
[third]: https://twitter.com/philnelson/status/240487857163235328 “Third Tweet”
[second]: https://twitter.com/philnelson/status/240487680947937280 “Second tweet”
[bg]: https://twitter.com/bengarvey/statuses/240496533638873089 “Ben Garvey’s theory”
[Garrett Murray on a troubling trend in Kickstarter projects:][link]
>At least once a week I receive an unsolicited request to fund a project. These messages are rarely offensive in and of themselves–they’re usually just information about the project and a paragraph or two of generic “please help us out” text–but they’re still spam. They’re usually sent to a blind carbon copy list, but occasionally someone will screw up and send it out via plain CC, exposing all the email addresses they’ve targeted.
This is spam, plain and simple. Kickstarter needs to decide if it’s the kind of company who wants to allow this (in order to potentially make more money in the short term, ala Facebook, at the expense of user satisfaction and damage to their brand) or come down hard on it (do the right thing for their users AND backers). I know what I hope they do.
[link]: http://garre.tt/kickstarters-spam-problem?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter “Kickstarter’s Spam Problem by Garrett Murray”
[Another big privacy / security win for Twitter][link]. They’re using a new feature in Firefox called, appropriately, “[Do Not Track][dnt]”:
>Do Not Track is a step toward putting you in control of the way your information is collected and used online. Do Not Track is a feature in Firefox that allows you to let a website know you would like to opt-out of third-party tracking for purposes including behavioral advertising. It does this by transmitting a Do Not Track HTTP header every time your data is requested from the Web.
Can anyone even imagine Facebook doing this? I hope this finds its way into WebKit. [“Do Not Track” is also available as an option in Safari 5.2, which is available to developers right now.][safari] (thanks, [Jesper][jesp])
[link]: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/twitter-implements-do-not-track-privacy-option/ “Twitter Implements Do Not Track Privacy Option – NYTimes.com”
[dnt]: http://dnt.mozilla.org/ “Do Not Track”
[safari]: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/03/01/inside_os_x_108_mountain_lion_safari_52_adds_privacy_settings_website_alerts.html “Safari 5.2 adds privacy settings, website alerts”
[jesp]: http://stmts.net/ “STMNTS”
