After Facebook

[Transporter]

We need a wholesale switch back to Myspace

 

[a_majoor]

One of the few useful services the Internet offers is under threat:

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2838775/why-google-wants-to-replace-gmail.html

Why Google wants to replace Gmail
Gmail represents a dying class of products that, like Google Reader, puts control in the hands of users, not signal-harvesting algorithms.

By Mike Elgan  FOLLOW
Computerworld | Oct 25, 2014 4:03 AM PT
I'm predicting that Google will end Gmail within the next five years. The company hasn't announced such a move -- nor would it.

But whether we like it or not, and whether even Google knows it or not, Gmail is doomed.

What is email, actually?

Email was created to serve as a "dumb pipe." In mobile network parlance, a "dumb pipe" is when a carrier exists to simply transfer bits to and from the user, without the ability to add services and applications or serve as a "smart" gatekeeper between what the user sees and doesn't see.

Carriers resist becoming "dumb pipes" because there's no money in it. A pipe is a faceless commodity, valued only by reliability and speed. In such a market, margins sink to zero or below zero, and it becomes a horrible business to be in.

"Dumb pipes" are exactly what users want. They want the carriers to provide fast, reliable, cheap mobile data connectivity. Then, they want to get their apps, services and social products from, you know, the Internet.

Email is the "dumb pipe" version of communication technology, which is why it remains popular. The idea behind email is that it's an unmediated communications medium. You send a message to someone. They get the message.

When people send you messages, they stack up in your in-box in reverse-chronological order, with the most recent ones on top.

Compare this with, say, Facebook, where you post a status update to your friends, and some tiny minority of them get it. Or, you send a message to someone on Facebook and the social network drops it into their "Other" folder, which hardly anyone ever checks.

Of course, email isn't entirely unmediated. Spammers ruined that. We rely on Google's "mediation" in determining what's spam and what isn't.

But still, at its core, email is by its very nature an unmediated communications medium, a "dumb pipe." And that's why people like email.

Why email is a problem for Google

You'll notice that Google has made repeated attempts to replace "dumb pipe" Gmail with something smarter. They tried Google Wave. That didn't work out.

They hoped people would use Google+ as a replacement for email. That didn't work, either.

They added prioritization. Then they added tabs, separating important messages from less important ones via separate containers labeled by default "Primary," "Promotions," "Social Messages," "Updates" and "Forums." That was vaguely popular with some users and ignored by others. Plus, it was a weak form of mediation -- merely reshuffling what's already there, but not inviting a fundamentally different way to use email.

This week, Google introduced an invitation-only service called Inbox. Another attempt by the company to mediate your dumb email pipe, Inbox is an alternative interface to your Gmail account, rather than something that requires starting over with a new account.

Instead of tabs, Inbox groups together and labels and color-codes messages according to categories.

One key feature of Inbox is that it performs searches based on the content of your messages and augments your inbox with that additional information. One way to look at this is that, instead of grabbing extraneous relevant data based on the contents of your Gmail messages and slotting it into Google Now, it shows you those Google Now cards immediately, right there in your in-box.

Inbox identifies addresses, phone numbers and items (such as purchases and flights) that have additional information on the other side of a link, then makes those links live so you can take quick action on them.

You can also do mailbox-like "snoozing" to have messages go away and return at some future time.

You can also "pin" messages so they stick around, rather than being buried in the in-box avalanche.

Inbox has many other features.

The bottom line is that it's a more radical mediation between the communication you have with other people and with the companies that provide goods, services and content to you.

The positive spin on this is that it brings way more power and intelligence to your email in-box.

The negative spin is that it takes something user-controlled, predictable, clear and linear and takes control away from the user, making email unpredictable, unclear and nonlinear.

That users will judge this and future mediated alternatives to email and label them either good or bad is irrelevant.

The fact is that Google, and companies like Google, hate unmediated anything.

The reason is that Google is in the algorithm business, using user-activity "signals" to customize and personalize the online experience and the ads that are served up as a result of those signals.

Google exists to mediate the unmediated. That's what it does.

That's what the company's search tool does: It mediates our relationship with the Internet.

