Meta announced a new partnership this week in the hopes that geothermal energy can help it reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
Meta and startup Sage Geosystems struck up a deal to develop new geothermal power plants. If they make it to the finish line, the plants would provide carbon pollution-free energy that Meta needs for new data centers in the US.
Routes were withdrawn, Facebook’s DNS servers went offline, and one minute after the problem occurred, Cloudflare engineers were in a room wondering why 1.1.1.1 couldn’t resolve facebook.com and worrying that it was somehow a fault with our systems.
With those withdrawals, Facebook and its sites had effectively disconnected themselves from the Internet.
Luckily, our favorite social networks also provide tools to help us debug our tags. Once you make sure that your tags are actually showing up in the source code of your website, you’ll be able to preview how your website will look in the feed.
Twitter: https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator
Facebook: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/
Pinterest: https://developers.pinterest.com/tools/url-debugger/
Ostensibly a chat app, WeChat is actually a superapp, because it seamlessly integrates many services and products. It is the way the vast majority of Chinese citizens communicate with friends and family. For some, it is a medical scheduling app, used to make and manage doctor’s appointments. And it is a wallet, the means by which users buy groceries, access their bank accounts, pay their mortgages, and engage in just about any financial transaction.
Shutting down a WeChat account is, in effect, a digital form of banishment for the many users who have opted into its ecosystem. Not only is the user cut off from communicating with friends and family, but in what is increasingly becoming a cashless society, it effectively denies users who have concentrated their money in WeChat Wallet the ability to independently function.
U.S.-based tech companies often deal with these and other wide-ranging country and regional-specific speech restrictions via something known as geo-blocking, which enables them to restrict in one region content that is otherwise permitted by the terms of service and thus accessible elsewhere. Implicit in this approach is a recognition of the obligation to comply with local law, even if it means complying with takedown and keep-off demands that run contrary to free speech commitments elsewhere.
Ten years ago, Facebook already had 15 billion photos in its database. As you uploaded pictures and tagged friends and added date and location data, the software got really, really good at recognizing people’s faces. This facial-recognition capability is mirrored at other companies—and some, such as Amazon, sell it to whoever wants it.
There isn’t some global corporate conspiracy to get you to post a photo of yourself from the old days and today. There has been a global corporate conspiracy to get you to post everything about yourself, continuously, for the past 15 years. Which many of us have done, providing the vast data sets that companies have already trained their neural networks with. If you think that not posting these two photos does anything to surveillance capitalism or the platforms that succeed through it, that’s just not right.
La modificación más relevante es la que hace que se deje de dar visibilidad a los contenidos que están a punto de violar las condiciones de uso de Facebook. Es decir, las publicaciones que se acercan a las líneas rojas marcadas por la red sobre desinformación, violencia, incitación al odio, clickbait y amenazas; incluso aunque no hayan violado estas condiciones de forma estricta.
El capitalismo moderno funciona colonizando la imaginación de lo que la gente considera posible. Marx ya se dio cuenta de que el capitalismo tenía más que ver con la apropiación del entendimiento que con la apropiación del trabajo. Facebook es la penúltima apropiación de la imaginación: lo que veíamos como útil ahora se revela como una manera de meterse en la conciencia de la gente antes de que podamos actuar. Las instituciones que se presentaban como liberadoras se convierten en controladoras. En nombre de la libertad, Google y Facebook nos han llevado por el camino hacia el control absoluto.
No queremos afrontar que lo gratuito implica siempre una forma de dominación.
El capitalismo tiene tendencia a pasar con gran facilidad del mercado al monopolio. Y ahí, con la represión de la competencia, empiezan los grandes problemas, la gran desprotección. Con monopolios, el capitalismo pasa de ser el sistema de la competencia a ser el de la dominación.
…vos signets, vos courriels, vos contacts, vos fichiers sur Google Drive, toutes les informations citées ci-dessus, vos vidéos YouTube, les photos que vous avez prises sur votre téléphone, les produits que vous avez achetés en passant par Google et les sociétés qui vous les ont vendus…
La société détient également les informations de votre calendrier, vos hangouts Google, l’historique de vos déplacements, la musique que vous écoutez, les Google books que vous avez achetés, les groupes Google dont vous faites partie, les sites Internet que vous avez créés, les téléphones que vous avez eus, les pages que vous avez partagées, combien de pas vous faites par jour…
I understand this reaction, but it’s also an unfair one: Deleting Facebook is privilege. The company has become so good at the many things it does that for lots of people, leaving the service would be a self-harming act. And they deserve better from it, too. Which is why the initial answer to Facebook’s failings shouldn’t be to flee Facebook. We need to demand a better Facebook.
Unlike broadcast television and radio, which are also free for the price of having to endure ads, on Facebook you can’t change the channel. If you leave Facebook—which is where your friends, scene, and community already is—you’re alone, because for many people, Facebook is becoming the internet and the internet is becoming Facebook.
Facebook, for all its problems, has become a necessary part of life for people, one that they can’t afford to shed, personally or professionally.
And in countries with lower internet adoption, Facebook is often people’s foray onto the whole internet. Facebook’s Free Basics program is operating in 63 countries and municipalities across Africa, Asia, and Latin America—and with that, people get free access to Facebook and a small handful of websites that partner with Facebook, though they can’t access other sites or email. For those users, Facebook is, in a sense, the whole internet.
Le réseau social est à nouveau montré du doigt après la découverte de l’utilisation de données personnelles de plusieurs millions d’utilisateurs, par une entreprise d’analyse liée à la campagne présidentielle de Donald Trump.
L’affaire Cambridge Analytica tourne autour d’une application, nommée «thisisyourdigitallife» (littéralement «cestvotrevienumérique») et accessible via le réseau social, jusqu’à sa suppression en 2015.
Derrière cette façade, présentée comme «une application de recherche utilisée par les psychologues», un système bien plus complexe. Non seulement les 270 000 personnes ayant utilisé l’application ont fourni des informations volontairement sur eux-mêmes, mais ils en ont aussi fourni d’autres de manière bien moins consciente (l’application avait accès aux contenus qu’ils avaient «aimé» sur le réseau social ou à leur ville actuelle).
Pire, ils ont aussi permis à l’application d’accéder aux données des contacts de ces personnes sur Facebook. Un effet boule de neige qui rend difficile d’évaluer l’ampleur de cette collecte : entre 30 millions (pour le New York Times) et 50 millions (selon le Guardian) de personnes. Des données récupérées par une première société (SCL) puis une seconde (Cambridge Analytica).
Like most of my friends, I use Facebook on a daily level. I use the website, the Facebook app, and the Messenger app. It should come as no surprise, that Facebook keeps track of every time you visit them through any of those means. The creepy thing is, that your friends can keep track of this too.
In the web-based Messenger, it is possible to see when a user was last active.
By creating a simple service that checks Facebook every 10 minutes, I’m able to get an accurate picture of my friends’ Facebook usage. Many people visit Facebook as the first thing in the morning, and the last thing before going to bed. It is therefore possible to get a good impression of their sleeping habits (or lack thereof).
