Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me
caterpillarcowboy.com
caterpillarcowboy.com
Really what he's doing is freaking out over Facebook because they've been open about what info they're collecting. While the Grocery store tricks him with a discount and then takes all his info on the back end.
If this goes tits up, it could be just the kind of surveillance needed for a 21st century locked-down police state.
The only possibly sketchy thing is they can correlate my food purchases to me and my address. However, this doesn't bother me personally. I don't care if the world knows I buy one kind of bread instead of another, or that I buy hummus instead of butter. If there are sensitive things you are paranoid about, like personal care products, just don't use the card for those purchases.
Either way, they just wind up with spending patterns on food correlated to one individual. The horror. It's not your SSN or passport or any of that jazz. Besides, if advertising became more accurately targeted, I feel that would generally be a good thing. You'd get in touch with products you were genuinely interested in, advertising costs would plummet (causing prices to drop as well), and there'd be less utterly useless cruft in the ads you receive.
[ This is all IIRC, btw. My memory could be waaay off, but it paints a picture of something is not that far-fetched from possibly being the truth in a 'it could happen to you' sort of way. ]
I had a leg up b/c I remembered that my source was slashdot.
The important part:
a major piece of evidence used against Lyons in his
arrest was the record of his supermarket purchases
that he made with his Safeway Club Card. Police
investigators had discovered that his Club Card was
used to buy fire starters of the same type used in
the arson attempt. For Lyons, the story did have a
happy ending. All charges were dropped against him in
January 2005 because another person stepped forward
saying he or she set the fire and not Lyons.
Hopefully it is not a great leap in logic to see that the justice system was what went wrong, not the club card thing.
China may have a totally different understanding on what is allowed and what not. The whole privacy data thing doesn't worry me very much in my country. But it's scary when i think of other countries.
It's the same as claiming that your privacy is safe because the company has a 'privacy policy' in place. In reality, the privacy policy say that it can change at any time and that the company has no legal obligation to notify you of these changes. These policies may change due to a change in direction at the company, or because the company is losing money and decides to sell that information to the highest bidder to stay afloat... Maybe the company is even swallowed by a larger company that then revokes all of the old privacy policies...
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/70072_loyal11.asp
This is a pretty serious outcome IMHO.
Edit: HBR article http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/d/5/7d50c016-6e60-4...
Nobody has a problem with this when it comes to auto insurance; you have a lot of tickets, you get high rates. You have too many tickets, they won't insure you. Why is it so different to give higher rates or refuse coverage to someone who treats their body like crap, when their body is what's being insured?
Counter-example: facebook.com. Supposedly that site has a lot of info on their users, yet their "targetted" ads are as useless and cruft filled as ever.
If you think publishing into their social graph is worth letting them spy on you, go for it.
If you want access to their social graph so you can unearth long-lost friends, feel free.
Personally, I don't see how any of it adds up to a fair deal in anyone's mind, but I very often am unable to understand why people do things that are against their own best interests.
You've listed the upsides, which for some people (I dare say even most people, at least outside of these circles) are quite significant - most people I know absolutely love Facebook, and feel it adds a lot to their lives. They're definitely getting something useful out of it.
But even if this advertising-pocalypse 2.0 comes to pass, what's the tangible downside for most of these people? Beyond the obvious "don't post naked pictures of yourself hitting the crack pipe right before going into your job interview" stuff, I mean.
Almost nobody actually gives a shit or a half whether some company knows what they buy, what sites they visit, what products they might be interested in, etc., as long as this stuff is not browseable by the public at large. Certainly this information could be used in ways that might hurt them, but for the most part it is merely used to try to sell them stuff that they didn't realize they might want. I just can't get behind the "ZOMG they'll try to sell me stuff that I actually might want to buy, based on what I've already bought, the HORROR!" logic, it really doesn't seem that sinister to me, and in certain contexts (Amazon, Netflix, etc.) I find it incredibly useful.
I don't use Facebook, but that's only because I value social privacy; as a rule, I don't want people I went to school with to be able to get in touch with me at all, especially not if it's as easy and impersonal as clicking a box next to my name on a list of former classmates. People that care enough can find me in any of a million other ways if they have anything specific to say to me.
But I could care less if Facebook gathers advertising data on me; I don't care one bit when Google does it, and I actually find a bit of value in it because if I'm going to be served ads, I'd prefer that they be targeted at me than completely irrelevant.
