It's a wednesday

[bill_schubert]

My lovely and talented sister susandennis was talking about Amazon's changing, or maybe decaying, customer service and kicked off a brain walkabout for me on the recent security discussions going on.  

1 — Prolific survey.  Prolific.co is a site I keep up all the time and make spare change on.  The surveys are usually by post grads collecting data to support or kill some hypothesis of theirs.  One thing the surveys have taught me is that some post grads know a lot less about hypotheses than I do and skew their questions so that they get the answers they want as if the paper is already written.  Case in point:

The question was whether I'd rather have an Amazon app (the shopping one I use all the time) with ads or a paid version without ads.  Why would one want an Amazon app without ads and how could there be one?  And, btw, there is no such thing so the example was terrible.

But to think that one could use an Amazon app from which Jeff would not extract every single piece of marketing data from the user is ludicrous.  

2 — Smart TV's collect data about the user!!!  All over the news this week.  I watch YouTubeTV all the time.  Google owns YouTubeTV.  Anything I watch is analysed by Google for marketing data.  Anyone who does not know that going in should not be on the Internet.  

3 — Put tape over the camera on your TV (tablet/notebook/webcam, etc).  THEY are watching.  Or, here's a thought.  If you want security on your internal network, spend the money and buy the equipment to be secure.  And learn how to use it.

OR... don't use the Internet.  

4 — I search for products sometimes just to change the ads in my articles in the news.  A few weeks ago I did a search for some kind of vegan shoe or something I had heard about.  After a couple of weeks of having that shoe company ad in my news stream I tired of the pictures so I did a search for some pants I was interested in.  Now I'm looking at the pants company.  Oddly I've managed to survive this marketing targeting.

One of the most exasperating things about having a computer business was never the complexity of systems, processes, and equipment.  It was the refusal of the user to learn enough about the equipment to protect themselves.  'I don't know anything about computers' was a line I heard thousands of times.  So maybe don't use them?  

It's a target rich environment for thieves.  They don't have to be very good to cull the herd and feast off the slow cattle.  But I've never, ever heard anyone propose that there are people who should not be on the Internet.  FOMO rules.  

Comments

[susandennis]

the one bit to me about the tv's is that none of them actually have cameras. so ... i have this vision of millions of idiots madly looking for where to put the black tape.

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

yeah... i think the newest ones are starting to get them --- but, yeah, I suspect the manufacturers of all the others are getting support calls asking 'where is the camera in my tv?'

one of the joys of not being in the business anymore...