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mantoosian-a-serf-in-mohmsville · 11 months ago

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So I've been thinking a lot about this since the OpenAI debacle. tl;dr I'm in favor of anything that takes power AWAY from boards and c-suites and puts them back into the hands of democratic processes. I agree with some parts of the article @vaspider linked (re-linked for visibility). I'd love to see employee representation on boards, and it should be more than half so they don't get out-voted. But I think the final recommendation gives too much discretion to the board. I don't always see eye to eye with Patrick Boyle. But I agree with a lot of the points he made here about the pitfalls of stakeholder capitalism:

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Firstly, the fiduciary duty to shareholders don't actually...have that much financial impact on management and definitely not the board. I saw a reblog from @mantis-lizbian (sorry to be tagging you, but since I'm quoting you I wanted to attribute directly, and I also wanted to hear your response. Let me know if I should remove the reference) that "CEOs, executive boards, anyone who runs a publicly traded company can be sued for any action or inaction they knowingly take that results in a forseeable drop in stock prices." I kind of wish that were true. Because that'd be able to hold so many boards and CEOs to account (cough cough WeWork, cough cough people still investing in Adam Neumann of WeWork, cough cough the entire board of fucking Theranos). But...I googled several companies that saw drops in share prices recently. Even when the share drop was clearly linked to some stupid decision like a big billions-of-dollars bet on the MetaVerse or NFTs, I couldn't find lawsuits that got enough traction to make the news. I'm sure some people do sue, you can sue anyone for anything, but it's really hard to get such a lawsuit off the ground. Shareholders do sue when there's fraud or gross negligence. Facebook/Meta got sued after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and when it was revealed they did basically nothing to stop child porn on their site. VW got sued after they defrauded the public about their emissions, and so on. This isn't because shareholders are kind souls that look out for the interest of the public. Suing takes a lot of money and effort.

So why are there less public lawsuits? Company shares drop all the time. First, winning is hard. There's a high burden of proof when trying to show that a company's management or board didn't fulfill their fiduciary duty. Shareholders need to prove that it is more likely that a reasonable person would not have made the same decisions management made if they had the shareholders interests in mind. That's why shareholders tend to sue when there's direct fraud or negligence because it's easier to show that a reasonable person would not commit fraud. Second, winning is kind of pointless. What happens when a shareholder sues a company's management for not fulfilling their fiduciary duty to shareholders? It tanks the stock because now there's proof to the share-holding public that the company's management isn't doing a good job. The lawsuit drags on. Now it tanks the stock EVEN MORE because the company is paying a lot of money for a public lawsuit about how bad the company is run. Death spiral. It's a lot easier and cheaper for shareholders to just cut their losses and sell the stock.

So why do CEOs do terrible, evil shit that seems to have no long term value and sometimes actively destroys the brand, if not for short-term stock bumps to appease the shareholders? My theory is that it's a lot of different reasons. I think it boils down to the following 1. Management bonuses and compensations are heavily-tied to short-term movements in stock during a set period, like the end of the year 2. Management / board don't go to jail. Even when their actions directly kill thousands of people. They generally don't even pay fines. 3. Management / board are generally people of average intelligence but much more egotistical, and totally out-of-touch. Sometimes they just do shit because they want to look and feel like a visionary.

Reason 3 is honestly the biggest reason stakeholder capitalism makes me nervous. Most CEOs are just as stupid I am. They also have no one to really tell them they're full of shit, and they generally have no idea what's going on. The board knows even less. We've seen through a lot of dying corporations that management / board can't be trusted even to prioritize the needs of one party, shareholders. How are they going to think about the tax-paying public and the consumers?

I'm not going to pretend there's no short-term, 'get the stock up right now at any cost' problem here. This brings me right back to Reason 1. C-suite bonuses are generally tied to stock performance, so there's a lot of incentive to do something big to give the stock a little bump before the ear end bonus. I've read some theories that that's why we've had so many sudden year-end layoffs (looking at you Etsy / Spotify). But plenty of boards structure CEO compensation so they only get the really big bucks if the stock stays up for several quarters to years. Management prioritizing short-term stock gains over long-term stability is actually a huge problem that boards are there to balance out and solve. This isn't due to short-term fiduciary duties. This is the board being stupid about how they structure CEO compensation. But now you have a group of people, so rich they think 'go into debt to hire a full-time cleaner so you can devote that attention to your job' is a good idea. They suffer no consequences for their action, and have no idea what's really going on. I firmly believe these are the last people we should ever trust to make decisions that's supposed to benefit the public. I'd like to see more focus on taking power back to the public (I don't care if they pay taxes or not). US regulations are written in blood. It doesn't have to be that way. There's already some movement to pass laws that will tighten food safety regulations and require that companies prove that the ingredient / process are safe, rather than the current framework we have where the government has to prove that a company's ingredient / process did harm. This is probably a pipe dream, but if you see related law proposals getting momentum, please tell your reps to vote for it. There aren't enough enforcement even on the regulations that do get broken. Theoretically, companies are supposed to pay to clean up environments after their operations devastate them. A lot of times they don't and NOTHING HAPPENS (link to npr article about the government needing to step in to clean up with taxpayer money). I DEMAND THEIR HEADS OR AT LEAST JAIL TIME. These are regulations and laws that already exist, so I think this is a more realistic ask. I worry that a lot of CEOs are advocating for stakeholder capitalism because the other solution, of taking power away from them and holding them accountable would have real consequences for their actions. So, conclusion: Let's send more C-suites and board members to jail.

While I'm writing things that I've been intending to write for a while... one of the things that I think that a lot of people who haven't been involved in like... banking or corporate shenaniganry miss about why our economy is its current flavor of total fuckery is the concept of "fiduciary duty to shareholders."

"Why does every corporation pursue endless growth?" Fiduciary duty to shareholders.

"Why do corporations treat workers the way they do?" Fiduciary duty to shareholders.

"Why do corporations make such bass-ackwards decisions about what's 'good for' the company?" Fiduciary duty to shareholders.

The legal purpose of a corporation with shareholders -- its only true purpose -- is the generation of revenue/returns for shareholders. Period. That's it. Anything else it does is secondary to that. Sustainability of business, treatment of workers, sustainability and quality of product, those things are functionally and legally second to generating revenue for shareholders. Again, period, end of story. There is no other function of a corporation, and all of its extensive legal privileges exist to allow it to do that.

"But Spider," you might say, "that sounds like corporations only exist in current business in order to extract as much money and value as possible from the people actually doing the work and transfer it up to the people who aren't actually doing the work!"

Yes. You are correct. Thank you for coming with me to that realization. You are incredibly smart and also attractive.

You might also say, "but Spider, is this a legal obligation? Could those running a company be held legally responsible for failing their obligations if they prioritize sustainability or quality of product or care of workers above returns for shareholders?"

Yes! They absolutely can! Isn't that terrifying? Also you look great today, you're terribly clever for thinking about these things. The board and officers of a corporation can be held legally responsible to varying degrees for failing to maximize shareholder value.

And that, my friends, is why corporations do things that don't seem to make any fucking sense, and why 'continuous growth' is valued above literally anything else: because it fucking has to be.

If you're thinking that this doesn't sound like a sustainable economic model, you're not alone. People who are much smarter than both of us, and probably nearly as attractive, have written a proposal for how to change corporate law in order to create a more sensible and sustainable economy. This is one of several proposals, and while I don't agree with all of this stuff, I think that reading it will really help people as a springboard to understanding exactly why our economy is as fucked up as it is, and why just saying 'well then don't pursue eternal growth' isn't going to work -- because right now it legally can't. We'd need to change -- and we can change -- the laws around corporate governance.

This concept of 'shareholder primacy' and the fiduciary duty to shareholders is one I had to learn when I was getting my securities licenses, and every time I see people confusedly asking why corporations try to grow grow grow in a way that only makes sense if you're a tumor, I sigh and think, 'yeah, fiduciary duty to shareholders.'

(And this is why Emet and I have refused to seek investors for NK -- we might become beholden to make decisions which maximize investor return, and that would get in the way of being able to fully support our people and our values and say the things we started this company to say.)

Anyway, you should read up on these concepts if you're not familiar. It's pretty eye-opening.

#Youtube

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years ago

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Capitalism's crooked refs

Capitalism is weird.

Almost without exception, people who invest in businesses do so without personally inspecting the business, overlooking its processes, seeing its bank statements, meeting its managers and going on the road with its sales-force.

Whether you’re managing a giant pension fund, buying into a fund with your 401k, or buying stocks (or STONKS) you likely have little to no direct experience of the firm you’re buying into. At best, you have visited a retail premises or tried a product, but that’s very thin.

Even if you think a business operates a tidy and efficient store, even if you love its products, you still have no basis to assess whether it is a sound investment. Maybe the business is selling products at a loss and teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.

Maybe those gorgeous stores are run by creepy harassers who’ve created billions in liabilities by abusing their employees. Maybe the owners have borrowed heavily to fund a cocaine habit.

You have no way to personally verify a firm’s commercial soundness prior to investing.

Instead, you must rely on the business’s own assurances about its viability — the balance sheets it publishes, the risks it discloses, its own profit and loss statements.

If these are competently prepared, it’s impossible to tell fraudulent statements from true ones.

Regulators aren’t much help. They’re mostly reactive, coming in after a fraud to figure out what happened and (sometimes) punish the perps.

While the fraud is in play, they’re unwitting participants, publishing those potentially fraudulent documents blended with true ones.

The main assurance that investors get comes not from regulators, but from auditors: those arms-length, third-party referees whose job it is to personally verify all those bank-statements, sniff around the shop floor, examine the P&Ls, and promise that it all adds up.

Auditors are the refs that keep the game honest. In theory, auditors are kept from cheating by strict ethics codes, licensure and regulatory oversight. Auditors are posed as neutral, trusted third parties who mediate between businesses and investors.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Great Neoliberal Decline: world governments stopped enforcing anti-monopoly laws, allowing every industry to shrink down to a handful of firms that are too big to audit, let along punish for wrongdoing.

This isn’t just true of the companies seeking investment — it’s especially true of the auditors themselves. The Big Four accounting firms — KPMG, PWC, E&Y and Deloitte — now control virtually the entire market for auditing, having bought all of their competitors.

But these Big Four — who audit nearly every large business — make most of their money from “consulting” — selling companies business advice. The Big Four claim that their auditors and consultants are separated, but those claims are hard to credit.

Time and again, we see Big Four firms fudging the books for their best clients — as with “zombie banks” whose reckless lending has made them the walking dead, sure to collapse and require government bailouts.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/28/cyberwar-tactics/#aligned-incentives

These banks pay Big Four firms vast sums to consult for them. Between 2009–17, Big Four-audited bank financials failed 800 (!) audits (!!).

But the regulator only initiated enforcement action against the auditors 53 times (!!!).

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/28/cyberwar-tactics/#aligned-incentives

It’s not just the businesses that Big Accounting audits that are too big to regulate. Big Accounting is also too big to regulate, even when it conspires with its clients to commit vast, terrible frauds.

Accounting fraud is the norm in big business. Big Four firms have their fingers in every one of these frauds, from Exxon lying about shale gas to Facebook lying about video views.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/18/ink-stained-wretches/#countless

It’s the inevitable and foreseeable outcome of merging “consulting” and “auditing.” Auditing’s job is to bring clarity to numbers. Consulting’s job is to obscure them. You can always make more money with fraud (for a while) than you can with honesty.

