GANGSTERS, PIRATES, AND PEDOPHILES

"...After 18 months investigating Facebook and online misinformation, a British parliamentary committee issued a scathing report on Monday, accusing the company of breaking data privacy and competition laws and calling for new regulations to rein in the technology industry."

According to the committee chairman, “Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalised ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources..."

According to The Guardian, among other things the committee claimed that...
     - As a result of the corrupting influence of Facebook "British electoral law is unfit for purpose and vulnerable to interference by hostile foreign actors, including agents of the Russian government attempting to discredit democracy."
     - On three separate occasions Mark Zuckerberg refused to appear and answer questions about Facebook operations.

The report warns, “Companies like Facebook should not be allowed to behave like ‘digital gangsters’ in the online world, considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law.”

According to Ad Age, this week Oracle issued a report claiming that a company called Tapcore, which claims to combat app piracy, was itself guilty of a massive ad fraud. Tapcore claims it works with 3,000 apps and delivers 150 million ad impressions a day to Android devices.

In dumbass blogger terms, here's how Tapcore's fraud works. Someone downloads an app. The app, loaded with Tapcore's "anti-piracy" code, also has code that disguises itself as mobile websites and makes it appear that they are looking for ads. Advertisers, via the the adtech ecosystem, "programmatically" send ads to these imaginary websites. The victims of this fraud are:
     - Advertisers who buy ads on these imaginary websites.
     - Publishers whose websites lose ad money to fraudulent versions of their sites.
     - Consumers whose infected cell phones could ring up $150 a month in additional data costs as they unknowingly run hidden programs in the background for Tapcore.

Tests conducted  by The Wall Street Journal revealed last week that apps in which people innocently input their most "intensely personal information" send that information to Facebook without their knowledge or consent even if the people have no Facebook account.

"The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook...The apps often send the data without any prominent or specific disclosure...The findings alarmed some privacy experts who reviewed the Journal’s testing."

Want a good laugh? “We require app developers to be clear with their users about the information they are sharing with us,” a Facebook spokesdipshit said. Which, you know, is the kind of transparency Facebook is famous for.

As usual in digital gangsterland, everything is someone else's fault.

This week it was reported that a pedophile ring on YouTube (owned by Google) was identifying and promoting abhorrent videos on the platform that were supported by reputable advertisers. The story was broken by a video blogger. If you want to watch the gut-wrenching report, you can watch it here.  But a warning -- I didn't last five minutes.

Meanwhile Disney, Nestlé, AT&T and Hasbro are doing the dance of futility, pulling their advertising from YouTube until YouTube "cleans up its act." Yeah, any minute. You may remember this was exactly this same hollow bullshit the ad industry went through last year with YouTube when a similar brand safety scandal arose.

5. The Adtech Connection.

What's the common denominator in all of this? Tracking. The scourge of surveillance marketing is crawling around in the dirt connecting all of these stories.

On Feb. 15, MillerCoors held a rally called "ToastToFarmers" to honor the brave men and women of our great nation who grow corn. Or maybe to promote the universal use of InteriorCaps.

Bud Light, the Super Bowl demonizer of corn syrup (whose parent company, by the way, happens to use corn syrup in the brewing of Busch, Natural Light, Stella Artois Cidre, and Shock Top ale) said, "Look, here is what is in our beer, and here is what is not in our beer. It's all based in ingredient transparency and it's nothing beyond that." Right.

     - McKinsey gave us the good news about "How Blockchains Can Change The World."
     - Forbes, taking it four steps further, told us about "Five Ways Blockchain Could Change The World"
     - Not to be outdone, FXEmpire told us "How Blockchain Will Change Our Life, Economy and the World." Sheesh, is that all?

Why all the hyperventilating about blockchain? According to The Wall Street Journal, "once a transaction has been made, the blockchain remains an immutable record of it." According to McKinsey, blockchain is "an extraordinary thing. An immutable, unhackable distributed database of digital assets." 

Well, you guessed it. Not exactly.

According to the MIT Technology Review blockchain is being hacked rather nicely. Something called a... "51% attack against Ethereum Classic was just the latest in a series of recent attacks on blockchains... In total, hackers have stolen nearly $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency since the beginning of 2017, mostly from exchanges, and that’s just what has been revealed publicly."

According to Google , who makes the Nest device, it was all a terrible mistake. You see, it wasn't supposed to be a secret that there was a built-in microphone. They just forgot to tell anyone or put it in the specs. Those nutty engineers! They'd forget their darn dicks if they weren't glued on.

It kinda reminds me of the time that Google's Street View cars "accidentally"  conducted drive-by gathering of personal data, including emails, from peoples' home WiFi networks. I keep wondering -- how do you do that accidentally?

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