Today's Must-Read #2: Sociopath du Jour

Mark Zuckerberg, a/k/a Facebook:

Concern about Facebook Inc’s (FB.O) respect for data privacy is widening to include the information it collects about non-users, after Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the world’s largest social network tracks people whether they have accounts or not.

Privacy concerns have swamped Facebook since it acknowledged last month that information about millions of users wrongly ended up in the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, a firm that has counted U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral campaign among its clients.

Zuckerberg said on Wednesday under questioning by U.S. Representative Ben Luján that, for security reasons, Facebook also collects “data of people who have not signed up for Facebook.”

I had been patting myself on the back for never having signed up for Facebook -- looks like my congratulations were premature. If they're collecting data on me just for visiting a site that is in some way associated with FB -- like those blogs on which you can only comment using your Facebook ID -- well, words fail me.

And thinking about it, I'd be willing to bet that this is standard practice among these tech/internet giants (can you say "Google"? I'd say "Time to change search engines," but then it occurs to me that Google owns YouTube and Blogger.)

Remember privacy? We used to be able to have some. And just think: this is the conservatives'/libertarians' ideal world -- just let the ruling class decide what's appropriate.

Today's Must-Read: Book Burning in the Digital Age

David Mixner has a sobering post at Towleroad this morning, on the "house cleaning" of government computers:

Recently over dinner with some friends, I brought up ‘Trump’s Book Burners’.

A friend responded that he hadn’t seen any evidence of book burning taking place in a systematic way by the Trump administration.

If you are looking for a 1930s Nazi type of public book burning, he is right. However, in today’s world, book burning doesn’t happen by pulling literature out of libraries and setting it afire.

Today, book burning is carried out by simply hitting the delete button.

Over the last year, the Trump administration has destroyed decades of research and data by hitting the delete button in almost every department and agency in the federal government. This administration is eliminating entire groups of people from past and future research as if they no longer exist.

He goes on to detail some of the research and other information that has vanished from government websites -- at least, the things we know about, like not allowing the use of the term "climate change".

As I noted, it's sobering, and I'll be it's just the tip of the iceberg.

But when you elect an Il Duce wannabe to the White House, this is what you get.