Saturday, April 13, 2019

Transparency tool on FB inadvertently provides window into confusing maze of companies who have your data

Transparency tool on FB inadvertently provides window into confusing maze of companies who have your data - BuzzFeedNews – “On Facebook under Settings, there’s a page in the Ads section where you can view your Ad Preferences. Most of this is fairly straightforward — choices about how you’ll allow ads and how advertisers target you based on things like what pages you’ve liked. But there’s one section there that will probably surprise you: a list of advertisers “Who use a contact list added to Facebook.”…
According to the description, “These advertisers are running ads using a contact list they or their partner uploaded that includes info about you. This info was collected by the advertiser or their partner. Typically this information is your email address or phone number.” The list of Advertisers, a feature Facebook added for transparency, is incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t an expert in advertising (and even some who are!), and leads to the unsettling realization that…, man, our data is out there and trafficked without our consent and being used by advertisers in ways we have no clue about…”

Overload! We live in an age of too much information, of anoverabundance of news. Will slowing down help us regain our sense of what is going on? 


Trump considered sending migrants to Democratic strongholds

The White House considered a plan to release detained immigrants into "sanctuary cities", a plan that critics branded as an effort to use migrants as pawns to go after political opponents.




Obama’s Presidential Library Is Already Digital

The Atlantic – The question now is how to leverage its nature to make it maximally useful and used…”The debate about the Obama library exhibits a fundamental confusion. Given its origins and composition, the Obama library is already largely digital. The vast majority of the record his presidency left behind consists not of evocative handwritten notes, printed cable transmissions, and black-and-white photographs, but email, Word documents, and JPEGs. The question now is how to leverage its digital nature to make it maximally useful and used…the record of President Obama’s White House: 1.5 billion “pages” in the initial collection, already more than 33 times the size of President Johnson’s library. I use “pages” because the Obama Foundation has noted that “95 percent of the Obama Presidential Records were created digitally and have no paper equivalents.” The email record alone for these eight years is 300 million messages, which NARA (the U.S. National Archives and Records