Category: Quotations

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Aside Quotations

2013.4.7

Robert Edwards had been on the popular dating site OKCupid.com for about six months when the administrators asked him to be a community moderator. “They wrote and said I am a responsible user, whatever that means,” he recalled, admitting that at first he was befuddled. Though fairly active on the site, Edwards, a medical professional who lives in the Mission District, had remained a confirmed bachelor.

But curiosity drove him to click the “moderation” button, and within minutes he was reading people’s messages to each other and perusing profiles flagged for possible terms of service violations.

Online love-seekers might not be aware of it, but OKCupid has deputized random strangers to gain access to intimate conversations between others — correspondence that many users, as well as Internet privacy experts, assumed to be private.

Testing Online Privacy Limits, OKCupid Lets Strangers Read Intimate Messages | San Francisco Public Press (via new-aesthetic)

Well, this is interesting. I mean, I get why the company is outsourcing this to free laborers, but wow. I wonder how many of these services’ users are aware of how moderation is performed

Categories
Quotations

2013.4.7

You should get out of town”, the man said.

And so began the journey that resulted in my path intersecting with Matthew Duncan’s path. And thence to these reasons, with a slight detour through territory that might have confused Lewis Carroll.

I suppose that I should clarify that there was no menace in the man’s directive to me to get out of town. He was a friend and a colleague in two careers. His suggestion had been that he and I should change positions for a fortnight, giving him exposure to the realities of the northern reaches of Toronto, while I would enjoy a similar change of environment in the more sylvan environs of Niagara Region. I might even see a few plays in the evenings, he pointed out.

And thus I came to meet Mr. Duncan.

At heart, Mr. Duncan’s case was unremarkable. A minor alleged Highway Traffic Act offence led to a police-citizen interaction in the parking lot of Mr. Duncan’s apartment building in the wee hours of the morning. A request that Mr. Duncan produce his licence led to an alleged refusal, which led to an attempt to arrest him, which led to a struggle, which was captured on a very poor quality video taken on a mobile phone, at the end of which Mr. Duncan found himself being placed under arrest for allegedly assaulting a police officer. Nothing unusual in all that. The bread and butter of provincial court.

Of course, I hadn’t counted on the freemen on the land.

Ontario Court of Justice, “Between: Her Majesty The Queen AND Mathew Duncan”

Seriously: this is an absolutely hilarious provincial court decision. Worth skimming (at least!) for the laughs.

Categories
Quotations

2013.4.5

Much of the information collected by CIFA [Counterintelligence Field Activity] was amassed in a database called Talon, which stands for Threat and Local Observation Notice. Under a classified order data July 20, 2005, and reported in the Washington Post by military affairs blogger William Arkin, CIFA was allowed to collect information about U.S. citizens in Talon if there was reason to believe those citizens were connected to international terrorist activities, narcotics traffic, and foreign intelligence organizations and were a “threat” to DoD installations and personnel (“In other words,” Arkin commented, “some military gumshoe or over-zealous commander just has to decide [that] someone is a ‘threat to’ the military”). CIFA also obtained information about U.S. persons from the NSA and the DIA. As it turned out, however, many of these threatening people were antiwar activists, and the information about them came from monitoring meetings held in churches, libraries, college campuses, and other locations.

Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. Pp. 178.
Categories
Quotations

2013.4.5

But perhaps the most important recent development at Facebook is one that has no immediate bearing on the company’s finances. In October, Brad Smallwood, Facebook’s head of monetization analytics—a convoluted, five-dollar title that obscures his importance at the company—took to the stage at a marketers’ conference to announce that Facebook had formed a partnership with Datalogix, a market-analytics firm with purchasing information on about 70 million American homes. Under the agreement between the companies, Facebook would be able to measure whether a user’s exposure to an ad on the site was correlated with that person’s making a purchase at a store.

That type of information is essential for Facebook. Put simply, many corporations are still mired in click-through data, a standard of analysis that fails to fully reflect purchasing activity generated by online advertising. “The click is a terrible predictor of off-line sales,” Smallwood says. “Every research company knows that’s true.”

Still, Smallwood acknowledges, Wall Street continues to view clicks as the critical measure of online-ad performance. “At some level, people have gotten used to the click, and they still want to see the click when they deal with online,” he says. “It’s kind of our job to explain that that is not necessarily the best measure.”

