Mark's Views, Perhaps — from behind my eyeballs
Google Street View near Perrysville, IN — except what you see below is looking up.
I have no idea what that is, though apparently it’s near a farm on N County Rd 200 E.
Some other blogger posted a more-zoomed-out version, though I have no clue why. I studied it and failed to find anything particularly outstanding.
Except for this: Read it all
Cram your chair a little closer to the monitor. (Thanks.)
I’m about to cast a wishful eye on the week expiring to note posts that might have been.
(Should there be a comma in there somewhere?)
What might have been — how dreary, that! Read it all
Maybe it’s time to quit posting personal photos online.
Anywhere.
Actually, it’s too late for me.
But I could continue to abstain from posting photos of new family members.
See what you make of these excerpts from an article I quickly scanned tonight:
With Carnegie Mellon’s cloud-centric new mobile app, the process of matching a casual snapshot with a person’s online identity takes less than a minute. Tools like PittPatt and other cloud-based facial recognition services rely on finding publicly available pictures of you online, whether it’s a profile image for social networks like Facebook and Google Plus or from something more official from a company website or a college athletic portrait. In their most recent round of facial recognition studies, researchers at Carnegie Mellon were able to not only match unidentified profile photos from a dating website where the vast majority of users operate pseudonymously with positively identified Facebook photos, but also match pedestrians on a North American college campus with their online identities.
The repercussions of these studies go far beyond putting a name with a face; researchers Alessandro Acquisti, Ralph Gross, and Fred Stutzman anticipate that such technology represents a leap forward in the convergence of offline and online data and an advancement of the “augmented reality” of complementary lives. With the use of publicly available Web 2.0 data, the researchers can potentially go from a snapshot to a Social Security number in a matter of minutes:
[…]
The relevant point here is not Schmidt’s thought on behavior and choice but the fact that, no matter what you choose to do or not do, your life exists in the cloud, indexed by Google, in the background of a photo album on Facebook, and across thousands of spammy directories that somehow know where you live and where you went to high school. These little bits of information exist like digital detritus. With software like PittPatt that can glean vast amounts of cloud-based data when prompted with a single photo, your digital life is becoming inseparable from your analog one. You may be able to change your name or scrub your social networking profiles to throw off the trail of digital footprints you’ve inadvertently scattered across the Internet, but you can’t change your face. And the cloud never forgets a face.
How naive we’ve been.
Well, for me, “had been.” The moment of awakening to this came several weeks ago. But still, prior to that was much too long a time to have been naive.
For a generally-suspicious, naturally-cynical, privacy-and-security-conscious person, that’s pretty bad.
But now it’s now…so…now what?
Do we just accept our fate and continue carelessly?
I say, “No!”
(So…?)
If your life is an open book, Facebook has had its face deep into it.
And if you thought your life was a closed book, Facebook has had its face deep into it, you poor deluded soul.
Facebook privacy issues: Social network is watching you even when you’re logged out
Facebook has admitted that it has been watching the web pages its members visit – even when they have logged out.
In its latest privacy blunder, the social networking site was forced to confirm that it has been constantly tracking its 750million users, even when they are using other sites.
The social networking giant says the huge privacy breach was simply a mistake – that software automatically downloaded to users’ computers when they logged in to Facebook ‘inadvertently’ sent information to the company, whether or not they were logged in at the time.
Before this, it was OnStar.
What next?
My cellphone listening in, even when it’s not on a call? Or when it’s allegedly turned off?
And what about Google?
Or my answering machine?
Or my toaster? 😯
OK. I lost interest in fleshing out this post. Sorry. That’s just the way it is. I have a real life to live…and that means I have to earn a living. Or rather, try. 🙁
PS to Facebook: The “blunder” and “mistake” and “inadvertently” and “bug” concepts all require the willing suspension of disbelief.
One Facebook friend told another (out of my presence, I suppose he thought) that I’m paranoid about The Cloud. Here. Read the exact quote for yourself:
His opinion versus my opinion — I’ll take mine any day! 😀
And I’ll even throw in this next piece for free:
The Cloud’s My-Mom-Cleaned-My-Room Problem
This is not a short reflection on my childhood neither of my parents was the room-cleaning type but a metaphor for the set of web services we call the cloud. We all know the feeling of logging into Facebook/Tumblr/Twitter/Netflix/Pandora/Gmail and realizing that the interface has changed.
[…you really ought to read the missing guts…]
The personal computing era rose at a time when bandwidth was very constrained. Software ran locally and most individuals’ computers were not hooked up to networks. Your computer *was* personal. And when you got a new one, the first thing most people did was to customize the desktop background. BBS, AOL, and the web began to change all that, but we still thought of our computers as objects distinct from the Internet. You ran software (games, word processors, organizing tools, music players) inside your box without reference to the wider web.
Now, more and more of the computing power we use comes from a CPU across the Internet. We no longer own our digital homes. Instead, we live rent-free with our parents. There are some serious upsides to living with your parents, particularly in today’s economy. You save money. You don’t have to worry about figuring as many things out on your own. Someone else fixes all the messes. And it’s harder to make a a mess when you’re being constantly monitored.
But the freedom of usage that defined personal computing does not extend to the world of parental computing. This isn’t a bug in the way that cloud services work. It is a feature. What we lose in freedom we gain in convenience. Maybe the tradeoff is worth it. Or maybe it’s something that just happened to us, which we’ll regret when we realize the privacy, security, and autonomy we’ve given up to sync our documents and correspondence across computers.
So, no, I don’t Carbonite or Sync or Mozy or GoogleDocs or DropBox or Office 360.
I still believe in privacy and security.
I still believe in personal computers and personal local-box software.
I’m old school. 😯
I don’t live with my parents.
Go ahead. Call me paranoid for that too! 🙄
Someday a tornado is going to come out of that cloud and remind you of me.
PS: I have some Facebook “privacy” news in the hopper for my next post.
What’s the deal with Timothy David Miller’s alleged involvement in Lisa Miller‘s alleged international parental kidnapping of her own biological daughter (a minor of whom she had legal custody)?
I don’t know, even though I’ve read plenty of news accounts and other online commentary.
Is Timo guilty as accused?
I don’t know that either. After reading a document purporting to be the official Read it all
Attention: Whoever Sent This Email to Me
This e-mail is to inform you that your E-mail Address has won you the sum of £3,500,000.00 (Three Million Five Hundred Thousand Pounds Sterling) from the GM LOTTERY. For your payment, you are required to contact our fiduciary agent with the contact details below:
Look, my info is already available online.
It shouldn’t be difficult for you to find a valid mailing address for me.
I know you’ll have to work harder for that information (than if I were to simply email it to you).
But I’ll compensate you handsomely for that little bit of extra work on your part. Just send me 10% of the amount you mention above…and you keep the rest.
I really could use the money, so please don’t delay.
Thank you.