That's why Google killed Google Reader, for example. Subscribing to an RSS feed and having an RSS reader deliver 100% of what the user signed up for in an orderly, linear and predictable and reliable fashion is a pointless business for Google.

It's also why I believe Google will kill Gmail as soon as it comes up with a mediated alternative everyone loves. Of course, Google may offer an antiquated "Gmail view" as a semi-obscure alternative to the default "Inbox"-like mediated experience.

But the bottom line is that dumb-pipe email is unmediated, and therefore it's a business that Google wants to get out of as soon as it can.

Say goodbye to the unmediated world of RSS, email and manual Web surfing. It was nice while it lasted. But there's just no money in it.

 

[a_majoor]

I have no doubt that Canadian carriers like Telus, Rogers and Bell are also experimenting with something like this. Any savvy super geeks out there know how to defeat this threat to privacy?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/verizon-atandt-tracking-their-users-with-super-cookies/2014/11/03/7bbbf382-6395-11e4-bb14-4cfea1e742d5_story.html

Verizon, AT&T tracking their users with ‘supercookies’

By Craig Timberg November 3 

Verizon and AT&T have been quietly tracking the Internet activity of more than 100 million cellular customers with what critics have dubbed “supercookies” — markers so powerful that it’s difficult for even savvy users to escape them.

The technology has allowed the companies to monitor which sites their customers visit, cataloging their tastes and interests. Consumers cannot erase these supercookies or evade them by using browser settings, such as the “private” or “incognito” modes that are popular among users wary of corporate or government surveillance.

Verizon and AT&T say they have taken steps to alert their customers to the tracking and to protect customer privacy as the companies develop programs intended to help advertisers hone their pitches based on individual Internet behavior. But as word has spread about the supercookies in recent days, privacy advocates have reacted with alarm, saying the tracking could expose user Internet behavior to a wide range of outsiders — including intelligence services — and may also violate federal telecommunications and wiretapping laws.

One civil liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says it has raised its concerns with the Federal Communications Commission and is contemplating formal legal action to block Verizon. AT&T’s program is not as advanced and, according to the company, is still in testing.

The stakes are particularly high, privacy advocates say, because Verizon’s experimentation with supercookies is almost certain to spur copycats eager to compete for a larger share of the multibillion-dollar advertising profits won by Google, Facebook and others.

Those companies track their users and sell targeted advertising based on what they learn. Supercookies could allow cellular carriers and other Internet providers to do the same, potentially encircling ordinary users in a Web of tracking far more extensive than experienced today.

“You’re making it very difficult for people who want privacy to find it on the Internet,” said Paul Ohm, a former Federal Trade Commission official who teaches at the University of Colorado Law School.

Verizon began tracking its 106 million “retail” customers — meaning those who don’t have business or government contracts — in November 2012, the company said. The company excluded all government and some business customers, though it would not say how many. Verizon said it sent notifications to customers and offered a way for them to opt out of the program, but it declined to say how many did.

Privacy advocates, who typically favor systems in which customers must choose to participate by opting in, have long maintained that such company notices are ineffective; the few who read them struggle to express their preferences. Even those who did opt out of the Verizon program still have a unique identifying code attached to all of their Web traffic, the company said, but that information is not used to build behavioral profiles that are sold to advertisers.

A company spokeswoman, Adria Tomaszewski, said the super­cookie — a unique combination of letters and numbers — is changed regularly to prevent others from tracking Verizon customers, but she declined to say how often. Tomaszewski also said that those who are not part of the Verizon advertising program called Precision Market Insights are not able to use the supercookie to track Verizon customers.

“The way it’s built, it wouldn’t be able to be used for that,” Tomaszewski said.

Independent researchers dispute that claim. Unique codes — such as device ID numbers, Internet protocol addresses and cookies — get shared among Web sites, advertisers and data brokers, allowing them all to gather so much information on individual users that it’s easy to derive a name or other identifying data, experts say. The process is called “de-anonymizing” a user.

One security researcher, Stanford’s Jonathan Mayer, said, “I don’t know any computer scientist who takes that ‘It’s anonymous’ argument seriously. It’s been so thoroughly debunked in so many ways.”

