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I decided to give blue sky a try. I am not much of a user of social media but every once in a while is ….. fine.
29 Wednesday Jan 2025
Posted in Social Media
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I decided to give blue sky a try. I am not much of a user of social media but every once in a while is ….. fine.
16 Monday Sep 2024
Posted in Social Media
≈ Comments Off on Cybersecurity for Democracy: Facebook
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There are many reasons why I left Facebook and Instagram. One of those reasons is Meta’s continued violations of its stated policies in exchange for more money.
Read the report here. Cybersecurity for Democracy
” ….64% of those Telegram-linked ads appear to have violated Meta’s policies, including some promoting illegal activity.”

09 Sunday Jul 2023
Posted in About, Social Media
≈ Comments Off on Social Medi-aocrity
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I use social media, and have been used by social media. Meta Corp., which owns Facebook (FB), Instagram (IN), and WhatsApp, earns 97.5% of its revenue from the sale of advertising (Wikipedia).
I have had a personal profile page on Facebook since 2005. Until recently my last post on my personal page was in 2019 and decided to only post on my business page which has the same name. In January 2022 I decided to delete both personal and business pages after repeatedly having difficulties connecting my website/blog to my FB business page. Apparently I simplely put it to sleep (disabled).
After reading an article where the writer also thought he had deleted his account only to discover it was just disabled I decided to see if I made the same mistake…. and I did and un-disabled or rather re-enabled my FB account.
I also had an Instagram business account under the same name which as of now has been static for 4 months and I will not be using it ever again. Not deleted, nor disabled, but disowned!
I also have a Twitter account under the same business name and mostly used it to view (and attempt to answer) medical case questions. Rarely successful I nevertheless enjoy it, reminding me of my time working at a hospital as a therapist. I no longer use Twitter as it’s a sack of shite. And not the good shite mind you but the really really egotistical mind-numbing shite.
The only social media I use with any regularity is YouTube and its mostly a one way street as I don’t up load many videos.
I guess in the now and future I will post to this blog and rather reluctantly my FB personal page. That is until FB disgusts or bores me or the mother ship comes back to pick me up.
Beam me up Scotty.
.

20 Tuesday Jun 2023
Posted in Social Media
≈ Comments Off on Watch I’m not afraid. You’re afraid | Tristan Harris | Nobel Prize Summit 2023. AI, Social media and You
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04 Sunday Jun 2023
Posted in Data hack, Social Media
≈ Comments Off on Social Leaky Media
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Facebook has been involved in eight data breaches since its launch in 2004. The most famous breach was the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where the company sold the data of 87 million users.
In 2021, Facebook acknowledged a data leak that exposed the personal information of approximately half a billion users. The data included names, birthdays, locations, and phone numbers. Facebook said the leak stemmed from a security problem in 2019 that they had since fixed. They denied any wrongdoing, saying that the data was scraped from publicly available information on the site.
Facebook parent company Meta Platforms agreed to pay $725 million in settlement in a lawsuit seeking damages for allowing third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, access to user data. Facebook users who had an active account at any point between May 2007 and December 2022 can apply to receive a piece of the settlement.

Instagram has had several data breaches in recent years, including:
In August 2020, an unsecured database containing 235 million profiles from Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube was discovered.
In January 2021, a data leak exposed scraped data on 214 million social media accounts.
In September 2022, Irish regulators fined Instagram €405m for data privacy violations.
Instagram was accused of processing children’s privacy data for business accounts and on a user registration platform. Earlier, teen users’ (aged between 13 and 17) accounts were made ‘public’ by default, and they were easily targeted by ads and hacking methods.

Twitter had a data breach in November 2021 that was caused by a vulnerability in Twitter’s software. The vulnerability allowed hackers to learn if an email address or phone number was associated with an existing account. The vulnerability was first flagged to Twitter in January 2022. Twitter fixed the flaw on January 13, 2022.
The breach involved tricking a piece of software linked to Twitter called an API (application programming interface) into revealing hidden details about accounts. Hackers were able to submit an email address or phone number to Twitter’s systems to reveal the username associated with that phone number or email address.
At the end of 2022, there were reports that hackers were selling data stolen from 400 million Twitter users. Researchers now say that a widely circulated trove of email addresses linked to about 200 million users is likely a refined version of the larger trove with duplicate entries removed.
Sources: Wired, Firewall Times, CNN, Verge.