In 2013 I was flying around speaking on big data security controls, and waste water analysis was one of my go-to examples of privacy and integrity risks.

The charts I showed sometimes were the most popular drugs detected in each city’s wastewater site (e.g. cocaine in Oregon) and I would joke that we could write a guide-book to the world based on what “logs” were found.

Scientists at that time claimed the ability to look at city-wide water treatment plants and backtrack outputs to city-block locality. In near future they said it would be possible to backtrack to house or building.

For example, you get a prescription for a drug and the insurance company buys your wastewater metadata because it shows you’re taking the generic drug version while putting brand label receipts in claim forms. Or someone looks at past 5 year analysis of drugs you’re on, based on sewer data science, to estimate your insurance rates.

This wasn’t entirely novel for me. As a kid I was fascinated by an archaeologist who specialized in digs of the Old West. Everything in a frontier town might be thrown down the hole (e.g. destroy evidence of “edge” behavior), so she would write narratives about real life based on the bottles, pistols, clothes, etc found in and around where an outhouse once stood.

I’m a little surprised, therefore, that instead of a water sensor for toilets the latest startups ask people to use their phones to take pictures of their stool and upload.

…Auggi, a gut-health startup that’s building an app for people to track gastrointestinal issues, and Seed Health, which works on applying microbes to human health and sells probiotics — are soliciting poop photos from anyone who wants to send them. The companies began collecting the photos online on Monday via a campaign cheekily called “Give a S–t”…

It’s a novel approach in that you aren’t pinned to the toilet in your home and can go outside and take pictures of poop on a sidewalk to upload.

This could be a game-changer given how many rideshare drivers are relieving themselves in cities like San Francisco.

Here’s the sort of chart we need right now, and not just because it looks like ride-share companies giving us the finger.

Uber’s army of 45,000 people suddenly driving from far-away places into a tiny 7 mile by 7 mile peninsula, with zero plans for their healthcare needs, infamously drove up rates of feces deposited all over public places.

…anecdotal complaints have gotten the attention of San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera. Last week, his office released information for the first time about the number of Uber and Lyft drivers estimated to be working in the city: 45,000. To compare, 1,500 taxi medallions were given out [in 2016], according to the city’s Treasurer & Tax Collector. For perspective, Bruce Schaller, an urban transportation expert, said there are about 55,000 Uber, Lyft and other ride-sharing drivers in New York City, a metropolis of 8 million people, eight times the size of San Francisco.

I’ll just say it again, that a rise in human waste on the streets correlates pretty heavily to a rise of ride share drivers from far away needing a convenient place to relieve themselves (especially as many ended up sleeping in their cars).

In a conversation I had with a man in 2016 who had jumped out of his car to start peeing on the sidewalk in front of my house (despite surveillance cameras pointed right at him), he told me his plight:

• Uber driver: I plan to quit as soon as I got my $700 bonus for 100 rides
• Me: Because you just needed that quick money?
• Uber driver: No, man there are no restrooms. I’m tired of taking a shit on sidewalks and peeing in newspaper boxes. It’s degrading

There definitely was a spike in 2016, which perhaps could have been correlated to gig economy workers seeing that $700 bonus and wandering into the city.

In some cases it appears that ride-share drivers would accumulate a giant bag during the day and then throw it onto the street.

Sightings of human feces on the sidewalks are now a regular occurrence; over the past 10 years, complaints about human waste have increased 400%. People now call the city 65 times a day to report poop, and there have been 14,597 calls in 2018 alone. Last year, software engineer Jenn Wong even created a poop map of San Francisco, showing the concentration of incidents across the city. New mayor London Breed said: “There is more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen growing up here.” In a revolting recent incident, a 20lb bag of fecal waste showed up on a street in the city’s Tenderloin district.

Do you know what also became a regular occurrence over the past 10 years? Ride share vehicles with drivers needing to poop and no time or place to go.

Many people mistakenly attribute the dirty truth about ride-share driver behavior to homelessness, despite curious facts like “there aren’t actually more homeless people than there have been in the past”.

