Tag Archives: culture

Another Facebook Fail

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Chinese firms Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo and TCL were among numerous handset makers that were given access to Facebook data in what the US company said was “a controlled operation.”

The social media giant’s vice president of mobile partnerships, Francisco Varela, confirmed a report in The New York Times Tuesday that Facebook had given Chinese device makers deep access to the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent.

A “controlled operation.”  Meaning the accesses were deliberately granted, consents were deliberately not requested in advance.  Which raises the question: were any consents actively withheld and those denials ignored by Facebook?

Huawei already has been identified as a threat to our national security.  Lenovo is headquartered in Beijing, Oppo (Electronics Corporation) is headquartered in Dongguang near the south coast of the People’s Republic of China, and TCL is headquartered in Huizhou, just down the road a piece from Dongguang.  These three are each under the influence, if not the control, of the PRC government.  Facebook knew these things at the time they engaged in their “controlled operation.”

Here’s Varela again, this time in his best What, me worry? impression:

…we wanted to make clear that all the information from these integrations with Huawei was stored on the device, not on Huawei servers[.]

Well, that settles it, then.  Huawei has no way at all to copy data “stored on [its] device” to its servers.  Nope.  Can’t be done.

Sure.

Merit?

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We don’t need no stinking merit.  That’s what the Progressive-Democratic Party in Pennsylvania says.

In May, two women were elected to the Progressive-Democratic State Committee.  Then the Committee said the election doesn’t matter.  They rejected the women, denied them their places on the committee.  The committee instead

[gave] the positions to men who garnered fewer votes. Believe it or not, Democrats are justifying this decision in the name of gender equity.

If Darrell Clarke and Noam Kugelmass, the two men who were gifted the seats resoundingly won by Judi Golding Baker and Mariel Martin, had a scintilla of grace, of self respect, of integrity, they’d have refused to accept the seats.  But….

It’s not only the dishonesty of the Party’s hypocrisy that’s in play here.  It isn’t even the Progressive-Democrats’ plain war on women that this move illustrates.  It’s both of those, but even more importantly, it’s the deliberate overruling of the will of the voters.  The Progressive-Democrats didn’t just ignore their voters.  Having been issued their instructions by those voters, the Party flat overruled them.  Voters’ votes just don’t count according to this Party.

This is the sort of thing we can expect if the Progressive-Democratic Party regains a majority in the House this fall—in spades if they regain the Senate.

A Sanctuary City Success

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New York City is a sanctuary city.  There are more than eight million stories in the city. Here is one of them.

Within the three months, from January to mid-April this year, ICE prepared more than 440 detainers against aliens booked by NYPD or NYDOC. Nearly 40 individuals who were released from custody, reoffended and were again arrested for crimes by local law enforcement officers.

That’s a 9% repeat offense rate, and those repeats happen quickly.  Here are some of those releases.

A 43-year old man from China was released in March after being arrested for Criminal Possession Controlled Substance…, then re-arrested for Criminal Possession Controlled Substance…in April.

And

A 28-year old man from Azerbaijan was released in February after being returned on a warrant for a Criminal Trespass…, then re-arrested in April for Grand Larceny…. [This one also is a violent offender, with an assault conviction in his history]

And

A 20-year old from Guatemala arrested for a felony count Assault 2nd Degree: Injure Victim 65 or older and released in January, arrested in February for Felony Grand Larceny, and arrested again in March for Resisting Arrest

And

A 28-year old Salvadoran man arrested for Assault in March was released, then again arrested for Robbery in April

Yes, indeed, that’s a success.  For illegal aliens who also are serious criminals.

A Matter of Integrity

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Elizabeth Bernstein asked—and she was serious—the question of when it’s appropriate to violate a confidence.

A while back, my sister, Rebecca, called with a request: she wanted me to book a flight to come and see her immediately—and not tell anyone.

Rebecca explained that she was having a breast biopsy the next day, was terrified to hear the results, and wanted me there for support. But she didn’t want to worry others in our family.

