Notes from the Electronic Cottage 4/26/18

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Online Privacy

The hits just keep on coming with regard to how companies, often without our knowledge,are collecting personal information about our activities on the Web. Since government at present seems uninterested in helping us to protect out privacy, it is up to us as individuals to do what we can to at least partially exert control over what we do while on the web. Here are some other ways we can try to do that.

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 4/19/18

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

The media show surrounding Congress people questioning Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s privacy policies is blessedly over but the problem of what we can do as individuals to protect our personal information online goes on. Here are a few more ideas.

Here is a link to an article that may offer users of Facebook and Google a bit of a surprise: www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/technology/personaltech/i-downloaded-the-information-that-facebook-has-on-me-yikes.html

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 4/12/18

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Is there any way we can preserve some personal privacy online in our digital world?

Facebook has been much in the news lately since Cambridge Analytica scraped data on 87 million American Facebook users and used that information to try to influence voters in the last national election. But, of course, using people’s personal information to profile them is nothing new – it goes on all the time for all sorts of purposes. That’s the bargain we users make. We use free online services like Facebook, and those services sell our information to others who will pay for it. Is there any way we can preserve some personal privacy online in our digital world? Here is a first suggestion.

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 4/5/18

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Psychographic Profiling

Recent disclosures about how Cambridge Analytica mined data on 50 million Facebook users to conduct psychographic profiles of Americans to use in the last election have surprised and shocked many people. Those people have not been regular listeners to Notes from the Electronic Cottage since we have been pointing out such efforts for years. As a refresher, here’s an episode from October — of 2015!

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 3/29/18

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell
Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act (SESTA)

Congress just passed, with much righteous posturing and by overwhelming majorities, the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act, or SESTA. While the Act’s intent is noble, the likelihood of it accomplishing its goal is small, even according to the Department of Justice, while the possibility of the unintended consequence of reducing free speech online is significant. Here’s why.

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 3/22/18

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell
AI & Life 3.0

Have you ever wondered what it means to be human in the age of Artificial Intelligence? If not, now is a good time to start pondering because the age of AI is upon us. A recent book tries to at least begin a discussion about that question. It’s called “Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” by Max Tegmark. Here are some of the questions that book raises, questions we are all going to have to answer for ourselves very soon.

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 3/15/18

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

What do fitness trackers and cars have in common? They both provide a treasure trove of information about where their users go, the routes they take, when and how long they are moving, and a whole lot more. Estimates are that 98% of cars sold this year will have modems embedded in them, which could be very convenient – and very revealing about their drivers’ lives. Fitness trackers can sometimes tell even more, as the military recently found out when the data from fitness trackers that soldiers were wearing made secret military bases not so secret any more.

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