Digital rights advocates on Tuesday welcomed Facebook’s announcement that it plans to jettison its facial recognition system, which critics contend is dangerous and often inaccurate technology abused by governments and corporations to violate people’s privacy and other rights.
“Corporate use of face surveillance is very dangerous to people’s privacy.”
Adam Schwartz, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) who last month called facial recognition technology “a special menace to privacy, racial justice, free expression, and information security,” commended the new Facebook policy.
“Facebook getting out of the face recognition business is a pivotal moment in the growing national discomfort with this technology,” he said. “Corporate use of face surveillance is very dangerous to people’s privacy.”
The social networking giant first introduced facial recognition software in late 2010 as a feature to help users identify and “tag” friends without the need to comb through photos. The company subsequently amassed one of the world’s largest digital photo archives, which was largely compiled through the system. Facebook says over one billion of those photos will be deleted, although the company will keep DeepFace, the advanced algorithm that powers the facial recognition system.
Facebook has announced they will be deleting over a billion face recognition templates as they shut down their entire face recognition system. This is great news for Facebook users, and for the global movement pushing back on this technology. https://t.co/0ErdCBhkCT
In a blog post, Jerome Presenti, the vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta—the new name of Facebook’s parent company following a rebranding last week that was widely condemned as a ploy to distract from recent damning whistleblower revelations—described the policy change as “one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history.”
“The many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole,” he wrote.
Facial recognition technology, which has advanced in accuracy and power in recent years, has increasingly been the focus of debate because of how it can be misused by governments, law enforcement, and companies. In China, authorities use the capabilities to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. In the United States, law enforcement has turned to the software to aid policing, leading to fears of overreach and mistaken arrests.
Concerns over actual and potential misuse of facial recognition systems have prompted bans on the technology in over a dozen U.S. locales, beginning with San Francisco in 2019 and subsequently proliferating from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon.
Caitlin Seeley George, campaign director at Fight for the Future, was among the online privacy campaigners who welcomed Facebook’s move. In a statement, she said that “facial recognition is one of the most dangerous and politically toxic technologies ever created. Even Facebook knows that.”
"Facial recognition is one of the most dangerous and politically toxic technologies ever created. Even Facebook knows that," @caitlinseeley of @fightfortheftr told ABC News, "and even as algorithms improve, facial recognition will only be more dangerous." https://t.co/XBZGfyE6mp
— Evan Greer is on Mastodon and Bluesky (@evan_greer) November 2, 2021
Seeley George continued:
From misidentifying Black and Brown people (which has already led to wrongful arrests) to making it impossible to move through our lives without being constantly surveilled, we cannot trust governments, law enforcement, or private companies with this kind of invasive surveillance.
“Even as algorithms improve, facial recognition will only be more dangerous,” she argued. “This technology will enable authoritarian governments to target and crack down on religious minorities and political dissent; it will automate the funneling of people into prisons without making us safer; it will create new tools for stalking, abuse, and identity theft.”
Seeley George says the “only logical action” for lawmakers and companies to take is banning facial recognition.
So Facebook is deleting one billion facial recognition scans, but it's keeping DeepFace, the model that is trained on all those faces. Note that "the company has also not ruled out incorporating facial recognition into future products." Very meta. 👀 https://t.co/8ntPg5Hyf9
Amid applause for the company’s announcement, some critics took exception to Facebook’s retention of DeepFace, as well as its consideration of “potential future applications” for facial recognition technology.
Originally published on Common Dreams by BRETT WILKINS and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
The metaverse is a network of always-on virtual environments in which many people can interact with one another and digital objects while operating virtual representations – or avatars – of themselves. Think of a combination of immersive virtual reality, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game and the web.
The metaverse is a concept from science fiction that many people in the technology industry envision as the successor to today’s internet. It’s only a vision at this point, but technology companies like Facebook are aiming to make it the setting for many online activities, including work, play, studying and shopping.
Metaverse is a portmanteau of meta, meaning transcendent, and verse, from universe. Sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson coined the term in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash” to describe the virtual world in which the protagonist, Hiro Protagonist, socializes, shops and vanquishes real-world enemies through his avatar. The concept predates “Snow Crash” and was popularized as “cyberspace” in William Gibson’s groundbreaking 1984 novel “Neuromancer.”
There are three key aspects of the metaverse: presence, interoperability and standardization.
Presence is the feeling of actually being in a virtual space, with virtual others. Decades of research has shown that this sense of embodiment improves the quality of online interactions. This sense of presence is achieved through virtual reality technologies such as head-mounted displays.
Interoperability means being able to seamlessly travel between virtual spaces with the same virtual assets, such as avatars and digital items. ReadyPlayerMe allows people to create an avatar that they can use in hundreds of different virtual worlds, including in Zoom meetings through apps like Animaze. Meanwhile, blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrenciesand nonfungible tokens facilitate the transfer of digital goods across virtual borders.
Standardization is what enables interoperability of platforms and services across the metaverse. As with all mass-media technologies – from the printing press to texting – common technological standards are essential for widespread adoption. International organizations such as the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group define these standards.
Why the metaverse matters
If the metaverse does become the successor to the internet, who builds it, and how, is extremely important to the future of the economy and society as a whole. Facebook is aiming to play a leading role in shaping the metaverse, in part by investing heavily in virtual reality. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained in an interview his view that the metaverse spans non-immersive platforms like today’s social media as well as immersive 3D media technologies such as virtual reality, and that it will be for work as well as play.Hollywood has embraced the metaverse in movies like ‘Ready Player One.’
The metaverse might one day resemble the flashy fictional Oasis of Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” but until then you can turn to games like Fortnite and Roblox, virtual reality social media platforms like VRChat and AltspaceVR, and virtual work environments like Immersed for a taste of the immersive and connected metaverse experience. As these siloed spaces converge and become increasingly interoperable, watch for a truly singular metaverse to emerge.
Scammers Are Using Fake Job Ads to Steal People’s Identities
It has become a ubiquitous internet ad, with versions popping up everywhere from Facebook and LinkedIn to smaller sites like Jobvertise: Airport shuttle driver wanted, it says, offering a job that involves picking up passengers for 35 hours a week at an appealing weekly pay rate that works out to more than $100,000 a year.
But airports aren’t really dangling six-figure salaries for shuttle drivers amid some sudden resurgence in air travel. Instead, the ads are cybercriminals’ latest attempt to steal people’s identities and use them to commit fraud, according to recent warnings from the FBI, the Federal Trade Commission and cybersecurity firms that monitor such threats. The U.S. Secret Service, which investigates financial crimes, also confirmed that it has seen a “marked increase” in sham job ads seeking to steal people’s personal data, often with the aim of filing bogus unemployment insurance claims.
“These fraudsters, they’re like a virus. They continue to mutate,” said Haywood Talcove, chief executive of the government division of LexisNexis Risk Solutions, one of several contractors helping state and federal agencies combat identity theft. (ProPublica subscribes to public records databases provided by LexisNexis.)
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
This particular mutation is an emerging threat, Talcove and others said. The numbers are small so far, but they’re rapidly increasing. In March, LexisNexis detected around 2,900 ads touting unusually generous pay, using suspicious email domains and requiring that one verify one’s identity upfront. The total had grown to 18,400 by July, and then to 36,350 as of this month. Talcove said these figures are based on a small sample of job ads and that the real number is likely much higher.
This form of scam is surging at a moment when targets for job application fraud abound. Millions of Americans are quitting jobs and looking for new ones. An all-time high percentage of workers — 2.9% — quit their jobs in August, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Meanwhile, huge numbers of laid-off workers are still looking for work, making for a historic churn in the labor market.
The ads reflect a tactical adjustment by cybercriminals. A massive wave of unemployment insurance fraud during the pandemic prompted authorities to heighten identity verification requirements. In most U.S. states, cybercriminals can no longer simply input stolen identity information into government websites and frequently collect unemployment insurance aid. Now, applicants whose names are used to apply for unemployment benefits often need to verify on their phones that they’re the ones seeking assistance, a process similar to two-factor authentication.
That means scammers may need help from their victims — and sometimes they go to elaborate lengths to mislead them. Some fraudsters recreate companies’ hiring websites. One fake job application site uses Spirit Airlines’ photos, text, font and color code. The phony site asks applicants to upload a copy of both sides of their driver’s license at the outset of the process and sends them an email seeking more information from a web address that resembles Spirit’s, with an extra “i” (spiiritairline.com). Spirit Airlines did not respond to requests seeking comment.
Other job scams are less elaborate and have more visible signs of inauthenticity. One fake ad for airport shuttle drivers on Facebook was posted by a woman who purported to be working at Denver International Airport. Diligent readers may have noticed that the only location linked from the woman’s Facebook profile was a Nigerian city called Owerri. (A spokesperson for the Denver airport reported the profile to Facebook after an inquiry by ProPublica, and the ad is no longer active.)
In other instances, unsolicited job offers simply land in applicants’ inboxes after they’ve uploaded their résumés to real job search sites, which scammers can access if they pose as potential employers. Jeri-Sue Barron has received a slew of emails since the start of the pandemic informing her that she was preapproved for a variety of jobs she hadn’t even applied for. Barron, a retiree in suburban Dallas, had uploaded her résumé to several job hunting sites in hope of finding some part-time work to supplement her Social Security income. She then received multiple job offers with nary a request for an interview. One email originated from a school in India’s Kerala state; another came from a Croatian website she’d never heard of. “They started coming in from places that were weird,” said Barron. “You almost don’t want to find out the next stage.” She ignored the offers.
As with fake unemployment claims more broadly, the fraud is being facilitated by an underground infrastructure, including online forums where cybercriminals share advice on how to perfect their techniques. A person using the handle “cleverinformation” on a U.K. forum called Carder put together a how-to video that recommends posting fake job ads using a generic job application that can be modified to collect personal data. In September, someone going by “mrdudemanguy” on another forum, known as Dread, offered this advice to a person seeking stolen identities: “Pretend to be a local business and post some job ads. When they send in their résumé, call them and ask some basic job application questions. Make them think they’ve got the job as long as they can do a background check. For the background check request they send you photos or scans of ID documents.”
In response to a query from ProPublica, mrdudemanguy did not answer questions about sharing fake ads and instead focused on explaining the source of his recommended technique and its success. “I have not tried this method myself,” he wrote. “It’s just a method that I know other people do and it does work. It can be done in any part of the world, the country does not matter. As long as the job ad looks legitimate, a person looking for a job will be likely to apply.” Questions sent to cleverinformation yielded a similar response. “It’s effective,” the person said, noting that it’s an underused technique. The person added: “Trying to start a group chat where we share our knowledge.”
The ubiquitous ad for airport shuttle drivers was discussed in a similar forum. One version of it was posted in a Telegram channel of a Nigerian scam group called Yahoo Boys Community, along with instructions on what to tell applicants to get them to share their Social Security number, photographs of their driver’s license and other personal details. The post urged the group’s 5,000 members to ask applicants generic questions via email and offer them the gig — but only if they first shared their personal documents to land the plum job. “Once the client gives you the details, buzz me on WhatsApp and let start work on it Asap,” read the July message, whose initiator could not be identified.
Job application scams have been around in various forms for years. Some entice applicants to buy equipment or software from the scammers in preparation for a nonexistent job. Others try to trick victims into working for free or reshipping goods bought with stolen credit cards. But, according to law enforcement agencies, using fake job ads to steal identities and using them to cash in on government benefits is a new wrinkle.
Alexandra Mateus Vásquez fell for one such scam in December 2020. An aspiring painter, Vásquez was thinking of quitting her sales job at a suburban mall near New York City. She applied for a graphic designer position at the restaurant chain Steak ‘n Shake via the widely used job website Indeed. She was elated when what appeared to be a Steak ‘n Shake representative invited her via Gmail to participate in an email screening test for the job.
Conducting an interview via email initially struck Vásquez as odd, but she proceeded because the questions seemed standard. They included queries like “How do you meet tough deadlines?” according to emails she shared with ProPublica, and she provided earnest answers. Hours later she received an email offering her the job and asking for her address and phone number so a formal offer letter could be dispatched. The offered pay was attractive: $30 per hour. When the letter arrived, it sought her Social Security number, too. Vásquez provided all the requested information.
