Well beyond the realm of incompetence...

In case you were wondering... Facebook's day of bad news didn't only revolve around the consequences that they're now facing for their reckless disregard of their users' privacy. It also included new insight into that disregard for their users' privacy. As reported by The Guardian:

Facebook targets users with location-based adverts even if they block the company from accessing GPS on their phones, turn off location history in the app, hide their work location on their profile and never use the company’s “check in” feature, according to an investigation published this week.

There is no combination of settings that users can enable to prevent their location data from being used by advertisers to target them, according to the privacy researcher Aleksandra Korolova. “Taken together,” Korolova says, “Facebook creates an illusion of control rather than giving actual control over location-related ad targeting, which can lead to real harm.”

Facebook users can control to an extent how much information they give the company about their location. [...] But while users can decide to give more information to Facebook, Korolova revealed they cannot decide to stop the social network knowing where they are altogether nor can they stop it selling the ability to advertise based on that knowledge.

They say that you should hesitate to ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence, but there is no incompetence surrounding this latest revelation: Facebook themselves straight-up admit that they use "IP and other information such as check-ins and current city from your profile" to built these shadow profiles of users' location data, even after those users refused to grant Facebook permission to build a profile of their location data. This is clearly malicious. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Google does not do this. Microsoft does not do this; Apple and Amazon do not do this. There is no "all sides" argument to be made by WIRED magazine, or any of Facebook's other Definers Media-fueled defenders.

Only Facebook is this shady. Facebook is the problem, here.

To say that this most likely contravenes multiple provisions of the GDPR would be something of an understatement; whether U.S. laws currently prohibit this sort of "shadow profiling" is anyone's guess, although I'm sure the new U.S. Congress will be looking into that question, among others. If you're waiting for government regulators to get a handle on the full breadth and depth of Facebook's scumminess, though... you should probably stop waiting, and just delete Facebook, already.

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...

Fucking Facebook's terrible year isn't over yet

With two more weeks to go, Facebook's horribad year is still getting worse, as reported by Gizmodo:

According to a bombshell report in the New York Times on Tuesday, Facebook’s behind-the-scenes efforts to give select corporate partners access to user data have been far more expansive than previously reported, including allowing certain third-party companies access to user contact lists and access to users’ private messages.

Yes, that’s right, Facebook gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read users’ messages, and other tech giants including Microsoft, Amazon, and Sony access to data on users’ friends, according to hundreds of internal documents obtained by the paper and interviews with dozens of “former employees of Facebook and its corporate partners.” 

Not only did Facebook allow 150 companies, including Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, and Yahoo, access to users’ private messages, they also allowed them unprecedented access to users’ personal data. According to BuzzFeed News:

Facebook allowed Microsoft’s search engine Bing to see the names of nearly all users’ friends without their consent, and allowed Spotify, Netflix, and the Royal Bank of Canada to read, write, and delete users’ private messages, and see participants on a thread.

Let that sink in for a second: these companies could not only see your messages, they could delete any of them which they didn't like, allowing them to censor Facebook users without their consent, and possibly even without them noticing. It's the nuclear option of damage-control PR. And that's not all they could do.

It also allowed Amazon to get users’ names and contact information through their friends, let Apple access users' Facebook contacts and calendars even if users had disabled data sharing, and let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts “as recently as this summer,” despite publicly claiming it had stopped sharing such information a year ago, the report said. Collectively, applications made by these technology companies sought the data of hundreds of millions of people a month.

So, yes, in case you were wondering, Facebook's regard for your personal privacy, safety, and fundamental right to self-expression really is utterly non-existent, and the situation is far worse than we knew... with, doubtless, even worse revelations to come. Because this is just what we're learning in spite of Facebook's best efforts to keep all of this under wraps; what we'll learn next year, when the Democratic Party takes control of the U.S. Congress and its various investigative and oversight committees, is anyone's guess, but there's almost certainly more to learn here.

Epic Games' big gamble

Having mentioned Epic Games' storefront in passing in my last post, I suppose it would behoove me to elaborate a bit on my thoughts on the issue. Because I'm firmly of the opinion that Epic Games will not become any more a competitor to Steam than any of the other already-existing online storefronts: Origin, Uplay, GOG, Itch.io, etc., for several reasons.

