Everything is Shit: Tracking the Great Enshittening

[Captainant 27,680]

Can we talk about the nationwide effort to criminalize books as enshittification of our education system?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna161444

The law enforcement officer spent months methodically gathering evidence. He leafed through thousands of pages and highlighted key passages amid reams and reams of paper. He wore his body camera to record his interactions with witnesses and suspects. And he photographed what he saw as instruments of the alleged crime:

Books.

 

The targets of the investigation? Three school librarians in Granbury, Texas. The allegation? They had allowed children to access literature — such as “The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison — that the officer, Scott London, a chief deputy constable, had deemed obscene.

[Brisketexan 105,154]

3 hours ago, Captainant said:

Can we talk about the nationwide effort to criminalize books as enshittification of our education system?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna161444

The law enforcement officer spent months methodically gathering evidence. He leafed through thousands of pages and highlighted key passages amid reams and reams of paper. He wore his body camera to record his interactions with witnesses and suspects. And he photographed what he saw as instruments of the alleged crime:

Books.

 

The targets of the investigation? Three school librarians in Granbury, Texas. The allegation? They had allowed children to access literature — such as “The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison — that the officer, Scott London, a chief deputy constable, had deemed obscene.

Fuck fascists.  Always and forever.

[Vegas64 676]

You hate dynamic pricing, wait until you hear about it's cousin, "surveillance pricing":

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/ftc-issues-orders-eight-companies-seeking-information-surveillance-pricing

Agency seeks information about products and services that use personal data, including finances and browser history, to set individualized prices for the same goods or services.

The FTC issued civil subpoenas to eight companies in financial services and consulting—including Mastercard, JPMorgan, and McKinsey—that advertise targeted pricing products to clients like Starbucks, McDonald’s, Home Depot, and Kirkland’s.

[thunderlounge 7,866]

46 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Fuck fascists.  Always and forever.

 

 

[gofuckyourself 8,339]

9 hours ago, Captainant said:

Can we talk about the nationwide effort to criminalize books as enshittification of our education system?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna161444

The law enforcement officer spent months methodically gathering evidence. He leafed through thousands of pages and highlighted key passages amid reams and reams of paper. He wore his body camera to record his interactions with witnesses and suspects. And he photographed what he saw as instruments of the alleged crime:

Books.

 

The targets of the investigation? Three school librarians in Granbury, Texas. The allegation? They had allowed children to access literature — such as “The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison — that the officer, Scott London, a chief deputy constable, had deemed obscene.

 

Libraries are quiet places where one can take in knowledge and discover new worlds.

So naturally authoritarians and terrified imbeciles are making them battle grounds and attacking the real threats in our society -- librarians. 

Happened in Llano also. Other places I'm sure since it's happening most in Florida and Texas. Yee-haw.

Pen America is a great source of info on the increasing censorship trend.

https://pen.org/

[Horn Under a Bad Sign 20,409]

More evidence of the great enshittification. Delia's Tamales raided by feds because apparently there is evidence of wage theft, social security fraud, financial abuse, discrimination, and workers being made to work as housekeepers in Delia Lubin's home. 


https://www.mysanantonio.com/food/article/delias-tamales-fbi-19593974.php

Edited July 24 by Horn Under a Bad Sign

[HenryJames 66,115]

[HenryJames 66,115]

Spoiler

Automakers Sold Driver Data for Pennies, Senators Say

Ron Wyden and Edward Markey urged the F.T.C. to investigate how car companies handled the data from millions of car owners.

July 26, 2024Updated 11:16 a.m. ET

 

Sen. Ron Wyden, above, and Sen. Edward J. Markey sent a letter on Friday to Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission.Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times

By Kashmir Hill

Kashmir Hill has been reporting for the last year on the privacy implications of connected cars.

If you drive a car made by General Motors and it has an internet connection, your car’s movements and exact location are being collected and shared anonymously with a data broker.

This practice, disclosed in a letter sent by Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts to the Federal Trade Commission on Friday, is yet another way in which automakers are tracking drivers, often without their knowledge.

Previous reporting in The New York Times, which the letter cited, revealed how automakers including G.M., Honda and Hyundai collected information about drivers’ behavior, such as how often they slammed on the brakes, accelerated rapidly and exceeded the speed limit. It was then sold to the insurance industry, which used it to help gauge individual drivers’ riskiness.

The two Democratic senators, both known for privacy advocacy, zeroed in on G.M., Honda and Hyundai because all three had made deals, The Times reported, with Verisk, an analytics company that sold the data to insurers.

In the letter, the senators urged the F.T.C.’s chairwoman, Lina Khan, to investigate how the auto industry collects and shares customers’ data.

One of the surprising findings of an investigation by Mr. Wyden’s office was just how little the automakers made from selling driving data. According to the letter, Verisk paid Honda $25,920 over four years for information about 97,000 cars, or 26 cents per car. Hyundai was paid just over $1 million, or 61 cents per car, over six years.

G.M. would not reveal how much it had been paid, Mr. Wyden’s office said. People familiar with G.M.’s program previously told The Times that driving behavior data had been shared from more than eight million cars, with the company making an amount in the low millions of dollars from the sale. G.M. also previously shared data with LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

“Companies should not be selling Americans’ data without their consent, period,” the letter from Senators Wyden and Markey stated. “But it is particularly insulting for automakers that are selling cars for tens of thousands of dollars to then squeeze out a few additional pennies of profit with consumers’ private data.”

Hyundai enrolled any car with an internet connection in the data sharing, the letter said. G.M. and Honda customers had to opt in to be included, but Mr. Wyden called the enrollment process “deceptive.”

The sharing of driver behavior data stopped after The Times reported on it in March. Verisk shut down its “data exchange” for driving behavior in April.

A spokesman for Honda, Chris Martin, said that Verisk had provided a driving score service to its customers, and that “no identifiable consumer information was shared with any insurance company” without customers’ opt-in.

Hyundai also provided a driving score service. Ira Gabriel, a company spokesman, said the terms and conditions of its Bluelink connected car service had informed customers that data would be shared with Verisk when they activated Bluelink at the dealership. Verisk shared the data with insurance companies only with a customer’s consent, Mr. Gabriel said.

“Verisk paid Hyundai for potential future earnings from customers who affirmatively opted into the insurance feature,” he said in a statement.

The Detroit headquarters of General Motors, which does not seek customer consent for sharing anonymized location information, the senators’ letter said. Rebecca Cook/Reuters

While G.M. has stopped selling personally identifying information about driver behavior to data brokers, it still shares anonymized location information from its cars with a company that Mr. Wyden’s office said G.M. had declined to identify. According to the letter to the F.T.C., G.M. told the office that it did not seek consent from customers to share the location of their cars, and that the only way to opt out “was by disabling the car’s internet connection entirely.”

