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The Internet With A Human Face

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Re: The Internet With A Human Face

#11

Post by thaumaturgy »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #5

The formatting of this article itself is something worth studying. It's brilliantly seductive to read and read all of it. The pictures/slides by each paragraph were like rewards, continually luring me to the next paragraph. For the first time in a long time. I read every single word. Not skimmed. Although I disagree with the idea of regulating how long behavioral data is saved. Not all behavioral data is sensitive. R…

> Not all behavioral data is sensitive.

Maybe not, but I am surprised on a regular basis at inventive new uses for data that I had never before imagined. At this point, I think a safer default is, "all behavioral data is sensitive", until we better understand how all of this stuff works.

> Inflating databases and costing money.

Everything costs money. It is meaningless to point out that something costs money without attaching a number to it. Databases would be inflated by four or 8 bytes per datum; at 500 million rows, you'd add between 8 and 16 GB to a database that is likely very much larger already. I really don't see this being an insurmountable engineering challenge.

> These obligations must be handed down from company to company during acquisitions. A company selling data about to expire will get acquired for a lot less than a company with fresh data. This may in turn cause a series of unforseen consequences in the acquisition market.

This is a feature, not a bug.

> Rather than controlling and manipulating what can and cannot be done, it may be best to just create transparent policies and let the free market converse its way towards a compromise.

One of the central points of the lecture was that there is insufficient competition in some very important parts of the internet right now. Those companies could easily say, "Our policy is that we keep everything forever and there's nothing you can do about it", and it would not affect their business at all because they have no competitors.

Regulations exist in the real world for a good reason, and we're rapidly approaching a point where regulation is exactly the appropriate solution for some of these problems.

Re: The Internet With A Human Face

#12

Post by thaumaturgy »

This was excellent. It described some of the reluctance I've had towards social networks since 2000 at least.

It's also a little bit funny that it was written by the guy behind pinboard.in, a nice social bookmarking service (where many people went when del.icio.us died). But that makes me trust the service more, not less.

Which probably means I am stupid.

Re: The Internet With A Human Face

#13

Post by L_Rahman »

alecdbrooks wrote: post #10
L_Rahman wrote: post #2

Still reading the talk, but as an aside wanted to point out that the way the transcript is formatted with the words alongside the slides is probably the best way I've seen a talk presented in text form on the internet.

He's uploaded talks in this format before. Thoreau 2.0 [0] is a particularly good one. [0]: https://static.pinboard.in/xoxo_talk_thoreau.htm Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eky5uKILXtM

This was great. Thanks for bringing it up.

Re: The Internet With A Human Face

#15

Post by jay_neyer »

angersock wrote: post #7

There's a rather hilarious portion (in an otherwise soul-crushing deck): the author is trying to figure out what this massive dragnet and mining of their information has actually gotten, and so they look at all of the ads they get served. This bring forth this gem: "There was an ad for the new Pixies album. This was the one ad that was well targeted; I love the Pixies. I got the torrent right away. "

The thing I wondered was whether that was deliberate or not. Charles Duhigg talks about this in his book on habits. Target has the data to identify expecting mothers. Rather than bombarding strictly baby related photos, they careful include seemingly other unrelevant ads so it doesnt come off as intrusive.

Although I will say that in my own ad experience, the ads have generally been more related to my interests than this author describes. .

Re: The Internet With A Human Face

#16

Post by munro »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #5

The formatting of this article itself is something worth studying. It's brilliantly seductive to read and read all of it. The pictures/slides by each paragraph were like rewards, continually luring me to the next paragraph. For the first time in a long time. I read every single word. Not skimmed. Although I disagree with the idea of regulating how long behavioral data is saved. Not all behavioral data is sensitive. R…

It doesn't make sense that a company would expire data, it's not illegal, and users are not the customers to companies like Facebook, and Google. Users are the product to advertising.

A more concrete solution would be to own our own data for these kinds of services, and pay for the active development & hosting. I'm all for this, and hope to see business like this in the future, I would definitely pay for Facebook if it were possible.

Some issues I could see with allowing the free market to yield, is allowing interoperability with existing services. Is it illegal to plug Diaspora into Facebook and redirect friends to my service? I'm sure it's against their ToS, and I bet Facebook will do everything in it's power to protect it's product.