It just. Won't. Die!

Do you remember the Universal Windows Platform? The new paradigm for Windows software distribution, which Microsoft has been pushing since Windows 8, when it was called Metro, and which Windows users have been resoundingly rejecting ever since?

Metro, and Windows 8 with it, was so unpopular that Microsoft was forced to allow OEMs to install Windows 7 instead on machines whose purchasers were paying for Windows 8 licenses. Valve's Gabe Newell saw Microsoft's attempt to seize control over software distribution as so profoundly anti-competitive, and anti-consumer, that it birthed the Steam Machine initiative, whose SteamOS has since given rise to Steam Play/Proton, which is well on its way to making Windows irrelevant for gaming. And UWP-exclusive titles are virtually non-existent, since they can only be installed via Microsoft's storefront of desolation, while basically the entire PC gaming industry distributes their games through Steam.

That is the legacy of UWP for Microsoft: repeated failures, alienated consumers, and a well-deserved reputation for monopolistic bullshit. Well, apparently Microsoft still see UWP as their key to global domination, because it's baaaack!!!

Facebook's latest round of PR problems are a purely self-inflicted injury

Maclean's has an interesting piece about how RBC (the Royal Bank of Canada) "quietly stopped allowing online transactions through Facebook in 2015 after Facebook changed its network’s privacy settings." The most interesting tidbit, though, isn't RBC's part, but rather this:

Canadian MPs travelled to Britain last month to participate in a parliamentary inquiry into “disinformation and fake news,” helping grill Facebook representatives about the firm’s role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The committee seized the Facebook emails—part of a sealed record in an American legal dispute—after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declined to testify. The emails were disclosed as part of a lawsuit by American software developer Six4Three, which once ran a bikini photo application on Facebook.

The seized emails, of course, are the same ones that touched off the most recent PR firestorm, and it looks like Mark Zuckerberg could have avoided both the emails' seizure, and their subsequent public disclosure, by simply agreeing to the British Parliament's request that he show up in person to answer some questions.

Irony, truly, thy name is Zuckerberg.

How low is morale at Facebook?

According to NYMag's Intelligencer, it's pretty damn low:

“People now have burner phones to talk shit about the company — not even to reporters, just to other employees,” one former employee said. Another described the current scene as a “bunker mentality,” meaning that after nearly two years of continuous bad press some people are, to borrow a phrase, leaning in as hard as they can to cope. “It’s otherwise rational, sane people who’re in Mark’s orbit spouting full-blown anti-media rhetoric, saying that the press is ganging up on Facebook,” said the former employee.

Yeah.... When you're buying a burner phone just so you can vent to your fellow employees? That's a sign, people; that's when you start burnishing that resume, and planning your exit strategy. Just saying.

As to why folks at Facebook are "spouting full-anti-media rhetoric"... maybe it's because all the news about Facebook looks like this?

• New Documents Show That Facebook Has Never Deserved Your Trust
• A Few Things Facebook Forgot to Include in Its Year in Review
• Why is Facebook in the doghouse? Here are 5 reasons
• Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is more ruthless than clueless
• The biggest culprit in the Facebook debacle
• Facebook Never Really Cared About Connecting the World
• The Facebook papers are a timely reminder that Mark Zuckerberg is ruthless about making money
• Facebook Stock Could Take a Hit From Growing Distrust, Analyst Says
• 5 takeaways from the UK's Facebook document dump

Only WIRED is still playing from Facebook's false equivalence playbook, drawing attention to other, lesser examples of bad behaviour from Silicon Valley companies as if they were in any way comparable to what Facebook has just been caught doing; I guess that Definers Media money was well-spent, after all. Even WIRED couldn't maintain the facade all the way to the end of their piece, though:

Amid Facebook’s rapid expansion, [Zuckerberg’s mentor Peter Thiel] told [journalist David Kirkpatrick] he was confident that the company would avoid government intervention. “Facebook will have the maximum amount of legal and political leeway in a world where it’s seen as friendly and not threatening,” Thiel said. [...] Nearly a decade later, Facebook’s effect on humanity appears to be careening in a different direction—and Thiel’s views on globalization also have soured since. Still, Thiel’s line about fast-growing companies seeming friendly turned out to be right on the money.

