Slashdot Mirror
NY Comic Con Takes Over Attendees' Twitter Accounts To Praise Itself
Okian Warrior writes "Attendees to this year's New York Comic Con convention were allowed to pre-register their RFID-enabled badges online and connect their social media profiles to their badges — something, the NYCC registration site explained, that would make the 'NYCC experience 100x cooler! For realz.' Most attendees didn't expect "100x cooler" to translate into 'we'll post spam in your feed as soon as the RFID badge senses that you've entered the show,' but that seems to be what happened."
ReedPop's apology was insincere and showed no remorsefulness. They've done it before and they'll do it again.
Morale of the story: don't use your social media accounts for any type of authentication.
Slashdot is amazing!
Revenge is a dish best served cold -- grits should be served hot!
Apparently this is such a problem Comic Con listed “shower” as item No. 3 on its event “survival” checklist.
“Things tend to get hot at NYCC with so many fans around and you don’t want to be the stinky one!” the organizers wrote. “Do everyone a favor and shower before and wear clean clothes!”
Apparently this is such a problem Comic Con listed “shower” as item No. 3 on its event “survival” checklist.
“Things tend to get hot at NYCC with so many fans around and you don’t want to be the stinky one!” the organizers wrote. “Do everyone a favor and shower before and wear clean clothes!” http://nypost.com/2013/10/10/comic-con-plea-shower/
The people allowed the app, complete with special warning, to 'post tweets on their behalf'.
There comes a time in your life where you take responsibility for your own actions. For the most part, we call this adulthood.
...
When you connect your social media account to somethiing, it's reasonable to expect that every permission that they describe they are requesting they are actually going to use. If you're not comfortable with this, then don't connect the account to the service. Period.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
An established principle in the law is that there are certain rights you cannot sign away. For instance, you cannot legally, voluntarily or otherwise, enter into slavery in the United States of America. It remains for the courts to decide if one's identity is one of those rights. Prosecute them.
But they didn't steal an identity. Just requested allowance to post on a Twitter feed. Unless they did something other than what the article said, there's no identity theft going on. Giving someone access to use your broadcast mechanism is hardly equal to slavery.
In the few cases an app has posted on my social media accounts, it's been a benign (and true) message like "raymorris is at NY Comic Con". That's what a respectable organization might do and what I'd expect from a company that wants to keep my business.
On the other hand, what they did is misleading and they are assholes for doing it. Just because I give someone access to something doesn't excuse them for abusing that access. One of my employees has access to the company checkbook. If she abuses that access she could go to jail.
The people allowed the app, complete with special warning, to 'post tweets on their behalf'.
Problem is, there is no way to say "install the app, but block all tweet-related permissions"
Can't install anything on Android nowdays. Each app wants permissions to make phone calls, take pictures with your camera (without your knowledge, not just while it is used) or read address book and current phone state. No good reason for the app to want this, but no way to install without allowing everything the app asks for.
Spam is:
1. Unsolicited
2. Commercial
3. Bulk
4. Off-topic
It must be all four or it is not spam.
And yep, I was on the Internet when the term was invented.
It is impossible for anything posted to a Twitter feed to be spam, since seeing it requires you to follow that feed. That fails the first test, therefore it is not spam. Case closed, end of discussion.
Learn what the word means before you use it. Spam is not "anything I don't want to read."
NYCC's mistake was to jump ahead to what they'd be able to get away with in a few years. If they'd kept the tweets "benign (and true)" as you suggest, people would've squawked briefly, but gotten over it and accepted it as "the new normal" for businesses to tweet bland ads in their feed. (One step beyond what Facebook already does with their "Ray Morris likes Starbucks" ads.) Then, in 2 or 3 years, when the ads started to get more huckstery and misleading, they'd probably get away with that too. The secret to boiling a live frog is to turn the temperature up slowly.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I just finished up at a company that creates mobile apps for clients (under contract). Pretty much every app being made now (by all companies not just the one I worked at) uses at least one of your social media accounts to log in. It saves them from having to create and manage their own authentication mechanism. It also saves them from lawsuits etc if and when someone hacks their user database and steals the information because they don't want to spend the money to create a reliably safe user/security system themselves (or on the other hand if they just aren't bright enough to).
So good luck with that, at least for now. And the truth is, most users aren't bright enough to understand the consequences of allowing any and every app out there access to their social media accounts and potentially a tonne of their personal data. That, with only the trust of the company that build the app's integrity because they said they might have one in the copy on the page. Meanwhile the one thousand line user agreement designed to cover their ass no matter what they do says they can change their mind without telling you. Or after you are so committed to it that psychologically you can't break free... kind of like Google wanting to suddenly use all your profile information in advertisements. Now I understand why they wanted so much to get people to change their usernames to their real names. It wasn't for protection. Glad I didn't change mine.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Sedgwick, W.T., 1888, On Variations Of Reflex-Exciteablilty In The Frog, Induced By Changes Of Temperature. Studies From The Biological Laboratory, pp385-410.
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?