My problem with Facebook and Instagram

Have you read Dave Carroll's Facebook's Privacy Problem with Parents?

Apparently, I am one of the first people on Earth to carefully inspect the latest Facebook data policy because I found several broken links, blank page dead-ends, and the most astonishing form I have ever come across as a parent. I promptly tweeted it. It immediately went viral in collective disbelief and general outrage.
...
It’s both chilling and telling that the company forces a parent or guardian to hire a lawyer to draft a notorized statement to “establish guardianship rights” in order to opt their child out of ad settings on Facebook which include using their name to endorse unknown products and services to other users, should they experience any trouble finding, understanding, and using this screen in their child’s account settings.

I'm not going to paraphrase it here, because Prof. Carroll does a very able and thorough job explaining why this is so dangerous and alarming. Read it!

I left the Facebook platform because I was unhappy with the way they used private medical data gleaned, not from public posts, but from private messages between FB users*. Anyway, now I wonder if I should leave Instagram.

What do you think?

* It's difficult to find the news stories that criticize FB practices.  FB likely pays a lot of money to make sure those search results appear far, far down--or disappear altogether.

Views & Social Media

I've been super-busy preparing for the talk and workshop next week. I'll just post some pictures of my past two weeks, with very short comments.

I'm tweeting more often, especially about science and women in STEM. If that interests you, follow @gspeng. Twitter, and email are the quickest ways to message me if you have a question or comment.  Comments left on this blog also get forwarded to my email.

I've also joined Instagram as bmgmlax. Instagram allows people to open accounts without verifying their email address. A young man used my personal email address to sign up for Instagram and was quite active on that site.

I couldn't get Instagram to delink that account to my email address. Finally, I took control of that account using the "forgot my password" option and then deleted his account. I felt bad about that for about a millisecond. The squatter using my email address and Instagram deserved it.

Twitter is is an extension of my professional life.  Instagram is for my off-duty life.

Waiting for a meeting to start.  That's the outdoor patio of the cafeteria.

Leaving work the day after the storm that just missed being classified as a blizzard because the high winds and zero visibility did not last 3 continuous hours.

Another shot as I left work.

View from my office window.

View from my neighbor's window.  You can see both my current office building up on the mesa top and my former campus tower office.

Mariposa for my reading nook.

I can see Long's Peak from my kitchen and bedroom windows. I'm told that I can see Pike's Peak from my office window, but I haven't learned how to recognize the shape yet. We had ~35 inches of snow in one week (3 storms). Each snowfall was preceded by half an inch of rain. The town is a soggy and muddy mess. The views are beautiful, but I've been putting in my miles on the treadmill indoors lately.

Dear Burdastyle

Your website is one big ad for Burda. It's overkill to run banner ads for non-sewing-related companies on top of your commercial site.

At least the banner ads stay put and I can ignore them.

But I cannot forgive the ads that play peekaboo, obscuring the pictures of your products that I came to see.  They move up, they move down.  I can't seem to aim my mouse over the 'close' button.  Then, when I finally do hit close, it gives me another misleading and counter-intuitive popup screen which opens yet another ad page.

I just cannot make them go away.

Even if you do manage to close one, these zombie ads keep coming back.

Burda, how much money are you making from these ads?

How much money are you losing from these ads?

I hate Time Warner Cable Part 2 (soon to be an infinite series)

Bad Dad asked if I mentioned that TWC (Time Warner Cable) was charging us a monthly fee for a cable modem that we didn't even have.

Oops, I forgot about that particular transgression.

When we started with Adelphia* prior to 2000, we rented a cable modem from them.  Sometime later, we purchased our own cable modem and returned theirs.  Adelphia went bankrupt and TWC/Road Runner took over our cable and internet respectively.  Eventually, TWC rebranded RR as TW Internet.

The entire time that we had an account with TWC, we have used our own cable modem.  For most of that time, they knew that and didn't charge us modem rental fees.

The bills climbed ever higher with more and more fees.  Bad Dad and I have PhDs, but we are also busy people.  We don't understand the purpose of every cryptic line item fee on their bills but we pay them anyway.

When Bad Dad called to cancel our cable service on Tuesday, they asked us to return their modem.  Bad Dad informed them that we don't have one of their modems.  They asked, "then why have you been paying for rental of a cable modem for the last 6 months?"

Bad Dad asked them how they decided to tack on the fee and why they obscured the $3.95/mo fee so it wasn't clear that we were paying for something we never received.  He wanted the fee refunded retroactively.

They went on the offensive and told him that he should have alerted them earlier.

Bad Dad stuck to his guns.  They were able to confirm that they don't have a record of issuing us a cable modem.  (They could also easily have checked our MAC address and seen that it wasn't one of theirs.)

Why, after so many years, did they sneak a modem rental fee to our account when we have always provided our own modem?

