Little lies from Big Tech

After my last article on the hysteria about Post-Truth I want to delve more on the habits & behaviors of our closest friends. I’m not talking about that one person, who you spent your most memorable years with, and there was no desire to be anything but friends. I am talking about our good friends Mark, Larry & Jeff.

Being lied to has become a normative behavior for brands & organizations that we interact with. Companies no longer bother with niceties such as fine-print or carefully crafted language that alludes to a darkness within the terms & conditions. This is not an article about deceptive advertising practices. Instead, I wish to focus on dishonesty within the most simple interactions that we have with products that billions of people use everyday.

A list that refuses to list

When Facebook is lying to my face

The Facebook Newsfeed drives billions of user engagements each month. Even the most minute change to the feed behavior can alter the products bottom line by millions of dollars. It is no surprise that the managers of the Newsfeed have resisted any feature that prioritizes user intent over business goal.

Facebook friend lists are a unique editorial feature. The typical Newsfeed bombards users with algorithmic-ally generated click-bait. Friend lists on the other hand allow a user to view content posted by a specific set of friends. For instance, you could check-up on what’s going on with the lives of your friends from middle-school, old coworkers or quickly catch-up with your cousins. Or even worse, limit your Newsfeed content to only the people who matter the most to you.

Alas, Facebook quickly realized the power of people curating their own feeds, and decided to have none of it.When you click on a Friend’s list the curated news feed blatantly lies to you and removes the majority of the posts generated by people in the list. This feature has effectively had its limbs chopped off.

A price-tracker that doesn’t track prices

Unlike Mark, Jeff actually has a genuine reason to be nice to you. After all you pay him for the valuable services he provides. Jeff even wants you to believe that he is ‘obsessed’ with making you a happy customer.

Both shopping carts & lists on Amazon indicate changes in prices to the items. If an item’s price increases after its added to the cart, you are promptly alerted. This act of kindness is not extended to items in your shopping list.

Many items in my shopping list are big ticket items such as cameras, laptops, projectors & furniture. If an item’s ‘list price’ increases by 30%, that’s an important factor that affects my purchase decision – Jeff agrees.

That’s why he decided to remove this info from the shopping list. The shopping list only shows price drops, not increases. Neat huh?

A Privacy Checkup to end your Privacy

Google loses money when people search & browse the internet without logging in. If you recently searched for a long haul flight or browsed new car prices, you are a valuable source of revenue. Advertisers are willing to pay more for you to see (i.e. your ‘ad impression’) or click (AKA ‘ad click’) their ad.

Search recently started showing a pop-up suggesting user’s undertake a privacy check-up. But how exactly does this check-up work when a user is not signed-in? or worse-still has no know history to tie into?

Fun Fact: It doesn’t.

When a user interacts with this pop-up, they are led to log into the Google ecosystem.

This pop-up is serves a single goal – to unmask your privacy. After logging-in Google associate’s your browsing history from an untraceable session to an existing Google account.

Google even goes on to create a false sense of privacy with the ‘incognito mode’. That’s a far more nefarious plot, and beyond the scope of this article.

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