You browse for 'sexual' things in 'private browsing mode' you say? What about the insurance company finds out that you're on a rock-climbing mailing list or that you frequent a rock-climbing forum? Up goes your rates!
Access to these kinds of information need to come with a set of rules regarding how the information can be used. The problem is that hindsight is 20/20 on what rules will work the best (i.e. which are too strict, which are not strict enough, which don't do anything, which have loopholes, etc), too bad foresight isn't.
I personally don't think that private B2B contracts can get everything right, nor do I believe that the government can/will pass any laws that will fix this. Personally, I don't think that anyone can be trusted with the vast quantities of data that are out there.
The bigger issue at hand is that when you start adding up all the various public bits of information, things can get rather scary. Did you know that in Canada, a credit card company could determine potential credit risk based off whether or not an individual bought a drink in a particular bar in a particular city with fairly impressive accuracy? http://consumerist.com/2009/05/your-credit-card-company-is-b... I could easily imagine that an insurance company may want to determine risk profile for customers based off of browsing history and age, or possibly an online retailer may alter prices slightly because they know you have more income to spend and a history of not checking prices that aggressively.
The larger a presence you have, the easier it is to do that sort of thing.
Well, Google already does it better, but Facebook might be able to catch up.
By contrast on Facebook it's just a vanity contest.
One example ... I'm sometimes searching for interesting articles in an area, but without having anything specific in mind. Delicious provides way better results than browsing Reddit ... that's because on Delicious the rating is not a conscious choice.
Hmm, startup idea: a browser designed specifically to keep facebook in its place.
#!/bin/sh
test -n "$CHROMIUM_COMMAND" || CHROMIUM_COMMAND=`which chromium-browser`
test -n "$CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR" || CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR="/tmp"
USER_DATA_DIR=`mktemp -d "$CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR/clean-chromium.XXXXXXXX"`
case "$1" in
cleanup)
(cd "$CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR" && find . -name "clean-chromium.*" -print0 2>/dev/null | xargs -0 -r rm -rv )
;;
*)
chmod 700 "$USER_DATA_DIR"
echo "CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR = $CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR"
echo "USER_DATA_DIR = $USER_DATA_DIR"
echo "CHROMIUM_COMMAND = $CHROMIUM_COMMAND"
echo "Running '$CHROMIUM_COMMAND' --user-data-dir='$USER_DATA_DIR' $@"
"$CHROMIUM_COMMAND" --user-data-dir="$USER_DATA_DIR" $@
find "$USER_DATA_DIR" -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -r chmod 700
find "$USER_DATA_DIR" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -r chmod 600
;;
esacBut really chromium/chrome has the best implementation as it creates a new window and doesn't destroy your session.
Or simply block the facebook iframe urls?
What are some other dangerous scenarios that people can imagine?
In some cases, it may be that the government has better controls over who can internally access the data. Not that I necessarily trust the government to create such oversight, but the sheer amount of bureaucracy can prevent things from happening. On the other hand, there are plenty of companies that have 'organically' grown from a point were everyone was trusted, and now they have poor controls in place or they just have the bare minimum 'government mandated' controls in place to comply with the law.
In general though, I don't really think that anyone can be trusted with that sort of information.
It's covered here http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/ftc-info_mktpl.htm (buried deep in the page)
Wrong. All the medium-sized sites will have it, and all the >= 2nd place large sites (bing, retailers that aren't amazon) will have it. All the top large site will have their own systems to push.
The 21st century is all about UX, i.e. power to the people. Entities who do not recognize this will not thrive in the long-term.
I have been seriously questioning my presence on Facebook for some time now, the only thing holding me back is that a large portion of my distant friends and relatives are on Facebook, and they use it as a primary method of contact. I was an early adopter of Facebook, the amount of data they have on me over the years -- especially during my stupid years at University, scares me. When will this be used against me? Furthermore, HOW it can be used against me scares me most.
There are still plenty of people who use Facebook and even the Internet as little as possible. They can do so because there are other communication channels available and because networks other than the ones online still matter as much or more than their online networks.
The cloud and mobile computing will allow some people to opt-out of social networks, providing ecological niches for competitor networks to grow. Some youth will aways find it awkward to be on the same social network as their parents. New social networks will arise and competition will keep these networks in check.
I can not believe that Google & other ad networks have not been doing this for years already. (That's why they are networks).
I predict some migration of young people to newer, trendier social networks because of this issue.
There have been a bunch of posts about "Company X will know too much about me, . . . "
No one ever says WHY that scares the shit out of them.