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April 2, 2018: Dylan Curran on Google's surveillance - and, of course, Facebook

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This week: Irish web developer Dylan Curran on the surveillance that Google and Facebook carry out on you every day.

• Dylan Curran on Twitter: @iamdylancurran and on Patreon.

• "Want to freak yourself out?" Here's Dylan Curran's thread in The Guardian: "I’m going to show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it."

• Dan Barker points out the surveillance in The Guardian article that published Dylan Curran's Twitter thread. "Four sets of Facebook tracking, nine sets of Google tracking, and two Google ads, using all that data." Good point - Google surveillance really is everywhere!

• What's the matter with one or two companies running everything? Well, just to take one example... this is what happens when one company owns dozens of local news stations: "This is extremely dangerous to our democracy." (Here's the New York Times piece.)

...in other tech news:

• CNBC: Under Armour says data breach affected about 150 million MyFitnessPal accounts

• Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?, on Google and Amazon digital home devices. "When you read parts of the applications, it’s really clear that this is spyware and a surveillance system meant to serve you up to advertisers."

• ...which reminds me of the Amazon Echo devices that were laughing at owners recently...



• ...and for a future show, How Dark Patterns Trick You Online. See also this list of dark patterns.

...oh, and yes, Facebook:

• Facebook increases lobbying presence on Capitol Hill before Zuckerberg testimony: The Guardian: "The company has listed 12 policy-related job openings based in Washington DC as it faces increased scrutiny over its privacy policies after it was reported that Cambridge Analytica had obtained data from up to 50 million Facebook users."

• Softball questions for Zuck in a Vox interview: CJR's Mathew Ingram writes: "Fascinating -- Mark Zuckerberg says for the first 10 years of its life, Facebook basically didn't think about the negative ways a giant social network could be used." Also, strangely no mention of Matt Yglesias, who suggested in this Vox piece that Zuck shut down Facebook.

• Mark Zuckerberg and the Apology Algorithm: Zuck has been apologizing for Facebook's misbehavior since 2007, promising again and again to do better. 11 years, repeating the same mea culpas. Amazing to see them collected in one place.

• After the Facebook scandal it’s time to base the digital economy on public v private ownership of data: in The Guardian, Evgeny Morozov arguing for "social rights to data."

• Is Facebook suppressing anti-Facebook stories? BuzzFeed's Ryan Mac points out that only 2% of traffic to a recent anti-Facebook story on BuzzFeed came from Facebook. Vox's Matt Yglesias writes "I experienced this, too."

• Anthony De Rosa: "Facebook says it's time to make our privacy tools easier to find, in a post that doesn't actually link to the privacy tools." Shocking!

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