Facebook Update: Fact Checks, Cryptocurrency – Spotlight #313
News

Good Monday morning. It’s Indigenous People’s Day in four states: Alaska, Minnesota, Vermont, and South Dakota. Not only is Columbus Day inappropriate based on what historians now tell us, but it was a recent invention that Congress first approved as a holiday in 1937. It’s still on the federal calendar as a holiday so there is no mail delivery and most federal offices are closed. 

Today’s Spotlight takes about 4 minutes to read. Want to chat about something you see here? Press your email reply button or click the silver “Write George” button below.

2. News To Know Now

1. Turk Telekom, partially owned by the government, cut access to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms for 48 hours while Turkey first invaded Syria last week according to the Internet Society’s NetBlocks initiative. An even larger Internet blackout began this weekend in Ecuador as large anti-government protests were reported.

2. Instagram has removed the “Following” tab that allowed people to learn which accounts were followed by other people. Instagram also rolled out a new app called Threads that mimics the  Snapchat functionality allowing users to quickly send images and messages to a group of close friends. Color me naive, but that seems a lot like social media’s initial purpose.

3. Color me skeptical, too, after hearing about an Accenture survey that reports half of U.S. consumers will  choose slower ground transportation and have items shipped together “for a lighter carbon footprint.”

Did you miss our annual look at how politicians, law enforcement, and others use government data mining to manage people and resources–even to fight crime?

We’ve pulled it all together for you in one easy-to-read report.

3.  Facebook Update: Won’t Fact Check Politicians

Facebook will not fact check ads placed by political campaigns according to Sir Nick Clegg, a Facebook senior executive and former deputy British Prime Minister. Clegg has specifically said that Facebook has no intention of intervening “when politicians speak.”

The move immediately inspired an advertisement from Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) announcing that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had endorsed Donald Trump’s reelection bid. That’s not true, of course, but it’s a smart ad placement from Warren whose social media advertising is among the best of the Democratic presidential hopefuls. 

Anyone can sort and view ads placed on Facebook at the company’s Ad Archive.

Facebook has realized for years that the ads are a bigger problem than local news stories. That’s confirmed by a recent Nieman Lab analysis that looked at 300,000 local stories and found that 40% werre related to sports or obituaries. Emergency information accounted for another 28%. 

That does not mean that news articles on Facebook are accurate.  It means that the ads are especially inaccurate, and that stories from trusted local media sources address community needs and do well with consumer engagement. Have a look at one of the report’s top line graphs below and click through to get more.

Facebook’s hope for cryptocurrency will undoubtedly be tested by politicians when Zuckerberg testifies before the House Financial Services Committee about its Libra product on October 23. We’ll be watching this product closely this week after PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, and Square all canceled their involvement with the new product last week.

And Facebook’s biggest problem likely remains the antitrust review conducted by a coalition of state AG offices. The Washington Post reported last week that “roughly 40 states” are participating in the review of Facebook’s advertising and consumer data practices.

4.  Google Search Updates

Google is also facing antitrust and other government reviews, but has the enviable position of market share. Analytics provider StatCounter reported that for the 12 months ending in September, Google accounted for about 88% of U.S. search and about 93% of worldwide search.

We told you two weeks that Google had recently updated its core algorithm, a much larger update than the daily tweaks and adjustments the company makes. UK firm Sistrix is already reporting that some of the sites seeing traffic increases include tabloid the Daily Mail, Brighton paper The Argus, and Country Life magazine.  That doesn’t mean that this was only an update to improve media site visibility although we’ve written often about Google’s focus on EAT (Expertise-Authority-Trust) as a quality indicator. 

5. Debugged: Greta Thunberg was not with George Soros

Images of climate activist Greta Thunberg supposedly posing with philanthropist George Soros are doctored, according to a FactCheck.org analysis. Conspiracy theory sites like “The Gateway Pundit” have tried to link the 16-year-old with the nearly 90-year-old billionaire.

Thunberg was pictured with fellow climate activist Al Gore, and the picture is ten months old.

6. Also in the Spotlight

European privacy laws continue to be aggressively interpreted. Europe’s top court has ruled that pre-checked consent boxes for tracking website users via cookies are not valid. TechCrunch has more.

