Tag: Facebook

It’s a Mean Old World

The first time I heard that was from an unlikely source. Decades ago I had a client who was an elderly Jewish widow. She had all kinds of money, owned a condominium in the same building as Elton John in Buckhead, Atlanta. She and her husband had worked hard and been successful so I couldn’t understand why she had that outlook on life. Then one day I was at her home and her son stopped by. He was in his fifties I would guess and was permanently crippled from polio, which he had contracted as a child. I began to see how she might think the world was mean if she had seen him suffer, both physically, and in other ways from going through life with a disability. He, like my parents, was born before the polio vaccine was invented. None of my immediate relatives ever contracted it, but neither my mom nor my dad ever learned to swim because of the danger when they were growing up. I never found out any more about my client’s son’s story. All the money in the world could not cure what polio had done to him during childhood.

A lot of years have passed since I heard my elderly friend make that comment and for the most part I had forgotten it, being an optimist I guess because so many kind things have happened to me I tend to take the good in people for granted. But here lately it does seem like the world has gotten meaner. We’re all shouting at each other, cursing and threatening to kill each other over the slightest thing. I know social media has caused most of it, the more we give into our emotions online, the better our chances of going viral, which seems to be everyone’s goal these days. We can now vent our frustrations to the world. As I recall, pre-internet that was something I would only do with my closest friends and family and in private. Now it’s become the norm to show our worst selves to the world at large. And where a friend or family member would listen and try to calm our negative emotions, now once it goes viral there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. The media companies themselves, but we all know that isn’t going to happen, not in a million years.

So there we are. Yes, there’s lots of good things going on but what gets the most attention in all of our media is the ugly, the frightening, the worst. Maybe that little old lady was right, it is a mean old world after all. Too bad because most people are really basically good. I still believe that, in spite of how it looks online.

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Project Liberty

I read an article today about a new service that seeks to create an altogether different Internet. The inventors of the current model say it’s fundamentally flawed. It’s design allows a few tech giants to gather up everyone’s data and use it without consent or even knowledge that it’s being done. They say that it can never be fixed because of the way it was built and the only solution is to start over. I agree wholeheartedly.

I remember when the Internet first came into use. I was thrilled with all of the amazing things it was going to bring into our lives. And in many ways it has. I currently work from home which could not happen without it. I check out many websites on a weekly or even daily basis for updates. But outside these places that I feel fairly confident of I no longer have much faith in the authenticity of what I’m seeing. And this is before the full implementation of AI. Just think what can of worms that’s going to open up. Very soon you will not be able to trust anything you see online. The ability to gather up data and manipulate it to fit whatever model is in vogue at the time will overwhelm the internet.

One thing I know, having worked in the tech field for almost twenty five years, is you do not want the current group of tech wizards to be in charge of anything. They are brilliant in many ways but they are also not and most likely never will be adults. It’s as though we’ve given the keys to the universe to a group of teenage boys who have no more moral aptitude than you would expect of a smart ass sixteen year old. You keep hoping to see some glimmer of responsibility beginning to appear but it never does. There’s too much money blinding them to what their success is really about. Part of it, a large part, was being at the right place at the right time. Some deliberately positioned themselves there but others were just the lucky ones. Their adolescent egos will never let them admit that nor will adversity ever cause them to stop and re-evaluate.

The damage done to society by the digital garbage in our online environment may turn out to be as devastating as the plagues of the dark ages. No one knows what’s true anymore so they choose what they want to believe and once started the internet provides justification for any and every point of view. We rush headlong into the abyss of our worst nightmares. That’s what the current version of the internet is providing us, a way to make almost anything we can imagine seem real. Don’t for a moment think that the boys behind all of this will have any qualms at all about using any and every device they know of to get you to click. True or false, right or wrong, makes absolutely no difference. Getting you to click is the only thing that matters.

Unless we drop their version of the internet and adopt a new one that is built on principles of privacy and trust. Check out Project Liberty. I hope we all live to see it flourish.

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Star Trek

Isn’t it amazing how much of the old Star Trek series, with Captain Kirk, Bones, Scottie and Spock, has come true? Remember the walkie talkies that look so much like our modern flip phones? What about Capt. Kirk asking, ‘Computer, give me any information on XYZ?’ We’ve come a long way. Now we can answer most any question by typing it in on our computers, an almost infinite amount of information is at our fingertips. Voice-activated ‘assistants’ are remarkably like the ‘computer’ Captain Kirk used. And this has happened in the last fifteen years.