Critics also say the supercookies, especially if more widely deployed, will be extremely valuable to intelligence agencies that monitor Internet behavior. The National Security Agency has used cookies — an older and more easily erased tracking code that is stored on a browser — to pinpoint Internet users worldwide for hacking attacks, The Washington Post reported last year.

AT&T declined to say how long it has been tracking its customers’ Internet behavior but said the program remains in testing and has not yet been used to target advertising. “We are considering such a program, and any program we would offer would maintain our fundamental commitment to customer privacy,” spokeswoman Emily J. Edmonds said in an e-mail.

The AT&T supercookie changes every 24 hours in an effort to protect privacy, Edmonds said.

AT&T’s program, unlike Verizon’s, would not attach an identifying code to its customers’ Internet traffic once they opt out.

There was surprise among security researchers and privacy activists in the days after the Electronic Frontier Foundation, based in San Francisco, first tweeted about the practice on Oct. 22, calling it “terrible” and citing an article in Advertising Age from May. Several news organizations have since reported the news.

Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, a senior staff technologist for the foundation, said he was surprised by the intensity of the reaction generated by the tweet, which was sent from his account. “Everybody was like, ‘Wow, that’s really appalling,’ ” he said.

The potential legal issues, experts say, stem in part from the Communications Act, which prohibits carriers from revealing identifying information about their customers or helping others to do so. That is at the heart of complaints by the foundation, which is contemplating a lawsuit or other action to stop Verizon, said one of the group’s lawyers, Nate Cardozo.

Also potentially at issue is the federal Wiretap Act, which prohibits altering personal communications during transmission without consent or a court order. Ohm, the law professor, said the companies could be vulnerable if a court found that the notification efforts by Verizon and AT&T were not adequate. Officials from both companies told a Senate committee in 2008 that they wouldn’t begin tracking their customers without seeking explicit permission first.

Privacy advocates say that without legal action, in court or by a regulatory agency such as the FCC or FTC, the shift toward supercookies will be impossible to stop. Only encryption can keep a supercookie from tracking a user.Other new tracking technologies are probably coming soon, advocates say.

“There’s a stampede by the cable companies and wireless carriers to expand data collection,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a Washington-based advocacy group. “They all want to outdo Google.”

Follow The Post’s tech blog, The Switch, where technology and policy connect.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

I have family spread all over as well and friends, Facebook is a great way to keep tabs on them and it reminds me about birthdays, which has been the bane of my life to remember.

 

[a_majoor]

I certainly have no objection to services which allow you to remember and connect to people. My solution is calendaring software and email, but YMMV.

The primary reason to object to Facebook and other social and psudo social media is the ability to agregate your data and use it to spy on you and manipulate or attempt to manipulate you without your knowledge or consent. Sometimes it creates funny situations (once in Petawawa, I started watching Bollywood movies for something to do. After I looked up a few things on Google to understand what I was watching, targetted ads for Indian food, sarees and dating Indian women started appearing in the sidebar of by gmail inbox). Sometimes it creates true areas fo concern (the founder of Facebook is famous for his open fiscal and personal support for the Democrat party. Facebook did illegal experiments in manipulating the opinions of users. Put the two together and you now have the ability to manipulate a large fraction of the population for the benefit of one political party; outside of normal campaign laws and regulations).

I would certainly like either the ability of the user to control the information being collected and used, or (an exception of my usual preference) tight regulatory controls over the collection and use of user data by Social Media sites.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

those creep glasses might have a problem, some site profiles I have listed myself as a 85 year old black lesbian in a wheelchair. People may put in "telltales" that will allow you to gauge where someone is getting info.

All in all I don't mind FB making some money off of me, it's an exchange of services basically. I have seen some people consider social media as a "right" but it is a business and it has lots of associated costs to keep it running.

 

[a_majoor]

As long as the business you are dealing with is ethical and transparent, then you should have no issues.

Sadly, many of these sites have the morals of fly by night used car dealers. You get what you pay for.

 

[The Bread Guy]

.... once in Petawawa, I started watching Bollywood movies for something to do. After I looked up a few things on Google to understand what I was watching, targetted ads for Indian food, sarees and dating Indian women started appearing in the sidebar of by gmail inbox) ....