Is this the appropriate point to mention that Facebook is now shedding users, and not growing? Or that Facebook's ravenous hunger for unconstrained growth is what had ultimately landed them in so much hot water now? I'm sensing a connection, there... it's almost as if Facebook's focus on growth at all costs was the root of the problem.

Microsoft makes it official

After word leaked yesterday that Microsoft was redesigning their Edge browser to use Google's Chromium engine "under the hood," Windows-watchers were left wondering just how long Microsoft would make everyone wait before actually acknowledging this shift publicly. The answer, apparently, was one day.

As reported by VentureBeat:

Microsoft today embraced Google’s Chromium open source project for Edge development on the desktop. The company also announced it is decoupling the browser updates from Windows 10 updates, and that Edge is coming to all supported versions of Windows and to macOS. [...] The first preview builds of the Chromium-powered Edge will arrive in early 2019, according to Microsoft.

[...]

Microsoft hopes moving to Chromium will “create better web compatibility for our customers” and “less fragmentation of the web for all web developers.” The former is certainly true, as the Edge web platform will thus become aligned with web standards and other Chromium-based browsers. The latter is not true in the short term (plenty of testing will be needed to accommodate the switch) but it is likely in the long term, as developers will have one fewer browser to explicitly test against.

Fucking Facebook...

As someone who's never installed a Facebook app, I'd totally missed this when it first surfaced back in March, and I don't recall seeing it make headlines either. It should have. As reported by The Verge:

In March, many Android users were shocked to discover that Facebook had been collecting a record of their call and SMS history, as revealed by the company’s data download tool. [...] According to [internal emails released by the UK Parliament], developers knew the data was sensitive, but they still pushed to collect it as a way of expanding Facebook’s reach. [...] Notably, the project manager recognized it as “a pretty high-risk thing to do from a PR perspective,” but that risk seems to have been overwhelmed by the potential user growth.

[...]

Initially, the feature was intended to require users to opt in, typically through an in-app pop-up dialog box. But as developers looked for ways to get users signed up, it became clear that Android’s data permissions could be manipulated to automatically enroll users if the new feature was deployed in a certain way. [...] The group developing the feature seems to see the Android permissions screen as a point of unnecessary friction, to be avoided if possible. When testing revealed that call logs could be collected without a permissions dialog, that option seems to have been obviously preferable to developers.

Yes, that's Facebook, bypassing Android's privacy controls to access data that they knew damn well they had no right to, without bothering to ask permission from anybody at all... because GREED.

Microsoft may finally have stopped trying to make "fetch" happen

Following about a month after the news that Microsoft were finally planning to stop pushing Cortana on consumers who are plainly not interested, comes the news that they're also going to let go of another of their attempts to foist a doomed and unwelcome product on users who couldn't care less. That's right, Microsoft are apparently planning to finally listen to what consumers have been telling them since 2015 about Edge.

As reported by Windows Central:

Microsoft's Edge web browser has seen little success since its debut on Windows 10 in 2015. Built from the ground up with a new rendering engine known as EdgeHTML, Microsoft Edge was designed to be fast, lightweight, and secure, but it launched with a plethora of issues that resulted in users rejecting it early on. Edge has since struggled to gain traction, thanks to its continued instability and lack of mindshare, from users and web developers.

Because of this, I'm told that Microsoft is throwing in the towel with EdgeHTML and is instead building a new web browser powered by Chromium, which uses a similar rendering engine first popularized by Google's Chrome browser known as Blink. Codenamed "Anaheim," this new browser for Windows 10 will replace Edge as the default browser on the platform, according to my sources, who wish to remain anonymous. It's unknown at this time if Anaheim will use the Edge brand or a new brand, or if the user interface (UI) between Edge and Anaheim is different. One thing is for sure, however; EdgeHTML in Windows 10's default browser is dead.

Assuming this is accurate, Microsoft finally cutting the bullshit and doing not only the right thing, but the obvious thing, is great news. The only downside is that Microsoft have taken three years to finally get here, after years of taskbar advertising, questionable battery use statistics, and refusals to allows Google's wildly popular Chrome browser onto the Microsoft store... because Google refused to adopt Microsoft's EdgeHTML rendering algorithm, while ditching the Chromium algorithm which has become the standard for all web browsers.

