Doc Searls has written an interesting article called "The coming collapse of surveillance marketing" which ends with the following conclusion
“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln said.
That was in 1858, and in respect to slavery.
In 2015 the language of
marketing — in which customers are “targets” to be “acquired,”
“controlled,” “managed” and “locked in” — is not much different than the
language of slave owners in Lincoln’s time.
This will change for the simple reason that we are not slaves.
We are
the ones with the money, the choice about patronage, and the network.
Companies that give us full respect will be the winners in the long run.
Companies that continue to treat us as less than human will suffer the
consequences.
Indeed.
In Asher Wolf's timeline I found a article called "Facebook patents technology to help lenders discriminate against borrowers based on social connections" which states that Facebook has updated a patent which amongst other use cases contains this particular one:
In a fourth embodiment of the invention, the service provider is a
lender. When an individual applies for a loan,
the lender examines the
credit ratings of members of the individual’s social network who are
connected to the individual through authorized nodes.
If the average
credit rating of these members is at least a minimum credit score, the
lender continues to process the loan application.
Otherwise, the loan
application is rejected.
But social graphs are completely harmless. Pinky swear.
Via Glyn Moody's timeline and BoingBoing I stumbled on an article on Vox called "Is the media becoming a wire service?" which notes the extremely destructive threat of media platforms and thus journalists becoming exclusive content providers for the likes of Facebook, Flipboard and Apple's new News app:
So fast-forward three years. Imagine it's not just distribution. Now
every article has to work in the publishing systems built by Facebook,
Apple, Snapchat, Flipboard, mobile app developers, and so on. Even if
these systems are great — and, in many cases, they will be — they're not
all going to be the same. A lowest common denominator effect will set
in quickly: The pieces with the highest possible audience will be the
pieces that work across the most platforms. So it won't make much sense
to pump endless energy into innovative, custom articles. Why spend so
much of your time on a piece or a format that will only be available to a
fraction of your audience?
The same goes for site design. Why roll out a powerful new
annotations system on your site if the resulting work won't survive on
other platforms? Why create an interactive video if you can't upload it
to YouTube and Facebook? What's the point of a new method of grouping
related content if no one on Snapchat will ever see it?
Last but not least there seems to be some movement starting in the Infosec community to counter Microsoft's blatant attack on privacy in Windows 10. Recently a project popped up on GitHub which is specifically aimed at disabling nearly all of Microsoft's telemetry ingestion, and another one which contains a set of PowerShell scripts meant to decrapify (or at least, as much as possible. wink wink) Windows 10 including not just the forementioned telemetry but also disabling unnecessary services, "fixing" (thus enabling) the privacy settings, removing unnecessary default apps and the like. Might be worth a look into if you (or a loved one) are stuck on Windows for some reason. Do note however that you are still using third party software, and at your own risk.
If you don't trust third party Python or PowerShell scripts there's always the option to DIY. ZDNet has assembled a guide which guides you across all important settings which need to be addressed for a more private experience, which ends up with this rather painful advice (or at least for a certain tech company headquartering in Redmond, USA):
Still not private enough for you? Then don't use Windows 10, Chrome OS, iOS, Android, or any other system that's tied closely into the cloud. Instead, use Linux as your desktop operating system. By default, Linux is the only mainstream operating system that still relies primarily on true desktop apps.
Not ready for such a radical move? Well, actually, it's not that radical.
If you can use Windows, trust me, you can use Linux distributions such as Ubuntu 15.04 or Mint 17.2. Otherwise, get busy locking down Windows 10. Good luck.
Auch.
And, that's it for this edition. Hope you liked it!
