Dilip Simeon's blog

Whistleblower describes how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target American voters  The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of  Facebook  profiles of US voters, in the tech giant’s biggest ever data breach, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. A whistleblower has revealed to the  Observer  how  Cambridge Analytica  – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. How Facebook’s destructive ethos imperils democracy The  revelations in our lead story  today are shocking not just because ...

Many popular Facebook apps are obtaining sensitive information about users—and users' friends—so don't be surprised if details about your religious, political and even sexual preferences start popping up in unexpected places. Apps on Facebook may be grabbing and sharing more personal information than many users realize. And even if people understand that they're sharing personal data, they often can't envision the ways it may be used in the future. . Not so long ago, there was a familiar product called software. It was sold in stores, in shrink-wrapped boxes. When you bought it, all that you gave away was your credit card number or a stack of bills. Now there are "apps"—stylish, discrete chunks of software that live online or in your smartphone. To "buy" an app, all you have to do is click a button. Sometimes they cost a few dollars, but many apps are free, at least in monetary terms. You often pay in another way. Apps are gateways, and when you bu...

If you’ve been using Facebook recently, it may be time to ask for a raise. According to new  figures from market-research website eMarketer , you’ve made the company over 20% more this year than you did in 2014.  The average  Facebook  user now generates $12.76 in advertising revenue every year, according to the analytics firm, up from $10.03 the year before. That figure is expected to rise still further, to $17.50 in 2017. If you don’t use Facebook, you may be earning Twitter money instead. The company makes $7.75 per user, up from $5.48 last year, and its average revenue per user (ARPU) is expected to almost double over the next few years, to $12.56 in 2017. Where you are matters an awful lot to how valuable you are to social networks, however. Break down the difference between Americans and the rest of the world, and it becomes immediately obvious why the US receives the bulk of the attention from Facebook and Twitter. While one Facebook user outside the ...

The plot was made for front-page headlines and cable-news chyrons: A scientist-turned-political-operative reportedly  hoodwinked Facebook users into giving up personal data  on both themselves and all their friends for research purposes, then used it to develop  “psychographic” profiles on tens of millions of voters —which in turn may have helped the Trump campaign manipulate its way to a historic victory. No wonder Facebook is in deep trouble, right? Investigations are being opened; calls for regulation are mounting; Facebook’s stock plunged 7 percent Monday. FB data scandal is just the beginning Zuckerberg's ambitions over Sensational as it sounds, however, the Cambridge Analytica scandal doesn’t indict Facebook in quite the way it might seem. It reveals almost nothing about the social network or its data policies that wasn’t already widely known, and there’s little evidence of blatant wrongdoing by Facebook or its employees. It’s also far from clear what impa...

The scale of Facebook’s audience is unprecedented. More than 1.6 billion people use Facebook at least once a month, or half of all internet users. That’s before you count users on other Facebook-owned sites including  WhatsApp , which has more than 1 billion monthly active users, and photo-sharing site Instagram, which has 400 million. Facebook has also introduced its  free basics service to 37 countries , offering a free but limited package of apps to mobile phone users, but which some critics say allows Facebook to tightly control the online experience of potentially the next billion people to come online. “You hear all the platitudes about Facebook connecting the planet, but to say they are doing it for benevolent reasons is absolute nonsense. It’s about connecting commerce, not people,” says venture capitalist and former journalist Om Malik, who reminds us of the hidden agenda of social networking firms: if you’re not paying, you’re the product. Facebook – whi...

'The utilisation of Facebook for propaganda promoting disingenuous portrayals of the African American community is reprehensible,' says NAACP president A civil rights organisation in the US has called for a boycott of  Facebook  after a report found a Russian influence campaign on the platform was working to suppress African-American voter turnout.  The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) is leading the #LogOut protest on Tuesday, 18 December, while also calling on Congress to further investigate the social network.  A report for the US Senate Intelligence Committee into Russia's online meddling in the build up to the 2016 Presidential election determined black voters were specifically targeted by Russian operatives on social media.  Researchers at Oxford University and network analysis firm Graphika found Russians "sought to confuse, distract and ultimately discourage" black people from voting, as well as other v...

..why is Facebook so committed to supporting gender hate speech? One possible explanation is that its company culture has naturalised sexist norms to the point where its members truly believe, along with the creators and users of pages such as Raping Your Girlfriend, that violently misogynistic content is acceptable and funny... There's all sorts of stuff  wrong with capitalism , but one thing I'd miss if I woke up in an economic utopia tomorrow is a good boycott. Offended by something racist, homophobic, classist or sexist about a company's product or advertising? Boycott. Tell the company why you're boycotting. Encourage others to boycott. If enough people agree with you, companies change the way they behave. Yay! If only there were as straightforward a way to react to ALL the racist, homophobic, classist, sexist arsery one encounters daily. But it's hard to boycott society (though God knows there are times I try). Then there's Facebook. Facebook is a sp...

Facebook has 845 million users and $3.7 billion in revenue last year.. Some estimates put the company’s potential value at $100 billion.. last summer Facebook became, by some counts, the first Web site to receive 1 trillion page views in a month. In the last three months of 2011, users generated an average of 2.7 billion “likes” and comments every day.. YVETTE VICKERS, A FORMER Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still ...

