Good Monday morning. It’s December 3rd.  #GivingTuesday was a hit last week. Thank you for supporting our friends at SPARC. They reached their goal. Overall, donors gave $320 million to charity, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy. More than a third of that was on Facebook.

Also, Hanukkah started at sundown local time yesterday. Chag Sameach!

Today’s Spotlight takes about 3 minutes to read.

Highlights

 

• Marriott’s data breach of 500 million records got the headlines, but the USPS also had a slip up that caused them to expose the records of 60 million people.  Meanwhile, the EU’s Data Protection Commissioner accused LinkedIn of misusing 18 million email addresses to target individuals with ads.

 

• Akami reports that 45,000 older routers have been compromised by a known vulnerability. Those routers connect behind the scenes to millions of devices. The best way to protect yourself is to have new hardware or ask your Internet service provider to help you determine if your router has up-to-date firmware.

 

• Google is now providing answers without any search results in some cases. Google confirmed to Search Engine Roundtable that they would display calculations or information without any links to web pages when they have a “high degree of confidence” that the searcher wants a calculation, unit conversion, or local time. Details and samples here.

Facebook’s Empty Chair Problem

We ran down Facebook’s latest scandals last week. Although everyone knew that Mark Zuckerberg would not be testifying to Parliament last week the UK Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee tweeted out this image of an empty chair with Zuckerberg’s name in front.

No one is happy with Zuckerberg, but he is the founder, CEO, and most importantly, controlling shareholder of Facebook.  Prominent tech journalist Kara Swisher has been a vocal critic. “He’s 33 years old and has two children,” she famously said earlier this year. ” I think this idea that we sort of juvenilize these men from Silicon Valley as if they don’t have responsibility is kind of ridiculous.”

Facebook’s Black People Problem

That’s the subtitle of a 2,500 word memo that black Facebook exec Mark Luckie sent to all Facebook employees on November 8th. Luckie, who was planning to leave his role as Strategic Partner Manager for Global Influencers, wrote that the company’s staffing and treatment of many of its black employees is lacking.

Luckie cites data that black employees only make up about 4% of Facebook’s employee base. “In some buildings, there are more ‘Black Lives Matter’ posters than there are actual black people,” he writes before describing anecdotal but pain-filled examples like seeing employees tap or hold their wallet or put their hands in their pockets when he passed by.

What Does All This Mean For You?

Inertia exists in any enterprise that serves a double-digit percentage of the planet’s population. But Facebook also faces strong opposition from product-oriented tech companies like Apple, the EU and U.S. governments, and a growing chorus of tech voices including Swisher, Jaron Lanier, and Tristan Harris.

We expect there to be data privacy regulations in the next 2-3 years. Facebook execs already support that idea. Getting industry-wide engagement will be more difficult, but we know that the federal government wants to create advertising regulations beyond what the Federal Trade Commission currently manages.

Smart consumer-centric organizations won’t leave Facebook, and they shouldn’t. Whether business or government-facing organizations leave is a judgment call based on whether a Facebook presence increases the organization’s profits.

If you’re looking at the issue from a strictly consumer perspective, this is probably the most open your data will be on the site. But even this week, a press release arrived touting new availability for third party data to be used to target you, friendly reader, on Facebook based on your offline purchases.

 

Spotlighted

 

• Google employees are airing their anger at their employer working with the Chinese government to build a censored search engine called Dragonfly. More than one thousand of them signed an open letter to the company in August. A new open letter to the company says that Google will be complicit in human rights abuses if it allows some features like identifying searchers to be launched. You can read the letter here.

 

• Another letter to a tech company started gaining momentum this weekend when eight Democratic lawmakers wrote to Amazon over concerns about its facial recognition software. Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) says it’s the third time he’s asked the company for answers. NBC has details.

 

• Can you tell the difference between a computer generated image and a photograph? I joined nearly 60% of people in failing to get half the answers correct in an online test from software company AutoDesk. Try your hand at their Fake or Foto quiz.

Good Monday morning. It’s November 26th. #GivingTuesday is tomorrow. We’re supporting SPARC, a Virginia organization that helps adult with disabilities, and we’re asking you to do the same. Thank you in advance for being generous.

Today’s Spotlight takes about 3 minutes to read.

Highlights

• • Facebook tried a news dump the day before Thanksgiving, but had even more problems as the week went on, especially in London.

 

• • More than 500,000 people downloaded malware posing as racing games from the Google Play store. Get details here.

 

• • YouTube is now offering ad-supported full length movies for no additional fee. Congratulations to YouTube’s parent company, Alphabet, for reinventing broadcast television.

   

Facebook vs. Parliament

Choose wisely: do you think a social media network that allows people to play Farmville can triumph over a legislative body that has helped govern a country for 803 years?

The Serjeant-at-Arms of the House of Commons escorted a Facebook contractor to Parliament last week. The businessman was advised that he was subject to fines and imprisonment if he failed to surrender documents related to how Facebook handles user data.

He complied with the order, and Facebook is unhappy. Among their arguments falling on deaf ears was a California court order sealing those records.

MP Damian Collins released the text of a message to Facebook VP Richard Allan, who is due to testify in Europe tomorrow. You can read Collins’ message here.

This is still fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal that was made public earlier this year. Another current scandal that is still developing relates to Facebook hiring a public relations firm that used normal but ethically questionable techniques to smear Facebook competitors and critics.

Facebook released a message from an outgoing exec on Wednesday that was apparently intended to provide cover for #2 exec Sheryl Sandberg.

Recode has an excellent explainer about this latest scandal.