One solution to the specific problem of search engines saving your info:  duckduckgo.com, "The search engine that doesn't track you".

 

[a_majoor]

Even computer manufacturers are in the act now; Leveno has installed malware on their new computers, and other similar malware now exists to crack the secure layer of internet transactions (HTTPS). So far I have not seen a countermeasure or antivirus solution, hopefully this is coming soon (as well as hardened software that instantiates the secure layer on the Internet to begin with):

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/ssl-busting-code-that-threatened-lenovo-users-found-in-a-dozen-more-apps/

SSL-busting code that threatened Lenovo users found in a dozen more apps
"What all these applications have in common is that they make people less secure."

by Dan Goodin - Feb 22, 2015 3:45pm EST

The list of software known to use the same HTTPS-breaking technology recently found preinstalled on Lenovo laptops has risen dramatically with the discovery of at least 12 new titles, including one that's categorized as a malicious trojan by a major antivirus provider.

“SSL HIJACKER” BEHIND SUPERFISH DEBACLE IMPERILS LARGE NUMBER OF USERS
Lenovo wasn't the only one using SSL certs that unlock every SSL site on the Internet.
Trojan.Nurjax, a malicious program Symantec discovered in December, hijacks the Web browsers of compromised computers and may download additional threats. According to a blog post published Friday by a security researcher from Facebook, Nurjax is one such example of newly found software that incorporates HTTPS-defeating code from an Israeli company called Komodia. Combined with the Superfish ad-injecting software preinstalled on some Lenovo computers and three additional applications that came to light shortly after that revelation, there are now 14 known apps that use Komodia technology.

"What all these applications have in common is that they make people less secure through their use of an easily obtained root CA [certificate authority], they provide little information about the risks of the technology, and in some cases they are difficult to remove," Matt Richard, a threats researcher on the Facebook security team, wrote in Friday's post. "Furthermore, it is likely that these intercepting SSL proxies won't keep up with the HTTPS features in browsers (e.g., certificate pinning and forward secrecy), meaning they could potentially expose private data to network attackers. Some of these deficiencies can be detected by antivirus products as malware or adware, though from our research, detection successes are sporadic."

Komodia, a company that brazenly calls one of its software development kits as an "SSL hijacker," is able to bypass secure sockets layer protections by modifying the network stack of computers that run its underlying code. Specifically, Komodia installs a self-signed root CA certificate that allows the library to intercept encrypted connections from any HTTPS-protected website on the Internet. This behavior is by no means unique to Komodia, Superfish, or the other programs that use the SSL-breaking certificates. Antivirus apps and other security-related wares often install similar root certificates. What sets Komodia apart from so many others is its reuse of the same digital certificate across many different computers.

Researchers have already documented that the password protecting most or all of the Komodia certificates is none other than "komodia". It took Errata Security CEO and whitehat hacker Rob Graham only three hours to crack this woefully weak password. From there, he used the underlying private key in the Komodia certificate to create fake HTTPS-enabled websites for Bank of America and Google that were fully trusted by Lenovo computers. Despite the seriousness of Graham's discovery and the ease other security researchers had in reproducing his results, Superfish CEO Adi Pinhas issued a statement on Friday saying Superfish software posed no security risk.

According to Facebook's Richard, more than a dozen software applications other than Superfish use Komodia code. Besides Trojan.Nurjax, the programs named included:

CartCrunch Israel LTD
WiredTools LTD
Say Media Group LTD
Over the Rainbow Tech
System Alerts
ArcadeGiant
Objectify Media Inc
Catalytix Web Services
OptimizerMonitor
A security researcher who goes by the Twitter handle @TheWack0lian said an additional piece of software known as SecureTeen also installed Komodia-enabled certificates. Over the weekend, the researcher also published findings documenting rootkit technology in Komodia code that allows it to remain hidden from key operating system functions.

Web searches for many of these titles uncover forum posts in which computer users complain that some of these applications are hard to remove once they're installed. Richard noted that he was unable to find documentation from any of the publishers explaining what effect Komodia software had on end-user PCs such as its ability to sniff passwords and other sensitive data from encrypted Web sessions.

