Ethics and Data

I read within the past week that Facebook tried to get banks to allow them access to their customer’s data. Whoa! And the stocks went up upon those news. Yep, those shareholders are salivating at the prospect of Facebook attaining your financial information.

Okay, this is beyond the pale. So far the banks have resisted providing such information due to concerns about privacy invasion. But those shareholders!

It looks like if you do any analysis of data or retrieval of data, like a data analyst or data scientist, you run the risk of overreaching and getting into trouble. Right now the field is so new that the boundaries are not clear because the law hasn’t spoken yet about what you can and cannot do. It’s a Wild West out there and the shareholders are not helping matters any.

At the moment, any comment anyone posts to your Facebook page or to your website is probably usable, as long as you state what your privacy policies are – such as those for the European GDPR. Any financial data that you get when your customer make purchases is probably fine too, since we’ve always had that for years. But the actual selling of customer data or purchase of outside data might start to get into gray areas. And any devious attempt to obtain data, like Cambridge Analytica did, is probably a definite no-no.

I don’t know. You have to be really careful about what data you use or purchase. And you can’t use trickery when asking customers; you need to be up front about collecting their data because they need to understand and need to have the option to opt out.

Facebook asking banks for people’s financial data is just going too far. Shareholders are not your friend

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Okay, the new Gutenberg editor for WordPress is not working very well so I had to deactivate it. I was going to do this post yesterday but my ability to post died. I kept getting a blank page and none of the Gutenberg features.  I tried again today with no success so I've temporarily deactivated the Gutenberg editor until there is a new update. I'm still having posting issues despite deactivating the Gutenberg; I don't know if that means something else is in the way.

Just when I was having fun learning how to use the Gutenberg, even though I missed some of the features Site Origin offered.

My posting may be impacted; it looks like it will still be rather infrequent.

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