The Big Four are far more likely to cook books than straighten them — every one of the Big Four firms is deeply implicated in tax evasion, for example, using numbers to obscure a business’s financials, rather than reveal them.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/15/shorter-brother/#tax-havens

It’s been nearly two decades since Arthur Andersen — part of the then-Big-Five accounting cartel — was given the corporate death penalty for its role in the Enron fraud. That was the last time a Big Accounting company really suffered over a fraud.

Since then, the regulators overseeing Big Accounting have largely ignored its crimes, or, at worst, charged the companies penalties that were smaller than the profits they realized through fraud. A fine is just a price.

Take KPMG.

In 2019, the SEC found that KPMG’s most senior managers were helping their auditors cheat…on ethics exams.

KPMG execs bribed employees at the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board to slip them advance copies of the ethics exams.

https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-professional/article/sec-probe-finds-kpmg-auditors-cheating-on-training-exams-061819

Even better (worse): the bribe that KPMG offered to regulators was a job at KPMG.

Remember, KPMG plays a vital role in the market system: to be perfectly, scrupulously honest, so that rich people (and regular slobs) can make sure that they’re not getting ripped off.

KPMG’s job is to stop cheating. And KPMG cheats.

Not surprisingly, a company whose official policy is to help its employees cheat on ethics exams keeps getting embroiled in ethics scandals, which end up costing regular investors and even very rich people a lot of money.

Here’s a good one: since 2016, investors have been suing KPMG for signing off on the books of Miller Energy Partners, a dirty-as-fuck oil company that turned out to be a giant scam.

https://www.desmog.com/2021/06/03/miller-energy-kpmg-auditors-oil-fraud/

Miller claimed that it could profitably extract oil from wells other companies had abandoned as too dry to pump (energy companies routinely incorporate standalone businesses for each field, then declare those companies bankrupt rather than pay to shut down when they dry up).

Miller was a fraud. It inflated the value of the wells it bought by $400m. Miller was run by serial scammers. Its CEO, Scott Boruff, stole $6m from his father-in-law, and was a veteran of a company that went bust after roping for Provident Asset Management, a Ponzi scheme.

Boruff brought in Provident’s former National Sales Director to oversee Gibson’s sales — publicly praising the Ponzi schemer’s “proven track record in raising capital.”

Miller was full of red flags and might have struggled to attract investors, but then it paid KPMG millions to sign off on its fraudulent books. That was the clincher than brought in millions more from investors who lost everything.

Even after the SEC fined KPMG for helping commit fraud, the partner who masterminded the crime kept his job at KPMG, staying on until retirement.

Now, it’s possible the reason KPMG’s internal watchdog missed all this was because it was a little distracted at the time — you see, that was around the time that David Middendorf — who ran KPMG’s Department of Professional Practices — was being sent to prison for fraud.

Meanwhile, Miller’s top fraudsters got paid millions — and paid fines of $125,000, each.

KPMG tried to weasel out of the Miller victims’ class-action suiit, but a judge in Tennessee just overruled its objections, so it’s going to court:

https://www.goingconcern.com/kpmg-class-action-suit-miller-energy-investors/

But the days of corporate death penalties are long behind us. If KPMG loses this suit, it will pay out a few million, but it will continue to operate, providing assurances of probity where none exist.

Big Accounting is a rarity in late-stage capitalism: a sector that preys on wealthy people as well as everyday people. Somehow, it gets away with it — perhaps because there is no honor among thieves?

#pluralistic

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marked-by-fire · 5 years ago

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Here’s my research paper. Took me 3 days to type up.

In most recent years, video games have become incredibly popular with a wide variety of titles and different systems to play on. People have been able to start whole careers based on competitive gaming and amass a fortune. If only playing for fun, the internet allows for anyone to play with different people across the world that they never would’ve met otherwise. All in all, the advancement and availability of video games has definitely changed the world and brought a lot of people together. Even though gaming has improved by leaps and bounds, there’s a lot of negatives that’s come with its popularity. The more prominent issues are greed and control, but that’s only scratching the service. Right now, long time gamers are getting fed up with gaming companies and their practices, and said companies are losing millions, sometimes billions, of dollars. In this essay, we’re going to explore what some of those actions and practices are and why it seems like gaming is heading towards a whimpering, drawn-out end.

First, one of the biggest issues that recent games are facing is that more than a fair share of them are being released unfinished. By “unfinished”, that means that textures aren’t loading properly, enemy and ally AI don’t behave how they’re supposed to, or there are glitches that prevent story progression. There are even games that some people call unplayable because the game itself doesn’t even work. This happens because many of the higher-ups from well-known studios will rush a game through development in order to release it by a certain date or major holiday. One such instance was during the release of Fallout 1776, that was due to be released on Thanksgiving 2018. The game performed so badly that Bethesda was sued due to the game being borderline unplayable. The most common issue for the game was that it would crash constantly. If it didn’t crash, the world was mostly empty with weak enemies, an inconsistent loot system, and, the most egregious offense, the exact same enemy that was just taken down would respawn right in front of a player if they stood still for too long in any given area. Some of these issues have been fixed with patches, but a game shouldn’t need a patch within the first week in order to work properly after being installed. To sum up this section, gaming companies are starting to release half-baked games for a quick buck, at the cost of angering fans, to only fix the mess they made later if it starts costing them actual money.

While everything stated above is a driving factor of why gaming may take a nosedive in the future, the state of games upon release only covers one side of the production coin. The other side has to do with advertisement and add-ons. One of the prominent ways advertising games has changed is the inclusion of pre-ordering. Pre-ordering games has become incredibly common to where most games can be bought and held on to a year or more before they’re released. The problem with that is a person could’ve very well bought a game that’s such a mess it fries their system during start-up and leaves the customer with an unusable block. If a game is released unfinished, or “broken”, consumers usually can’t get a refund if the game was pre-ordered because the window for a full refund has long past expired. Along with pre-ordering, there’s also DLC (downloadable content). DLC is supposed to be additions to an already finished game in the form of new areas to explore, side stories, or new/exciting items not necessary to the main game. Some companies have done the unthinkable and will cut out core parts of a game and package them up as DLC to sell back to customers. A shining example of this was with the game Asura’s Wrath. If a person manages to reach a high enough rank at different parts of the story, you’re treated to an alternate ending where you meet the true antagonist of the series. To actually face him, get the true ending, and finish the game though, you had to pay roughly an extra $10 for the DLC. Many fans were understandably angry and refused to buy the DLC and were either content with first ending or found free, illegal downloads of the DLC. That was a lot of information to take in, but everything that was just mentioned only covers just a game having all its necessary pieces. What’s made its way into games when it works is another beast entirely

When it comes to the way content has been affected, two words come to mind: Gentrification and Politicization. Gentrification is going to be covered first seeing as that’s going to be a little less volatile to talk about. What’s meant by gentrification is now that gaming has become more popular, people that were never fans of the hobby in the first place feel as though they have a right to change games to fit their sensibilities, despite how others may feel about it, and game companies are suffering for it. The reoccurring cycle is that an “outrage mob” campaigns to change features or aspects of new games they find offensive or not inclusive enough, companies cave to the demands because they think they found a new target audience, established fans end up hating the final product when it’s released because they feel alienated and infantilized, the “outrage mob” that wanted the changes in the first place don’t even buy what they campaigned for, and then the company loses out on profits. This either ends with a series or new entry being cancelled because it didn’t sell well enough or a studio going bankrupt because that game was their last hope of making a profit. This cycle has been seen so often that it coined the phrase “get woke, go broke,” meaning that companies almost always fail after listening to these people. This phrase also plays into the politicization aspect of current games

What’s meant by politicization is that more games in recent years seem to think that some political statement has to be made in order to sell and do well. It’s not uncommon for entertainment to have some sort of political statement during controversial periods of time, but that’s not the issue here. The issue is that many of the political components end up feeling forced, make no sense in where they come up, or carry little nuance. It’s one thing to have an antagonist that holds a belief or goal that’s objectively wrong, like genocide or dividing people by class, but it’s another thing entirely to awkwardly shoehorn in current, reasonable politics or people, push one or both side’s views to their extremes, and then paint one side as wholly good and the other irredeemably evil. There’s no nuance of either side making good and bad points. In the end, no matter which side the game paints as the “good side,” the other half of the fan base is still going to be angry because they’re also being called evil by affiliation by having vaguely similar views. Another issue is that people just don’t want current politics in their games. Due to social media, school, friends, the news, or any other source of information, the last thing people want is more of the current world’s problems in their escapism. People are tired of having to constantly be bombarded with issues about racism, sexism, the economy, the environment, etc. People don’t want to have to deal with that all day just to come home and have their form of entertainment shove even more of it down their throat.

There’s so much more to cover on this topic because this essay has only covered the tip of the iceberg of the issues plaguing current day gaming. There’s a lot that wasn’t covered that deserves to be but is a bit of a touchy subject that ties in with gentrification and content, and one of those subjects is censorship. A lot of games that catch the attention of the aforementioned outrage mobs are games that tend to have some degree of sexual or violent content in them, at varying degrees, that the target audience is willing to pay for. The outrage mob basically functions as new age puritans who seem to think no one should ever consume any kind of sexual or unnecessarily violent content of any kind in games because it’s “degrading to women” or “it inspires violence in the real world”. Never mind the fact that there’s never been a link between real world violence and violence in games, many of the women featured in games are designed by women, and that many of the men featured in games can be as equally sexualized, but in a different way. There seems to be this disconnect between what’s fiction and what’s reality for them and they believe everyone else suffers from this condition too, especially for people who play video games. So now there’s this rabid need to censor everything for everyone because a select few people can’t handle a woman dressed a little sexily. People don’t like having third party views pushed into their entertainment, but it’s happening anyway, and gaming companies seem to be ignoring this issue that’s rotting them from the inside out.

In the end, if this kind of trend continues, gaming is going to die out in the near future. There’s already been a number of game studios closing because they listened to people screaming on Twitter and Facebook over loyal, paying fans. Too many of these gaming companies try go for the social justice, good boy points to only have the bar moved farther away to unattainable levels. This is on top of pushing out games that don’t work or just look and handle horrendously because they were more focused on politics or making as much money as possible with the least amount of work. There are a few major studios left that stick by their fans and core principles, and there are hundreds of smaller studios that fully embrace making a good game over making money or sending a message. Though, with the way things are going, it’s only a matter of time before someone else takes over that prioritizes their online image over appeasing the people who got them where they are now. If and when that day comes, it’ll be the end. The gaming industry as a whole will die a slow, painful death.

#video games #gaming #business #college writing #long post

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the-firebird69 · 2 years ago

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Trump files $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN

And we are going to sue Facebook and Twitter and other places like that for excluding our son when he was simply not telling people to do stuff most of it's opinion and I'm going to say Tumblr for having him put inflammatory stuff up and forced him to post threats and so forth but he's excluded his sight that doesn't matter music people running are right there forcing him to.

Zeus and Hera door and Freya are requesting it for today I am as well and John remillard is on the board of Tumblr and he's sitting there at Publix threatening for our son to write stuff and threatening for the phone to be charged. I want him to rain today for it

Trump is suing CNN he thinks he's going to win and it's a coated number he's suing for. And in his his mind is right but he was launching threats and it's very clear their threats and he has ability to carry them out on some people. Mitch McCullough is launching a lawsuit against Trump and his filing criminal charges today and it's a real lawsuit and he's facing criminal charges for it and real criminal charges and it's in public and it is against Trump and is what everyone has been waiting for someone to step forwards and Mitch McConnell's doing it it's about time everyone's saying and they're going to stand behind him. And his own daughter and his own son are going against him because he is massively abusive. Him and his stupid face and his dumb luck staring at people harassing them he's got to get the f*** out of here.

