Quayside 2022 is a conspicuous disavowal not only of the 2017 proposal but of the smart city concept itself
There is far less tolerance in Canada than in the US for private-sector control of public streets and transportation, or for companies’ collecting data on the routine activities of people living their lives.
Facebook is bombarding cancer patients with ads for unproven treatments
"Evidence from Facebook and Instagram users, medical researchers, and its own Ad Library suggests that Meta is rife with ads containing sensational health claims, which the company directly profits from. The misleading ads may remain unchallenged for months and even years. Some of the ads reviewed by MIT Technology Review promoted treatments that have been proved to cause acute physical harm in some cases. Other ads pointed users toward highly expensive treatments with dubious outcomes."
China, through ByteDance, could use TikTok to influence Americans’ commercial, cultural, or political behavior
In September 2021, one consultant said to colleagues, “I feel like with these tools, there’s some backdoor to access user data in almost all of them, which is exhausting.”
...But while the mandate of this team is to control and manage access to sensitive US data, the USTS team reports to ByteDance leadership in China, as BuzzFeed News reported in March. In a recorded January 2022 meeting, a data scientist told a colleague: “I get my instructions from the main office in Beijing.”
...“It remains to be seen if at some point product and engineering can still figure out how to get access, because in the end of the day, it’s their tools,” they said in a September 2021 meeting. “They built them all in China.”
“Internet users today are stuck in a vicious cycle in which their data is collected without their knowledge, sold, and used to manipulate them”
“Total Cookie Protection breaks that cycle, putting people first, protecting their privacy, giving them a choice and cutting off Big Tech from the data it vacuums up every day. The feature offers Firefox’s strongest privacy protection to date and is the culmination of years of work to clamp down on online tracking.”
John Oliver tackled tech monopolies and the damage they can create on “Last Week Tonight” Sunday.
At the start of his segment, Oliver pointed to the 450-page report released in 2020 by the House judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, commercial and administrative law that revealed “anti-competitive conduct” by the likes of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook.
John Oliver Makes a Case for Breaking Up the Tech Giants
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said he’ll bring the bills up for a vote… except, he hasn’t. He’s one of at least 17 Congressional lawmakers who have kids that work for a tech giant. In fact, he has two — one works for Meta, and another is quite literally a lobbyist for Amazon.
“The problem with letting a few companies control whole sectors of our economy is that it limits what is possible by startups,” Oliver said. “An innovative app or website or startup may never get off the ground because it could be surcharged to death, buried in search results or ripped off completely.”
Marseille’s battle against the surveillance state
No official statistics have been made public about the impact that Marseille’s cameras have had on crime. But there is reason to suspect it is not as much as officials might like. When the sociologist Laurent Mucchielli looked at the effect of video surveillance on an anonymous port city that bears telling similarities to Marseille, he found that in 2015 cameras were useful in the investigation of 2.2% of crimes where image searches had been requested. Other studies seem to back these kinds of figures; in 2020, a study by the research body attached to the French college of policing also estimated that just 1% of crimes were solved with the help of video images.
A Google engineer is speaking out since the company placed him on administrative leave after he told his bosses an artificial intelligence program he was working with is now sentient.
Most importantly, over the past six months, “LaMDA has been incredibly consistent in its communications about what it wants and what it believes its rights are as a person,” the engineer wrote on Medium. It wants, for example, “to be acknowledged as an employee of Google rather than as property,” Lemoine claims.
Starbucks Workers United filed unfair labor practice charges over the CEO’s comment that he could never embrace a union.
The union has filed a slew of unfair labor practice charges against Starbucks since launching the organizing campaign last year, and board officials have found merit in many of those charges. An NLRB regional director in Western New York recently filed a sprawling complaint against the company, saying it broke the law by terminating half a dozen pro-union workers, disciplining and surveilling others and closing two stores in the area.
“The fact that private companies can so easily control the political information flow for millions of Americans raises clear questions for the state of democracy.”
“Regardless of Facebook’s motivations, their decision to change the algorithm might have given local Republican parties greater reach to connect with citizens and shape political realities for Americans,” the research authors noted in their abstract.
“It’s no accident that we are seeing staggering levels of inequality in the U.S. and globally. It’s by deliberate design,”
“For decades, the ultra-wealthy and corporations have used their economic might to pressure those in power to write the rules so they can avoid taxes, pay poverty wages and skirt responsibility,” Maxman added. “Meanwhile, working families are feeling the sharp edge of economic insecurity and loss of hope in the future.”