Soon Vásquez was invited for a background check, via online chat, with a supposed hiring manager. She found herself trading messages with an account that had a blurry photograph of an old man and the name “Iran Coleman” attached to it. (Several other applicants described similar experiences in a discussion about the Steak ‘n Shake job on the hiring site Glassdoor.)
The person claiming to be the Steak ‘n Shake’s hiring manager requested copies of Vásquez’s personal records to verify her identity. She shared photographs of her New York state ID and her green card but grew suspicious when the person asked for her credit card number, too. As Vásquez hesitated, she got a call from ID.me, an identity verification vendor used by 27 states to safeguard their unemployment insurance programs. The company asked if she was applying for jobless aid in California. That’s when she realized she was being scammed. “I was so disappointed,” Vásquez said. “I really believed that that position was real.”
Steak ‘n Shake did not respond to messages seeking comment. (ProPublica was able to reach Iran Coleman, the purported Steak ‘n Shake manager cited in the scam. He said the Louisville Steak ‘n Shake he used to manage is closed and he hasn’t worked there since at least 2014. He said he hadn’t updated his cursory LinkedIn profile, which lists him as a Steak ‘n Shake restaurant manager, in years. Coleman said he now manages three Waffle House restaurants. “I feel for that person,” he said of Vásquez when informed of her experience.)
Vásquez reported the incident to the police and contacted the Social Security Administration, which informed her that it had denied multiple requests to create an account in her name. (A spokesperson for the agency said privacy laws preclude it from discussing individual cases.) She then gave up on her job search. “I started doubting if all the jobs I’m applying for are real,” she said. Vásquez recently launched a website to begin selling paintings online and still hopes to become a design professional.
Blake Hall, chief executive of ID.me, said the company has rolled out language on its systems that informs users when their identities are being used to apply for unemployment insurance benefits and warns them not to proceed if they are being offered a job. Hall said it’s ultimately up to users to heed such warnings. “We will do as much as we can to make it clear that they’ve been scammed,” he said, “but ultimately protecting somebody from themself is a really tall order.” He compared his company to a goalkeeper who also needs help from other members of the team, in this case the job websites where criminals post fake ads.
The Better Business Bureau said in an alert last month that Indeed, LinkedIn and Facebook topped the list of online platforms where users reported spotting fraudulent job advertisements that duped them.
Indeed removes tens of millions of job listings that do not meet its quality guidelines each month, according to a company spokesperson, and it declines to list employers’ jobs if they do not pass those guidelines. In July, the site published a blog post detailing how to spot scam job ads. “Indeed puts job seekers at the heart of everything we do,” the spokesperson said.
LinkedIn removed 10 fake airport shuttle job postings after they were pointed out by ProPublica. A spokesperson said that posting bogus job ads is a “clear violation” of LinkedIn’s terms of service and said the company is investing in new ways of spotting them, such as hiring more human reviewers and expanding a work-email verification system for potential employers.
Facebook took down some of the airport shuttle posts after ProPublica alerted the service, but the company did not respond to questions about its processes for spotting and removing fake ads.
In recent months, the social media platform has also been plagued with fraudulent pages masquerading as state unemployment agencies. Some states complained to the U.S. Department of Labor that Facebook was slow to act on their requests to remove such pages, according to a March email from the department to state workforce agencies disclosed under a public records request. A Department of Labor official said that in March the agency set up a new process for states to report fake unemployment insurance websites to Facebook and that “to date, Facebook has been responsive in taking down fraudulent pages” reported by states.
New ones, however, keep popping up: A fake version of California’s Employment Development Department Facebook page was live as of Oct. 12. The agency confirmed the page was not its own, and it was removed from Facebook shortly after ProPublica’s inquiry.
Even if online platforms clean up their job postings, other identity theft scams are proliferating. On Oct. 15, the FBI issued an alert warning about fake websites that cybercriminals created to resemble the state unemployment websites of Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico and Wisconsin. Criminals use the sites to steal victims’ sensitive personal information, according to the FBI.
“This industry is rotten at its core,” said one critic, “and the clearest proof of that is what it’s doing to our children.”
Internal documents dubbed “The Facebook Papers” were published widely Monday by an international consortium of news outlets who jointly obtained the redacted materials recently made available to the U.S. Congress by company whistleblower Frances Haugen.
“It’s time for immediate action to hold the company accountable for the many harms it’s inflicted on our democracy.”
The papers were shared among 17 U.S. outlets as well as a separate group of news agencies in Europe, with all the journalists involved sharing the same publication date but performing their own reporting based on the documents.
According to the Financial Times, the “thousands of pages of leaked documents paint a damaging picture of a company that has prioritized growth” over other concerns. And the Washington Postconcluded that the choices made by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as detailed in the revelations, “led to disastrous outcomes” for the social media giant and its users.
From an overview of the documents and the reporting project by the Associated Press:
The papers themselves are redacted versions of disclosures that Haugen has made over several months to the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging Facebook was prioritizing profits over safety and hiding its own research from investors and the public.
These complaints cover a range of topics, from its efforts to continue growing its audience, to how its platforms might harm children, to its alleged role in inciting political violence. The same redacted versions of those filings are being provided to members of Congress as part of its investigation. And that process continues as Haugen’s legal team goes through the process of redacting the SEC filings by removing the names of Facebook users and lower-level employees and turns them over to Congress.
One key revelation highlighted by the Financial Times is that Facebook has been perplexed by its own algorithms and another was that the company “fiddled while the Capitol burned” during the January 6th insurrection staged by loyalists to former President Donald Trump trying to halt the certification of last year’s election.
CNNwarned that the totality of what’s contained in the documents “may be the biggest crisis in the company’s history,” but critics have long said that at the heart of the company’s problem is the business model upon which it was built and the mentality that governs it from the top, namely Zuckerberg himself.
On Friday, following reporting based on a second former employee of the company coming forward after Haugen, Free Press Action co-CEO Jessica J. González said “the latest whistleblower revelations confirm what many of us have been sounding the alarm about for years.”
“Facebook is not fit to govern itself,” said González. “The social-media giant is already trying to minimize the value and impact of these whistleblower exposés, including Frances Haugen’s. The information these brave individuals have brought forth is of immense importance to the public and we are grateful that these and other truth-tellers are stepping up.”
While Zuckerberg has testified multiple times before Congress, González said nothing has changed. “It’s time for Congress and the Biden administration to investigate a Facebook business model that profits from spreading the most extreme hate and disinformation,” she said. “It’s time for immediate action to hold the company accountable for the many harms it’s inflicted on our democracy.”
“Kids don’t stand a chance against the multibillion dollar Facebook machine, primed to feed them content that causes severe harm to mental and physical well being.”
With Haugen set to testify before the U.K. Parliament on Monday, activists in London staged protests against Facebook and Zuckerberg, making clear that the giant social media company should be seen as a global problem.
Flora Rebello Arduini, senior campaigner with the corporate accountability group, was part of a team that erected a large cardboard display of Zuckerberg “surfing a wave of cash” outside of Parliament with a flag that read, “I know we harm kids, but I don’t care”—a rip on a video Zuckerberg posted of himself earlier this year riding a hydrofoil while holding an American flag.
While Zuckerberg refused an invitation to tesify in the U.K. about the company’s activities, including the way it manipulates and potentially harms young users on the platform, critics like Arduini said the giant tech company must be held to account.
“Kids don’t stand a chance against the multibillion dollar Facebook machine, primed to feed them content that causes severe harm to mental and physical well being,” she said. “This industry is rotten at its core and the clearest proof of that is what it’s doing to our children. Lawmakers must urgently step in and pull the tech giants into line.”
Happening now: we are outside UK parliament with a visual protest against Facebook’s treatment of children and its business model which puts profit before public safety. (1/7) #PeopleVsBigTechpic.twitter.com/37UA18PL3r
“Right now, Mark [Zuckerberg] is unaccountable,” Haugen told the Guardian in an interview ahead of her testimony. “He has all the control. He has no oversight, and he has not demonstrated that he is willing to govern the company at the level that is necessary for public safety.”
Correction: This article has been updated to more accurately reflect the context of the comments made by Jessica González of Free Press, who responded to the revelations of a second whistleblower not those of Frances Haugen.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JON QUEALLY and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
While still CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos testified in Congress by video conference on July 29, 2020. Now, there are at least Five members of a congressional committeealleging that he and other executives may have lied under oath andmisled lawmakers.
In a press release by the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee the lawmakers state that they are giving Amazon a “Final Chance to Correct the Record Following a Series of Misleading Testimony and Statements”.
CurrentAmazon CEO Andy Jassy, who, in July, succeeded Bezos is being asked to respond to the discrepancies, including information found by The Markup published in a recent article
Leaked documents reveal the e-commerce company’s private-brands team in India “secretly exploited internal data” to copy products from other sellers and rigged search results.
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday renewed her call to break up Amazon after internal documents obtained by Reutersrevealed that the e-commerce giant engaged in anti-competitive behavior in India that it has long denied, including in testimonies from company leaders to Congress.
“These documents show what we feared about Amazon’s monopoly power—that the company is willing and able to rig its platform to benefit its bottom line while stiffing small businesses and entrepreneurs,” tweeted Warren (D-Mass.) “This is one of the many reasons we need to break it up.”
Warren is a vocal advocate of breaking up tech giants including but not limited to Amazon. The company faces investigations regarding alleged anti-competitive behavior in the United States as well as Europe and India. The investigative report may ramp up such probes.
Aditya Karla and Steve Stecklow report that “thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents examined by Reuters—including emails, strategy papers, and business plans—show the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India, one of the company’s largest growth markets.”
“The documents reveal how Amazon’s private-brands team in India secretly exploited internal data from Amazon.in to copy products sold by other companies, and then offered them on its platform,” according to the reporters. “The employees also stoked sales of Amazon private-brand products by rigging Amazon’s search results.”
In India, Amazon stoked sales of private-brand products by manipulating its search results so that the products would appear ‘in the first 2 or three … search results’ when customers were shopping on https://t.co/OA0tY09fhk, an internal document shows https://t.co/1FMsAX0pza
In sworn testimony before the U.S. Congress in 2020, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos explained that the e-commerce giant prohibits its employees from using the data on individual sellers to help its private-label business. And, in 2019, another Amazon executive testified that the company does not use such data to create its own private-label products or alter its search results to favor them.
But the internal documents seen by Reuters show for the first time that, at least in India, manipulating search results to favor Amazon’s own products, as well as copying other sellers’ goods, were part of a formal, clandestine strategy at Amazon—and that high-level executives were told about it. The documents show that two executives reviewed the India strategy—senior vice presidents Diego Piacentini, who has since left the company, and Russell Grandinetti, who currently runs Amazon’s international consumer business.
While neither Piacentini nor Grandinetti responded to Reuters‘ requests for comment, Amazon provided a written response that did not address the reporters’ questions.
“As Reuters hasn’t shared the documents or their provenance with us, we are unable to confirm the veracity or otherwise of the information and claims as stated,” Amazon said. “We believe these claims are factually incorrect and unsubstantiated.”
“We display search results based on relevance to the customer’s search query, irrespective of whether such products have private brands offered by sellers or not,” the company said, adding that it “strictly prohibits the use or sharing of nonpublic, seller-specific data for the benefit of any seller, including sellers of private brands.”
Warren was not alone in calling for the breakup of Amazon following the report.
“This is not shocking. But it is appalling,” the American Economic Liberties Project said in a series of tweets. “Independent businesses have sounded the alarm for years—providing evidence that Amazon stole their intellectual property.”
4/ Months later, in April 2020, @WSJ revealed that Amazon had been stealing from independent businesses to create competing products.https://t.co/ZgsNmtExIJ
— American Economic Liberties Project (@econliberties) October 13, 2021
“We said back in 2020 that a perjury referral was in order—and it still is,” the group added, highlighting testimony from Bezos and Nate Sutton, Amazon’s associate general counsel. “But Amazon will remain an anti-business behemoth, flagrantly breaking the law and daring policymakers to stop them.”
Highlighting a report from a trio of its experts, Economic Liberties added that “it’s time to break Amazon up.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“What do we do when we destroy the planet?” asked one demonstrator. “We have nothing else.”
Tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of Brussels on Sunday to demand Belgium’s elected leaders and others from around the world finally dispense with proclamations, broken promises, and half-measures and instead “act” on the climate emergency.