“As is common business practice, we share de-identified data not associated with specific drivers or vehicles with select partners to enhance city infrastructure and road safety for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers,” a G.M. spokeswoman, Malorie Lucich, said.

Previously, G.M. shared cars’ locations with a British data broker, Wejo, in which G.M. had an investment. Wejo filed for bankruptcy last year.

Matt Bialuk, who was an executive at Wejo, said that the company had gotten the precise location of about 10 million G.M. cars up to every one to three seconds, but that the data did not include identifying details about the driver. The data was useful for universities and state transportation departments, he said.

“You can see braking, bottlenecks, route optimizations,” Mr. Bialuk said. “There are tons of use cases. This is how to create smart roads.”

He added: “We could see windshield wipers are on. Windshield wipers tell a huge story in vehicles.”

This is at least the third letter the F.T.C. has received from Congress asking it to investigate the collection of data from Americans’ cars. In March, the F.T.C., which is responsible for policing unfair and deceptive business practices, solicited reports from consumers about the issue, but an agency spokeswoman said she couldn’t comment on whether the agency is investigating.

 

[thunderlounge 7,866]

https://fortune.com/2024/07/26/general-motors-honda-and-hyundai-are-accused-of-inappropriately-selling-customer-data/

Snippet:

Quote

Two U.S. senators are calling on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate automakers selling customers’ driving data to brokers who package it and then sell it to insurance companies.

In a letter to FTC Chairwoman Linda Khan, Democrats Ron Wyden of Oregon, and Edward Markey of Massachusetts allege that General Motors, Hyundai, Honda and perhaps others are sharing drivers’ data, such as sudden braking and acceleration.

The automakers, the senators said in a statement Friday, used deceptive tactics to manipulate customers into signing up for disclosure of the data to brokers.

After reading a report in The New York Times, Wyden’s office looked into the three automakers and found that they shared data with broker Verisk Analytics. In the letter to Khan, the senators wrote that all three automakers confirmed disclosure of the data. GM also confirmed that it disclosed customer location data to two other companies that the automaker would not name, the letter said.

Verisk used the data to prepare reports on driving-behavior history and sold them to insurance companies, the letter said. Some automakers may have deceived customers by advertising data disclosures as a way to reduce insurance bills, without telling them that some insurers could charge more, the senators wrote.

“If the FTC determines that these companies violated the law, we urge you to hold the companies and their senior executives accountable,” the senators wrote to Khan.

 

[Captainant 27,680]

1 hour ago, thunderlounge said:

https://fortune.com/2024/07/26/general-motors-honda-and-hyundai-are-accused-of-inappropriately-selling-customer-data/

Snippet:

 

We really REALLY need a US version of the GDPR. It's fucking absurd how impossible it is to avoid all the data skimming in the US

[Hank Kingsley 20,966]

This is a real product. Shit's getting dark, man. 

 

[Incredulity 11,675]

[Bolero88 277]

59 minutes ago, Hank Kingsley said:

This is a real product. Shit's getting dark, man. 

 

That's the most Black Mirror thing I've ever seen. Dark times. 

[Captain Ron 12,883]

1 hour ago, Bolero88 said:

That's the most Black Mirror thing I've ever seen. Dark times. 

Then it's already a fail. Swisher brought this up recently - if your product COULD be  a Black Mirror episode, you're doing something wrong.

Edited July 31 by Captain Ron

[crash_davis 23,113]

https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/younger-generations-are-facing-a-higher-risk-of-cancer-than-their-parents

Younger generations are facing a higher risk of cancer than their parents, or don't be obese.

Each successive generation born during the second half of the 20th century has faced a higher risk of 17 cancers, according to a US study. The team looked at the incidence of 34 cancers and death rate of 25 for people aged 25-84 years from 2000 to 2019 using US cancer registry data to estimate the differences in risk between different birth cohorts. They say 17 of the 34 cancers studied had a higher incidence in younger birth cohorts. 10 of these cancers are linked to obesity, the researchers say, which means increasing obesity could play a role, and both declines and increases in specific cancers appear to mirror trends in smoking and alcohol use. The researchers say we need to do more work to understand the other factors contributing to this increased cancer risk so we can work on them.

[DigglerontheHoof 21,202]

[HenryJames 66,115]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-08-04/apple-intelligence-early-preview-in-call-recording-safari-summaries-new-siri-lzfk2949

[HenryJames 66,115]

[Parliament 14,260]

4 hours ago, HenryJames said:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-08-04/apple-intelligence-early-preview-in-call-recording-safari-summaries-new-siri-lzfk2949

We are not surprised by this.

[Braff Zacklin 13,618]

3 hours ago, HenryJames said:

[Hook1997 5,382]

On 7/26/2024 at 3:12 PM, HenryJames said:

  Reveal hidden contents

Automakers Sold Driver Data for Pennies, Senators Say

Ron Wyden and Edward Markey urged the F.T.C. to investigate how car companies handled the data from millions of car owners.

July 26, 2024Updated 11:16 a.m. ET

 

Sen. Ron Wyden, above, and Sen. Edward J. Markey sent a letter on Friday to Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission.Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times

By Kashmir Hill

Kashmir Hill has been reporting for the last year on the privacy implications of connected cars.

If you drive a car made by General Motors and it has an internet connection, your car’s movements and exact location are being collected and shared anonymously with a data broker.

This practice, disclosed in a letter sent by Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts to the Federal Trade Commission on Friday, is yet another way in which automakers are tracking drivers, often without their knowledge.

Previous reporting in The New York Times, which the letter cited, revealed how automakers including G.M., Honda and Hyundai collected information about drivers’ behavior, such as how often they slammed on the brakes, accelerated rapidly and exceeded the speed limit. It was then sold to the insurance industry, which used it to help gauge individual drivers’ riskiness.

The two Democratic senators, both known for privacy advocacy, zeroed in on G.M., Honda and Hyundai because all three had made deals, The Times reported, with Verisk, an analytics company that sold the data to insurers.

In the letter, the senators urged the F.T.C.’s chairwoman, Lina Khan, to investigate how the auto industry collects and shares customers’ data.

One of the surprising findings of an investigation by Mr. Wyden’s office was just how little the automakers made from selling driving data. According to the letter, Verisk paid Honda $25,920 over four years for information about 97,000 cars, or 26 cents per car. Hyundai was paid just over $1 million, or 61 cents per car, over six years.

