* Facebook's Pope

New Haven Register

Paul Keane: Where does all that data go?

By Paul Keane

Published 10:13 pm EST, Friday, February 8, 2019    

 

I don’t know a gigabyte from a mosquito bite, but I do know that one drains my blood and the other drains my wallet.

But when my computer said I had used 99 percent of my storage or 14.86 gigabytes of the “15 GB” provided by my system for files, I thought I’d better find out what a gigabyte is.

A gigabyte is a billion bytes.

MacDonald’s has sold 99 billion hamburgers for instance and the astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson says that if stacked one on top of the other, that would be enough burgers “to reach the moon and back.”

He notes as an aside it is also “terrible news for cows.”

But it gives me a visual idea of a billion, or in this case 99 billion.

A tech friend told me that my email was definitely the culprit, eating up my 14.86 gigabytes and I would have to delete them.

It took three tries before the computer could clump all 55,410 the Inbox and Sentbox emails together and delete them.

Where did they go? I have no idea. Will they pour down from the cloud now as digital acid rain?

My hunch is that Google is selling them to somebody, although both Google and Facebook claim that they do not “sell” their data, they “share” it for free with advertisers who want to target Facebook and Google users.

What’s the difference if the money goes into the cash cow as “sharing” or “selling”? Either way the cow gets fatter and delivers green milk.

It was amusing to watch Facebook’s creator 33-year-old Mark Zuckerberg testify last year before Congress. He had donned a Wall Street uniform, a sedate suit instead of the college Joe uniform he usually wears: a T-shirt and hoodie

You cant really be an ordinary Joe when you are worth $55.7 billion, even if you do wear a hoodie and did start your Facebook empire in a Harvard dorm room as a dating service for hormonal undergraduates.

It turns out if you do the math, that my 55,410 emails amount to a mere 12.6 emails a day.

Just imagine the digital chains America’s teenagers are accumulating who have switched from emails to text messages and now send between 90 and 100 texts a day.

“Appalling!” some might say.

As a English teacher who taught teenagers for 25 years in Vermont schools, I have a different take.

Anything that encourages reading and writing is good, even text messages.

You can’t read if you don’t eye a few words now and then and you cant write if you don’t scribble something occasionally. You have to begin somewhere. I began with comic books and graduated to The Hardy Boy mysteries.

So text messaging and emailing in my opinion are stretching the cerebral reading and writing muscles of our children.

That may have been the hidden agenda of Dartmouth’s late president John G. Kemeny when he and a colleague invented the first digital language in 1964 called “Basic” setting in motion the birth of digital empires now called Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon.

Facebook by the way has 2.27 billion “monthly active users.”

Thus Facebook is very close to catching up with the world’s largest religion, Christianity, which has 2.3 billion active users or as they used to call them “members.”

But there’s one caveat. Facebook is run by that 33-year-old guy in the hoodie and T-shirt or Wall Street suit, depending on his audience’s costume needs.

No one, not a Pope or a president, or a Nobel prize winner, or the Dartmouth inventor of Basic, should have the kind of power to govern such a gazillion gigabyte universe involving 2.27 billion “monthly active users” without some kind of oversight.

Even the Pope had a Martin Luther.

In 1519 Christianity was split in two after a Pope tried to scam the public by, in effect, selling tickets to heaven, called “indulgences” and a Catholic monk, Martin Luther, challenged him, inadvertently spawning the Protestant Reformation.

Is there a challenger waiting in the offing for Facebook?

Listen to the words of Sen. Dick Durbin when he interviewed Mark Zuckerberg before Congress :

“Mr. Zuckerberg, would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night?”

Zuckerberg: “Um. No.”

Durbin: “If you messaged anyone this week would you be comfortable sharing their names with us?”

Zuckerberg: “I would not feel comfortable doing that, Senator.”

Durbin: “I think that might be what this is all about.”

Facebook and its “services” seek and record exactly where we are located thanks to global positioning satellites, every time we click on one of their accounts, perhaps hundreds of times a day. Google does the same with Gmail.

When I deleted my 55,410 emails, I got a automatic digital message from Gmail. “Your account is empty. We miss you.”

 

I’ll bet they do.

 

Paul Keane grew up in the Mt. Carmel section of Hamden. He lives in Vermont where he retired after teaching English for 25 years.