The Internet is getting uglier every year. Whether it is the amount of ads on websites, social media feeds and surrounding thumbnails, the cookie pop-ups on every single website with the worst and ugliest offenders being the news media and even government websites, it is getting worse. But you never noticed, because it has been creeping up on use steadily over the years. Just stop and have a mindful look right now at the website you are on. Not this one of course, this one (Medium) hasn’t yet been polluted. Maybe Ev Williams - CEO at Medium has learnt from his days at other tech firms?
The MOST stressful modern issue
Kids, teenagers and adults have never felt as much stress in their lives as they have today. The pressure put upon every age group by advertisers is immense. It is actually worse than paying tax in fact it is like paying tax. It’s draining.
But not even as stressful as Chargers, WiFi and Internet access as they are potentially the MOST stressful and comes even before stressful relationships and stressful family. If we don’t have security around Chargers, WiFi and the Internet, we become very short tempered and moody. We will be short with others and even rude. You may even accuse others for the reasons why you don’t have access to those essential human needs. Seriously that has happened to us at home!
It even comes ahead of food and water. We can live without food and water for at least a day, but not without Chargers, WiFi or the Internet.
We now expect to be able to walk into any public place and be able to connect to WiFi, free of charge. Do you remember the days when you visited hotels and you had to purchase a 1 hour or 24 hour internet access voucher. I know some hotels still do this, like the UK’s Travelodge, but I’m talking more about the bigger hotels, when you made use of their reception area for meetings. Now we can walk into any reception in any hotel and expect to be able to go to the reception desk and ask for a WiFi code totally free of charge.
Amazing!
The Facebook Effect
If I said to you that the Internet was being run by criminals and the only way to stop them is for you to stop using the Internet, you would never do it. The reason you’d never do it is because you can’t do without the Internet. It’s like electricity, gas and oil, you and everyone else couldn’t survive without it.
The same applies with Facebook. Facebook is so much part of society, an eco-system we just can’t do without. Most of us know that it causes untold harm in the world, people post the worst of humankind on the platform and Facebook are struggling to regulate themselves.
When Facebook became mainstream, we were all so overjoyed, apart from email there was nothing, well okay maybe Friends Reunited and MySpace, that allowed us to communicate and befriend almost anyone. In the beginning we would only connect with family and friends, this then grew beyond people we knew and we accepted requests from complete strangers. I wonder why we did this? Maybe we wanted to receive more likes (love) from strangers to makes us feel good about ourselves?
Facebook is like electricity, like gas and oil, maybe even food. We can not live without it, governments know this too and they can not live without it either, so any regulation or the dishing out of fines will always be small, because they need to make use of the platform to enable human surveillance, I know because I’ve heard this from Cyber Security professionals who advice the U.K. government.
Not everyone is staying on the platform though. They have lost users and more people tell me that they don’t do Facebook. They often say they prefer Instagram, haha they don’t realise it’s also Facebook! Some say they don’t do either, they prefer WhatsApp to stay in touch with friends. Oops that’s also Facebook! You see you can’t get away from them. Thousands of small business owners who have your email address and/or mobile phone number are able to add it to Facebook audiences and target you with ads and the latest changes to Facebook, which means you can’t even get your details removed from the advertisers that uploaded them, even if you’re not there. Facebook says nobody can see those details, but Facebook has them!
Happy Facebooking, just know who they are.
Expelliarmus
This is the spell that Harry Potter uses when he’s in a duel.
This how I feel sometimes when I’m duelling against the manipulation of the internet, email marketing and advertising.
No matter what I do I’m bombarded with these messages every day. They suggest that we are exposed daily to 5000 marketing messages. We don’t even know it’s happening to us.
A connection of mine Nolan Clemmons posted this fabulous graphic (see below) illustrating the routes that corporations use to manipulate us using email and the internet. Once they have us in their sales funnel they will bombard us with adverts wherever we browse, in our email inboxes and then eventually by phone.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe the Internet is a great invention, I’m an advocate a believer and yet I also believe that tech companies have carefully examined us humans as targets and data sets to be manipulated and controlled.