G.M. would not reveal how much it had been paid, Mr. Wyden’s office said. People familiar with G.M.’s program previously told The Times that driving behavior data had been shared from more than eight million cars, with the company making an amount in the low millions of dollars from the sale. G.M. also previously shared data with LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

“Companies should not be selling Americans’ data without their consent, period,” the letter from Senators Wyden and Markey stated. “But it is particularly insulting for automakers that are selling cars for tens of thousands of dollars to then squeeze out a few additional pennies of profit with consumers’ private data.”

Hyundai enrolled any car with an internet connection in the data sharing, the letter said. G.M. and Honda customers had to opt in to be included, but Mr. Wyden called the enrollment process “deceptive.”

The sharing of driver behavior data stopped after The Times reported on it in March. Verisk shut down its “data exchange” for driving behavior in April.

A spokesman for Honda, Chris Martin, said that Verisk had provided a driving score service to its customers, and that “no identifiable consumer information was shared with any insurance company” without customers’ opt-in.

Hyundai also provided a driving score service. Ira Gabriel, a company spokesman, said the terms and conditions of its Bluelink connected car service had informed customers that data would be shared with Verisk when they activated Bluelink at the dealership. Verisk shared the data with insurance companies only with a customer’s consent, Mr. Gabriel said.

“Verisk paid Hyundai for potential future earnings from customers who affirmatively opted into the insurance feature,” he said in a statement.

The Detroit headquarters of General Motors, which does not seek customer consent for sharing anonymized location information, the senators’ letter said. Rebecca Cook/Reuters

While G.M. has stopped selling personally identifying information about driver behavior to data brokers, it still shares anonymized location information from its cars with a company that Mr. Wyden’s office said G.M. had declined to identify. According to the letter to the F.T.C., G.M. told the office that it did not seek consent from customers to share the location of their cars, and that the only way to opt out “was by disabling the car’s internet connection entirely.”

“As is common business practice, we share de-identified data not associated with specific drivers or vehicles with select partners to enhance city infrastructure and road safety for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers,” a G.M. spokeswoman, Malorie Lucich, said.

Previously, G.M. shared cars’ locations with a British data broker, Wejo, in which G.M. had an investment. Wejo filed for bankruptcy last year.

Matt Bialuk, who was an executive at Wejo, said that the company had gotten the precise location of about 10 million G.M. cars up to every one to three seconds, but that the data did not include identifying details about the driver. The data was useful for universities and state transportation departments, he said.

“You can see braking, bottlenecks, route optimizations,” Mr. Bialuk said. “There are tons of use cases. This is how to create smart roads.”

He added: “We could see windshield wipers are on. Windshield wipers tell a huge story in vehicles.”

This is at least the third letter the F.T.C. has received from Congress asking it to investigate the collection of data from Americans’ cars. In March, the F.T.C., which is responsible for policing unfair and deceptive business practices, solicited reports from consumers about the issue, but an agency spokeswoman said she couldn’t comment on whether the agency is investigating.

 

 

5 hours ago, HenryJames said:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-08-04/apple-intelligence-early-preview-in-call-recording-safari-summaries-new-siri-lzfk2949

Anyone have a iPhone???  My maps literally now tells me where I go day by day with it’s suggestions everytime I open maps by the time and where I’ve been over time on certain days and when to go to the work, home, significant location (girlfriend’s house), bar on certain days..  It’s also mostly accurate but it seems a bit intrusive.  

[Deej 76,830]

8 hours ago, Hook1997 said:

 

Anyone have a iPhone???  My maps literally now tells me where I go day by day with it’s suggestions everytime I open maps by the time and where I’ve been over time on certain days and when to go to the work, home, significant location (girlfriend’s house), bar on certain days..  It’s also mostly accurate but it seems a bit intrusive.  

Google maps has been doing that for some time. Of course Apple is just getting around to it. 

[Parliament 14,260]

8 hours ago, Hook1997 said:

 

Anyone have a iPhone???  My maps literally now tells me where I go day by day with it’s suggestions everytime I open maps by the time and where I’ve been over time on certain days and when to go to the work, home, significant location (girlfriend’s house), bar on certain days..  It’s also mostly accurate but it seems a bit intrusive.  

Get Google Maps.  

[blacklab 11,941]

12 hours ago, HenryJames said:

Not sure if they fixed it or it's fake but

[huge 3,793]

Look, I for one dont understand how I have lived all these years without AI.  

Whatever we are paying for it, I'm prepared to DOUBLE DOWN.

[thunderlounge 7,866]

 

[Chopper 17,238]

This article apparently didn't make it's way over here. 

 

OOPS. Who could've predicted putting items behind a barrier (for no good reason) while not bothering to hire staff to help customers would backfire?

Quote

 

Several years ago, Americans emerging from the early days of the pandemic found that aisles at some of the country’s biggest retailers had begun to change. After a year of shoppers mainlining online deliveries and battling unpredictable product shortages, stores finally replenished their shelves, but with a catch: Many products were locked behind acrylic barriers. The plastic shields, once used sparingly to secure certain kinds of expensive or heavily regulated items such as cellphones or cigarettes, were now holding hostage run-of-the-mill toiletries and cleaning supplies. To negotiate their release, you’d need a key-wielding store employee. If no one was around—and no one ever was—you could press a call button and hope for the best.

The practice has since metastasized to so many kinds of products in so many more stores—big-box discounters, beauty retailers, chain pharmacies—that it’s become routine to discover entire aisles transformed into untouchable product galleries armored in plexiglass. The whole thing has a whiff of pawnshop, which might actually be unfair to pawnshops. They, at least, have someone ready and waiting to take things out of lockup.

To understand how we got to this demoralizing retail reality, we have to go back to the Great Shoplifting Freak-Out of 2021. In the aftermath of pandemic upheaval and widespread protests following the murder of George Floyd by police, an unsettled country turned its attention to a handful of viral videos showing bands of thieves ransacking stores in violent smash-and-grab robberies and making off with huge quantities of everything from shampoo to luxury handbags.

According to retailers, these videos were evidence of a larger problem: More and more organized crime rings were swiping large quantities of desirable, easily resold goods from brick-and-mortar stores and listing them online. Some retailers, including Target Corp., have cited these losses as justification for the decision to close stores, often in dense cities or less wealthy neighborhoods. (Not all of these claims stand up to scrutiny—Target, for example, said that it was closing its East Harlem store in Manhattan in part because of crime, but also plans to open a new store nearby, closer to major transit lines.)
 

