Pure Evil: “AP Exclusive: Google tracks your movements, like it or not”

Posted on August 13, 2018 by coldstreams

The sole purpose of Android is to spy on its users. Researchers discover that even when you disable location tracking services throughout Android, Google continues to track your every movement.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google wants to know where you go so badly that it records your movements even when you explicitly tell it not to.

Source: AP Exclusive: Google tracks your movements, like it or not

Google revised their old motto of “Don’t be evil” to “Do be evil”.

Google repeatedly insists, when caught spying on people, that data collection was due to a software error or that they do not store the data. All of their errors are on the side of collecting more data, never the reverse.

Up through Android 7, you could easily swipe down from the top notification bar and click to turn Location off. Android 8 removed that feature and you must now go into Settings, page down, find location and then turn it off. Google intentionally made it harder to disable their spying service.

In the past, Google was found tracking users who had no SIM card in their phone. Google was collecting tracking data and then uploading to Google when the device connected to Wi-Fi.

The user interface in Android to disable all the features to – presumably – reduce Google’s tracking of you is convoluted and not a quick “turn it off”. It’s easier to go to a web browser on your computer and go to the Google Dashboard (just search for that), and then look for the Search Activity item on the right hand side of the screen, click the down arrow icon, then click on Go to Web & App Activity. Here you can change settings (I turn most of them to off).

And while on this page, you can delete Google’s past history by selecting “Delete Activity by”, and then select “All Time” and “All products”.

Select Other Google Activity – here you can see online comments you have posted, and view your YouTube Likes and Dislikes. It used to be impossible to delete your Liked video selections as you had to go to each and every past Youtube video and unlike the video. Now there is an option labeled “Delete All”.

Does this actually delete the records? We have no idea. It might, for example, merely hide the data collection from you so that it looks like it was deleted but it actually remains on the Google servers.

“Likes” on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are the *primary* method used to analyzer your interests. All of these services use your collection of Likes to discern what products or services you may like, even what your political affiliation is (Facebook datamined my likes and friend’s list to identify me as both a Democrat and a Republican, simultaneously, even though I do not belong or affiliate with either political party).

Each time you innocently click on Like, you are adding data to the dossier that they maintain on you, specifically. Consequently, Likes are a primary “currency” of their global surveillance operation.

You will also need to go to the My Activity tab and delete everything there too. Google makes it some what cumbersome to delete their spying records.

Political propaganda drops all pretense of logical thinking #ACA #ObamaCare #MedicareForAll

Posted on August 3, 2018 by edwardm

“Faithfully executed, as the Constitution requires, the ACA was working and insurance markets were stable” – Andy Slavitt, former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, 2015-2016.

During the period from 2014 to 2016, the average premium went up by 106% according to the CMMS, and in 3 states average premiums went up by over 200%. This, he says, is a “stable” market. And he was in charge during most of that time frame. Prices continued to rise at similar rates in 2017 and 2018.

The AP reports:

Of course – a very stable market requires ever increasing government subsidies while premiums rise at astronomical rates. Not.

This column in USA Today works as propaganda rather easily through the use of

Appeal to Authority (Slavitt)
Asserting things are true, that clearly are not. Which is just another form of lying.
Logical fallacy, “the ACA was working and the markets were stable”.
Censorship, by leaving out the writer’s relevant past experience.
The target’s quick acting System 1 thinking style that avoids details and misses the logical fallacies used in the proponent’s arguments.

The USA Today column mentions Slavitt’s involvement with CMMS but omits his full history. Once you learn of his past history, your perspective of his comments may change. What do you think?

Slavitt left a job as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs to become CEO of a company named Ingenix, a subsidiary of United Healthcare. Under his leadership, Ingenix was sued, twice, for creating fraudulent data used in health care billing and paid $400 million in settlements. Slavitt, who led the fraud scheme, was appointed to head CMMS and implementation of the ACA. Ingenix changed its name after the settlements – and Slavit was put in charge of CMMS where he regulated his past employer which is a conflict of interest prohibited by the Federal government. However, the Obama Administration issued an “Ethics Waiver”, waiving its conflict of interest rules and permitting Slavitt to head CMMS anyway.