Grammarly, the software that tells you to stop using passive voice among other things, received a $90 million investment in a second funding round that values the company at more than $1 billion, Venture Beat reports.

A University of Mexico archaeologist using a free map made with light detection and ranging technology has discovered the ruins of 27 previously unknown Maya ceremonial centers. Some even contain a type of construction archaeologists hadn’t seen before. This is easily our favorite story this week and you can read it in full in The New York Times.

7. Great Data: Using Great Presentation

Video is underused as a reporting media. And a little goes a long way, but this 150 second animation of the growth of different social media networks since 2003 is worth your time for the way it shares data.  Have a look below.

8. Protip: Google’s Digital Wellbeing Tools

We’ve written a lot of words about technology’s effect on reading comprehension, attention span, and linguistic changes. The overwhelming effect is on interpersonal engagement, though, and Google is introducing requirements for digital wellbeing tools to be used on all Android devices.

See what they look like and how to use them.

9. Bizarre Bazaar (strange stuff for sale online)

Shaun Dakin spotted this great use of an Instagram profile page to link to other social media channels, and of course, to the Amazon page selling this calendar of Harslo the Balancing Hound. 

Seems that Harslo has built up an audience of 107,000 Instagram followers, almost that many on Facebook, and some great media hits for balancing stuff on his head.

He’s a cute doggo.

Government Data Mining in 2019
Articles News

Facial Recognition Grows Up

Observers could spend every working minute analyzing facial recognition to stay updated with its constant changes. For example, Amazon recently announced a change to its Rekognition software that “improved accuracy for emotion detection (for all 7 emotions: ‘Happy’, ‘Sad’, ‘Angry’, ‘Surprised’, ‘Disgusted’, ‘Calm’ and ‘Confused’) and added a new emotion: ‘Fear’. Lastly, we have improved age range estimation accuracy; you also get narrower age ranges across most age groups.”

Somehow Amazon is still working on age estimation accuracy, but can detect fear.

Facebook also announced new privacy settings for DeepFace, its facial recognition software. That sounds nice, but remember that DeepFace is believed to be the largest facial recognition database in the world thanks to the 250 billion photos that have been voluntarily uploaded to Facebook. The company claims that it beats the FBI’s facial recognition programs with 15% more accuracy.

Google’s Face Match algorithm now makes use of a camera in its Nest Hub smart home display, which is a nice way of saying that Google’s thermostat and light controlling gizmos point an always-on camera at your living space. You can learn more about that in CNet’s excellent “Google collects face data now. Here’s what it means and how to opt out.“

The race to get this facial data isn’t only to sell you more stuff although that’s certainly helpful. Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary has said that it will use facial recognition at live events. Not so fast, say some artists like the aptly named Rage Against The Machine.  

More than half of U.S. adults trust law enforcement agencies to responsibly use facial recognition, according to Pew Research. The approval rating drops to 36% for technology companies and 18% for advertisers. California lawmakers sent a bill last week to Governor Gavin Newsom that would ban state and local police from using facial recognition software on their body cameras.

Tattletale Apps and Ancillary Data

Scary stories about phone apps, browser extensions, and smart devices abound in our society. We’re no longer surprised when we learn that a tech company is selling ovulation data from apps women use to track their periods or that Foursquare doesn’t care if you use their app to check in to a location since they have “passive” data collection.

Personal data from all of your transactions constantly flows into buckets at data brokerages around the world. WaPo columnist Geoffrey Fowler wrote a blockbuster expose this summer about browser extensions that seem innocuous but “leak information” directly to data brokers. In Fowler’s expose, one of the browser extensions was used to magnify images on a screen, but requested the ability “to read and change your browsing history.” The extension had 800,000 users and was packaging each user’s search history.

At a large family gathering this weekend, I was asked to troubleshoot someone’s PC because it seemed like Google was unresponsive. After only fifteen minutes of tinkering I found that there was a Firefox extension that promised private browsing. Instead, it read search data and routed the request to another network. Luckily, they didn’t return to Google but to Yahoo! search, which was my first clue that something terrible was happening.

Don’t forget that the absence of data is also data. Netflix raised eyebrows last month when The Verge found that Netflix was monitoring a phone’s physical activity sensor. Netflix later said it was a test to see if they could improve video quality while people were watching on the move. But the question remains why a video app gets to track your movements and activity. Fitness trackers, phones, and smart watches all have the ability to understand where you are and what you are doing or not doing.

