We have all heard of the bizillionaire who dropped out of College and became fabulously wealthy and happy, but let’s face it, you are not Marc Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. You can also find the odd 90 year old still smoking a pack a day, but again, we both know Read more…
The first time you heard of antitrust laws being used to break up large companies you likely thought that that it would result in a destruction wealth. Depending upon your political persuasion or past experience with the company, that may or may not have bothered you. However, it is important Read more…
If you think Samsung can’t get over blowing up batteries and Telsa can do no wrong… your wrong 🙂 . Samsung moved up 28 places between 2018 and 2019 while Tesla dropped a stunning 39 places in the same period. The following research conducted by Harris Insights and Analytics with Read more…
The Backfire Effect is part of a larger physiological phenomenon called Confirmation Bias. Confirmation Bias is the human desire to seek information that backs up what we already believe and avoid information that disproves our beliefs. A Backfire occurs with more emotionally drawn positions, like politics or abortion, that causes Read more…
This interesting video explains that while the world economy has recovered from the 2008 economic collapse, wages are still only growing at the rate of inflation; that is half of what they were growing before the Great Recession. This is because the 80% of corporate profits are now concentrated in Read more…
Below is a list of current serious Facebook legal issues:
The Canadian Federal Government and the Province of BC agreed to join the separate investigations into Facebook user data being sent to AggegateIQ (part of the Cambridge Analytica scandal)
In the aftermath of the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has upped the reported number of user profiles included from the original number 50 million to 86 million. Most of those users profiles were from Americans but 660,000 of them were Canadian. Those are some big numbers. To give Read more…
There is a crisis at Facebook because of the constant negative media coverage of the Cambridge Analytica scandal causing users to question staying on the product and that has caused Facebook stock drop a truly staggering $70B in value in 11 days. It’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, owns 28.2% of the company so he has lost $20B personally.
There is a also crisis being experienced by some Facebook users that have finally realized Facebook and nearly all other ‘free’ online services are harvesting personal data to allow others to micro-target advertising at them. WHO DIDN’T KNOW THIS ALREADY? Apparently millions of people thought Facebook was some benevolent do-gooder, that provided a complex service for free because they were nice people.
The saying in the industry holds as true today as it did in the 1999 when it was coined: “You are not the customer; you are the product“.
The only ethically questionable behavior by Facebook in this current crisis, was corrected way back in the spring of 2015. That issue was the ability of users to share not only their own information, but that of their friends (if those friends had not changed default privacy settings).
Facebook made USD$40B in 2017 and that was another record amount for them. They did this by monitoring you, figuring out what you might be interested in and then allowing advertisers to target you personally, just like they said they would.
The along came Cambridge Analytica who used a large set of Facebook user data and figured out patterns they could use to apply to other Facebook users. Cambridge Analytica organized the social media efforts for the Donald Trump Presidential campaign and now it is a political crisis too.
It is important to note that:
Now that much of the dust has settled on Cambridge Analytica‘s misuse of Facebook users data the sad story can now be told.
It is critical to note upfront that Facebook was not hacked and that the information that was misused was provided voluntarily by Facebook Users. The only breach was a breach of misplaced trust.
270,000 people responded and at the time it was possible for users of that app to provide limited information on their ‘friends’, if those ‘friends’ Facebook privacy settings allowed it