Facebook Spying,Good Cybersecurity=Profits, and More; AM1280 The Patriot, Brad Carlson, Sunday, Apr. 7, 2024

It seems that companies who take cybersecurity seriously are more profitable then companies who give cybersecurity lip service. And only five percent of corporate boards of directors have somebody with cybersecurity expertise. Business decision-makers, listen up. The internet is here to stay. Willful ignorance will cost you dearly.

In 2020, a high-priced law firm filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook for privacy violations and anti-competitive behavior. Facebook settled in 2023 and the court recently released a juicy document from the case. It seems Facebook CEO Zuckerberg wanted a way to find information on Snapchat and other Facebook competitors. And so Facebook engineered a way to use the Onavo VPN software it bought in 2013 to scrape information from Snapchat before Snapchat encrypted it. Facebook eventually expanded this to Youtube and Amazon.

Right-wingers get it wrong when they complain about big tech censoring them, especially when they use social media to share their complaints with millions of followers. Social media companies make money from engagement. So when right-wingers duke it out against left-wingers over the internet, social media companies laugh all the way to the bank while people use their platforms to fight. The old line, there’s a sucker born every minute, is just as true today as in the early days of the Barnum and Bailey Circus.

A call came in about a movie showing rogue AI taking over every internet-connected device in the world. I shared thoughts on that a long time ago – see Hollywood Hackers. But it brought up a great question; how would you blow up the world using the internet? I can think of two feasible approaches and I’ve written about them. See Virus Bomb for a way to mount a deadly physical attack, and Internet Viral Lies, Online Grooming, and Bullying, for a technique the Russians use to pit Americans against each other.