“YouTube, TikTok, Telegram, and Snapchat represent some of the largest and most influential platforms in the United States, and they provide almost no functional transparency into their systems. And as a result, they avoid nearly all of the scrutiny and criticism that comes with it.”
Cruz expressed great confusion about why he got relatively few new Twitter followers in the days before Elon Musk said he was going to buy it, but then got many more after the acquisition was announced.
The actual explanation is that Musk has lots of conservative fans, they flocked back to the platform when they heard he was buying it, and from there Twitter’s recommendation algorithms kicked into gear.
As usual, though, Europe is much further ahead of us. The Digital Services Act, which regulators reached an agreement on in April, includes provisions that would require big platforms to share data with qualified researchers. The law is expected to go into effect by next year. And so even if Congress dithers after today, transparency is coming to platforms one way or another. Here’s hoping it can begin to answer some very important questions.
“Facebook’s business model has evolved into social engineering via psychological warfare,” she declared. “The platform weaponizes user data to fuel algorithmic manipulation in order to maximize ad sales—not just for products, but for ideas like the disinformation that led to the conspiracy theories associated with the January 6 Capitol attack.”
“One thing is clear: Facebook and the other digital platforms that rely on an extractive business model will not change on their own,” the letter states. “Congress needs to step in.”
“The secretive collection, sale, and algorithmic manipulation of our personal data by platforms like Facebook must end,” he said. “It is a primary driver of the virality of the misinformation, hate speech, and online radicalization that people across the political spectrum are worried about.”
DuckDuckGo is a search engine that builds its search index using its DuckDuckBot crawler, indexing WikiPedia, and through partners like Bing. The search engine does not use any data from Google.
What makes DuckDuckGo stand out is that they do not track your searches to build a user profile or share any personal or identifying data with third-party companies, including ad networks.
The Go had to be paired with a phone to enable it to work. How can that possibly be an option in a school with many dozens of headsets? Content had to either go through the Oculus Go Store, which is being shut down at this very moment, or side-loaded through an odd “Developer Mode” access, which is extremely difficult when dealing with large numbers of headsets. Even something as mundane as printing the serial number of that VR device on the headstrap, which can easily be mixed up with other headsets, is a troubling and odd choice to make. Those serial numbers are very important when bulk loading content onto a number of devices at a time, which is the only way they can be managed by school IT departments, and once again shows a lack of understanding of the needs from within schools.
Of course, there is also the elephant in the room… Facebook.
Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn’t hand over at all, but that was collected from other people’s contact books, a hidden layer of details Facebook has about you that some have come to call “shadow contact information.”
Former Zoom executive Jin Xinjiang worked with Chinese authorities to provide data on users outside of China. Court documents say this allowed Zoom to keep market access in China.