People also ignore the fact that being homeless and living on the street doesn’t mean that people don’t care about their living environment. Homeless are known actually to clean and sweep, whereas a driver is far more likely to poop at whatever spot they can get away with and then scoot.

I’m not sure why it is so hard for people to admit that a massive rise in ride-sharing drivers and no public restrooms for them becomes an obvious contributor of waste problems.

In one case I even saw an Uber SUV stop in the middle of a street, a passenger with a dog jumped out and peed directly uphill from a small restaurant with sidewalk seating…the Uber crew then jumped back in and sped away as those eating watched helplessly while rivers of hot dog urine flowed under their dining tables.

That kind of scenario is common sense bad, no? Just look at ride-sharing booms in the 1800s for cities like London, which led to special huts being built for driver care and control.

By 1898 newspapers around the world reported “40 shelters in London, accommodating 3500 cabmen, and there was a fund, provided mostly by subscription, for the maintenance of them.”

An app uploading photos for analysis, or even doing checks within the app itself, would both be a privacy threat to all the ride share drivers hoping to get away with their dirty business on streets, as well as give knowledge that would prove a city’s most vulnerable (homeless) populations aren’t always to blame.

It would also help analysis that often just assumes a public toilet is for people walking rather than drivers who could loiter anywhere in the city.

It’s a highly political topic, such that a “wasteland” interactive map with 2014 data turned into a crazy right-wing propaganda campaign to generate fear about San Francisco sanitation.

No mention ever is made in these political fights about unregulated ride-share drivers despite the obvious impact of at least 40,000 people driving into the city and around in circles all day every day generating pollution, noise, congestion and ultimately desperate for places to poop.

Waste analysis sensors could change all that and the real cost of Uber, Lyft etc could lead to sanitation fees (maintenance funds) for a modern-day Rideshare Shelter, which of course would have sensors on toilets.

However, already there’s a security issue mentioned in the plan for these startups. Their data collection requires people uploading photos to manually classify, which sounds to me like an integrity disaster. A recipe for shitty data, if you will.

[Jack Gilbert, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine and cofounder of the American Gut Project, a science project that solicits fecal samples from people] said that people are asked to rate their stool on the Bristol stool chart in pretty much every clinical trial he conducts, and automating this process would reduce bias and variation in data collection. “Human beings are just not very good at recording things,” he said.

Hopefully the startups will transition to the automated app and then traditional San Francisco residents who still walk on sidewalks, instead of calling a car to drive them three blocks, can use AI to efficiently report the prevalence of Uber poops.

A “Potemkin Village” is made from fake storefronts built to fraudulently impress a visiting czar and dignitaries. The “front organization” is torn down once its specific message/purpose ends.

Step one (PDF): Facebook sets up special pay-to-play access (competitive advantage) to user data and leaks this privileged (back) door to Russia.

(October 8, 2014 email in which Facebook engineer Alberto Tretti emails Archibong and Papamiltiadis notifying them that entities with Russian IP addresses have been using the Pinterest API access token to pull over 3 billion data points per day through the Ordered Friends API, a private API offered by Facebook to certain companies who made extravagant ads purchases to give them a competitive advantage against all other companies. Tretti sends the email because he is clearly concerned that Russian entities have somehow obtained Pinterest’s access token to obtain immense amounts of consumer data. Merely an hour later Tretti, after meeting with Facebook’s top security personnel, retracts his statement without explanation, calling it only a “series of unfortunate coincidences” without further explanation. It is highly unlikely that in only an hour Facebook engineers were able to determine definitively that Russia had not engaged in foul play, particularly in light of Tretti’s clear statement that 3 billion API calls were made per day from Pinterest and that most of these calls were made from Russian IP addresses when Pinterest does not maintain servers or offices in Russia)

Step two: Facebook CEO announces his company doesn’t care if information is inauthentic or even disinformation.

