Messaging App Jott Is Blowing Up Among Junior High and High Schoolers
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
> OWN YOUR PRIVACY
> Stop wondering what happens to your photos and texts after you hit send. Jott’s privacy features, such as screenshot detection and disappearing chats, keep you in control of your privacy.
I hear a lot of people say that kids growing up today will be immune to surveillance since they grew up with it, and will likely not care it's happening.
But the privacy of their chats and photos seems pretty important to them, so I question the validity of this stance. Maybe thanks to Snapchat for making this type of feature easy and accessible.
A) Anyone who wants to bypass this protection and is slightly tech savvy can.
B) The illusion of safety is more dangerous than a true lack of safety. You can't be betrayed if you don't trust in the first place.
As engineers we can solve the technical issues over time and improve the status quo, but changing peoples behaviour is incredibly hard.
All of the most effective encryption tools in the world won't matter - in the context of privacy - if people don't care about them, or are aware of the risks that exist, or if the tools aren't designed in a way to be usable by the average human.
Yes, the fact people adopt the Apps/Technologies that claim to have security/privacy functions is a good thing from a behavior/demand perspective.
I just worry they'll get burned by how poor the implementations are and end up with something embarrassing on the internet that floats around forever.
1. Flushed all our old social ideas down the toilet
2. Had raucous, loud celebrations of our new freedoms
3. Discovered the problems that prompted the old social ideas
4. Started the long, slow process of groping for new social
ideals
5. Re-discovering the old social ideals actually had reasons
and that rather than discarding them and replacing
them wholesale we'd have been a lot better off
tweaking them.
(And to be clear, in step 5, a lot of our ideals do need tweaking; that's not a rhetorical concession, but a core part of the process. But I'd submit we've thrown out far more baby with the bathwater than almost anybody in modern times is any longer equipped to understand.)
The short stories of R.A. Lafferty contain many instances of such patterns, often as historical or science fiction.
An overview of his style, http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/aug/13/ra-la...
His most popular collection was Nine Hundred Grandmothers, http://www.ralafferty.org/works/collections/nine-hundred-gra...
Most of his work is out of print or rare, but a search for "Man Who Talled Tales" may help.
Then again, the world has been through a lot in the last couple of centuries.
I view it as similarly to how it seems like the programming world is in such fast flux. On the one hand, a Javascript framework comes out every week and you MUST MUST MUST change everything to using it or you're falling behind! On the other hand, I can't help but notice the computer science undergrad curriculum hasn't hardly budged an inch since I took it 1996-2000, nor can I help but notice that for all the sound & fury of web development, 2015-me could pretty much bring 2005-me up to speed in a couple of days. (A smidge of cheat there... 2005-me had actually written a pure-JS widget system that I can't necessarily call "modern", but let's just say that "shadow DOMs" wouldn't exactly blow 2005-me's mind either.) There's a lot of high-frequency churn... there's a lot less fundamental change. Again, not zero. But a lot less. A study of history will even show a lot of modern trends you think are unique in history may not be.
On topic, "the need for privacy" is one of these things. Many have heralded a generation who has no need of privacy, but then, as we all live in the "global village", we are slowly groping back towards some of the very same ideals of privacy that villages used to have, for instance, or at least I'd contend that over time in lots of little ways people tend to rediscover that just chucking the entire idea overboard wasn't smart. That's not a religion, nor directly a hot-button issue. And should we ever decide that totalitarianism sounds totally awesome and we should totally do it, a whole bunch of people will have the opportunity to rediscover the virtues of privacy. "Yay."
I really don't care if the NSA reads them, to be quite honest, since I don't really know them and they're not really going to have much to do with anything. I'm not a terrorist, I'm not going to be flagged. And I know that my parents and teachers can't access the NSA's data banks.
Surveillance is different than privacy. Please don't confuse the two.
So they're acquiring 10-20K broke users a day? So acquisition is the only way this company stays alive..
Another possibility the users could have a data plan but prefer not to use it/ are out of data for the month. My much younger siblings on my father's plan are limited to a portion of the data plan (enforced by verizon plan options) and once they go over that they can't get data anymore.
But that won't happen. They'll continue to play imaginary company, acquiring a heavier and heavier daily burden of seemingly broke users.
Sidenote: how do teens spend money online nowadays? When I was < 18 I used a paypal account + credit card in my parent's name. Have technologies like Bitcoin changed payment patterns amongst the teen demographic?
That business model is broke, just like the students.
It seems to be the European countries that have users willing to pick up "data-free" apps.
For instance, her first week with a phone, my kid managed to consume almost half of the shared plan for the month. So that phone now has a hard cap set on data usage, and was wi-fi only until it reset for the new billing cycle. For bonus points, much of that time was spent at a Luddite relative's house who did not have a home Internet connection (though leeching off the neighbors was barely possible).
That wasn't even a grounding. Parents may wish to lock down a kid's phone to the point where it doesn't do anything but communicate with whitelisted contacts or place a voice call to emergency services. Taking the phone away, the only sure-fire way to eliminate undesired uses, also eliminates the phone's use as a tattletale/tracker for the parents. Parents who are not tech savvy may not even realize that mesh networking even exists, and thus Jott may present a partial countermeasure to grounding restrictions.
I have also seen social posts wherein parents encourage the completion of chores by changing the wi-fi password and giving out one character of it to their kids per chore done. Teen-to-teen meshes sabotage that strategy.
The average boy sends 2,815 text messages per month? 94 per day? 6 per waking hour, every hour, every day, every week for a month? On average?
The average girl sends 8 text messages per waking hour, every hour?
Wow.
If you phrase it as "the average teen says 94 sentences to his friends each day", that doesn't sound so extreme. And a good portion of those sentence will come in a few much longer conversations.