Note Ali (Muhammad Ali), Leia (Carrie Fisher), Major Tom (David Bowie), Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder), Prince, and Brady's Mom (? - Florence Henderson?), all recent celebrity deaths.

Lyrics from https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/perfectcircle/solongandthanksforallthefish.html :

Time is money and money is time
We wasted every second dime
On diets, lawyers, shrinks and apps
And flags, and plastic surgery
Now Willy Wonka, Major Tom
Ali and Leia have moved on
Signal the final curtain call
In all this atomic pageantry

Bravissimo, hip-hip hooray
For this fireworks display
Mind and body blown away
What a radiant crescendo

Ticker tape parade
Our hair and skin like
Like Marilyn Monroe
In an empty wind

Time is money and money is time
We wasted every second dime
On politicians, fancy water
And guns, and plastic surgery
Like old Prince and Brady's mom
All the dolphins have moved on
Signaling the final curtain call
In all this atomic pageantry

Bravissimo, hip-hip hooray
What a glorious display
Melt our joyous hearts away
Under the mushroom cloud confetti

Hip-hip hooray
For this fireworks display
Mind and body blown away
What a radiant crescendo

Hip-hip hooray
Hip-hip hooray

Ticker tape parade
Our hair and skin like
Like Marilyn Monroe
In an empty wind

Time is money and money is time
We wasted every second dime
On diets, lawyers, shrinks and apps
And flags, and plastic surgery
Now Willy Wonka, Major Tom
Ali and Leia have moved on
Signal the final curtain call
In all this atomic pageantry

Not that I saw, but I didn't watch it all.
The glaring issue to me was, when asked 'You found out in 2015 about this data breach, when did you notify your customers?'
he answered with 'When we found out, we removed the apps and asked the thieving companies to delete the data, and took their word that they did...which was a mistake.', never addressing the question because they still haven't notified all the customers whose data was taken by this one breach and never would have if it hadn't been discovered by investigators and made public, and make no mistake it's far from the only breach.
To me, it's outrageous that he's pretending that keeping your data private is a goal, it's not. They exist by selling your data. Nothing's free, and things that claim to be free usually cost far more than you would voluntarily pay.

I could well be wrong about this, but my understanding is that the data wasn't really stolen, it was freely shared by Facebook. I also don't think there is any evidence that suggests that CA used their psychoanalytic stuff on the Trump campaign specifically. It sounds like they are targeting voters more on purely their geographical location than any in depth analysis of their social media profile. It seems doubtful to me that CA were the only ones at this game though...

I do think Facebook absolutely shares some blame - They hand over their users data and make app creators etc pinky-swear that they will use it responsibly and delete it once they are done...and then they do absolutely nothing to ensure that agreement is honoured. They either willfully ignored it because they knew the data was likely to be misused, or they were naive to the point of complete incompetence. I really can't see an option C.

Your video, Quagmire Discovers Tinder App, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Ha! I expected a stupid phone app.
Hire that man.
*promote

From the YouTube link:

Guy Gets Inside A Chinese Click Farm And Holy Crap, That's A Lot Of Phones

​Turns out if you want to run a business where you rate a bunch of apps and write fake reviews, you can't just spoof having a bunch of phones — you actually need the phones. And so that's what we have here: a room full of phones relentlessly rating apps and writing BS reviews because everything in life (and particularly on the internet) is a lie.

A Russian man visited a Chinese click farm. They make fake ratings for mobile apps. He said they have 10,000 more phones.

A Russian Went Inside A Chinese Click-Farm: This Is What He Found

On the day when Snapchat erased billions of market cap from investors (and founders) accounts - as the MAUs-means-money model seems to break - we thought it worthwhile taking another glimpse into the hush-hush world of 'click-farms' and the fakeness of the latest social network fads.

So, if they're not human, where do all those "likes," "retweets," and "followers" lighting up your social media accounts from?

Thanks to this Russian gentleman - who visited a Chinese click farm, where they make fake ratings for mobile apps and other things like this - we now know...

He said they have 10,000 more phones just like these.

As we concluded previously, the bottom line is simple: "The illusion of a massive following is often just that," said Tony Harris, who does social media marketing for major Hollywood movie firms, said he would love to be able to give his clients massive numbers of Twitter followers and Facebook fans, but buying them from random strangers is not very effective or ethical. And once the prevailing users of social networks grasp that one of the main driving features of the current social networking fad du jour is nothing but a big cash scam operating out of a basement in the far east, expect both Facebook and shortly thereafter, Twitter, to go the way of 6 Degrees, Friendster and MySpace, only this time the bagholders will be the public. Because "it is never different this time." The only certain thing: someone will promptly step in to replace any social network that quietly fades into the sunset.

Inside China's phoney 'click farm': Tiny office uses 10,000 handsets to send fake ratings and 'likes' for boosting clients' online popularity.

Pretty much everything @ChaosEngine said, and as pointed out in the Humans Need Not Apply video. There are far more factors going into this than the economists are willing to look at.

