I reluctantly joined Facebook back in December 2011. During the couple of years I had the account, I learned more and more about the shadowy monster that provided us with our daily hourly doses of dopamine in the forms of likes, shares and status updates.
This brings us to the first inconvenient – and most obvious – truth about the so-called Cambridge Analytica case: there’s absolutely nothing new in any of it.
Continue reading “The Inconvenient Truths about the Cambridge Analytica Files”
After my previous blog post got some unexpected publicity, there were some curious instances of Vero apologists defending the platform. Two main cases they presented were:
I’ll give it to them, the second point is almost 100% accurate, but it simply doesn’t make it any more OK to invade users’ privacy. However, it’s the first point that really grinds my gears, especially when it comes to Vero.
Continue reading “Perceived Privacy vs. Revealing Reality – Case Vero”
TL;DR: if you allow Vero to access your phone’s Contacts even for a brief moment, instead of one-time reading them, it quietly stores them all, links them to your account and uses to shape the user experience. It also gives users who have given access to their Contacts a way of connecting with users who have explicitly denied Vero’s access to their respective phone’s contact list. As an icing on the cake, there’s no way you can delete that info from the service afterwards. This blog post examines how this works.
The Police of Finland has been noticeably increasing its presence on social media, especially on Twitter where there’s more than 60 official accounts already. Most of these accounts represent individual police officers, and therefore they’re supposed to represent the official police’s brand and communication, but of course there’s bound to be some personal nuances included in the tweets as well. This personal tone is perfectly normal and only human, but unfortunately it makes them (individuals and the police) a target for a backslash.
And oh boy, they’ve been targeted alright. As of this writing, there’s at least eight parody accounts made of Finnish Police, and most of them have been activated within the last two months. Although parody accounts are accepted in Twitter’s policy and often intended just as harmless fun, I wanted to take a closer look at these eight and see if I could find any interesting details on them.
There were definitely some similarities and other easily connectable dots between the eight that were apparent even after just a quick glance (e.g. multiple mentions of “vihapuhe” = “hate speech”). I realize that by doing this I’m just feeding the trolls, so to speak, but let’s just call this professional curiosity that prompted me to investigate further.
Continue reading “An Analysis of Finnish Police Parody Accounts on Twitter”
Many of you have probably heard about Twitter’s new privacy policy which was sold to you the same way these things always are: “to bring you a more personalized experience”. Obviously, this meant that more of your data is getting analyzed and sold to the highest bidder. I immediately encouraged my followers to opt-out of it, and since then also the great folks at EFF have written a guide on how to do so.
But what many Twitter users don’t know is that there are other ways that Twitter is already (and by default) doing to “enhance” your timeline. This is how you can opt-out from the rest of those settings:
Compared to other social networks, Reddit is a bit more barebones in terms of features and therefore also in terms of privacy settings. Here’s a handy list of the things you can do to harden your Reddit account.
Continue reading “Reddit Privacy Settings Guide (updated 2021)”
Social media marketers are silly. At the same they keep preaching (and bragging) loudly how fast things and trends change in social media landscape, but on the other hand, they’ve been declaring that “this is The Year of the Influencer” at least four years in a row now. However, very often even professionals seem to forget (or outright not know) that not all influencers have to be persons.
Especially on channels like Twitter and Instagram, accounts that are e.g. parodies (like in my case) or content curators, can have massive follower bases. These are my findings from a tweet that gained +850% more impressions and prompted almost +1000% more profile visits than my average 140-characters do.
Continue reading “Twitter Influencers: How I got +850 % Impressions & What I Learned”
Didn’t see that one coming. Or the fact that I would be writing about, *sigh*, emojis. Those funny yellow faces were cool maybe 10-15 years ago, when they were popularized by MSN Messenger. Sure they’ve been plaguing our text communications more recently too, mainly because of smartphones and IM platforms, but for some reason, a lot has been happening in the emoji-front in 2015. Let’s take a look:
I joined Facebook relatively late, in December 2011, and even then only because it was semi-mandatory for me at the time. I didn’t see true value in the platform before that, and frankly, even during those three years I had an account, I hardly used it besides the groups-feature (that I originally joined FB for). Following brands’ pages would have been convenient, but as we all know, only a tiny percent of users actually see companies’ updates, whether sponsored or not. Throw in the mix the continuously piling issues of Facebook’s notorious spying behavior, and for me the platform became just repulsive. For more info on how Facebook stomps on your privacy, check this must-read article “Get Your Loved Ones Off Facebook” by Salim Virani.
So this month the long-awaited opportunity finally rose for me (i.e. all responsibilities for different groups & associations were over) to delete my account. Turns out Facebook doesn’t want to let you go easily.
Continue reading “How to Delete a Facebook Account – It’s Harder than You Think!”
Joel Latto 