2018 didn’t exactly go swimmingly for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, and he knows it. So he wrote an op-ed reminding people that Facebook “need[s] your information for operation and security, but you control whether [Facebook uses] it for advertising”, and really, Facebook is your friend! Trust your friend!

At the same time, a judge has unsealed internal documents, showing that Facebook knowingly profited off of children playing games on Facebook, failed to send proper receipts for charges, and repeatedly refused refunds to parents contesting the charges, and made no real effort to stop the whole practice because it was making too much money.

Meanwhile on Facebook itself, people are taking the 10-year-challenge, posting both a current and a ten year old photo of themselves, side-by-side. Just a harmless meme? Probably, but still, it makes you wonder:

Imagine that you wanted to train a facial recognition algorithm on age-related characteristics and, more specifically, on age progression (e.g., how people are likely to look as they get older). Ideally, you’d want a broad and rigorous dataset with lots of people’s pictures. It would help if you knew they were taken a fixed number of years apart—say, 10 years.

At the very least, Facebook is getting more engagement out of this, the cat-nip of technology companies.

Still Facebook

Part of Facebook’s problems is its secrecy. It doesn’t want to reveal how the sausage (or in this case, the feed) is made, because doing so would give up their competitive advantage. It’s the same for Google’s search algorithm, and YouTube’s recommendation engine. None of these companies want to open up, because they built their businesses on top of these algorithms.

That strategy has other advantages too: Since no one knows how these algorithms work exactly, it’s hard to blame anything on them with any certainty. This secrecy, however, also creates a disadvantage, fueling resentment and conspiracy theories:

When platforms become entrenched and harder for users to leave, the secrets they keep are reflected back to them as resentments. On Facebook, where every user’s experience is a mystery to all others — and where real-world concepts like privacy, obscurity and serendipity have been recreated on the terms of an advertising platform — users understandably imagine that anything could be happening around them: that their peers are being indoctrinated, tricked, sheltered or misled on a host of issues.

One of the more stubborn ones is that Facebook is listening to you via your Smartphone. The truth is that Facebook probably doesn’t, because it already gathers much more information about you through online tracking that it could ever really get from listening to you. But a spy in your pocket seems more plausible than an invisible tracking of your surfing.

Still, it kind of makes me wonder who at Facebook thought a device for video calls that you put in your own home would be a good idea.

Also: Zuckerberg Plans to Integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger. No way this won’t go wrong, right?

Time’s Running Out

I wrote about the EU’s copyright initiative not too long ago. Last week, the ongoing copyright negotiations hit a brick wall in the EU Council, because the member states couldn’t reach an agreement on the two controversial articles, 11 (the “Link Tax”) and 13 (the “Upload Filter”).

Interestingly, even the rightholder groups lobbying for article 11 seem to have turned their backs on it. That doesn’t mean it’s over though, just that the fight over Europe’s internet got even messier:

[A]s there is a limited number of plenary sessions [to accept the new legislation] this year before EU elections take place in May, time is running out. After the elections, any fragile consensus among MEPs that are established in the next few months could be destroyed as new politicians take office. This could “completely upend the process,” says Cory Doctorow, blogger, activist, and special adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Especially given the other kinds of political turmoil roiling EU member-states.”

Expensive Spoilt Milk

If you leave milk out for too long, it will spoil, and eventually go bad, and you’ll throw it out. If companies leave milk out for too long, they turn into very expensive pieces of spoilt milk that we love to eat and put over other foods: Why Parmesan Cheese Is So Expensive

Automated Shopping

Buying vintage sneakers used to be as simple as putting in a bid or three at an auction online. Then, programmers got into the game, and built bots that started outbidding everyone else, so they could sell them for even more on secondary markets. And then someone had the bright idea to start selling the bots: How Bots Ruined Buying Sneakers (via kottke.org)

📖 Weekly Longreads 📚

How a Stroke Turned a 63-Year-Old Into a Rap Legend — The Story of Doctor Rapp

🦄 Unicorn Chaser 🦄

Look, last year sure seemed like a raging dumpster fire, but it wasn’t all bad. Here are 99 good news stories you probably didn’t hear about in 2018.