Commentary

Not only was the ACA not working due to how the Act was written, the ACA is not sustainable. I wrote a paper on the subject that was read by staff at the Oregon Health Authority, numerous Oregon state legislators, health care industry executives and economists and was, in part, influential in changing Oregon State law to partially fix the definitely not stable ACA markets here. To learn more, please read my paper.

Proponents who say the ACA is “working” and “stable” are simultaneously advocating “repeal and replace” the ACA:

Logically, why is it necessary to repeal and replace a government program that is “working” and “stable”?

The propaganda efforts by Slavitt are perplexing. Presumably he is trying to buttress his past association with the ACA. But he is doing so through the use of lies while supporters simultaneously say it should be repealed and replaced. There is a logical disconnect here.

Apple hit a $1 trillion market cap and CEO Tim Cook is all smiles? Maybe, but this photo has nothing to do with it

Posted on August 2, 2018 by edwardm

CNBC illustrates their story about Apple Computer achieving a market capitalization of $1 Trillion with this photo – Tim Cook must be happy about achieving $1 Trillion market cap, right?

The photo, however, is from at least December 2017, is probably from the Fifth Ave Apple Store opening in September 2017, and has nothing to do with today’s achievement. CNBC never mentions that this photo is unrelated to today or the news story.

Later, CNBC swapped out that photo and replaced it with this Getty Images photo of excited Apple Store staff – except its actually from September 22, 2017 – nearly a year ago and has nothing to do with the story.

In effect, this is a propaganda photo intended to convey a feeling of jubilation. Sadly, news services do this all the time. Good journalists will attach a note giving the source of the photo, when from a different event, but many, as we have documented on this blog, do not.

Substituting a photo of a different event is a classic technique used by propagandists. When this is done by social media propagandists, we’ve called it out. See here, here, here and here. There are more examples on this blog.

Substituting photos of different events and passing them off as a photo of a contemporary event is fictional news. CNBC blunders like this a lot (more on that here).They do not care about accuracy. At all.

Fake comments too? How everything is fake on the Internet

Posted on August 1, 2018 by edwardm

This blog has commented in the past on the problem of fake reviews all over the Internet. Fake reviews are used to make a product sound better or sometimes to make a competitor’s product sound awful. It is difficult to rely on Amazon product reviews, for example, because for many products, an overwhelming number of reviews are fake. Web sites like fakespot.com help people identify products that are flooded with fake reviews.

I rarely look at YouTube comments but just looked at comments on a video by a prominent YouTube reviewer. It looked like almost all of the comments were bogus – literally posting a few words of near nonsense that added nothing to the discussion. Seems they are trying to get visibility for themselves in hopes that a few people will click on their YouTube ID and then pick up more views or subscribers. A few comments even ask the reader to check out their channel.

The high prevalence of fake stuff on the Internet is turning the Internet in to something far less than what we all envisioned 10 or 20 years ago.

Today, the primary business model of the Internet is surveillance for the purpose of producing targeted advertising to get you to buy something or adopt someone else’s agenda.

Update – “Average renter can’t afford their apartment”

Posted on July 29, 2018 by edwardm

A few months ago, a news item spread saying that the “average renter” or “minimum wage renter” cannot afford a one bedroom apartment.

But that is not what the study actually said.

The study picked a price point equal to the 40th percentile of rental unit price distributions. In general, those earning a single minimum wage income are usually not able to afford a one bedroom apartment at the 40th percentile. They can afford lower cost units in the market below the 40th percentile – in other words, they can rent units in the lower 40% of the market.

I have updated the original blog post to incorporate this new information.