So we're testing about an angry but we're not out of control and we are insisting that he leaves the neighborhood now permanently and if he doesn't we're going to keep him out and we're requesting help and doing so and Mac Daddy had formulated this plan a while ago and we're actually helping. He's a useless person evil and he goes backwards on things. But CNN is going to counter Sue and for libel and slander and they woke up this morning and they saw in the news and the team called their lawyer immediately they got on conference call from their house from their houses and they saw the news this morning no they saw it yesterday and they were talking all last night and they filed the counter suit for $450 billion dollars and that means something. It means they're going after him with teeth and CNN is a broadcasting station and they're going to broadcast stuff about the a****** it's exactly what our sense at sunset would happen if this numbskull went ahead and did that. And Trump has been slandering the media for a long time other lawsuits are already coming out he slandered Fox channel 4 he said that they're no good and they're crappy people and hateful people and he said it on TV and Fox 4 has a lawsuit against him and they are filing it today we hear about it because we saw them filing. 10 more lawsuits are to follow that we know about and we hear that there are possibly 20 additional to that from the media because he insulted them and slandered them and maligned them while he was president and after but most of it is both 99%. Other people are coming forward to sue him and these are real lawsuits not just for a few bucks or a few dollars these are people who are mad at him and there are others who are suing for wrongful death and there are millions of them and it is a valid lawsuit I looked at it and it's regarding this covid stuff because his policies made people sicker to go in and shut her in and not have oxygen and to they are suing for people's gas and a lot of people are suing him for them getting sick because he's not a doctor and he's not the person who is in charge of the medical wing of the United States government and he was recommending people do things and it was evil and he meant to kill them and they're going to prove it in court those lawsuits are all being filed today

Bitol and Goddess Wife

So good luck John remillard AKA Trump let's see how far this goes means we want to go far we're not the ones who care if you get exposed or not you piece of s*** think about it stupid

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deniscollins · 6 years ago

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They’re Falsely Accused of Shoplifting, but Retailers Demand Penalties

Lesleigh Nurse was accused of stealing groceries from a self-checkout line at a Walmart outside Mobile while she shopped with her husband and two children. If you were a Walmart manager, what would you do if the customer asked to see video surveillance footage of the alleged crime: (1) show the footage or (2) have a collect agency demand $200 repayment and now show up in court? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Crystal Thompson was at home watching the Rose Bowl parade when a county sheriff came to arrest her for shoplifting from the local Walmart.

Ms. Thompson, 43, was baffled and scared. An agoraphobic, she had not shopped at a Walmart in more than a year. She was taken to a Mobile jail, searched, held in a small room and required to remove her false teeth, something she didn’t even do in front of her husband.

Four days after she returned home, the letters from Walmart’s lawyer started to arrive. The lawyer demanded that Ms. Thompson pay the company $200 or face a possible lawsuit. She received three letters over two months in early 2016.

Shoplifting is an intractable problem for retailers, costing stores more than $17 billion a year, according to an industry estimate. To get the money back, many companies employ aggressive legal tactics and take advantage of loosely written state laws, pushing for restitution even when people have not been convicted of wrongdoing.

Many of the laws were established so retailers could pursue shoplifters without clogging up the courts. Retailers, though, often move on both fronts, pressing criminal charges against suspects, while demanding that they pay up before cases are resolved.

In many states, retailers do not have to return the money they collect if the cases are ultimately dismissed or the people are cleared. A Walmart executive, in a court deposition, acknowledged that the company did not follow up to check on whether people it sought money from had been convicted of shoplifting.

Walmart and other companies have created well-oiled operations, hiring law firms to send tens of thousands of letters a year. Walmart set a collection goal of about $6 million in 2016 for one of its go-to firms, Palmer Reifler & Associates, according to a court paper filed as part of a lawsuit Ms. Thompson brought against the retailer. The firm also pointed out to Walmart that minors tended to pay off more frequently, the filing said.

“It is my word against this company,” said Ms. Thompson, whose criminal case was dismissed after no one from Walmart appeared at a hearing to testify against her. “I’m nobody special. I didn’t feel like I had a prayer.”

Walmart declined to comment on individual cases, citing continuing litigation.

“While there are multiple steps that our associates follow before initiating a civil claim against a customer, people can make mistakes,” the company said in a statement. “We are deeply sorry when that happens. We continually evaluate the effectiveness and benefit of our programs.”

Starting decades ago, the retail industry lobbied state legislatures for legal recourse to pursue shoplifters with fines. Retailers argued that the penalties would go a long way toward deterring future theft, and that rampant shoplifting ate into already thin profit margins, potentially raising prices for consumers.

In some states, companies have been able to collect more than the value of the allegedly stolen items, up to $1,000 in some instances. Despite numerous lawsuits against retailers and news reports about collection tactics, the laws have remained largely intact.

Maryland is one of the few states to revise its shoplifting statutes. In 2016, the state began requiring retailers to report the number of collection letters they send. To date, no retailer has complied with the new requirements, according to state records.

In Illinois, a 2015 proposal to reduce the penalties that retailers can demand from shoplifting suspects died in the legislature. One of the bill’s sponsors said an industry lobbyist had warned him that the issue was a “third rail” among retailers with deep political influence in the state.

“There is no evidence that these laws have decreased shoplifting or decriminalized petty crime at all,” said Ryan Sullivan, an assistant professor at the Nebraska College of Law who studies the impact of shoplifting laws.

Yatarra McQueen got ensnared in the system after she exchanged an inflatable mattress for a grill at a Walmart in Montgomery, Ala.

Store employees suspected that she had stolen the mattress. But they let her make the exchange and leave the store.

A few days later, Ms. McQueen found an arrest warrant in her mailbox. She drove to a detention center, where she was searched and made to wear a blue jump suit.

At the same time, Walmart forwarded her name to Palmer Reifler. The firm sent her two letters demanding that she pay $200 or face a potential lawsuit on top of the criminal charge, according to a suit she later filed against Walmart. Ms. McQueen said she was scared of being sued, but she did not have the money to pay.

“The most powerful company in the world called me a thief,” Ms. McQueen said in a court document. “I was terrified.”

No one from Walmart showed up at her criminal trial, and the case was dismissed. While she was awaiting trial, Ms. McQueen said, her temporary nursing license was put on hold for nearly six months.

“This is an unpopular constituency,” said Christian Schreiber, a lawyer who filed a lawsuit in California state court against Home Depot over the practice. The suit resulted in a settlement for about 3,500 people who received demand letters from Palmer Reifler. “These are people accused of theft, so there is not a big interest in their rights.”

In Burlington, N.C., Anna Marie Martin said two police officers “threw” her on a couch, handcuffed her and took her to jail, according to a lawsuit she filed against Walmart. Her alleged crime: stealing a Bryan Adams CD and two others, totaling $25.62, then hitting a car in the Walmart parking lot and driving away.

Palmer Reifler sent her two letters demanding that she pay $150 within 20 days. “You may be held civilly liable” for as much as $1,000, the letters said.

Both letters were sent before the authorities determined that Ms. Martin had been “mistakenly charged” and dropped the criminal case, according to her suit. A Walmart employee had told the police that she was “80 percent sure” that Ms. Martin was the thief.

Ms. Martin recently settled her suit with Walmart for an undisclosed sum.

For many, a mere charge of shoplifting can do damage.

Lesleigh Nurse was accused of stealing groceries from a self-checkout line at a Walmart outside Mobile while she shopped with her husband and two children. She said that Walmart refused to show her video surveillance footage of the alleged crime. In the weeks after her arrest, Ms. Nurse said she got at least two letters from Palmer Reifler demanding $200, but she was advised by her lawyer not to pay.

Ms. Nurse appeared in court three times. No witnesses from Walmart ever showed up, she said, and her case was eventually dismissed. The letters stopped coming to Ms. Nurse once her case was dropped.

But Ms. Nurse has still had to repair her reputation. The day after she reported to jail, an internet police blotter posted her mug shot on a popular Facebook feed. Her husband said he had to pay more than $100 to the site’s operator to take down her photo.

“I can’t erase what people think of me in the back of their mind,’’ she said in an interview.

In a deposition this year in Ms. Thompson’s civil case, a senior Walmart manager at the time, said Walmart did not audit whether the people who received the demand letters had committed a crime.

He said such due diligence was the responsibility of Walmart’s outside law firms, which had “expertise” in the area.

“What investigations do you expect the law firms to conduct to determine whether these allegations are true?” Ms. Thompson’s lawyer David McDonald asked the executive in a deposition.

The executive replied: “We do not get involved in their processes because they are an independent contractor.”

In Alabama, Palmer Reifler hired a lawyer who had not practiced law in 27 years to sign letters sent to shoplifting suspects. The lawyer said he was employed part time at a funeral home while also working for Palmer Reifler. In a deposition, he said he was typically paid a retainer of $200 a month to sign collection letters.

The law firm did not return calls seeking comment.

In Ms. Thompson’s suit, a Walmart employee acknowledged in a deposition that he mistakenly accused her of shoplifting in December 2015.

He said it had appeared that one of Ms. Thompson’s daughters failed to scan about $70 worth of groceries at the self-checkout line.

The employee followed Ms. Thompson’s daughter out to the parking lot and wrote down the license plate of her car, which was registered to her mother. Based in part on the license plate, Walmart sought a criminal complaint against Ms. Thompson.

Mr. McDonald said that if Ms. Thompson’s daughter took the groceries without scanning them properly, it was by mistake. Video surveillance, reviewed by The New York Times, shows her daughter trying to scan and rescan groceries at the checkout machine for about 17 minutes.

Walmart has not filed shoplifting charges against Ms. Thompson’s daughter.

“They are playing games with people’s future,” Ms. Thompson said.

#Shoplifting #Walmart

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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

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Did Trump Ever Say Republicans Are Stupid

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/did-trump-ever-say-republicans-are-stupid/

Did Trump Ever Say Republicans Are Stupid

Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters

Donald Trump Tells Oprah in 1988 What He Would Do as President

Former aides say that in private, the president has spoken with cynicism and contempt about believers.

One day in 2015, Donald Trump beckoned Michael Cohen, his longtime confidant and personal attorney, into his office. Trump was brandishing a printout of an article about an Atlanta-based megachurch pastor trying to raise $60 million from his flock to buy a private jet. Trump knew the preacher personallyCreflo Dollar had been among a group of evangelical figures who visited him in 2011 while he was first exploring a presidential bid. During the meeting, Trump had reverently bowed his head in prayer while the pastors laid hands on him. Now he was gleefully reciting the impious details of Dollars quest for a Gulfstream G650.

Trump seemed delighted by the scam, Cohen recalled to me, and eager to highlight that the pastor was full of shit. Theyre all hustlers, Trump said.

The presidents alliance with religious conservatives has long been premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats hold them in disdain. In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes praise on conservative Christians, casting himself as their champion. My administration will never stop fighting for Americans of faith, he declared at a rally for evangelicals earlier this year. Its a message his campaign will seek to amplify in the coming weeks as Republicans work to confirm Amy Coney Barretta devout, conservative Catholicto the Supreme Court.

The People Whom President Trump Has Called Stupid

Since he declared his candidacy for the presidency, no group has been deemed stupid by Donald Trump more frequently than Americas leaders. There are stupid people running the country, he said over and over and over again on the campaign trail; making stupid deals with Iran and stupid deals on trade. Everyone in charge was dumb and he wasnt except that he was stupid for self-funding his campaign. That, in broad strokes, was Trumps rhetoric in 2015 and 2016.

