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The Brutal Fight To Mine Your Data and Sell It To Your Boss (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report from Bloomberg, explaining how Silicon Valley makes billions of dollars peddling personal information, supported by an ecosystem of bit players. Editor Drake Bennett highlights the battle between an upstart called HiQ and LinkedIn, who are fighting for your lucrative professional identity. Here's an excerpt from the report: A small number of the world's most valuable companies collect, control, parse, and sell billions of dollars' worth of personal information voluntarily surrendered by their users. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft -- which bought LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016 -- have in turn spawned dependent economies consisting of advertising and marketing companies, designers, consultants, and app developers. Some operate on the tech giants' platforms; some customize special digital tools; some help people attract more friends and likes and followers. Some, including HiQ, feed off the torrents of information that social networks produce, using software bots to scrape data from profiles. The services of the smaller companies can augment the offerings of the bigger ones, but the power dynamic is deeply asymmetrical, reminiscent of pilot fish picking food from between the teeth of sharks. The terms of that relationship are set by technology, economics, and the vagaries of consumer choice, but also by the law. LinkedIn's May 23 letter to HiQ wasn't the first time the company had taken legal action to prevent the perceived hijacking of its data, and Facebook and Craigslist, among others, have brought similar actions. But even more than its predecessors, this case, because of who's involved and how it's unfolded, has spoken to the thorniest issues surrounding speech and competition on the internet.
...it kinda sucks when someone takes information you thought was yours alone and sells it to the highest bidder, eh?
will stop at nothing. Maybe it's time that we stop following the law in some cases. These people must be dealt with, physically. They are evil and we must not be afraid to remove evil from the face of the Earth. A Nuremberg style trial must happen to these people for the evil that they did, after which they must be sent to the gallows. It's the only way to instill fear so that future generations don't do it anymore.
The EULA of places liked LinkedIn, Facebook, and other sites expressly state that when one posts or shares info with the site, advertisers and any third party can do what they please with that info.
LinkedIn is just the same thing. Don't want your boss to see you are looking for jobs? Don't do LinkedIn. Just like on other social media, if one is going to do a crime, don't post it for the world to see before doing it. It is also an employer's prerogative to know if someone is about to bail on them anyway, so they are not surprised and have to deal with the financial losses that do happen.
HiQ is doing nothing wrong here, other than being chased down by other parties wanting their money stream. Employers should have this info anyway, so HiQ is providing a critical, needed service.
...I still manage to stay aside from LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Left linkedin years ago when the second wave of cracked passwords took them to warn the users. As the spam I received from other members had already fed me up, it was the time to leave. I may need to use them again, but in the last three years I have no information with them and intend to keep that way. Information is power...learned that in the BBS-era...in my early twenties, it was the intro phrase for the TERMINATE bbs dialing software. It is the truth more than ever.
If the goal is to share information (like your resume to potential employers or customers) you can't keep it private (say, from your current employer, family, or your nosey neighbour).
If you publish information about yourself on the Internet... YOU'VE PUBLISHED INFORMATION ABOUT YOURSELF ON THE INTERNET.
Who is mining the sites and what they're doing with that information is more or less irrelevant, since you should be assuming everyone is doing whatever they want with it.
Did you stop taking your meds?
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
Last week the headhunters started piling up in my inbox. I mean, yes, I usually got the odd "don't you wanna reorient yourself" mail, but we're talking a flood of mails, with headhunters bending over backwards with offers that made me question their sanity.
But if they were mining what's publicly available about me, I can understand it.
You see, the game works both ways. You can dig up anything I put out there about me, but in turn, nothing I put out there about me has to be true. This system assumes that people are actually truthful when they write stuff about themselves. Beats me why this works, but it seems to.
Well, I am not truthful when I write stuff about me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter, whatever.
According to my "social media" pages, I'm the hottest potatoe there is right now in security. I rub shoulders with the best and brightest in the field, there are pictures of me hanging out at a bar with some of the key players in the security world (Photoshop is one hell of a program), and it seems i held the keynote at some of the past Black Hats (hey, it ain't my fault if they use my page instead of Black Hat's as a source for their information!). I also complained about the cocktails at the bar there. And that Bruce Schneier can't really tell jokes. You know, spice it up a bit.
None of this is true. Nothing. I know Bruce, of course, I can truthfully answer yes if someone asks "you really know Bruce Schneier?". Of course I do, the whole security world does.
