fortythirteen

Not safer, but not there is a key difference.

If I turn off voice assistant on my phone, ethically speaking, it shouldn't be recording my voice. Companies/governments doing so is an actual wire tap, and they should have a warrant.

Putting these devices in your home is giving Amazon/Google/Apple permission to record your every conversation.

The things people are willing to give up for the most minimal of conveniences are only going to get worse in the next decade.

I wouldn't be willing to put an open wiretap in my home, even if it did something amazing, like extend my lifespan. The quality of my life is not significantly improved with these devices, and all of their practical uses can be duplicated with the minimal effort of tapping a screen a couple of times.

> No, it called public interest journalism.

There is little to no "public interest journalism" anymore, only click interest journalism.

> You can not have a character assassination on a corporation.

This is metaphor for the pattern of behavior. They are taking the same methods they use for the news cycle's "horrible person of the week" and turning it on Facebook.

> I'm more disturbed by your labeling something as "propaganda"

Considering the media's hyper focus on how the RNC used FB with the CA story, and an almost complete omission of how the DNC did the same thing, and more, with CTR, I'm comfortable sticking with "propaganda".

None of this is false, but none of this is new information, either. Watchdogs have been saying all of this for years.

Now we see the propaganda machine at work.

Not satisfied with sticking to the important story of FB's monstrous track record with personal data, the news media must turn each cycle into a full on character assassination. Regardless of how I feel about FB, I'm more disturbed by the media pattern.

Water from a stone at this point.

If I can't consolidate micro deposit hashes without spending 100x more in transaction fees than the total amount deposited, then the whole currency is bullshit.

And at this point, the market is so flooded with speculators that nobody will accept bitcoin as anything but a gamble.

If I had a nickel for every time someone called me paranoid or a conspiracy theorist for mentioning this before last week, I'd have a ton of nickels.

I should feel better now that people of aware of the nefariousness of this type of data collection, but I feel worse. The general public is being fed this as "Russia" and "Trump", and not getting the real, horrifying, surveillance state truth of what's going on.

I'm less worried that the Trump campaign used CA (and that the Clinton campaign used CTR), than I am by Obama saying "it's just metadata".

What is the legality of Facebook recording the SMS conversations of someone who never signed up for FB, but whose text messages got caught in the feed of someone who did?

Secondly, were they just siphoning text or did they get a whole bunch of nudie photos too?

The work Chollet is doing at Google is reaching an equally nefarious end. There are studies showing how manipulated search results have the same effects on perception, and YouTube is manipulating their feed in the same ways as Facebook.

His analysis is correct, but this:

> If you work in AI, please don't help them. Don't play their game. Don't participate in their research ecosystem. Please show some conscience

is a clear cut case of the pot calling the kettle black.

> everyone else is biased against the often-maligned center-right, but there's some conspiracy where no one can talk about it unless they're far-right

Perhaps the issue is that people talking about it, regardless of their actual beliefs, are labeled "far-right". Hell, even Stephen Pinker has been called "alt-right" at this point.

> At some point people who read the NYT or WSJ and say it's far too liberal may have to accept that their definition of "center" is skewed.

Or perhaps the Overton window on what is considered "progressive" has moved left. For example, ten years ago, senators Clinton and Obama voted for a border fence.

> the very-much centrist mainstream media is too biased toward liberal news

Did you read the Podesta emails? It was example after example of mainstream journalists going out of their way to curry favor with the Clinton campaign. Once again, I think the Overton window of "mainstream progressive" views has shifted. For example, where are the Blue Dog Democrats anymore?

I would invite you to question your own biases.

Creating another layer of bureaucracy, even when covered in the veneer of startup tech, can definitely make things worse. Here are some open questions that may show how that's possible:

* What will happen if nefarious actors discover how to hack or game this system? Will you be able to pay the mob to get hacked out of jail?

* On the flip-side, could a nefarious actor put you in the penal system, or at least make it look like you were arrested?

* What protections are there around malfeasance within the company? Parole officers are public employees, but what's the liability within a LLC?

What have I said that's solidly right? I've only stated that other organizations show bias. The irony is that you're applying your own biases to someone whom you've never met while denying bias.

I don't agree with most of what comes out of right-wingers' mouths. I'm a center-leftist that's tired of having half of the viewpoints "filtered". When Politifact labels something Trump said as "Pants on Fire", then buries the fact that he was 95% correct at the bottom of the article, I call that bias.

Unfortunately, most articles pointing this out come from right-wing outlets, because they're the ones incentivized to put in the work. I don't think that negates the facts (pun-ish unintended), because you can investigate the claims yourself. Here, though, is a Forbes article detailing how they engage is coverups of their own political punditry: https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/12/27/in-200...

CTR would be a better comparison, and perhaps even more nefarious, since they employ full-time... let's call them "engagers".

Don't be hyperbolic and put the word "enemies" in my mouth. They are biased sources, though. Those who align with the left typically don't see it, because the organizations align with their biases... and because people rarely read beyond the "truth gauge" at the top of their articles.