These companies say the only way to stymie crime without closing stores is to harden their on-shelf defenses. Less obtrusive options, including increasing in-store surveillance and carrying fewer name-brand goods, haven’t done enough to cut down on theft, they claim. Retailers are generally reticent to discuss these tactics in any detail, and when I tried to interview the biggest ones, they stuck to that vagueness: Walgreens didn’t respond to a request for comment, and a Target spokesperson declined to respond to questions, instead emphasizing in-store safety and a positive customer experience in a statement. A spokesperson for CVS—one of the retailers that uses hard plastic barriers most liberally—would only describe putting products under lock and key as “a last resort.”

In retailers’ eyes it might be their best option, but it’s one that appears to be backfiring. Neil Saunders, managing director of the retail practice at the firm GlobalData, describes the locking up of merch as “a blunt instrument.” Several years into this experiment, the instrument’s outcomes are becoming clear: miserable workers, irritated customers, abandoned shopping carts and more reasons than ever to shop online. The modern American store is designed around self-service, which encourages customers to buy more. If you can’t just grab most of the things you want, the brick-and-mortar retail system as we know it stops working.

At a Target in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, the locked cases shielding the men’s underwear are so vast, you begin to wonder whether, at some point, this store had been the target of a massive undies heist. The logistics of such a robbery would present some challenges. Briefs are on the second floor. So even if someone were to load all the undies into a cart, push it onto the cart escalator and try to make a break for it, they’d still need to wait at the bottom for the loot to slowly make its way down.

As I roamed the store, I found myself making similar getaway calculations every time I encountered an aisle of sealed-off shelves. Deodorant, body wash and toothpaste were inaccessible, but most shampoos and conditioners fended for themselves. To get a $24 tube of La Roche-Posay moisturizer, I had to get in an impromptu line of customers following a red-vested young woman like ducklings as she unlocked one clear, tiny cupboard after another. But an endcap displayed $45 allergy medication, free for the taking. An aisle filled on both sides with giant jugs of laundry detergent looked like the freezer section at the grocery store, except that the rows of doors weren’t keeping anything cold. They were just making it impossible to buy Tide.

Locked Up Shelves at Retail Stores Endanger Businesses’ Success

In general, products that get locked up are those most likely to go missing. But part of the issue with these locked cabinets is that retailers don’t always know if the missing inventory was stolen off a shelf or never made it to the shelf to begin with, says Jennifer Fagan, a retail industry analyst at consulting firm EY. If the merchandise was purloined, little is usually known about the perpetrator, or their intentions—an organized resale theft ring is hardly the only potential culprit. All of this is “an assumption,” Fagan says. “Retailers don’t have the data to give you that exact answer.”

This is why, in part, any particular store’s choices about what to lock up can seem completely arbitrary. Most products that end up behind plastic are health, beauty, electronics or cleaning products—but not all health, beauty, electronics or cleaning products. In a Target I visited, the replacement heads for electric toothbrushes were encased, but regular toothbrushes weren’t. Bulk packs of Rogaine selling for $72 were on regular shelves next to $6 deodorant that you couldn’t touch. Pricey toys, home-improvement products and name-brand printer ink cartridges roamed free, but the $1.99 plastic bath loofahs had been imprisoned. Name-brand products are known to be a larger theft risk because they’re more valuable to resellers, Fagan says, but beyond that, what to lock up tends to be guesswork for retailers.
 

Jason Brewer, a senior executive vice president at the Retail Industry Leaders Association, a trade group that often speaks about theft issues on behalf of large retailers, disputes this characterization. “Retailers have developed sophisticated inventory management systems that give them a very good picture of what is happening in stores,” he says, and they’re using that intel to determine which products are at high risk of large-scale theft and need confinement. If a missing product can’t be otherwise accounted for, he says, then it’s reasonable for a retailer to assume it’s stolen.

All the industry watchers I spoke with say that large-volume theft is indeed a real and growing issue for the retailers that have shifted into product lockdown mode. It’s just that retailers’ and analysts’ ability to assess these things tend to be largely vibes-based. Retailers “like to talk about it, but they don’t like to put numbers around it,” GlobalData’s Saunders says.

Across American retailers, average shrink—the industry term for inventory lost for any reason, expressed as a percentage of total sales—has remained relatively steady at around 1.5% for years, according to the National Retail Federation, a trade group that’s long lobbied for a more robust law enforcement response to retail theft. But shrink accounts for many types of things, including paperwork and checkout errors, losses in transit, returns, spoilage and theft from employees or vendors. NRF’s are some of the only publicly available statistics on the industrywide problem, but they’re compiled using private data voluntarily provided by an undisclosed list of companies.

It’s not that product doesn’t get smuggled out the front door, EY’s Fagan says. Shoplifting happens, and some of what’s stolen does get resold, a phenomenon that long predates more recent agita about organized retail theft. The problem is that product goes out the back door too, or doesn’t make it through the door in the first place. Videos of Supermarket Sweep-style deodorant robberies might be popular online, but experts generally regard less visible types of theft and loss as just as much of a threat, if not more.

A recent police raid on a warehouse outside Los Angeles turned up millions of dollars in stolen merchandise that law enforcement said they suspected was headed for resale, but they alleged that it had all been stolen in transit, not from retail sales floors. This has always been the preferred operational method of large, sophisticated theft rings (See: Goodfellas and The Sopranos), because stealing from tractor trailers or warehouses yields large quantities of brand-new goods that are packaged for efficient transport, storage and resale. In fact, according to the cargo security firm CargoNet, this type of theft has recently soared—in the first quarter of 2024, 46% more incidents were reported than in the same period in 2023.

None of that larceny is going to be thwarted by turning stores into plexiglass wastelands. But for the segment of theft happening off shelves, is putting products behind barriers an effective prevention measure? Although actual data is scarce, the answer seems to be yes. But that yes comes with significant caveats. Locking up merchandise “does work in the sense that it reduces theft” in the most basic way possible, says GlobalData’s Saunders. “The problem is it also reduces sales.”

The practice of locking up products is near-universally reviled among consumers. “Congrats, you have created a store that is literally impossible to shop at,” Brooklyn resident MJ Knefel posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, in June, after finding that all the buttons used to call employees to secured display cases at the local Walgreens had suddenly disappeared, even though the cases remained locked. Indeed, when Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., which also owns Duane Reade, announced that same month that it would need to close a “significant” number of its American stores because of underperformance, the response on social media amounted to, “Well, what did you expect?”

