Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride Home for Wednesday, October 24th, 2018.

I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Tim Cook attacks the Data Industrial Complex, why political texts are flooding your phone,

the US, China, and the AI Cold War, and how Facebook Messenger got its new look.

Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.

Today, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave a Barnburner keynote speech at the 40th International Conference

of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners in Brussels.

His speech was a chilling warning about the dangers of what he called the data industrial complex.

Harkening back to President Eisenhower's 1962 message to Americans about the growing power of the so-called military industrial

complex during the Cold War. Let me start by quoting a section of Cook's speech.

Our own information from the everyday to the deeply personal is being weaponized against us with military efficiency.

These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded, and sold.

Taken to its extreme, this process creates an enduring digital profile and lets companies know

you better than you may know yourself. Your profile is then run

through algorithms that serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our

harmless preferences into hardened convictions. If green is your favorite color you may find yourself reading

a lot of articles or watching a lot of videos about the insidious threat from people who like

orange. In the news almost every day we bear witness to the harmful even deadly effects of these narrowed

world views.

We shouldn't sugarcoat the consequences.

This is surveillance." end quote.

He also warned about the danger of training artificial intelligence based on identifiable

data about users.

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