Consultant, CMO, Non-Exec
Lots of the newspaper articles about Cambridge Analytica speak as if what they (apparently) did was extremely advanced. Many also speak about it as if it’s unrepeatable. It was not extremely advanced. And it is repeatable. Advanced? Most of the things they apparently did were standard marketing tactics stretched in an unethical way. Repeatable? In …
Continue reading “How to Repeat what Cambridge Analytica Did”
There have been lots of articles over the last week or so talking about “fake news” on Facebook, many revolving around the US election. The ‘poster child’ of Facebook Fake News is this post: “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead…“. It appeared a few days before the US presidential election, and was …
In early 2013, Steve Lohr of the New York Times published an article where he tracked down the origin of the phrase “Big Data”. He found several different sources, and declared that it originated in the mid-1990s. But… he specifically opted to conclude that the very earliest source he could find – from 1989 – …
Continue reading “The Real Original Source of the Phrase “Big Data””
When you visit BuzzFeed, they record lots of information about you. Most websites record some information. BuzzFeed record a whole ton. I’ll start with the fairly mundane stuff, and then move on to one example of some slightly more scary stuff. First: The Mundane Bits Here’s a snapshot of what BuzzFeed records when you land on a …
Here’s the front cover of the Daily Mirror. A haunting image of a starving British child, crying their eyes out. Only… the child is from the Bay Area, and the photo was purchased from Flickr via Getty Images… Here’s the source of the original image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/laurenrosenbaum/4084544644/ (Here’s a happier one taken the following day: https://www.flickr.com/photos/laurenrosenbaum/4086511962/. Apparently she was …
Continue reading “The Mirror’s Crying Child Photo – Not All That it Seems”
Over the last couple of years, Twitter silently changed the way they treat any links you include in tweets. In doing so, they have given themselves a very nice competitive advantage in lots areas, but they’ve also silently taken away the ability for search engines to follow the links you post to Twitter. Here’s what Twitter changed: …
Continue reading “Twitter Is Telling Google Not to Follow Your Links”
Every large news site is preaching about the NSA PRISM programme, and Obama’s apparent hypocrisy in monitoring his citizens. What none of them mention explicitly is that they themselves use hundreds of technologies to track their readers both on their own sites, and as their readers move around the web. Here are 6 images showing …
Continue reading “The Hypocrisy of Big News Sites on State Surveillance in Seven Images”
The biggest finance/data story of the month is that “Bloomberg snooped on Goldman Sachs”. Here is one of the dozens (thousands) of articles covering it: http://theweek.com/article/index/244050/is-bloomberg-news-spying-on-goldman-sachs What’s the fuss about? This is the summary of the story: Most banks & financial institutions use Bloomberg systems to gather information about financial markets. Bloomberg record data on who …
Continue reading “Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg, and Data Literacy”