Politifact will regularly find a small technicality with a right wing politician and use it to label something "untrue", but give a pass to left wingers. They are run by the Tampa Bay Times, whose editorial board endorses almost exclusively Democrats.

Snopes is just a mom and pop shop whose editorial team has about as much accreditation as your average blogger. The only reason they have any presumed credibility is because of how long the site has been around.

Right of center news sources? They've been openly hiding them from the feed through their partnership with Snopes and Politifact.

Your uncle sharing InfoWars doesn't count.

Prediction: Facebook's goal for this investigation will be to make sure the public doesn't learn that Cambridge Analytica was only one of countless political actors that "somehow gained access" the pool of user information.

I was in meetings with FB almost 10 years ago, as the OpenGraph API was being implemented, where they were openly selling, to anyone willing to pay, exactly what CA supposedly "hacked their way into".

And I did substantiate it by linking to a story about the UN resolution, yet you ignored it.

Your zeal for covering up Iranian actions betrays an extreme bias or hired mission.

The only countries even somewhat denying Iranian involvement in Yemen are its allies in the UN Security Council, and Russia isn't even really denying it, just blocking resolutions. Iranian soldiers have been killed or captured non-stop over the last 20 years in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Lebanon. They have directly supplied every Shia militant group in the Middle East for decades.

The fact that you deny this makes me believe you've been told to.

Iran has always fought its external wars by funding and training Shia insurgents with the Imperial Guard, in the same way the US sends Special Forces into insurgent groups to fight alongside them. Or are the Yemeni rebels building counterfeit Iranian missiles that kill civilians?

The UN put up a resolution to denounce Iran from doing this just last month, but Russia vetoed it[0].

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/world/middleeast/iran-yem...

Your comment is either born of extreme ignorance, or is deliberate misinformation.

Lambasting SA for fighting in Yemen and then praising Iran, the other country fighting in Yemen, is beyond ridiculous.

Trashing SA for being an authoritarian dictatorship and then praising Iran, another theocratic, authoritarian dictatorship, that is just as happy to have the secret police disappear its citizens, is intellectual malfeasance.

> Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution.

Leaving not just Facebook, but Twitter, Instagram, and all other social media of its ilk is an extremely viable solution. It's like quitting smoking. For the first month or so you feel off-kilter, but, after a while, you can't imagine going back. Life is quantifiably better without it.

Realizing that I don't need up to the minute updates on literally everything has done amazing thing for my mental health in the last year.

Justice? Because political actors used the available tools to their advantage?

If we're going to go down that line, what justice should be served to Jimmy Kimmel, who regularly pushes his political agenda in what's supposed to be a variety show?

Don't mistake my form of emphasis as overly-emotional behavior, or my statements as any indication that I see myself as significantly more rational than the average person.

There are steps you can take to make yourself less susceptible to propaganda, and it starts with disengaging from the Huxleyan, social media, dopamine machine. Until you do that it's near impossible to get a real sense of your own cognitive biases.

Just get the f### off Facebook, already.

If you're the kind of person who votes based on targeted advertising, or the hyperbolic posts of people who vote based on targeted advertising, don't ask Facebook to change. Get the f### off Facebook.

If you don't like how Facebook is being used as an addictive propaganda tool by any and all political actors, including Facebook itself, then get the f### off Facebook.

Ask the Facebook "friends" you care about for an email address, phone number, or other messaging account and get the f### off Facebook.

You don't need up to the minute information on the playdate of your cousin's college room mate's toddler. Get the f### off Facebook.

As someone who spent a lot of time in the early AR space, it's disappointing to see that, a decade later, marketing teams haven't come up with anything better to sell the tech than dancing characters placed on tables.

But, hey, you don't need a black and white marker to do it anymore, so I guess that's progress.

So the fifty year old that got picked up for weed in 1982 doesn't deserve to find anything more than the most menial job?

I think the operative word there is "westerner". Particularly in America, there has at least been room for open, somewhat peaceful discourse on contentious topics. One need only look at the Buckley/Vidal debates for proof of that.

Those days are gone, and a emboldened radical left, hell bent on stamping out heterodoxy through violence and intimidation, has the silent consent of progressives.

Did any smaller percentage of Americans go along with McCarthyism? The mechanisms of delivery are the excuse used to keep people blind to the faults that lay within.

Propaganda and its delivery methods only have the power you give them. We all have the ability to seek out truth.

Nothing has changed over the centuries but the mechanisms by which propaganda is spread. The term "fake news" is itself propaganda, playing to people's innate sense that they are not, in fact, irrational and emotional beings, and are somehow better than the "morons" who fall for false stories.

The sad truth is that even the smartest of us are, in some degree, intellectually lazy and hold at least one false belief. The only thing that has increased over the last decades is the average westerner's desire to force those beliefs upon their fellow citizens.