Another foreseeable conseqence

Surprising nobody except, presumably, crypto-bros everywhere, the United States Congress has taken an interest in FTX.

As reported by The Block:

The House Financial Services Committee will hold a hearing next month on FTX’s collapse and the broader implications for the digital asset industry.

[...]

“Oversight is one of Congress’ most critical functions and we must get to the bottom of this for FTX’s customers and the American people,” said Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., the top committee Republican, in a statement. “It’s essential that we hold bad actors accountable so responsible players can harness technology to build a more inclusive financial system.”

[Note for Rep. McHenry: There are no responsible players in crypto. Just FYI.]

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., the current but likely outgoing chair of the House Financial Services Committee, added:

“The fall of FTX has posed tremendous harm to over one million users, many of whom were everyday people who invested their hard-earned savings into the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, only to watch it all disappear within a matter of seconds. Unfortunately, this event is just one out of many examples of cryptocurrency platforms that have collapsed just this past year.”

[Oh, good, someone else remembers that Terra/Luna happened.]

It bears emphasizing that Rep. McHenry is a Republican, while Rep. Waters is a Democrat. Yes, in spite of the fact that MAGA Republicans are extremely pro-crypto, the fact that crypto is sufficiently awful that there ought to be a law has bipartisan support.

This is why you should still be ad-blocking online

Having just pointed out how different Google's advertising-fuelled business is from Facebook's surveillance-fuelled shop, I suppose it's only fair to point out that being distinctly different from, and less evil than, Facebook, doesn't automatically make the crew at Google into paragons of virtue.

Por ejemplo, take this report from Huffpost:

The ad caught Gordon Turner’s eye immediately. It was an official-looking online video encouraging viewers to apply for the “Senior Booster Program,” which entitled those 65 and older to government-issued payments of $1,728. For Turner, a 77-year-old Texan on disability benefits who lives alone and financially supports his elderly mother, that kind of cash could go a long way. So he clicked the ad’s link right away to input his personal information, and he waited.

Unfortunately for Turner — and the more than 10 million others who’ve viewed this video — no such program exists, and no check will be coming in the mail. Behind the Google ad, and hundreds of others like it, is 1111 LLC, a little-known affiliate marketing company run by a former pro MMA fighter from the Canadian prairies. The firm, which also operates a network of pro-Trump news sites and MAGA merch e-shops, has quietly erupted into one of Google’s top-performing and highest-spending political advertisers

1111 LLC has pumped out a deluge of slickly produced videos via Google ads in recent months that promote entirely fabricated government handouts [...] Many of these ads are designed to look like news segments, with miscontextualized footage of President Joe Biden at his desk appearing to sign documents related to the bogus payouts. [...] They have collectively been viewed well over 100 million times in a matter of months, according to public Google data, sparking false hope in an untold number of households nationwide as the coronavirus pandemic drags into its third calendar year.

Shady companies fleecing people online is a story as old as the internet, but what’s noteworthy in this ruse is Google’s complicity. The tech behemoth has pocketed more than $2.2 million from 1111 LLC since September to run ads that cruelly con its own users while flagrantly violating its own policies — and, experts say, federal law.

Dammit, Google, must you?

A while back, I was watching The WAN Show, a weekly tech-focused podcast on Linus Tech Tips, when Linus, a YouTuber who makes a significant chunk of his company's revenue from Google Adsense, opined that ad-blocking was tantamount to theft; if not outright piracy, it was at the very least privateering.

Linus was wrong. There's a false equivalency at work in his argument, in which ads served up by Google are essentially the same thing as the ads that you'd see on network television: a minor nuisance which is borne by the audience in exchange for otherwise-free programming. The problem is that online ads aren't at all the same as the TV ads of the long ago time; online ads are lousy with scams and grift, when they aren't actually installing malware on your system when they're auto-executed by your browser. 

Do you remember cryptojacking? Because I do.

And then there's the creepy surveillance aspect of things; even Google, whose business model is still viable if the link between advertising and surveillance is broken, isn't yet a surveillance-free zone. There's a reason why the U.S. Congress is marking up legislation right now which will mandate a stop to the process; a looming legal problem that Google is trying to get ahead of by making cross-app tracking more difficult, much like Apple has already done.