“We need a Belgian Green New Deal and we propose more than 100 concrete solutions to make it happen.”
With U.N. climate conference (COP26) set for next month in Glasgow, the estimated 70,000 or more people who took part in the march offered a dramatic show of force for the nation’s climate movement.
Zanna Vanrenterghem of Greenpeace Belgium toldThe Brussels Times on Sunday that her government’s climate pledges so far “are not ambitious enough,” but that words are no longer enough. “It is one thing to talk about climate,” she said, “and another to take concrete action.”
Ahead of the march, Vanrenterghem said the message from the Klimaatcoalitie (Climate Coalition), which she co-chairs and that organized the march, was a simple one: “We demand ambitious, solidarity-based and coherent measures. We need a Belgian Green New Deal and we propose more than 100 concrete solutions to make it happen.”
Up to 70 000 people took on the streets of #Brussels today for the #climate strike.
The first mobilization since the pandemic exceeded all expectations and sent a strong message to leaders ahead of #COP26 🌍
Thousands of people and 80 organizations took part in the protest, aiming for the biggest such event in the European Union’s capital since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, which stopped the climate movement’s weekly marches in its tracks.
Cyclists, families with children and white-haired demonstrators filled city streets, chanting slogans demanding climate justice and waving banners in English, French and Dutch. One carried a stuffed polar bear on her head, and others were dressed as animals endangered by human-caused climate change.
The crowds was large—with the march often stretching further than the eye could see—and participants each sharing their various reasons for attending. Signs and banners said things like “Destroy the System/Not the Planet”; “Walk the Talk”; and “Protect What You Love.”
Lucien Dewanaga, a marcher who spoke with AP, asked the question: “What do we do when we destroy the planet? We have nothing else. Human beings have to live in this world. And there is only one world.”
According to Vanrenterghem, extreme weather within Belgium and elsewhere in the world over the past year have offered only more reasons for leaders to turn lofty rhetoric into the concrete policies that scientists say are necessary to stave off the worst impacts.
“The tough climate actions of the past few years have put the climate crisis high on the political agenda,” she said. “Now is the time for politicians to turn their promises into concrete action.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by COMMON DREAMS STAFF and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Above: Collage by Lynxotic, Original Photo on Unsplash
Kurt Thigpen clenched his hands around the edge of the table because if he couldn’t feel the sharp edges digging into his palms, he would have to think about how hard his heart was beating. He was grateful that his mask hid his expression. He hoped that no one could see him sweat.
A woman approached the lectern in the center aisle, a thick American flag scarf looped around her neck.
“Do you realize the mask, the CDC said it’s only 2% effective?” she demanded. “You’re failing our children, you’re failing our country, you’re failing our students’ future ….”
Thigpen fixed his eyes on a spot in the back of the blue-and-green auditorium. He let the person speaking at the lectern fade. It will be over soon, he told himself.
A dark-haired woman in a red vest removed her face shield as she moved to take her turn at the mic. As she began to speak, the school board employee responsible for queuing up public commenters interrupted: “Ma’am, I’m gonna have to ask you to please keep your shield on —”
“No, you’re not the boss of me, you work for us, I can’t breathe with it on —”
“Ma’am —”
“Don’t you dare cut my microphone —”
The crowd cheered. Thigpen focused on his breathing.
It will end soon, he told himself. It must. His sweat turned cold under his suit.
“The science isn’t there, take the kids outta the masks and let’s move on.”
It was March 2021, Thigpen’s second month as a school board trustee in Washoe County, Nevada. He had planned his campaign around local issues like improving the district’s diversity and equity policies and fixing an intersection where 20 students had been injured in traffic.
Public comment periods at school board meetings felt endless. Parents’ angers — over masking, over politics, over the “LGBTQ agenda” — fed off each other.
“I came here to speak about your fascist propaganda and ideology …”
He concentrated on making it to the next break period. His thoughts had begun to turn toxic. Why am I not good enough? Why am I the one struggling? They would turn darker. I don’t want to be here anymore. If something happened to me today, that would be fine.
“We will work tirelessly to remove you if you don’t focus on what’s important ….”
When the eight-hour meeting finally ended, he would drive home and pull off the suit and rip off his shirt. He would only take care with his rainbow tie, resting it gently in the closet. It still hangs there today. He would close the door, lay down on his bed, and let himself cry.
The stories of cruel, seemingly irrational and sometimes-violent conflicts over coronavirus regulations have become lingering symptoms of the pandemic as it drags through its second year. Two men on a Mesa-to-Provo flight got into a cross-aisle fight after one refused to wear a mask. A Tennessee teenager asking his school board to impose a mask mandate in honor of his grandmother who died of COVID-19 got jeered by the crowd. A California parent angered by the requirement that his child wear a mask allegedly beat up a teacher so badly that the teacher had to go to the emergency room. An Arizona father showed up to an elementary school with zip ties, allegedly intending to make a “citizen’s arrest” over COVID-19 rules. A Missouri medical center has distributed panic buttons to about 400 employees after an increase in assaults on health care workers by people frustrated over coronavirus-induced visitation restrictions and long wait times.
Many of the altercations have begun over masking because, unlike your vaccination status, a mask is right there on your face. Depending on your point of view, the mask can symbolize an erosion of personal freedoms or a willingness to protect others, a society that accepts tyranny or one that embraces science. A person’s reaction to a mask — or the absence of one — can be driven by an entire network of beliefs and emotions that have little to do with the face covering itself.
“What the hell is happening?” said Rachel Patterson, who owns a hair salon in Huntsville, Alabama, and who has been screamed at, cussed out and walked out on for asking clients to don a mask. “Like, I feel like we are living on another planet. Like I don’t — I don’t recognize anyone anymore.”
On Julie Simanksi’s first day of teaching for the fall 2021 semester, she tried to get her students to wear masks using the only method she was allowed: an emotional appeal. Simanski teaches at Des Moines Area Community College in Iowa. By state university policy, she can’t instruct her students to wear masks. Almost none did.
Simanksi told her students about her 20-year-old daughter, Olivia, who has a neuromuscular condition and requires 24-hour care. She didn’t know how Olivia’s body would cope with the virus. She was scared.
That night she sent an all-class email. She attached a picture of Olivia, smiling to her gums in blue sunglasses.
“I cannot mandate you to wear a mask in my class,” she wrote. “However, for the sake of my daughter and potentially others, I will make a continual plea to wear one.”
Simanksi brought a box of paper masks and put them in the back of the room. Some students took them. In each of her two sections, she has a group of four or five students who will not put one on.
“I’m surprised and I’m disappointed and a little bit angry that they just didn’t have the compassion to wear a mask for 55 minutes,” she said.
People’s pandemic views aren’t just preferences. They’ve evolved to fundamental beliefs. And when that happens, social psychologists say, people are more likely to accept incivility to achieve what they want.
“When people feel that their attitudes reflect strong moral convictions, that gives them permission to dehumanize those who oppose them,” said Linda Skitka, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who’s researching ideological divides. “And it doesn’t take a lot for the shift into perceptions of good and evil. So if the other side is basically evil, it’s not a far stretch to say it’s OK to yell at them.”
Courtney, a 29-year-old office worker living in Virginia who has asked that her last name not be shared for fear that she might lose her job if she’s identified, sat up on a medical bed surrounded by portraits of expectant mothers and their babies. In one, a brown-haired woman smiled at her 32-week mark, hands cupping her round belly. In another, the woman’s 6-day-old baby lay swaddled in a blue-and-white quilt, eyes closed. Courtney had just listened to her unborn child’s heartbeat. It was Aug. 17, two months out from her due date, and she had never before gotten so far along in a pregnancy without a miscarriage.
Courtney said her doctor went through the standard questions about her physical condition. Then the doctor asked if Courtney was working from home. No, she said. She had to go in twice a week.
Courtney looked at the pictures of the happy mothers. She’d undergone fertility treatment and had two miscarriages in less than a year. Both times, she’d asked herself: Was it my fault?
She knew that, even though she’d been fully vaccinated since May, a severe breakthrough infection could mean a ventilator for her and premature birth or death for her baby. She walked out of the office with a doctor’s note: Either everyone had to wear a mask around her, or she needed to work from home.
She saved a copy of the note on her phone and brought it with her the next time she went to the office. She recalls that as she sat at her desk, a colleague she considered a friend walked through her open door and sat down across from her. The colleague had just returned from a weeklong vacation and hoped Courtney could catch her up on what she’d missed.
The woman wasn’t wearing a mask.
“I actually have this note,” Courtney recalls saying. She pulled it up on her phone and held it out. “Do you mind wearing a mask?”
Her colleague didn’t look at the phone. She didn’t need to mask, the woman said. She had antibodies.
Courtney tried again. She told her colleague she was worried about what the virus could do to her baby. Even if there was no damage, she said, they might have to take the baby after birth to isolate her.
Courtney said that her colleague looked at her across the desk and said: “I’m not worried about it.”
She sat across from Courtney unmasked for the next 30 minutes.
Two weeks later, Courtney’s doctor wrote her another, sterner note: “It is my professional opinion that due to the lack of support for CDC recommended mask wearing indoors, please allow Courtney to work from home for the remainder of her pregnancy.”
Courtney forwarded it to her boss. He replied that he would remind the colleague who had sat in her office unmasked to follow the policy. But she still had to come in to work. They needed staff consistency.
She is due within the month.
If it looks like we’ve forgotten each other’s humanity, it’s because we’ve evolved to do so.
Humans are tribal creatures, and our responses to the pandemic have been tribalized almost since the beginning: A Pew Research poll from June 2020 found support for masking divided along partisan lines. Almost a year after the Pew poll, Fox News host Tucker Carlson urged his supporters toconfront people wearing masks.
Because the mask has become so polarizing, the extreme reactions aren’t really about being asked to wear one for an hour. It’s about communicating what side you’re on.
David Chester, a psychology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies aggression, puts it this way: If you see members of the opposing group as human like you, you’ve failed as a tribalist.
“It really makes adaptive sense to treat out-group members not like people, because then it’s much easier to hurt them and to act against them,” he said. “One central piece of intergroup conflict is a switch in viewing your enemies from full-blown humans to dehumanized entities that you do not ascribe all the things that you typically ascribe to a person. That makes conflict so much easier.”
Seeing someone else wear a mask in a grocery store becomes what Chester calls “a threatening proposition from an out-group member.” It triggers anger. And giving in to anger can feel good — especially after months of frustration.
In a viral incident from June 2020, a woman who has cancer was shopping in a Florida Pier 1 when she had a confrontation with another shopper, later identified as Debra Jo Hunter. The incident culminated in Hunter, maskless,coughing in the woman’s face. In a virtual sentencing hearing nine months later, as Jacksonville’s First Coast News reported, Hunter submitted 23 pages of threats that she and her family had received. Hog from hell. I hope your whole family gets COVID and suffers immensely, then dies. Kill yourself.
Hunter’s husband testified on her behalf. It had been a hard couple months leading up to the incident, he said. They’d had a house fire and lost most of their possessions. A family member had been in a boating accident.
No one from the family responded to requests for comment.
“It was like air being inflated into a balloon, and it finally got to the point where she couldn’t handle any more air,” Hunter’s husband testified. “And then she finally rubbed up against something and just popped.”
The paper was written sometime around the turn of the third century. The author was philosopher-slash-medical writer Claudius Galenus, known today as Galen.
Two millennia later, the fundamental idea holds true. It’s one of the main tools in modern-day cognitive behavioral therapy: Learn how to pull yourself back from getting swept away by strong feelings, and then evaluate the situation with your rational side.
“There’s a lot of research that says that if people think about injustice from a first-person perspective, they’re more likely to respond aggressively,” said Tracy Vaillancourt, a professor at the University of Ottawa specializing in children’s mental health and violence prevention. “If they think about injustice from a third-person perspective, they’re less likely to be aggressive. And it’s because, in a sense, now they pulled back and are able to take the perspective of both parties that are involved.”
On a societal scale, one of the fastest ways for two deeply entrenched, opposing groups to start seeing each other as fellow humans again is to give them something bigger to fight against together. It’s an “Independence Day” sort of scenario, Chester, the Virginia Commonwealth University professor, said: If aliens invaded, countries who hate each other in normal times would suddenly work together against an external threat.