If stores lock up too much stuff, they cease to be stores—they become giant vending machines with no place to insert your money. Impulse purchases are thwarted. You can’t browse, because you can’t pick up anything to examine it more closely. If you hit the buzzer to summon an employee, you have to be sure you actually want something, otherwise you’ll waste their time as well as your own. You can’t dither and compare your options once the cabinet is opened, because whoever unlocked the door for you is likely being pulled away. Saunders recounted a recent experience at a chain pharmacy in which even the chocolate bars and bags of nuts were locked up—products that drugstores, by definition, carry for people to spontaneously toss on the counter at the last second.

A few weeks ago, when I asked an employee who’d arrived to open a cabinet full of underwear at the Target in White Plains, a suburb north of Manhattan, if she had to run around answering buzzers all day, she said, “Back to back, constantly,” before she darted off to do the same for someone else. At the Bensonhurst store, I asked the attendant who’d arrived to liberate laundry detergent if this got annoying. She hesitated slightly before assenting—yes, it sucks.

In both situations, I counted myself lucky that someone came at all. Retail, with its low pay and odd hours, has an industrywide problem with understaffing, a shortage that’s been exacerbated by decades of corporate cuts in labor budgets. That’s left many large retailers with barely enough employees in some locations to keep the lights on and the doors open. You can press that little button all you want, but there just might not be anyone to answer it. Each locked cabinet requires about 500 hours of annual labor to operate, Joe Budano, the chief executive of Indyme Solutions, a company that sells retail security products such as the now-ubiquitous employee call buttons, told the Wall Street Journal in 2023. Fagan says these kinds of loss prevention tactics only make retail work less appealing to potential hires and good employees more difficult to keep.
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That very well may feed into a vicious cycle for retailers if they don’t find better ways to deal with the theft issues they’re already having: When no one is minding the store, potential thieves feel emboldened. “Where staffing is better and staffing levels are better, theft goes down,” Saunders says. In 2023, Marvin Ellison, the chief executive of Lowe’s, credited the company’s investment in in-store employees for keeping its theft rates lower than its competitors’. Retail Industry Leaders of America’s Brewer disagrees that more workers is the solution. “It’s not a staffing issue,” he says, arguing that professionals engaged in large-scale theft aren’t dissuaded by a couple of extra employees. And, of course, acrylic cabinets can stand vigil in stores all day, every day without becoming legally entitled to health insurance.

What most retailers fail to account for is that while these tactics may help shore up quarterly earnings for now, they’re also doing real, long-term damage to their sales and to their brand. Browsing an aisle full of locked-up stuff is a bad user experience. Dare to linger too long, and whoever is watching the store’s security cameras might begin to find you suspicious. At least it might start to feel that way. After all, those plexiglass partitions are a constant reminder that where you are could be as much a crime scene as it is a big-box store—a feeling that won’t exactly, in the mantra of enlightened retailers, surprise and delight you.

You don’t have to try and fail to buy deodorant or toothpaste too many times before you simply stop trying to buy those things in person. When foot traffic declines, so do sales on all kinds of things, including those not behind plexiglass. “I worry that’s going to have a long-lasting effect,” says EY’s Fagan. For a lot of shoppers, those locked shelves become another reason to avoid in-person shopping and hand their business over to Amazon.

But retailers have already backed themselves too far into a corner for them to admit defeat. Retrofitting so many stores with lockup systems is time-consuming and expensive. Stores have sunk too much effort and money into safeguarding their shelves to fling them open now. Maybe next they’ll mess around with high-tech gadgetry, like RFID tags or facial recognition software. But perhaps a better solution is also the most obvious one: staffing up. It’s workers who make stores pleasant, orderly, convenient places to shop, and attracting more of them and keeping them around would probably require retailers to also raise wages and improve working conditions. To make these stores work again, retailers are going to have to find some way not to treat everyone as if they’re the next thief.

 

 

[WBT 20,610]

On 7/26/2024 at 3:12 PM, HenryJames said:

  Reveal hidden contents

Automakers Sold Driver Data for Pennies, Senators Say

Ron Wyden and Edward Markey urged the F.T.C. to investigate how car companies handled the data from millions of car owners.

July 26, 2024Updated 11:16 a.m. ET

 

Sen. Ron Wyden, above, and Sen. Edward J. Markey sent a letter on Friday to Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission.Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times

By Kashmir Hill

Kashmir Hill has been reporting for the last year on the privacy implications of connected cars.

If you drive a car made by General Motors and it has an internet connection, your car’s movements and exact location are being collected and shared anonymously with a data broker.

This practice, disclosed in a letter sent by Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts to the Federal Trade Commission on Friday, is yet another way in which automakers are tracking drivers, often without their knowledge.

Previous reporting in The New York Times, which the letter cited, revealed how automakers including G.M., Honda and Hyundai collected information about drivers’ behavior, such as how often they slammed on the brakes, accelerated rapidly and exceeded the speed limit. It was then sold to the insurance industry, which used it to help gauge individual drivers’ riskiness.

The two Democratic senators, both known for privacy advocacy, zeroed in on G.M., Honda and Hyundai because all three had made deals, The Times reported, with Verisk, an analytics company that sold the data to insurers.

In the letter, the senators urged the F.T.C.’s chairwoman, Lina Khan, to investigate how the auto industry collects and shares customers’ data.

One of the surprising findings of an investigation by Mr. Wyden’s office was just how little the automakers made from selling driving data. According to the letter, Verisk paid Honda $25,920 over four years for information about 97,000 cars, or 26 cents per car. Hyundai was paid just over $1 million, or 61 cents per car, over six years.

G.M. would not reveal how much it had been paid, Mr. Wyden’s office said. People familiar with G.M.’s program previously told The Times that driving behavior data had been shared from more than eight million cars, with the company making an amount in the low millions of dollars from the sale. G.M. also previously shared data with LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

“Companies should not be selling Americans’ data without their consent, period,” the letter from Senators Wyden and Markey stated. “But it is particularly insulting for automakers that are selling cars for tens of thousands of dollars to then squeeze out a few additional pennies of profit with consumers’ private data.”

Hyundai enrolled any car with an internet connection in the data sharing, the letter said. G.M. and Honda customers had to opt in to be included, but Mr. Wyden called the enrollment process “deceptive.”

The sharing of driver behavior data stopped after The Times reported on it in March. Verisk shut down its “data exchange” for driving behavior in April.

A spokesman for Honda, Chris Martin, said that Verisk had provided a driving score service to its customers, and that “no identifiable consumer information was shared with any insurance company” without customers’ opt-in.