I just highly doubt that he has any clue who I could possibly be...
I would of course never lie to a potential employer. If they actually ask me whether I gave keynotes at Blackhat, whether I am on a first name base with Bruce Schneier, whether I really declined speaking at Def Con because I didn't like their attitude and that it's "too commercial" for my tastes and I got better things to do than give talks at "insignificant petty has-been cons" like my Facebook claims, I will of course tell them the truth.
That my Facebook page, along with the other social media pages, are tools to weed out the stupid and gullible.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
These companies have a very narrow definition of employee quality that they peddle to insecure managers.
What they don't take into account is the influence their systems have on the level of 'psychological safety' that employees feel in organizations. The level to which they are willing to challenge dominant (but often wrong) ideas, or share new thoughts. In short, by over-measuring these systems actually limit the ability to innovate.
Ironically, one of the organizations that has pointed to psychological safety as the key factor for good teamwork is Google:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0...
A good example of a company in this 'human risk management' field is Red Owl, which recently got bought by another risk management company, Forcepoint. Amongst other things, their software aims to weed out potential whistle blowers.
A concept I've been working on to help us talk about the long term issues at stake here is "Social Cooling". The website explains the large scale chilling effects which are created by our unprecedented ability and desire to manage risk.
https://www.socailcooling.com/
Found the leech that is working for these evil men.
Come on, moderators! You have failed the troll test.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Doubling down on your original demented post, eh? Lighten up, Francis.
So now our data is not ours, it is LinkedIn's?
Both computers updated this morning. Went very smoothly. New features, seems to be more secure and faster. There was zero cost for this update. Great job Redmond, keep 'em coming. Much appreciated here! Highly Recommend!
I am completely unable to tell if this post is straight-up, or if it is straight-faced sarcasm.
Only the AC knows for sure.
The EU seems perfectly willing to fine these nice big US companies when they break EU regulations, and they tend to make the fines a nice percentage of their gross income:
http://www.eugdpr.org/
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Since I may or may not have 3+ TB of confidential information I archived from work, safely encrypted and stored off site in case we had any issues between us.
There may or may not be information that would cause jail time for many levels of my management.
You need to ostracize not just these companies, but any real companies that use it. In short order, companies that sell real products will quickly be brought to heel.
Someone should do this someday, someone should.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
like the supreme court case in 2012 when it was ruled illegal to attach a GPS device to a car when it would have been legal for the poilice to obtain similar information by tailing the suspect, i think/hope this will be decided in favor of linkedin, for the use of bots effectively makes this a case of surreptitious recording, where the meta-data is being digitally recorded by the bots--each a kind of hyper-spectral recording device.
Linkedin is the most ass backwards site I have ever seen and the entire user base should best just go straight to hell. Who else will they attack next the browser makers, the fiber layers, its always someone else fault isn't it with those whiny paranoid Luddites that just don't deserve to be on the Internet in the first place.
The sign of the most competent of colleagues is the lack of a LinkedIn page. Its exactly like how saying you don't have a facebook page gets you a date instantly. Confidence is the key.
The EU shrugged off the repressive, tyrannical iron fist of the Spanish government as it violently crushed the peaceful secession movement in Catalonia.
The EU has no moral authority.
if you are IT, is to take note of any license "improprieties" and report an employer to the BSA (Business Software Alliance). They'll come in and audit the hell out of the place. If they find what you said was wrong, especially if the licensing is dodgy or they are hiding seats behind a proxy or other, then you get a piece of the fine, which is usually substantial (hundreds of thousands to over a million).
Loss-making venture capital backed companies sure do have contemp for the pricacy of working people.
If they actually ask me... , I will of course tell them the truth.
Good luck with that. When they realise that you’ve been intentionally posting lies about yourself, I doubt they will take the time to listen and favourably reflect about your motives (especially when it’s about “weeding out the stupid and gullible” among them).
On the other hand, I think that your experience illustrates the dangers of this type of low quality data mining, when widespread. If Internet postings contain flattering lies about you, when those recruiters eventually talk to you, they will find out (from you or otherwise) and likely write you off for good. If Internet postings contain defamatory lies about you, those recruiters won’t ever talk to you and instead will write you off for good. Either way, you lose.
In a way, recruiters relying on this type of large-scale automated data mining are acting as sloppy high-school students mindlessly copying answers from random web sites. With the difference that high-school students are only harming themselves.