But that wasnt the full extent of it. When Trump tweeted disparagement of LeBron James and CNNs Don Lemon Friday night, it was a reminder that Trump often divides the world into two groups: those who are stupid and those who arent. It was also a reminder that, of late, Trump has often chosen to describe as stupid people who are not white.

That wasnt always the case. Before the presidential election, Trump mostly disparaged white people as stupid.

Of course, back then, his political opponents were mostly white people: those running against him in the Republican primary and the conservative establishment broadly opposed to his candidacy. He called Karl Rove, former George W. Bush adviser, stupid five times, including in interviews. Bloombergs Tim OBrien, whom Trump once sued unsuccessfully for alleged libel, earned the description three times, as did television host Glenn Beck.

Since President Trumps inauguration, though, that has changed.

It wasnt Obama.

The Dumbest Stuff Donald Trump Has Ever Said

Paul J Richards/AFP/Getty

Americas favorite faux-political shock jock came back with a vengeance two weeks ago when, during a press conference to announce his candidacy for the presidency, he characterized all Mexican immigrants as drug-peddling rapists.

The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody elses problems, he said. When Mexico sends its people, theyre not sending their best. Theyre not sending you. Theyre sending people that have lots of problems, and theyre bringing those problems with us. Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

The comments ended up getting both him and his television programs booted from NBC. After a public pressure campaign that racked up more than 200,000 petition signatures, the network decried his words as derogatory. Trump, as to be expected, railed against NBC. Instead of apologizing for his words, he later asserted that his stance on immigration is correct.

Its not the first time Trump has insulted Americas southern neighbor. This past February, when Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu took home an Oscar for his film Birdman, Trump offered dubious congratulations. Well it was a great night for Mexico, as usual in this country It was a great night for Mexico. This guy kept getting up and up and up. I said, you know, whats he doing? Hes walking away with all the gold.

On African-Americans:

Laziness is a trait in blacks.

On women:

On religion:

Read Also: Do Republicans Support The Death Penalty

Trump ‘knows Republicans Are Stupid’ Jared Kushner Allegedly Said To Former Editor

Greg Price U.S.Jared KushnerDonald TrumpRepublicans

One of the strategies Donald Trump employed as he began putting his name on the U.S. political map years ago was championing “birtherism,” the long-held conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was born outside of the U.S. and hence should never have been elected. He often chastised Obama and demanded the president produce his birth certificate, revving up an anti-Obama base that eventually helped put Trump in the White House.

Evidently, Trump may have been using the so-called birthers only as a means to an end.

His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is also a senior adviser to the president, allegedly told a former editor of the newspaper he once owned that the billionaire real-estate mogul didn’t believe his own “birtherism” claims, and only made them to charge up Republicans because they are “stupid,” GQ reported.

During a discussion on how to cover Trump, the former New York Observer editor, Elizabeth Spiers, claimed she told Kushner that she had serious problems with Trump’s repeated claims that Obama was not born in the U.S., to which Kushner allegedly told her: “He doesn’t really believe it, Elizabeth. He just knows Republicans are stupid and they’ll buy it.”

Spiers told her Kushner anecdote in response to a question from a conservative blogger on Facebook, and then screenshotted the response and put it up on Twitter.

In 1988 Oprah Asked Donald Trump If He’d Ever Run For President Here’s How He Replied

Donald Trump;wasn’t always so sure he wanted to run for president.

Long before The Donald officially kicked off his;polarizing2016run and became;the Republican frontrunner, Oprah asked the business tycoon about his political aspirations on a 1988 episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” ;Trump had originally appeared on the show to promote a new book and discuss his life as a businessman, but the conversation soon turned toward foreign policy and how Trump would take a tougher stance with America’s allies.

“I’d make our allies pay their fair share. We’re a debtor nation; something’s going to happen over the next number of years in this country, because you can’t keep going on losing $200 billion,” he said on “The Oprah Show” back then. “We let Japan come in and dump everything right into our markets… They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs. They knock the hell out of our companies. And, hey, I have tremendous respect for the Japanese people. I mean, you can respect somebody that’s beating the hell out of you, but they are beating the hell out of this country. Kuwait, they live like kings and yet, they’re not paying. We make it possible for them to sell their oil. Why aren’t they paying us 25 percent of what they’re making? It’s a joke.”

The rant prompted Oprah to ask the question that people would ask for the next few decades.

Of course, he couldn’t help but hedge.

“I think I’d win,” Trump said. “I’ll tell you what: I wouldn’t go in to lose.”

Also On HuffPost:

Don’t Miss: What Republicans Voted Against Tax Bill

Trumps 10 Most Hilariously Stupid Things He Said In 2019

President Donald Trump has a long history of saying some of the most bizarre things in politics. This year was one for the books as the president flailed, searching for excuses for his July 25 phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Here are some of the most hilariously stupid things the president has said this year:

1. Windmills cause ear cancer

If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value, Trump told Republicans in April. And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one. He then made a whirring noise mimicking a turbine.

2. He wants to buy Greenland

In meetings, at dinners and in passing conversations, Mr. Trump has asked advisers whether the U.S. can acquire Greenland, listened with interest when they discuss its abundant resources and geopolitical importance and, according to two of the people, has asked his White House counsel to look into the idea, the Wall Street Journal reported in August.

Denmark essentially owns it, Trump told reporters in the days that followed. Were very good allies with Denmark. We protect Denmark like we protect large portions of the world. Strategically its interesting.

Trump then got into a fight with Danish leaders and had to cancel a trip hed planned to the country.

3. Trump is the chosen one.

4. Why dont they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.

Im Getting The Word Out: Inside The Feverish Mind Of Donald Trump Two Months After Leaving The White House

I Alone Can Fix It

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To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.

Seventy days had passed since Donald Trump left Washington against his will. On March 31, 2021, we ventured to Mar-a-Lago, where he still reigned as king of Republican politics. We arrived late that afternoon for our audience with the man who used to be president and were ushered into an ornate sixty-foot-long room that functioned as a kind of lobby leading to the clubs patio. A model of Air Force One painted in Trumps proposed redesigna flat red stripe across the middle, a navy belly, a white top, and a giant American flag on the tailwas proudly displayed on the coffee table facing the entrance. It was a prop disconnected from reality.; Trumps vision never came to be; the fleet now in use by President Biden still bears the iconic baby blue-and-white livery designed by Jacqueline Kennedy.

Trump had invited us to Mar-a-Lago to interview him for this book. He had declined an interview for our first book about his presidency, and when A Very Stable Genius was published in January 2020, attacked us personally and branded our reporting a work of fiction. But Trump was quick to agree to our request this time. He sought to curate history.

But future elections were not front and center in his mind. A past election was. Trump was fixated on his loss in 2020, returning to this wound repeatedly throughout the interview.;

Also Check: How Many Republicans Voted For Obamacare In The Senate

Trump Told A Reporter His Biggest Secret: That He Is A Danger To The American People

Trump is a particularly stupid man who thinks he is very smart. Perhaps this lies at the root of his monumentally dumb decision to grant Bob Woodward 18 interviews

The Inuit are supposed to have dozens of words to describe snow. The Brits have endless ways to talk about rain. Now its time for Americans to delineate all the many ways that Donald Trump is dumb.

If Bob Woodwards new blockbuster teaches us anything new about the character of the 45th president, its that we dont yet have the words to describe the multiple variants of the vacuum inside his head.

Theres the stupidity of arrogance, the stupidity of ignorance and his old friend: the stupidity of blatant duplicity. Theres his homicidal stupidity, his traitorous stupidity, his criminally corrupt stupidity and his plain old infantile stupidity.

Lets start with the top of this taxonomy: the domain of Donalds dumbness. At his core, the former reality TV star is a particularly stupid man who thinks he is very smart. Or as he prefers to call his own character, a very stable genius.

Perhaps, just maybe, this lies at the root of his monumentally dumb decision to grant Woodward 18 interviews, on the record and on tape.

Instead, our very stupid genius vomited up all manner of secrets that collectively prove beyond all reasonable doubt that he represents the greatest single danger to the fate of both the American people and to himself.

Fact Check: Did Trump Say In ’98 Republicans Are Dumb

Donald Trump: I didnt say that. (He did.)

Did Donald Trump tell People magazine in 1998 that if he ever ran for president, hed do it as a Republican because theyre the dumbest group of voters in the country and that he could lie and theyd still eat it up?A:;No, thats a bogus meme.

FULL ANSWER

The meme purports to be a quote from Trump in;People;magazine in 1998 saying, If I were to run, Id run as a Republican. Theyre the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe;anything on Fox News. I could lie and theyd still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific.

We were alerted to the meme by a reader, A. Douglas Thomas of Freeport, N.Y., among others, who saw it in his Facebook feed, along with a message from someone who said, I just fact-checked this. Google Donald Trump, People magazine and 1998. This is an actual quote by Trump.

Well save you the effort. It is;not;an actual quote by Trump.

We scoured the;Peoplemagazine archives and found nothing like this quote in 1998 or any other year.

And a public relations representative with;People;told us that the magazine couldnt find anything like that quote in its archives, either.;Peoples Julie Farin said in an email: Peoplelooked into this exhaustively when it first surfaced back in Oct.;We combed through every Trump story in our archive.;We couldnt find anything remotely like this quote and no interview at all in 1998.

There were several stories in the late 1990s about Trumps flirtation with a presidential run.

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Trump Is Right: Republicans Are Stupid

Donald Trump, master of the deal, is right. The Republicans are stupid, not only as politicians but also as political psychologists. He criticized Paul Ryan for bringing up the subject of Medicare reform that the Democrats could use to turn the elderly against the Republicans. Their video of grandma being shoved over the cliff by Republicans is a stark indication of how the Dems will fight to win four more years for Obama.

As the discussions over increasing the debt limit go on, the Democrats are portraying themselves as the more flexible party in the negotiations. They are willing to cut cherished programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, provided Republicans agree to some increases in revenue. They want the Republicans to agree to raise taxes and cut spending on programs that the elderly hold sacred. A perfect recipe for Republican defeat in November 2012. Thursdays meeting was supposed to focus on spending cuts in the two health care programs and on new revenue. And only stupid Republicans would attend such a meeting.

From the very beginning, by focusing on cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, the Republicans have trapped themselves into a no-win situation. Why havent they offered a list of real cuts in federal spending? Who told them that cutting programs that the elderly are dependent on is the way to win votes in 2012?

Here Are The Top 10 Stupidest Things Trump Did As President

We’re tentatively starting to emerge from the four year-long national nightmare of Donald Trump’s presidency, but the reckoning of what the nation endured will take years to really understand. Trump was terrible in so many ways that it’s hard to catalog them all: His sociopathic lack of regard for others. His towering narcissism. His utter ease with lying. His cruelty and sadism. The glee he took in cheating and stomping on anything good and decent. His misogyny and racism. His love of encouraging violence, only equaled by his personal cowardice.

But of all the repulsive character traits in a man so wholly lacking in any redeemable qualities, perhaps the most perplexing to his opponents was Trump’s incredible stupidity. On one hand, it was maddening that a man so painfully dumb, a man who clearly could barely read even on those rare occasions when he deigned to wear glasses still had the low cunning necessary to take over the Republican Party and then the White House.