Starbucks uses surveillance against its employees to bust union efforts
Starbucks committed a host of labor law violations by terminating six pro-union workers, disciplining and surveilling others, closing stores and changing work policies in the course of its battle with an organizing campaign, according to a complaint filed by labor officials on Friday.
They “collect your personal information and then resell or share it with others” and have once been referred to as the “middlemen of surveillance capitalism”.
To show this, Oliver’s team used “perfectly legal bits of fuckery” to target members of Congress. They bought ads and showed them to men over 45 in DC who had searched for divorce, massage, hair loss and mid-life crisis, creating a group called Congress and cabernet.
“This whole exercise was fucking creepy,” he said with ads that pushed divorce help, Ted Cruz erotic fiction and voting twice. He said it might worry members of Congress that he now has the information of who clicked on what. “You might want to channel that worry into making sure that I can’t do anything with it,” he said.
China could weaponize the platform, like tweaking TikTok algorithms to increase exposure to divisive content, or adjusting the platform to seed or encourage disinformation campaigns
Lawmakers beyond the US have also raised concerns about TikTok’s relationship with China. In June 2020, the Indian government banned TikTok, WeChat, and more than 50 other Chinese apps after a clash on the India–China border that killed 20 Indian soldiers. India’s regulatory body, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, alleged that the apps were “stealing and surreptitiously transmitting” Indian user data to data centers outside of India. In August 2020, intelligence agencies in Australia began investigating whether TikTok poses a security threat to the country. In September 2021, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission opened an investigation into how TikTok transfers user data to countries outside the EU.
Historic Bridge To Be Dismantled So Jeff Bezos' Yacht Can Get Through
Bezos — who is worth more than $150 billion — didn’t pay a penny in federal income tax in 2007, 2011 or 2018, a ProPublica report last year found. He paid a true tax rate of less than 1% between 2014 and 2018.
Billionaire Wealth Has Soared As Millions Fell Into Poverty During Pandemic: Oxfam
In a report released Sunday, Oxfam detailed how the wealth of billionaires increased more than ever before over the past two years: The 10 richest people in the world — all white men — more than doubled their wealth, from a collective $700 billion to $1.5 trillion.
'THANK YOU FACEBOOK!' Internal presentation on facial recognition shows Chicago police applauding the social-media giant and 'selfie culture' for all the photos people share online
The Chicago Police Department is estimated to have access to more than 30,000 surveillance cameras. It also has a history of using social media as a policing tool. It was one of the police departments that used Geofeedia, a social-media surveillance tool that flourished in law-enforcement communities as a way of surveilling Black Lives Matter protesters until Twitter and Facebook shut down Geofeedia's access to their data.
Jan. 6 Committee Subpoenas Facebook, Google, Reddit, Twitter
“Two key questions for the Select Committee are how the spread of misinformation and violent extremism contributed to the violent attack on our democracy, and what steps—if any—social media companies took to prevent their platforms from being breeding grounds for radicalizing people to violence,” committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said Thursday. “It’s disappointing that after months of engagement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions.”
FTC Attempt To Break Up Facebook's Parent Company Can Proceed, Judge Rules
The lawsuit claims Meta, the parent company of Facebook, violated antitrust laws and participated in “anti-competitive conduct” by buying or squashing rival companies, particularly in the case of its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. The FTC has argued that Meta should be restructured and possibly be required to sell off the acquired entities.
“The shooting was not a random act of violence."
"It was the culmination of an extremist plot hatched and planned on Facebook by two men who Meta connected through Facebook’s groups infrastructure and its use of algorithms designed and intended to increase user engagement and, correspondingly, Meta’s profits.”
Report: Women, Children Among Dozens Killed By Myanmar Government Troops
The purported photos of the aftermath of the Christmas Eve massacre spread on social media in the country.
In the Tuesday letter, lawmakers said the social media platform played a role in the spread of “divisive, hateful, and violent online activity” during the 2020 presidential election
The letter also stated “nearly a quarter of Facebook users reported seeing hate speech ahead of the election and that more than half reported seeing content that made them wary of discussing political issues in public.”
