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Cookies and Social Media

Social media: The dangers of  highly misunderstood social  media are without historical precedent.  They is scarcely research, and few case studies.  

They allow contact with select groups with no possible reflection, with no possible oversight, and with only a slight possibility of correction.  They allow the naïve to be converted to almost any persuasion. They are used to bully others, sometimes to the act of suicide.  The worst possible outcome is a populace convinced by errant arguments onto a pathway of destruction.  This allows results generated by the clever miscreant to recruit the ignorant toward societal demise. 

Principles from hundreds of generations past are cast aside in favor of an emotional construction of truth. Base principles seem to have disappeared.  On top of all that social media operators mine all subscribers for information about them and at minimum their possible buying habits, possible political beliefs, and religious affiliations.  This is an aspect of data mining, and what's called deep learning. Statistical Inference and Bayesian methods are powerful tools when you have sample sizes in the millions.

Can you think any benefits of social media to balance these obvious demerits?  

All of this brings us to the next topic, and more about prying into your life.  "Getting to know you," from The King and I,  is a song from the past, but it has a new and deeper dimension of meaning through those little cookies. 

Cookies: little snippets of information on your computer that websites use to keep useful information about you such as browsing history, name, address, and more. 

Cookies help you betray yourself online.  I like to look online for various toys, such as cameras.  Mostly I go to Amazon, Ebay, and a couple of others.  I also go to a different site altogether for electronics, never cameras. But, just today I received a message from that other site advertising to me exactly a camera I was looking at on another site.  And it happened again just today from one of those "big-box" retailers.  

 So, I inquired online about whether one site can look at the cookies from another site.  The answer is a resounding yes!  This may be how that other site discovered what I was looking at.  The other, of course, is that these retail sites share information. 


In either event, count on this: What you do on one site may well be observed by other sites, mercantile or malicious, but certainly malodorous, now and in the future.   Be absolutely certain any private information you give online is under the HTTPS protocol, which is a method by which two computers can encrypt information they share while not allowing others to interpret it. 
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