No official word has yet come from Microsoft, of course, so they might still find some way to screw this up, but considering how well-received this news has been today, it's hard to imagine that Microsoft won't go through with this. If once is an incidence, and twice a coincidence, we're just waiting for Microsoft to prove this to be a pattern by doing it just once more. We'll see if doing that now, after years of coercive bullshit, can win back enough good will among consumers to stop Windows' gradual-but-steady market share decline.

Denial of Virtual Reality

I spotted this accidental juxtaposition in a Google search for VR news, and it couldn't have been more perfect. First, from RoadToVR:

A Road to VR analysis of the latest data from Valve’s Steam Hardware & Software shows that VR users on Steam have not only been growing, but are at their highest point in history.

First generation VR hardware may not yet have had its mass adoption moment, but pundits claiming the end is near for VR are overlooking strong evidence against their claims. Not only has the tech fostered a strong enthusiast community, but that group continues to grow. In fact, in November there were more VR users on Steam than ever before.

And then, from The VR Soldier:

Although there are still four weeks in the year 2018, VR-related forecasts are not looking great. Research by CCS Insight confirms there will be a total of eight million headsets to be sold throughout 2018. This number combines both VR and AR units, which further confirms the VR industry itself may face a bigger uphill battle than originally assumed.

This total figure is down by 20% compared to 2017. While one would assume sales figures to rise as more content is produced, the opposite is coming true. Further growth will occur in 2019 and beyond, according to the research. CCS Insight confirms 52 million units will be sold in 2022. Whether that favors VR or AR, is difficult to predict at this time.

I couldn't have planned a more perfect rebuttal.

The percentage of VR headset owners increased by 0.05% of Steam's total user base, with only HTC Vive and Oculus Rift showing growth that registered as more than 0.00% on the Steam Hardware Survey. Multiplied by Steam's 125 million users, that's about 62,500 headsets sold... in November, which is one of the two busiest sales months of the year.

Even Black Friday couldn't shift VR's market momentum.

The 0.78% of Steam's total users who have VR or AR headsets, by the by, similarly approximate to 975K total headsets, worldwide, since VR's launch two years ago, and to get even that high, you have to include Oculus Rift's two developer kits, which are almost certainly not in the hands of average consumers. Which must mean that the "eight million headsets" cited by The VR Soldier includes non-SteamVR users, also, like PlayStationVR, GearVR, and, presumably, Google Cardboard.

That's not enough to support any platform, and VR is a platform; headset sales need to pick up sharply, and soon, if this round of either VR or AR hardware is going to be anything other than a footnote in tech history.

Needless to say, I think that's unlikely.

Rats and sinking ships, and "a marriage made in hell"

Today, in Facebook...

We'll start with this report from CNBC:

Some former Facebook employees say their phone is ringing a lot more in the last two months. On the other line: former Facebook colleagues asking about job openings or looking for a reference.

This type of behavior is normal at most companies. But according to a half dozen former employees, all of whom left in the last year or two, it's a major change in behavior at Facebook, which had long been known around Silicon Valley as the company that no one leaves.[...] The shift could be an early warning of recruiting and retention challenges for Facebook after a turbulent year. 

[...]

The stories from former employees are only anecdotal at this point, and there's no firm data showing a significant uptick in departures or employee dissatisfaction. On Glassdoor, a site where workers anonymously review their employers, Facebook is among the best-rated tech companies, with a satisfaction rating of 4.3 out of 5. However, that rating has fallen noticeably during the last year, with a particularly sharp drop in the last few months.

It looks like those earlier reports of morale problems at the scandal-plagued social media firm may have been on the money; we'll have to see if this story continues to grow, and if it receives corroboration from elsewhere. In the face of Facebook's obvious rampant amorality and occasional outright evil, though, I'm less inclined to be sympathetic to these would-be rats, apparently seeking to abandon their slowly sinking ship. They had no qualms at all about sticking around when it looked like they could do whatever the fuck they wanted to with impunity, after all. Considering how much damage they've had a hand in doing to the fabric of society and democracy worldwide, any tears that I'd be crying at the sight of their misfortunes would be of the crocodile variety.

Speaking of rats, though...