Off of Autopilot

The Sunday Night Reader for 6/19/22

Jun 19, 2022

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Round Up the Usual Sources

We all have sources of information that we return to again and again. You read this newsletter. I read a handful of magazines and newspapers and a Twitter feed with about 640 accounts on it. There are people we trust and people we want to keep an eye on, and they have a big influence on our worldview.

But Jim Dey at the News-Gazette is in an exceptional rut. In the last five months, seven of his columns have used Wirepoints as their primary or only source. This is in addition to two guest column published by writers from Wirepoints that ran in the paper. In 2021, the News-Gazette published five Dey columns, nine guest commentaries, and four editorials that had Wirepoints as their foundation.

I looked into Wirepoints last year, but here’s a refresher. (And this is still up-to-date, because Wirepoints’ more recent IRS 990 disclosures remain unavailable.)

The organization received about $80,000 in support in 2019, reported no revenue in 2018, and did not exist prior to that. It’s board consists entirely of four people, who appear to be a pair of married couples. Of its $80,000 budget, $60,000 came from “loans” from two of those board members, Ted Dabrowski and Mark Glennon. There are five people on the Wirepoints team, including Dabrowski and Glennon. They shared $51,600 in salary in 2019.

Wirepoints simply isn’t on the up-and-up. It’s a bad faith machine and a vanity project for its board. Yet the News-Gazette continues to consider it as credible as the Office of Management and Budget, Pew Research, or Dow Jones. Dey considers it more credible, I suppose — because when was the last time you saw him quote something from Pew or OMB?

Autopilot

I have every confidence that autonomous vehicles can be as safe or safer than people-piloted vehicles. But this is your annual reminder that corporations and rock-star CEOs are never on your side. From Fortune’s coverage of a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration probe of Tesla:

“Initially the probe started last year in response to Tesla vehicles mysteriously plowing into the scene of an existing accident where first responders were already present.

On Thursday, NHTSA said it had discovered in 16 separate instances when this occurred that Autopilot ‘aborted vehicle control less than one second prior to the first impact,’ suggesting the driver was not prepared to assume full control over the vehicle.

CEO Elon Musk has often claimed that accidents cannot be the fault of the company, as data it extracted invariably showed Autopilot was not active in the moment of the collision.” Read more.

Meta Pixel

Those same corporations, even when they’re healthcare organizations, are also very sloppy with your privacy. An investigation by The Markup and STAT magazine showed how hospitals were using Meta Pixel and, inadvertently it seems, sending private data — including prescription information and services patients were receiving — to Facebook. (Meta Pixel is a snippet of code that is used on many, many websites to track your activity and share that information with Facebook to “improve your experience,” which is to say, serve you advertisements targeted to your behavior.)

From the article: “The Markup tested the websites of Newsweek’s top 100 hospitals in America. On 33 of them we found the tracker, called the Meta Pixel, sending Facebook a packet of data whenever a person clicked a button to schedule a doctor’s appointment…The 33 hospitals The Markup found sending patient appointment details to Facebook collectively reported more than 26 million patient admissions and outpatient visits in 2020, according to the most recent data available from the American Hospital Association. Our investigation was limited to just over 100 hospitals; the data sharing likely affects many more patients and institutions than we identified.” (Locally, Carle and OSF were not on the Newsweek list and were not examined as part of the investigation.) Read more.

Substack, the service that you’re reading this newsletter on, does not use Meta Pixel, but it does track and share some information about you. Details are available in their privacy policy.