LENOVO PCS SHIP WITH MAN-IN-THE-MIDDLE ADWARE THAT BREAKS HTTPS CONNECTIONS [UPDATED]
Superfish may make it trivial for attackers to spoof any HTTPS website.
Richard went on to publish the SHA1 cryptographic hashes he used to identify software that contained the Komodia code libraries. He invited fellow researchers to use the hashes to identify still more potentially dangerous software circulating online.

"We're publishing this analysis to raise awareness about the scope of local SSL MITM software so that the community can also help protect people and their computers," he wrote. "We think that shining the light on these practices will help the ecosystem better analyze and respond to similar situations as they occur."

Well that was quick: a way to clear Superfish from your PC:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a14194/how-do-i-delete-superfish-lenovo/

How To Clear Your Lenovo Computer of Superfish Adware
Lenovo has been installing a dangerous piece of software that makes its machines vulnerable to hackers. Find out if your computer has it and how to delete it.
By Rachel Z. Arndt
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Lenovo, the world's largest PC manufacturer, has been installing a dangerous piece of adware on its consumer laptops. The software, called Superfish, leaves computers vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks in which hackers steal data as its sent from a user's computer to a supposedly secure server.

What is Superfish?
Superfish is supposedly meant to give users "better" ads. (Better for advertisers, that is, and more insidious for consumers). It does this is by tracking all web browsing on computers where Superfish is installed and using that data to insert ads on sites you visit. Targeted ads are just another insufferable part of modern digital life, but it gets worse. Superfish can do this on secure sites too, as the software replaces an encrypted site's certificate with its own. That's not good.

ALL A HACKER NEEDS TO GAIN ACCESS TO TONS AND TONS OF SECURE DATA IS FIND A SINGLE KEY
Usually when you visit an encrypted site—say, Bank of America's—your web browser uses a certificate to confirm that you are in fact visiting the real Bank of America site. That certificate is signed by whichever certificate company the website owner contracted with; in Bank of America's case, it's Verisign. On a computer with Superfish installed, however, the certificate from the Bank of America site comes back signed not by Verisign but by Superfish. And your computer has been brainwashed to treat the certificate as legitimate, thereby routing your encrypted data not through the proper and secure certificate, but through Superfish's.


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To make matters worse, the encryption key is the same for all Superfish certificates, so all a hacker needs to do to gain access to tons and tons of secure data is find a single key—which, according to Errata Security's Robert David Graham, is pretty easy.

Lenovo says it stopped putting Superfish on computers in January, but to make sure your computer is safe, you can check here.

How to clear and protect your computer
First, Microsoft is doing what it can to root out the software. Its Windows Defender anti-virus software began removing Superfish this morning by resetting the certificates that Superfish messed with.

To make sure Windows Defender does its job, update it immediately. Go to Windows Update or open Microsoft Security Software, select the Update tab, and click the Update button.

If you'd rather remove Superfish yourself, do the following:

Uninstall "Superfish Inc VisualDiscovery."
You Also Need To Remove All Superfish Certificates: You Can Do This By Searching For And Launching Certmgr.msc From The Start Menu
Click On Trusted Root Certification Authorities, And Then Certificates
Delete All Certificates With "Superfish Inc" In Their Names.
Or, as Slate advises:

If you have a Lenovo laptop that has Superfish on it ... I would advise nothing short of wiping the entire machine and installing vanilla Windows—not Lenovo's Windows. Then change all of your passwords.

 

[a_majoor]

Twitter becomes an Orwellian operation modelled after the "Ministry of Truth". How sad that so many people see 1984 as a how to guide rather than a warning:

https://reason.com/blog/2016/02/20/did-twitters-orwellian-trust-and-safety

Did Twitter's Orwellian 'Trust and Safety' Council Get Robert Stacy McCain Banned?
Prominent GamerGate figure clashed with council member Anita Sarkeesian. Now he's gone.
Robby Soave|Feb. 20, 2016 1:00 pm

Remember a few days ago, when Twitter elevated anti-GamerGate leader Anita Sarkeesian to its “Trust and Safety Council,” an imperious-sounding committee with Robespierre-esque powers to police discussion on the social media platform? The goal, according to Twitter, was to make it easier for users to express themselves freely and safely.