And even if online ads weren't dangerous to your security, invasive to your privacy, and occasionally outright-illegal scams which Google not only fails to detect, but profits from, online ads are intrusive to the online experience, to a truly obnoxious degree.

Do you remember when a U.S. Congress, who couldn't agree at the time to keep their own fucking lights on, came together to mandate a decibel cap for television ads? Because I do.

Do I like LTT's content? Yes, I do. It their content so good that I'd be willing to give up my privacy, my security, my emotional well-being, and subject any number of desperate people to an endless (and apparently unstoppable) fire-hose of lies, scams, phishing attacks, misinformation, radicalization, and addiction? Yes, addiction; our current epidemic of opiate addicts is a direct consequence of Oxycontin advertisements which were pumped into people's homes, depicting an opiate painkiller as addiction-free, side-effect-free, and totally safe.

BTW, Purdue Pharmaceuticals, who were responsible for that ad campaign? They're desperately trying top settle the resulting class-action wrongful-death lawsuit... so far, without success.

Online ads aren't a relatively-innocuous thing which we endure to get access to free content. They're often dangerous, frequently outright evil, and demand far too much in exchange for showing us a few minutes of a movie trailer on YouTube... which, I'll remind you, is already a fucking advertisement, and shouldn't need to also be supported by selling additional pre- and end-roll ads... or mid-roll ads, for that matter.

So, no, Linus, ad-blocking isn't piracy, or privateering, or theft of any description. It's self-defence. If Google want me to stop blocking the ads they're hosting and serving, then that ad stream needs to be independently certified as 100% clean, by people whose word we can trust on the subject. In other words, not by Google themselves, who have a vested material interest in shading the truth on this subject.

This week in Facebook

It's been a while since I've done one of these, eh? Let's get right to it.

Do you remember when I said that Facebook's ongoing and ever-deepening scandals were going to end with someone from the firm doing jail time? Well, it looks like those wheels of justice may just be grinding slowly in the direction of no less a figure than Mark Zuckerberg, himself.

From arstechnica:

Mark Zuckerberg has "repeatedly lied to the American people about privacy," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said in a recent interview with the Willamette Week, a Portland alternative weekly newspaper. "I think he ought to be held personally accountable, which is everything from financial fines to—and let me underline this—the possibility of a prison term."

Zuckerberg, Wyden said, has "hurt a lot of people."

[...]

Technology companies, Wyden argued, have "done practically everything wrong since the 2016 election." He said he recently told technology companies: "If you don't get serious on moderation, you're going to have a lot of people coming after you."

Yikes.

Sheryl Sandberg's here to make it better worse

It looks like Facebook's creepy teen-data-collection app is not going away, mainly because Facebook can't help themselves. Sheryl Sandberg, who I once praised for having better communication skills than Mark Zuckerberg, only to be proven 100% wrong about that during the whole Definers Media business, has once again stepped forward to try to direct the narrative, and her defense of Facebook appears to be almost entirely composed of lies.

As reported by Gizmodo:

Chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg’s defense? The teens “consented.”

“So I want to be clear what this is,” Sandberg told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin on Wednesday. “This is a Facebook Research app. It’s very clear to the people who participated. It’s completely opt-in. There is a rigorous consent flow and people are compensated. It’s a market research program.”

“Now, that said, we know we have work to do to make sure people’s data is protected,” Sandberg added, repeating a thoroughly unconvincing line that has been rolled out so many times amid Facebook’s constant scandals that it has barreled into self-satire territory. “It’s your information. You put it on Facebook, you need to know what is happening. In this case the people who chose to participate in this program did.”

“But we definitely have work to do and we’ve done it,” Sandberg said, just to hammer home that line.

Here's the problem, though: the teens that Facebook bribed into accepting this app on their phones almost certainly didn't know how comprehensive the data collection would be. They didn't know that Facebook was behind the app, either, since Facebook took pains to hide their involvement:

Facebook had users sideload the app and avoided submitting it through TestFlight, Apple’s beta testing system, which requires Apple review.