Hyundai also provided a driving score service. Ira Gabriel, a company spokesman, said the terms and conditions of its Bluelink connected car service had informed customers that data would be shared with Verisk when they activated Bluelink at the dealership. Verisk shared the data with insurance companies only with a customer’s consent, Mr. Gabriel said.

“Verisk paid Hyundai for potential future earnings from customers who affirmatively opted into the insurance feature,” he said in a statement.

The Detroit headquarters of General Motors, which does not seek customer consent for sharing anonymized location information, the senators’ letter said. Rebecca Cook/Reuters

While G.M. has stopped selling personally identifying information about driver behavior to data brokers, it still shares anonymized location information from its cars with a company that Mr. Wyden’s office said G.M. had declined to identify. According to the letter to the F.T.C., G.M. told the office that it did not seek consent from customers to share the location of their cars, and that the only way to opt out “was by disabling the car’s internet connection entirely.”

“As is common business practice, we share de-identified data not associated with specific drivers or vehicles with select partners to enhance city infrastructure and road safety for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers,” a G.M. spokeswoman, Malorie Lucich, said.

Previously, G.M. shared cars’ locations with a British data broker, Wejo, in which G.M. had an investment. Wejo filed for bankruptcy last year.

Matt Bialuk, who was an executive at Wejo, said that the company had gotten the precise location of about 10 million G.M. cars up to every one to three seconds, but that the data did not include identifying details about the driver. The data was useful for universities and state transportation departments, he said.

“You can see braking, bottlenecks, route optimizations,” Mr. Bialuk said. “There are tons of use cases. This is how to create smart roads.”

He added: “We could see windshield wipers are on. Windshield wipers tell a huge story in vehicles.”

This is at least the third letter the F.T.C. has received from Congress asking it to investigate the collection of data from Americans’ cars. In March, the F.T.C., which is responsible for policing unfair and deceptive business practices, solicited reports from consumers about the issue, but an agency spokeswoman said she couldn’t comment on whether the agency is investigating.

 

I'm sure it's only General Motors and not every car made after 2015

[HenryJames 66,115]

[Chopper 17,238]

Well...FUCK YES! There's hope for some de-shittening

Quote

Aug. 5, 2024Updated 3:24 p.m. ET

Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, a federal judge ruled on Monday, a landmark decision that strikes at the power of tech giants in the modern internet era and that may fundamentally alter the way they do business.

Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said in a 277-page ruling that Google had abused a monopoly over the search business. The Justice Department and states had sued Google, accusing it of illegally cementing its dominance, in part, by paying other companies, like Apple and Samsung, billions of dollars a year to have Google automatically handle search queries on their smartphones and web browsers.

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Mehta said in his ruling.

The ruling is the most significant victory to date for American regulators who are trying to rein in the power of tech giants in the internet era. It is likely to influence other government antitrust lawsuits against Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

The ruling did not include remedies for Google’s behavior. Judge Mehta will now decide that, potentially forcing the company to change the way it runs or to sell off part of its business.

The ruling capped a yearslong case — U.S. et al. v. Google — that resulted in a 10-week trial last year. The Justice Department and states sued in 2020 over Google’s dominance in online search, which generates billions in profits annually. The Justice Department said Google’s search engine conducted nearly 90 percent of web searches, a number the company disputed.

The company spends billions of dollars annually to be the automatic search engine on browsers like Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox. Google paid Apple about $18 billion for being the default in 2021, The New York Times reported.

Google and the Department of Justice did not immediately offer comments on the ruling.

During the trial, Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, testified that he was concerned that his competitor’s dominance had created a “Google web” and that its relationship with Apple was “oligopolistic.” If Google continued undeterred, it was likely to become dominant in the race to develop artificial intelligence, he said.

Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, countered in his testimony that Google created a better service for consumers.
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Users choose to search on Google because they find it useful, and the company has continued to invest to make it better, the company’s lawyers said.

“Google is winning because it’s better,” John Schmidtlein, Google’s lead courtroom lawyer, said during closing arguments, which were held months later in May.

The government argued that by paying billions of dollars to be the automatic search engine on consumer devices, Google had denied its competitors the opportunity to build the scale required to compete with its search engine. Instead, Google collected more data about consumers that it used to make its search engine better and more dominant.

The government also accused Google of protecting a monopoly over the ads that run inside search results. Government lawyers said Google had raised the price of ads beyond the rates that should exist in a free market, which they argued was a sign of the company’s power. Search ads provide billions of dollars in annual revenue for Google.
Image
John Schmidtlein walks outdoors with blurry foliage behind him.
John Schmidtlein, Google’s lead lawyer, heading to court for the trial in October. Closing arguments waited until May.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

During closing arguments, Judge Mehta grilled the lawyers about factual statements and asked them to explain how their cases squared with legal precedent.

“The importance and significance of this case is not lost on me, not only for Google but for the public,” he said.

Legal scholars expect this decision to help set precedent for government antitrust lawsuits against the other tech giants. All of those investigations, conducted by the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department, began during the Trump administration and have ramped up under President Biden.

The Justice Department has sued Apple, arguing that the company made it difficult for consumers to ditch the iPhone, and brought another case against Google — focused on its advertising technology — that is set to go to trial in September. The F.T.C. has separately sued Meta, claiming the company stamped out nascent competitors, and Amazon, accusing it of squeezing sellers on its online marketplace.

“It’s a very prominent test of the Biden administration’s new antitrust enforcement agenda,” said Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a professor at Vanderbilt University’s law school.

With those cases, the government is testing hundred-year-old laws originally used to rein in utility and other monopolistic companies like Standard Oil.

A victory for the government provides credibility for its broader attempt to use antitrust laws to take aim at corporate America, said William Kovacic, a former chairman of the F.T.C.

“It creates momentum that supports their other cases,” he said in an interview in June.

The last major court ruling on a tech antitrust case — in the Justice Department’s 1990s lawsuit against Microsoft — cast its own shadow over the Google arguments. Judge Mehta repeatedly pressed lawyers to explain how the specifics of the case against Google could fit into the legal precedents.

The Microsoft antitrust case alleged that the tech giant combined practices like bullying industry partners and leveraging the popularity of its digital platform, from which users typically didn’t switch, to stifle competition.

A District Court judge initially ruled against Microsoft on most counts of possible antitrust violations, but an appeals court reversed some of those decisions. President George W. Bush’s administration settled with the company in 2001.

Judge Mehta’s Google decision is likely to be appealed. “Regardless of who wins or loses, this case probably has a date with the Supreme Court,” Mr. Kovacic said.

Steve Lohr contributed reporting from New York.