Shelf checkouts might result in slightly higher theft rates, and each person might be at the register than they would be with a properly trained cashier, but you now have one minimum wage employee watching 6 or 12 registers, rather than 6 or 12 people... that is a huge savings. That's 5 to 11 jobs lost, and at the low end, where people can least afford to lose job opportunities. It's just a matter of time until McDonald's, Wendy's and the like all add app-based ordering, or ordering at a kiosk, and that saves a couple employees there (Chick-fil-a already has that in their app, order, notify when you are there, they process the order)... and it wouldn't be too difficult to automate the McDonald's cooking line either... the burgers aren't flipped, the grill cooks both sides at the same time, drop them in place, grill down, cook, up, then put them in the stream tray, easy for a cheap bot to do. Portion control would be far easier with a bot too... there are huge incentives for them to move to automate...

The only real incentive not to automate as fully as everyone can is the fact it would cause a huge disruption to the economy if a Universal Basic Income isn't in place. I'd expect the biggest push for a UBI to eventually come from the various industries that want to automate, who'd gladly pay an automation tax to help pay the UBI in order to greatly increase their bottom lines, because we are very close to where a UBI, even based on an automation tax, is still cheaper than employing people.

TBH this looks fake and sensationalist. Two days later it showed up in their feed!? It only takes one search for a cat on the internet for it to affect EVERYTHING everywhere.

Is that model strong enough to run apps in the background and actively listening?

I know only SIRI on iPhone 7 is capable of actively listening and that is a much newer model than what was shown here.

Shenanigans!

My wife and I tried talking about road flares around her phone, our need for more road flares, and questions about where we might find road flares....nothing, but I don't think she had the Facebook app open.

The 'you agreed to it' argument always makes me think of the human cent-I-pad episode of South park. Why can't they make it READ!?

Slashdot had a post about an upcoming (about 1 year out) phone that can run pretty standard Linux distros. I took interest because I'm very annoyed about how UNconfigurable android is.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S2, very old by now, but hardware wise it still works fine. Software wise, it is shit. Android apps are massively bloated compared to when the phone was new, so the "system" partition of the phone is too small to install anything other than like 1-2 apps. From what I can tell, rooting might not help because there are still standard partitioning requirements? I dunno. Anyway, it is a big mess compared to a desktop, where I can partition things any way I want (which works great if you know what you are doing).

Anyway, I don't want to shill for Purism, the company that will be making the phone in the Slashdot article (for one thing, the phone is still a year or so away from final production), but they seem to be doing things right. They DO have some laptops on the market now, which apparently include a relevant feature mentioned in the write-up about their upcoming phone: hardware kill switches for the microphone, camera, and WiFi/Bluetooth.

If you read the ToS (hah! as if) for things like Facebook's app or the phones / OS themselves, you might see that you are "agreeing" to this kind of data collectionspying. If that sets the bar for "good" behavior, imagine what the bad guys (NSA, other agencies, state actors, unscrupulous advertisers, malware producers, etc.) can and will do. That's why any software solution is dubious. That's why electrical tape over your webcam is better than assuming that the record light is trustworthy. That's why a hardware kill switch is a good feature if you're concerned about this (like me).

Here's links to:
an article about the hardware kill switches in Purism's laptops, and
an article about their upcoming phone the Librem 5

I don't own any of their hardware. I don't like paid shills. That being said, I'm interested in what they are doing.

It's right in the Terms of Service that you agree to Instant Messenger listening to audio and possibly the camera.

They don't hide it - You agree to let them when you use the app.

There's YouTube and Facebook making it easy to add captions, there's the Apple Clips app and there are "social media video text packs" to use in editing software..
nooooooo..

Subtle subtitling is fine though.

*dead -- "'Building the App...' This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Apple, Inc.. "

21. if you're a teleworker and I'm trying to help you over the phone don't give me vague descriptions like "I can't get to my stuff. I clicked on the thing and I can't get in now." I'm not in the room looking over your shoulder for the past 5 minutes, you need to describe the steps you took to get to where you are now. And don't give me this exasperated tone when I ask you to do something the Help Desk already asked you to do, like reboot your computer. You got a cab waiting?

22. Don't present a problem like "My FAX123 program won't connect" as if was working yesterday and stopped connecting today. When more likely you have been told many times your supervisor needs to request an account for you and you haven't bothered to start the process. And you think somehow I have the magic touch and can circumvent that whole process on the spot. And even if I could do it you would appreciate it for all of 3 seconds, then come to expect it every time. And so would your colleagues sitting within earshot.

23. Don't ask me to work on something without telling me another tech is already working on it and you just haven't heard back from them in a timely manner and thought you would start over with me.

24. Not everyone in IT knows each other and can do each others' jobs and are cross-trained on account creation, purchasing, application support, etc. So the guy at the home office in Virginia hasn't created your account after a week, you want me to drive there and stand over him? There are MBA's who get paid buckets to manage this mess, you want bottom-rung techs to somehow make it all better?

25. Make sure to follow the last instructions I gave you with troubleshooting an issue, like try it on a spare computer, or reboot, or try printing from a different app, etc. Because when you don't, and a week later when I get a high priority email from your manager saying "why is nobody helping them with this issue?" I will provide a record of our last contact where the ball was in your court.

26. You wonder why it's hard to get a hold me by IM, email or voice mail now? You no doubt wasted my time with one of the previous entries above, or sounded annoyed and impatient that I can't do everyone's job or escalate your issue instantly.

27. If you see me in the building don't ask me IT questions any more, I have moved on to SQL development.