On the other hand, it was the one aspect of Trump’s personality that kept hope alive. Surely a man so stupid, his opponents believed, will one day blunder so badly he can’t be saved, even by his most powerful sycophants. That has proved to be the case as Trump fumbles his way through a failed coup, unable and unwilling to see that stealing the election from Joe Biden is a lost cause.

He then pointed at his head, and said, “I’m, like, a person who has a good you-know-what.”

Read Also: Where Are Republicans On The Political Spectrum

Top 10 Actual Things Donald Trump Said At His 2016 Presidential Campaign Kickoff

Top 10 Actual Things Donald Trump Said At His 2016 Presidential Campaign Announcement

— On Tuesday, real estate mogul-turned reality show star, Donald Trump, became the latest Republican to jump into the 2016 presidential race.

If hes elected in 2016, the GOP hopeful predicated that he would be the most successful president for U.S. jobs that God ever created, used the recent sale of a multi-million dollar apartment he owned to someone from China as an example of his friendly ties with the country, voiced concern that people from the Middle East are probably sneaking into the country through the border, and revealed that rich Islamic terrorists are his competition within the hotel market in Syria.

This is all real, and its trademark Trump. Here are the quotes from Trumps presidential announcement that you will never hear another presidential candidate say — ever.

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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The Big Deal in Amazon’s Antitrust Case This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it weekdays. Hoo boy, this is a moment. A government authority in the United States has sued Amazon over claims that the company is breaking the law by unfairly crushing competition. The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday by the attorney general for the District of Columbia, joins the recent government antitrust cases against Google and Facebook. These lawsuits will take forever, and legal experts have said that the companies likely have the upper hand in court. The D.C. attorney general, Karl Racine, however, is making a legal argument against Amazon that is both old-school and novel, and it might become a blueprint for crimping Big Tech power. It’s a longstanding claim by some of the independent merchants who sell on Amazon’s digital mall that the company punishes them if they list their products for less on their own websites or other shopping sites like Walmart.com. Those sellers are effectively saying that Amazon dictates what happens on shopping sites all over the internet, and in doing so makes products more expensive for all of us. Racine has made this claim a centerpiece of his lawsuit. Amazon has said before that merchants have absolute authority to set prices for the products they sell on its site, but that ignores that the company has subtle levers to make merchants’ products all but invisible to shoppers. If a merchant lists a product for less on another site, Amazon can respond by making it more cumbersome for a shopper to buy the item. Amazon, in a statement to my colleagues, said that merchants have the freedom to list and price their products however they wish, but that Amazon can chose “not to highlight” products that are not competitively priced. Why is the attorney general’s claim a big deal? Legal experts have said that it’s tricky to sue technology giants for breaking antitrust laws. That’s partly because of the ways U.S. competition laws have been written, interpreted and enforced over the decades. But the lawsuit against Amazon bypasses this by saying that the tech giant hurts the public the same way that 19th-century railroads and steel giants did — by strong-arming competition and raising prices at will. Last year, the legal scholar and Big Tech critic Tim Wu told me that he believed that those price claims were the strongest potential antitrust case against Amazon on legal grounds. (He has since been picked to advise the White House on corporate competition issues.) I don’t know if any of these lawsuits against Big Tech will succeed at chipping away at the companies’ tremendous influence. And I can’t definitively say whether we’re better or worse off by having a handful of powerful technology companies that make products used and often loved by billions of people. It has been remarkable, though, to see the evolution of thinking among some of the public and politicians, from justified awe of these companies and what they make to questioning the downsides of technologies and the at-times brazen companies behind them. It’s a sometimes unfair and noisy mess. But remember why we got to this point: Technology giants are among the most powerful forces in our world, and the price of power is scrutiny. How to fight back against bogus online information: The comedian Sarah Silverman and three of my colleagues are hosting a virtual event Wednesday about disinformation and how to combat it. Sign up here for the online event at 7 p.m. Eastern. It’s open only to New York Times subscribers. Before we go … Florida passed a law that will fine social media companies for permanently barring political candidates’ accounts. The measure is most likely unconstitutional and unenforceable, Democrats, libertarian groups and tech companies told my colleague David McCabe, but it’s a response to Facebook’s and Twitter’s suspension of former President Donald Trump. Posting is life. My colleague Taylor Lorenz explains how social media invitations to a teenager’s birthday party spread on TikTok and drew thousands of people and a police crackdown. The event got big partly because it was an opportunity for attendees to post compelling material online. SIGH. POTUS loves Apple News? I don’t like it when computers and smartphones come with the device makers’ apps already installed, but it’s effective — even with the president of the United States. The Washington Post reported that during the 2020 campaign Joe Biden shared with aides human interest stories from Apple News, which came on his iPhone and he apparently hadn’t deleted. Hugs to this The Linda Lindas are glorious. Here is the talented punk band of four girls between the ages of 10 and 16 — Bela, Eloise, Mila and Lucia — playing “Racist, Sexist Boy” at a Los Angeles public library. The Guardian interviewed them about their sudden internet fame. We want to hear from you. Tell us what you think of this newsletter and what else you’d like us to explore. You can reach us at [email protected]. If you don’t already get this newsletter in your inbox, please sign up here. You can also read past On Tech columns. Source link Orbem News #Amazons #Antitrust #Big #Case #deal

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years ago

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Privacy Without Monopoly, EU edition

Tech monopoly apologists insist that there’s something exceptional about tech that makes it so concentrated: “network effects” (when a product gets better because more people use it, like a social media service).

They’re wrong.

Tech is concentrated because the Big Tech companies buy up or crush their nascent competitors — think of Facebook’s predatory acquisition of Instagram, which Zuckerberg admitted (in writing!) was driven by a desire to recapture the users who were leaving FB in droves.

Google’s scale is driven by acquisitions — Search and Gmail are Google’s only successful in-house products. Everything else, from Android to Youtube to their entire ad-tech stack, was once a standalone business that Google captured.

Monopolies extract monopoly rents — like those delivered by Googbook’s crooked ad-tech marketplaces, or Apple/Google’s 30% app shakedown — and use them to maintain their monopolies. Google gives Apple billions every year so it will be the default Ios and Safari search.

These are the same tactics that every monopolist uses — high-stakes moneyball that creates a “kill-zone” around the monopolist’s line of business that only a fool would try to enter. Tech DOES have network effects, but that’s not what’s behind tech monopolies.

We see monopolies in industries from bookselling to eyeglasses, accounting to cheerleading uniforms, pro wrestling to energy, beer to health insurance. These monopolies all follow Big Tech’s template of mobilizing monopoly rents to buy or crush all competition.

The differences between the anticompetitive tactics that monopolized these industries are largely cosmetic — swap out a few details and you might well be describing how John D Rockefeller and Standard Oil monopolized the oil markets in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Big Tech does have network effects, but these are actually a tool that can be used to dismantle monopolies, as well as maintaining them. Network effects are double-edged swords: if a service gets more valuable as users join, it also gets less valuable as users leave.

If you want to understand the anticompetitive structure of the tech industry, you’d be better off analyzing switching costs, not network effects. Switching costs are the things you have to give up when you leave a service behind.

If your customers, community, family members or annotated photos and other memories are locked up in Facebook’s walled garden (or if you’ve got money sunk in proprietary media or apps on Apple’s, etc), then the switching cost is losing access to all of that.

Here’s where tech really is different: tech has intrinsically low switching costs. Latent in all digital technology is the capacity to interoperate, to plug a new service into an old one, to run an old app inside a simulator (“runtime”).

There’s no good technical reason you can’t leave Facebook but take your treasured photos with you — and continue to exchange messages with the people you left behind.

True, Facebook has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep its switching costs high, deploying technical countermeasures to block interoperability. But these aren’t particularly effective. Lots of people have figured out how to reverse-engineer FB and plug new things into it.

Power Ventures created an app that aggregated your FB feed with feeds from rival services, giving you a single dashboard. NYU’s Ad Observer scraps the political ads FB shows you for analysis to check whether FB is enforcing its own paid political disinformation rules.

And there’s a whole constellation of third-party Whatsapp clients that add features FB has decided Whatsapp users don’t deserve, like the ability to block read-receipts or run multiple accounts on the same device.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/african-whatsapp-modders-are-masters-worldwide-adversarial-interoperability

Most of these are technical successes, but they’re often legal failures. FB has used the monopoly rents it extracted to secure radical new laws and new interpretations of existing laws to make these tactics illegal.

Power Ventures was sued into oblivion. Ad Observer is fighting for its life. The Whatsapp mods are still going strong, but that may be down to the jurisdictions where they thrive — sub-Saharan Africa — where FB has less legal muscle.

With low switching costs, much of FB’s monopoly protection evaporates. Lots of people hate FB, and FB knows it. You’re on FB because your friends are there. Your friends are there because you’re there. You’ve taken each other hostage, and FB benefits.

With low switching costs, you could leave FB — but not your friends. The kill zone disappears. All we need is interoperability.

Enter the EU’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, proposed regulations to force interop on the biggest Big Tech players.

The EU has recognized that mandating interop can reduce switching costs, and reducing switching costs can weaken monopoly power.

Some critics (like me!) of the EU proposals say they don’t go far enough, asking for “full interop” for rival services.

Against these calls for broader interop come warnings about the privacy implications of forcing FB to open up its servers to rivals. It’s hard enough to keep FB from abusing its users’ privacy, how will we keep track of a constellation of services that can access user data?

Last Feb, Bennett Cyphers and I published “Privacy Without Monopoly,” for EFF, describing how interoperability can enhance privacy.

Interop means that users can choose services that have better privacy policies than Facebook or other incumbent platforms.

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

But in theory, it means that users could choose worse services — services that have worse privacy policies, services that might be able to grab your friends’ data along with your own (say, the pictures you took of them and brought with you, or their private messages to you).

That’s why, in our paper, we say that interop mandates have to be backstopped by privacy rules — democratically accountable rules from lawmakers or regulators, not self-serving “privacy” limitations set by the Big Tech companies themselves.

For example, Facebook aggressively imports your address books when you sign up, to connect you to the people you know (this isn’t always a good experience — say, if your stalker has you in their address book and automatically gets “friended” with you).

If you try to take your address book with you when you quit, FB claims your contact list isn’t “yours” — it belongs to your contacts. To protect their privacy, FB has to block you from exporting the data — making it it much harder to establish social ties on a new service.

It’s not obvious who that contact info “belongs to” (if “belong to” is even the right way to talk about private information that implicates multiple people!).

But what is obvious is that Facebook can’t be trusted to make that call.

Not only has Facebook repeatedly disqualified itself from being trusted to defend its users’ privacy, but it also has a hopeless conflict of interest, because privacy claims can be used to raise switching costs and shore up its monopoly.

In our paper, Bennett and I say that these thorny questions should be resolved democratically, not in a corporate boardroom.

Now, as it happens, there’s a region where 500M people are protected by a broad, democratically enacted privacy law: Europe, home of the GDPR.

Today, in a new appendix to “Privacy Without Monopoly,” EFF has published “The GDPR, Privacy and Monopoly,” my analysis of how the GDPR makes interoperability safer from a privacy perspective.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/gdpr-privacy-and-monopoly

Working with EFF’s Christoph Schmon and Bennett Cyphers, we develop a detailed analysis of the GDPR, and describe how the GDPR provides a lawful framework for resolving thorny questions about consent and blended title to data.

The GDPR itself seeks to promote interoperability; it’s right there in Recital 68: “data controllers should be encouraged to develop interoperable formats that enable data portability.” But loopholes in the rules have allowed dominant companies to stymie interop.

For years, Europeans have had the “right” to port their data, but nowhere to port that data to. The DMA closes the loopholes and dismantles the hurdles that kept switching costs high.