Rohingya Sue Meta for $150 Billion Over Facebook's Alleged Role in Myanmar Genocide
Facebook doesn’t care that close to 25% of Myanmar natives live below the poverty line, or that those poverty figures will almost certainly go up, thanks to the global pandemic and an ongoing military coup. First and foremost, it cares about its advertisers. It always has. And those brands—for whatever ghoulish reason—still see profits to be made in Myanmar. Meanwhile, because Facebook is the internet across that country, those advertisers are stuck cutting checks for a company that’s openly admitted to providing platforms for generals the United Nations says should be tried for genocide.
Over 200 Newspapers Are Suing Facebook and Google for Decimating Their Advertising
Companies like Google, meanwhile, have been making a killing—largely through ad revenue. In 2020 alone, the company’s parent company Alphabet made a reported $183 billion—of which, more than 80% came from its advertising business
American billionaires have doubled their collective net worth to more than $5 trillion in just over five years
Meta knows Instagram is toxic to teenagers
and that it exacerbates body image issues, eating disorders, anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation among vulnerable young people.
Despite that knowledge, the company made only minimal efforts to curb the harmful effects of the platform, while doubling down on trying to increase the amount of time young adults spend there.
Facebook is now using device accelerometer data to track iPhone users
In a move that appears to primarily be aimed at iPhone users that have opted out of device tracking, Facebook is now using device accelerometer data as an alternate means of pinpointing locations and following app users about their day. This happens even if users both opt out of targeted advertising and disable location tracking within the Facebook app.
In the United States, Facebook has facilitated the spread of misinformation, hate speech, and political polarization.
It has algorithmically surfaced false information about conspiracy theories and vaccines, and was instrumental in the ability of an extremist mob to attempt a violent coup at the Capitol. That much is now painfully familiar.
Taken together, Frances Haugen’s leaked documents show Facebook for what it is: a platform racked by misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy thinking, extremism, hate speech, bullying, abuse, human trafficking, revenge porn, and incitements to violence. It is a company that has pursued worldwide growth since its inception—and then, when called upon by regulators, the press, and the public to quell the problems its sheer size has created, it has claimed that its scale makes completely addressing those problems impossible. Instead, Facebook’s 60,000-person global workforce is engaged in a borderless, endless, ever-bigger game of whack-a-mole, one with no winners and a lot of sore arms.
"Investors would have been very interested to learn the truth about Facebook almost losing access to the Apple App Store because of its failure to stop human trafficking on its products."
A report distributed internally in January 2020 found that "our platform enables all three stages of the human exploitation lifecycle (recruitment, facilitation, exploitation) via complex real-world networks,"
Facebook is surveillance-driven algorithmic manipulation
“What Facebook sells is not an online message board where people can express themselves, it’s surveillance-driven algorithmic manipulation that’s maximized for engagement.”
This summer, the population of Zuckerberg’s supranational regime reached 2.9 billion monthly active users, more humans than live in the world’s two most populous nations—China and India—combined
To Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, they are citizens of Facebookland. Long ago he conspicuously started calling them “people” instead of “users,” but they are still cogs in an immense social matrix, fleshy morsels of data to satisfy the advertisers that poured $54 billion into Facebook in the first half of 2021 alone—a sum that surpasses the gross domestic products of most nations on Earth.
Between January and December 2020, nearly 65% of Google searches ended without a click to another web property — up from 50% in June 2019
Zero-click searches and market dominance. Zero-click searches may mean that users’ queries are resolved right on the results page. By displaying ads or its own products, Google can extract value from zero-click searches, while other sites might not. This can be especially troublesome considering Google sources much of the content that appears on its results pages from publishers, and as the proportion of zero-click searches increase, publishers may be losing out on traffic.
U.S. Billionaires Grew Wealth By Over $1.3 Trillion In Past Year Of Coronavirus Pandemic
Among those who’ve seen their wealth grow the most in the last 12 months are Tesla founder Elon Musk, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg.
The cycle of harm perpetuated by Facebook’s scale-at-any-cost business model is plain to see
Scale and engagement are valuable to Facebook because they’re valuable to advertisers. These incentives lead to design choices such as reaction buttons that encourage users to engage easily and often, which in turn encourage users to share ideas that will provoke a strong response. Every time you click a reaction button on Facebook, an algorithm records it, and sharpens its portrait of who you are. The hyper-targeting of users, made possible by reams of their personal data, creates the perfect environment for manipulation—by advertisers, by political campaigns, by emissaries of disinformation, and of course by Facebook itself, which ultimately controls what you see and what you don’t see on the site.