Even medical data isn’t protected despite health privacy laws. ProPublica found 5 million health records on hundreds of computer servers worldwide. Anyone with a web browser or a few lines of computer code can view patient records, they found, including names in some cases. They didn’t do any hacking or nefarious activities because the records—either for consultation or stored for archives—were publicly accessible on the Internet.

Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are part of a new trade group called the CARIN Alliance that is creating a medical records universal standard for patient records. You’re probably already thinking to yourself, “What could go wrong with those three setting up programs accessing my most personal data?” Good news. The federal government, many state governments, and major health insurance companies are also participating.

The point is that your transactions every day create a growing pool of data about you.  Here in northern Virginia, our state is one of several using “remote sensing” that checks a vehicle’s emissions when it passes through a toll booth. The program is a great way to monitor air quality but also allows local jurisdictions to understand which vehicles don’t meet emissions standards and the locations that they travel through. 

Foursquare would call that a passive check-in.

The Algorithms

DNA testing at home led to big databases stuffed with results—and helped police solve multiple cold case crimes, including a 52 year old murder case in Seattle. GEDmatch, one of the larger aggregators of uploaded DNA data, is the database police most often use. That old Seattle case and the Golden State Killer case received headline attention, but law enforcement agencies are solving dormant cases every week using this unique collaboration between the public and law enforcement.

Users can opt-in to allow police genealogy experts to work with crime scene DNA results, genealogy hobbyist results, and create family trees for people who are still living. 

Technology is also fueling the New York Police Department’s real life exampleofa detective movie staple. Using software they developed and then made public for free, the NYPD uses Patternizr to find similarities between crimes. Like the genealogy situation, Patternizr requires human analysts to sort through the program’s output and decide which results to send to detectives.

Police are also finding new ways to use older technology like cameras and scanners. In London, the BBC reported that police tested rail passengers for hidden explosives or knives using new scanners that providing imaging from up to thirty feet away. Cameras are more widely used in other countries to surveil cities according to Comparitech. Their overview shows that London and Atlanta are the only non-Chinese cities on a list of the ten most surveilled cities, but plenty of western cities made the top 20, including Chicago, Sydney, and Berlin.

Benign social media use exists throughout law enforcement. We’ve all read tweets and social media updates about events in our communities as well as efforts to humanize officers. For example, the Gloucester (NJ) Police post images of recovered bicycles on Pinterest. But for every wholesome use of technology, we also see complaints like a 2016 ACLU of California warning about some police departments tracking activists and their movements on social media.

What Happens Next

Ivanka Trump didn’t start the trend, but quickly tried linking gun violence prevention legislation the White House finds troubling to a new federal agency proposal called the Health Advanced Research Projects Agency, or HARPA. Proponents see the agency as a medical science equivalent of the military’s DARPA, which created the technology that evolved into the Internet.

The administration specifically wanted to know if this new agency could help identify people who were on the brink of becoming mass shooters. Washington Post reporting shows that their three page proposal included tracking data from fitness trackers, smart watches, and mobile phones used by mentally ill consumers, which presupposes that gun violence is linked to mental health, something that is in no way proven.

The HARPA example of analyzing Fitbit data is one extreme but real example of government data mining and law enforcement using technology in preemptive ways. Another extreme recent example is Wednesday’s news that the Department of Justice will authorize Homeland Security to collect DNA from all migrants who are detained rather than only those who are arrested. We’ve covered DNA databases before, but this is DNA involuntary seized when a non-American is detained. That DNA will also undoubtedly be used to identify American citizens, leading many to question the constitutionality of the federal government collecting the data.

In addition to physical tracking, government agencies are also increasingly interested in using semantic analysis to question the words people post to social media. This type of analysis has been around for years and is behind robust marketing concepts like search engine optimization and advertising, but government plans call for wholesale monitoring of all platforms.

Israeli startup Zencity expanded into the U.S. last year and already has deals in place with local governments in Chicago, San Francisco, and Houston to monitor social media and telephone calls to city services while classifying citizen sentiment. This is no longer about counting complaints, but using software to classify the severity of the feedback. Federal offices increasingly want this information too, and Attorney General William Barr co-signed a joint US-UK open letter Thursday that urges Facebook not to encrypt communications.