One user who won’t be expressing himself at all is Robert Stacy McCain: a conservative journalist, blogger, self-described anti-feminist, and prominent GamerGate figure who was banned from Twitter on Friday night. Clicking on his page redirects to this “account suspended” message that encourages users to re-read Twitter’s policies on abusive behavior.

But as with other Twitter suspensions, it’s impossible to tell which specific policy McCain is accused of violating, or which of his tweets were flagged as abusive. McCain is an animated and uncompromising opponent of leftist views. His statements are extreme, and I don’t often agree with them, but I would be reluctant to label them as abusive (at least the ones I’ve seen).

In a response to his banning that is in many ways emblematic of his worldview and behavior, McCain explicitly blamed Sarkeesian and her crew:

This is why you can’t even state FACTS about these people on Twitter without being accused of “harassment.” Facts are harassment and truth is hate and Oceania Has Always Been at War With Eastasia. Sarkesian is anti-freedom because she is anti-truth. She and her little squad of soi-disant “feminists” are just hustlers looking for a free ride, and the only way they can get that ride is to silence anyone who speaks the truth about them and calls them out as the cheap bullshit artists they actually are.

McCain did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He concluded the above post with a statement, “fuck ‘social justice’.” He despises leftists and feminists, and doesn’t hold back his hate.

But there’s a difference between using strong language to disagree with people, and abusing them. If McCain has crossed that line, I’m not aware of it.

Twitter is a private company, of course, and if it wants to outlaw strong language, it can. In fact, it’s well within its rights to have one set of rules for Robert Stacy McCain, and another set of rules for everyone else. It’s allowed to ban McCain for no reason other than its bosses don’t like him. If Twitter wants to take a side in the online culture war, it can. It can confiscate Milo Yiannopoulos’s blue checkmark. This is not about the First Amendment.

But if that’s what Twitter is doing, it’s certainly not being honest about it—and its many, many customers who value the ethos of free speech would certainly object. In constructing its Trust and Safety Council, the social media platform explicitly claimed it was trying to strike a balance between allowing free speech and prohibiting harassment and abuse. But its selections for this committee were entirely one-sided—there’s not a single uncompromising anti-censorship figure or group on the list. It looks like Twitter gave control of its harassment policy to a bunch of ideologues, and now their enemies are being excluded from the platform.

Banning McCain wasn’t even Twitter’s only questionable activity last night. It seems that Twitter also suppressed the pro-McCain hashtag subsequently created by his supporters, #FreeStacy. After it started trending, Twitter made it so that the hashtag wouldn’t autocomplete when people typed it. “The #FreeStacy tag would be in the US top 10 now, but Twitter has scrubbed it,” wrote Popehat’s Patrick on Twitter.

Another Popehat author, Ken White, has been skeptical that Twitter’s censorship of certain conservative figures is actually coming from a place of malice. In response to Yiannopoulos getting de-verified, he wrote:

Big companies, even when run by ideologues, tend to make decisions like big companies, not like individuals. The decision-making looks less cinematic and more cynical. The focus tends to be on branding, but mostly on money-making, avoidance of unpleasantness, reduction of cost, and ease of use. Twitter's line employees are almost certainly disproportionately liberal, and by assigning command-and-control of individual account decisions to them, the impact is probably that evaluations of abuse complaints will have a liberal bias. Similarly, if you make a corporate decision to police harassment (or at least pretend to), and the people doing the policing have a bias, then the results will have a bias. But that's not the same as a deliberate decision to take sides; it's a cost-driven, practicality-driven decision.

If Twitter wants to go full-on Ministry of Truth, it can. But its user have the right to raise hell about it—to call out the platform for punishing dissident alt-right figures while empowering their adversaries. I’m not convinced that’s what’s happening, but the exclusion of Robert Stacy McCain—a mere 10 days after the Trust and Safety council came into existence—is cause for concern.

