Everyone,
I am no longer making new posts to the Google-sponsored “blogspot” blogs I have been using. I will be transferring most of those posts from “blogger” to this blog, which is on my own domain/server space. Those Google blogs will subsequently be closed.
I have been concerned for some time now about the direction social media sites have taken, in the purposes they serve, and the kind of social changes these media are encouraging among the public in general.
As I am fond of saying, if you are not paying for it, you are the product being sold. Google and Facebook perform a great deal of datamining, and information drawn from our posts are sold to advertisers and corporations. We all know there is no expectation of privacy on public social media, yet we are seduced into revealing more about ourselves that we normally would, because we are thinking about the people we love and trust when we are writing self-revealing posts. It’s a beautiful strategy – to get you to open up about your true preferences in front of a corporate audience that uses that information to target you.
Changes are often made without notice, impacting security and privacy, and putting the task on us to be vigilant about those changes, and how they affect the choices we thought we made about our privacy.
The social media platforms are really just advertising bots, and I want to get as far away as possible from all of that exploitation and pressure.
The Internet continues to devolve into a cesspool, and incivility and cruelty have become competitive sports among people with nothing better to do. We even have names for them: “trolls.”
On this blog, some posts will be password protected. I will be emailing passwords to selected people based on whether or not the content is of interest or use to those people.
Thanks to everyone for your comments, feedback and support!
Yours,
Michael