Linked List: February 22, 2019

Friday, 22 February 2019

The Talk Show: ‘Plagiarists and Fabulists’ 

Glenn Fleishman returns to the show. Topics include: rumors of new Mac hardware and Marzipan at WWDC, Samsung’s new phones unveiled at their “Unpacked” event, 5G networks, Apple’s purported foray into the credit card business, and more — including Glenn’s “Tiny Type Museum” Kickstarter project.

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More Apps Caught Sending Highly Personal Information to Facebook 

Sam Schechner, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

In the Journal’s testing, Instant Heart Rate: HR Monitor, the most popular heart-rate app on Apple’s iOS, made by California-based Azumio Inc., sent a user’s heart rate to Facebook immediately after it was recorded.

Flo Health Inc.’s Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker, which claims 25 million active users, told Facebook when a user was having her period or informed the app of an intention to get pregnant, the tests showed.

Real-estate app Realtor.com, owned by Move Inc., a subsidiary of Wall Street Journal parent News Corp , sent the social network the location and price of listings that a user viewed, noting which ones were marked as favorites, the tests showed.

None of those apps provided users any apparent way to stop that information from being sent to Facebook.

Just incredible. The appetite for analytics is so pervasive and perverse it’s led the entire industry to lose its mind.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I think Apple needs to institute stringent disclosure requirements on apps that share data with third parties. Apple’s not directly involved, but they promote the App Store as a resource users can trust.

Pinterest Is Blocking Disinformation 

Julia Carrie Wong, writing for The Guardian:

Schiff’s search results were indeed alarming: autofill suggestions for phrases such as “vaccination re-education discussion forum”, a group called “Parents Against Vaccination”, and the page for the National Vaccine Information Center, an official-sounding organization that promotes anti-vaccine propaganda. And while search results on Facebook are personalized to each user, a recent Guardian report found similarly biased results for a brand new account.

If the congressman had tried to search “vaccines” on the rival social media site Pinterest, however, he would have had little more to screenshot than a blank white screen. Recognizing that search results for a number terms related to vaccines were broken, Pinterest responded by “breaking” its own search tool.

Via Jason Snell, who says:

Pinterest’s solution isn’t perfect, but at least they’re trying. Which is more than we’ve seen from Facebook and Google.

Renee Diresta, back in August: “Free Speech Is Not the Same as Free Reach” — to me that gets to the core of what Pinterest is doing here.

Advertisers Pull Ads From YouTube Amid Pedophilia Controversy 

Todd Spangler, reporting for Variety:

AT&T, one month after it thought it was safe to advertise on YouTube again, said it is pulling all advertising spending from the world’s biggest video platform. The telco joins a boycott by marketers alarmed by the discovery that a secret group of child predators has been using YouTube to make sexual comments about kids. […]

The issue — the latest “brand safety” scandal for YouTube — was exposed by vlogger Matt Watson in a Feb. 17 video. Watson discovered that YouTube’s algorithms enabled child predators to secretly connect across a series of videos with young girls engaged in everyday activities like gymnastics, stretching or hanging out at home. In those videos, members of what Watson called a “soft-core pedophilia ring” made sexualized comments about the girls tagged with timestamps identifying moments in the videos when the kids were in certain poses. The users in some cases traded child pornography in the comments section, he claimed.

Other marketers that have dropped spending with YouTube over the scandal include Disney, Epic Games, Hasbro, McDonald’s and Nestlé.

I thought maybe this controversy was overblown, but I watched Watson’s exposé and it is as awful as it sounds. I take issue with describing the group as “secret” though — they were (are?) operating in the open, under YouTube’s nose. They’re just using YouTube comments and YouTube’s algorithms are “helpfully” linking these videos together.