I jumped on a plane but wrestled with a dilemma. Many members of my family are doctors. Rebecca herself is an internist. Our father is an orthopedic surgeon and another sister is a gynecologist. I knew they would have advice for Rebecca—and would want to know if she were sick. But my sister asked me not to share what she told me. And I didn’t.

How do you decide whether to keep someone’s secret when there are good reasons to tell?

There are no good reasons to tell this sort of secret.  There are no good reasons to tell anyone’s secret of any sort, to violate any confidence, with a single exception.  Either the person being told the secret has honor and integrity, or he doesn’t, and giving up someone else’s secret is a terrible dishonor. There isn’t any middle ground.

Two days later, while I was sitting in Rebecca’s living room, I got a call from my mother. My sister, overwhelmed with worry, had told her about the biopsy she’d asked me to keep secret, and my mom was angry with me for preventing the rest of the family from supporting Rebecca. Then my other sister, the gynecologist, called, hurt that I didn’t seem to value her expertise. Too late, I realized that in keeping Rebecca’s secret, I might have betrayed others.

Not even close.  Those folks were completely out of line on two counts. One is directing their ire at Bernstein: she was keeping a confidence, as integrity demanded.  Their beef was with the sister for insisting they not be told.  That’s the other count: their beef was bogus.  The secret was the sister’s to tell, or not; it most assuredly was not the others’ to demand to hear.  Full stop.

“Essentially, you become a co-owner of the information,” says Sandra G Petronio, a communication professor and director of the Communication Privacy Management Center at Indiana University[.]

No, you don’t.  You become a co-keeper of the information, but ownership in no way, shape, or form, changes hands or gets diluted.

“Just having to think about someone else’s secret makes it harmful to our wellbeing,” says Michael Slepian, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School….

Having integrity, honoring obligations, isn’t all roses and sugar plums.  Doing the right thing isn’t always going to be easy, and rarely will it be comfy-cozy in the short term.

Here is the single reason a confidence can be violated: if the one passing the secret and asking for secrecy is describing her victim status in an abusive relationship. Then, and only then, can a confidence be violated, since the person’s life is in the wind.

Private Enterprise and Social Media

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In one of The Wall Street Journal‘s frequent debate articles, this time about whether businesses should allow employees to use social media at work, a couple of comments made by the pro-use debater jumped out at me.

When I first began helping companies use Twitter and Facebook more than a decade ago, every organization started with this question: how can we use social media without compromising our security and privacy obligations?

The answer to this question seems straightforward, yet the debater equivocated.  While a business needs access to social media for its advertising and other communications with current and future customers, the plain fact, made all the more plain with recently revealed misbehaviors of Facebook and Twitter, is that businesses cannot use social media without severe risk of compromising their security and privacy obligations.  The business models of social media like Twitter and Facebook depend on exploiting exactly those privacy data, and those enterprises—and not only Twitter and Facebook—have shown themselves incapable of maintaining security regarding those data.

And this one:

The same kind of risk/benefit assessment applies to the use of personal social-media accounts by employees.

While it is true that companies can reduce risk if they ban personal social-media use during business hours, discourage employees from making any online references to their work and maybe even ban personal smartphones from the workplace, that is a terrible idea for the same reason companies now embrace social-media marketing: you can’t be a successful company in the social-media era unless you accept some level of social media-related risk.

This is just flat wrong.  In the first place, there’s no reason at all an employee should be conducting personal business on company time and company equipment.  Normal breaks and lunch hours answer the first part, but it’s still company equipment.

More importantly, the claim of no success without employees on social media is wrong.  I worked for one of the most successful defense contractors in the world in our niche of the industry.  Along with hundreds of fellow employees I worked behind a cipher lock.  No radios (and so no cell phone), no personal tablets or laptops or the like, we were air-gapped from the Internet.  We survived the isolation.  In fact, we thrived in that environment, and so did our company.  Companies that don’t do classified work still do proprietary work.  There’s no more need for those employees to access the Internet than there was for us.  They’ll thrive, too.  Saying a business just must surrender and accept social media-related risk is nothing but a quitter’s attitude.

And: any company is better off operating short-handed than operating with an employee who will put the company at risk with his own security errors, especially if those errors flow from doing personal business on company time or equipment.