Who Knows Me Best: Google or Facebook? - New York Magazine

13/12/2017

Who Knows Me Best: Google or Facebook?

By

Madison Malone Kircher

@4evrmalone

Have Silicon Valley’s biggest companies become too powerful? This series examines monopoly and power in the tech industry — and what, if anything, can be done.

Facebook knows I wear glasses. I mean, it knows exactly what I look like, and can easily identify me in photos. It’s pretty sure I went to summer camp. (I did.) It knows I live in an apartment and if I won the lottery I’d like to fill that apartment with overpriced mid-century modern furniture. And it’s not my only close, intimate friend on the internet. Google can tell you everywhere I’ve been in the last month. It knows what movies I’ve been thinking of seeing. It also probably has a pretty good sense of the state of my immune system.

These companies know me so well because I’ve more or less willingly handed over all this data to them: submitting it to Facebook as profile updates and photos, and to Google as searches on maps or the web. But I’ve always wondered: Which one of my two big, friendly internet giants knows me better?

A big part of what Facebook does with your information revolves around ads, so that was where I started my great data-harvest adventure. The easiest way to find out what the company already knows about you — or thinks it knows about you — is to check out your ad preferences. Facebook says it uses a list of a whopping 98 data points, from what kind of credit card (American Express) you use to whether you commute to work (yes, when the trains actually run) to determining how far you live from where you grew up (about a four-hour drive) to target ads to you. A lot of this is information you probably don’t even realize you’ve given them. Who among us can remember every single page we’ve liked or group we’ve joined?

But the thing I always forget is just how good Facebook is at seeing. Facebook breaks down your preferences into categories, like “hobbies and activities,” “family and relationships,” and “lifestyle and culture.” Some of the topics within mine make sense to me — emoji, women’s rights, hiking. Some of them, uh, less so — natural selection, fuel, Bernie Madoff. Unclear what Facebook would want to sell me with that last one. Still, the things it gets right about me far outnumber the bits of information about me it gets wrong. I’m not a brunette. I have no interest in luxury cars. And I’m genuinely befuddled as to why “masculinity” appears under my education preferences. But I am a left-leaning apartment dweller, an iPhone user, and a journalist, with a birthday in March, who spends too much time on Twitter. (I feel so seen!)

On the other hand, Facebook’s algorithm has a tendency to take things very literally. A shot of a plane’s wing indicates my interest in “wing tips,” but when I clicked to see sample ads for that preference, Facebook had nothing to show me — probably because I was interested in an ad for a pair of menswear-inspired shoes, not aviation. I’m not sure how to take that: Facebook knows I like wing tips, but it doesn’t know what wing tips are. Does that mean it knows me better, or worse?

Google makes it a bit easier to see just how much it’s been surveilling you — the company has a handy “My Activity” dashboard where you can see everything you’ve searched, mapped, listened to or watched. For me, that means Google knows I watched as alt-right YouTuber Baked Alaska livestreamed on YouTube from an In-N-Out parking lot after he was kicked off Twitter earlier this month. It also knows I watched a few too many YouTube videos of a friend’s new girlfriend doing stand-up comedy. If you’re a Chrome user — I am — you can see all the pages you’ve visited on any given day; if you’re a Gmail user — duh — the same goes for interactions with your inbox.

You can see your ad preferences in Google too, though they’re not as detailed as Facebook’s. You’ll find them under “Ad Settings,” where Google shows a list of “topics you like” and, if you’ve tweaked your settings at all, “topics you don’t like.” (Google pulls some of these topics from the videos you watch on YouTube.) My list includes things like “pop music,” “TV dramas,” and “news.” I moved “country music” to the “topics you don’t like” column — a few early Taylor Swift videos here and there does not a country fan make. The Google list reads more like a generic understanding of my video tastes and less like Facebook’s strangely specific puzzle of my personality traits.