The GDPR’s consent/security/minimization framework sets out the parameters for any interoperability, meaning we don’t have to trust Facebook (or Google, or Amazon, or Apple) to decide when interop must be blocked “to defend users’ privacy” (and also shareholders’ profits).

Big Tech platforms already have consent mechanisms (and must continue to build them) to create the legal basis for processing user data. An interoperable FB could be a consent conduit, letting your friends decide when and whether you can take their data to a new service.

And the GDPR (not a tech executive) also determines when a new service meets the privacy standards needed for interop. It governs how that new service must handle user data, and it gives users a way to punish companies that break the rules.

Today, if you leave Facebook, your friends might not even notice. But in a world where FB is a consent conduit to manage your departure and resettlement, all your friends get signals about your departure — perhaps prompting them to consider whether they should go, too.

Far from prohibiting interop, the GDPR enables it, by creating an explicit privacy framework that is consistent across all services, both the old monopolies and the new co-ops, startups, public utilities, and other alternatives that interop would make possible.

Monopolies distort the world in two ways. The most obvious harm is to competition, choking out or buying out every alternative, so you have to live by whatever rules the monopolist sets.

But the other kind of harm is even worse: monopolists can use their political power to get away with terrible abuses.

Ad-tech concentration produced monopoly rents that blocked or weakened privacy law for decades, allowing for a grotesque degree of commercial surveillance.

We don’t want competition in surveillance.

Opening space for interop poses a legitimate risk of creating a contest to see who can violate your human rights most efficiently.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#monkeys-paw

Yet, it’s obvious that monopolists themselves shouldn’t get to decide where they should be subjected to competition and where they should be subjected to regulation. That’s a job for democratic institutions, not autocratic board-rooms.

Adding privacy regulation (strong privacy regulation, with a private right of action allowing users to sue companies for breaking the rules) to interop is how we resolve this conundrum, how we make sure we’re banning surveillance, rather than “democratizing” it.

#pluralistic

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ard1choke · 6 years ago

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The past month has seen one blockbuster revelation after another about how our mobile phone and broadband providers have been leaking highly sensitive customer information, including real-time location data and customer account details. In the wake of these consumer privacy debacles, many are left wondering who’s responsible for policing these industries? How exactly did we get to this point? What prospects are there for changes to address this national privacy crisis at the legislative and regulatory levels? These are some of the questions we’ll explore in this article.

In 2015, the Federal Communications Commission under the Obama Administration reclassified broadband Internet companies as telecommunications providers, which gave the agency authority to regulate broadband providers the same way as telephone companies.

The FCC also came up with so-called “net neutrality” rules designed to prohibit Internet providers from blocking or slowing down traffic, or from offering “fast lane” access to companies willing to pay extra for certain content or for higher quality service.

In mid-2016, the FCC adopted new privacy rules for all Internet providers that would have required providers to seek opt-in permission from customers before collecting, storing, sharing and selling anything that might be considered sensitive — including Web browsing, application usage and location information, as well as financial and health data.

But the Obama administration’s new FCC privacy rules didn’t become final until December 2016, a month after then President-elect Trump was welcomed into office by a Republican controlled House and Senate.

Congress still had 90 legislative days (when lawmakers are physically in session) to pass a resolution killing the privacy regulations, and on March 23, 2017 the Senate voted 50-48 to repeal them. Approval of the repeal in the House passed quickly thereafter, and President Trump officially signed it on April 3, 2017.

In an op-ed published in The Washington Post, Ajit Pai — a former Verizon lawyer and President Trump’s pick to lead the FCC — said “despite hyperventilating headlines, Internet service providers have never planned to sell your individual browsing history to third parties.”

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai.

“That’s simply not how online advertising works,” Pai wrote. “And doing so would violate ISPs’ privacy promises. Second, Congress’s decision last week didn’t remove existing privacy protections; it simply cleared the way for us to work together to reinstate a rational and effective system for protecting consumer privacy.”

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) came to a different conclusion, predicting that the repeal of the FCC privacy rules would allow broadband providers to collect and sell a “gold mine of data” about customers.

“Your mobile broadband provider knows how you move about your day through information about your geolocation and internet activity through your mobile device,” Nelson said. The Senate resolution “will take consumers out of this driver’s seat and place the collection and use of their information behind a veil of secrecy.”

Meanwhile, pressure was building on the now Republican-controlled FCC to repeal the previous administration’s net neutrality rules. The major ISPs and mobile providers claimed the new regulations put them at a disadvantage relative to competitors that were not regulated by the FCC, such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.

On Dec. 14, 2017, FCC Chairman Pai joined two other Republic FCC commissioners in a 3-2 vote to dismantle the net neutrality regulations.

As The New York Times observed after the net neutrality repeal, “the commission’s chairman, Ajit Pai, vigorously defended the repeal before the vote. He said the rollback of the rules would eventually benefit consumers because broadband providers like AT&T and Comcast could offer them a wider variety of service options.”

“We are helping consumers and promoting competition,” Mr. Pai said. “Broadband providers will have more incentive to build networks, especially to underserved areas.”

MORE OR LESS CHOICE?

Some might argue we’ve seen reduced competition and more industry consolidation since the FCC repealed the rules. Major broadband and mobile provider AT&T and cable/entertainment giant Time Warner are now fighting the Justice Department in a bid to merge. Two of the four-largest mobile telecom and broadband providers — T-Mobile and Sprint — have announced plans for a $26 billion merger.

The FCC privacy rules from 2016 that were overturned by Congress sought to give consumers more choice about how their data was to be used, stored and shared. But consumers now have less “choice” than ever about how their mobile provider shares their data and with whom. Worse, the mobile and broadband providers themselves are failing to secure their own customers’ data.

This month, it emerged that the major mobile providers have been giving commercial third-parties the ability to instantly look up the precise location of any mobile subscriber in real time. KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that one of these third parties — LocationSmart — leaked this ability for years to anyone via a buggy component on its Web site.

LocationSmart’s demo page featured a buggy component which allowed anyone to look up anyone else’s mobile device location, in real time, and without consent.

We also learned that another California company — Securus Technologies — was selling real-time location lookups to a number of state and local law enforcement agencies, and that accounts for dozens of those law enforcement officers were obtained by hackers. Securus, it turned out, was ultimately getting its data from LocationSmart.

This week, researchers discovered that a bug in T-Mobile’s Web site let anyone access the personal account details of any customer with just their cell phone number, including full name, address, account number and some cases tax ID numbers.

Not to be outdone, Comcast was revealed to have exposed sensitive information on customers through a buggy component of its Web site that could be tricked into displaying the home address where the company’s wireless router is located, as well as the router’s Wi-Fi name and password.

It’s not clear how FCC Chairman Pai intends to “reinstate a rational and effective system for protecting consumer privacy,” as he pledged after voting last year to overturn the 2015 privacy rules. The FCC reportedly has taken at least tentative steps to open an inquiry into the LocationSmart debacle, although Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has called on Chairman Pai to recuse himself on the inquiry because Pai once represented Securus as an attorney. (Wyden also had some choice words for the wireless companies).

The major wireless carriers all say they do not share customer location data without customer consent or in response to a court order or subpoena. Consent. All of these carriers pointed me to their privacy policies. It could be the carriers believe these policies clearly explain that simply by using their wireless device customers have opted-in to having their real-time location data sold or given to third-party companies.

Michelle De Mooy, director of the privacy and data project at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), said if the mobile giants are burying that disclosure in privacy policy legalese, that’s just not good enough.

“Even if they say, ‘Our privacy policy says we can do this,’ it violates peoples’ reasonable expectations of when and why their location data is being collected and how that’s going to be used. It’s not okay to simply point to your privacy policies and expect that to be enough.”

CHECKING THE FTC’S RECORD

When the FCC’s repeal of the net neutrality rules takes effect on June 11, 2018, broadband providers will once again be regulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). That power was briefly shared with FCC when the agency under the Obama administration passed its net neutrality rules with the assumption that it could regulate broadband providers like telecommunications companies.

When it comes to investigating companies for privacy and security violations, the FTC’s primary weapon is The FTC Act, which “prohibits unfair and deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” According to the FTC Act, a “misrepresentation or omission is deceptive if it is material and is likely to mislead consumers acting reasonably under the circumstances.” It also finds that an act or practice “is unfair if it causes, or is likely to cause, substantial injury that is not reasonably avoidable by consumers, and not outweighed by countervailing benefits to consumers or competition.”

It’s difficult to think of a bigger violation of those principles than the current practice by the major mobile providers of sharing real-time location data on customers with third parties, without any opportunity for customers to opt-in or opt-out of such sharing.

But it’s unclear whether the FTC would take take any action against such activity, or indeed if it has any precedent to do so. The agency had the ability to go after mobile broadband providers for privacy and security violations between 2002 and 2015, and so KrebsOnSecurity asked the commission to share how many times during that period that it took enforcement actions against broadband providers.

The list I got back from them wasn’t exactly privacy or security focused. The FTC cited a case in 2003 in which it sued AOL and CompuServe over unfair billing practices. In 2009, it helped to take down 3FN, a small, shady ISP that was based in the United States but run by Russians and hosting a stupendous amount of malware, scams and illegal content (i.e. child pornography).

In 2014, the FTC alleged that AT&T Mobility deceptively advertised “unlimited” data while throttling mobile customers who used certain amounts of data (this case is still pending but a recent appeals court decision cleared the way for the FTC to continue its lawsuit).

In 2015, TracFone, the largest prepaid mobile provider in the United States, agreed to pay $40 million to the FTC for consumer refunds to settle charges that it deceived millions of consumers with regard to its “unlimited” data service.

The FTC also cited a scolding letter (PDF) that it sent to Verizon over issues related to the security of its customer routers. No action was taken by the FTC in that case.

How eager the FTC will be to police privacy practices of broadband providers may come down to the priorities of the agency’s new leaders. The Trump administration just tapped Andrew Smith as head of the FTC’s consumer protection office. Smith is a lawyer who used to represent many of the companies that the agency is already investigating.

Smith will need to recuse himself from multiple ongoing investigations his office would normally lead, including data breaches at Equifax and Facebook, thanks to his previous work on behalf of the companies. According to The Hill, Smith testified in October before the Senate Banking Committee on behalf of the credit reporting industry as the panel investigated an Equifax data breach that compromised more than 145 million people.

Gigi Sohn, a fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law and Policy and a former senior adviser to former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler in 2015, said the FTC doesn’t have a strong record on broadband privacy enforcement.

Sohn said the FTC’s legal framework does not require affirmative opt-in consent for browsing history and app usage, and that a provider would only have to let you opt-out — something that consumers rarely do and which companies routinely make it hard to do. More importantly, she said, while the FCC’s rules would have protected consumers before they were harmed, the FTC can only act after harm has already occurred.

“We passed privacy rules for broadband and mobile providers that would have required them to seek customer opt-in for anything that was considered sensitive,” Sohn said of her work at the FCC under the Obama administration. “The carrier had to give you clear and consistent opportunities to opt out. It was very broad, but the definition we set for personal information was far broader than what even the FTC considered sensitive.”

REPEALING THE REPEAL OF NET NEUTRALITY

So the carriers are already reneging on their promise to customers that they won’t share location data without customer consent or a court order. But where does that leave us on net neutrality? The answer is that the major wireless carriers are already doing what was expressly prohibited under the FCC’s net neutrality rules: Favoring their own content over competitors, and letting companies gain more favorable access by paying more.