The numbers from the early studies are powerful. Some 70 percent of the campaigns that were measured showed sales equal to three times or more the amount spent for the ads; 49 percent brought in at least five times what the ad had cost.

Kurt Eichenwald, “Facebook Leans In”
Categories
Quotations

2013.4.5

The new Home app/UX/quasi-OS is deeply integrated into the Android environment. It takes an effort to shut it down, because Home’s whole premise is to be always on and be the dashboard to your social world. It wants to be the start button for apps that are on your Android device, which in turn will give Facebook a deep insight on what is popular. And of course, it can build an app that mimics the functionality of that popular, fast-growing mobile app. I have seen it done before, both on other platforms and on Facebook.

But there is a bigger worry. The phone’s GPS can send constant information back to the Facebook servers, telling it your whereabouts at any time.

(…)

And most importantly it is Facebook, a company that is known to have played loose-and-easy with consumer privacy and data since its very inception, asking for forgiveness whenever we caught them with its hand in the cookie jar. I don’t think we can be that forgiving or reactive with Facebook on mobile.

Om Malik, “Why Facebook Home bothers me: It destroys any notion of privacy”
Categories
Aside Quotations

2013.3.30

The determination by Congress and President Barack Obama’s administration to protect networks of critical U.S. industries from hackers and cyberspies is creating an explosive growth opportunity – for lobbyists.

There were 513 filings by consultants and companies to press Congress on cybersecurity by the end of 2012, up 85 percent from 2011 and almost three times as many as in 2010, according to U.S. Senate filings. Twelve firms have submitted new registrations this year on behalf of companies including Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Motorola Mobility unit, Symantec Corp. (SYMC), United Parcel Service Inc. (UPS) and Ericsson Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Stockholm-based Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson.

Eric Engleman & Jonathan D. Salant, “Cybersecurity Lobby Surges as Congress Considers New Laws”

I’m sure the lobbyists are only there as good patriotic Americans, aiming to best ensure that Americans are kept safe and Congresspeople and Senators (and their associated staff) just get the best information possible. No way that, in the wake of US scaremongering, lobbyists are looking to massively expand ‘security’ projects to the detriment of Americans’ privacy and (almost comically) security interest. Right?

Categories
Quotations Writing

“Commercially Friendly” Privacy Rules

Dr. Pentland, an academic adviser to the World Economic Forum’s initiatives on Big Data and personal data, agrees that limitations on data collection still make sense, as long as they are flexible and not a “sledgehammer that risks damaging the public good.”

He is leading a group at the M.I.T. Media Lab that is at the forefront of a number of personal data and privacy programs and real-world experiments. He espouses what he calls “a new deal on data” with three basic tenets: you have the right to possess your data, to control how it is used, and to destroy or distribute it as you see fit.

Personal data, Dr. Pentland says, is like modern money — digital packets that move around the planet, traveling rapidly but needing to be controlled. “You give it to a bank, but there’s only so many things the bank can do with it,” he says.

His M.I.T. group is developing tools for controlling, storing and auditing flows of personal data. Its data store is an open-source version, called openPDS. In theory, this kind of technology would undermine the role of data brokers and, perhaps, mitigate privacy risks. In the search for a deep fat fryer, for example, an audit trail should detect unauthorized use.

Steve Lohr, “Big Data Is Opening Doors, but Maybe Too Many”

So, I don’t really get how Pentland’s system is going to work any better than the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) work that was done a decade ago. Spoiler alert: P3P failed. Hard. And it was intended to simultaneously enhance users’ privacy online (by letting them establish controls on how their personal information was accessed and used) whilst simultaneously giving industry something to point to, in order to avoid federal regulation.

There is a prevalent strain of liberalism that assumes that individuals, when empowered, are best suited to control the dissemination of their personal information. However, it assumes that knowledge, time, and resourcing are equal amongst all parties. This clearly isn’t the case, nor is it the case that individuals are going to be able to learn when advertisers and data miners don’t respect privacy settings. In effect: control does not necessarily equal knowledge, nor does it necessarily equal capacity to act given individuals’ often limited fiscal, educational, temporal, or other resources.