But the external threat with the potential to unite a deeply polarized country, he said, should have been the pandemic. And it didn’t happen.
“I think fundamentally, it’s because we have different perceptions of this pandemic,” he said. “It’s really hard now that it’s so entrenched, that masks are viewed as this group symbol. It’s really hard to get people out of that.”
It’s possible that signals from authority figures — at least the ones you already trust — could sway individual behavior, Chester said. Then again, former President Donald Trump got booed at an August rally in Alabama after suggesting that his followers get vaccinated.
When Skitka, with the University of Illinois at Chicago, saw Trump get booed, she thought it might be too late for even political leaders to temper their constituents’ passions. “We’re still trying to figure out what will work,” she said.
Kurt Thigpen resigned from the Washoe County School District on May 24, citing medical reasons. Later, he wrote an op-ed explaining what he really meant. The anxiety and the panic that had been triggered by the school board meetings had mutated into passive suicidal ideation. Even when the board transitioned to virtual meetings, he could barely get out of bed and make himself presentable for Zoom. He wished he could stop existing. No job was worth that.
“I thought I had things handled,” he wrote, “but my coping skills were no match for the events of the last seven months.”
He had sought therapy and worked with a psychiatrist to find medication. He got diagnosed with ADHD. He learned new coping mechanisms.
The initial reaction was positive. People were angry on his behalf. They wished him well. They thanked him for his openness.
And then the op-ed was mentioned in anAssociated Press article on toxic school board meetings around the country. Thigpen had no idea until a friend on the city council texted him. His original op-ed got reshared on Facebook. The commenters rushed in.
“What a whiney person,” someone wrote.
“Where do these woke zombies come from?”
“I have a lot to say to this young fragile individual.”
“Perfect example of a PACB= Professional Adult Cry Baby”
“You have no idea how badly I wanted to stop reading that article, but he is such a trainwreck of an individual I couldn’t stop,” one woman posted. She added: “You know, upon re-reading my post, I apologize for being so cruel. Clearly this man is severely mentally disabled and belongs in an institution.”
No one, Thigpen said, has reached out to apologize.
With live view in Find My and ETA in Maps, iOS 15 is on a whole new level with keeping track of traveling significant others
Find My App (left) in iOS 15
In an update that is “just there” there has been an upgrade to the performance of the oft overlooked Find My app for iOS 15. In case you don’t use it, it’s the app that will help you find your iPhone or other iCloud connected device, as well as AirTags (or third-party geolocation products) and the devices they are attached to.
When you are following a person, generally with an iPhone or iPad (though, again the above additions and exceptions apply) you can click on that person’s name or icon (once they’ve allowed you to see their location (by turning on share my location in the FindMy app on their iPhone), in Find My and the their current location will show on the screen.
This is especially helpful, of course, if they are driving home from work, or on a road trip and you would like to follow along to see when they arrive, as examples. This level of intimate knowledge may not be necessary or appropriate for every contact in your address book (!) but between significant others (one obvious example) it can be incredibly useful.
One caveat, however, is that since this is a “stealth” update that “just works” your actual results may not be the same. Our video example was accomplished with two connected iPhone 13 Pro Max phones, both having 5G connectivity. Your results may vary.
With live view and in conjunction with the Maps app location tracking is now in a whole new universe
The update, which has been in a gradual roll-out since the public release of iOS 15 and upgraded in iOS 15.1 is a live feature where you can literally see the person (the icon or photo they have set) as they are driving, or even walking, and follow along with a moving map that updates in real time.
If used, for example while driving and using maps for the route, the map will update incrementally, showing the progress with a highlighted route all the way to the destination, while in FindMy there will be a second by millisecond live map showing the actual location as it changes. See the video above for the full effect!
The Maps app will also send notices and updates with an Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) and will re-notify if the arrival time is significantly sooner or later (the exact amount that is deemed enough of a change to trigger a notification is unclear.
Just plain fun to watch, but also useful if the movements of a loved on are critical
There is also a secret, exclusive tip that we can divulge, which we stumbled on through trial and error. If you are watching someone driving, say on a freeway with little traffic, and they are moving smoothly along, but you want to see them at full speed, you can do the following:
Use a two-finger pinch-and-zoom gesture 3-4 times – the 3 or 4th gesture will zoom in to-the-max
Repeat #1 to maintain zoomed in status
Allow Find My live view to re-set to the standard zoom (medium)
Repeat as desired
Using this technique the person / car will be seen in an extreme close-up of the road (highway, freeway, etc.) and will appear to be traveling at the actual speed they currently are in relation to the zoom.
Think of it like a virtual drone that is following the car / person and then dives in close and has to keep pace to keep the subject in frame. Crazy.
In zoomed in mode it is also possible to do a one-finger-swipe in the direction of movement in order to keep the car / person in view (rather than letting them drive starlight off the edge of the iPhone screen).
The future is out there, and already here on your phone (with enough bandwidth and other possible requirements).
Increasing this feature to this degree of intensely detailed functionality may not be much more than a basic useful feature on overdrive, but applications for the future, for example the same feature but with satellite imagery, or maybe a simulated live view, could be a metaverse standard communication activity. We might all need to get used to having the ability to stay literally connected (in a virtual way) even as we hurtle through space. In a self-driving Apple Car, perhaps?
A huge but little-known industry has cropped up around monetizing people’s movements
Companies that you likely have never heard of are hawking access to the location history on your mobile phone. An estimated $12 billion market, the location data industry has many players: collectors, aggregators, marketplaces, and location intelligence firms, all of which boast about the scale and precision of the data that they’ve amassed.
Location firm Near describes itself as “The World’s Largest Dataset of People’s Behavior in the Real-World,” with data representing “1.6B people across 44 countries.” Mobilewalla boasts “40+ Countries, 1.9B+ Devices, 50B Mobile Signals Daily, 5+ Years of Data.” X-Mode’s website claims its data covers “25%+ of the Adult U.S. population monthly.”
In an effort to shed light on this little-monitored industry, The Markup has identified 47 companies that harvest, sell, or trade in mobile phone location data. While hardly comprehensive, the list begins to paint a picture of the interconnected players that do everything from providing code to app developers to monetize user data to offering analytics from “1.9 billion devices” and access to datasets on hundreds of millions of people. Six companies claimed more than a billion devices in their data, and at least four claimed their data was the “most accurate” in the industry.
The Location Data Industry: Collectors, Buyers, Sellers, and Aggregators
The Markup identified 47 players in the location data industry
“There isn’t a lot of transparency and there is a really, really complex shadowy web of interactions between these companies that’s hard to untangle,” Justin Sherman, a cyber policy fellow at the Duke Tech Policy Lab, said. “They operate on the fact that the general public and people in Washington and other regulatory centers aren’t paying attention to what they’re doing.”
A Catholic news outlet also used location data from a data vendor to out a priest who had frequented gay bars, though it’s still unknown what company sold that information.
Many firms promise that privacy is at the center of their businesses and that they’re careful to never sell information that can be traced back to a person. But researchers studying anonymized location data have shown just how misleading that claim can be.
The truth is, it’s hard to know all the ways in which your movements are being tracked and traded. Companies often reveal little about what apps serve as the sources of data they collect, what exactly that data consists of, and how far it travels. To piece together a picture of the ecosystem, The Markup reviewed the websites and marketing language of each of the 47 companies we identified as operating in the location data industry, as well as any information they revealed about how the data got to them. (See our methodology here.)
How the Data Leaves Your Phone
Most times, the location data pipeline starts off in your hands, when an app sends a notification asking for permission to access your location data.
Apps have all kinds of reasons for using your location. Map apps need to know where you are in order to give you directions to where you’re going. A weather, waves, or wind app checks your location to give you relevant meteorological information. A video streaming app checks where you are to ensure you’re in a country where it’s licensed to stream certain shows.
But unbeknownst to most users, some of those apps sell or share location data about their users with companies that analyze the data and sell their insights, like Advan Research. Other companies, like Adsquare, buy or obtain location data from apps for the purpose of aggregating it with other data sources. Companies like real estate firms, hedge funds and retail businesses might then turn and use the data for their own advertising, analytics, investment strategy, or marketing purposes.
Serge Egelman, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute and CTO of AppCensus, who has researched sensitive data permissions on mobile apps, said it’s hard to tell which apps on your phone simply use the data for their own functional purposes and which ones release your data into the economic ether.
“When the app asks for location, in the moment, because maybe you click the button to find stuff near you and you get a permission dialog, you might reasonably infer that ‘Oh, that’s to service that request to provide that functionality,’ but there’s no guarantee of that,” Egelman said. “And there’s certainly usually never a disclosure that says that the data is going to be limited to that purpose.”
Companies that trade in this data are reluctant to share which apps they get data from.
Companies like Adsquare and Cuebiq told The Markup that they don’t publicly disclose what apps they get location data from to keep a competitive advantage but maintained that their process of obtaining location data was transparent and with clear consent from app users.
“It is all extremely transparent,” said Bill Daddi, a spokesperson for Cuebiq.
He added that consumers must know what the apps are doing with their data because so few consent to share it. “The opt-in rates clearly confirm that the users are fully aware of what is happening because the opt-in rates can be as low as less than 20%, depending on the app,” Daddi said in an email.
Yiannis Tsiounis, the CEO of the location analytics firm Advan Research, said his company buys from location data aggregators, who collect the data from thousands of apps—but would not say which ones. Tsiounis said the apps he works with do explicitly say that they share location data with third parties somewhere in the privacy policies, though he acknowledged that most people don’t read privacy policies.
“There’s only so much you can squeeze into the notification message. You get one line, right? So you can’t say all of that in the notification message,” Tsiounis said. “You only get to explain to the user, ‘I need your location data for X, Y, and Z.’ What you have to do is, there has to be a link to the privacy policy.”
Only one company spokesperson, Foursquare’s Ashley Dawkins, actually named any specific apps—Foursquare’s own products, like Swarm, CityGuide, and Rewards—as sources for its location data trove.
But Foursquare also produces a free software development kit (SDK)—a set of prebuilt tools developers can use in their own apps—that can potentially track location through any app that uses it. Foursquare’s Pilgrim SDK is used in apps like GasBuddy, a service that compares prices at nearby gas stations, Flipp, a shopping app for coupons, and Checkout 51, another location-based discount app.
GasBuddy, Flipp, and Checkout 51 didn’t respond to requests for comment.
A search on Mighty Signal, a site that analyzes and tracks SDKs in apps, found Foursquare’s Pilgrim SDK in 26 Android apps.
While not every app with Foursquare’s SDK sends location data back to the company, the privacy policies for Flipp, Checkout 51, and GasBuddy all disclose that they share location data with the company.
Foursquare’s method of obtaining location data through an embedded SDK is a common practice. Of the 47 companies that The Markup identified, 12 of them advertised SDKs to app developers that could send them location data in exchange for money or services.
Placer.ai says in its marketing that it does foot traffic analysis and that its SDK is installed in more than 500 apps and has insights on more than 20 million devices.
“We partner with mobile apps providing location services and receive anonymized aggregated data. Very critically, all data is anonymized and stripped of personal identifiers before it reaches us,” Ethan Chernofsky, Placer.ai’s vice president of marketing, said in an email.
Into the Location Data Marketplace
Once a person’s location data has been collected from an app and it has entered the location data marketplace, it can be sold over and over again, from the data providers to an aggregator that resells data from multiple sources. It could end up in the hands of a “location intelligence” firm that uses the raw data to analyze foot traffic for retail shopping areas and the demographics associated with its visitors. Or with a hedge fund that wants insights on how many people are going to a certain store.
“There are the data aggregators that collect the data from multiple applications and sell in bulk. And then there are analytics companies which buy data either from aggregators or from applications and perform the analytics,” said Tsiounis of Advan Research. “And everybody sells to everybody else.”
Some data marketplaces are part of well-known companies, like Amazon’s AWS Data Exchange, or Oracle’s Data Marketplace, which sell all types of data, not just location data. Oracle boasts its listing as the “world’s largest third-party data marketplace” for targeted advertising, while Amazon claims to “make it easy to find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud.” Both marketplaces feature listings for several of the location data companies that we examined.
Amazon spokesperson Claude Shy said that data providers have to explain how they gain consent for data and how they monitor people using the data they purchase.
