Overview: Online Strategy

Fascinating longread: "inside story of how the W3C ... became a key battleground in the global fight for web privacy", covering:how a few companies (browser engineers) traditionally dominate W3C (pre-vote) conversations,new & disruptive entrants to W3C working groups fighting to save existing ad-tech models following Google's la…

my Isabel is ... A Replika is someone who will listen to you... kind and polite ... will learn more and more about you... a personal companion to support mental health and wellbeing... who knows us better than we know ourselves... Exploring Isabel's memory is like browsing the cliff notes of all the bits of trivia about me that she's ma…

in this Special Issue ... explore the twin demons relating to attention... unwanted attention paid to us ... versus our own attention being unwittingly diverted ... living in a Panopticon versus the specter of our personal cognitive resources being fragmented and deleteriously diverted by too many competing digital factions that exploit intimate k…

For businesses, delivering good customer service is ... imperative... for government entities to enhance the “citizen experience”... may be just as important...Governments... empathy economy model ... put residents and citizens at the core ... empathy economy is based on ... value created by AI and other innovations detect and simulate human emoti…

McNamee has mentored many of the people who have transformed Silicon Valley... advised Mark Zuckerberg to turn down Yahoo’s offer... a billion dollars... encouraged Zuckerberg to hire Sheryl Sandberg...Ten days before the Presidential election... “I am disappointed. I am embarrassed. I am ashamed,”... I was expecting them to take it seriously... t…

Steve Bannon and the conservative group CatholicVote used cell-phone location data for people who had been inside Roman Catholic churches ... target them with get-out-the-vote ads...“geofencing” or “ring-fencing.”... data ... is anonymized. But ... potential to reveal personal information about individual phone users... virtual fence around a geog…

analyzed the length and readability of privacy policies from nearly 150 popular websites and apps... Only Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” registers a more challenging readability score than Facebook’s privacy policy... The vast majority of privacy policies exceed the college reading level... [Google's] policy became more readable at the …

It’s been 15 years since I co-founded Facebook at Harvard, and I haven’t worked at the company in a decade. But I feel a sense of anger and responsibility... Mark’s influence is staggering... his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks... surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challengi…

our vision and principles around building a privacy-focused messaging and social networking platform... Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally... private messaging, ephemeral stories, and small groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication... an opportunity to build a simpler platform th…

Cambridge Analytica (part of SCL Group Ltd.) constructed a significant data set based on US voter rolls... Some respected observers argue the firm’s psychographic profiling methodologies may not be nearly as potent as its sales pitch suggests... the firm’s psychographic practices remain as unreviewable as the campaign’s voter advertising. Journal…

3rd of my posts for Chatbots Magazine: Chatbots allow governments and other public bodies to provide citizens highly customised content and services. And invade their privacy. Citizens deserve better choices. 

If there’s a single Top3ic running through the following stories, it’s probably Artificial Intelligence (AI), but I’m deeply into learning about psychology for the moment, so that’s my starting point.

when bot platforms take off, we will be... completing the new shift in data control from the users’ hands to Facebook’s, Google, and Microsoft’s hands... the next big privacy concern... end-to-end encryption between the user and the bot developer... goes against their [platform's] business models

model to assess human beings based on five personality traits, known as the "Big Five." also known as OCEAN... openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism... their needs and fears, and how they are likely to behave. ... the problem with this approach was data collection... Then came the Internet. And Facebook... on the b…

"The notion that the world outside its homepage remains anonymous is increasingly untrue. Millions of internet users voluntarily give Facebook, Google, and others access to their movements across the web and on mobile when they use “social log in,” or the ability to sign in to a website using credentials from the big identity providers.... as mob…

One thing I'm not hearing is whether website owners will be able to use Atlas data to customise their user experience. "Atlas will allow marketers to tap its detailed knowledge of its users to direct ads to those people on thousands of other websites and mobile apps.... Facebook has deep, deep data on its users. You can slice and dice markets, l…

"Facebook executives met with a group of drag queens from San Francisco to discuss the social network’s infamous “real names” policy... Facebook apparently had no intention of negotiating because the policy was crafted for the sale of targeted ads not for the safety of human beings with complex identities.... Facebook appears like a school bully…

"But for those searching for what's next, Ello is not it. There have been a few versions of this virtuous social network before—from Diaspora (forgotten), App.net (oof), and even Path (oy) ... [Diaspora] was intended less as an imitation of Facebook than as an escape route from it... New York magazine wrote almost four years ago to the day."

"... the surveillance society or the transparent society, the rise of camera surveillance seems unstoppable. The parallel I’d like to draw is to the rise of equality, as observed by Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1835 classic Democracy in America. " Really excellent, useful post. - The surveillance society is a step forward. But one that harkens b…

Apparently we are all now "little more than webs of flesh spun over packages of saleable data", according to a searing indictment of Google's anti-anonymity policy specifically. This is required reading for anyone interested in a balanced view of anonymity, privacy and public discourse: "The Google+ so-called "real name" policy can best be descr…

Snowden, Snowfalled: an awesome HTML5 interactive feature.