The French government also wants social media access according to The Guardian last Tuesday, but for tax purposes. The French Public Action and Accounts Minister said last year in an interview that “the tax office will be able to see that if you have numerous pictures of yourself with a luxury car while you don’t have the means to own one, then maybe your cousin or your girlfriend has lent it to you, or maybe not.”

China remains the foreign government most invested in social media. The country’s Social Credit System remains a hodgepodge of basic counting (think: number of complaints), business information, and traditional credit reporting (which some may argue is already creepy enough). 

China’s vague plans were written about in breathless terms by Western media, especially in America, and have served as the backdrop or inspiration for more than one television show. Since then privacy advocates in the West agree that social credit scores could be very bad indeed, but no one understands how to codify those yet.

A fantastic explainer infographic by Visual Capitalist explains how social credit grew out of financial markets and has been used to stop people with unpaid taxes from leaving China or dog owners who don’t clean up after their dogs to potentially lose them. Both of those penalties sound fine. But there are warning signs too, including citizens being blocked from purchasing air or rail tickets or being eligible for a job.

The Bottom Line:  Nothing summarizes the dynamic nature of governments using consumer technology to govern better than what happened as we wrote this series.  We developed the idea to write about government data mining at the end of this summer and began the series in September. Since then we have had opportunities to include multiple new stories each week. 

What was written about China’s systems in 2015 and 2016 are inaccurate now. Either a new administration or a Trump reelection in 2020 will create additional programs. 

And there are ever-increasing numbers of private programs such as the DRN vehicle location database created entirely by companies that repossess vehicles. They’re tracking locations of all vehicles, not only the ones they’re interested in pursuing. They’re likely tracking your car too, which begs an answer to the oft-asked: whose data is it anyway?

Google Core Update – Spotlight #311
News

Good Monday morning. It’s September 30th. Shanah tova. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year holiday, began at sundown local time yesterday and ends tomorrow. 

Today’s Spotlight takes about 4 minutes to read. Here is a contact form if you want to talk about anything here.

2. News To Know Now

1. MIT researchers say that limiting WhatsApp’s distribution reduces the amount of disinformation publicized. The Facebook owned company limited accounts to forwarding messages from 256 groups to 20 groups and again to 5 groups. That’s important because an Oxford social media study released last week found that 70 countries are using computational propaganda to influence public opinion with 25 of them partnering with private firms to publish disinformation.

2.  Facebook will neutralize some fear-based advertising on Facebook and Instagram by creating rules to block certain weight loss products and cosmetic procedures from being displayed to users under the age of 18.

3. An ability to preserve thousands of languages spoken by small numbers of people is one overlooked benefit of social media according to a thoughtful essay by Dr. Raphael T. Garcia. He writes that YouTube’s reach and capabilities allow activists to preserve languages that may only be spoken by thousands of people.

3.  Government Data Mining, Part 3: The Algorithms 

Our government data mining analysis covers four areas over four weeks.

1. Facial recognition’s growth – two weeks ago
2. Ancillary data from applications – last week
3. National and local algorithms to make sense of all the data – below
4. Extensions into areas like personal health records and trackers  – next week

DNA testing at home led to big databases stuffed with results—and helped police solve multiple cold case crimes, including a 52 year old murder case in Seattle. GEDmatch, one of the larger aggregators of uploaded DNA data, is the database police most often use. That old Seattle case and the Golden State Killer case received headline attention, but law enforcement agencies are solving dormant cases every week using this unique collaboration between the public and law enforcement.

Users can opt-in to allow police genealogy experts to work with crime scene DNA results, genealogy hobbyist results, and create family trees for people who are still living. 

Technology is also fueling the New York Police Department’s real life exampleofa detective movie staple. Using software they developed and then made public for free, the NYPD uses Patternizr to find similarities between crimes. Like the genealogy situation, Patternizr requires human analysts to sort through the program’s output and decide which results to send to detectives.

Police are also finding new ways to use older technology like cameras and scanners. In London, the BBC reported that police tested rail passengers for hidden explosives or knives using new scanners that providing imaging from up to thirty feet away. Cameras are more widely used in other countries to surveil cities according to Comparitech. Their overview shows that London and Atlanta are the only non-Chinese cities on a list of the ten most surveilled cities, but plenty of western cities made the top 20, including Chicago, Sydney, and Berlin.