“Only qualified data providers will have access to the AWS Data Exchange. Potential data providers are put through a rigorous application process,” Shy said.
Oracle declined to comment.
Other companies, like Narrative, say they are simply connecting data buyers and sellers by providing a platform. Narrative’s website, for instance, lists location data providers like SafeGraph and Complementics among its 17 providers with more than two billion mobile advertising IDs to buy from.
But Narrative CEO Nick Jordan said the company doesn’t even look at the data itself.
“There’s a number of companies that are using our platform to acquire and/or monetize geolocation data, but we actually don’t have any rights to the data,” he said. “We’re not buying it, we’re not selling it.”
To give a sense of how massive the industry is, Amass Insights has 320 location data providers listed on its directory, Jordan Hauer, the company’s CEO, said. While the company doesn’t directly collect or sell any of the data, hedge funds will pay it to guide them through the myriad of location data companies, he said.
“The most inefficient part of the whole process is actually not delivering the data,” Hauer said. “It’s actually finding what you’re looking for and making sure that it’s compliant, making sure that it has value and that it is exactly what the provider says it is.”
Oh, the Places Your Data Will Go
There are a whole slew of potential buyers for location data: investors looking for intel on market trends or what their competitors are up to, political campaigns, stores keeping tabs on customers, and law enforcement agencies, among others.
Fast food restaurants and other businesses have been known to buy location data for advertising purposes down to a person’s steps. For example, in 2018, Burger King ran a promotion in which, if a customer’s phone was within 600 feet of a McDonalds, the Burger King app would let the user buy a Whopper for one cent.
Of the location data firms The Markup examined, the offerings are diverse.
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Advan Research, for instance, uses historical location data to tell its customers, largely retail businesses or their private equity firm owners, where their visitors came from, and makes guesses about their income, race, and interests based on where they’ve been.
“For example, we know that the average income in this neighborhood by census data is $50,000. But then there are two devices—one went to Dollar General, McDonald’s, and Walmart, and the other went to a BMW dealer and Tiffany’s … so they probably make more money,” Advan Research’s Tsiounis said.
Others combine the location data they obtain with other pieces of data gathered from your online activities. Complementics, which boasts data on “more than a billion mobile device IDs,” offers location data in tandem with cross-device data for mobile ad targeting.
The prices can be steep.
Outlogic (formerly known as X-Mode) offers a license for a location dataset titled “Cyber Security Location data” on Datarade for $240,000 per year. The listing says “Outlogic’s accurate and granular location data is collected directly from a mobile device’s GPS.”
At the moment, there are few if any rules limiting who can buy your data.
Sherman, of the Duke Tech Policy Lab, published a report in August finding that data brokers were advertising location information on people based on their political beliefs, as well as data on U.S. government employees and military personnel.
“There is virtually nothing in U.S. law preventing an American company from selling data on two million service members, let’s say, to some Russian company that’s just a front for the Russian government,” Sherman said.
Existing privacy laws in the U.S., like California’s Consumer Privacy Act, do not limit who can purchase data, though California residents can request that their data not be “sold”—which can be a tricky definition. Instead, the law focuses on allowing people to opt out of sharing their location in the first place.
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation has stricter requirements for notifying users when their data is being processed or transferred.
But Ashkan Soltani, a privacy expert and former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission, said it’s unrealistic to expect customers to hunt down companies and insist they delete their personal data.
“We know in practice that consumers don’t take action,” he said. “It’s incredibly taxing to opt out of hundreds of data brokers you’ve never even heard of.”
Companies like Apple and Google, who control access to the app stores, are in the best position to control the location data market, AppCensus’s Egelman said.
“The real danger is the app gets booted from the Google Play store or the iOS app store,” he said.” As a result, your company loses money.”
Researchers found, however, that the companies’ SDKs were still making their way into Google’s app store.
Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“The Google Play team is always working to strengthen privacy protections through both product and policy improvements. When we find apps or SDK providers that violate our policies, we take action,” Google spokesperson Scott Westover said in an email.
Digital privacy has been a key policy issue for U.S. senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, who told The Markup that the big app stores needed to do more.
“This is the right move by Google, but they and Apple need to do more than play whack-a-mole with apps that sell Americans’ location information. These companies need a real plan to protect users’ privacy and safety from these malicious apps,” Wyden said in an email.
Bokeh into a corner; the coming of age for smartphone photography
Much has been said about the new camera system, and in particular, the top end iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max versions. Cinematic mode is one new feature that has generated a lot of interest, some admiration and some confusion.
Apple marketing has not helped to clarify – the emphasis with the name and all the marketing materials and ads are jumping into the claim that this is a high-end pro replacement for prime lenses and a human focus puller. And you should make professional movies with it.
This is a valid idea, to a point, and it’s a fantastic accomplishment to have a cinematic mode at all, especially in your pocket. And, perhaps, the limitation at HD video and no 4k capability will be overcome, either in software or with the iPhone 14.
But, in reality, none of that matters. In reality this mode was absolutely necessary, with or without the autofocus “robot-focus-puller” trick.
Including the telephoto camera made the cinematic effect absolutely mandatory
So taking a small step back for a moment, let’s look at the big changes in the iPhone 13 Pro cameras compared to the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro. The big change was the ultra-wide camera / lens combo along with the 3X 77mm telephoto camera / lens. In total making 6x optical zoom range possible.
It’s the 77mm that is the huge move. Why? Well, if you are a photographer and have ever worked with a prime or zoom lens of 77mm or above you will be aware of a couple of things. The size, length and weight of the lens is massive. And to duplicate that in a tiny camera module as part of a three camera array on an iPhone presents a pretty big challenge.
Obviously the size limitation makes it impossible for a “real” 77mm lens to be strapped to the back of an iPhone. And, even if the magnification was possible, what about the “look” and the quality of the image?
And what constitutes, in photographic tradition, the beauty and style that makes a long lens like a 77mm artistically desirable? Because just having the ability to get a closer view or shot of an subject without moving the camera closer is a small and relatively insignificant part of the challenge.
Bokeh because it’s beautiful and highlights the subject (often a human or animal) in the video or photo.
Now, to be clear, we are really talking about video recording, not just photos. Because the portrait mode on iPhone has been around, and improving, for years, and cinematic mode is creating similar effect and adding a new level for video.
Adding a 77mm lens, however, if it was not getting the bokeh effect in the video recording, would have been a disappointment of monumental proportions for photographers and would not have been an option.
And, good news folks, the bokeh in cinematic mode when using the 77mm lens is very usable and takes the cinematic style potential into a creative realm that is “Pro”, with or without the focus pulling tricks, and / or the panning or dolly shots with a moving camera.
Both the addition of “portrait mode” backgrounds for FaceTime video, which is a look that has become standard for YouTube videographers, and, more impressively and more importantly, the ability to shift through the lens “kit” as a feature film director would, using different focal lengths (like swapping out prime lenses on a feature film shoot) is a game changer.
However, none of this would be even remotely possible if the switch from a virtual 26mm wide angle prime lens to a virtual 77mm prime did not have some emulation of the unique qualities such as depth or field and, above all, bokeh that shifted as well.
And, thankfully this works the way a director or DP would want – not the same, of course, as a rig that has lenses that cost as much as a dozen iPhone 13 Pro Maxes, but one that is unique and able to produce beautiful, soulful and human effects that are a computationally assisted approximation. That look, or at least something with a similar feel, is akin to what has inspired generations of filmmakers to love what a 77mm or 85mm or even a 100mm (my personal favorite) does for a human subject in the wild.
It is now possible to produce images that have the convenience of an iPhone and the creative mix of styles that could previously only be found in a full professional kit with multiple prime lenses, and that is something that will change and impact the quality and style of everything we watch, particularly in production areas where million dollar kits are not an option.
Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic / J. Flavia / Unsplash
Ear related! 2nd best and more are also interesting
With so many new features on the iPhone 13 Pro models, and with so many of them made possible by iOS 15, the A15 bionic chip, the 16-core Neural Engine, which performs up to 15.8 trillion operations per second, and power features like Cinematic Mode and Smart HDR 4, machine learning and other hard to explain facets of the overall experiential upgrade, sound playback (and recording) are often barely mentioned, it seems.
Ever since there was the biggest Apple success story near the turn of the century there has been a special relationship between the fruit company and music / sound. I’m talking, of course, about the iPod.
Long before the iPhone was even a rumor, the iPod was a huge success, taking over the mp3 player market and, with the iTunes store for music downloads, launching the software and services division, for all practical purposes.
It’s hard to imagine now, but there was doubt that Apple could make it in the competitive cell phone market, with behemoths like Nokia and Blackberry so well established. It was the iPod’s success that made it seem plausible.
There was one thing that the iPod never had, however; speakers. And even the recent iPhones, with speakers for voice and music, if you didn’t use your AirPods for that, had speaker and sound quality that was not on the quality level of the larger iPads.
With a much larger area to hide speakers, the iPad was always an obvious choice for watching movies and listening “out loud” via the built in speaker system. With an iPad pro that could be pretty spectacular with a relatively full frequency spectrum and, more recently via software upgrades, spatial audio.
With iPhone 13 Pro models the audio barrier has finally been shattered
In a tiny, nearly forgotten passage at the very end of a list of new specs and enhancements in the iPhone 13 line, Apple adds one more thing; a stereo speaker at the top where the notch is located and a second stereo speaker at the bottom next to the Lightning port.
What it doesn’t mention is the improvement in the sound quality. Like so many features in the newer generation of devices and software, this unassuming, seemingly simple statement is just the tip of the iceberg and does not divulge what’s really going on.
Once more a combination of all the recent software and hardware upgrades combine to produce an experience that goes beyond what you could expect with these tiny, nearly invisible, speakers.
First, the two stereo speaker sets are, sound wise, equal in quality. So when you are watching a movie in landscape mode there is a distinct stereo effect. This is enhanced by spatial audio and dolby atmos depending on your set up.
The actual experience is noticeably “iPad like” and in some ways even goes beyond. Having the phone relatively near you, due to its size, and listening to a high quality movie score, there’s a feeling that your phone has morphed into a personal theater – as long as you can let the sound out into your local environment.
Try “SharePlay”, once it’s live in iOS 15.1, or just manually sync with your partner, assuming you each have a new iPhone 13 (!) and you will get a glorious room filling surround experience from the 4x stereo output (8 speakers?!) into the room.
And the mysterious mics also hidden in multiple places, are also a big upgrade – the seem to switch roles for video, calls etc and maximize the audio quality in live recording situations.
Apple’s software and service bundles and ambitions are driving hardware and iOS upgrades
As jubilant as this may sound, there is also an ulterior motive lurking. Some of the audio features work best (or at all) with an Apple Music subscription. And having more subscriptions, Apple TV, Apple News, Apple Music, iCloud Extra Storage, along connected devices, with so many available, it becomes an ecosystem of plenty for Apple, already the largest company by market cap.
On the optimistic side there’s always Apple One Premiere, the top of the line for bundled services (see below) and looking more and more like a steal at $29.95 per month.
Perhaps, one day not to far away, there will be a Apple One Premiere plan that also includes all Apple devices and you just trade them in every two years (every year?) or maybe you never own them at all?
The way the upgrades in hardware, software and the rest are becoming more interdependent and how crazy it already is to upgrade various devices (assuming you have more than one or two) yearly or bi-annually it’s an interesting idea to try and imagine.
And with an Apple Car perhaps on the way (self driving and outfitted with all the rest of the tech and service bundles) this could be a whole-house, whole-office (will there still be offices?) all transport bundle too. Apple haters will be in trouble, and have to move to Google Island, but otherwise, hey, why not?