 

 

Edited August 5 by Chopper
article text added

[YChang 3,452]

16 hours ago, Parliament said:

We are not surprised by this.

I'm biased since I work for the company.

But A. It's still in beta and b, the company literally telegraphed that the rollout will be in stages, and C. Bloomburg and Gurman suck. 

[HenryJames 66,115]

Are the six fingers on his left hand an advantage?

[Bevo 13,579]

16 hours ago, HenryJames said:

In 2003 - a little late to the game.

[Chopper 17,238]

went down the drain a long time ago, keeps getting passed around like a huge spliff

Edited August 6 by Chopper

[huge 3,793]

18 hours ago, YChang said:

I'm biased since I work for the company.

But A. It's still in beta and b, the company literally telegraphed that the rollout will be in stages, and C. Bloomburg and Gurman suck. 

Ok but will it ever be worth the squeeze?

[YChang 3,452]

6 minutes ago, huge said:

Ok but will it ever be worth the squeeze?

<shrug> I only partially drink the Kool-Aid. We shall see, but what little I've played with has some nice quality-of-life improvements. The smarter/contextual Siri stuff shown off at WWDC is still a bit away. 

[huge 3,793]

I know a guy that is an operations manager at a mid size law firm and he is able to cut a LOT of time out of what used to take him longer using ChatGTP to generate shit he used to have to do from scratch.  Said that it is vital for him now.

He is the exception to the rule as far as I have seen.  But this isn't about AI, its about how my GD online wine deliveries cost $20 now when they used to be free, then $1, then $5.

[Samson's Wig 3,192]

2 hours ago, huge said:

I know a guy that is an operations manager at a mid size law firm and he is able to cut a LOT of time out of what used to take him longer using ChatGTP to generate shit he used to have to do from scratch.  Said that it is vital for him now.

He is the exception to the rule as far as I have seen.  But this isn't about AI, its about how my GD online wine deliveries cost $20 now when they used to be free, then $1, then $5.

He may want to read up on how many lawyers have already lost their license due to relying on AI, because you know, AI just makes shit up from time to time.  Most competent lawyers are avoiding it like the plague now.  We tried implementing it in a handful of ways to cut down on doc prep and you end up spending more time than before running back through everything and correcting all of the errors.  The things that are simply missed, rather than the glaring mistakes, are the biggest concern as they're harder to catch.  We scrapped all of it, and rightfully so.   AI is fun toy, and has some applications where it can be beneficial.  Anything that involves precision shouldn't be anywhere near it.  Mostly it's just a vehicle for violating IP rights, as well as privacy and publicity rights.  So the Internet and children love it, naturally, but I'm still waiting for real world applications that actually amount to anything of substance.  The one area you can maybe point to, the applications in the discovery of new antibiotics and other drugs leave me skeptical, frankly.  Given how shitty it is at everything else, should we really be trusting what it outputs for pharmaceuticals? 

[huge 3,793]

2 hours ago, Samson&#x27;s Wig said:

He may want to read up on how many lawyers have already lost their license due to relying on AI, because you know, AI just makes shit up from time to time.  Most competent lawyers are avoiding it like the plague now.  We tried implementing it in a handful of ways to cut down on doc prep and you end up spending more time than before running back through everything and correcting all of the errors.  The things that are simply missed, rather than the glaring mistakes, are the biggest concern as they're harder to catch.  We scrapped all of it, and rightfully so.   AI is fun toy, and has some applications where it can be beneficial.  Anything that involves precision shouldn't be anywhere near it.  Mostly it's just a vehicle for violating IP rights, as well as privacy and publicity rights.  So the Internet and children love it, naturally, but I'm still waiting for real world applications that actually amount to anything of substance.  The one area you can maybe point to, the applications in the discovery of new antibiotics and other drugs leave me skeptical, frankly.  Given how shitty it is at everything else, should we really be trusting what it outputs for pharmaceuticals? 

This guy is more like an office manager and what he was doing was closer to templates than biologics.  But we agree regardless.

[Mikey4 2,476]

On 8/5/2024 at 8:33 AM, blacklab said:

Not sure if they fixed it or it's fake but

This is what I got. It's wrong of course.

[HenryJames 66,115]

On 6/17/2024 at 6:47 PM, HenryJames said:

  Reveal hidden contents

Sick of scams? Stop answering your phone.

Experts and family members are begging you: Send any unknown call to voice mail.

Heather Kelly

 

(Illustration by Elena Lacey/The Washington Post)

The first rule of avoiding scam calls is to never answer unknown numbers, and even some known ones.

Curious? Bored? Worried it’s an emergency? Wait the extra minute it takes for the call to go to voice mail, then decide if it’s legitimate.

Unfortunately, every year hundreds of thousands of people in the United States either ignore that golden rule or are tricked into answering. According to the Federal Trade Commission, people lost $851 million to phone scams in 2023. After email, phone scams are the most common fraud method reported to the FTC.

I’ve been breaking the rule myself recently, out of professional curiosity and, yes, boredom. The most recent was the kind of common scam that could give anyone pause. The caller claimed to be from a generic-sounding company that wanted to send me an urgent document. I broke down some of their techniques:

Story continues below advertisement

 

• They used a number that was not flagged as a scam or telemarketer by the built-in features on my phone or from my carrier. It had a United States area code and didn’t pop up on a Google search.
• They provided a different phone number and reference number to call them back. This is a gambit to gain trust and delays them asking for anything that would raise red flags.
• They had enough personal information about my family to dismiss any concerns of being targeted at random. Thanks to constant hacks and breaches, most people have ample personal data that can be bought by scammers.
• The caller said they were calling about a legal complaint, in an attempt to trigger panic in me. The more questions I asked, the more agitated the caller became, even sprinkling in veiled threats.

Eventually, I annoyed the man so much that he hung up on me (not a first). Here’s what we can all learn to avoid losing money and time to phone scams.

 

Learn to not answer your phone

Resist the urge to pick up that call unless is it an individual or small business you know personally and is saved in your contacts. This applies to unknown numbers, local numbers, and recognizable large companies or organizations.

“The deck is so stacked against you as a consumer when you’re responding to these types of phone calls,” said Michael Jabbara, Visa’s senior vice president of global fraud services. “I wouldn’t even put myself in that position, period.”

Your first defense is your phone’s contacts app. Since you should only answer calls from people and businesses you deal with regularly, make sure yousave them in your phone’s built-in contact app. Next, turn on the setting that sends all other calls straight to voice mail.