NB :  Both the content and style of the text below are taken from: Guy Debord's   Society of the Spectacle , available on Marxist Internet Archive and here:   http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/4 But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.  Feuerbach , Preface to the 2nd edition of The Essence of Christianity # 1: In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of networks. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. # 2: The faces detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in whi...

capital’s grip (will) only grow tighter as it sought to involve even the worker’s personality and subjectivity within the production of value...  The last frontier is actually interiority   What are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms doing if not commodifying our relationships? THEY SAY IT’S FRIENDSHIP. WE SAY IT’S UNWAGED WORK. WITH EVERY LIKE, CHAT, TAG OR POKE OUR SUBJECTIVITY TURNS THEM A PROFIT. THEY CALL IT SHARING. WE CALL IT STEALING. WE’VE BEEN BOUND BY THEIR TERMS OF SERVICE FAR TOO LONG—IT’S TIME FOR OUR TERMS. Laurel Ptak has been mulling over the manifesto  Wages for Facebook  for over a year now. She first publicly presented a version of it last April at the Photographic Universe II, a two-day conference organized by the Aperture Foundation and the New School. She prefaced the reading by telling the assembled academics, artists, and students that she was attempting an experiment of sorts, and she ended the presentatio...

Soros has been openly critical of Facebook and Google. “The internet monopolies have neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions,” he  said in a speech  at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. “That turns them into a menace and it falls to the regulatory authorities to protect society against them Robinson, whose organization has run online  campaigns criticizing Facebook  over racial discrimination in housing ads, privacy and surveillance, racist hate speech, and other issues, said he was deeply troubled by the report. “This narrative has really dangerous antisemitic undertones about Jewish people controlling the world,” Robinson told the Guardian by phone. “ Facebook hired a PR firm that attempted to discredit the company’s critics by claiming they were agents of billionaire George Soros, the  New York Times  reported Tuesday. Soros is a Jewish philanthropist who is the frequent ...

In recent days, Frances Haugen , a former member of Facebook’s “civic integrity team”, has launched a deft and professional public assault on the company. Unlike previous Facebook whistle-blowers, like  former Facebook data scientist  Sophie Zhang, Haugen managed to capture the interest and attention of policy leaders and journalists around the world. We have to ask why Haugen has had so much traction and impact when Zhang, who was fired for raising objections within the company to Facebook’s human rights problems, did not. The most straightforward answer is that Haugen pushed forward a problem that strikes the concerns of many – if not most – parents in the developed world: Instagram’s influence on the prevalence of eating disorders, self-harm and suicide among teenaged girls. This was an issue that Americans, especially, understand and recoil against… https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/08/facebook-frances-haugen-whistleblower-pr-catastrophe-yet Is Facebook th...

Facebook developed an experimental feature called "Dark Profiles" which would give secret accounts to people who did not even sign up, a new book by a former employee of the social networking site has claimed.  Engineers wanted to create shadow pages for those who were tagged in photos by their friends in the hope they would cave-in and join the social networking website, Katherine Losse, the author of 'The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network', said. Nobody at Facebook "even flinched" when staff raised this disturbing new twist as they were so blinded by their mission to take over the world. The book also claimed that in 2007 Facebook technicians worked on a programme called "Judgebox", which would let users compare and rate women in echoes of founder Mark Zuckerberg's sexist "Facemash" app he developed at Harvard.  It confirms for the first time that Facebook staff have a programme called "Facebook Stalker...

Dear Mr Zuckerberg: Recently, you wrote in the Financial Times that “Facebook is not waiting for regulation” and is “continuing to make progress” on issues ranging from disinformation in elections to harmful content on your platforms. Despite the new policies and investments you describe, I am deeply concerned that Facebook’s actions to date fall far short of what its unprecedented global influence requires.  Today, Facebook has 2.9 billion users across its platforms, including Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram. In dozens of countries, Facebook has unparalleled power to shape democratic norms and debate, and as a result, elections. I am concerned that  Facebook , as an American company, has not taken sufficient steps to prevent its platforms from undermining fundamental democratic values around the world. Globally, misuse of Facebook platforms appears to be growing worse. Last year, the Oxford Internet Institute reported that governments or political parties orches...

On Friday, Facebook  announced a massive security breach —probably the most significant in its history. Taking advantage of three separate bugs in tandem, hackers gained full control of at least 50 million users’ Facebook accounts. That meant that, in theory, the users could do just about anything on those accounts: post status updates for you, download your photos, send messages to your friends, download your friends’ nonpublic photos, and much more. Facebook confirmed later on Friday that the breach would have also given hackers access to  users’ accounts on third-party apps  and websites for which they used their Facebook credentials to log in. Facebook executives said in a call with reporters Friday afternoon that the company had learned of the attack on Tuesday, notified law enforcement on Wednesday, and had fixed the bugs by Thursday night. But Facebook doesn’t know yet who the hackers were, what they were after, or what they planned to do with any information ...

Luxury is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed. Such, at any rate, is the provocative argument put forward by Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. Recently dubbed “the Varian rule”, it states that to predict the future, we just have to look at what rich people already have and assume that the middle classes will have it in five years and poor people will have it in 10. Radio, TV, dishwashers, mobile phones, flatscreen TVs: Varian sees this principle at work in the history of many technologies. So what is it that the rich have today that the poor will get in a decade? Varian bets on personal assistants. Instead of maids and chauffeurs we would have self-driving cars, housecleaning robots and clever, omniscient apps that can monitor, inform and nudge us in real time. As Varian puts it: “These digital assistants will be so useful that everyone will want one and the scare stories you read today about privacy concerns will just seem quaint and old-fashioned.”  Goo...