Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Everyone wants to pile on poor Mark Zuckerberg. Anyone have a practical solution in mind?
FTC to Probe Facebook Over Privacy Practices
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) confirmed news reports from last week that it had opened an inquiry over the harvesting of data on tens of millions of Facebook users by the British consulting group Cambridge Analytica.
… Acting FTC consumer protection chief Tom Pahl said the agency will look into whether Facebook violated its privacy promises or failed to comply with the US-EU agreement on data protection known as the Privacy Shield.
The agency also will also determine if Facebook engaged "in unfair acts that cause substantial injury to consumers in violation of the FTC Act."
Separately, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley said he had asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to appear at a hearing on April 10 "to discuss Facebook's past and future policies regarding the protection and monitoring of consumer data."
Grassley said he also invited Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey "to discuss the future of data privacy in the social media industry."


(Related)
Mark Zuckerberg refused to explain Facebook's data scandal to British politicians — and wants to put senior execs in the firing line instead




For my Software Architecture students. Design a better digital instrument panel.
In Car Makers’ Digital Dash, Little Room for Error
Luxury cars are shedding the knobs, needles and dials once needed to control the cabin, opting instead for digital dashboards. But the software that now runs everything from speedometers to climate controls can prove buggy, causing car buyers to rethink just how modern they want their cars to be.
Car companies that typically charge a hefty premium have issued recalls to fix various glitches, and regulators now pinpoint software problems as being responsible for an increasing number of malfunctions.




Now this is an interesting article that I completely disagree with. Kind of like saying Drug Dealers are a utility? I can see the failure of Water, Gas, Electricity or Banking causing massive disruption, but Social Media? I might even agree that the Internet is rather important. Sometimes Social media acts like they believe this.
The Social Utility | Social Media
If you study economic cycles, you can watch the evolution of a disruptive technology throughout its lifecycle, from a specific product to a competitive industry. The last phase in the evolutionary chain is the formation of a utility.
For example, over a couple of centuries we've seen the evolution of electricity from a curiosity, to a business, to a group of public companies. Along the way there were the inevitable mergers and acquisitions to enable a winnowing field of competitors to achieve the scale needed to compete in very large markets.
It wasn't just the electric industry that went through an evolution. The oil, gas and coal industries did the same. Banking is in a similar position. In fact, any industry that attracts the term "too big to fail" is showing signs of utility status.
When your business becomes so big that it affects large segments of society, it can't be allowed to fail lest it crater the economy or cause massive disruption that would injure many people. At that point, government has a compelling interest in preventing failure -- and along with that, an interest in regulating the riskiest corporate behaviors.
The latest example to hit the radar might be social media, which has completed many steps of the lifecycle with blistering speed in just over a decade. This speed notwithstanding, we are now at a point where what happens in social media affects all of us.




For the next time I teach Statistics.
New on LLRX – Statistics Resources and Big Data 2018
Via LLRXStatistics Resources and Big Data 2018Marcus Zillman’s new guide is a comprehensive resource for all researchers who require access to reliable and accurate publicly available statistics and big data sets that address diverse and timely subject matter. The resources included in this guide are developed and maintained by a range of organizations, including: academic and scholarly sources, the federal government, the corporate and business sectors, open source contributions, advocacy groups, NGOs and IGOs.




Is this why my students are surfing the Internet as I lecture?


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