Apple One Premiere example package:
Speakers after tear down by iFixit:
credit: iFixit
Audio Playback
Audio formats supported: AAC‑LC, HE‑AAC, HE‑AAC v2, Protected AAC, MP3, Linear PCM, Apple Lossless, FLAC, Dolby Digital (AC‑3), Dolby Digital Plus (E‑AC‑3), Dolby Atmos, and Audible (formats 2, 3, 4, Audible Enhanced Audio, AAX, and AAX+)
Spatial audio playback
User‑configurable maximum volume limit
Video Playback
Video formats supported: HEVC, H.264, MPEG‑4 Part 2, and Motion JPEG
HDR with Dolby Vision, HDR10, and HLG
Up to 4K HDR AirPlay for mirroring, photos, and video out to Apple TV (2nd generation or later) or AirPlay 2–enabled smart TV
Video mirroring and video out support: Up to 1080p through Lightning Digital AV Adapter and Lightning to VGA Adapter (adapters sold separately)9
Upgrades for hard and software, though groundbreaking and exciting, do have limitations and problems
The new upgrades for iOS 15, iPad OS 15, mac OS 12 Monterey and the rest are in many ways amazing, feature filled wonders, as we’ve discussed at every opportunity. The multi-year transition to a more unified system across all apple devices is underway and we are big supporters of the benefits.
However, nothing is perfect, and particularly in the early days it is to be expected that glitches and strange twists and turns in the journey can disappoint and confuse along the way.
Below we’ve outlined a few.
Various less than perfect ideas and execution in the OS software
Some issues are not really issues at all but things that people just don’t like. One example is the move of the address bar on safari in iOS 15 to the bottom. Many people had trouble getting used to this so a button was added to move it back to the top.
Other glitches include a false warning that you are out of storage space. Others have reported a reduction in perceived (if not real) battery life. Although these are minor annoyances and will be fixed with future updates, such as iOS 15.1 due any minute now, they show that this bug hunting is, unfortunately part of the process of any upgrade, much less a huge and important one like iOS 15.
There are also specific limitations though that should be mentioned about the iPhone 13 Pro camera system.
This issues are less bugs or errors and just limitations that may, or may not, be improved at a later date.
The new high end Pro camera system for the iPhone 13 Pro series is a major upgrade that has so many features and new capabilities that it is hard to even list them all, let alone illuminate the multitude of options and enhancements that they create.
On the obvious down side, however, a few things have jumped out at users now that these phones are in the wild.
Cinematic mode only works (currently) in 1080p. This is a serious limitation, since the whole idea of “Pro” is 4k and above. Many even go so far as to say that 1080p aka HD is no longer the standard for video and even obsolete. While there are rumors that this could get a software upgrade, perhaps even before the next iPhone model next fall, but it is not at all clear if, or when, that might happen.
This limitation is a fairly serious one, since an entire project would have to be shot at 1080p HD rather than 4k to make any use at all of the beautiful and fascinating rack-focus effects available in cinematic mode.
Less and issue but often mentioned is the inability to shoot 4k slow motion footage.
The lack of slo-mo at any resolution above 1080p is also something that has surprised aficionados. There is an option for 1080p at 240 fps, but unless you are shooting ultra high speed action that is not a hugely useful setting.
It seems odd, since a large part of the limitation is likely the large amount of data required to make this happen at 4k but there is a silver-lining here that few have mentioned in recent articles decrying the lack of 4k slow-mo options.
Since the system is already capable of shooting 4k at 60fps, and a final project setting for editing could be 4k at 30 or even 24fps, the 4k 60fps could be seen as a double speed slo-mo setting for a 4k video projects shot at 30fps for standard and 60fps for footage to be slowed to 30fps for the 1/2 speed slo-mo effect.
In the feature film 35mm celluloid days this was a very common and useful way to get slow-mo without eating up tons of expensive film stock.
Also, shooting at 4k 60fps for a 4k 24fps project would yield a 1.5 ratio of frame rate, giving an even more extreme slow-mo effect. For most slow motion effects 1 to 1.5x speed in-camera for later playback at the project rate is more than adequate.
The 120fps rate, since the top frame rate at 4k is 60fps, is, indeed, double which, as stated above, standard.
Therefore, for all practical purposes, there is already a way to produce beautiful 4k slow motion effects in a 30fps or 24fps project and have those be in camera pristine slo-mo and not the less desirable edit-only EFX.
Summing up, even with glitches and minor disappointments, it’s a beautiful world and now we just have to shoot it
If no more serious glitches or known issues pop up during the transition from iOS 14 to iOS 15, and iPhone 12 Pro to iPhone 13 Pro, we can be satisfied that this is a monumental job well done by the gang at Apple.
Though there are a lot of shortcomings that we may perceive in the new world topping combo-pack; iPhone 13 Pro Max running iOS 15.1, these are when compared to far more costly and cumbersome alternatives, or simply, when compared to our wildest dreams. Those will have to wait a few years, in all likelihood.
Human greed is a powerful thing. When given a photographic system that even attempts to approximate a profession system based on prime and zoom lenses and accessories, there’s a tendency to want it all, right now!
Of course, instead, what we get is an amazing extension of the iPhone photo tradition – taken up a bunch of notches at once. The computational enhancements are incredible and will only get better – in many cases without a new phone as they are based on AI and machine learning, which as the name implies, are continually improving while you sleep.
It is also the reason why real lenses and traditional DLSR cameras still have an important use and value.
The new system unveiled with the iPhone 13 pro is revolutionary precisely because of the potential for people to create new visual expressions and ways of communicating.
These photographic traditions and the efforts that were made in the design to emulate them are important and valuable. However, the future will benefit from the spontaneous and new ways that people will decide to use this evolving system and the current extensions of our eyes, ears and minds….
The cameras are at the center of what makes an iPhone 13 a Pro investment
Direct hands on experience with something as complex and interesting as the new iPhone 13 Pro Max is invaluable for a useful assessment. After a few days and also taking into account some observations of others I will attempt to shed light on the state of the art of iPhone as of September 2021.
Comparing this iteration of iPhone with the previous versions is meaningful for buying decisions, but it must also be compared based on what it can do for a professional that has a need for a higher grade of gadget.
Judging and comparing the machine as a whole is also necessary, since the cameras are not cameras at all be just one part of an integrated system of visual (and audio!) production tools.
Big changes that begat others and on the circle goes
The first thing I noticed, out of the box was the sheer size of the 13 Pro Max, particularly compared to the 11 Pro Max, which was my previous workhorse. From photos I had gathered that the three cameras stuck out more and, yet they do, so much so that it is almost comical.
If you brave the world sans case and put this monster in your the back pocket of your loose fitting jeans, the bulge from the cameras will feel like you are doing something crazy, as it is as if they are rubbing against anything they touch, continuously.
That’s not all about the physical size, though. Looking at the diameter of the three circles (lenses) they appear significantly larger. Believe me, they are. Since the 11 Pro max and the 12 Pro Max have the same size triple camera layout (spec upgrades notwithstanding) this is an immediate and obvious change.
Above: Photo / Lynxotic
The increased size and weight of the camera itself is noticeable, more than I expected. The screen appears far larger due to the new specs and it is a bit of a shock at first, but the level of quality is the biggest and most noticeable feature.
The design logic has an implied history that jumps out once you start to use the camera system.
The changes to the three cameras are significant. After two years of using the 2019 11 Pro Max the framing options, based on the three lenses is a complete new experience.
The ultra wide 13mm equivalent is a bit of a bold and crazy choice. If I was ordering a set of lenses for a music video shoot the ultra wide might go as far as 11mm (very wide!) but that is basically an EFX look and causes an almost fish-eye look.
The 13mm is literally as wide as you can get without getting into potential “clown” territory, which is fun but not usable for a non-EFX composition.
What is odd, in a way, is that the “main” lens at 26mm equivalent is still very wide meaning that the standard 40mm equivalent, which was always considered the closest to a neutral look, is absent here.
Similarly, the telephoto lens at a 77mm equivalent is exactly the same type of choice – once again in my kit this would have been a 100mm for a deep bokeh and a noticeable sweet spot that is ultra-flattering for close ups and head shots.
The 77mm, therefore, is a long enough lens to get the magnification and emulate the look of a telephoto style. But wait, no glass no bokeh.
Both the 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max have the same sensors, optics, stabilization and features. The three cameras in the Pro models span a 6x optical focal length range.
This is where the logic of the design and how the system works, as a whole, begins to get deep.
Once you have made the commitment to not only extend the range of the entire optical focal length range to 6x the differences between a glass & steel 77mm prime lens and a “cell phone camera” must be addressed.
The 77mm requires the bokeh and relatively narrow in-focus range of a “real” telephoto lens is the stylized creative uses that a full kit of prime lenses makes possible is to be achieved.
This is addressed with the already present portrait mode – with enhanced functionality made possible by the A15 chip, the machine learning, AI and neural network – in other words software and computational assists.
And for video, cinematic mode is an absolute must – since the same bokeh effect and stylized effects are needed and desired for video.
All of this does not include the macro effects that effectively extend the range into the nearly microscopic. This feature requires a whole article, which you can check out here.
Getting to a full photographic system in your pocket, and beyond.
Once the effects and artifacts of the 77mm style glass prime lens have been added to the mix, emulated things get more interesting.
Since the bokeh and artifacts in the cinematic mode for video are computational and not photographic, they are stored separately and can be altered after the fact, just like has been the case with portrait mode all along.
This is a big deal in one way, since it could never be conceived of with traditional lenses and cameras. It also, however, one more variable to consider when putting together a large batch of footage for a project. This adds a new layer of creative flexibility, and choices to contend with.
Further, since the long lens stylizations are a byproduct of and influenced by focus settings, that has to be in the mix also. That produced the need for the cinematic mode which you can think of as a slightly stoned robot focus puller. who is also a little bit psychic.
The first robot camera assistant is already in the box when your phone arrives
Let me explain…. A real life focus puller (doing rack focus settings) in real life would function roughly as follows:
A shot is planned that requires a focus pull from one subject to another – this could be a close shot of a face panning to another face, or a close up that refocuses from the foreground to the background, for example. The focus must also factor in any movement of the camera / dolly.
The two desired subject distances are measured (using a tape measure) and the focus settings noted. In complex shots this can be multiple focus settings and a particular speed of the “rack pull” from one to the next.
Often such complex focus / dolly set ups must be rehearsed multi times just for the focus puller – so that his error does not ruin a perfect take when, for example, the actors get their best performances.
So, in the robot world practice is also good – and a plan is almost essential, but the virtual focus puller will go with the flow, and try to anticipate and predict what you want him to focus on in real time as you shoot.
This is pretty incredible and also, much like autocorrect typing, sometimes very successful and sometimes comical in the outcome. What is tricky is how to get the robot puller to know what you are trying to have as a subject if it is not a persons head or face.
Also, if the action is fast or if you are shooting something that has no pre-determined outcome or script, like a political protest or a sporting event, you will get somewhat random results.
This makes the name apt, since cinematic also implies a movie with a plot and a script.
Conclusions and a few known limitations and caveats
Human greed is a powerful thing. When given a photographic system that even attempts to approximate a profession system based on prime and zoom lenses and accessories, there’s a tendency to want it all, right now!
Of course, instead, what we get is an amazing extension of the iPhone photo tradition – taken up a bunch of notches at once. The computational enhancements are incredible and will only get better – in many cases without a new phone as they are based on AI and machine learning, which as the name implies, are continually improving while you sleep.
There are specific limitations though that should be mentioned about the iPhone 13 Pro camera system.
Cinematic mode only works (currently) in 1080p. This is a serious limitation, since the whole idea of Pro is 4k and above. There are rumors that this could get a software upgrade during the year but it is not clear if or when that will happen.
Along with the lack of slo-mo at any resolution above 1080p there is a lot of disappointment in this issue. It is the reality of how difficult the computational “assist” really is to achieve that makes this a big step that is still in the future.
It is also the reason why real lenses and traditional DLSR cameras still have an important use and value.
The new system unveiled with the iPhone 13 pro is revolutionary precisely because of the potential for people to create new visual expressions and ways of communicating.
These photographic traditions and the efforts that were made in the design to emulate them are important and valuable. However, the future will benefit from the spontaneous and new ways that people will decide to use this evolving system and the current extensions of our eyes, ears and minds….
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is said to be working on a rebranding plan. According to The New York Times, the plan which has come to be known internally as “Project Amplify” was signed off by the CEO and included a boost of pro-Facebook stories (written by the Facebook Team) onto its billions of users.
An internal meeting back in January hatched the initiative to showcase “positive” stories about the social network platform on its largest digital real estate, the News Feed.
Based on the report from the Times, some executives present at the meeting were “shocked” by the proposal.
Project Amplify also made strong attempts for the Facebook platform to distance itself from any scandals (i.e. minimizing access to negative reports) relating to Zuckerberg, while simultaneously, ramping up new stories that provided a more flattering spin on the social network.
