Out of Control Facebook

originally posted by: skunkape23

originally posted by: abe froman
a reply to: skunkape23

Some of us have family and friends spread across the country or globe.

It's a very useful tool for that reason.

Phones and emails work well enough for me.
Hell, when was the last time you mailed a letter?
Facebook seems to be a cesspool from where I stand.

I agree, but many family members will no longer use email, and virtually none use letters at all. So I have a FB account, but am very rarely there, and only log in from one browser, that is used for almost nothing else. On the one I use regularly, they are totally blocked.

originally posted by: Kandinsky
a reply to: proteus33

This TED talk from last week creeped me out a bit. It relates to how FB and Google/YT influences us without any editorial or human intent.

Seriously though, experiment by speaking on certain subjects and comparing the ads you get delivered. Believe it or not, I'm not totally dismissive and have a genuine curiosity about all of it. I don't do FB and have my browsers packed with various ad-blockers so adverts aren't a big part of my internet experience.

PrivacyBadger is an app not many have heard of. It's good.

You were "a bit" chilled? Only a bit? Yikes! That's seriously disturbing. The machines don't need terminators; they can push people to eliminate one another, if they so choose.

originally posted by: proteus33
I was talking with a lady yesterday about helping find her kid a decent tablet for christmas she said no she would rather go get his nintendo ds fixed i had my new samsung tab e on table beside me in standby mode. today i had a bunch of ads for where to buy or fix a nintendo ds on my newspage on facebook. i have never searched for a ds and last nintendo i bought was a gamecube and ds isn't a current gamesystem to my knowledge which leaves 1 conclusion nintendo was listening to conversation to tailor ads. i know i sound like a guy who wears tinfoil hat but its only thing that makes sense

I have this happen all the time any more even on internet explorer. Like you, some of those things I NEVER looked up at all but had talked about it to someone while sitting at my desk and on the phone. Talk about tinfoil hats! I have no clue why I would have gotten those ads! What can we do really? I often dram of getting off of the net altogether and losing the cell phone.

a reply to: Tulpa

It is spooky because the last few weeks, I also have been getting reccomendations on youtube for little things I'm thinking about!

One example, I was staring at the wall THINKING hmmmm I should put a mirror here...but not sure what size. I flip on youtube...and the first suggested video is a DIY SMART MIRROR.

There are many instances I have been aware of since early 2016.... but cannot find anyone to relate to. I believe it could be the NFC chips in devices...or my synchronicity power level shot up to some Jedi Mind Tricks level!

JON AKA NIKO

originally posted by: proteus33
today i had a bunch of ads for where to buy or fix a nintendo ds on my newspage on facebook. i have never searched for a ds and last nintendo

You thought facebook was free?

The whole idea behind facebook, gmail, yahoo mail, etc... is that computer programs monitor all the conversations in the messages and emails to determine what ads to present to the particular users.

All your messages are indexed and used for statistics to build and distribute advertising.

That's how they make money.

I recently bought a book on amazon, which wasn't being listed by any seller, so I put it in my "wish list", and a seller then offered it for sale. Then, as soon as I bought the book, another seller immetiately listed the same book at a lower price. So, Amazon is selling information about what people are wishing for and actually buying to other sellers so that they can decide what to offer for sale.

Everything you do on the internet is being watched, monitored, and your activity is being sold to those that need to know how to make money from you.

Its called smart advertising. You leave patterns when you browse the interweb and the ads are customized for you do to algorythm. Your personal data is worth millions ( see Facebook ).

a reply to: Vector99

I did this same thing as a joke after my friend suspected his Facebook app of listening to his conversations based on how much battery it was using up and the fact he would get ads for things he had been talking about (one example was that he had a long conversation about getting a new mower and the next day had lawn care ads on Facebook). Sure enough, the next day I had Spanish ads sprinkled in on Facebook. I deleted my Facebook that week and haven't had one since.

It's the world we now live in. And we've allowed it.
Samsung TV's are listening to you.

You can easily hack peoples webcams and watch them. Make it so the lights don't come on that indicate it is on.
Law enforcement agencies are know to be able to remotely turn on peoples phones and use them as listening devices, so even if you disable voice functions your device can still be listening to you. (locks only stop honest people as the saying goes.)

I have noticed this kind of stuff myself, friends too. Talking about things and have them magically appear on my youtube suggestions etc. Even when I have been browsing the web in Firefox, I then use chrome and have content suggested in that even though it's a completely different browser.
A friend of mine in the U.S after he got his Kinect on the Xbox 360 started noticing targetted ads on his dashboard.
He was talking to his girlfriend about marriage and next day marriage related stuff started appearing.

It's nothing new, and it aint going away. And you can see why every time you see someone post "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about"
The majority of people don't understand the tech they use, nor do they care. We're being socially engineered to willingly give up our privacy.

I mean manufacturers could easily install mobile phone like technology and button hole cameras into TV's and other devices, and how many people would even notice?

We're in the age of big brother already, just the majority are oblivious to it. Have been for some time.
But hey, once you get desensitized to something for long enough, you start accepting it as normal.
Good example is video games and DLC. Kids who've grown up with knickle and diming cannot understand what we old farts are complaining about when we get 1/4 of a game for a full price and are expected to pay even more to get the full product.

Most people I know leave their wifi on even if they're not using their devices. Internet routers are on 24/7.

Just gonna get worse and it won't get better because instead of doing anything about it, we'll all sit here bitching about it and nothing else. People these days don't act until they're already in the pens.
#slacktivism, the powers that be love our passive protesting.

Delete facebook. That is all you need to do. Delete it from your phone and your tablet. Delete it from everything.