And Facebook didn't do anything to protect the privacy of these teens; Apple had already blocked the app before Facebook made a show of "voluntarily" taking it down.

U.S. lawmakers, naturally, are furious, as reported by The Verge:

Tuesday night, a TechCrunch investigation revealed that Facebook had been secretly paying teenagers to install a VPN that let the company see nearly everything they did on their phones. Today, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are lashing out at the tech giant, raising new questions about how the company might fare in future privacy legislation.

“Wiretapping teens is not research, and it should never be permissible.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said in a statement. “Instead of learning its lesson when it was caught spying on consumers using the supposedly ‘private’ Onavo VPN app, Facebook rebranded the intrusive app and circumvented Apple’s attempts to protect iPhone users.”

Blumenthal said that he would be sending letters to Apple and Google to probe them on their involvement by hosting the apps.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) tweeted, “Wait a minute. Facebook PAID teenagers to install a surveillance device on their phones without telling them it gave Facebook power to spy on them? Some kids as young as 13. Are you serious?” This is Hawley’s first year serving in the Senate, and he has already positioned himself as a strong conservative voice on tech. At his first Judiciary hearing in January, Hawley lambasted President Trump’s attorney general nominee with questions regarding his stance on regulating Silicon Valley companies.

Yes, folks, that's bipartisan agreement that something needs to be done about Facebook, in a country where it took the two major political parties over a month to agree that government was something that needed to exist, and be paid for.

It's not all doom and gloom for Facebook, though. Advertisers have apparently decided that they don't care how terrible Facebook's image is, leading to a 61% jump in earnings despite the firm's bad press, and Facebook managed to gain a few users over the quarter, too. The result? A surge in their share price, of course, meaning that the company's new, more combative media strategy is likely to be the tone we hear from them going forwards. And why not? It's working for them, at least in the near term. And if there's one thing on which you can rely, it's that bad corporate behaviour that gets rewarded with increased share prices and executive bonuses is guaranteed to continue.

All in all, it looks like this year in Facebook is going to be an even bumpier ride than last year, with #deleteFacebook having stalled, Facebook's soul-less advertiser clients having returned, and Facebook's increasingly defiant tone in the face of a continued litany of scandal having finally got the attention of U.S. lawmakers, who are already proposing legislation to put Facebook back in its place.

Buckle up, sunshine. It gets even rougher from here.

Facebook's very bad year gets even worse

It turns out that Facebook couldn't even make it through one more day before getting hit with more bad news. This time, though, it's not news of their incompetence, or their outright malice, that's wrecking their week; rather, it's news of actual consequences for Facebook. Finally.

As reported by The Washington Post:

Nine months after a whistleblower revealed Facebook had allowed outsiders to improperly access personal information about millions of its users, the social media giant faced its first major rebuke from regulators in the United States -- a lawsuit filed by the attorney general of the District of Columbia.

The lawsuit from Karl Racine on Wednesday targeted Facebook mainly for its entanglement with Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that harvested names, “likes” and other data from the social site without users’ permission. The incident, which affected more than 87 million users beginning in 2014, came to light this March, sparking investigations around the world.

The opening salvo from the D.C. attorney general ended a protracted silence on the part of many U.S. regulators, who have faced immense pressure -- from members of Congress and average web users -- to discipline Facebook for what many see as a reckless disregard for online privacy. Some of Silicon Valley’s toughest critics have urged the government to slap Facebook with severe fines and other penalties that might force it to rethink a business model that monetizes the most intimate details of consumers’ lives.

“It’s about time,” said Christopher Wylie, who exposed the Cambridge Analytica controversy through reports in several news organizations.

[...]

The D.C. case threatens to develop into an even worse headache for Facebook. Racine told reporters that his office has “had discussions with a number of other states that are similarly interested in protecting the data and personal information of their consumers,” though he cautioned there is no formal agreement for them to proceed jointly. And the attorney general’s aides said they could add additional charges to their lawsuit as other details about Facebook’s privacy lapses become public.

Hello, again, Christopher Wylie! I'd honestly forgotten that he even existed. But I digress...