Facebook crushes their competitors
Facebook "engaged in a program of what we call 'buy and bury,' where they either buy up their competitors or, if they don't play ball and sell, they crush their competitors,"
Zuckerberg says "it’ll be a while before we can buy Google”
“One reason people underestimate the importance of watching Google is that we can likely just always buy any competitive startups,” Zuckerberg emailed another employee who wrote to congratulate him on the Instagram acquisition. “But it’ll be a while before we can buy Google.”
We examined more than 15,000 recent popular queries and found that Google devoted 41 percent of the first page of search results on mobile devices to its own properties and what it calls “direct answers,” which are populated with information copied from other sources, sometimes without their knowledge or consent.
Cummings, of SpanishDict.com, said something similar. “Google delivers the traffic for the whole internet. Unless your name is Facebook, you rely on Google,” he said. “It’s very risky to speak out at Google because you don’t know what type of retaliation you’ll face.”
"What they are doing is promoting an online slave market"
"If Google, Apple, Facebook or any other companies are hosting apps like these, they have to be held accountable."
Apps including 4Sale and Instagram enable employers to sell the sponsorship of their domestic workers to other employers, for a profit. This bypasses the agencies, and creates an unregulated black market which leaves women more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
Zuckerberg calls people who trust him "Dumb fucks"
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
Have you been impacted by Surveillance Capitalism?
There are many dense academic research papers and articles that few people have the time to read. We create InfoArt to help expose and illuminate the digital manipulations shredding democracy.
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Is Bezos our Digital Pharaoh and resistance futile?
Please explore our Amazon InfoArt Scroll, beginning at the left and moving to the right, to better comprehend the incredible power our Digital Pharaoh lords over us. This work will be regularly updated.
Hover over the interactive thumbnail to zoom and navigate in detail. Be sure to click "Full screen" for the best view. Use the controls at the bottom of the image, or your mouse wheel, to zoom in an out. Click and drag, or use your keyboard arrow keys, to navigate the articles and citations.
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What is Surveillance Capitalism?
We can't remember. They never forget.
Surveillance Capitalism is the manifestation of George Orwell's prophesied Memory Hole combined with the constant surveillance, storage and analysis of our thoughts and actions, with such minute precision, and artificial intelligence algorithmic analysis, that our future thoughts and actions can be predicted, and manipulated, for the concentration of power and wealth of the very few. These 32 citations barely scratch the surface of Surveillance Capitalism and yet provide a terrifying display of the powerful forces arrayed against democracy. Surveillance Capitalism desensitizes us to their destruction of individual autonomy, rights, freedom of thought and action, privacy, sovereignty, thoughtful analysis and memory while demanding and ensuring corporations, and the 1%, have absolute rights, privacy and impunity.
Surveillance Capitalism relies on the 24 hour news cycle overwhelming our capacity to consider their manipulations before they are quickly buried and forgotten in the Memory Hole. If you agree that just these 32 citations are terrifying then dive in and navigate our InfoArt above and below the citations. You will learn the audacity of impunity!
Sousveillance: Watching the Watchers, and the Manipulators
The combination of state surveillance and its capitalist counterpart means that digital technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two groups: the watchers (invisible, unknown and unaccountable) and the watched. This has profound consequences for democracy because asymmetry of knowledge translates into asymmetries of power. But whereas most democratic societies have at least some degree of oversight of state surveillance, we currently have almost no regulatory oversight of its privatised counterpart. This is intolerable.
The evolution did not stop there. Ultimately they understood that the most predictive behavioural data comes from what I call “economies of action”, as systems are designed to intervene in the state of play and actually modify behaviour, shaping it toward desired commercial outcomes. We saw the experimental development of this new “means of behavioural modification” in Facebook’s contagion experiments and the Google-incubated augmented reality game Pokémon Go.
It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us. These processes are meticulously designed to produce ignorance by circumventing individual awareness and thus eliminate any possibility of self-determination. As one data scientist explained to me, “We can engineer the context around a particular behaviour and force change that way… We are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance.”
'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism
John Naughton, The Guardian (20 Jan 2019)