 

Spotlighted

 

• Amazon continues disrupting retail markets. Whiskey is the latest as it sells an exclusive 19-year-old Bowmore single malt. “Amazon has decided to compete against us” are words you don’t want to tell your Board. Oh, and advertising. It’s selling an awful lot of advertising. Not Google-levels yet, but give them time.

 

• Think hard before you agree to run a Flash plugin on your browser. That means whether you use Safari, Chrome, Firefox, or something else. The once-necessary Flash has only 13 months of official life left before Adobe officially discontinues the software.  Quoting Lifehacker, “Flash has some major security issues that are incredibly easy to take advantage of, and as time went on, Flash became notoriously known as the entry point for many a security breach. Annoying ads, backdoor malware installation, and data collection have found their ways onto many a PC thanks to the holes in Flash’s security.”

 

• And because Internet users band together for really nice things, here is the story of two college-aged women reunited after they were friends on a cruise their families took 12 years ago. Story at Elite Daily.

Good Monday morning. It’s October 29th. Daylight savings time ends in 6 days. Change the batteries in your smoke detectors.

Today’s Spotlight takes about 4 minutes to read

Highlights

• • Macros and executables aren’t the only dangers in your email. One group is trying to trick people into using PDFs that load malicious online resources. We’ll explain how to be safer below.

 

• • Snapchat and Twitter both lost users this quarter. That’s not surprising for Twitter but a little surprising for Snap. Keep reading for details.

 

• • Google Maps has shiny new upgrades including easier sharing of your ETAs, new accessibility information at 40 million locations, and the ability to follow businesses. Have a look below.

Google Maps Readies for the Road

 

Nearly 50 million Americans travel by car during the November-December holidays. For those traveling with a newer car in unfamiliar territory, Google Maps will highlight electric vehicle charging stations. Also new on Google Maps is crowd sourced information related to accessibility. Google has received 500 million responses from 7 million people when asking questions like, “Is there a wheelchair accessible entrance?” The information from those answers now appears on 40 million location listings.

Google users on Android (iOS updates coming) will also start seeing business listings up to 3 months before a business opens. Users will be able to “follow” any business–a term made familiar by social media listings. This will allow people to see information about special events and sales.

If you’re on the road to Grandmother’s house for some Thanksgiving turkey, Google Maps has also made it easier to share your progress and ETA, including posting it to third party platforms like Facebook. Their announcement is here.

Google earlier this month launched a Commuter tab that allows people to check on traffic with a single click or to see real-time information about buses and trains.

Be smart: Almost 90% of users who search for local information on a smartphone are then “likely to use driving directions”.  Your organization needs to pay attention if people ever visit your office. (Search Engine Land)

Staying Safe with Apps & Email

 

Smartphone apps may track behavior users are unaware of or create subscriptions that are not clearly disclosed. Forbes and Buzzfeed have investigated separate cases and broke their stories within 6 days of each other. Buzzfeed’s is great reading for anyone who wants to understand how scammers bought legit apps and then defauded advertising networks.

The Forbes expose has much less detail but a huge consumer impact. Using tricky “Free Trial” buttons and not openly disclosing terms allowed some application developers to charge as much as $4/week for basic functioning apps like flashlights and barcode scanners.

There were big examples of fraud, too: a web translator app for Apple Safari that cost $89 weekly and something called “Life Tricks Ace” that cost $59.99 each week and which billed itself as “…the leading source of practical and adaptable knowledge dedicated to improving Productivity, Happiness, Health and more.”

We also learned this week that some bank employees received good phishing emails that didn’t include malicious code. Instead an attached “simple but authentic-looking” PDF tries to get the target to download a malicious macro to complete the form. Cyberscoop has the details.

The bottom line: Don’t click or open any file that you weren’t expecting even if you think you know the person’s identity.

 

What We Learned from Earnings Week

 

Well, we learned that guidance still remains a short play nightmare for all companies after Amazon posted record profits but missed its guidance and has been hammered since. Don’t cry yet. The company still controls half of e-commerce in North America and its market cap is still up $260 million during 2018.

But we also learned this week:

•  Amazon didn’t just set record profits. That profit was nearly double what experts expected.
• Overall search volume is up 6%, and Google’s dominance in U.S. market share now matches its dominance in Europe. Yahoo! and Bing combine for about 8% of search. Google gets 90%.
• Search volume is down on desktops and tablets, but skyrocketing on mobile devices. This is the part where you’re reminded again that your website needs to be designed for mobile.
• Google (and Microsoft) continue coming for Amazon’s Web Services division.
• Breaking news Sunday has IBM paying $34 billion for Red Hat so they’re in the cloud game to win it, too.
• Snapchat lost users, but in the good citizen division, managed to help register 400,000 people to vote.

It’s Facebook’s turn under the microscope Tuesday afternoon when it reports third quarter earnings.

 

Great Data

 

Companies like Spotify and Netflix are masterful at understanding how customers interact with them and predicting what will interest those customers next.

Your organization doesn’t have to be a tech giant to find data that people will enjoy. You already have amazing data that will engage your customers and prospects. Here’s a test that will prove that at your next meeting.

Show people the irresistible Merriam-Webster Time Traveler web page.

The kicker: the dictionary company already tracks when words first show in print. And they already track new words. They understood that they could make words personal for people.

Question: What’s the difference between the Oxford family of dictionaries, Random House, or Merriam-Webster?
Answer: I’m telling you about Merriam-Webster today.

And that’s how you differentiate in mature markets.

P.S. I want to hear your stories if you take my advice and test this page on people at your company. What are you brainstorming about as a result?