🙂 I agree with her. It’s “patronising” because Pawluk presumptuously assumes—without having an actual conversation with the woman—that he is somehow ‘in a better place’ than her. He is using her as a prop, as clickbait. A true “random act of kindness” would be ANONYMOUS, and not some filmed publicity stunt by a so-called “creator“.
Want to try it? A real “random act of kindness”? When you’re at a restaurant, pay someone else’s check as you are leaving. Make sure the restaurant staff doesn’t tell that person until you are out of the building. Then leave and don’t turn around. No filming. No peeking to see what happens. That’s authentic. Fake or real? You have the power to choose.
Once again, I’ll say: talk to your neighbors, use a telephone for actual conversation, #BewareTheInternet, and #DeleteFacebook.
—TechWite’s Do the Right Thing (“Tee DRaT“) Award for 2022!! As former self-appointed Vice President in charge of Doing the Right Thing at Apple, —known “inside the donut” as the “EViP of DRaT” — it’s my pleasure to announce that Microsoft wins TechWite’s “Do the Right Thing” Award!! In this MS vs FB competition, Facebook says it can identify a user’s emotional state and share that with advertisers and anyone else for $$$, but gosh, they’ll stop doing that.
Meanwhile Microsoft’s response? “Nah, let’s not go there. And BTW, we’re okay if you guys want to unionize.” Is this the same Microsoft that hijacked the code for OS/2 from IBM, tried to crush Apple, insisted on its private standards vs. open Internet standards, etc. etc. etc.?? 🤪
Microsoft shares its Responsible AI Standard. Microsoft Corp., as part of its framework for building AI systems, announced that its Azure Face service would no longer include capabilities “that infer emotional states and identity attributes such as gender, age, smile, facial hair, hair, and makeup.”
—Wall Street Journal, “CIO Tech Report” newsletter for 6/22/22
Meta agrees to end alleged discriminatory practices in housing ads. Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. agreed Thursday to adopt new online advertising practices to settle an investigation by federal officials, who said its ads discriminated against users by race, gender and other factors.
Discrimination by algorithm. According to federal officials, Meta created an ad-targeting algorithm that would consider protected characteristics—including race, religion and sex—to find users who mirrored the advertiser’s targeted audience. The WSJ’s John D. McKinnon notes that it is illegal to deny someone housing based on federally-protected characteristics such as race, religion and sex.
—Wall Street Journal, “CIO Tech Report” newsletter for 6/22/22
Since Covid, QR Codes have become popular, especially as a “no-touch” tool to view a restaurant menu using a cell phone. Sometimes you can even orderand pay using your cell phone. Although this New York Times article doesn’t outright suggest that using QR codes is risky or dangerous or a threat to your online privacy, it doesn’t do much to explain how a QR Code works, leading many readers to assume that the QR Code is some sinister new technology that will steal their identity, or worse.
Reader reactions to the article were just off-the-charts, paranoid-whacko. I tried to help out with this soothing comment:
“QR codes save you typing in a URL to get to a web page. As suggested by others here, any “damage” to privacy etc., results from the security threats already present on web sites and the internet. If this idea drives you to action, then get off Facebook and Amazon, both of which do far more damage than a restaurant web page.”
Christopher Plummer, Reader Comment, on article “QR Codes Are Here to Stay”, NYT, 7/26/2021
By this evening, there were almost 300 more comments about the article, mostly paranoid-whacko comparisons to the dystopias of Huxley and Orwell and horrified exclamations of former customers who swear they’ll never go to a restaurant again…and so on.
America, calm down! There are plenty of reasons to #AvoidtheInternet, but QR Codes used by restaurants are not one of them. If you use the simple camera connection in your phone or tablet that recognizes a QR Code, it:
Translates the text that the “code” represents
Recognizes that text as a URL (the kind you would type in your web browser)
Passes that URL to yourbrowser
And opens your browser to that specific web page
That’s all that is happening! QR Codes can contain other information—addresses, phone numbers—but if all you’re doing is reading the code with the camera on your device (and NOT using a 3rd party QR app), then the not-sinister QR Code is saving you some keystrokes to get you to a web site. THAT’S ALL.
As I imply, once you get to the web site in question, your security and privacy is entirely up to you, and contains the same risks as any other commerce web site that may use trackers, cookies, spy pixels, profiling, blah, blah, blah, all the reasons you have to be smart and consider that you might want to #AvoidTheInternet, #DeleteFacebook, and so on. But please, don’t blame the QR Code.
TechWite 