Governments actually love Facebook, they may suggest all sorts of action for data leaks, privacy hacks etc., but they themselves are the biggest users of searching for individuals using these technologies. I’ve sat in front of cyber security experts that have shown me a whole host of hacks they use to get the intel that governments, security firms, the police, MI5, the FBI, NSA, GCHQ and the CIA need in order to locate criminals. Well they can adopt these techniques for all of us too, for any of us. On the day of publishing this, I received this email.
By: Sarah Miller — Citizens Against Monopoly
Facebook Inc. is inviting Capitol Hill staffers to Washington DC’s “newest, most exclusive event venue” for free food and drinks. Events like this enable Facebook to peddle influence in the halls of power, and keep lawmakers from cracking down on its abuse of our democracy. In the first quarter of 2018, Facebook spent $3.3 million lobbying the U.S. government, more than ever before. That’s a key part of how it builds power and evades accountability, and events like this one are part of the process. At “A Place to Connect,” Facebook’s executive and top lobbyists will be schmoozing the people who are supposed to represent us, and trying to bamboozle Congress into believing that the company’s reforms are for real. For instance, a former corporate lawyer who is now Facebook’s deputy chief privacy officer will try to argue that Facebook is stepping it up on privacy — all actual evidence to the contrary.
Sign the Freedom From Facebook petition. Tell the Federal Trade Commission to break up Facebook’s monopoly: https://freedomfromfb.com
You know when you get that sinking feeling, that what you’ve been doing on the Internet for over a decade in order to be noticed, get found and help your own small business is now catching up with you and the realisation that corporations are using all your data to make millions, no sorry, billions.
Today I sat through a presentation by the UK CEO of Cisco and he told us that in 2018, that’s right now, there are 18 billion devices connected to the internet, by 2020 it will be 50 billion and by 2030 it will be 500 billion, that’s ½ trillion devices connected to the internet. And that’s not just mobile phones by the way, of course it couldn’t be.
He also said there are more mobile phones in the world compared to toothbrushes. What a ridiculous statistic that is, but it’s true!!
Happy brushing!
Just saw this interview with Jaron Lanier on Channel 4 news in the UK. He confirms the manipulation point.
Monopoly
I received this email from Citizens Against Monopoly.
A new story from the New York Times exposes yet another way Mark Zuckerberg has abused user trust to build Facebook into a social-network juggernaut. Facebook secretly “struck agreements allowing phone and other device makers access to vast amounts of its users’ personal information.”
Facebook gave the over 60 companies — including Apple, Blackberry, Samsung, Amazon, and Microsoft — “access to the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent, even after declaring that it would no longer share such information with outsiders.”
The full list of companies isn’t known.
These secret agreements look like clear violations of the 2011 consent decree Facebook signed with the Federal Trade Commission.
Facebook Inc. enjoys social networking market dominance, with strong majorities of Americans using one or a combination of its desktop and mobile products, which now include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
Relatedly, Facebook holds a dominant market position in online advertising due in part to the unregulated collection of user activities through its social-media and tracking products and through data-sharing agreements with other data aggregators.
Story after story is now revealing that Facebook built that its dominance through repeated violations of user privacy and deliberate negligence — or, as Mark Zuckerberg himself liked to call it, by “moving fast and breaking things.”
As Rep. David Cicilline said, “Sure looks like Zuckerberg lied to Congress about whether users have ‘complete control’ over who sees our data on Facebook.”
The five members of the Federal Trade Commission, which is the part of our government tasked with overseeing Facebook, has the authority and power to make Facebook safe for our democracy. Armed with the 2011 consent decree, the FTC has the immediate power to impose remedies that will break up Facebook’s monopoly power, give us the freedom to communicate across networks, and protect our privacy.
Together, we will make sure that they do.
Read the New York Times story.
Share the news widely.
