Comments on: Cambridge Analytica – Part 2

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 01:21:12 +0000

Definitely not Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix…

By: Badtux

Badtux — Sun, 15 Apr 2018 17:49:42 +0000

Oh my. There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. A quick glance at Wikipedia later and I was surprised that a) he’s still alive and performing at age 81, and b) he has a new album released six months ago. Of course, you already knew that, since Amazon showed you the advertisement for the new album on your “Recommendations” list. 😉

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sun, 15 Apr 2018 17:38:03 +0000

I could could live with Tony Bennett, but Engelbert Humperdinck !!

By: Badtux

Badtux — Sun, 15 Apr 2018 08:10:21 +0000

Oh come on, everybody knows that you want another copy of the Greatest Hits of Tony Bennett. 🙂

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sun, 15 Apr 2018 02:05:27 +0000

Well that selection beats Amazon’s ‘suggestions’ after I would buy CDs that my Mother wanted.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Sat, 14 Apr 2018 22:49:29 +0000

Well, I don’t mind getting those advertisements, so maybe their algorithm works? 🙂

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sat, 14 Apr 2018 22:39:00 +0000

So, you will get all of the Lovecraft related media, Dungeons & Dragons miscellany, New Age tschokes, and unclaimed wyrd effluent of eBay and the Amazon Marketplace. No matter what you put down an algorithm will find something to advertise to you. 😉

The amazing part is that someone actually pays to have those algorithms created.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Sat, 14 Apr 2018 21:23:51 +0000

But hey, my BA in Arcane Studies at Miskatonic University with specialties in Eldritch Studies and Cthulhu Mythos surely gives them all the data they need to properly target me with advertising, right? 😉

As does my job and place of employment — Worshipper at Temple of Cthulhu, job description “Kneel at the knee of your great god Facebook”. Heh.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 02:06:19 +0000

I can understand why people would use it – if you have non-technical friends and family they may swear by it and it is the only thing they use on line. You can warn them all you want but they don’t want to learn a new, more secure system. I can understand. I know that I could lie about everything, but I had to do that for too many years when I was in the military and it is annoying. They were government created and approved lies, but lies none the less. It is easier and less stressful to tell the truth or say you can’t talk about it.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Thu, 12 Apr 2018 23:43:00 +0000

I’m on Facebook for one reason — it’s the only real way I have of coordinating things with my far-flung set of desert friends, given that we live at all points on the compass. I don’t answer those quiz things (especially the ones that read like the security questions for my bank!), and my profile is not set to ‘public’ so if you want to get data you have to get it directly from Facebook, not by going to the public API. Unfortunately Facebook didn’t respect that setting on my profile. GRR!

So they now know my Social Media Birthday (which is a totally different birthday from my real birthday), know that my music preferences are Britney Spears and Ted Nugent (LOL!), studied at Miskatonic University, and otherwise have trash data. About the only thing they’re right about is when they say I’m “very liberal”. That one’s pretty easy to figure out just by what I follow and read :).