Facebook’s disclosures under scrutiny by the FBI, SEC, FTC, and DOJ

When the extent of the Cambridge Analytica scandal was first breaking back in March, I wrote this:

There are people at Facebook who signed off on a business plan that involved collecting legally protected information about people with neither their knowledge nor their consent, and selling that data to third parties; people who then decided not to notify users when it was crystal clear that the whole shady business had gone very, very wrong. Those people will not just be facing lawsuits; those people will be facing jail time... in addition to the lawsuits.

Some readers (all two of you 😃) may have thought that I was being somewhat hyperbolic with that  statement. And, in fairness, apart from a few relatively uneventful appearances before lawmakers in the U.S. and EU, Facebook was looking like they might have escaped the worst of the possible outcomes that they could have been facing. But appearances can deceive, and Facebook themselves are now confirming that they've been under investigation, by multiple U.S. federal agencies, since at least May.

As reported by the Washington Post:

A federal investigation into Facebook’s sharing of data with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica has broadened to focus on the actions and statements of the tech giant and now involves three agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to people familiar with the official inquiries.

Representatives for the FBI, the SEC and the Federal Trade Commission have joined the Department of Justice in its inquiries about the two companies and the sharing of personal information of 71 million Americans, suggesting the wide-ranging nature of the investigation, said five people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a probe that remains incomplete.

[...]

The questioning from federal investigators centers on what Facebook knew three years ago and why the company didn’t reveal it at the time to its users or investors, as well as any discrepancies in more recent accounts, among other issues, according to these people.The Capitol Hill testimony of Facebook officials, including Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, also is being scrutinized as part of the probe, said people familiar with the federal inquiries.

Facebook confirmed that it had received questions from the federal agencies and said it was sharing information and cooperating in other ways. “We are cooperating with officials in the US, UK and beyond," said Facebook spokesman Matt Steinfeld.

This puts yesterday's revelations (from last Friday's midnight document dump) in a different light. Who wants to bet that Facebook's 747-page infodump will be mostly information that investigators already know? Who else thinks that they were trying to get out ahead of the narrative on investigative heat that's about to get way hotter, in addition to burying as many juicy details as possible in the Friday night news graveyard?

Who else thinks that they might not get away with either of those things, this time around?

About-Face(book)

I'm just going to jump straight to the lede, from CNBC:

Facebook has admitted that it gave dozens of companies access to its users’ data after saying it had restricted access to such data back in 2015, the latest wrinkle in a firestorm over how the social network manages user information.

In news first reported by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook handed a 747-page document to U.S. lawmakers released late Friday. In that cache of information, Facebook said it granted 61 companies like AOL, Nike, UPS and dating app Hinge a "one-time" six-month extension to comply with its policy changes on user data. In addition, there are at least five other firms that may have accessed limited data, due to access they were granted as part of a Facebook experiment, the company added.

In 2015, Facebook said it had cut off developer access to its users’ data and their friends.

What's that you say? Facebook said one thing about its treatment of users' data in 2015, only to be forced to admit in 2018 that their previous claims were actually bullshit? Quelle surprise!

Unlike their 450-page written response to Congressional questioning, Facebook dropped their latest coma-inducing door-stopper late on Friday, which is what you do if you're trying to bury a story; the idea is that most newsrooms have closed for the weekend, leaving only cable news channels who mostly rely on print media outlets to do their actual reporting, anyway. The Wall Street Journal, however, apparently had other ideas, and posted an extensive write-up:

Facebook provided the document to the Energy and Commerce Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives in response to hundreds of questions from the committee, which quizzed Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg during testimony in April. The committee said on its website that it received the responses shortly before midnight on Friday; the deadline for the responses was the close of business Friday.

It is Facebook’s second attempt at answering Congress’s queries [...] lawmakers asked Mr. Zuckerberg whether Facebook was in violation of a settlement the company made in 2012 with the Federal Trade Commission, under which the company is required to give its users clear and prominent notice and obtain their express consent before sharing their information beyond their privacy settings. Facebook said in the document that it has not violated the FTC act.