But location is where Google really shines. The most thorough, and probably most useful, information Google has on me comes from Google Maps. My Activity breaks down your, well, activities by date, so pick a day and you can see all the places I needed to go that day. The address of an upstate New York airbnb. The Brooklyn DMV. The coordinates of a waterfall in northern Iceland. Of course, those are just mapping directions, which don’t necessarily mean I actually went to those places. Though in most cases, I did. Conveniently, and I don’t have any active memory of doing this, I have location tracking turned off for my phone, so Google doesn’t keep a log every time I go somewhere. Which is a thing it can do, if you’d like. Google would probably like it, too. (I’ve also got Google’s device info storing — things like your contacts and calendar info — turned off, as well as voice/audio activity, which would probably matter more if I had a Google Home or an Android phone.)

On top of checking out your ad preferences, you can use Facebook’s graph searching tool to search for things like “Places visited by [Your Name]” or “Events attended by [Your Name].” (I used Stalkscan — it’s free — which collated all this for me in one place.) I’d thought that Google would easily beat Facebook on knowing where I’ve been, thanks to Google Maps, but looking at all the places you’ve been to — this includes location check-ins and geotags on photos — you start to realize maybe you didn’t need to let Facebook know every time you took a vacation. And there’s something anxiety-inducing about seeing every Facebook event you’ve ever attended, or “attended,” listed and dating back for years. I’d rather not be reminded of the great Gamma Xi stoplight party — wear green if you’re single, red if you’re not, and yellow if you’re somewhere in between — of 2012, but there it was for all the Facebook data-mining world to see. I’d told Facebook where I was, who I was there with, and exactly when I was there. It’s everything your parents wanted to know about you in high school, except instead of telling them, you told a giant company.

So which platform knows “me” better? Having parsed through what info I could get my hands on I think I’ve settled on Facebook being the better surveillance organization. At least for me, personally. Facebook’s got a load of information about places I’ve been, things I “like,” and the real people I interact with online, and subsequently in the real world. Google might know of every dumb question I’ve ever asked, but it’s Facebook that could realistically calendar out the last decade of my life down to the places I went, the people I was with, and what color shirt I was wearing while I was there. The information Facebook has on me is both hyperspecific and generally accurate because, well, I told Facebook everything it wanted to know about me — mostly when I was a teen and not quite wary enough of the dangers of data.

“I’d say Facebook is a bit more immersive, while Google is more contextual,” David McQueen, research director at marketing-intelligence firm ABI Research said, agreeing when I told him my pick. “It [Facebook] makes the individual the center of the universe so you buy in. You share things, you share information with your friends … which Facebook then has the ability to use for other purposes.” Which is not to say that Google doesn’t also know a metric ton about me, too — often, even more private and potentially embarrassing things than Facebook. It just comes in second. (Debating the tie for third — Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Snapchat — could keep up here all day.)

In fact, Facebook and Google probably know me better than my co-workers, and even some of my friends. It sounds almost funny when you think about it like that — and it certainly makes both sites, in most ways, better and more personalized. (It’s also what allows them to remain free: I give them data about me in exchange for social networking and search-engine skills.) But it’s also a bit nerve-racking. It’s difficult to get a full picture of exactly what information Facebook and Google have acquired and stored about me. “They really don’t make it easy to get ahold of data,” McQueen told me. “And that’s the element they’re able to sell to marketing companies and companies who want to push their products on you.”

It’s not that I’m worried, necessarily, that creeps at Facebook or Google are spying on me. Most of my data is being processed entirely by software to serve up specific ads for me, with no human beings looking at me. Facebook assures users all data given to advertisers has been anonymized: “We do not share information that personally identifies you (personally identifiable information is information like name or email address that can by itself be used to contact you or identifies who you are) with advertising, measurement or analytics partners unless you give us permission.” And Google emphasizes that it “doesn’t sell your personal information” to advertisers. It’s more that it’s frightening to think that all of this data about me — points that range from the obvious to the intimate — are being collected and stored by enormous single companies that have built elaborate profiles of me, and my legal rights as a consumer aren’t very broad. What happens in the event of a catastrophic security failure?

Earlier this year, the Economist wrote that the most valuable resource in the world in 2017 isn’t oil, but personal data. The developer Maciej Ceglowski has compared personal data to something even less appealing: nuclear waste. “The current model of total surveillance and permanent storage is not tenable,” he writes. “If we keep it up, we’ll have our own version of Three Mile Island, some widely-publicized failure that galvanizes popular opinion against the technology.”