Around the time of the FCC’s repeal of the net neutrality rules last year, The Wall Street Journal prognosticated about what might happen with the regulations out of the way. To do this, it looked at some of the offerings the mobile carriers pitched before the rules were drawn up.

“One example of how things could work is the mobile wireless market, where some providers already have used pricing tactics to favor certain websites and services over others,” wrote John D. McKinnon and Ryan Knutson for The Journal:

The 2015 Obama-era rules didn’t explicitly prohibit these tactics, which generally allow customers to access certain websites without having it count against their monthly data cap. Wireless carriers, which often subject their users to strict data limits, were aggressive in experimenting with such plans, also known as “zero rating.”

Deals began emerging several years ago for inexpensive plans that offer unlimited high-speed access to popular services such as Facebook or Twitter, but limited or even restricted access to the rest of the internet.

T-Mobile US Inc. in late 2013 announced that its GoSmart Mobile brand had “become the first wireless provider…to offer free access to Facebook and Facebook Messenger for all of its wireless customers, even those without monthly data service.” The GoSmart Mobile plans started at $25 a month for “unlimited talk” with no other data service. T-Mobile has since transferred the GoSmart brand to another wireless firm.

In 2014, Virgin Mobile USA, a unit of Sprint Corp. , offered a wireless plan that cost $12, but users were only allowed to access one website: either Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest. If they wanted all four, it was $10 more a month. Another $5 and they could access any online music streaming service.

Big internet providers also used zero-rating plans to favor their own content. AT&T Inc. gave paying customers unlimited usage of its own online video service DirecTV Now, while other video sites counted against monthly data caps. Verizon Communications Inc. did the same for its mobile video app, called go90.”

AT&T Mobility offers a zero-rating plan called “Sponsored Data” that allows content providers to pay up front to have streaming of that content allowed without counting against the provider’s monthly data caps.

Sohn said the FCC under the Obama administration initiated an investigation into AT&T’s Sponsored Data plan and Verizon for its go90 service, but that the inquiry was abandoned by the current FCC leadership.

There are some prospects for a Congressional repeal of this administration’s gutting of the FCC’s net neutrality rules. On May 16, the Senate approved a resolution nullifying the FCC’s rollback of the net neutrality rules. But the measure faces an uphill battle in the House.

“Right now we’re probably 30 to 40 members short of being able to bring a vote in the House,” Sohn said. “About 20 Democrats haven’t gotten on board, and we have no Republicans so far. But I think that’s going to change. If Congress repeals the net neutrality repeal, the next step would be to craft stronger rules [either at the FCC or Congress]. We have until the end of this Congress to get it done.”

The CDT’s De Mooy gives the effort to repeal the repeal of net neutrality rules slim chances of passage this year. But she said the prospects for revisiting net neutrality and consumer privacy in the next Congress look good, particularly if Democrats pick up additional seats in the House.

“It seems to be something the Democrats are taking up more now,” Demooy said. “So much depends on what happens in November. But that’s true of so many tech policy issues.”

SHOCK AND YAWN

When I first saw a Carnegie Mellon University researcher show me last week that he could look up the near-exact location of any mobile number in the United States, I sincerely believed the public would be amazed and horrified at the idea that mobile providers are sharing this real-time data with third party companies, and at the fact that those third parties in turn weren’t doing anything to prevent the abuse of their own systems.

Instead, after a brief round of coverage in several publications, the story fell out of the news cycle. A story this week in Slate.com lamented how little coverage the mainstream press has given to the LocationSmart scandal, and marvels at how much more shocked people were over the Cambridge Analytic scandal with Facebook.

“Privacy abuses and slip-ups by major tech companies have become so numerous, and the prospect of containing them seems so hopeless, that the public and much of the media have become nearly numb to them,” writes Will Oremus for Slate. “My data was hacked? So it goes. It may have been used in unauthorized ways by unspecified parties? C’est la vie.”

Oremus argues that what the LocationSmart scandal lacks is not import, nor the potential for serious harm, “but a link to some divisive political issue or societal outrage sufficient enough to generate visceral anger from people who aren’t privacy wonks.”

If you’ve read this far (bless you), don’t let breach fatigue and incessant media exposure of how little privacy we have harden into resignation. Yes, the prospects of any public debate about consumer privacy protections in the United States at the legislative level seem dim in a high-stakes mid-term election year. But supporters of net neutrality ideals can start getting involved by tweeting, calling and emailing the House lawmakers listed in red at BattleForTheNet.com.

While you’re at it, tell your lawmakers what you think about mobile providers giving or selling third-parties real-time access to customer location information, and let them know that this is no longer okay.

This is the second article in a two-part series. The first is here: Mobile Giants, Please Don’t Share the Where.

#IFTTT #Published articles #rss

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mustafa-el-fats · 4 years ago

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in: Featured, Heading Out On Your Own, Money & Career, Networking, Professional Skills

Brett & Kate McKay • August 9, 2012 • Last updated: September 23, 2020

Managing Your Online Reputation

This article series is now available as a professionally formatted, distraction free paperback or ebook to read offline at your leisure.

All the basic life skills we’ve covered so far in this series have been things that your dad, and even your granddad, had to learn when he left home for the first time too.

But today’s young man faces a new challenge that Pops never encountered: managing his online reputation.

Despite the nascent nature of this skill, I truly believe it’s one of the most important things we’ll talk about in this series. As the line between the offline and online world gets increasingly blurry, your online reputation is your reputation. Before you meet your freshman roommate, before you pick up a date, before you shake the hand of a potential employer…you better believe they’ve already Googled you, already formed a first, first impression about you, your interests, and what kind of person you are. Thus, if you’re not careful and conscious about the content you create online, you can end up shooting yourself in the foot in all areas of your life.

Heading Out on Your Own…And Into a Fishbowl World

Leaving for college or another kind of adventure after high school has long been an exciting and heady time. It’s an age where you’re experimenting with ideas and values, testing new freedoms, meeting new people, and often changing your mind about who you are and what you want out of life. One week you feel one way, and the next you feel another. During this process you often make mistakes, and do bone-headed things that twenty years later will still make you wonder, “What was I thinking?”

Just a decade ago, only you, and a few of your closest friends, would have held the memory of those crazy and sometimes cringe-worthy moments. The only record of them could be found by digging up a private photo album or journal.

Today…it’s a whole new ball game.

Now, everything you do and say can potentially become part of your permanent and public record. Everybody’s got a smartphone and can snap a picture of you anywhere, anytime and post it online. And things that go up online about you and from you can remain there forever. Mistakes you made when you were just 19 can haunt you for the rest of your life. Being a young man used to mean you could entirely reinvent yourself by moving to a new place and making new friends, but now your online reputation will follow you wherever you go.

I don’t mean to sound all doom and gloom about it. But that’s the sobering reality of living in the Internet Age, and it doesn’t help to bury one’s head in the sand and try to whatever that reality away. It absolutely doesn’t mean that college can’t still be the fun, spontaneous experience it’s always been; it just means you need to take a conscious, proactive approach to taking responsibility for what parts of that experience end up online and in the public eye.

Why Is Proactively Managing Your Online Reputation So Important?

One of the greatest things about the internet is that it is a giant pot that people can both add to and take from. This puts the most enormous wealth of knowledge in human history right at our fingertips and provides an endless amount of inspiration that can be added onto and “remixed.”

The downside of the big internet pot, is that the moment you put something into the pot, you pretty much lose all control over it. Many viral embarrassments have started out as something someone just wanted to share with a few good friends. But those friends shared it with their friends, who shared it with their friends…on and on until it ended up on Tosh.O.

There are essentially no guaranteed take backs when it comes to what you put online. You can erase your Facebook status, blog post, comment, tweet, or video, but someone else may very well have already shared it, copied it, taken a screenshot of it, or downloaded the video and reposted it somewhere else. How websites looked on a certain date in time are captured and archived on sites like the WayBack Machine (take a look at AoM circa 2008!). Emails that you thought you deleted forever can still sometimes be retrieved, and just because you deleted an email doesn’t mean the person you sent it to didn’t archive it. If someone else wants to post something of yours, you may not be able to get them to take it down without suing.

All of which is to say, pretty every piece of digital content you create can potentially exist forever. And this digital record can be accessed by any of the 250 million internet users in the US, not to mention the 2 billion online all over the world.

What’s on that record can have a big impact on both your personal and professional life.

Your college’s admissions office may have Googled you when they looked over your application. As soon as your freshman roommate knew you’d be bunking with him, he Googled you. When you network with someone at a party and tell them about your great idea, they’ll Google you later. And 81% of singles say they Google or check the Facebook page of someone before meeting him or her for a date.

Even though only 7% of Americans think their online reputation influences hiring decisions, in reality, 75% of US companies have made an online screening a formal part of the hiring process, 85% of recruiters and HR professionals say that having a positive online reputation influences their hiring decisions, and 70% of recruiters say they have rejected candidates based on something they found about them online. And since those numbers come from a study done in 2009, they’re undoubtedly even higher now.

What kinds of online discoveries cause recruiters and HR personnel to push your resume to the trash? This chart shows the most common red flags employers look for:

As you can see, it’s not just content you create that employers are checking out, it’s stuff your friends and colleagues post too. Be careful who you associate with.

Some young folks may be tempted to respond by saying, “Well, if a company is going to reject me for posting pictures of my drunken revelry, I wouldn’t want to work for them anyway.” But that’s pretty short-sighted. I’d venture to say that these companies aren’t rejecting candidates so much because they like to drink or swear, but rather that their willingness to show off these behaviors publicly shows a lack of judgment and wisdom. Not at all an unreasonable assumption.

The information that new friends and potential employers can find about you online may not even be true. Some people will try to verify it, some will not. And what they see will often come without any context – maybe you were being funny, maybe it’s an inside joke, but they won’t know that, they’ll simply make immediate judgments about what they find. This is why when it comes to managing your online reputation, you must be both proactive and defensive — deleting anything inappropriate, wisely choosing the digital content you create, and purposefully creating positive content about yourself.

Self-Reflect Before You Self-Reveal

“Young people in particular often self-reveal before they self-reflect. There is no eraser button today for youthful indiscretion.” –James Steyer

There are some practical ways to manage your online reputation, and we’ll get to them in a moment. But the first step in taking responsibility for your online presence is creating a mindset for how you want to approach your online life.

Matt Ivester, the author of lol..OMG! (despite the silly-sounding title, this is actually a great book, with solid advice from the guy who learned about online reputation management firsthand from his misadventures in founding Juicycampus.com), suggests three questions to ask yourself before you put something online:

1. Why are you doing this?

Why? This is the most important question of all, and one that unfortunately usually goes unasked and uncontemplated.

Today’s colleges are welcoming the first “digital natives:” they’ve never known a time when the internet wasn’t a huge part of their lives. And even for those who are old enough to have used encyclopedias for elementary-school research papers, interacting and participating online has become so ubiquitous that it’s hard to imagine that life was ever any other way. This is just how things are, and we do what everyone else is doing, so much so that we hardly ever ask why we are doing those things. Once we do start asking why, the answers are surprisingly hard to come up with and articulate.

Why do you update your status or share a link on Facebook? Do you want to share news? Are you bored? Do you want to be thought clever? Are you trying to make someone else jealous? Do you want to see if people feel the same way as you? Why?

Why do you care how many likes or upvotes something you submit on Facebook or Reddit gets? Is it confirmation that you shared something with value? Why?

