Twitter, and Youtube a week ago, appear to banning the use of photos or videos that may include anyone for which you do not have a signed release form. This would appear to ban the posting of photos or videos you have taken in public settings, such as a public parade, outdoor sports activity, showing other people while hiking on a trail, and other examples.
Privacy issues galore but it’s all for a good cause, of course: The Israeli domestic intelligence agency has been granted temporary permission to access the phone data of people with confirmed cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant in order to trace who those people met recently. The agency was given similar powers during earlier waves of the pandemic. Using emergency legislation, the Israeli cabinet voted on Sunday to permit the spy agency, the Shin Bet, to track Omicron patients’ phones…
Sad day for mainstream media and CNN. CNN used its resources to try and dig up dirt on the accusers of Gov. Cuomo. Specifically, CNN host Chris Cuomo – the brother of the Governor – orchestrated an attempted media hit on the Governor’s accusers. Unbiased reporting? Chris Cuomo still works for CNN…
An Arizona school district is accused of maintaining extensive dossiers on 47 parents – and their children – for having merely spoken out against district policies. The data was kept in a private but shared Google Drive folder and is said to have included names, photos, personal information, vehicle license plates, photos of children, screen captures of social media posts, and copies of legal documents such as mortgage and divorce papers.
Snopes is a “fact checking” web site, also known for a co-founder who wrote fake articles for the site and plagiarized content from others, which now fact checks a social media post, finds most of it largely correct, and then labels the post “false”. They relied, in part, on a CDC report that is easily seen to have cherry picked data to produce a misleading, if not active disinformation report. But Snopes does not fact check the obvious deficiencies in the CDC report.
Starting today, Youtube will begin removing the “dislike” count from videos, saying that too many people had participated in “dislike” mobs to downvote videos (often political videos). The dislike button will remain, and content creators can see the count, but the count will no longer be visible to others.
Government has used third-party services to track the locations of all smart phones in a given area. This is made possible by apps that collect location data (but may not make this clear to users) and sell it to data brokers. Data brokers, in turn, have then provided this information to the police and other government agencies, and the example here, gave it to public health authorities. Your smart phone is a literal 24×7 surveillance device to track you in real time.
The most viewed items on Facebook are actually content stolen from other social media and web sites.
Nature published over 40 papers that were nonsense gibberish and has now retracted them.
Is it time to cut back on this blog? Today everyone seems aware of the issues with social media, and to a large extent, the issues with media manipulating our thinking. Is this blog still needed?