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On an iPhone, go to Settings → Phone → Silence Unknown Callers. On an Android device, go to the Phone app → menu button → Settings. Most phones will have options for blocking numbers and caller ID/spam protection here.

“But my caller ID says it’s Chase Bank. Clearly, I need to answer,” you might say.

No, you still should not answer. Scammers have successfully compromised caller ID, making it unreliable. They use a technology called spoofing, which makes calls appear to come from real companies, your area code and even specific people you know. In some cases, they can mimic the numbers of people you know or your own number.

Scammers are testing AI tools to clone voices, but experts say these are still just a small amount of scams. If you’re concerned, come up with a password with family members that can be used to confirm their identity.

 

So you’ve answered the phone anyway …

Well, I tried. Let’s say you’ve answered the phone despite the warnings. Now what do you do?

Story continues below advertisement

 

Most people think they’re smart enough to outwit the scammer, but the criminals on the other end of the line are often counting on that.

“Don’t overestimate your ability to outsmart the fraudsters. This is their job. They make a living doing this — they’re highly motivated to be good at this job,” Jabbara said.

Listen for asks: If you haven’t already, memorize the red flags. If they ask for money, personal information or login information, it’s a scam.

Ask your own questions: You can ask questions to try to confirm their legitimacy. If they claim to be from a company you haven’t heard of, ask for the location and street address. Keep in mind that they can easily lie. They’re scammers, there is no oath or law requiring them to answer you truthfully.

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Give them nothing: Even if your account was hacked and someone purchased $90,000 in sneakers, your credit card will not ask you to confirm your password, address or any other sensitive information.

Say you’ll contact them separately: Tell the caller you’ll look into it and contact them in your own way. If they need to give you information, tell them to mail it, but do not provide an address. A real organization, like a debt collector, will already have it, said Amy Nofziger, director of fraud victim support at AARP. If they push back, end the call.

“Most legitimate businesses that do need you will give you the safe way to get the information that you need,” Nofziger said.

As soon as you have the tiniest of doubts or concerns about a call, end it. Do not worry about being polite or missing out on something important. Anything legitimate — a stolen credit card, package delivery, outstanding debt — can be confirmed by contacting companies directly.

Story continues below advertisement

 

“Don’t trust and then verify. Verify and then trust,” Nofziger said.

If the caller said they were from a big company or bank, use trusted channels that you can directly access yourself, Jabbara said. If someone claims to be Visa, for example, take your card out of your wallet and call the number on back. You can also open the mobile app on your phone and look for alerts or contact information there.

Avoid Googling a company to find the customer service number, as scams can use SEO to get fake numbers high in the results and even convincing fake webpages.

Don’t just look out for yourself, talk to other people in your life who may be victimized by a scam. Offer to help them investigate or turn on settings that minimize risk.

Cool how we just let scammers take over.

Vice President can’t even call a sitting governor. 

[Brisketexan 105,154]

1 minute ago, HenryJames said:

Vice President can’t even call a sitting governor. 

You think that's bad?  The red phone in the White House, which is a direct line to Russia to make sure nukes won't fly?   It rings at least three times a day now, every time to say "We've been trying to reach you about your car warranty...."

[956 Worldwide 34,715]

Now this is some real straight uncut enshittening.  Your Facebook feed is a cesspool of insane AI slop because Facebook itself is paying Indian teenagers to post images of starving Jesus getting eaten by bugs.  And of course, Zuck is one of the drivers of AI as the future. 
 

https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/ 

Quote

Abhishek has 115,000 YouTube subscribers, dozens of instructional videos, and is part of a community of influencers selling classes and making YouTube content about how to go viral on Facebook with AI-generated images and other types of spam. These influencers act much like financial influencers in the United States, teaching other people how to supposedly spin up a side hustle in order to make money by going viral on Facebook and other platforms. Part of the business model for these influencers is, of course, the fact that they are themselves making money by collecting ad revenue from YouTube and by selling courses and AI prompts on YouTube, WhatsApp and Telegram. Many of these influencers go on each others’ podcasts to discuss strategies, algorithm changes, and loopholes. I have found hundreds of videos about this, many of which have hundreds of thousands or millions of views.  

But the videos make clear that Facebook’s AI spam problem is one that is powered and funded primarily by Facebook itself, and that most of the bizarre images we have seen over the last year are coming from Microsoft’s AI Image Creator, which is called “Bing Image Creator” in instructional videos.

 

[Captainant 27,680]

31 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Now this is some real straight uncut enshittening.  Your Facebook feed is a cesspool of insane AI slop because Facebook itself is paying Indian teenagers to post images of starving Jesus getting eaten by bugs.  And of course, Zuck is one of the drivers of AI as the future. 
 

https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/ 

 

It's gonna be some interesting Hapsburg AI when those images get scraped for training sets in the future

[Samson's Wig 3,192]

Feed something shit, get even stinkier shit in return.  AI in a nutshell.  It all seems like just another scammy part of Web 3.0 to me.

It's amazing how most societal leaps forward involving technological innovation have made life better for most humans, until we ran into the latest iteration (the computer age).  I know the jury is still out, but I'm failing to see how any benefits outweigh the huge stonking negatives of the high-tech era we've been living through.  Perhaps we'll find a way to regulate the nonsense, much like the industrial revolution required to fix the issues it caused with unsafe work environments, health and environmental hazards, etc., and the end result will end up positive.  I have a hard time seeing it though.  It's all just a fucking shell game, with the only winners being the douchebags with their hands on the cups (and those lucky enough to ride their coattails and get a payoff).

[Gravy Train 974]

22 hours ago, HenryJames said:

Vice President can’t even call a sitting governor. 

Spoiler

That's a bigger indictment upon the FTC for failing to control 'consent farms' and domestic databrokers who are to blame for the bulk of on-shore spam calls we all receive with phone numbers harvested from applications, membership services, inquiry forms, and who knows what.
 https://www.businessinsider.com/consent-farms-spam-calls-robocalls-do-not-call-list-2023-8

[thunderlounge 7,866]

Cocksucking mother fuckers. 

[HenryJames 66,115]

Chatbot maker Replika says it’s okay if humans end up in relationships with AI - The Verge

These people are fucking nuts.

[Incredulity 11,675]

On 8/7/2024 at 2:45 PM, thunderlounge said:

Cocksucking mother fuckers. 

Coprolalia is the medical term used to describe one of the most puzzling and socially stigmatizing symptoms of Tourette Syndrome

[Parliament 14,260]

1 hour ago, HenryJames said:

Chatbot maker Replika says it’s okay if humans end up in relationships with AI - The Verge

These people are fucking nuts.