Categories
Quotations

2013.3.28

Right now, in Montreal, the very right to protest, that most fundamental right to freedom of expression, is under assault. If we give in, and stay home for fear of these preposterous tickets, we will have lost not just the battle but the war itself. Indeed, the worst part about these tactics is that they work. I know many friends who will no longer go to protests for fear of arrest and a ticket they cannot afford. What a sad state of affairs when the police bully and intimidate citizens out of exercising their right to criticize the government. So go to the demos, go to all the demos, and prove you will not let fear and intimidation win out. If you get a ticket, contest it. The legal resources to ensure you succeed are freely available. And no matter what you do, make sure to go to the demo on the 22nd of April, which I think should be branded as a manif in defence of our civil liberties. If there are enough people in the streets, the cops can’t do a thing. Small crowds are what allow these abuses.

When our police force denies that we have any right to peacefully express our dissent, there is no recourse but to fight tooth and nail to protect our rights. This is far too important an issue to let slide.

Ethan Cox, “‘There is no right to protest’: Montreal police deny Charter rights”
Categories
Quotations

2014.3.26

That smartphones allow us to imprison twice the number of people at half the cost is the kind of cutting-edge innovation that only management consultants and tech entrepreneurs would be excited about. Such breakthroughs would be worth celebrating if they didn’t distract us from the more radical (and simpler) solution to the problem of overcrowded prisons: incarcerating fewer people.

Smart technologies are not just disruptive; they can also preserve the status quo. Revolutionary in theory, they are often reactionary in practice.

…

Smart technology, thanks to its ubiquity and affordability, offers us the cheapest — and trendiest — fix. But the gleaming aura of disruption-talk that often accompanies such fixes masks their underlying conservatism. Technological innovation does not guarantee political innovation; at times, it might even impede it. The task ahead is to prevent our imagination from being incarcerated by smart technologies. Or should we settle for gamifying ourselves to death?

Evgeny Morozov, “Imprisoned by Innovation”
Categories
Quotations Writing

2013.3.26

But in the long run that’s a problem for Google. Because we tend not to entrust this sort of critical public infrastructure to the private sector. Network externalities are all fine and good to ignore so long as they mainly apply to the sharing of news and pics from a weekend trip with college friends. Once they concern large swathes of economic output and the cognitive activity of millions of people, it is difficult to keep the government out. Maybe that deterrent will be sufficient to keep Google providing its most heavily used products. But maybe not.

Huh. This Economist article seems to be in favour of nationalizing the internet? And most other services?

(via towerofsleep)

I think that the focus was more on the services provided by private companies, as opposed to infrastructure itself (i.e. not the wires, but the stuff that runs on the wires). But I think The Economist has a point that governments could be involved if services that are perceived (note: perception does not necessarily correspond with empirical facts) as essential are threatened.

What really threw me in the piece was this paragraph:

But that makes it increasingly difficult for Google to have success with new services. Why commit to using and coming to rely on something new if it might be yanked away at some future date? This is especially problematic for “social” apps that rely on network effects. Even a crummy social service may thrive if it obtains a critical mass. Yanking away services beloved by early adopters almost guarantees that critical masses can’t be obtained: not, at any rate, without the provision of an incentive or commitment mechanism to protect the would-be users from the risk of losing a vital service.

I mean: I really, really, really use Google Reader. I use the shit out of it on a daily basis. I’m the definition of one of their power users, with hundreds of sites subscribed to – often ones that only get updates every month or two, but that are super helpful for my research – and so I’m far from impressed that Google’s shuttering the service. Reader lets me hold onto the long-tail of the Internet.

But: I’m not certain how a writer can clearly link ‘early adopter’ with yanking away Google Reader. I mean, it’s an older(ish) service. We’re not talking about something that was spawned a few months ago. I get that the write might have been obliquely referring to the social functions of reader that were stripped out a year or so back, but still: there’s no way (at the time of Reader’s social demise) that you can imagine those individuals as ‘early adopters’. The product was mature (as far as many Internet products go) and just didn’t have a lot of people using the service for social purposes beyond a pretty vocal minority.

I want to be clear that I’m already dreading the loss of Google Reader. Seriously dreading. But the article in The Economist is kind of weird insofar as it mixes what are arguably fair points with insider baseball and vaguely suggested ‘beware government regulators if you screw with the services your users really use.“