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My Cow Game Extracted Your Facebook Data (theatlantic.com)
Ian Bogost, writing for The Atlantic: Already in 2010, it felt like a malicious attention market where people treated friends as latent resources to be optimized. Compulsion rather than choice devoured people's time. Apps like FarmVille sold relief for the artificial inconveniences they themselves had imposed. In response, I made a satirical social game called Cow Clicker. Players clicked a cute cow, which mooed and scored a "click." Six hours later, they could do so again. They could also invite friends' cows to their pasture, buy virtual cows with real money, compete for status, click to send a real cow to the developing world from Oxfam, outsource clicks to their toddlers with a mobile app, and much more. It became strangely popular, until eventually, I shut the whole thing down in a bovine rapture -- the "cowpocalypse." It's kind of a complicated story.
But one worth revisiting today, in the context of the scandal over Facebook's sanctioning of user-data exfiltration via its application platform. It's not just that abusing the Facebook platform for deliberately nefarious ends was easy to do (it was). But worse, in those days, it was hard to avoid extracting private data, for years even, without even trying. I did it with a silly cow game. Cow Clicker is not an impressive work of software. After all, it was a game whose sole activity was clicking on cows. I wrote the principal code in three days, much of it hunched on a friend's couch in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I had no idea anyone would play it, although over 180,000 people did, eventually. And yet, if you played Cow Clicker, even just once, I got enough of your personal data that, for years, I could have assembled a reasonably sophisticated profile of your interests and behavior. I might still be able to; all the data is still there, stored on my private server, where Cow Clicker is still running, allowing players to keep clicking where a cow once stood, before my caprice raptured them into the digital void.
But one worth revisiting today, in the context of the scandal over Facebook's sanctioning of user-data exfiltration via its application platform. It's not just that abusing the Facebook platform for deliberately nefarious ends was easy to do (it was). But worse, in those days, it was hard to avoid extracting private data, for years even, without even trying. I did it with a silly cow game. Cow Clicker is not an impressive work of software. After all, it was a game whose sole activity was clicking on cows. I wrote the principal code in three days, much of it hunched on a friend's couch in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I had no idea anyone would play it, although over 180,000 people did, eventually. And yet, if you played Cow Clicker, even just once, I got enough of your personal data that, for years, I could have assembled a reasonably sophisticated profile of your interests and behavior. I might still be able to; all the data is still there, stored on my private server, where Cow Clicker is still running, allowing players to keep clicking where a cow once stood, before my caprice raptured them into the digital void.
Cow Clicker? That sounds like a more accurate name for Tinder.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Remember the hacker group "Cult of the Dead Cow?" Never trust the Bovine Threat.
A 2012 report from
Facebook is also being seen as a source of invaluable data on voters. The re-election team, Obama for America, will be inviting its supporters to log on to the campaign website via Facebook, thus allowing the campaign to access their personal data and add it to the central data store – the largest, most detailed and potentially most powerful in the history of political campaigns. If 2008 was all about social media, 2012 is destined to become the "data election".
While most people like to blame FB for "selling" your data, much of it is given away by your friends. As this Cow Clicker guy points out, when someone signed up for the game they agreed to give certain information. FB didn't call up and sell it to him, the people playing the game gave it to him. Other apps ask for, and get, your list of friends, email address and other info.
I have more a problem with LinkedIn. They'd casually ask you for your email account and password in order to extract all your contact names and email addresses ( and spam them with generic "please join my network" email ) While LinkedIn has the info and does who knows what with it, they just politely asked your friends for it and they gladly gave it to them. Lots of phone apps will also ask for access to your contact list.
So who's really the worst at keeping your info private? Your idiot friends.
You do know why. Because Trump is evil and therefore anything he does is bad. Even if other people did it worse before, he is bad. Therefore He Must Be STOPPED!!!!
Yes he must. Not because he's evil but because he's vain, easily manipulated and, in the words of the former CEO of the world's largest oil company, a fucking moron
Pain is merely failure leaving the body