Facebook asked for users’ email passwords, then “unintentionally uploaded” people’s contact lists without asking for separate permission, according to Business Insider. Stop trying to explain these violations one at a time. A pattern is increasingly obvious. To that end: here are the fundamental laws of Facebook, which will explain not just this violation but all…
Is this wrong? “Samsung has released a new product. They worked really hard on it.” According to style books, it is ungrammatical. “Nouns that denote a unit take singular verbs and pronouns” says the AP stylebook. Let’s look a bunch of instances. In the groups of statements below, which seems right to you? 1a. Dell…
The actress Felicity Huffman just pleaded guilty to bribing college authorities to get her daughter into college Oliva Jade into USC. Then she apologized briefly and effectively. A true apology admits guilt and addresses the harm the apologizer caused to specific people. It isn’t “I’m sorry you were hurt,” it is “I’m sorry I hurt…
A decade ago, in the social media business book Groundswell, Charlene Li and I described online social technologies as an uncontrollable grass-roots movement. I had hoped social media would be a force for good. But now Facebook, along with its subsidiary Instagram, dominates that movement. It controls more of our collective attention – and gathers…
Last week, the editors of the Boston Globe requested me to write an op-ed on Facebook and what needs to happen in the wake of its consistently poor behavior. Here’s a link to what they published, which will appear in Sunday’s “Ideas” section. (If you’re not a subscriber, you’ll have to provide your email address…
Thanks to research by Samuel Braslow of Los Angeles Magazine, we now know what kind of California vanity plate requests are rejected for being . . . well, a bit iffy. It’s a great case study in the challenges of content blocking policy; “I know it when I see it” is no way to determine…
Tim Murtaugh, Director of Communications for Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, sent a memo to TV producers regarding who they should put on TV. Imagine what would happen if we took this seriously? The text of Murtaugh’s memo to producers at networks like CNN is below. Memorandum To: Television Producers From: Tim Murtaugh Director of Communications,…
I’ve characterized Facebook as an addiction. I think I was wrong. After yesterday’s outage, now I think the correct way to describe our relationship with Facebook is as codependency. Codependency is “a psychological condition or a relationship in which a person is controlled or manipulated by another who is affected with a pathological condition.” (Merriam-Webster)….
A week ago, Facebook announced a shift to focus more on messaging (or as Mark Zuckerberg designated it, Facebook’s “privacy-focused” vision). I suggested that this would allow the company to personalized its ads even more. Would this even be possible if, as the company promised, the messages would be encrypted? A guy I respect on…