United States Stamp Collecting Groups On Face Book

Pablo Escobar is the hands down best example of the charity/carnage dichotomy. He is still worshipped and memorialized by many in Colombia, all of them in poor areas. He built towns and soccer fields for the lower income people. He knew that it would buy him loyalty. There are countless stories of his largesse. We all know as well just what devastation he delivered across the Globe and particularly in America. He was a brutal man that provided little if any value in the big picture.

One lesson is that "free stuff" is rarely free.

Everyone should be insulted when a handful of Big Tech humans decide that they will be the arbiters of what you see for information. Everyone should be equally insulted that their information is being monetized and traded by those same humans. Those people have zero respect for you. They really do not.

Yet it is really our own fault. No makes us go to Big Tech to get our information, we choose to use them as a source.

This is the same issue I struggle with here and on other forums with stewardship topics. Having someone post a comment like 'I have used Crystal mounts for years with no damage' is simply a person posting their experience. I am not going to remove their post even if I think the information is incorrect. I think that the issue is the way other folks might use this kind of post. Far too many folks read something like this and think, "Crystal Mounts are safe'. So where does the problem lie (poster or the reader) and how do you promote good stewardship and prevent someone from making a costly mistake? What responsibility do we have here to ensure that good stewardship info is being communicated?
Don

Interesting dialogue. Thoughtful and thought provoking. Begs the question ,what is the penalty for "alternative facts" if they can be monetized.
There is no free lunch.

Maybe we should open a new topic at the general forum, and let DeEII get more answers to his question here.

There is a movie called "The Social Dilemma" on Netflix now.

It is documentary-style with many tech industry experts, including former employees and execs of these companies, sounding the alarm about what they have created.

TXSTAMP - Thank you for the heads up. I will check it out.

After watching the movie, I finally mustered the fortitude to quit following anyone/anything other than family.

I also finally logged out of facebook for the first time in a couple of years. I have always had FB set up to basically not email or notify me in any appreciable way. After being logged out for a day, FB started emailing me, telling me what I have missed and that I should come back. It has never done that to me before, and this should have meaning in particular, to people once you've seen this movie.

In the beginning few of us thought through what we were doing; back in the late 1990s we were developing data harvesting thinking that it would be helpful as marketing purposes. I distinctly remember thinking to myself, 'gee this is great, I might never have to see another feminine product promotion'.

Big Data is far beyond FB alone; every single tiny piece of information on us is being compiled forming a mosaic of who we are, what we do, and where we go. At this point, Big Data companies they probably have more personal information on us than we have on ourselves. I bet few here can even name any of the Big Data companies (i.e. Alteryx, Cloudera, Segment, and Crunchbase).

I worry less about what the originating Big Tech Company is doing with my data. They sell it to a Big Data company who 'adds value' but combining it with hundreds of other pieces of data on me and then they sell it. It then might get 'value add' several more times and be sold many more times until it finally gets to a company who does Lord knows what with it.
Don

So Thomas kicked you out. I know a few others he has kicked out, one being an expertiser for the PF. Not sure why he does that.