White House staff has reportedly been compelled to sign non-disclosure agreements. Someone must think it’s of vital importance for them not to tattle about what goes on in the West Wing. Security clearances for top aids, not so much. Those can be handed out on a temporary basis, or just waived.
Another example of effective business management.
In 2014, Facebook was revealed to have conducted a vast experiment on users, without their consent, which entailed tweaking the amount of positive and negative content appearing on their feeds to see if the tech giant could manipulate some kind of “emotional contagion”.
Last year, leaked documents revealed how Facebook had told advertisers they had the capacity to monitor posts in real time and identify when teenage users were feeling “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost”.
That kind of finite information is invaluable to advertisers – whether selling products or political candidates – as it helps them more effectively tailor and target their message to individual users on the platform.
— Paul Lewis and Julia Carrie Wong in today’s Guardian, “Facebook Employs Psychologist Whose Firm Sold Data to Cambridge Analytica”
Read about the “plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup.” – At today’s Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump
“If every economic argument is framed as a struggle between a hardworking white middle class and an undeserving minority, then workers of all shades are going to be left fighting for scraps while the wealthy withdraw further into their private enclaves.” – Barack Obama, in his farewell address as president.
“America is not only a nation but also an idea, cleanly if not tightly defined. Pluralism is not a secondary or a decorative aspect of that idea. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51., the guarantee of religious liberty lies in having many kinds of faiths, and the guarantee of civil liberty lies in having many kinds of people – in establishing a ‘multiplicity of interests’ to go along with a ‘multiplicity of sects.’ ” – Adam Gopnick, The New Yorker, Feb. 13 & 20, 2017.
Still relevant more than a year later.
Back in December, the consumer products’ guy at the NY Times wrote about Alexa and Google Home and other digital assistants:
“conversation history with Google Home and the Google Assistant is saved until you choose to delete it,” the company says, adding that “Google Home records what you say” during interactions and sends that recording to Google’s servers “in order to fulfill your request.” The recordings can be deleted at any time, the company says.
Those safeguards all sound reassuring. But last month, some Google Home Mini units were found to be recording conversations all the time, not just when users were interacting with it. And over the summer, a hacker showed that an Echo could effectively be turned into a wiretap, though that required physical contact with the device itself. A Bluetooth flaw was also found to be putting both devices at risk of remote hacking. The companies have said they have addressed these problems.
Still, in some cases, the devices can be triggered by mistake. Amazon also says that “information may be stored on servers outside the country in which you live.”
(Clearly, nothing to worry about here.)
“In January, after the breaking-newsiest year in recent memory, I decided to travel back in time. I turned off my digital news notifications, unplugged from Twitter and other social networks, and subscribed to home delivery of three print newspapers — The Times, The Wall Street Journal and my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle — plus a weekly newsmagazine, The Economist. …
“It has been life changing. Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulletins.
“Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed (though there are some blind spots). And I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father.” – Farhad Manjoo, “For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.”
“…no policymaker truly committed to the agenda Ms. [Ivanka] Trump espouses would have joined this administration. No presidential adviser with the values she claims would still be working for a president so determined to lay waste to them. So why does Ms. Trump stay? The answers could only be family allegiance, personal gain, or plans — wildly optimistic plans, in light of the F.B.I. noose tightening around this White House — for a dynastic political career. These are precisely what the founders condemned as nepotism’s dangers to democracy. Ivanka Trump isn’t serving America, she is serving the Trumps.” – NY Times, March 1, 2018
hamiltonbeck 