Thursday, October 18, 2018

Most of my students are iPhone users.
Apple enables data downloads for US customers
Earlier this year, Apple started allowing its customers in the EU to download copies of the data the company holds on them to comply with General Data Protection Regulation rules that came into effect in May. Now, Apple has updated its privacy website, and it is letting its customers in the US grab their data too.
… it could take up to a week for Apple to prepare your download. The data may include details about your App Store purchase history, Apple Music activity and AppleCare support tickets.




I don’t think we have this figured out yet.
The Secretive Organization Quietly Spending Millions on Facebook Political Ads
Over just two weeks in September, a limited-liability company calling itself News for Democracy spent almost $400,000 on more than 16 million impressions for a network of 14 Facebook pages that hadn’t existed until August. This represented the second-largest political ad buy on Facebook for the period, trailing only Beto O’Rourke’s Texas Senate campaign and substantially overshadowing the third-place spender, the National Republican Congressional Committee, according to an analysis by a team at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, led by Damon McCoy.
… So what is “News for Democracy”?
Buried in unrelated Google results, you’d find an item from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay, which linked together a series of Denver LLCs that were sponsoring ads on Facebook: Three of these entities share a Denver P.O. box with two other LLCs
… Three weeks out from the 2018 midterms, we still know very little about the financial backing, operation, or ultimate goals of one of the biggest political-ad purchasers on Facebook in the run-up to the election. It’s not perfectly clear what News for Democracy is trying to build. Is it simply pushing individual-issue ads in key states, or is the organization trying to amass information on voters, which it can use in subsequent campaigns?
Anyone who watches one of these videos for more than 10 seconds can be added to a Facebook “custom audience” and can be targeted with future ads.
… With a little gumption and some savvy, News for Democracy and MotiveAI easily evaded Facebook’s system for making political ads more transparent.
“In these cases, transparency and disclosure—especially when voluntarily and provisioned by private companies—doesn’t do much to solve the underlying issue, which is accountability, meaning the public’s ability to discern who is trying to influence the outcome of an election,” Jonathan Albright of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University told me.




Perspective. I don’t suppose anyone chose to read a book?
The world is so dependent on YouTube for videos that people frantically searched for alternatives during its 90-minute outage
… A glitch caused the Web's second-most visited site, behind Google Search, to go down for about about 90 minutes on Tuesday evening. For Google's rivals, YouTube's outage was like manna from Heaven.
According to Google Trends, a glut of people began searching for Vimeo and Dailymotion as soon as YouTube went offline.
… Journalists often make fun of how people react in panic when a favorite site goes dark, but YouTube has become a major source of entertainment, news and communication for billions of people around the world. As of May, the site had a staggering 1.8 billion logged-in users.

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