Thank you,
CAM is a growing movement to protect America’s (and maybe the world’s) economy and democracy from corporate monopolies that undermine opportunity, competition, choice, and freedom of expression.
ps.
Facebook has a fantastic hack for businesses who wish to advertise directly to you (said sarcastically). All they need is either your email address or phone number and upload that list to Facebook. So now you’ve become a laser targeted object of adverts from people or companies you know. By the way this is not a suggestion to go and do this, but I understand this might happen too. It’s to highlight that once you’re on a list, they can do with it what they wish. Now, you can remove yourself from those lists, although it may already be too late, watch the video on how they do this. You need to go to settings in Facebook, select ‘Ads’, 4th items from the bottom to undo all those companies who have you in their list. Enjoy!
[embed]https://youtu.be/6uOdeWJsF10[/embed]
TSB UK — Internet Banking Outage
The UK Bank, ‘TSB’, faces hefty regulatory fines for what’s been described as one of the worst tech problems to hit the country’s banking space in recent years. 2 million customers were locked out of their accounts for six days! #OMG heads will roll, fines and compensations will be delivered without mercy. Really this is truly uneblievable. All the advertising spend can never repair a customer service blunder like this one.
[embed]https://youtu.be/KvevYHazQzs[/embed]
Cambridge Analytica & Facebook
Even the name Cambridge Analytica gives me the creeps. Cambridge obviously is a famous University in England and has a great standing, after all some famous people were students there.
So using the University town’s name in your business title is a clever move. It just feels reputable and very knowledgable. Add a bit of Harry Potter sparkle by adding the word ‘Analytica’ and it sounds like a spell straight out of one of J.K. Rowling’s novels.
[embed]https://youtu.be/zOL4aeOz5xQ[/embed]
Don’t be Evil
The ‘Don’t be Evil’ motto was coined by Google around 2000 and was dropped by Alphabet in 2015 and replaced by ‘Do the right thing’.
The human brain doesn’t hear the word ‘not’ when used as part of the verb doing. So instead of hearing ‘don’t’ we hear ‘do’.
Don’t believe me? Try it out with a child. I once walked into a party and it was a summer party in the daytime so kids were allowed to attend. One of the kids had a ‘bored moment’ going on.
This young boy was opening and closing the living room door with his full force, making a real noise and potentially damaging the door or maybe the doorframe. His Dad was shouting at him ‘don’t close the door, don’t close the door and he repeated the mantra without success. It was both annoying to the guests and of course the Dad and his son.
So I intervened and simply said; ‘Stop closing the door’.
Guess what? Yes indeed he stopped doing it.
With Google’s motto ‘Don’t be Evil’, of course the internet has been evil and I’m sure there’ve been a lot of ‘evil’ goings on even inside Google.
One such an example is YouTube autoplays, which literally create patterns of addiction in our brains by allowing YouTube (owned by Google) to tell us which video we should be watching next.
And of course because they are queuing up the next video, it will also include those annoying ads, which pre-play and allow to skip or as is often the case these days no option to skip. (YUK!).
YouTube, (Google) prey on our psychology for their own profit, as do many others on the Internet.
Happy browsing!
Internet Crooks
I’ve received several calls over the years from a foreign country trying to get me to allow them to log in to my computer. Of course I know what they are trying to do, I’m not stupid but I also know that many people who are not aware have had thousands of pounds or dollars stolen from them.
I had such a call again on 14th February, 2018. We had a bit of warning, the number had been trying to get hold of us for days, but every time we answered we stayed quiet and the call rang off automatically. This time I said hello and as these auto callers respond to voice it connected me to an agent (scammer), who started their scam routine.
Over the years I’ve recorded the calls and shared them on the web and even with the right authorities. I also recorded this latest call and the scam was different, they have invented a new approach. The sound quality was terrible, so I’ve had to increase the volume, which may sound a bit scratchy on your devices. Anyway be warned they may contact you or a family member, so please warn them, send them the video/audio for them to hear what their scam is.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDDVLGO-T-I[/embed]
Happy crook catching.