As a solution, Ceglowski suggests that companies limit their collection of data, and clear the behavioral data they do collect every 90 days. It might make Google and Facebook marginally less useful, but it’d also help hedge against catastrophic events. This seems right to me — though I’d add that the U.S. would be well-served to adopt the European Commission’s privacy rules, which require software companies to hand over all collected personal data to European citizens who request it. At the very least, that’d make it easier to find out who knows me better.

North Korea resumes missile activity as South offers Olympics talks - CBS News

January 2, 2018, 2:17 PM

North Korea resumes missile activity as South offers Olympics talks

SEOUL, South Korea -- North Korea appears to be in the early stages of a launch cycle for another intercontinental ballistic missile test, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports. Meanwhile, South Korea on Tuesday offered high-level talks with its rival to find ways to cooperate on next month's Winter Olympics in the South.

The missile activity is at the same location just north of Pyongyang where an ICBM test occurred in November, Martin reports. If there is a test, it would likely take place later this week or next.

Seoul's quick Olympics proposal follows a rare rapprochement overture from the North a day earlier. The North offered the possibility of better ties after a year that saw a nuclear standoff increase fear of war on the Korean Peninsula.

Complete Olympics coverage on CBSSports.com

In a closely watched New Year's address, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said Monday that he was willing to send a delegation to the Olympics, though he also repeated fiery nuclear threats against the United States. Analysts say Kim may be trying to drive a wedge between Seoul and its ally Washington in a bid to reduce international isolation and sanctions against North Korea.

Kim's overture was welcome news for a South Korean government led by liberal President Moon Jae-in, who favors dialogue to ease the North's nuclear threats and wants to use the Pyeongchang Olympics as a chance to improve inter-Korean ties.

Moon's unification minister, Cho Myoung-gyon, proposed in a nationally televised news conference that the two Koreas meet Jan. 9 at the shared border village of Panmunjom to discuss Olympic cooperation and how to improve overall ties.

Earlier Tuesday, Moon spoke of what he described as Kim's positive response to his earlier dialogue overtures and ordered officials to study how to restore talks with North Korea and get the North to participate in the Olympics.

In Washington, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said U.S. policy hasn't changed on North Korea.

"The focus here is to continue ... to apply maximum pressure on North Korea," she said, "and we want all of the other countries - this is not just a United States threat, this is a global threat - which is why we're calling on everybody to step up and do more, and we're going to continue working with a lot of different leaders and other countries to help do that, and we're going to keep all of our options on the table."

The International Olympic Committee welcomed the overtures.

"The IOC welcomes the mutual intention of the governments of the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to start direct talks about the participation of athletes from DPRK in the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018."

The IOC said in a statement it is continuing discussions with North Korea and its invitation to North Korea to take part in the games would remain open.

North Korea did not immediately react. But if there are talks, they would be the first formal dialogue between the Koreas since December 2015. Relations between the Koreas have plunged as North Korea has expanded its weapons programs amid a hard-line stance by Moon's conservative predecessors.

Last year, North Korea conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear test and test-launched three intercontinental ballistic missiles as part of its push to possess a nuclear missile capable of reaching anywhere in the United States. The North was subsequently hit with toughened U.N. sanctions, and Kim and President Trump exchanged warlike rhetoric and crude personal insults against each other.

Kim said in his speech Monday that North Korea last year achieved the historic feat of "completing" its nuclear forces. Outside experts say that it's only a matter of time before the North acquires the ability to hurl nuclear weapons at the mainland U.S., but that the country still has a few technologies to master, such as a warhead's ability to survive atmospheric re-entry.

Talks could provide a temporary thaw in strained inter-Korean ties, but conservative critics worry that they may only earn the North time to perfect its nuclear weapons. After the Olympics, inter-Korean ties could become frosty again because the North has made it clear it has no intention of accepting international calls for nuclear disarmament and instead wants to bolster its weapons arsenal in the face of what it considers increasing U.S. threats.

