Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
The biggest issue today is everything is done through feeling/emotion and it is no longer about the facts or distribution of the correct information. If groups feel something is correct all facts will be ignored just like facebook. Millions of people enjoy the feeling of connection even though the facts point to everything you do seems to be tracked in one way or the other...
And the Facebook scandals just keep on coming. Last week an article was published in The New York Times which revealed the controversial social media monopoly “reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers — including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft, and Samsung — over the last decade”.
According to their company sources, it’s been reported that these data partnerships were established even before Facebook apps were placed on smartphones, raising further concerns about privacy protections and whether the company is in violation of a 2011 consent decree issued with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
The most concerning data partnership, however, is Facebook’s ties with companies such as Huawei, the telecommunications giant with known ties to the communist government in China, which caused the FBI, CIA, and NSA to label them a national security threat earlier this year. These U.S. officials seem to believe Huawei’s products are being used as a “Trojan Horse” for the Chinese government to spy on international customers, yet Facebook continued the partnership regardless.
Revelations from the Snowden Documents detail how the NSA was fighting back against Huawei, mass-hacking that very same telecom-company during 2014, four years after the company signed their agreement with Facebook. Spiegel Online reports not only did the NSA manage to intercept company emails, they even managed to secure Huawei’s entire source code of products — giving the NSA free reign to scour the company from top to bottom.
“Facebook allowed the device companies access to the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent, even after declaring that it would no longer share such information with outsiders,” explained The Times’ journalists Michael LaForgia, Nicholas Confessore and Gabriel J.X. Dance. “Some device makers could retrieve personal information even from users’ friends who believed they had barred any sharing.”
Facebook has filed to patent a system that can remotely activate the microphone on someone’s phone using inaudible signals broadcast via a television.
The patent application describes a system where an audio fingerprint embedded in TV shows or ads, inaudible to human ears, would trigger the phone, tablet or long-rumoured smart speaker to turn on the microphone and start recording “ambient audio of the content item”. The recording could then be matched to a database of content to allow Facebook to identify what the individual was watching – like Shazam for TV, but without the individual choosing to activate the system.
Diagrams accompanying the patent application highlight how the technology would know which adult or child within a household was watching a particular broadcast.
The patent, first spotted by the New York Times, positions the technology as a way for broadcasters to know exactly who is watching their TV shows or ads and for how long. The same system could then be used to build viewing profiles of individual members of a household for better content recommendation and more targeted advertising.
Privacy experts are concerned about the intrusion into people’s homes, particularly as the ambient audio recording would likely catch snippets of people’s private conversations without their knowledge.
“It’s extremely disconcerting for privacy to have an inaudible beacon as it means they want to make it not obvious to the user that the device is listening,” said William Budington, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Such a system could also give Facebook a better understanding of people’s social connections as it would show the social network which people were meeting up in real life.
Facebook was quick to downplay the patent filing.
“It is common practice to file patents to prevent aggression from other companies. Because of this, patents tend to focus on future-looking technology that is often speculative in nature and could be commercialised by other companies,” said Facebook’s head of intellectual property, Allen Lo, in a statement.
“The technology in this patent has not been included in any of our products, and never will be.”
Facebook isn’t the first company to design a system that uses secretly broadcast audio signals to track people’s viewing habits. In 2015, a company called SilverPush developed ultrasonic audio “beacons” within TV commercials that could be identified by any device running apps that incorporated SilverPush’s software.
The system allows for far more accurate tracking of people’s viewing habits at an individual level.
Google has confirmed that private emails sent and received by Gmail users can sometimes be read by third-party app developers.
People who have connected third-party apps to their accounts may have unwittingly given external developers permission to read their messages.
One company told the Wall Street Journal that the practice was "common" and a "dirty secret".
Google indicated that the practice was not against its policies.
One security expert said it was "surprising" that Google allowed it.
Gmail is the world's most popular email service with 1.4 billion users.
Google lets people connect their account to third-party email management tools, or services such as travel planning and price comparisons.
When linking an account to an external service, people are asked to grant certain permissions - which often include the ability to "read, send, delete and manage your email".
According to the Wall Street Journal, this permission sometimes allows employees of third-party apps to read users' emails.