And, why, would they blame a customer for their own mistake?  Or was it a deliberate and fraudulent attempt at revenue maximization?

He got the fee refunded retroactively.

We hate Time Warner Cable.

Time Warner Cable Sucks.

* I have some real horror stories about Adelphia customer service.  I would have gone after them for the malicious damage by one of their service guys, but Adelphia collapsed due to mismanagement and outright fraud in the tech bubble.

I hate Time Warner Cable

I hate Time Warner.

Time Warner Sucks.

Last night, Bad Dad canceled cable and downgraded us to "basic internet only" service, which was not supposed to change anything about our internet service or speed.

At 6 PM today, we were unable to browse the internet (with Chrome, Safari or Firefox).  All browsers showed a Time Warner provisioning error message telling us to call 1-877-777-7371 and give them my MAC address (provided in the browser) so that they could turn it on.

OS X network diagnostics showed that we were connected to the internet.

The UNIX command line utility, ping, also confirmed our connection.  Packet speeds were very slow, but less than 10% of the packets were dropped.  We were connected to the internet.  So why can't we browse?  Very strange.

I rebooted all the computers, the modem, and the wi-fi routers.  Still no change.

I called the number at 7:00 PM and dutifully navigated through the Byzantine voicemail prompts (that don't describe anything similar to my problem), trying to figure out the magic combination that would get me to a live person who can help me.

At 7:10, I landed a person in India who told me that he couldn't help me but could transfer me to someone who could.  I asked for a phone number that I can use in case my call got dropped (a non-negligible concern when dealing with TW customer service) but he refused to give me one.

At 7:14, I was patched through to their "internet service" customer service queue and placed on hold.

At 7:18  A "internet" customer service rep with an Indian accent asked me for my phone number and account information .again. !  ( Last time, I gave my real name but it didn't match the name on their account and told me my husband, the account holder, had to call them.  Of course, when he called them, the department that could help us was closed.)  This time, they took my husband's name and my name and proceeded to try to turn on connections to our MAC address.

I asked why ping works but he had no idea what I was talking about.  So then I tried to explain that I can access the internet through UNIX command line but not through a browser window.  He still didn't catch my drift.

At 7:27 the technician was unable to resolve the problem and said he would put us on hold while he worked with a more senior technician.

Time Warner Sucks.

At 8:00 he came back with apologies for taking so long (3 minutes, 33 minutes, what's an order of magnitude when you are TW?).  He told me that my modem was too old and not compatible with their system.  I asked to speak to a supervisor.

At 8:10 I asked the supervisor why we were being alerted now to old hardware compatibility.  Why didn't they alert us earlier, like when Bad Dad was on the phone with them last night?  Or during normal business hours so I can run out and purchase a newer modem?  And why can't they back out the firmware change?

They told me to buy a new modem tomorrow and then call them back so with the MAC address of the new modem.  I again asked for a direct phone number so that I don't have to go through the voicemail and hold hell again.  I don't like having to spend an hour just to get through to someone who can do something.  They said that they can't give me a more direct phone number than the TW customer service number.

So I asked them what is the TW customer service number and they refused to tell me.  Why don't they know their own number?

Bad Dad arrived home and I spoke with him and the rep on speakerphone.  Magically, they transferred Bad Dad to someone stateside who confirmed that we did NOT change our internet plan and ascertained that our old modem should work for the lower network speeds characteristic of our basic plan.  The  rep remotely enabled our old modem immediately.  I asked him, why didn't India transfer me to you right away?

I'm a former UNIX sysadmin.  I did the normal tests to try to isolate the problem.  I'm not a network engineer, but I hang out with friends who are.  My understanding of computer networking is sophisticated for a non-specialist.

I tried to explain to the Indian techs my observations, but they didn't listen to me or answer my questions.  It's not even clear to me that they even understood what I was telling them.

Why did Bad Dad get immediately referred to a stateside tech that understood and could resolve the problem quickly?  Why did I have to waste 80 minutes with bozos in India who told me that I was asking the impossible?

Is there any software or device that will lower my voice so I can sound like a man and get better customer service?

Or can Time Warner learn to respect their female customers?  Better yet, can they hire techs that respect female customers?  Can those techs be found in India given their pervasive climate of treating women badly?  Why is TW outsourcing to a country with such a poor human rights record?  Are there places more deserving of our $ support?

Don't tell me that Americans can't do the job.  It's clear from my experience tonight that Indians can't do it either.  ;-)

Time Warner Sucks.

What ISP are you using and how do they treat you?

Does it matter if you are a man or woman when you call customer service?

I hate Time Warner.

Thank-you for letting me vent.  It's been a frustrating evening.  I'm off to do a little yoga and then cast-on a project for moi.  I deserve it.  I'd show you the beautiful yarn, but I can't find my camera.