Facebook indicated it has struggled to fully reconstruct what happened to its users’ information. “It is possible we have not been able to identify some extensions,” Facebook said about companies that had access to users’ friends’ information past the 2015 cutoff.

Q:  Did you, Facebook, violate your 2012 settlement with the FTC?

A: No, because we changed our policies three years after that, which is clearly good enough to keep us out of trouble.

Q: Are you sure?

A: OK, it's possible that we issued extensions to some of our favourite corporate customers after 2015. So, maybe. But probably not. [Three weeks later.] OK, yes. Yes, we did. Can we please bury this in a Friday night news dump?

[And... scene!]

Seriously, somebody needs to hold Facebook accountable for this shit.

Slightly unexpected...

After Tuesday's underwhelming performance by U.S. Senators, I wasn't expecting Mark Zuckerberg's testimony before the House to go much differently. It turns out that I might have been a bit too pessimistic about that.

From the NY Times:

While Tuesday’s Senate hearing contained tough questions, the lawmakers were generally deferential to the executive. That was less the case in the House, where lawmakers repeatedly interrupted Mr. Zuckerberg and chided him for not answering questions to their satisfaction.

Lawmakers on both side of the aisle on Wednesday pushed Mr. Zuckerberg on his company’s handling of user data. They were particularly focused on the platform’s privacy settings, which put the onus on users to protect their privacy.

[...]

Representative Greg Walden, Republican of Oregon and chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, kicked off the hearing by declaring that “while Facebook has certainly grown, I worry it has not matured.”

Mr. Walden floated the prospect of regulation, saying that “I think it is time to ask whether Facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things.”

Later in the hearing, Mr. Zuckerberg said regulation was “inevitable.” But he repeated that the right kind of regulation mattered and he pointed out that some regulation could only solidify the power of a large company like Facebook, which could hurt start-ups.

Facebook's CEO not only recognizing that new regulation is "inevitable," but asserting that new regulations should not be unfairly advantageous for FB? Unexpected.

Next, the House...

With his testimony before the U.S. Senate behind him, and having made little by way of new news, Mark Zuckerberg now heads to the House, for what should be a round of an even softer questioning. House Republicans, in lockstep with their GOP President, have little to no appetite for new regulations of any kind, and are unlikely to press on any of those issues. And since they're unlikely to be even as well informed as the colleagues from the other chamber, I'm not expecting today's testimony to be much different in tone.

Now to find out if I'm right about that. Place your bets!

The U.S. Senate put their kid gloves on for Zuckerberg

Yesterday, I was genuinely curious how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's testimony would go.

On the one hand, it was a pretty friendly panel, stuffed with elected officials whose election and reelection campaigns receive substantial donations from Facebook, and from FB-connected PACs. On the other hand, the winds of public opinion have been blowing very much against FB for the past two weeks, and Senators wanting to pander to voters couldn't have asked for an easier target. It was going to be either a day of fireworks, or a snooze-fest that produced virtually no new information of note, but which one?

Well... now we know. Snooze-fest, it is. As reported by HuffPpst:

After initially apologizing and accepting responsibility for failing to protect user data, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared support for some vague form of regulation as 44 senators questioned him during his first congressional testimony.

“My position is not that there should be no regulation,” Zuckerberg said. “I think the real question, as the internet becomes more important in people’s lives, is what is the right regulation?”

Under more direct questioning, the 33-year-old billionaire refused to endorse any specific regulatory proposal. He remained on the defensive, touting his company’s idealistic vision.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) asked Zuckerberg if he would back legislation to mandate that digital platforms like Facebook obtain affirmative consent from users to collect their data for targeted advertising. Zuckerberg dodged: “In general, I think that principle is exactly right.”

When Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) raised the possibility of the U.S. enacting data protection laws similar to the new rules about to go into effect in the European Union, he dodged again. “It’s certainly worth discussing,” he said.

These kinds of easy dodges were common throughout the hearing. Zuckerberg received numerous questions that revealed simple misunderstandings about what Facebook does and how it works. He answered questions about how the company makes money (“We sell ads”), how much data it collects, whether it sells data, how targeted advertising works and whether it combines data from its many products. It wasn’t clear whether the senators really understood how Facebook worked.