Why do you leave comments on blog posts? Do you want the author of the blog to know that you appreciated the article? Do you think you have the insight to add that might help another reader? Do you want the author to know how and why they are wrong? Why? What do you hope to accomplish? Do you think it will change their mind? Is it because the psychological angst you feel when you think someone is wrong needs to be discharged? Why?

Why do you participate in online forums? Does it provide a feeling of camaraderie? Do you like to hear others’ opinions? Why do you respond when you think those opinions are wrong? Why do you care what a stranger thinks about you? Why?

When you ponder the why behind creating any kind of online content, from a status update to a YouTube video, you may come up with a reason that you find satisfactory and worthwhile. Or you may find that your motivation is hard to make sense of and decide it’s not worth your time. Either way, by asking why, you’ll become what Ivester calls “a conscious creator of content.”

2. Is now the right time?

The internet creates a perfect storm for impulse control: at the same time that it actively solicits impulsive communication and make satisfying those impulses incredibly easy, it makes taking back the results of those impulses incredibly difficult; it’s easy to hit “send” or “submit,” and quite hard to un-send and un-submit something.

Facebook asks, “What’s on your mind?” while Twitter wants to know “What’s happening?” They owe their existence to people’s desire to share their thoughts, videos, and photographs – and they need to be constantly fed to survive and grow and make money. And blogs (including ours) want to engage readers and build community and so ask for comments. The internet is set up to encourage you to share whatever thought crosses your mind, and taking that thought from your cranium to the walls and screens of the digital world only takes a few clicks.

But just because you can share your thoughts on impulse doesn’t mean you should. Not only because you probably haven’t thought through the why behind wanting to share first, but because strong impulses are usually born from strong emotions: anger, depression, and grief, or from chemically-altered states (like being drunk). When you spout off and share personal feelings while emotional or trashed, you will likely come to regret it once those strong emotions fade or you sober up.

The best thing to do when you feel you’re dealing with an impulse to put something online that you might regret later, is just to sit on it. The internet creates a false sense of immediacy, giving you an overwhelming feeling that you have to respond now. But what you’ll find is that something that felt super urgent and mega important to say in the moment, will seem totally pointless when you wake up the next morning.

One method I use to thwart impulsive responses is to imagine myself living before the internet. If I feel a burning urge to tell the author of an article what a chucklehead he is, I think of reading a magazine in the 80s, and how I would have had no outlet to express my opinion about it besides writing up a letter to the editor or talking to my wife or close friends about it. Or if something annoys me and I want to rant about it on Facebook, I think of a time before Facebook when I would have had no choice but to keep my rant to myself. It makes me realize that just as sharing whatever crosses your mind wasn’t necessary then, it’s not necessary now. The fine-folks of the 80s, while they made some questionable fashion-choices, weren’t any less happy than we are now that we’re able to shout what we’re feeling and thinking to everyone 24/7.

3. How controversial do you want to be?

The younger generation (including those my age) was raised with a lot of rhetoric about how special and unique they are, how important it is to be “authentic,” and that it’s good to be “transparent.” This can lead folks to throw caution to wind about what they share online because, “I’m just trying to be me! And if other people don’t like it, they can bite me!”

But just because you can now display your opinions and personality to a greater number of people than ever before, doesn’t mean you should, or that the more you share, the more authentic you are. Going back to my suggestion of thinking about life before the internet, people used to only be able to share their quirks with a close circle of family and friends, and they weren’t any less themselves than we are (actually they were probably more themselves since they didn’t get instant feedback on all of their quirks).

Examining the meaning of authenticity isn’t within the purview of this post (although it will be a future series), but suffice it to say for now that the ideal for many of the great men of the past was not transparency, but sprezzatura – only revealing themselves to others slowly as a relationship of trust developed. You may want to “be yourself” by trumpeting your religious, social, and political beliefs online every chance you get, but if those meme’s you keep flooding Facebook with is the only thing new acquaintances know about you, they may decide they don’t want to get to know you before they even do — they’ll miss the complexity of your character that would have shown through over time…that you’re both a liberal and a rabid gun owner, or a fervent Christian and a scientist, or a zealous vegetarian and a Marine.

The three questions above can go a long way to helping you judiciously choose what and what not to post online. A final question to consider is what the general public might think of the content if for some reason what you post went viral or you were suddenly thrust into national prominence. Would it embarrass your family? What impression would a stranger have of it? You and your friends might think it’s funny, but would others find it offensive? You never know who’s going to see your post, what’s going to be dug up on you later, and who might be looking at your phone.

How to Manage Your Online Reputation

Managing your online reputation involves both deleting content you don’t want out there and creating content you do. Follow the steps below that Ivester and others have suggested, and complete each step right after you read it. This is the kind of thing that’s easy to put off indefinitely. Do it now.

1. Google yourself.

Before you can know what actions to take to manage your online reputation, you need to know what’s already out there. To do this, first deactivate Google’s customized search – when you typically do a Google search, the results Google brings up are based on things like your location, what you’ve clicked on before, and things your friends like. But you want to see what would come up if someone else searched for you. Here’s how to take off the customized search feature.

If you have a common name like “Rob Smith,” then search for your name with a qualifier like, “Rob Smith St. Louis,” or “Rob Smith Tulane University.”

After you look at Google’s results for you, check out other search engines like Bing and Yahoo as well.

When you look at the results that come up for your name, try to imagine what conclusions someone might reach about you if they had no other context for that content, and knew nothing else about you.

2. Try to remove content that you don’t want showing up in search results anymore.

After you do a search for yourself, it’s time to try to delete things that showed up that you’d rather not have out there anymore. Maybe you signed up for an internet forum with your real name. Maybe you left a comment on a blog post under your real name. Maybe you wrote a review or a blog post that you now feel is too controversial. Some of these things you can delete yourself.

If you can’t delete something yourself, like a blog post comment on another person’s blog, then try to contact the owner of the site to see if they will remove it for you. They may or may not, but the nicer you are about it, the greater the chance of them helping you, so make your request as civil and appreciative as possible.

If you can’t find the contact information for the site owner, try the site WHOis. Website registrars are required to publish the contact information for the person who registered the domain. Oftentimes when you look up a site on WHOis, you’ll find that the owner has decided to keep their direct contact information private and have instead given a proxy email address. Either way, your email will end up in the same place.

Understand that even if you’re successful at removing the offending content from a site, it may take a few days or even weeks before it’s reflected in search engine results. Also, understand that the offending item really hasn’t “gone away.” There’s a chance that it has been archived on the WayBack Machine. Remember, what’s put on the internet stays on the internet forever.

Moving forward, be extremely judicious when using your real name online.

3. Proactively create a positive first impression online.

Your best bet in managing your online reputation is proactively creating positive content about yourself that pushes the bad stuff off of the first few pages of search engines. Set up accounts with large social networking sites that typically rank high on Google and other search engines. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+ profiles are often on the first page when you look up someone’s name. Set up accounts with them and post stuff that you’d be proud to have your name associated with.

The best thing you can do to ensure positive stuff associated with your name is at the top of search results is to start a blog and update it regularly. If you can, try to secure a domain name with your given name for your blog. What should you write about on your blog? You can publish your resume (redacting phone numbers and addresses, of course), write posts sharing insights in an expertise you might have, or use it to create a portfolio of your work if you’re a freelancer. Whatever it is, make sure it’s stuff you want associated with your name.

Cross-link your blog and all your social networking profiles together: put your link to Facebook and Twitter on your blog, a link to your LinkedIn profile and blog on your Facebook account, and so on.

Even if you don’t plan on using Twitter or Google+ or even putting anything on your blog, it doesn’t hurt to have your name registered with those accounts and domain. You don’t want some Joe Schmo mucking up your good name with a bunch of crazy online antics.

4. Adjust privacy settings on Facebook and clean up your Facebook Profile.

To ensure that potential employers or love interests only see the best of you when they look you up on Facebook, make the following adjustments:

First, take a look at how your profile page looks to the public. If you see any information visible that you don’t want strangers to see, make a note of it.

To change what’s visible on your profile page, click “About.”

Click “Edit” on the next page. On each segment select “Friends” if you don’t want anybody who’s not your FB friend to see a particular piece of information. For networking reasons, I’ve left my job and school information visible to the public.

Visit the Facebook Privacy Settings page and adjust all your privacy settings so only your friends can see photos and status updates you make.

On the privacy settings page, update what your friends can share about you under “Timeline and Tagging.” Enable the ability to review and approve posts or photos that you are tagged in before they’re published on your Timeline. You can also disable Facebook’s tag suggestion when your friends upload photos that look like you. You don’t want your name tagged in an unflattering photo or post.

While you’re on the privacy settings page, limit who can see posts from the past. Even if you used to post everything publicly, this will retroactively make those posts private.

Review the photos that you’re tagged in and untag yourself from any unflattering photos. While you’re at it, you might ask your friend to remove the photo if it’s something you don’t want out there. Even if you’re not tagged in the pic, it could come back to haunt you.

Leave groups and unlike pages that may be seen as controversial…or just dumb. At least set the privacy settings on them so only your FB friends can see the pages you like. how.

5. Be more conscious of what you share and whom you share it with on Facebook.

Ask the three questions we covered above before posting something on Facebook. That will save you a lot of grief.

Also, take into account if what you’re about to share is appropriate and relevant to ALL your Facebook friends. You don’t need to share your weekend plans with your old boss and former professors. In real life, you adjust what you talk about depending on your company — do the same on Facebook. Create lists on Facebook for close family/friends, acquaintances, professional colleagues, people that are the same religion as you, people you enjoy talking politics with, etc. Before posting something, ask yourself if this is something all your friends would be interested in or is better for a specific list of your friends. And even if you’re only posting for a list of close friends, still keep in mind what others would think if that status or photo got shared with people outside the list. It could happen.

6. Create strong passwords for your accounts.

If the recent story of tech writer Mat Honan’s online life being completely demolished by hackers doesn’t motivate you to strengthen your online security, then I don’t know what will. Create strong passwords for all your accounts and change them every six months. A strong password is at least 8 characters long and includes at least one special character (&!#) and both upper and lower case letters. Your passwords shouldn’t be the same for all your accounts. To manage all your passwords, use an app like LastPass.

To reduce the chance of getting hacked, enable two step authentication. Here’s how to do it on Google (if you use Gmail) and Facebook.

7. Use passwords on your laptop and mobile devices.

An unattended laptop or mobile device provides a devilish opportunity for friends or random strangers to mess with your online life. I know several people who had to do a lot of scrambling to recover from an offensive tweet sent from an unattended iPhone by a mischievous friend. Avoid that. Enable password protection on all your mobile devices.

8. Set up a Google Alert for your name.

Keep your finger on the pulse of what’s said about you on the web by setting up a Google Alert for yor name. Just enter your name as a search query and Google Alert will email you a digest once a week (or daily if you want) of all the new content that’s hit the web with your name in it.

Conclusion

The internet is an amazing educational, social, and networking tool — you just need to use it wisely. Using it too little can be just as damaging to your personal and professional life as using it too much. Be a “conscious content creator” and use sound wisdom and judgement in deciding where you personally want to draw the line between your public and private life.

Any other tips on managing your online reputation? Share them with us in the comments (only after asking yourself why you’re commenting and making sure it’s the right time, of course)!

Going Undercover: How to Protect Your Privacy Online

Being a Gentleman in the Age of the Internet: 6 Ways to Bring Civility Online

Escape the Algorithm!

3 Ways You Should Never Start an Online Comment

16 Ways to Support the Art of Manliness in 2016

How to Support and Follow the Art of Manliness

Tags: Heading Out on Your Own

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