 

[a_majoor]

Fighting back against Twitter's Orwellian approach to business. As the author says, Twitter is a private company and can do as they like, but *we* are also people with agency, and can take steps of our own:

http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2016/02/using-twitters-own-risk-factor-analysis-to-force-it-to-respect-viewpoint-diversity.html

Using @Twitter's own risk factor analysis to force it to respect viewpoint diversity

As mentioned in an earlier post, many conservatives (including yours truly) are increasingly concerned by Twitter's lack of respect for viewpoint diversity and silencing of center-right and right of center voices. Of course, as a private company, Twitter is free to engage in any sort of non-invidious discrimination it chooses. As consumers, however, we are free to fight back.

So I took a look at Twitter's most recent SEC Form 10-K. Such reports have to identify "risk factors," which are defined as items that could have a material adverse effect on the company or its securities.

Twitter's risk factors analysis includes a number of items that could represent useful pressure points:


If we fail to grow our user base, or if user engagement or ad engagement on our platform decline, our revenue, business and operating results may be harmed.

Idea 1: Don't engage with ads on Twitter. Ever.


We generate a substantial majority of our revenue based upon engagement by our users with the ads that we display. If people do not perceive our products and services to be useful, reliable and trustworthy, we may not be able to attract users or increase the frequency of their engagement with our platform and the ads that we display.

Idea 2: Complain to companies that advertise on Twitter (nicely). Remember, a reasoned argument will be heard more than ranting and raving. Make clear that your willingness to buy their goods and services is adversely affected by their presence on Twitter.

Idea 3: Don't quit Twitter. They make no money off you unless you engage with their advertisers. Use the service but not the advertisers. Use ad blockers. (But see idea # 6 below.)


A number of factors could potentially negatively affect user growth and engagement, including if: ... we are unable to present users with content that is interesting, useful and relevant to them;

Idea 4: Let Twitter AND its advertisers know that you value strong conservative voices.


A number of factors could potentially negatively affect user growth and engagement, including if: ... we do not maintain our brand image or our reputation is damaged.

Idea 5: Let Twitter AND its advertisers know that Twitter's ideological biases have substantially damaged its brand image.

If our users do not continue to contribute content or their contributions are not valuable to other users, we may experience a decline in the number of users accessing our products and services and user engagement, which could result in the loss of advertisers, platform partners and revenue. ... If we experience a decline in the number of users, user growth rate, or user engagement, including as a result of the loss of world leaders, government officials, celebrities, athletes, journalists, sports teams, media outlets and brands who generate content on Twitter, advertisers may not view our products and services as attractive for their marketing expenditures, and may reduce their spending with us which would harm our business and operating results.

Idea 6: Individual conservative users quitting Twitter does it little harm and deprives you of a soapbox for criticizing the company and its advertisers. But if a critical mass of conservatives, including GOP politicians, opinion leaders, commentary outlets and so on all quite at once, that would do something. Sadly, there is a collective action problem here. It is in all of our interests for all conservatives to quit Twitter, but it's not in any of our individual interest to do so. This needs thought.

Negative publicity about our company, including about our product quality and reliability, changes to our products and services, privacy and security practices, litigation, regulatory activity, the actions of our users or user experience with our products and services, even if inaccurate, could adversely affect our reputation and the confidence in and the use of our products and services.

Idea 7: Spread the word that Twitter is hostile to viewpoint diversity.

 

[a_majoor]

A look at how deeply Facebook has penetrated the Internet. How this affects you, or how it will affect you downstream as all this personal information is collected in one (possibly insecure) place is yet to be explored:

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-39947942

How Facebook's tentacles reach further than you think
By Joe Miller
Business reporter
26 May 2017

Facebook's collection of data makes it one of the most influential organisations in the world. Share Lab wanted to look "under the bonnet" at the tech giant's algorithms and connections to better understand the social structure and power relations within the company.

A couple of years ago, Vladan Joler and his brainy friends in Belgrade began investigating the inner workings of one of the world's most powerful corporations.

The team, which includes experts in cyber-forensic analysis and data visualisation, had already looked into what he calls "different forms of invisible infrastructures" behind Serbia's internet service providers.

But Mr Joler and his friends, now working under a project called Share Lab, had their sights set on a bigger target.

"If Facebook were a country, it would be bigger than China," says Mr Joler, whose day job is as a professor at Serbia's Novi Sad University.