And an update to our update – a link to yet another example of how CBS News merely parroted the press release propaganda. Reporters did not read the study to understand the nuance of what the study actually said versus what was written in the propaganda press release. The news media is just one link in the chain of an effective propaganda operation. (The editor of a local paper once referred to such reporting as “stenography reporting” and called it bogus. But those are the old days now!)

Source: Fake News: Average renter can’t afford their apartment | SocialPanic.org – Occupy Propaganda

Update: Polar bears, social media, and how our emotional response may have helped a PR stunt

Posted on July 28, 2018 by edwardm

Update: National Geographic has retracted the claims made about a widely viewed photo of a starving polar bear. The photos and video were seen by an estimated 2.5 billion people and purported to show the effects of climate change.

NGeo has retracted the claim and the photographer admits they were seeking a photo to be used for propaganda messaging. Details are in our now updated original post: Polar bears, social media, and how our emotional response may have helped a PR stunt | SocialPanic.org – Occupy Propaganda

The episode is likely the most successful propaganda message in history. It is highly doubtful that many of the 2.5 billion original viewers will learn of the retraction.

Fake photo re- purposed for propaganda message, once again

Posted on July 17, 2018 by edwardm

This is getting old – an old photo is re-purposed to pretend it represents something else in a Tweet on Twitter.

The photo was taken from Getty Images, of a protest in Tahrir, Egypt in 2011. It appears in multiple locations online. Has nothing to do with Tommy Robinson or Trump or the UK. Note that the tweet has been liked nearly 10,000 times and shared 7,600 times.

This is a very common technique used in social media propaganda messages – take a photo of something else, at a different date, time and location and pretend its another event. We have posted numerous examples of this on this blog.

Text for Indexing

“This was the Tommy Robinson and Pro-Trump Rally today in London 14th July 2018. The crowd is bigger than the Anti-Trump protest held yesterday. The main stream media won’t talk about it.“

We may be wrong but he is even “wronger”, or something :)

Posted on July 9, 2018 by edwardm

In a year and a half, President Trump has reportedly said or Tweeted over 3,000 false or misleading statements.
In an overlapping period of time, the media responded by piling on and making an extraordinary number of false, misleading or erroneous reports. Some are so wrong as to be funny 🙂 [1]

The adversarial relationship developed into a full scale propaganda war between the Administration and the media.

The way to respond to accusations of fictional news reporting is to double down on accuracy, objectivity and remaining calm. Unfortunately, the news industry continues to harm itself through self destructive behavior typical of middle school drama. This behavior is bewildering.

[1] Some of the items described in the article were previously confirmed by me, although not necessarily mentioned on this blog. Based on my sample of items that were verified I presume that most of that list is accurate.

Yet another fake social media propaganda poster

Posted on July 9, 2018 by edwardm

Some one took quotes that were manufactured for a satirical news web site and turned them into a propaganda poster.

The title and quotes are from a satire news site called The Babylon Bee. This was widely shared and commented upon as if this was real, showing the gullibility of idiots who believe what they see on social media.

The title is humorous (had us LOL) but this is all fake. And do take note of the last sentence in this collection of fake quotes:

Misjudging our gullibility

Text for Search Engine Indexing

Senate Democrats Demand Supreme Court Nominee Not be Unduly influenced by Constitution

“Time and again, we find progressive laws getting struck down. And it’s always – always – the ones the Constitution is against. These right-wing judges don’t think for themselves, they just do whatever the Constitution says. And it’s time for that to end” – Chuck Schumer

“We need judges to be advocates of progressive laws, not people who will bow to the whims of the Constitution, putting its extremist values of freedom of speech and freedom of religion against our agenda” – Elizabeth Warren

“We’re sick and tired of the Constitution sitting in the National Archives, manipulating everything we do.” – Cory Booker

SocialPanic.org – Occupy Propaganda

How Social media propaganda is manipulating your brain: Propaganda about propaganda

Category Archives: Lies