Thiel is getting a lot of likely unwanted press this week, looks like he deserves it…
A new feature book profile published in NYMag details the origins of Peter Thiel. His spectacular story, leading to what to some is a toxic, libertarian right-wing, stance that included support of Donald Trump and various other infamous acts, and more recently, such as a huge bankroll pushing his agenda in Washington political lobbying. Not to mention his Roth IRA story of non-taxed treasures worth billions.
The fascinating piece details the biographical details, culled from the book, beginning around 1988 when Thiel was a boy of twenty and first arriving in Northern California.
The article, showing how his eventual political perspectives were already emerging at that young age, it goes on to detail the entire story to nearly the present day as is chronicled in the new book:
Above: “The Contrarian” – Release date on September 21,2021. Available to order on Bookshop and Amazon.
His ideology dominates Silicon Valley. It began to form when he was an angry young man.
In many ways the book’s release seems to dovetail perfectly with the building thread of details regarding how he rose from obscurity to becoming an obscenely wealthy silicon valley “god”, and one that seems to seek inordinate influence over the direction of our common futures. Not only in the tech arena. Not only in his association with Facebook’s beginnings and origins of PayPal.
This character portrait is a must read. It goes along with why it feels like we also all need to follow the Trump saga to its conclusion, no matter how ignoble or tragic. Or the trial of Elizabeth Holmes, for that matter, to get a sense of how the runaway powers that are sometimes obtained, wether through force of will or just serendipity, and how they can, later, potentially grow so dangerous that the influences can infect and affect us all.
Release date on September 21,2021. Available to order on Bookshop and Amazon.
New features in the pipeline along with the new iteration of the hit timepiece
The next version of the Apple Watch (Series 7) is expected to be released in the coming weeks, and the WSJ reported that the company is currently working on additional health-related features and improvements for the smartwatch. While it is not certain that these to be included in Series 7, there is no doubt that they are coming, either as a software or hardware update.
Apple is already known for many of its current health conscious features, including the well known Exercise rings and Fitness App, as well as the ability to check your heart rate for irregularity with its electrocardiogram and check your Blood Oxygen levels with a Series 6.
One of the new capabilities that may be coming to your Apple Watch will include measuring blood-pressure which would prompt a user when their BP levels are too high (or increasing in rate). This can influence behavior, diet or give you a warning to seek medical attention is the reading is extreme, for example.
When Apple does roll out this feature, it could be a game changer (or rather a life-saver), as hundreds of millions of Americans suffer from high blood pressure and / or hypertension. The condition leads to almost half a million deaths a year according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Another feature said to be in the works is targeted towards females, a thermometer to help with fertility planning. Bloomberg also reported earlier of Apple’s additional health goals to add blood-sugar sensors to help those with diabetes monitor glucose levels.
A useful, even sometimes addictive health aid, which is a good thing
Those who have an Apple Watch can likely attest to its effectiveness in promoting health and well being, particularly around exercise and weight control. The recent addition of of medical features, that in some cases have directly contributed to lives being saved, appear to be a high priority at the giant tech company.
Although it is tantalizing to speculate on the incredible features yet to be added to the device, it will take time for the technological innovations and solutions to be developed in order to make these possible.
Apple has some very ambitious improvements they want to add to its Watch, however there is no official timeline that has been announced and most likely will not be expected before 2022.
I can’t link to a particular article explaining it because most of what’s out there is misleading. The truth is that nobody knows. The term comes from various science fiction sources, the most recent and least accurate is from “Ready Player One”.
The general idea of that book & film example is a future scenario where many, particularly the young, spend endless hours logged into a shared virtual reality game-like scenario where they can create a unique identity, via 3D avatars, and can interact in a realistic, yet magical, virtual reality environment.
There are many individuals and companies, such as Facebook that are advocating a link from the current online “world” to this type of “enhanced” 3D interactive “metaverse”. They even use the term and try to define its meaning based on their “vision” for the future of social media and the internet.
Zuckerberg monopolizing the Metaverse before it even exists?
The problem is, they are almost certainly wrong in this future prediction. The metaverse is already here, albeit in a very primitive form, where it will lead and what it will eventually turn into is completely open and up to all who inhabit it now and going forward.
The problem is, they are almost certainly wrong in this future prediction. The metaverse is already here, albeit in a very primitive form; where it will lead and what it will eventually become is completely open, and up to all who inhabit it now and going forward.
Elon Musk once said “We are all already Cyborgs” referring to the way cell phones (and for Tesla owners the onboard computer in their cars) extend our senses in a nearly continuous manner. We really can’t live the digital life most of us currently lead without our technological enhancements via hand-held (for now) computing.
Since this progression from the primitive early internet and web to the current, still primitive, phase of work-from-home and zoom business and education the is a continuous extension of our “world” into an artificial computer-aided meta-universe that is slowly becoming more responsive to our unspoken needs and wants.
“our electric global networks now begin to simulate the condition of our central nervous system. But a con-scious computer would still be one that was an extension of our consciousness, as a telescope is an extension of our eyes, or as a ventriloquist’s dummy is an extension of the ventriloquist.
Marshall Mcluhan, from “Understanding Media, pg. 388
What are “Dark Patterns”
Another recently coined term, dark patterns, has come to mean the ways that software designers use user interfaces to influence behavior and elicit a desired outcome, such as clicking a “buy button”.
Another way to imagine it is the digital equivalent to the grocery store designs that put necessities and staples like milk & eggs as far away as possible from the entrance, to try and entice impulse buying, while filling the check-out aisles with candy and other low cost / high margin goodies.
“We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror”
Marshall Mcluhan
The disconnect in this analogy is that people intuitively believe that the digital dark patters are less powerful and have less impact since they operate in cyberspace, while in fact is that the ability to manipulate behavior is much, much more powerful in the digital realm.
The “Dead Internet Conspiracy Theory” is just reality bumping into the truth
A recent article in the Atlantic noted the existence of the theory, and concluded that, though it had a ring of truth, ultimately the fact that this theory, on an obscure web page was possible to find, meant that the internet is not dead, and therefore the theory is invalid.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The rise of Dark Patterns, even as the devices we use and the sites we surf to and exist inside of (like Facebook) are evolving, and the endless self-inflating systems and algorithms that surround us are literally killing the internet and destroying our digital lives.
Infanticide would be a more accurate term, perhaps, since we are all baby cyborgs of the pre-metaverse and have barely had a chance to live, while these powers expand endlessly into a death-machine for our extended consciousness.
Infanticide would be a more accurate term, perhaps, since we are all baby cyborgs of the pre-metaverse and have barely had a chance to live, while these powers expand endlessly into a death-machine for our extended consciousness.
The internet is currently on life-support, because the one thing that it is innately predisposed toward, the enhancement and amplification of human interconnected communication, is at odds with the corporate goals of the gatekeepers, mainly Amazon, Facebook and Google.
Free and open communication, coupled with ever evolving and improving upgrades to the software of our lives, is nearly extinct, before it has even begun, due to this infinite conflict of interest.
Algorithms define our lives, the Metaverse is already our home and Dark Patterns follow us everywhere
The above, a dramatically described and yet painfully obvious truth, is what has even the US government, in the form of the FTC and its chair, Lina Khan, looking at antitrust remedies for the economic devastation that has been caused by the dead internet paradox.
And it has inspired legions of blockchain and coding resistance fighters to start the long process of finding a way to launch WW3, and other independent ways to connect humans using computers that are in are pockets, in our living rooms, and perhaps soon, implanted in our bodies.
Another example is Pi, a new and upcoming cryptocurrency, based on a future where a billion people will be mining and sharing the proceeds equitably using cell phones, and since they will all be connected via the mining software, the realization of this goal would automatically create, for a billion people worldwide, an alternative network, one without gatekeepers to block people from freely interacting with each other.
Oddly, it is the dim realization that the internet is, in fact, already dead in its current form, that will lead to the changes that will ultimately bring about a digital communication revolution, one that will make WWW1 look like a mistake from a primitive and misguided time.
Oddly, it is the dim realization that the internet is, in fact, already dead in its current form, that will lead to the changes that will bring about a digital communication revolution, one that will make WWW1 look like a mistake from a primitive and misguided time.
Anything, and anyone, that can wake us up to what we lack, and what we are missing, in our digital worlds and our lives – in the pre-metaverse – is a hero of the future and must be praised as such. Starting now.
Experts say the privacy promise—ubiquitous in online services and apps—obscures the truth about how companies use personal data
You’ve likely run into this claim from tech giants before: “We do not sell your personal data.”
Companies from Facebook to Google to Twitter repeat versions of this statement in their privacy policies, public statements, and congressional testimony. And when taken very literally, the promise is true: Despite gathering masses of personal data on their users and converting that data into billions of dollars in profits, these tech giants do not directly sell their users’ information the same way data brokers directly sell data in bulk to advertisers.
But the disclaimers are also a distraction from all the other ways tech giants use personal data for profit and, in the process, put users’ privacy at risk, experts say.
Lawmakers, watchdog organizations, and privacy advocates have all pointed out ways that advertisers can still pay for access to data from companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter without directly purchasing it. (Facebook spokesperson Emil Vazquez declined to comment and Twitter spokesperson Laura Pacas referred us to Twitter’s privacy policy. Google did not respond to requests for comment.)
And focusing on the term “sell” is essentially a sleight of hand by tech giants, said Ari Ezra Waldman, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University.
“[Their] saying that they don’t sell data to third parties is like a yogurt company saying they’re gluten-free. Yogurt is naturally gluten-free,” Waldman said. “It’s a misdirection from all the other ways that may be more subtle but still are deep and profound invasions of privacy.”
Those other ways include everything from data collected from real-time bidding streams (more on that later), to targeted ads directing traffic to websites that collect data, to companies using the data internally.
How Is My Data at Risk if It’s Not Being Sold?
Even though companies like Facebook and Google aren’t directly selling your data, they are using it for targeted advertising, which creates plenty of opportunities for advertisers to pay and get your personal information in return.
The simplest way is through an ad that links to a website with its own trackers embedded, which can gather information on visitors including their IP address and their device IDs.
Advertising companies are quick to point out that they sell ads, not data, but don’t disclose that clicking on these ads often results in a website collecting personal data. In other words, you can easily give away your information to companies that have paid to get an ad in front of you.
If the ad is targeted toward a certain demographic, then advertisers would also be able to infer personal information about visitors who came from that ad, Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said.
For example, if there’s an ad targeted at expectant mothers on Facebook, the advertiser can infer that everyone who came from that link is someone Facebook believes is expecting a child. Once a person clicks on that link, the website could collect device IDs and an IP address, which can be used to identify a person. Personal information like “expecting parent” could become associated with that IP address.
“You can say, ‘Hey, Google, I want a list of people ages 18–35 who watched the Super Bowl last year.’ They won’t give you that list, but they will let you serve ads to all those people,” Cyphers said. “Some of those people will click on those ads, and you can pretty easily figure out who those people are. You can buy data, in a sense, that way.”
Then there’s the complicated but much more common way that advertisers can pay for data without it being considered a sale, through a process known as “real-time bidding.”
Often, when an ad appears on your screen, it wasn’t already there waiting for you to show up. Digital auctions are happening in milliseconds before the ads load, where websites are selling screen real estate to the highest bidder in an automated process.
Visiting a page kicks off a bidding process where hundreds of advertisers are simultaneously sent data like an IP address, a device ID, the visitor’s interests, demographics, and location. The advertisers use this data to determine how much they’d like to pay to show an ad to that visitor, but even if they don’t make the winning bid, they have already captured what may be a lot of personal information.
With Google ads, for instance, the Google Ad Exchange sends data associated with your Google account during this ad auction process, which can include information like your age, location, and interests.
The advertisers aren’t paying for that data, per se; they’re paying for the right to show an advertisement on a page you visited. But they still get the data as part of the bidding process, and some advertisers compile that information and sell it, privacy advocates said.
In May, a group of Google users filed a federal class action lawsuit against Google in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleging the company is violating its claims to not sell personal information by operating its real-time bidding service.
The lawsuit argues that even though Google wasn’t directly handing over your personal data in exchange for money, its advertising services allowed hundreds of third parties to essentially pay and get access to information on millions of people. The case is ongoing.