"Kim Jong Un's strategy remains the same. He's developing nukes while trying to weaken international pressure and the South Korea-U.S. military alliance and get international sanctions lifted," said Shin Beomchul of the Seoul-based Korea National Diplomatic Academy.

He said the North might also be using its potential participation in the Pyeongchang Olympics as a chance to show its nuclear program is not intended to pose a threat to regional peace.

In his address Monday, Kim said the United States should be aware that his country's nuclear forces are now a reality, not a threat. He said he has a "nuclear button" on his office desk, warning that "the whole territory of the U.S. is within the range of our nuclear strike."

He called for improved ties and a relaxation of military tensions with South Korea, saying the Winter Olympics could showcase the status of the Korean nation. But Kim also repeated that South Korea must stop annual military exercises with the United States, which he calls an invasion rehearsal against the North.

No decision has been made yet, but Pentagon officials said it "makes logistical sense" to delay the annual Foal Eagle joint exercise so it does not overlap with the Olympics, Martin reports. The exercise would fill up hotel rooms and close down airspace and roads at a time when South Korea is playing host to thousands of visitors.

About 28,500 American troops are stationed in South Korea to help deter potential aggression from the North, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.

Hong Kong police union ‘extremely disappointed’ at jail sentence for retired cop Frankly Chu - Hong Kong Free Press

Hong Kong police union ‘extremely disappointed’ at jail sentence for retired cop Frankly Chu

3 January 2018 17:44 Ellie Ng

A police union has said that it is “extremely disappointed” at a court decision to imprison retired superintendent Frankly Chu for hitting a pedestrian during the 2014 pro-democracy Occupy protests.

The Junior Police Officers’ Association said in a statement Wednesday that “the decision will undoubtedly have a significant impact on law enforcement by frontline officers, as well as damage their morale.”

The remarks came shortly after Chu was sentenced to three months behind bars for striking passerby Osman Cheng with a baton in Mong Kok during the protests. The ex-officer was immediately released on bail pending his appeal.

Chu was convicted last month of one count of assault occasioning actual bodily harm. Principal Magistrate Bina Chainrai refused to hand down a community service order, on the basis that a jail term was necessary to deter future police misconduct.

Citing previous court judgments, the magistrate said that officers who abused their power must be made an example of in order to restore public confidence in the force.

She said she had taken into account mitigating factors such as Chu’s “distinguished career of public service,” the stress he was working under during Occupy, and 40 letters of support from his police colleagues, lawmakers and churchgoers.

See also: Ex-cop convicted of assault during Occupy had ‘selfless commitment’ to public service, claims lawyer

Chu appeared outside the court but did not speak to the press. He was ordered to report to Central Police Station every week as a condition for his bail.

frankly chu car

A chaotic scene outside court as reporters surrounded Chu’s car, while police supporters and democracy activists shouted slogans with loudspeakers. Photo: Ellie Ng/HKFP.

Last month, the junior police union said Chu’s conviction “confused” frontline officers over when they could use force legally. On Wednesday, it said it would convey its members’ concerns to the force management while promising to assist Chu with his court case.

Another police union, the Superintendents’ Association, previously described Chu as being “passionate about his work and well-liked by his colleagues.”

Pro-Beijing lawmaker and former security chief Regina Ip said Wednesday that the jail sentence was reasonable, though she was saddened by the decision.

Insults at magistrate

Chu was charged last March, more than 850 days after the incident took place. Last year, Cheng’s lawyers threatened a private prosecution if the justice secretary continued to take no action on the case.

While the pro-democracy camp had been demanding Chu be held accountable for his actions, Chu has received support from the pro-establishment camp.

On Wednesday, dozens of people gathered outside the Eastern Magistrates’ Courts waving banners saying that police officers were only trying to combat violence by “rioters.”

They hurled insults at Magistrate Chainrai, calling her a “dog.” They said foreign judges were undesirable and that it would only be fair if “Chinese people were tried by Chinese judges.”

frankly chu case

Demonstrators gather outside court. Photo: Ellie Ng/HKFP.

They accused the judiciary of being unfair and called the court decision an “international joke.”

