Meta may be crawling your site to train its AI, even when you tell it not to. Car companies may selling your data to insurance companies and it hurts at premium time. And Cisco makes employees wait a month to find out if they’ve been layed off.
All this and more on the “beatings will continue until morale improves”
” edition of Hashtag Trending. I’m your host, Jim Love. Let’s get into it.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has recently released two new web crawling bots – Meta-ExternalAgent and Meta-ExternalFetcher. These bots are intended to gather online content for training AI models and improving Meta’s product offerings.
The robots.txt protocol has long been used by website owners to prevent automated web scraping. However, Meta’s new bots appear to be designed to bypass these restrictions. The Meta-ExternalFetcher bot, in particular, is warned to “may bypass robots.txt rules.”
Another tactic employed by Meta is to combine two functions into a single bot, the Meta-ExternalAgent. This bot is used both for collecting AI training data and indexing content, making it harder for website owners to selectively block its activities.
According to data from Originality.ai, the new Meta-ExternalAgent bot is blocked by only 1.5% of top websites, compared to the older FacebookBot, which is blocked by nearly 10% of websites.
Experts suggest that companies like Meta should provide more transparency and options for website owners to control how their content is used for AI training, while still allowing indexing for improved visibility.
Meta has published instructions on how to detect and block their agents from crawling your site. You can find them at here.
Sources include: Business Insider
According to a new investigation published in pirg.org companies like GM, Honda, Kia, Subaru, Hyundai and Mitsubishi are collecting vast amounts of data on their drivers’ behaviors – everything from driving speeds to braking patterns.
The troubling part is that these car companies are then secretly selling this highly personal data to third-party data brokers, who in turn resell it to other entities like insurance companies.
But forget the threat of hackers for now. You may be a victim of your insurance company on this one. According to reports, one driver found his insurance rates spiked 21% overnight, simply because GM had sold his detailed driving data to an insurance company.
Beyond just higher insurance costs, this unchecked data sharing puts consumers at risk of data breaches, identity theft, and targeted scams as their personal information gets passed around without their knowledge or consent.
Does this ever happen? Last week we did a story on a data broker called National Public Data that got hacked and lost close to 3 billion records with your sensitive data. So the simple answer is – yes.
With National Public Data gathered this sensitive information without either permission or even awareness. Disturbingly, consumers have little ability to opt-out of this data collection either, as much of the tracking technology is built directly into new vehicles these days.
Consumer advocates are now urging car companies to be more transparent and to stop selling customers’ driving data for purposes beyond providing a safe and functional vehicle experience.
Others are lobbying for legislation to if not prevent, at least regulate this process. We have pointed out in the past that even the US government, instead of flirting with the edges of legality in gathering information on citizens, just buys it from brokers.
As the data economy continues to grow, it’s clear car companies and others must be held accountable for how they handle their customers’ personal information. And while the published accounts are from US consumer complaints, our Canadian listeners should be equally concerned about this latest incursion into their privacy.
Sources include: pirg.org
When do layoffs stop being merely bad and move into horrible treatment of workers?
After letting go of around 4,000 workers earlier this year, Cisco has now confirmed plans for another 7% workforce reduction, following lower than expected earnings.
According to Cisco employees who spoke to TechCrunch, the company is delaying notification of affected workers until September 16th – nearly a month after the decision was made.
Not surprisingly, this has created a “toxic environment” at Cisco, with one anonymous employee saying the “mood is as dark as I’ve ever seen it.” Many are simply waiting until their next stock vesting to leave the company.
Another employee criticized Cisco, saying the company “needs to stop layoffs every year and work on innovation and getting more revenue.”
Meanwhile, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins received $31.8 million in total compensation last year, despite the company’s financial challenges.
As major tech firms continue to struggle, the human cost of these repeated layoffs is taking a toll on Cisco’s workforce. And newsflash for the CEO’s of these companies – your employees are human beings with families, mortgages and kids to feed.
And if you’ll forgive me a few seconds of editorializing. I’m not picking on Cisco in particular. They are just the most recent example of a growing trend. The former CEO Eric Schmidt of Google recently was caught talking about how Google had lost its mojo and he blamed it on remote work. Apparently, his theory is that having work-life balance is deadly for competitiveness.
I’m just going to ask if there’s another possibility for tech companies that are losing their competitive edge. Could it be that that HR bafflegab you spout about “people being your only real competitive edge” might actually be —- true? So maybe you lost your edge because you treat your people like crap?
Just askin’
Sources include: Tech Crunch
And that’s our show for today. You can find show notes at our news site technewsday.com or .ca take you pick.
Hashtag Trending is on summer hours so there’s no morning news edition tomorrow, but our weekend show will be released early on Friday.
Thanks for listening. I’m your host Jim Love, have a Thrilling Thursday.
