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Thursday, December 14, 2023

Study concludes that 74% of all web traffic last year was generated by malicious bots

Facebook watches teens online as they prep for college

PopSci: “Picture a high school student who wants to go to college, likes to cheer on her school’s football team, and plays in a sport or two herself. .  One day after school, she signs up for an official ACT account so she can schedule her college entrance exam and see what score she gets after taking it.

 Then, she researches a few colleges through the Common App’s website, and like more than a million students every year, she uses the site to start an application for her dream college.  She spends a few minutes starting a presentation for class using the website Prezi. On a homework break, she registers for her high school’s after-school sports program through a service called ArbiterSports, then she hops on her phone, remembering to order a yearbook through the company Jostens.

 Long day over, she takes out her laptop and flips on her school’s big football game through the NFHS Network, a subscription service for high school sports. Here’s what the student doesn’t know: Although she surfed the internet in the privacy of her home, Facebook saw much of what she did. Every single site she visited used the Meta Pixel, a tracking tool that silently collects and transmits information to Facebook as users browse the web, according to testing by The Markup. Millions of invisible pixels are embedded on websites across the internet, allowing businesses and organizations to target their customers on Facebook with ads…”


Lessons in Separation of power - Parliament needs to take charge of the bureaucracy as Robdebt should shatter any naivety Australians may hold about the ‘purity’ of government. Robodebt shows that governments will lie and cheat, particularly when transparency and accountability are more a public relations con than reality.
- Spotted On Twitter


UK: Victims lost £2.7 million to charity fraud last year
 
Santander bank in the UK estimates that four out of five car ads on Facebook Marketplace are scams; may be 10,000 ads up at any given time
 
Study concludes that 74% of all web traffic last year was generated by malicious bots
 
Europol announces recent coordinated efforts resulted in arrests of 1013 money mules worldwide
 
Fraud Studies: Here are links to the studies I’ve written for the Better Business Bureau: puppy fraud, romance fraud; BEC fraud, sweepstakes/lottery fraud,  tech support fraud, romance fraud money mules, crooked movers, government imposters, online vehicle sale scams, rental fraud, gift cards,  free trial offer frauds,  job scams,  online shopping fraud,  fake check fraudand crypto scams
 
Fraud News Around the worldHumor FTC and CFPBVirus Benefit Theft Social mediaKidnapping and forced to scamBusiness Email compromise fraud Ransomware and data breachesBitcoin and cryptocurrencyATM SkimmingJamaica and Lottery FraudRomance Fraud and Sextortion 


Harvard Gutted Initial Team Examining Facebook Files Following $500M Donation


Whistleblower Aid: “Harvard Gutted Initial Team Examining Facebook Files Following $500 Million Donation from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Whistleblower Aid Client Reveals. University’s Former Disinformation – Expert Joan Donovan Calls for Investigation. Harvard University dismantled its prestigious team of online disinformation experts after a foundation run by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated $500 million to the university, a whistleblower disclosure filed by Whistleblower Aid reveals. 


Dr. Joan Donovan, one of the world’s leading experts on social media disinformation, says she ran into a wall of institutional resistance and eventual termination after she and her team at Harvard’s Technology and Social Change Research Project (TASC) began analyzing thousands of documents exposing Facebook’s knowledge of how the platform has caused significant public harm.. In her whistleblower declaration, Donovan lays out in detail how she and her research team at Harvard’s Kennedy School (HKS) came under sudden scrutiny from the school’s dean, Douglas Elmendorf, and other Kennedy School leaders, after they started working on Haugen’s Facebook Files – a cache Donovan describes as “the most important documents in the history of the internet.”

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