Grandpa's Bear Yogiwith goat, name forgotten.Wednesday, June 26, 2019
Episode 130: Vermin Feed on Forgotten Trash
Play Now!If you camp, protect your food, for the woods are full of opportunists quite happy to swap their diet of bugs and berries for your candy and cold cuts. Sadly, we must do the same at home, as I explain in Episode 130: Vermin Feed on Forgotten Trash.Grandpa's Bear Yogiwith goat, name forgotten. In this episode, I run myself off at the mouth, relying on a recent revelation and backing it with reminiscences related to both camping and the early intertoobs. I open the show with Bruce Livesey backed by KMFDM doing "Attack", and close today with Julie & Rolf and the Campfire Gang singing "Over The Rainbow" Hawaiian style.I'm releasing this and all my episodes under a Creative Commons 4.0 attribution, share-alike, and non-commercial license.
Grandpa's Bear Yogiwith goat, name forgotten.
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Wow. My head hurts. I feel like listening to this podcast has threatened my sanity, as if I'd read one of HP Lovecraft's forbidden tomes. Trash bears pawing through my 6-month-old e-mails because legally they no longer belong to me. So in theory, if some employee at the Searchies wanted to stalk me personally, or look at my old e-mails to try to gather passwords or bank info, then legally all they need to do is wait 6 months and then personally paw through my old e-mails by hand. Presumably the Searchies clamp down on this behavior or else we would have heard about it by now; perhaps the old e-mails on the Searchie servers are locked down tight in one of those infamous AI databases which can magically supply any data about me that the Searchies want, yet still lets the executives swear in Congress that no human ever sees my data.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, it's silly of me but I feel like I ought to apologize for my inadvertent role in bringing personalized photo editing Spam to your doorstep... just by being on the other end of that conversation.
My head hurts. I feel like listening to this podcast has threatened my sanity, as if I'd read one of HP Lovecraft's forbidden tomes.
DeleteDon't go blaming that mad Arab! There's a far more rational explanation for your mental instability: those with certain quirks of thought naturally gravitate toward Attack Ads! Ergo, the show is a symptom, not a cause.…
Oh, and while I'm thinking about it:
DeleteAnyway, it's silly of me but I feel like I ought to apologize for my inadvertent role in bringing personalized photo editing Spam to your doorstep….
Don't be! Think about it this way: the specificity of our email exchange was so unusual that it tipped me off that there was a problem. Had we been yakking about other common topics, like beers and power tools, I may never have questioned why those spammers came after me.
Okay, you threatened my sanity, now I'm returning the favor. Come with me, if you will, on a journey of speculation. And let's see if you emerge out the other side with a shred of your rationality intact.
ReplyDeleteI listened to your podcast and thought, "Gee, I was on the other end of that exact same conversation about photo editing, and thankfully, I haven't received any such personalized Spam." That's because, I reasoned, I'm using a GD-Mail account, whereas I guess you're using some kind of third-party service or Fruity e-mail account.
And the GD-Mail service is world famous for its highly effective Spam filters. My GD-Mail account gets thousands of Spam messages per month, and yet -- I frequently doublecheck for myself -- all my "real" messages end up in my GD-Mail In-Box, and all the Spam I ever receive reliably ends up in the GD-Mail Spam Folder. Seriously it's 100%. I have never seen GD-Mail make a single mistake in that respect. I think I remember GD-Mail executives crowing that they have "ended Spam forever" for their users.
So why are GD-Mail's Spam filters so very effective?
Well, what if...
...what if...
What if GD-Mail made a boatload of money by selling my 6+ month-old personal messages to Spammers, yet at the same time, they kept all that personal information, which they just sold, inside one of those 'infamous AI databases' that I just mentioned.
So Step 1, the Spammers pay the Searchies big money to get such juicy personal info about me from GD-Mail.
Step 2, the Spammers generate highly personalized Spam,
Step 3, the GD-Mail Client knows exactly what to look for to identify incoming Spam aimed at me, because THE SEARCHIES JUST SOLD SPAMMERS THE DATA IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Step 4, GD-Mail users rave about how effective the GD-Mail Spam filters are. They've blocked tens of thousands of Spam messages from ever hitting my In-Box and never made a mistake!
Everybody's happy!
Except for me, now, because all of a sudden my brain hurts again.
If this speculation is true, then the Searchies are acting somewhat like the stock brokers at Gallstone Sux, who before the 2008 financial crisis were pushing their customers to buy "great bargain" stocks, while privately referring to those same stocks as "dogs" or "pieces of sh#t". There's no law against what they are doing, but it is utterly unethical. If this speculation is true, then they're being unethical towards Spammers, so maybe nobody cares.
But in that case the Searchies' alleged motto -- ("Don't Be Evil") -- would be exposed as the hollow, meaningless advertising propaganda that it most certainly is. If that speculation is true, they've made a huge chunk of their billions off of pure Evil. Charging money for a service that they themselves are actively undermining and cancelling out. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. That's how you make a fortune in the 21st Century, I guess.
You have a friend who's a reporter, don't you? You ought to set him on this trail and see if it pans out.
Well, what if...
DeleteYou should also consider that GDmail has about the largest cache of email accounts to compare for mass mailings. If more than one GDmail user gets a nearly identical message at the same fricking time, chances are it's spammy. If a hundred get one…. How about ten thousand? More?
That said, your theory, as I understand things, isn't far off. I was very recently reading (IIRC) Shoshana Zuboff's Rise of Surveillance Capitalism, where she notes that the early GDmail users were more than a bit peeved at seeing ads fed to their inbox too personalized to have come from anything but that inbox. I suspect the Searchies received enough backlash to implement exactly the privacy restrictions upon which you speculate.
Still, there is no reason that same information cannot be farmed out to the programmatic ad placements wherever you spend your eyeball time.
So the Searchies have created the best of both worlds; a rich mine of info, made richer by the supposed lack of the very bears rooting through their goodies that all the other online email services seem to encourage; and made even richer as their own inbox pawing goes to personalizing ads far away from that cache of Mountain Bars you thought were safe.
It's like the old adages concerning dating at the office: Don't shit where you eat; Don't fish of the company pier; or (my favorite) Don't prepare your meat where you make your bread.
There's no law against what they are doing….
And that's the real topic of conversation, isn't it? This crap is about as complicated as it gets, meaning no one really understands it, meaning lawmakers don't get many calls for restricting it, and those calls they do get they don't understand themselves.
You have a friend who's a reporter, don't you?
Not me, at least not lately. I think a woman I knew in high school worked at a local paper in our hometown, but that was at least thirty years ago.
If that speculation is true, they've made a huge chunk of their billions off of pure Evil.
I think——again, from Zuboff's book——the whole Evil thing has been wholeheartedly embraced. "Don't be" is so last century.
I found the reference I referenced earlier. From Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:
DeleteAs soon as the first [GDmail] user saw the first ad targeted to the content of her private correspondence, public reaction was swift. Many were repelled and outraged; others were confused. As [the Searchies]' chronicler Steven Levy put it, "By serving ads related to content, [Searchies] seemed almost to be reveling in the fact that users' privacy was at the mercy of the polices and trustworthiness of the company that owned the servers. And since those ads made profits, [the Searchy Head] was making it clear that it would exploit the situation."
I think you're right: that reaction convinced the Searchies to scrub targeted ads from the inbox and make, as you say, "Everybody Happy!"
Except….