This was good fodder for humor about out-of-touch senators, but it also underscored how complicated Facebook is. Here, 44 senators had a chance to interrogate the chief executive of one of the most powerful corporations in the world about how it has violated user privacy, fueled the spread of propaganda, crushed competitors with potentially unfair practices and gutted the news industry by monopolizing digital ad dollars ― and they couldn’t quite get their arms around what they were dealing with.

The senators, in some cases, were just like most of Facebook’s more than 2 billion users; not well informed about what they signed up for.

I am not surprised; I am merely disappointed.

Zuckerberg's greatest hits

Well, we now know what Mark Zuckerberg plans to say to Congress, and imagine my surprise! It's basically the most successful bits from his "apology tour" comments and press released of the past two weeks. As reported by CBC News:

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told Congress in written testimony Monday that the social media network did not do enough to prevent itself and its members' data being misused over the past few years, and he offered an apology to lawmakers.

His conciliatory tone in written testimony precedes two days of Congressional hearings, where Zuckerberg is set to answer questions about Facebook user data being improperly appropriated by a political consultancy and the role the network played in the U.S. 2016 election.

"It's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm..." he said in remarks released by the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee on Monday. "That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy."

[...]

We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake," his written testimony continued. "It was my mistake, and I'm sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm responsible for what happens here."

Some of this is literally pulled verbatim from earlier press releases, which has the effect of making them look even less sincere in retrospect, since those earlier statements now appear to be nothing more than cynical tests of material that he was prepping for the really big event; at the same time, it makes his prepared remarks to Congress appear less than sincere, since he's been field-testing various different versions of these same talking points for weeks now, something that the Congresspeople who are questioning him will doubtless be aware of.

Of course, that's just my take on it; we'll know soon enough how this plays before those Congressional committees themselves. Some pundits think that it won't be much help, though.

Today in Facebook...

I have a feeling that this will be a regular thing for a while.

To start with, I'd like to draw your attention to this great piece from Engadget:

Let’s stop pretending Facebook cares

[...]

The really great thing to come out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal is that Facebook will now start doing that thing we were previously assured at every turn they were doing all along. And all it took was everyone finding out about the harvesting and sale of everyone's data to right-wing zealots like Steve Bannon for political power. Not Facebook finding out, because they already knew. For years. In fact, Facebook knew it so well, the company legally threatened Observer and NYT to prevent their reporting on it; to keep everyone else from finding out.

[...]

When the The Guardian's 2015 article came out, Facebook pretended to care."And then," former Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie told The Observer, "all they did was write a letter."

"But literally all I had to do was tick a box and sign it and send it back, and that was it," says Wylie. "Facebook made zero effort to get the data back."

[...]

It wasn't until the NYT and The Observer prepared to publish their articles last Friday that Facebook decided to suspend Cambridge Analytica and Christopher Wylie from the platform -- in a weak attempt to get ahead of the story. Even then, it was after Facebook made legal threats on both NYT and The Observer in an effort to silence both publications.

[...]

It almost goes without saying that this whole sickening affair is more proof we didn't need that Facebook only cares when it is forced to. When the company decides it has a reputation problem. Which is the only problem they actually care about fixing. Other than that, it's all about creating more data dealer WMD's, like Facebook's impending patent to determine social class, which we can all assume will be abused until press who can afford to stand up to Facebook write an article about it.

Yes, Cambridge Analytica have definitely done bad things, but Facebook is the problem. It's heartening to see that the media is increasingly seeing past the Cambridge Analytica trees to the out-of-control Facebook forest fire. Some of them have also started paying attention to Facebook's corrosive social and psychological effects, too.

Engadget is also keeping tabs on the class action lawsuit situion (up to four), #deleteFacebook picked up steam todayt when Elon Musk deleted Tesla's and SpaceX's Facebook pages, and Facebook's share price is down 13% for the week - although, if you've got nerves of steel, now is either a great time to take a short position on Facebook, or to pick up some FB stock cheap, in the hope that they can ride this shitstorm out... and good luck with that.

