Category: Links

Love these suggestions.

Roger McNamee:

The people at Facebook live in their own bubble. Zuck has always believed that connecting everyone on earth was a mission so important that it justified any action necessary to accomplish it. Convinced of the nobility of their mission, Zuck and his employees seem to listen to criticism without changing their behavior. They respond to nearly every problem with the same approach that created the problem in the first place: more AI, more code, more short-term fixes. They do not do this because they are bad people. They do this because success has warped their perception of reality.

Only people who will be shocked by this are the ones who wasted money on these.

Abhimanyu Ghoshal:

The ruling is significant because it runs counter to previous interpretations of the law in cases requiring access to data locked on personal devices. With that, biometric methods for unlocking phones are now being viewed similar to alphanumeric passcodes in the eyes of the law in the US.

Interesting, as it’s not the toolkit or setup I would have expected.

This should surprise no one, and yet I am guessing this will surprise most.

John Porter:

Apple tells The Verge that Samsung’s smart TV ad-tracking features cannot track viewing usage within the iTunes Movies and TV Shows app, in another example of Apple’s focus on privacy.

Here’s the thing: this means you’ll need to connect your Samsung TV to WiFi in order for this to work. And there’s long been privacy questions over even allowing that to happen.

No. Just no. I’d also extend this to mobile devices too.

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries and Natasha Singer:

In the complaint, the city attorney excoriated the Weather Company, saying it unfairly took advantage of its app’s popularity and the fact that consumers were likely to give their location data to get local weather alerts. The city said that the company failed to sufficiently disclose its data practices when it got users’ permission to track their location and that it obscured other tracking details in its privacy policy.

Some serious bullshit, as weather apps are nearly useless unless you grant location access.

Easily the greatest laptop ever made.

Emily Badger:

Surely there is nothing left to fear in New York, a place that already has tall buildings and high rents. But the pending arrival of Amazon in Long Island City, as Vice recently put it, has some residents on edge about “becoming Seattle on steroids.” The specter captures the particular mix of high housing costs, tall buildings and tech bros.

This whole article, damn.

Good list.

Dr. Nathalie Maréchal in a very damning essay on targeted advertising has this brutal quote:

“That’s all ‘AI’ and ‘machine learning’ is for these companies: getting better at guessing what ads to show you,” (Tim) Libert said. “Every tiny bit of data increases the chances they show the ‘right’ ad so they never stop, they never sleep, and they never respect your privacy—every single day everybody at Google collectively works to one purpose: getting the percentage of ‘right’ ads shown slightly higher.”

You could add Facebook to Google there too. And one more brutal quote:

This logic of “engagement” is motivated by the twin needs to collect more data and show more ads, and manifests itself in algorithms that value popularity over quality. In less than 20 years, Silicon Valley has replaced editorial judgment with mathematical measures of popularity, destabilized the democratic systems of checks and balances by hobbling the Fourth Estate, and hammered nail after nail into the coffin of privacy.

Having read this, I’m working on a site redesign which will remove custom fonts, which I think is the last bit I can ditch to making this site as free from, tracking as possible.

This article actually prompted me to change to passwords in many places where I used biometric access before.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Coaching is an essential leadership behavior. Curiosity is the driving force in being more coach-like. Questions fuel curiosity.

Be sure not to read ‘leadership’ as ‘management’. They are not the same. Most managers aren’t leaders. This lack of curiosity Stanier talks about is a dead giveaway as to which type of manager, your manager is.

Emma Thomason:

A recent survey of 3,000 employees in eight countries including the United States, Britain and Germany found that nearly half thought they could easily finish their tasks in five hours a day if they did not have interruptions, but many are exceeding 40 hours a week anyway – with the United States leading the way, where 49 percent said they worked overtime.

She also mentions Japan encouraging 4-day work week schemes, which is huge. Reminds me of something my wife was telling me the other day “productivity as a measurement for human work is pretty bullshit”.

Kieren McCarthy:

By any measure, Facebook as an organization has knowingly, willingly, purposefully, and repeatedly lied. And two reports this week demonstrate that the depth of its lying was even worse than we previously imagined.

It’s hard to argue with Raymond Wong, about how Microsoft really crushed it this year. They quietly ,add great stuff, reminded me a bit of Apple ten years ago.

I had to chuckle at this line too:

The Windows company started by Bill Gates and mismanaged by Steve Ballmer, has flourished under CEO Satya Nadella after he took over in 2014.

Great read, and really shows how little we know about this.

Arno Schuetze:

On the recordings, a man and a female companion could be overheard in his home and the magazine was able to identify and contact him through the recorded information, according to the report.

That’s a pretty big “human error”. I’m so glad I don’t have one of these eavesdropping devices in my home.