He reels off the familiar, but still staggering, numbers: the barely teenage Silicon Valley firm stores some 300 petabytes of data, boasts almost two billion users, and raked in almost $28bn (£22bn) in revenues in 2016 alone.

And yet, Mr Joler argues, we know next to nothing about what goes on under the bonnet - despite the fact that we, as users, are providing most of the fuel - for free.

"All of us, when we are uploading something, when we are tagging people, when we are commenting, we are basically working for Facebook," he says.

The data our interactions provide feeds the complex algorithms that power the social media site, where, as Mr Joler puts it, our behaviour is transformed into a product.

Trying to untangle that largely hidden process proved to be a mammoth task.

"We tried to map all the inputs, the fields in which we interact with Facebook, and the outcome," he says.

"We mapped likes, shares, search, update status, adding photos, friends, names, everything our devices are saying about us, all the permissions we are giving to Facebook via apps, such as phone status, wifi connection and the ability to record audio."

All of this research provided only a fraction of the full picture. So the team looked into Facebook's acquisitions, and scoured its myriad patent filings.

The results were astonishing.

Visually arresting flow charts that take hours to absorb fully, but which show how the data we give Facebook is used to calculate our ethnic affinity (Facebook's term), sexual orientation, political affiliation, social class, travel schedule and much more.

One map shows how everything - from the links we post on Facebook, to the pages we like, to our online behaviour in many other corners of cyber-space that are owned or interact with the company (Instagram, WhatsApp or sites that merely use your Facebook log-in) - could all be entering a giant algorithmic process.

And that process allows Facebook to target users with terrifying accuracy, with the ability to determine whether they like Korean food, the length of their commute to work, or their baby's age.

Another map details the permissions many of us willingly give Facebook via its many smartphone apps, including the ability to read all text messages, download files without permission, and access our precise location.

Individually, these are powerful tools; combined they amount to a data collection engine that, Mr Joler argues, is ripe for exploitation.

"If you think just about cookies, just about mobile phone permissions, or just about the retention of metadata - each of those things, from the perspective of data analysis, are really intrusive."

Facebook has for years asserted that data privacy and the security of its operations are paramount. Facebook data, for example, cannot be used by developers to create surveillance tools and the firm says it complies with privacy protection laws in all countries. Thousands of new staff have been recruited to police its content.

Mr Joler, though, while admitting that his research made him a little paranoid about the information that was being harvested, is more worried about the longer term.

The data will remain in the hands of one company. Even if its current leaders are responsible and trustworthy, what about those in charge in 20 years?

Analysts say Share Lab's work is valuable and impressive. "It's probably the most comprehensive work mapping Facebook that I've ever seen," says Dr Julia Powles, an expert in technology law and policy at Cornell Tech.

"[The research] shows in cold and calculated terms how much we are giving away for the value of being able to communicate with your mates," she says.

The scale of Facebook's reach can be stated in raw numbers - but Share Lab's maps make it visceral, in a way that drawing parallels cannot.

"We haven't really got appropriate historical analogies for the tech giants," explains Dr Powles. Their powers, she continues, extend "far beyond" the likes of the East India Company and monopolies of old, such as Standard Oil.

And while many may consider the objectives of Mark Zuckerberg's empire to be rather benign, its outcomes are not always so.

Facebook, argues Dr Powles, "plays to our base psychological impulses" by valuing popularity above all else.

Experts say there are no historical analogies for the power that today's tech giants hold

Not that she expects Share Lab's research to lead to a mass Facebook exodus, or a dramatic increase in the scrutiny of tech titans.

"What is most striking is the sense of resignation, the impotence of regulation, the lack of options, the public apathy," says Dr Powles. "What an extraordinary situation for an entity that has power over information - there is no greater power really."

It is this extraordinary dominance that the Share Lab team set out to illustrate. But Mr Joler is quick to point out that even their grand maps cannot provide an accurate picture of the social media giant's capabilities.

There is no guarantee, for example, that there are not many other algorithms at work that are still heavily guarded trade secrets.

However, Mr Joler argues, "it is still the one and only map that exists" of one of the greatest forces shaping our world today.