Also, credit card fees make it difficult to implement micro transactions. If I charge someone $1, 32.9% will go to fees [1]. I like fiat currencies, but the government should really step in and clean up the infrastructure. Credit card companies are centralized services for our transactions, held in power by the government. Paying with cash is amazingly decentralized, and crypto currencies accomplish the same effect on the internet. If our government designed a better currency for the internet, it would give more power to the free market.

[1] https://stripe.com/us/pricing

Re: The Internet With A Human Face

#17

Post by coldtea »

>There was an ad for the new Pixies album. This was the one ad that was well targeted; I love the Pixies. I got the torrent right away.

I laughed very hard on this!

In all, an excellent article. I disagree with blind faith in technology to solve all our problems and not create new ones

People often forget that technology is tools (and not always neutral tools, as is another naive belief: some inventions have larger inherent "harm potential"), and that policy matters as much, or even more, as does the kind of cultural landscape we guide our use of the tools.

(Remember the classic xkcd comic: http://xkcd.com/538/ ).

Re: The Internet With A Human Face

#18

Post by coldtea »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #5

The formatting of this article itself is something worth studying. It's brilliantly seductive to read and read all of it. The pictures/slides by each paragraph were like rewards, continually luring me to the next paragraph. For the first time in a long time. I read every single word. Not skimmed. Although I disagree with the idea of regulating how long behavioral data is saved. Not all behavioral data is sensitive. R…

>let the free market converse its way towards a compromise.

There's no "free market" that's an ideology (a made-up idea of how the world is that obscures one's thinking).

With government: I have more money than you, and I have friends in Washington. I'll use it to push things my way.

(And lest somebody suggest: "sure, the problem is government", here's the government less version:)

Without government: I have more money and/or power than you, and I have you beat to a pulp, and also spend it to make people go along with my propositions. I'll use it to push things my way.

Usually is a mix of 1 and 2. E.g most Latin American countries, for example, there's not much of a "free market" with regards to their exports/materials because stronger countries force them (with military might, diplomatic pressure, juntas, putting friendly lackeys in power, briding, etc) to go with their way. A powerful country can spend tens of millions of dollars just to promote a favorable candidate in power in a smaller countries (easily recouperated in a day's worth of profits from resource and trade agreements).

And of course with things as a patent system, intellectual property, etc, there's no free market also. The IP owner sets the terms, and you cannot offer the same thing for a reduced price even if you can.

Re: The Internet With A Human Face

#19

Post by munro »

coldtea wrote: post #18
ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #5

The formatting of this article itself is something worth studying. It's brilliantly seductive to read and read all of it. The pictures/slides by each paragraph were like rewards, continually luring me to the next paragraph. For the first time in a long time. I read every single word. Not skimmed. Although I disagree with the idea of regulating how long behavioral data is saved. Not all behavioral data is sensitive. R…

> let the free market converse its way towards a compromise. There's no "free market" that's an ideology (a made-up idea of how the world is that obscures one's thinking). With government: I have more money than you, and I have friends in Washington. I'll use it to push things my way. (And lest somebody suggest: "sure, the problem is government", here's the government less version:) Without government: I have more mo…

> There's no "free market" that's an ideology (a made-up idea of how the world is that obscures one's thinking).

Everything is a made up idea that obscures one's thinking. I think I have to drive on roads, but really nothing is stopping me. I could get through traffic faster if I just started driving on the shoulder, but the problem is if everyone did that it would be chaos, and would be worse overall. Systems have the potential to create a net good.

Re: The Internet With A Human Face

#20

Post by abrowne »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #12

This was excellent. It described some of the reluctance I've had towards social networks since 2000 at least. It's also a little bit funny that it was written by the guy behind pinboard.in, a nice social bookmarking service (where many people went when del.icio.us died). But that makes me trust the service more, not less. Which probably means I am stupid.

Pinboard does describe itself as "antisocial bookmarking" (and "Social Bookmarking for Introverts"). Delicious seemed to me to be about making bookmarking social. Pinboard seems to be about bookmarking with some social options.

[Edited to add more context.]

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