Serendipity35

The geocode system called what3words was launched in July 2013, but I only discovered it this year. In January 2018, Mercedes-Benz bought approximately 10% of the company and announced what3words support in future versions of the Mercedes-Benz User Experience infotainment and navigation system.

You can find your own address or any address and find out about using the address at what3words.com/using-your-address/  

What3words is a geocode system for the communication of locations with a resolution of three meters. The company story is at what3words.com/our-story/.

What makes What3words differs from most other location encoding systems in that it displays three words rather than long strings of numbers or letters. It encodes geographic coordinates into three dictionary words and the encoding is permanently fixed. For example, the omphalos of Delphi (believed by the ancient Greeks to be the center of the world) is located at "spooky.solemn.huggers".

I took a look at the New Jersey Institute of Technology campus and found that "narrow.jeeps.amuse" locates the entrance I used to my old office on campus, but being accurate to 3 meters, What3words codes "smoke.trail.sticks" to the Central Ave. entrance of that building.

What3words has a website, apps for iOS and Android, and an API that enables bidirectional conversion between what3words address and latitude/longitude coordinates. As the system relies on a fixed algorithm rather than a large database of every location on earth, it works on devices with limited storage and no Internet connection.

I came across this interesting post that aggregates "Essential (and Surprising) Social Media Statistics" by Bonnie Porter. The article's aim to to help inform social media strategies, but if you are in the almost half of the world that uses social media, these statistics should be of interest.

Why should we care? Because U.S. adults spend an average of 1 hour and 16 minutes each day just watching video on digital devices. Is that you? Well, 78% of people watch online videos every week. 55% watch every day.

The internet has 4.4 billion users 

There are 3.499 billion active social media users 

As of May 2019, total worldwide population is 7.7 billion, therefore 57 percent of the world’s population is on the internet. More people are online than those who aren’t online.

45 percent of the world is on social media

If you have the internet, there’s an 80 percent chance you have a social media account, too.  

On average, people have 7.6 social media accounts apiece

The average daily time spent on social is 142 minutes a day

User numbers on social media platforms change all the time and it's difficult to distinguish registered users versus active users (define "active"?) but these recent numbers are probably accurate as a group of the 10 biggest platforms.

1. Facebook — 2.4 billion users
2. YouTube — 1.9 billion users
3. WhatsApp — 1.6 billion users
4. Instagram (tie) — 1 billion users
5. WeChat (tie) — 1 billion users
6. TikTok — 800 million users
7. LinkedIn — 610 million users
8. Reddit — 542 million users
9. Twitter — 330 million users
10. Pinterest — 265 million users

The article also includes closer looks at the top 5. You might be surprised that 90 percent of Instagram users are younger than 35, so it joins Snapchat and TikTok as one of the young demographics social networks.

If you had a meeting and Apple CEO Tim Cook gave a speech and he was followed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and after the lunch break Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Google's Sundar Pichai were on the screen giving video messages, you would consider this to be a pretty high-powered meeting.

That was the lineup for some European data regulators at the 40th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, held this year in the European Parliament in Brussels.

I saw part of it on a recent 60 Minutes. Tim Cook talked about the "crisis" of "weaponized" personal data. It's not that Apple doesn't collect data on its users, but companies like Facebook and Google rely much more on user data to sell advertising than hardware-based Apple.

The focus in that segment is on Europe where where stricter laws than in the U.S. are already in place. Of course, they affect American companies that operate in Europe, which is essentially all major companies.

Multi-billion dollar fines against Google for anti-competitive behavior re in the news. The European Union enacted the world's most ambitious internet privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Tim Cook said he supports the law, but Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, says that "Americans have no control today about the information that's collected about them every second of their lives." The only exception is some guaranteed privacy on the internet for children under 13, and some specific medical and financial information.

This is an issue that will be even more critical in the next few years. Since GDPR was passed, at least ten other countries and the state of California have adopted similar rules. And Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Amazon now say they could support a U.S. privacy law. Of course, they want input because they want to protect themselves.

 

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

Data Privacy Law: A Practical Guide

Facebook has had a tough year in the press and with its public face (though its stock is holding up fine). There has been a lot of buzz about hacks and data being stolen and fake news and Senate hearings and general privacy concerns. All of these are legitimate concerns about Facebook and about other social media and e-commerce and financial site too.

But how much does Facebook really know about a user? There is the information you willingly provided when you joined and all the things you have given them by posting and clicking Likes and other interactions. Though that volunteered data is often overlooked by users, there is more concern about data you have not knowingly given them but have access to anyway.

I do believe that Facebook is more focused now on privacy and user experience, it needs that data to be a profitable public company. (Disclaimer: I am a Facebook stockholder - though not in a very big way.)

Facebook is free but, as Mark Zuckerberg had to explain to at least one clueless Senator this past summer, it sells advertising to make a profit. Ad sales are more valuable to companies when they know who they are advertising to, and the more granular that audience can be, the better it is for them and Facebook. It might even be better for you. That is something Google, Amazon, Facebook and many others have been saying for years: If you're going to get ads anyway, wouldn't you rather that they be relevant to your likes and interests?

According to one online post, it you total up what Facebook can know about a user, it comes to roughly 52,000 traits. That comes from three key algorithms. One is DeepText, which looks into data, much of which coming from commercial data brokers. They also use DeepFace, which can identify people in pictures and also suggest that you tag people in a photo.

The third algorithm is FB Learner Flow, which might be the most clever of all. It focuses on the decisions you have yet to make. Using predictive analytics, it decides which ads should be shown to you that you would be likely to click and even purchase a product.

Amazon will allow you to let it send out products before you order them based on your previous orders and usage. This is not difficult to predict. My pharmacy will tell me it is time to reorder a prescription and even process and deliver it without my input. That is not so predictive; my 30 daily pills will run out in 30 days.

When Amazon suggests that I might like a product similar to other things I have bought, it's not very creepy. When I see an ad or suggestion from them about a product or even a topic that I was just searching on Google, THAT is creepy.

Similarly, Facebook might give me an ad or a "sponsored" post at the top of my feed because of my recent activity and the activity of friends that I follow - especially those that I interact with frequently with Likes, shares and comment. 

It would be interesting to see what the feeds look like for some friends of mine who are Facebook lurkers and who rarely post anything and seem to rarely even log into the site. What are they seeing when it comes to ads?