Similar incidents took place last year when District Court Judge David Dufton jailed seven police officers for two years for hitting and kicking activist Ken Tsang in another high-profile police assault case during the Occupy protests.

The Department of Justice told HKFP at the time that it was “very concerned” about attacks against judges and had referred conduct that may constitute contempt of court to law enforcement agencies. No arrests have been made so far.

What makes Russia’s new spy ship Yantar special? - BBC News

3/1/2018

What makes Russia’s new spy ship Yantar special?

By Laurence Peter

BBC News

The Yantar seen in the Bosphorus en route to Syria in 2017

The Russian navy is very proud of its new spy ship, the Yantar, which is now doing Argentina a favour by helping to search for a missing submarine.

Argentina has given up trying to rescue the 44 crew aboard the ARA San Juan, which disappeared on 15 November. But it still wants to find the diesel-electric submarine.

Enter the Yantar, officially an oceanographic research vessel, but actually bristling with surveillance equipment, and the mother ship for manned and unmanned deep-sea submersibles.

A Russian ROV - remotely operated underwater vehicle - is scouring the ocean floor off Argentina.

The disappearance of the ARA San Juan remains a mystery

But what else has the Yantar (Russian for "amber") been up to?

Targeting undersea cables

The Yantar's movements were apparently what prompted a warning last month from the UK military that Russia could disrupt or cut vital undersea communications cables.

The chief of the UK defence staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach, said such a strike against internet and other communications cables could be "catastrophic".

Dozens of fibre-optic cables span the globe and Nato also has dedicated military cables on the ocean floor.

The Yantar is capable of tampering with them, says Igor Sutyagin, a London-based expert on the Russian military. But there is no evidence that it has done so.

"It's difficult to tap into optical fibres - it's just light inside, not electrical data," he told the BBC. "It would be easier just to cut the cable."

Mr Sutyagin noted that in the 1970s, during the Cold War, the US Navy had lost control of a Sosus undersea listening post for tracking submarines in the Atlantic. Sosus stands for "Sound Surveillance System".

The US military concluded that a Soviet submarine had cut the cables.

In the same period the US military, reports say, planted listening devices on Soviet undersea cables in the Sea of Okhotsk, where Soviet submarines were based.

A news report from the Russian parliament says the Yantar can do just such clandestine work, using deep-diving submersibles.

"The Yantar has equipment designed for deep-sea tracking, and devices that can connect to top-secret communications cables," said Parlamentskaya Gazeta (in Russian) last October.

Could Russia knock out undersea cables?

Russia's new military - should Nato worry?

What happens when a submarine vanishes

Mr Sutyagin, of the Royal United Services Institute, says the Yantar belongs to Russia's Main Directorate of Underwater Research (GUGI in Russian), part of the defence ministry.

The 108m-long (354ft) vessel has a crew of 60 and went into service in 2015. It was built in the Baltic port of Kaliningrad in 2015, the first in a series called Project 22010. A second, called Almaz, will soon be on its way to the navy.

Russia already has several older spy ships. In April, one of them, the Liman, sank off the Turkish coast after being breached in a collision with a freighter. All its crew were rescued.

The Yantar can deploy the three-man submersibles Rus and Konsul, which can dive to about 6,000m (20,000ft).

The Rus submersible has a crew of three and dived to 6,180m in the Atlantic

Spying on the US

The Russian parliamentary report noted that in the summer of 2015 the Yantar had deployed near the US Kings Bay naval base in Georgia.

"According to Pentagon officials, the Russians were gathering intelligence on US submarines' equipment, including underwater sensors in the DoDIN network," the Russian report said.

Kings Bay is home to six US Trident ballistic missile submarines, each of them armed with 24 nuclear missiles, naval-technology website reports.

Mr Sutyagin said the US underwater sensors near Kings Bay would be interesting for the Russian military, which might wish to copy the US technology.

Pentagon concern about the Yantar's cable-cutting potential was reported by the Washington Times.

In late 2016 the Yantar was found to be loitering over undersea communications cables off the Syrian coast, including some links to Europe.