Most of the attention on Facebook and disinformation in the past week or so has focused on the platform’s decision not to fact-check political advertising, along with the choice of right-wing site Breitbart News as one of the “trusted sources” for Facebook’s News tab. But these two developments are just part of the much larger story about Facebook’s role in distributing disinformation of all kinds, an issue that is becoming more crucial as we get closer to the 2020 presidential election. And according to one recent study, the problem is getting worse instead of better, especially when it comes to news stories about issues related to the election. Avaaz, a site that specializes in raising public awareness about global public-policy issues, says its research shows fake news stories got 86 million views in the past three months, more than three times as many as during the previous three-month period.

Step three: Facebook announces it has used an academic institution led by former staff to measure authenticity and coordination of actions (not measure disinformation).

Working with the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and the Daily Beast, Facebook determined that the shuttered accounts were coordinating to advance pro-Russian agendas through the use of fabricated profiles and accounts of real people from the countries where they operated, including local content providers. The sites were removed not because of the content itself, apparently, but because the accounts promoting the content were engaged in inauthentic and coordinated actions.

In other words you can tell a harmful lie. You just can’t start a union, even to tell a truth, because unions by definition would be inauthentic (representing others) and coordinated in their actions.

It’s ironic as well since this new SIO clearly was created by Facebook to engage in inauthentic and coordinated actions. Do as they say not as they do.

The Potemkin Village effect here is thus former staff of Facebook creating an academic front to look like they aren’t working for Facebook, while still working with and for Facebook… on a variation of the very thing that Facebook has said it would not be working on.

For example, hypothetically speaking:

If Facebook were a company in 1915 would they have said they don’t care about inauthentic information in “Birth of a Nation” that encouraged restarting the KKK?

Even to this day Americans are very confused whether the White House of Woodrow Wilson was coordinating the restart of the KKK, and they debate that instead of the obvious failure to block a film with intentionally harmful content intended to kill black people (e.g. huge rise in lynchings and 1919 Red Summer, 1921 Tulsa massacre, etc.).

Instead, based on this new SIO model, it seems Facebook of 1915 would partner with a University to announce they will target and block films of pro-KKK rallies on the basis of white sheets and burning crosses being inauthentic coordinated action.

It reads to me like a very strange us of API as privacy backdoors, as well as use of “academic” organizations as legal backdoors; both seem to mean false self-regulation, in an attempt to side-step dealing with the obvious external pressure to regulate harms from speech.

Facebook perhaps would have said in 1915 that KKK are fine if they call for genocide and the death of non-whites, as long as the KKK known to be pushing such toxic and inauthentic statements don’t put a hood on to conceal their face while they do it.

Easy to see some irony in how Facebook takes an inauthentic position, with their own staff strategically installed into an academic institution like Stanford, while telling everyone else they have to be authentic in their actions.

Also perhaps this is a good time to remember how a Stanford professor took large payments from tobacco companies to say cigarettes weren’t causing cancer.

[Board-certified otolaryngologist Bill Fees] said he was paid $100,000 to testify in a single case.

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Updated November 12 to add latest conclusions of the SIO about Facebook data provided to them.

Considered as a whole, the data provided by Facebook — along with the larger online network of websites and accounts that these Pages are connected to — reveal a large, multifaceted operation set up with the aim of artificially boosting narratives favorable to the Russian state and disparaging Russia’s rivals. Over a period when Russia was engaged in a wide range of geopolitical and cultural conflicts, including Ukraine, MH17, Syria, the Skripal Affair, the Olympics ban, and NATO expansion, the GRU turned to active measures to try to make the narrative playing field more favorable. These active measures included social-media tactics that were repetitively deployed but seldom successful when executed by the GRU. When the tactics were successful, it was typically because they exploited mainstream media outlets; leveraged purportedly independent alternative media that acts, at best, as an uncritical recipient of contributed pieces; and used fake authors and fake grassroots amplifiers to articulate and distribute the state’s point of view. Given that many of these tactics are analogs of those used in Cold-War influence operations, it seems certain that they will continue to be refined and updated for the internet era, and are likely to be used to greater effect.

One thing you haven’t seen and probably will never see is the SIO saying Facebook is a threat, or that privately-held publishing/advertising companies are a danger to society (e.g. how tobacco companies or oil companies are a danger).