Facebook keeps asking for our trust even as it loses control of our data

These breaches keep happening. One day in not so distant future, one of the breaches would end up being the final straw.

Over a long enough time span, all data is liable to be breached. It’s why some security researchers call on companies to store as little data about their customers as possible, to minimize the damage when the inevitable happens. As an advertising company, Facebook cannot easily adopt such an approach. But it could modulate the other ways in which it asks us for our trust — perhaps deciding, as Google did, to leave the camera out of its home speaker; or not to put on stage an executive soliciting our most personal information, however well anonymized, while the investigation into a data breach affecting millions is still underway.

Instead, it’s full speed ahead.

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Casey Newton — The Verge

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HOW TO KILL PEOPLE: A PROBLEM OF DESIGN

Disruptive innovation is causing social polarization through the decimation of jobs, mass surveillance, and algorithmic confusion. It facilitates the fragmentation of societies by creating antisocial tech monopolies that spread bubbled resentment, change cities, magnify shade, and maximize poorly paid freelance work. The effects of these social and technological disruptions include nationalist, sometimes
nativist, fascist, or ultra-religious mass movements.[10] Creative disruption, fueled by automation and cybernetic control, runs in parallel with an age of political fragmentation. The forces of extreme capital, turbocharged with tribal and fundamentalist hatred, reorganize within financials and filter bubbles.

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Hito Steyerl — R/D

The Constant Consumer

We have become an active consumer all through the day thanks to technology.

In light of Amazon’s all-encompassing ambitions, the strategy behind several of the company’s most important product initiatives — Alexa, Amazon Prime, physical retail stores (including Amazon Go and Whole Foods), and Amazon Key — becomes clearer. These products seek to redefine what being a customer means by immersing us more completely within the Amazon universe. Formerly, being a customer was a role one assumed upon physically entering a store or ordering something from a company. Amazon promises to create a newer type of environment, a hybrid of the digital and the physical, that lets us permanently inhabit that role: the world as Everything Store, which we’re always inside.

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Drew Austin — Real Life

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The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation

We have been hearing of AI a lot. A deeper look into it.

The ability of many robots to be easily customized and equipped with dangerous payloads lends itself to a variety of physical attacks being carried out in a precise way from a long distance, an ability previously limited to countries with the resources to afford technologies like cruise missiles . This threat exists independently of AI (indeed, as mentioned above, most robots are human-piloted at present) but can be magnified through the application of AI to make such systems autonomous. As mentioned previously, nonautomated drone attacks have been conducted already by groups such as ISIS and Hamas , and the globalized nature of the robotics market makes it difficult to prevent this form of use.

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The Scooter Economy

Indeed, the only thing that could make the experience better — for riders and for everyone else — would be dedicated lanes, like, for example, the 900 miles worth of parking spaces in San Francisco. To be sure, the city isn’t going to make the conversion overnight, or, given the degree to which San Francisco is in thrall to homeowners, probably ever, but that is particularly a shame in 2018: venture capitalists are willing to fund the entire thing, and I’m not entirely sure why.

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Stratechery

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The problem with Facebook

What’s your view?

“Antisocial Media” is not a hopeful book. Vaidhyanathan doesn’t think Facebook can be reformed from within, however many times CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologizes and promises to do better. “The problem with Facebook is Facebook,” he writes. It’s not just that the company makes its money by pimping its members to advertisers. It’s that the network is now so immense that it has become impossible to weed out the scoundrels and creeps until after they’ve done their damage. “Facebook,” Vaidhyanathan concludes, “is too big to tame.” The company will always be cleaning up messes, begging our forgiveness.

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Nicholas Carr – The Washington Post

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Why Generation Z Is Disillusioned with Social Media

So why are today’s teens opting out of social networking? Largely because of the effect social media has on their mental health. Thirty-five percent of anti-social media users cited that there was too much negativity floating around, while seventeen percent said it made them feel bad about themselves. Social media is often linked to anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem, and eighteen percent said they felt too much pressure from sites to get attention.

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Tallie Gabriel — The Content Strategist

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How to talk to your robot

Nearly all AI assistants today have an associated persona. Devices and their makers have come under scrutinyfor the fact that the majority have feminine names and default to female voices. While motives for pushing a persona can be myriad, two are likely significant. Firstly, developers may believe that personas will make assistants more ‘natural’ and easy to use. Secondly, a persona may advance the impression that the technology has achieved human-level intelligence or something very close to it.

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Calen Cole — Stripe Partners

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How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump

Twitter, the company, retweeted my talk in a call for job applicants to “join the flock.” The implicit understanding was that Twitter was a force for good in the world, on the side of the people and their revolutions. The new information gatekeepers, which didn’t see themselves as gatekeepers but merely as neutral “platforms,” nonetheless liked the upending potential of their technologies.

I shared in the optimism. I myself hailed from the Middle East and had been watching dissidents use digital tools to challenge government after government.

But a shift was already in the air.

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Zeynep Tufekci — MIT Technology Review

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Science Fiction Is Not Social Reality

“The trouble with a kitten is that eventually it becomes a cat.” — Ogden Nash

Tech creators and tech billionaires are influenced by Science Fiction for different reasons. Some of these have to do with the narrative of the ‘hero outsider’ who uses their knowledge and skill to fix a problem through engineering a solution or through adapting tools and technology in new ways to solve some type of problem. Other reasons have to do with creating a Utopian society that is “bettered” through time-saving devices that are automated. The doors in Star Trek, the just-in-time data knowledge and data access in any number of films: Bladerunner, Star Wars, Minority Report, etc. and books all are delivered seamlessly in Science Fiction. When things do break, there is often an engineering solution. Even when Science Fiction turns against mankind, as it did in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the gadgets and gear are shown as sufficiently technologically inspiring, so much so that even though it was a warning film of sorts, that element becomes minimized in favor of recreating “cool technology.”

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S.A. Applin — Motherboard