The ship's strange movements were tracked by a website called Covert Shores. The Yantar's frequent stops at points along a cable route suggested that a submersible was examining the sea floor, the report said.

Search and rescue

Besides the Argentina mission, the Yantar has been used previously for search and recovery.

The Russian parliamentary report said the ship had located two Russian fighter jets - a Su-33 and a MiG-29 - that crashed into the Mediterranean in 2016, during the Syria war.

The Yantar "recovered secret equipment from the planes in good time", the report said.

That could be secret radar or missile data, or the "identification, friend or foe" system, Mr Sutyagin said.

The disappearance of the Argentine submarine rekindled memories of Russia's Kursk submarine tragedy of 2000.

In 2000 a ship like the Yantar might have saved some Kursk sailors' lives and literally salvaged the Russian navy's reputation.

North Korea reopens hotline to South to discuss Olympics - BBC News

3/1/2018

North Korea reopens hotline to South to discuss Olympics

The hotline in the village of Panmunjom

North Korea has reopened a hotline to South Korea, almost two years after it was disabled on the orders of leader Kim Jong-un.

South Korea confirmed it had received a call from the North at 15:30 local time (06:30 GMT) on Wednesday.

The North Korean leader had earlier said he was open to dialogue with Seoul and to sending a team to the Winter Olympics in the South next month.

The two nations have not held high-level talks since December 2015.

North Korea cut off the communications channel shortly afterwards, refusing to answer calls, according to officials in the South.

A North Korean official announced the hotline's reopening in a televised statement.

He said the two nations would discuss the practical issues around a proposal to send a North Korean delegation to the Winter Games in Pyeongchang in February.

"We will make close contact with South Korea in a sincere and faithful manner," Yonhap news agency quoted the official as saying.

Trump to Kim: My button's bigger than yours

How has the South responded?

The press secretary for South Korea's President Moon Jae-in said the restoration of this communications channel was "very significant".

"It creates an environment where communication will be possible at all times," he said.

Where is the physical line?

According to the South Korean Unification Ministry, there are a total of 33 direct lines that North and South Korea once used to communicate with each other.

This particular phone line, established in 1971, is based in Panmunjom.

The border village, in the heavily guarded demilitarised zone (DMZ), is where the Koreas have historically held talks.

Take a tour of Panmunjom

Why have the Olympics become so important?

In a New Year's Day speech, Mr Kim spoke of lowering tensions and of melting "frozen North-South relations".

He said attending the Games would be "a good opportunity to show unity of the people" in North Korea.

A history of North Korea at the Olympics

South Korea had already indicated that the North's participation in the Games would be welcomed.

Seoul offered high-level talks in response, with President Moon Jae-in calling it a "groundbreaking chance" to improve relations.

It is not yet clear whether North Korea will accept that offer, but the opening of the hotline will allow for preliminary discussions to be held.

When did the line stop being used?

North Korea cut off communications on the hotline in 2016, following a row over the Kaesong industrial complex.

A North Korean employee works in a factory of a South Korean company at KaesongImage copyrightREUTERS

Image caption

Kaesong was the last major point of co-operation between the Koreas

The complex was joint economic venture between the two Koreas, but the South suspended the project it in response to a nuclear weapons test by the North.

Will nuclear testing be discussed?

North Korea has come under increasing international pressure in the past year over its nuclear weapons programme.

President Moon said the North's continuing tests would be the backdrop to any new discussions about the Olympics.

The initial call was brief as checks are still being carried out on the line, according to South Korean officials.

What role might the US play?

At the same time as offering an apparent olive branch to the South, Mr Kim used his speech to repeat threats against the US, saying a nuclear launch button was always on his table.

US state department spokesman Heather Nauert said that Mr Kim's latest move "may be trying to drive a wedge of some sort between the two nations - between our nation and the Republic of Korea [South Korea]".

Washington has encouraged all countries to isolate North Korea.

The South says it has discussed its latest steps with the US.

Meanwhile, Mr Trump remains outspoken in his tweets. On Tuesday night, the US president boasted that his nuclear button was "much bigger" and "more powerful" than the North Korean leader's.

@realDonaldTrump

North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!