Friday, May 30, 2014

Facebook Just Wants to Listen -- Like A Good Friend Would...

Read THIS if you don't mind. It would seem Facebook wants to record the ambient noise around you through the microphone on your iPhone or Andriod phone.

Oh, sure...it's voluntary. You can choose not to let them. No one is forcing you.

The horror ir that they are actually arrogant enough to ask and that there are those who will allow it.

I shouldn't be surprised that we live in a society in which anyone would choose to allow this. And I won't be surprised when that same society has signed away every last bit of its own privacy voluntarily...until they voluntarily sign away the right to choose to whether volunteer or not.

My advice, if you care...take Facebook off of your phone, at least. I did. They can't do it through your computer. Not yet.

We're like meat under the tenderizing hammer...with each blow, we get softened to the idea of living in full-view of anyone who cares to watch. "They only want to watch us so that they can personalize our Internet experience..."

We're so trusting. It brings a tear to my eye.


6 comments:

  1. I don't mind a certain amount of "remember me" for convenience.

    However, I do remember being absolutely horrified by the scene in Minority Report when Tom Cruise's character goes into a shopping mall to hide. The advertising was all video and instantly recognized him and started selling to him.

    The lack of privacy, the loss of exploring new options because of being pigeon-holed by past shopping/listening/watching/reading experiences, all that chatter and noise from video ads... Good God, I hope it doesn't come to fruition! But I do fear it's exactly where we are headed. And worse!

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    1. You are correct -- in a lot of ways, it has already happened...

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  2. Data mining of our social media apparently played a large role in the 2012 presidential election; the Obama team figured out what issues people cared about so that campaign workers target on-the-fence voters pretty much on a block-by-block basis. (The Republicans had no such operation, but I'm sure they'll get just as lamentably good at data mining by 2016.)

    I've enjoyed confounding Facebook in recent years. It doesn't know my employer, my birthday, or my relationship status. I randomly ask it to "hide" ads and other content, and when I'm asked why, I check the most outlandish option. Yes, that cat photo totally offended my religious beliefs! Or, if I'm feeling saucy, I check "it's illegal or violent." Given the proliferation of pseudonyms, fake accounts, and inaccurate information, I have to wonder just how accurate all this data mining really is.

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    1. Yeah -- it is fun to mess around with them. Also, I recently discovered a search engine called "Duck Duck Go" -- they do not track your information. Since searching on there, targeted ads for me have almost disappeared. No more music equipment popping up in my ads. The best they can do it, given my age, put up ads in the hope that I would like to file a lawsuit against Androgel.

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  3. I don't know if you've written about it yet, but you may want to look into the Xbox One; you're required to be on the Internet and have your web cam on at all times, which is built into the system. If you try to block the camera, it stops your system and prompts you to remove the obstruction. To prevent breaking their sharing policy, there is facial recognition and even heartbeat sensors to make sure you don't have too many people in the room while watching their media. But it's just a gaming system.

    I never used Facebook in the first place. The idea of it just struck me as being dangerous and lacking authenticity. Let's hope Google doesn't do it too.

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    1. Holy moly. That's unbelievable. Looks like we're sticking with the 360...

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