Benign social media use exists throughout law enforcement. We’ve all read tweets and social media updates about events in our communities as well as efforts to humanize officers. For example, the Gloucester (NJ) Police post images of recovered bicycles on Pinterest. But for every wholesome use of technology, we also see complaints like a 2016 ACLU of California warning about some police departments tracking activists and their movements on social media.

Next week: learn about the wild ways some law enforcement technologists hope to fight future crime.

Read Part One of the series, Facial Recognition’s Growth
Read Part two of the series, Tattletale Apps

4.  Google Updates Core Search Algorithm

This chart shows a website that Sue and I have been optimizing for a long time. We tried some new things recently and were happy to see daily traffic go from around 1,400 to 1,700. That’s a big jump. We were feeling pretty cocky about it until Google rolled out a core search algorithm update on September 24. You can see September 24th on the chart., It’s marked with a 2,700.

So what is a core search update and how do you get one?

  • Google’s search results are in constant flux.
  • More than 3,000 changes are made each year. 
  • Every few months, there is a big adjustment called a Google core search update.
  • Industry searchers can see the impact across many sites.
  • About half of all search marketers say that this update had no effect. 
  • But for individual websites like the one shown here, traffic can grow 50% overnight.

When we tell people that Google essentially sets the parameters for search, we mean that over the long haul most sites that do the right things prosper. Those who don’t (or even those who cheat) may see temporary improvements, but they always end up penalized or worse.

Google advises organizations that good search engine optimization (SEO) is iterative and improves over time. They also tell people that months can elapse before results are seen. That was our experience with this site.  We managed a website relaunch that improved the site’s mobile speed and usability in late May.  We saw early improvements, and by August, we were seeing dramatic improvement even without the huge increase in late September.

And yes, another site can absolutely be prioritized over this one in the future when there is another Google core update. Good search is an ongoing process. Google tells people that, and we assure you of that after working in search for more than ten years.

But the view from the deck is awfully nice when your ship comes in.

5. Debugged: Lottery Winners

Lottery winners also have a ship come in, but “conventional wisdom” said that they felt that they were worse off despite having won the money.

A study for a new economics textbook makes a compelling case that a 1978 academic paper on the subject only had twenty-two respondents.  That is certainly not a lot of people. Another study in 2007 only had 137 responses. That’s also too small a sample.

Read the Vox explainer about lottery winners being happy to win money.

6. Also in the Spotlight

Facebook is testing hiding like counts like we told you they would last week. The test began in Australia on September 27th, according to Techcrunch.

Attractive singles in your area may not be waiting suggested the FTC when it sued Match.com for deceptive advertising, Engadget reports.

Fake domain renewal invoices are commonplace, but Domain News Wire is showing one that uses a real PayPal invoice. Bottom line from us: if we’re not already managing your domain, you should only renew it or pay anything directly at the domain registrar’s site you used.

7. Great Data: See What Members of Congress Really Tweet About

The best looking data project I’ve ever seen for Twitter is also the newest. The Pudding has created awesome visualizations for issues and individual members with lots of easy-to-use options including time.

I lost an hour to this thing and I want more.

8. Protip: Your Clipboard History

One of the fun and useful things that Microsoft added to Windows 10 is the ability to see past clipboard entries.

Lifehacker shows you how to do it on Mac or PC.

9. Bizarre Bazaar (strange stuff for sale online)

Unique holiday gift alert. Emerald Heritage puts a spin on those buy a square foot of a country for fifty bucks offers. They’re using a location that Game of Thrones filmed at, knocked the price down to about $35 and include upgrades like maps and choose your own plot. Want some more space? You and a special friend can buy adjoining 9 square foot plots, fly to Ireland, and practice standing in them.

But it’s a smart use of the GoT affiliation, aggressively priced, and gift worthy. 

10. Coffee Break: The Typewriter Simulator

For those who learned how to type on a machine with clicks, clacks, and bells, this online simulator mimics carriage returns, correction paper, and prove how much of your speed on modern keyboards will not translate back to typewriters.

Hands on home row…and begin.