But here’s the thing. When Capt. Kirk asked ‘computer’ for information, or commanded ‘her’ (she spoke with a female voice, even back then) all of his interactions were private. No one could know what he had asked her unless they were in the room with him when he said it. Now just suppose that Kirk had been going about his business, asking Computer every now and then a few questions about various items he might be curious about. But without him realizing it, Computer had also been logging all of his other interactions with devices aboard the Starship Enterprise, had tracked his every move, whom he spoke with, for how long, and what was said. Which is all a distinct possibility. But what if, unbeknownst to anyone aboard the Enterprise, not even Spock, the Klingons had gained access to this information? While Computer may not have named the personnel aboard ship, using anonymous ‘numbers’ associated with each person, it wouldn’t take long to figure out who was who.

That is exactly what is happening today with our reliance on apps created by Facebook and Google, among others. If you have an app active on your phone, it has access to everywhere you go, how long you stay there, if you post updates to Facebook, who was with you, what they were doing. And behind the scenes, all of that information is being sold to the Klingons, or to anyone else who has the money to pay for it, including governments, corporations, anyone who cares to ask and can pay the money to get it.

Maybe you live your life in such a way that you are happy with it being a complete open book to anyone who cares to look. Societies who have operated in such a manner have opened themselves up to the worst kind of manipulation by those who can and will take that information and use it against you. Think of the Stasi, or North Korea. It is the beginning of a power that has such complete control you no longer have any freedom at all. If you are constantly under surveillance, which is the case with most of us who use modern technology, you are no longer free. You are being watched, listened to, tracked and recorded, not just the things you post, but anything and everything the phone is capable of noticing, which is a lot. You often hear that our modern day smart phones have more computing power than the computers that sent men to the moon. That’s a lot of knowledge. Remember, without privacy, there can be no freedom.

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Fakebook

I used to check Facebook at least once a day. While I never installed the app on my phone, I checked in every morning to see what friends and family were up to. Occasionally I posted something to my homepage, but not very often. I am a reluctant social media user.

But last fall while waiting in line at a movie theatre concession stand the service was so amazingly horrible I wondered if I could set up a dummy Facebook account in the time it took to place my order. Sadly, I could. I made up a name and gave a fake birthday, nothing about it was true, just to see if I could do it, then left a scathing review of the theatre’s customer service. After the movie, which was the latest JK Rowling Fantastic Beasts, I forgot about the dummy account. And since I signed off of my real account several months ago when it became increasingly clear that Facebook has no concern for it’s members other than having the ability to sell their data to the highest bidder, I didn’t think anything about Facebook again until a few weeks ago. Then I remembered the fake account on my phone and thought I should try to delete it. So I logged back into it and there were all of the suggested ‘friends’ the program had chosen for me. Almost all of them were from the church I go to, who are already friends on my ‘real’ account. I figured this was obvious since Facebook tracks where I go, it would assume that I would know members of my church. But then the strangest thing happened. All of this data that’s collected is supposed to be anonymous, they say it can’t really track YOU, just your data. But there in the list of suggested ‘friends’ was a real friend of mine whom I haven’t seen in several years and who lives in another city. I am absolutely certain that I am the only human being who knows both the people from my church and this particular person who has no connection with the church or this city at all. Without entering a shred of truth about my real identity, the application had recognized me. Needless to say, I was shocked because I thought anonymous meant just that. As I said, I never installed the app on my phone and only checked my Facebook account, the real one, from my computer at home. A further nail in the coffin of my Facebook account. I prefer to think of it as Fakebook. Oh, the way it was able to sort me from the fake account was real enough, but other than that, there is no verification of what is posted. Only your identity, where you go, who you talk to?, what you buy, who knows what they are tracking. And what you choose to say online is beside the point. The only thing Fakebook is interested in is your data. That’s where all of the money lies. I have a friend, from the same church that it recognized, who says she doesn’t care that she is being tracked. But this is not truly realizing the danger that these programs pose to our society. All of us are being watched, and not just real time, but our past, everything we do is being recorded through these apps that we so willingly install on our phones, and if Fakebook had their way, would control every interaction we have with anyone. If the government tried to do this people would be up in arms, but we are so naïve we are welcoming it, even paying for devices that spy on us. Are we really so desperate for the sad semblance of human interaction that social media really is, that we are willing to sell every bit of information about ourselves to get it?

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