Category: Tech

Social Disease

Children R Our Future Social Disease 46 Comments

Brain rot:

[A] new study from Norway, which examines IQ scores from 730,000 men (standardized tests are part of military service there) disproves all these ideas, because it shows IQ dropping within the same families. Men born in 1991 score, on average, five points lower than men born in 1975. There must, in other words, be an environmental explanation, and the chronology throws up a clear suspect: the rise in screen-time.
 

Kids brought up with Facebook and Instagram are more politically bigoted, not because they don’t hear alternative opinions, but because they don’t learn the concentration necessary to listen to opponents — a difficult and unnatural skill.

Not blogs though. Blogs are good for you.

Break Them Up

Social Disease Tech 21 Comments

Into a hundred thousand million pieces.

Back in 2015, a woman named Imy Santiago wrote an Amazon review of a novel that she had read and liked. Amazon immediately took the review down and told Santiago she had “violated its policies.” Santiago re-read her review, didn’t see anything objectionable about it, so she tried to post it again. “You’re not eligible to review this product,” an Amazon prompt informed her.
 
When she wrote to Amazon about it, the company told her that her “account activity indicates you know the author personally.” Santiago did not know the author, so she wrote an angry email to Amazon and blogged about Amazon’s “big brother” surveillance.
 
I reached out to both Santiago and Amazon at the time to try to figure out what the hell happened here. Santiago, who is an indie book writer herself, told me that she’d been in the same ballroom with the author in New York a few months before at a book signing event, but had not talked to her, and that she had followed the author on Twitter and Facebook after reading her books. Santiago had never connected her Facebook account to Amazon, she said.

Update.

Facebook admits that it allowed Netflix and Spotify to access your private messages

Break Them Up

Social Disease 11 Comments

Into a hundred thousand million pieces.

But thanks likely to this evasion of Android permission requests, Facebook users did not realize for years that the company was collecting information about who they called and texted, which would have helped explain to them why their “People You May Know” recommendations were so eerily accurate. It only came to light earlier this year, three years after it started, when a few Facebook users noticed their call and text history in their Facebook files when they downloaded them.

Related: Google policy “is to get right up to the creepy line but not cross it.”

The Children Are Our Future

Children R Our Future Social Disease Tech 18 Comments

I already knew this and you already knew this: Screen Time Changes Structure of Kids’ Brains

In brain scans of 4,500 children, daily screen usage of more than seven hours showed premature thinning of the brain cortex, the outermost layer that processes information from the physical world. Though the difference was significant from participants who spent less screen time, NIH study director Gaya Dowling cautioned against drawing a conclusion.
 
“We don’t know if it’s being caused by the screen time. We don’t know if it’s a bad thing,”

They know it’s a bad thing. Now they just want to figure out how best to exploit it.

Break Them Up

Social Disease Tech 16 Comments

Into a hundred thousand million pieces.

The disturbing scale of the personal data harvested and traded by multinationals can be revealed today.
 
Health details, children’s voice recordings and copies of passports can be at risk when customers tick an online consent box.
 
Analysis by the Mail found that Marriott International, Facebook, Asda, Paypal, BT and Tesco engaged in hidden data harvesting and sharing.
 
Giant firms can use personal data to build a profile of customers for targeted adverts or to pass to other organisations.

Related: A day that will go down in infamy…

Break Them Up

Social Disease Tech 27 Comments

Into a hundred thousand million pieces.

These patents tell us that Google is developing smart-home products that are capable of eavesdropping on us throughout our home in order to learn more about us and better target us with advertising. It goes much further than the current Google Home speaker that’s promoted to answer our questions and provide useful information, and the Google-owned Nest thermostat that measures environmental conditions in our home. What the patents describe are sensors and cameras mounted in every room to follow us and analyze what we’re doing throughout our home.

 

They describe how the cameras can even recognize the image of a movie star’s image on a resident’s t-shirt, connect it to the person’s browsing history, and send the person an ad for a new movie the star is in.

Related  – The Chinese are making doubly sure public displays of displeasure with their totalitarian regime such as occurred in Tiananmen Square in 1989 will never be repeated.  They are instituting a technological surveillance program so pervasive that when completed — quite soon, it seems — it will enforce conformity throughout their giant country on a scale that would stupefy Orwell and Huxley.

Break Them Up

Social Disease Tech 8 Comments

Into a hundred thousand million pieces.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford —during a wide-ranging interview at the Halifax International Security Forum — took Google to task for its recent decision to withdraw from a Defense Department artificial intelligence initiative.
 
“I have a hard time with companies that are working very hard to engage in the market inside of China, and engaging in projects where intellectual property is shared with the Chinese, which is synonymous with sharing it with the Chinese military, and then don’t want to work for the U.S. military.”

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