The Verge has a very detailed guide up to deleting Facebook, step-by-step (#deleteFacebook), and LifeHacker has a detailed guide to finding out everything that Facebook knows about you (spoiler alert: it's really, really not easy). GQ has just posted an article about how consumers can kill Facebook. Oh, and the notoriously feckless and ineffectual U.S. Congress has apparently smelled the cross-spectrum, bi-partisan outrage, and summoned Zuckerberg to the Hill so that he can lie to them again.

I've probably missed quite a bit. This story is now so big, and so hot, that a dozen new articles are being posted about it hourly. Make no mistake about it, folks; Facebook are in some real trouble, here.

We now return you to the Singularity, already in progress...

When it comes to truly autonomous self-driving vehicles, or capital-"a" Autos, it's helpful to remember that this cost- and life-saving technology doesn't need to be perfect in order to see widespread adoption; as CGP Grey put it, they just need to be better than us. And here's the thing; they already are better than us. Waymo's Auto has been in only 14 crashes during testing, of which 13 were caused by the human drivers that the AI had to share the road with; only one was caused by the Auto's software.

With a safety record like that, there was never any question that Autos would find their way onto our roads. The only question was, "When?" How long would it take the general public to accept the presence of self-driving vehicles on our roads? How long would public unease with these new AI drivers prompt risk-averse politicians to drag their feet on giving approval for automakers to bring these autonomous autos to market?

Well, we now know some of the answers to those questions. The general public may still be working their way around to a general acceptance of this new tech, but it seems that the politicians are all done with the foot-dragging, as of last Wednesday.

From Reuters:

A U.S. House panel on Wednesday approved a sweeping proposal by voice vote to allow automakers to deploy up to 100,000 self-driving vehicles without meeting existing auto safety standards and bar states from imposing driverless car rules.

Representative Robert Latta, a Republican who heads the Energy and Commerce Committee subcommittee overseeing consumer protection, said he would continue to consider changes before the full committee votes on the measure, expected next week. The full U.S. House of Representatives will not take up the bill until it reconvenes in September after the summer recess.

[...]

Democrats praised the bipartisan proposal but said they want more changes before the full committee takes it up, including potentially adding other auto safety measures.

[...]

Separately, Republican Senator John Thune, who is working with Democrats, said Wednesday he hopes to release a draft self-driving car reform bill before the end of July. 

AI does not need to be super-intelligent to completely reshape the way we do everything; automation technologies are already good enough to replace forty to fifty percent of the work force, and the impact that will have on society is incalculable. Self-driving Autos alone can replace cab drivers (Uber and Lyft are both working on this) and truck drivers (long-haul transportation, in particular, would benefit) long before consumers get around to replacing all of their personal transports with a shiny, new, auto. The economic impact of that can't be understated; it's not just the drivers' jobs that would be replaced, but also the related businesses, like truck stops, that would suddenly find themselves obsolete, and their employees looking for increasingly rare employment.

If you were thinking that this change was decades away, then think again. The benefits of Autos, in increased safety and productivity, are simply too compelling to ignore, and the only voices that might be inclined to fight against it (i.e. labour unions) just aren't influential enough, anymore, to be able to turn the tide. This is happening. Self-driving cabs and long-haul trucks will be playing city streets and highways across the continental U.S. in a matter of just a few years, with other countries doubtless following close behind, and industrialized society will never be the same again.

This is the Singularity, happening in slow motion. AI may still be well short of the super-intelligent mark, or even human-equivalent general intelligence, but it turns out that those things are not necessary for the Singularity to occur. There's a reason why governments across the industrialized world are already looking into things like Universal Basic Income as a way of caring for the basic needs of a populace who will find themselves not merely unemployed, but unemployable, within our lifetimes, through absolutely no fault of their own.

What will society look like when 40% of the population having nothing but time on their hands? What happens when simply having a job becomes a weird sort of status symbol, instead of being simply the baseline assumption that drives our perceptions of ourselves, and of each other? I don't know; I don't think anybody knows. But the U.S. congress, in a rare display of bipartisan agreement, have just decided that everybody, both within the U.S. and without, are about to find out.

We now return you to the Singularity, already in progress.