Use reddit for social interaction. It is like Facebook squared. But without all of the self righteous people in it.

originally posted by: Kandinsky
a reply to: proteus33

This TED talk from last week creeped me out a bit. It relates to how FB and Google/YT influences us without any editorial or human intent.

Seriously though, experiment by speaking on certain subjects and comparing the ads you get delivered. Believe it or not, I'm not totally dismissive and have a genuine curiosity about all of it. I don't do FB and have my browsers packed with various ad-blockers so adverts aren't a big part of my internet experience.

PrivacyBadger is an app not many have heard of. It's good.

Thanks for posting this brilliant vid Kandinsky.

Zeynep Tufekci is a very good speaker, and seems to attempt to stay away from drama and hyperbole.
But haven't really seen anyone else in this thread catch-on to one of the angles:

The posts in this thread are all about cause and effect, with humans being the cause, and the tailored ads being the effect.
Yet to me: this viewpoint is more of the same of our standard self-centeredness.
Like how we thought the Universe revolved around the Earth, or how God exists just to care for us.
Seems to be our big fat egos getting in the way again.
No worries: we just are that way, for now.

An alternate way of viewing the whole situation: would put the AI as the cause, and our thoughts as the effect.
This is hard for our ego to conceive.
To show an example: many of the posts in this thread go something like: "I was talking with by buddy about buying a F-150 pick-up, and then soon after started seeing adverts popping-up for new and used trucks".
But what no one has mentioned yet, is: how did the idea of buying a new pick-up, get into your consciousness?

Ego wants us to believe that our thoughts are all original, and without influence. This blinds us to how vulnerable we may be to suggestion.
How did we get to be thinking about getting a new pick-up, in the first place?

The scary possibility is that the idea was seeded in our sub-conscious, by AI suggestive adverts, that we see constantly, everywhere, but son't necessarily register in our consciousness.
So scary from the viewpoint of the ego, that we don't want to accept this possibility.

Apply this possibility to all of the posts, to flip them over, and see them in a new light of possibility.

Is anybody else thinking outside of the boxy-box?

I noticed it without chance of coincidence last year: www.abovetopsecret.com...


The search topic that my wife and I discussed was so very specific and we have never talked about it before 100%, I knew exactly what was happening when it started advertising it to us.

originally posted by: proteus33
I was talking with a lady yesterday about helping find her kid a decent tablet for christmas she said no she would rather go get his nintendo ds fixed i had my new samsung tab e on table beside me in standby mode. today i had a bunch of ads for where to buy or fix a nintendo ds on my newspage on facebook. i have never searched for a ds and last nintendo i bought was a gamecube and ds isn't a current gamesystem to my knowledge which leaves 1 conclusion nintendo was listening to conversation to tailor ads. i know i sound like a guy who wears tinfoil hat but its only thing that makes sense

The crook is the third or forth ritchest guy on the planet just because he shows you those ads, just because he monetises your actions on his website. What does he gives you in return?

a reply to: Nothin

The scary possibility is that the idea was seeded in our sub-conscious, by AI suggestive adverts, that we see constantly, everywhere, but son't necessarily register in our consciousness.
So scary from the viewpoint of the ego, that we don't want to accept this possibility.

I get hit every so often by adverts and act on them. This is done knowingly whereas, as you say, many, many more are operating on levels we aren't necessarily aware of. Political echo chambers, ideological biases and whatever else are cultivated by our internet clicks and we can't measure the effects they have on us.

Suggestibility is a term very few people use which is ironic considering we've never been more open to suggestion. Yes, it's scary.

a reply to: Kandinsky

Yes. We are being crafted into ideal little consumers.
Spending way more than we have, and spending more time doing whatever, to get money, to buy even more.

AI unplugged. Then what will be our thoughts?

a reply to: Nothin

Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

originally posted by: Kandinsky
a reply to: Nothin

Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

It does feel like that story. Must be something to it.
Feels like it's not real. Like a realistic hologram, or an induced shared psychosis.

Haven't been away to a camp for a couple of years, and these ideas renew the desire.
(Cue the ads, for camps for sale or rent...)
Would that be me influencing the AI, or the AI seeing me as a virus, and moving to send me away from the system?

originally posted by: Kandinsky
a reply to: proteus33

This TED talk from last week creeped me out a bit. It relates to how FB and Google/YT influences us without any editorial or human intent.

Seriously though, experiment by speaking on certain subjects and comparing the ads you get delivered. Believe it or not, I'm not totally dismissive and have a genuine curiosity about all of it. I don't do FB and have my browsers packed with various ad-blockers so adverts aren't a big part of my internet experience.

PrivacyBadger is an app not many have heard of. It's good.

This is exactly the principle on which a drug dealer operates. Machine learning learned how to addict us to its content.

Interesting it went that way, interesting but not surprising.

Can we impose ethics to a machine learning algorithm?

Should all machine learning algorithms be open source so they could be inspected by the authorities?

Interesting questions.

I would ban any interaction between machine learning algorithms and human beings, I would leave them exclusively to analyse scientific and anonymous sociological data.

a reply to: proteus33

EGO BOOK is the worst place online

delete everything the sooner the better, havent been on FB in more than a year now I think
best thing Ive ever done

a reply to: CrapAsUsual

This is exactly the principle on which a drug dealer operates. Machine learning learned how to addict us to its content.

Great point.

High-fructose corn syrup, aspartame, methylphenidate, amphetamines, coc aine, cocaethylene. They all ride the dopamine reward pathway and social media is arguably addictive.

I would ban any interaction between machine learning algorithms and human beings, I would leave them exclusively to analyse scientific and anonymous sociological data.

I like predictive text on android devices. Otherwise it looks like we're jumping in without any checks and balances.