The Facebook 10 Year challenged has been trending this past week with people sharing photos from what they looked like in 2009 and now. We never learn. Facebook has a lot of data on you and regarding this challenge, the giant social network has over 15 billion photos. Photos of you and your tagged friends with location and time data, even those unposted photos which you thought weren’t good enough – Facebook was saving them although it later blamed a bug and said it was going to delete them completely. This thread shade an interesting theory
Me 10 years ago: probably would have played along with the profile picture aging meme going around on Facebook and Instagram
Me now: ponders how all this data could be mined to train facial recognition algorithms on age progression and age recognition— Kate O'Neill (@kateo) January 12, 2019
The #10yearchallenge seemed playful at first with privacy critics claiming Facebook has already done the worst you can imagine. Social networks have been collecting everything they need to know about you from the posts, tweets or pictures you’ve been sharing on their platforms for years and this data set is the one they’re training their neural networks with. Not posting the two photos isn’t going to make a huge difference but that doesn’t mean you have to. Anyway, if participating in that challenge sparks some joy, do it.
Facebook’s business model is primarily based on compiling detailed user profiles that it then segments into custom audiences that advertisers pay to reach
Striking quote from this @karaswisher podcast on digital trust: “Facebook doesn’t really have users or customers, they have hostages.”https://t.co/fuSj5OB3Hx
— Aman Batheja (@amanbatheja) January 19, 2019
One takeaway is that you need to cautiously approach your interaction with tech bearing in mind the data you generate and how it can be either be used or abused. Respecting your data shouldn’t just be left to tech companies only, you should do it too.
- Facebook’s 10-year glow-up challenge reminds us that Facebook used to be fun. [Read More]
Other Facebook News:
- People Are Renting Out Their Facebook Accounts In Exchange For Cash And Free Laptops [Read More]
- I Mentored Mark Zuckerberg. I Loved Facebook. But I Can’t Stay Silent About What’s Happening.
https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/1087223388748300288
- Facebook Messenger’s redesign is finally rolling out to all [Read More]
- Nine steps for how Facebook should embrace meaningful interac— er, accountability [Read More]
- Sorry I Forgot Your Birthday, I’ve Stopped Checking Facebook [Read More]
- Research finds heavy Facebook users make impaired decisions like drug addicts [Read More]
- Facebook’s new Stories feature for event sharing actually sounds useful [Read More]
Crazy thing about this is that it was these 5-star Facebook Portal reviews that prompted me to report and write this: https://t.co/Zm1eWIOJgg https://t.co/d0DtBOkI7G
— Joanna Stern (@JoannaStern) January 17, 2019
- Hacked Instagram Influencers Rely on White-Hat Hackers to Get Their Accounts Back [Read More]
- Instagram caught selling ads to follower-buying services it banned [Read More]
- Instagram product designer creates nostalgic, tech-inspired AR effects for users [Read More]
- I just deleted my 118,000-follower, verified Instagram account. [Read More]
- Scammer impersonates Wendi Deng to con $16,000 from Instagram star as string of fresh victims emerges [Read More]
- Twitter’s upcoming conversation interface looks like a colourful mess [Read More]
- Twitter brings the reverse-chronological feed to Android [Read More]
- Jack Dorsey Has No Clue What He Wants: A Q&A with Twitter’s CEO on right-wing extremism, Candace Owens, and what he’d do if the president called on his followers to murder journalists.
.@ashleyfeinberg's interview with Jack Dorsey is great because she asks him all the questions that many in our industry would be too terrified or deferential to ask.
It's also weird how Dorsey manages to say a lot, while saying largely nothing.
— Ryan Mac 🙃 (@RMac18) January 17, 2019
#ICYMI
- CEO Satya Nadella says that Microsoft is embracing Amazon’s Alexa instead of fighting it — and he wants to be friends with Google, too [Read More]
- Slack’s new logo ditches the beloved plaid hashtag [Read More]
- Microsoft recommends switching to iPhone or Android as it prepares to kill off Windows phones
https://twitter.com/stevekovach/status/1086307739075297280
Privacy
- If the world’s richest man got got like this, no one is safe. Kara Swisher on the National Enquirer, Jeff Bezos’s text messages. and the death of privacy [Read More]
- How Microsoft has (so far) avoided tough scrutiny over privacy issues [Read More]
- Tim Cook, in an op-ed, asks Congress to pass privacy legislation and the FTC to create a data-broker clearinghouse so users can track and control their data [Read More]
- Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo announces it will use Apple Maps to power map and address-related searches, using Apple’s MapKit JS framework [Read More]
- Max Schrems files GDPR complaints against Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, others for failing to provide required info about data they collect on users [Read More]
- Pressure mounts on Google, Microsoft, and Amazon’s facial recognition tech [Read More]
Streaming Services
- The economics of streaming is making songs shorter [Read More]
- The YouTube app now lets you swipe through videos so you can watch forever [Read More]
- YouTube is testing new recommendation bubbles that appear under videos [Read More]
- EU’s copyright reform with “link tax” and “upload filters” suffers a setback as 11 member states vote against the proposal, making adoption in May less likely [Read More]
Interesting Reads
- Every Gadget and App Should Have a Dark Mode [Read More]
- What Does the Internet Look Like?
https://twitter.com/Lindsay_Howard/status/1086933297014419456
- The Rise and Demise of RSS [Read More]
- Is Email the next big thing? [Read More]
- The Swiss Alp Watch Concept Black from H Moser & Cie is high-end horology designed to look like a smart watch on standby. But with no dial and no hands, how does it tell the time? [Read More]
- Apple Traps Consumers in an App Store War [Read More]
- The Cab Ride That Nearly Killed Me Changed How I Think About Ride-Hailing Apps [Read More]
- A story of an online stalker takes a bizarre turn down the deepest of rabbit holes [Read More]
- 5G: if you build it, we will fill it [Read More]
Distract
- Remebmber the egg meme that is now the most liked photo on Instagram, well, there’s a second one and it already has a crack
https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1086393463208333312
- What a time to be alive?
https://twitter.com/cheddar/status/1086234498520489984
- check out the superhero landing
Well you don’t see this everyday. A Commando trained ‘rocket man’ training on our assault course! pic.twitter.com/23IsRQRlqt
— Brigadier Mike Tanner OBE ADC (@BrigMikeTanner) January 18, 2019
Clicked is a weekly roundup of tech news that made headlines, interesting reads and memes from the past week.
