I'm supposed to be on vacation but, darn it, I miss you guys!

FTC KISSES ZUCKERBUTT

The FTC reportedly fined Facebook $5 billion for enabling election tampering, undermining public confidence in the integrity of the 2016 US presidential election, lying about it, and doing next to nothing to remedy it.

Five billion is pizza money to Facebook. They spend more than that on hand lotion for lobbyists.

The travesty of this settlement guarantees that no tech company CEO will take consumer privacy or data security seriously. Nothing will change till someone either has to pay personally or go to jail. Paying insignificant fines with corporate money is now an officially established cost of doing business in techland and -- who knows? -- a jolly good way to boost share prices. While FB was paying 5 billion in fines they were coining over 10 billion in market value.

But let's keep our perspective and not forget who is funding the outrageous abuses that Facebook and friends have engendered. It's us and our disgraceful  "adtech" -- the practice of online tracking and surveillance.

If the irresponsible "leaders" at the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) would say to the irresponsible "leaders" at the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) "we don't want you spying on citizens on our behalf anymore," all this dangerous bullshit would end in ten minutes.

Friday was a very good day for Facebook, and a very bad day for the public.

If you want to understand how easy it is to become an "Instagram influencer" and con the shorts off marketing rubes, just take 30 seconds and scroll though this garden of fraud brought to you by your pals at Google.

The study in question was done by a Swedish group called A Good Company and the data was analyzed by a company called HyperAuditor. They analyzed almost 2 million Instagram accounts in 82 countries. The chart below shows how Instascam fraud affects the UK, the US, and the rest of world.

The CEO of the company that conducted the research had this to say, "Companies are pouring money into influencer marketing, thinking that they are connecting with real people and not Russian bots. In reality, they are pouring money down the drain..."  Couldn't have put it any better myself.

Like I've said about a million times, there's no bigger sucker in the world than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend.

The recordings included "identifiable information, including one person’s address and other personal information, like a family discussing their grandchildren by name, another user discussing their love life..." according to The Guardian.

In the nanosecond that the auction takes place hundreds of advertisers are sent private personal information about you. The information can include race, sexuality, health status, your location, birthday, the unique identifier of your mobile device, and your politics.

This happens tens of billions of times a day.

Regulators in Europe are studying whether RTB transactions violate the regulations established last year under the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation.) As far as I can tell, this is about as clear a violation of GDPR as you can find. If the EU regulators have the balls to do something about the privacy abuse of RTB, this can have significant impact on how online advertising is conducted.

In the UK, Germany, and France combined, about $5 billion annually is estimated to flow through the RTB system. Here in the US that number is estimated to be about $20 billion. Nonetheless, US regulators, willfully blind to the dangers of privacy abuse, will almost certainly do what they do best -- nada.

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