Private Social Media

Folks are funny. They rant & rave about privacy & yet post the most intimate details of their lives on social media & bitch and complain when no one reads their posts.

The real funny bits, are the Youtube stars who make Cinéma Vérité videos & say "I'm not telling you where I live because all of the nuts out there", yet give enough meta-data about their lives, such that any reasonably logic monkey can figure out their town, if not their exact address. Case in point, a youtuber injured himself in an earlier video & posted the antibiotic bottle for the drugs to combat the infection. He was careful to hide the address, but if you googled the pharmacy number on the label (which I did) it gave you the exact address.

But there are those of us who don't want Facebook to mine our data or sell our meta-data. We don't want our data disseminated.

So I am thinking of a new type of social media platform where all of your posts are encrypted. You pull a reverse asymmetric encryption. All of your contacts have your private key for that social media platform. You publish your posts with a public key that you don't disclose. Only those with your key can read the posts.  To pay for this platform, you agree to look at 10 ads a week. Makes sense to me.

(originally appeared as a Linked In post: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-bodnar-57b635133/ )

Laughable Social Media Marketing Effort of Chinese Company - A New Twitter Potemkin Village

I looked at my new follower on Twitter.  The photo above shows a pretty, young woman in a very coy pose. The screen name is Monica Geller.  The interesting banner photo on "her" profile was a representation of a network on the globe with luminescent node effulgence sprinkled over it.  The discordant thing was the mismatch between the screen name and the user name. The user name in this case was not Monica Geller, but LilyJohns012.  That is a warning bell.

I get a lot of followers that are bots, and one of the tip-offs is the mismatch between the screen name and the username. When a bot makes an account, the username is usually random letters and numbers like iurowjnx7.  However some of the accounts that sell stuff have a mismatch between screen name and user name.   This is a screen capture of the banner.

The real tip-off was the location - The People's Republic of China and "Monica's" website was china-cable-suppliers.com.

Monica's bio reads "I love travelling around the world. I like to make new friends. Welcome to my world. Now I'm working in Fiberstore."

What you don't see, is the next line saying: Born on February 05.    

Interesting.  What does this beautiful, Caucasian world traveler tweet about?  Is it about making new friends or her exotic travel places or that she is a dual personality named Monica Geller and Lily Johns? Nope.

She tweets about splicing cable with this photo:

or how great looking that this aerial splice enclosure looks:

Among the lovely pictures of the cable and fiber stuff, you have laudatory tweets by people with names like Lode Von Beethoven who are waxing ecstatic over the inventory of the cable and fiber store.

It's just amazing how every single tweet has a question about cable products or laudatory quotes about everything fiber, cable and connector.  And not one of the Tweeters is from China where Monica/Lily hails from.

I guess that this sort of Potemkin Village on Twitter is how the Chinese think that social media marketing should happen.

Super Bowl XLVIII Predictions From A Datamining Geek

First of all, let me say that these predictions will probably be somewhat wrong.  But what if they aren't?  These predictions are made without looking at the football performance of the two teams -- Seattle and Denver.  But rather they are made with an analysis of social media and datamining the web for crowd chatter.  There is the premise that the crowd is always right, and perhaps they will be on this one.  I like to call this technique "crowd mining".  So lets get to it.

My research and dubious math skill predict that going on crowd behavior alone, I predict that the winner will be the Seattle Seahawks.  After I crunched the numbers, I was disheartened to learn that Peyton Manning is the Broncos quarterback.  He is a formidable force and I am glad that I didn't recognize this fact before I started this exercise, otherwise it would have skewed my results.  And it may be the reason why these predictions could be wrong.

But what numbers does the crowd sentiment suggest:

31

24

Then I decided to apply some statistical normalization to the numbers, and I got the following result:

27

21

So, I am going to do something that I have never done before, and lay a bet on those two results.  Various pundits figure that over $100 million will be bet on this Super Bowl

As a further step in statistical analysis, you have to take into account fat tails, or random events.  Suppose that for some reason there is a blowout, an injury, or a team can't play well in the weather, or if the awesome Manning offence is brought down by the Seattle defense.  So, to cover the entire range of possibilities, the following are the complete fat tail results.  The left column is the Seahawks and the right column is the Broncos.  If these predictions are accurate and we get a weird game like a high scoring or a very low scoring game, here is the range of predicted results.

Seattle       Denver

3       to     0

7       to     3

10      to     7

13      to     10

17      to     13

21      to     14

24      to     17

27      to     20

27      to     21

30      to     23

31      to     24

33      to     26

35      to     27

35      to     28

36      to     29

37      to     30

38      to     35

It will be interesting to see how these geekazoid predictions turn out.

I Quit Cold Turkey ~ Facebook and LinkedIn

I got rid of my addiction. My Facebook addiction. I have been status-free for two weeks. I have quit my stalker fits. I stopped my furtive network-building on LinkedIn with people I barely know.

Actually it is easy to be smug and liken Facebook to smoking, but there is a deeper reason, and that is privacy. I am a citoyen du monde -- a citizen of the world. I write software for high net worth individuals in Caribbean tax havens. I have written money transfer and micro-payments software for a small developing country. I am currently writing software to fight epidemics in Africa. I have written software for a European Union concern, and I have been requested to do a threat and risk assessment for a UN agency on the African continent.

With the Facebook timeline, geo-location and the selling of data on Facebook, I value my privacy more than knowing that an old high school friend caught a five pound bass yesterday. I don't need a tax agency looking at my Facebook account to try and pinpoint my whereabouts on a specific day. I don't want potential employers to know that I fancy both a single malt scotch and a tropical beer. I don't want to be judged professionally by a vegetarian because I hunt my own fish and lobster on the reef. In short, I want to control my public persona.

LinkedIn is perhaps the most useless social media thing out there. I was an early adopter of LindkedIn, and had a ton of contacts in many countries. I never benefited from being on LinkedIn at all in any way. It was a colossal time waster.

Social media is quite handy for being able to keep track of a large amount of people with minimal effort. However with the ubiquitous selling of data by these social media companies, they are crossing the line in respect to violating my privacy. Using datamining, with the limited amount of data that I put out there, social media can figure out my address, age, buying habits, probable income, and relationship status. No thanks.

What this world needs, is a social media platform that doesn't need to create profits by selling my private information. I wouldn't even mind looking at ads to fund it, however, social media and Facebook is not exactly an ideal platform for selling crap.

If you examine Facebook's reported financials, they make about $4 billion per year or about $4 per user. This is in spite of 33% growth in users. What they don't realize is that if I am stalking my old highschool sweetheart to see if the jock that she married is fat, poor and not interested in her any more, then I really don't want to buy anything but her love (or eventually Viagra when I get to the stage where I need it).

But back to the point -- I missed it for a few days, but now I find that I have a lot more time to devote to actually generating an income, or making entries in my blog. And being a LinkedIn dropout hasn't hurt my income stream at all. Could this be a trend?

This Caught My Eye -- Investigating Jurors Over the Web

Check out how Facebook and social media is being used to investigate jurors.