Linked List: December 28, 2018

Friday, 28 December 2018

Shocker: Facebook’s ‘Clear History’ Privacy Feature Is Vaporware 

Kurt Wagner, writing for Recode:

Back in May, at the height of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, the company made a timely announcement: Facebook users would soon be able to clear the browsing history connected to their Facebook profile, meaning that the company would no longer link users to the apps and websites they visited off of the social network.

The product, called “Clear History,” got a lot of attention. Not only is browsing data important — Facebook uses it to target people with advertising — but CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Clear History himself during Facebook’s annual developer conference. Clear History was an olive branch meant to show everyone how serious Facebook is about privacy. […]

As it turns out, clearing your browser history was harder to implement than Facebook expected. It’s been more than seven months since Zuckerberg’s announcement and Facebook hasn’t mentioned Clear History since.

I don’t think it was hard, per se, but that the entire announcement was bullshit intended to distract people from the biggest privacy scandal in company history — and Facebook is a company riddled with privacy scandals.

This is what my idea of regulation would entail: every user of every social network should be able to see (and easily find) the entirety of what the network knows about them, and delete any and all of it whenever they want.

NYT: ‘Inside Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech’ 

Max Fisher, reporting for The New York Times:

Every other Tuesday morning, several dozen Facebook employees gather over breakfast to come up with the rules, hashing out what the site’s two billion users should be allowed to say. The guidelines that emerge from these meetings are sent out to 7,500-plus moderators around the world. (After publication of this article, Facebook said it had increased that number to around 15,000.)

The closely held rules are extensive, and they make the company a far more powerful arbiter of global speech than has been publicly recognized or acknowledged by the company itself, The New York Times has found.

The Times was provided with more than 1,400 pages from the rulebooks by an employee who said he feared that the company was exercising too much power, with too little oversight — and making too many mistakes.

An examination of the files revealed numerous gaps, biases and outright errors. As Facebook employees grope for the right answers, they have allowed extremist language to flourish in some countries while censoring mainstream speech in others.

Are there Facebook apologists remaining? It’s very clear that Facebook’s top priority was and remains growth at all costs. The side effects of what they’ve enabled — allowing formerly fringe hate groups to gather, organize, and fuel each others’ hatred, forming effective like-minded communities — should have been obvious all along. No one forced them to scale their platform worldwide faster than they could police it. They chose to do so for profit. It’s clear they have almost no control over it.

Facebook is, in my opinion, the most dangerous company in the world, and ought to be broken up and then severely regulated. Again I say, Facebook is to privacy and civil discourse what Enron was to accounting.

The Essential Phone Is No Longer Available 

I’d love to see them come out with a sequel, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. In a world where Google makes pretty good Pixel phones, I don’t see where Essential has a market.

Trip ‘Claim’ Chowdhry Strikes Again 

Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

My take: I usually ignore Trip Chowdhry’s hyperbolic missives, but this one—with its Street-low Apple price target—could cause some trouble. Are there still investors, I wonder, who take him seriously?

See also: How wrong-headed can one Apple analyst be? (From Fortune.com, July 8, 2013).

Chowdhry is proof that financial TV networks and publications will quote any analyst who seems serious, no matter how vapid their analysis is or how preposterously wrong their prior reports have been. Chowdhry has been banging the “Apple is doomed and can’t innovate without Steve Jobs” drum since before Jobs was even gone. He’s a veritable gold mine of claim chowder.