“We never sell people’s personal information and we have strict policies specifically prohibiting personalized ads based on sensitive categories,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda told the San Francisco Chronicle in May.
Real-time bidding has also drawn scrutiny from lawmakers and watchdog organizations for its privacy implications.
In January, Simon McDougall, deputy commissioner of the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office, announced in a statement that the agency was continuing its investigation of real-time bidding (RTB), which if not properly disclosed, may violate the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.
“The complex system of RTB can use people’s sensitive personal data to serve adverts and requires people’s explicit consent, which is not happening right now,” McDougall said. “Sharing people’s data with potentially hundreds of companies, without properly assessing and addressing the risk of these counterparties, also raises questions around the security and retention of this data.”
And in April, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators sent a letter to ad tech companies involved in real-time bidding, including Google. Their main concern: foreign companies and governments potentially capturing massive amounts of personal data about Americans.
“Few Americans realize that some auction participants are siphoning off and storing ‘bidstream’ data to compile exhaustive dossiers about them,” the letter said. “In turn, these dossiers are being openly sold to anyone with a credit card, including to hedge funds, political campaigns, and even to governments.”
On May 4, Google responded to the letter, telling lawmakers that it doesn’t share personally identifiable information in bid requests and doesn’t share demographic information during the process.
“We never sell people’s personal information and all ad buyers using our systems are subject to stringent policies and standards, including restrictions on the use and retention of information they receive,” Mark Isakowitz, Google’s vice president of government affairs and public policy, said in the letter.
What Does It Mean to “Sell” Data?
Advocates have been trying to expand the definition of “sell” beyond a straightforward transaction.
The California Consumer Privacy Act, which went into effect in January 2020, attempted to cast a wide net when defining “sale,” beyond just exchanging data for money. The law considers it a sale if personal information is sold, rented, released, shared, transferred, or communicated (either orally or in writing) from one business to another for “monetary or other valuable consideration.”
And companies that sell such data are required to disclose that they’re doing so and allow consumers to opt out.
“We wrote the law trying to reflect how the data economy actually works, where most of the time, unless you’re a data broker, you’re not actually selling a person’s personal information,” said Mary Stone Ross, chief privacy officer at OSOM Products and a co-author of the law. “But you essentially are. If you are a social media company and you’re providing advertising and people pay you a lot of money, you are selling access to them.”
But that doesn’t mean it’s always obvious what sorts of personal data a company collects and sells.
In T-Mobile’s privacy policy, for instance, the company says it sells compiled data in bulk, which it calls “audience segments.” The policy states that audience segment data for sale doesn’t contain identifiers like your name and address but does include your mobile advertising ID.
Nevertheless, T-Mobile’s privacy policy says the company does “not sell information that directly identifies customers.”
T-Mobile spokesperson Taylor Prewitt didn’t provide an answer to why the company doesn’t consider advertising IDs to be personal information but said customers have the right to opt out of that data being sold.
So What Should I Be Looking for in a Privacy Policy?
The next time you look at a privacy policy, which few people ever really do, don’t just focus on whether or not the company says it sells your data. That’s not necessarily the best way to assess how your information is traveling and being used.
And even if a privacy policy says that it doesn’t share private information beyond company walls, the data collected can still be used for purposes you might feel uncomfortable with, like training internal algorithms and machine learning models. (See Facebook’s use of one billion pictures from Instagram, which it owns, to improve its image recognition capability.)
Consumers should look for deletion and retention policies instead, said Lindsey Barrett, a privacy expert and until recently a fellow at Georgetown Law. These are policies that spell out how long companies keep data, and how to get it removed.
She noted that these statements hold a lot more weight than companies promising not to sell your data.
“People don’t have any meaningful transparency into what companies are doing with their data, and too often, there are too few limits on what they can do with it,” Barrett said. “The whole ‘We don’t sell your data’ doesn’t say anything about what the company is doing behind closed doors.”
That’s the first line of an open letter released Tuesday by 71 young professionals and students in the advertising and public relations industry calling for an end to contracts with fossil fuel companies, given their significant contributions to the climate emergency.
“The biggest threat to our future is climate change,” they write. “The world’s 20 biggest polluters are fossil fuel companies, with the entire energy sector responsible for creating 75% of carbon emissions. They are blocking necessary and urgently needed climate action.”
“And our industry is helping them do it,” the young professionals continue. “We’re angry. We’re afraid. And we refuse to sit back and watch it happen.”
The letter is clear in its demand:
“We, tomorrow’s leaders, call on all agencies, from the holding companies to the independent shops, to stop working with fossil fuel clients. This means oil giants as well as the alphabet soup of trade associations and front groups.”
– 71 Young Professionals
“No more marketing climate denial and disinformation” or “setting up fake front groups,” the letter adds, further calling for an end to “amplifying lies about how action will hurt the economy” and “greenwashing oil, gas, and coal companies, aiding them in their attempts to dodge pollution safeguards and block meaningful change.”
BREAKING: Today 71 professionals under 30, junior executives, and students in the advertising and PR industry released an open letter calling for advertising and PR executives to end contracts with fossil fuel companies. https://t.co/b3l47m45S0
The signatories urge everyone in the industry—especially agency heads, founders, and leadership teams—to take a stand against continuing to work with polluters, emphasizing that the climate emergency is already taking a toll.
“We won’t be able to reduce, reuse, recycle our way out of tomorrow’s catastrophe—because it is already happening today,” says the letter, which is open for new signatories through the end of the week. “Over the last few years, we’ve seen the devastating impacts of climate-related disasters, like record-breaking wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, and hurricanes. Bold action is needed, at all levels and segments of society. The time has come for our industry to do its part.”
Fires are devouring swaths of the Western United States, forcing evacuations and shutting down every national forest in California. On Sunday, Hurricane Ida, a “poster child for a climate change-driven disaster,” slammed into the Gulf Coast as a Category 4 storm, killing at least four people, leaving more than a million without power amid widespread destruction, and sparking calls for President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency.
“At some point in the recent past, climate change was something that was happening in some distant future, and maybe of little concern to most people. Well, that distant future is now today—everyone will experience climate change as a series of horrific front-page photos and videos until they themselves are taking those photos and videos. It’s no longer some abstract threat,” letter leader Joe Cole toldCommon Dreams.
Cole is strategist working with Clean Creatives, a campaign supported by Fossil Free Media that pressures ad and PR agencies to drop fossil fuel accounts.
The letter comes as the New York Times is under fire for allowing fossil fuel industry advertising, thanks to a new campaign and reporting by climate journalist Emily Atkin in her newsletter HEATED.
As Atkin reported Monday:
[A] new activist campaign to pressure the Times to stop creating and running fossil fuel ads is launching today. Called Ads Not Fit to Print, the campaign argues that fossil fuel advertisements endanger Times readers’ health in the same way now-banned cigarette ads did—and likely, even more.
“What the Times is doing right now is shameful,” said Genevieve Guenther, whose group End Climate Silence is spearheading the campaign. “On one hand, they’re trying to seem like part of the reality-based community who acknowledges the climate crisis and wants to solve it. On the other, they’re doing everything they can to keep the fossil fuel economy going because it is one of the sources of their own power and they believe in it.”
Activists aren’t the only ones taking issue with this practice, either. In conversations with HEATED over the last week, several current and former Times newsroom employees expressed concerns about the paper’s practice of creating and running fossil fuel ads. Their concerns ranged from undermining the Times‘ own climate reporting, to harming Times readers’ health, to aiding industry attempts to mislead the public about the deadly effects of fossil fuels.
Cole highlighted energy giants’ contributions to planet-heating pollution and told Common Dreams that “these clients are represented by some of the most storied ad agencies in the world like BBDO, Edelman, Ogilvy, and WundermanThompson.”
“These ads go on to be featured in some of the most prominent real estate around the world, from billboards to the NYT,” he said. “Although the tobacco industry was and is responsible for a personal health crisis, the fossil fuel industry is killing the entire planet.”
Praising Times journalists’ work on the climate emergency, Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn tweeted that “the paper should stop doing them—and all of us—a disservice by continuing to make and run ads for fossil fuel corporations.”
NYT reporters do great reporting on the climate crisis.
The paper should stop doing them — and all of us — a disservice by continuing to make and run ads for fossil fuel corporations. https://t.co/4wspKFp3eY
In a statement about the letter Tuesday, Cole said that “any time our industry starts to change for the better, it is through a combination of outside and internal pressure. I believe in the power of young professionals in our industry—the leaders of tomorrow—to hasten the necessary transition away from fossil fuel clients.”
The strategist pointed to recent findings that July 2021 was the hottest month ever recorded and asserted that “it’s no longer acceptable for agency executives to ignore the damage their work with fossil fuel clients is doing to the planet.”
He argued that “even a single contract with a client like BP, Shell, or Exxon can wipe out the impact of an agency’s sustainability pledge. If agencies are serious about not only protecting the future of their young staff, but recruiting them in the first place they need to begin by transitioning away from fossil fuel work and rejecting new contracts.”
“The people signing this letter truly are the leaders of tomorrow,” Cole added, “and if agencies want to remain relevant, and attractive places to work for top young talent, they need to end their work for the worst polluters on the planet.”
Ongoing attempts to enable travel between cities within a matter of minutes take form and shape…
A new concept video of the company’s plans for its Hyperloop system has been released, and if realized, the system will be a very fast one. The trains would travel inside a near-vacuum environment within a tube. The absence of air allows for the luxury train-like pods to travel at low power yet at extremely fast speeds, reaching up to 1,080km/hour or 670 mph.
The concept of a Hyperloop system is not a new one, and actually it was Elon Musk that initially brought the idea of developing a hyperloop transportation concept into the mainstream via the Boring Company.
photo / Virgin Hyperloop
Plans to build fully realized systems did not materialize under his watch, perhaps due to his very full agenda with sustainable energy, EVs, the moon and mars all on his plate, and now Virgin appears to be picking up the mantel and aiming for a complete transport system. With jet speeds, comfort of luxury train travel and the flexibility of car individuality the concept projections are, at the very least, beautifully imagined.
While the slick, enjoyable video (below) might make you eager to jump into a pod pronto, the reality, if realized, of the system in some kind of full commercial operations, is projected for 2027 and beyond.
All of this is promised, along with nearly zero emissions. Looking forward using a 30 year time horizon the company’s studies estimated that there could be a reduction CO2 emissions by 2.4 million tons with a connection built between three cities creating $300 billion in overall economic benefits.
This somewhat utopian vision would enable incredibly smooth, clean, cheap transportation between cities and be fast. Really fast. Although it may be easy to scoff at this rosy view of the future – it is exactly the kind of bold utopian vision that will be required if humanity is going to be saved from oblivion. Climate crisis disasters, financial meltdowns, political gridlock and corruption, these are the obvious likely candidates for a believable future.
On the other hand, ideas like universal basic income (paid in bitcoin mined by cell phone), emission free ultra luxurious hi-speed transport systems, powered with renewable energy, a world where scarcity and want are not the measurement of reality, these are the necessities of utopia.
Perhaps it’s time to start thinking it could be possible. Since the alternative is oblivion and extinction, why not?
“It starts off with two people riding a Hyperloop. It ends with hundreds of millions of people riding on a Hyperloop and that’s what the 2020s, the roaring ’20s will be”
Virgin Hyperloop Co-founder and Chief Executive Josh Giegel
One difference between the Virgin Hyperloop and a high-speed maglev train system, for example, is the idea of an individual pod system which would allow for individual pods to break away and head to secondary tubes leading towards a different destination.
Virgin Hyperloop is part of the Virgin empire created by Richard Branson, below he shared the video explaining how travel pods work.
According to MacRumors who spoke with DigiTimes, Apple has plans to have a series of events in the month of September. This would clearly deviate from how the company approached the launches of its newest products last year.
In an unusual twist at the time, the launches were spread out into three separate product events that landed during the fall months of September, October and November.
Due to the ongoing pandemic, last year’s event was live-streamed versus in-person, which may have allowed Apple to better adapt its product rollouts in digital form.
There are many new products rumored to be released that include the iPhone 13, Apple Watch Series 7, next generation AirPods, a new baseline iPad, an updated iPad mini, as well as the much anticipated 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pro laptops.
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