Showing posts with label Wall Street Journal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wall Street Journal. Show all posts

LIKE IT OR NOT ...




Obfuscate: To darken, To make obscure. To be evasive, unclear or confusing. To make so confused or opaque as to be difficult to perceive or understand.

Guilty: Facebook, Twitter and Google.

A recent investigation by the Wall Street journal into the use of "LIKE" buttons and widgets placed on thousands of major sites, signaled yet another serious breach of ethics that will surely have the privacy police up in arms.

It appears these buttons capture a user's visit to the site and feeds it back to the originator. The kicker is that you need not click on the button. Your visit is automatically logged by the likes of Facebook.

Their explanations obfuscate. Do we really believe when they tell us they don't use the data? If so, why are the visits tracked in the first place.

Their real response should be .... We know you're too stupid to understand what we do and we don't want to tell you why we're doing it but we're going to do it anyway.

Gotcha!

Read the story here.

APPLY THE BRAKES



PSFK is a trends, research, idea generation and activation company with a daily news site.

A recent clipping from the site, or whatever the digital equivalent is called, focused on a Wall Street Journal article authored by John Freeman, the acting editor of Granta Magazine. His essay,
"Not So Fast" was adapted from his forthcoming book, "The Tyranny of E-Mail".

For those of us that consider the pace of our lives to be inextricably caught up in the web of the web, this is a must read. Twenty years from today, many of you may believe his words fall into an anachronism, sadly missing his point.

"The ultimate form of progress is learning to decide what is working and what is not; and working at this hyper-pace, e-mailing at a frantic rate is pleasing very few of us.

How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen?


If technology is to be used for the betterment of human life, we must reassert that the Internet and its virtual information space is not a world unto itself but a supplement to our existing world."


Read the essay
here.