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Wil Wheaton on Instagram's new ad policy

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Re: Wil Wheaton on Instagram's new ad policy

#41

Post by div »

ianstallings wrote: post #34

This is dubious at best. He doesn't use it, he's not a lawyer, and his grasp on what they are doing is plain wrong. I'm not saying that privacy concerns are moot. I'm saying Wil Wheaton is your typical self-proclaimed geek these days. He shoots from the hip at anything that might trounce his sense of entitlement.

Would you mind elaborating on how his grasp on what they're doing is plain wrong ?

Specifically, how is his example of a celebrity's silly picture being used by Instagram to advertise a silly product plain wrong ?

I also fail to see how he comes across as entitled in his post. He's merely expressing a concern, one that, at face value, seems to be pretty valid.

Re: Wil Wheaton on Instagram's new ad policy

#42

Post by rmc »

Just as we have a "do not track" option for our webbrowsing habits, we're going to need to have something similar for other aspects of our increasingly-digital lives:

Sounds like the EU's Data Protection law. Making it illegal to store personal information about people unless they have opted in, etc.

Re: Wil Wheaton on Instagram's new ad policy

#43

Post by rmc »

jerf wrote: post #27
casca wrote: post #3

Axiom 1: Company is collecting and storing personal data that you voluntarily provide Axiom 2: Company does not charge you for this service Axiom 3: Company has no other visible means of income Axiom 4: Company has non-trivial operating expenses Given that this covers a huge amount of "our digital life", there are a few possible solutions: - Keep getting services without paying money but paying with privacy - Identif…

Wil's point about companies using information about you that you did not provide, and in fact have no relationship with, business or otherwise, is a more interesting one. For some people, contact information is a very sensitive matter, and celebrities are the uninteresting case, compared to those being stalked, witness protection, etc. How are we going to deal with this? Especially in light of the fact that the data…

How are we going to deal with this?

EU law deals with it. It's illegal (and has been for decades) to store personal information about someone unless you have a legitimate, proportionate reasons etc. etc.

Re: Wil Wheaton on Instagram's new ad policy

#44

Post by peterevans »

ianstallings wrote: post #34

This is dubious at best. He doesn't use it, he's not a lawyer, and his grasp on what they are doing is plain wrong. I'm not saying that privacy concerns are moot. I'm saying Wil Wheaton is your typical self-proclaimed geek these days. He shoots from the hip at anything that might trounce his sense of entitlement.

So what, in his grasp, was wrong? I'm curious. He says "Instagram is now going to use photos taken by its users in advertising, and they may or may not disclose to viewers when the advertising is happening" -- is that incorrect? That's pretty much the only assertion he makes that could be factually wrong. Everything else in there is his opinion, which isn't "plain wrong"; it's just his opinion, just as it is yours that he's "your typical self-proclaimed geek these days" and "shoots from the hip at anything that might trounce his sense of entitlement."

Re: Wil Wheaton on Instagram's new ad policy

#45

Post by TillE »

ianstallings wrote: post #34

This is dubious at best. He doesn't use it, he's not a lawyer, and his grasp on what they are doing is plain wrong. I'm not saying that privacy concerns are moot. I'm saying Wil Wheaton is your typical self-proclaimed geek these days. He shoots from the hip at anything that might trounce his sense of entitlement.

Time to file "entitlement" alongside "hipster" as words that no longer mean anything.

Re: Wil Wheaton on Instagram's new ad policy

#46

Post by icebraining »

pretoriusB wrote: post #31
imgabe wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The backslash from the users Yes, this backlash from users is exactly what's happening. You can't simultaneously try to dissuade the backlash from happening and depend on it to prevent the undesirable events from taking place.

> Yes, this backlash from users is exactly what's happening. You can't simultaneously try to dissuade the backlash from happening and depend on it to prevent the undesirable events from taking place. No, but I CAN and AM expecting people participating in the backlash: a) NOT to behave like it's the first time they are seeing this b) NOT to behave like this move was intended as perceived, and c) NOT to behave like thi…

Question: if people behaved like this would be reverted pronto, would it still be reverted?

Re: Wil Wheaton on Instagram's new ad policy

#48

Post by courtewing »

ianstallings wrote: post #34

This is dubious at best. He doesn't use it, he's not a lawyer, and his grasp on what they are doing is plain wrong. I'm not saying that privacy concerns are moot. I'm saying Wil Wheaton is your typical self-proclaimed geek these days. He shoots from the hip at anything that might trounce his sense of entitlement.

I think I interpreted Wheaton's post in a different way than you did. To me, the author didn't seem to make any bold claims about effects this would have, and he also did not give me the impression that he was an authority on the subject.

To the contrary, I thought the theme of his post was specifically that he didn't know how Instagram's new policies would effect personal privacy, and that lack of understanding concerns him. When pondering the implications, he even goes as far as to ask whether a worrisome, fictional scenario was even a possibility rather than insisting that it would happen.

Where do you think he expressed a sense of entitlement? He's not a user of Instagram, so I didn't get the impression that he thought Instagram owed him something.

I think his whole post is a lead in to an excellent point: in the "social web" in which we all interact daily, we are seeing more and more that you don't have to use a service in any way in order to be affected by the decisions that services make about its own users' privacy. All entitlements aside, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain control over your own privacy when the details of your life are extracted not as a result of your own deliberate decisions but by the decisions of others.

Opinions about whether Wil Wheaton is a self entitled geek aside, I hope we can all agree that that is a point worthy of consideration.

Re: Wil Wheaton on Instagram's new ad policy

#49

Post by polshaw »

jws wrote: post #15

The celebrity angle is interesting here. I eventually killed a little product because it was too hard to legally acquire face shots of celebrities and it just didn't have enough zing without pictures by names. If enough celebrities used Instagram, and Instagram could figure out their accounts, they could open autopaparazzi.com.

Wikipedia? And surely you could just buy shots of them?

Re: Wil Wheaton on Instagram's new ad policy

#50

Post by jerf »

bad_user wrote: post #35
jerf wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wil's point about companies using information about you that you did not provide, and in fact have no relationship with, business or otherwise, is a more interesting one. For some people, contact information is a very sensitive matter, and celebrities are the uninteresting case, compared to those being stalked, witness protection, etc. How are we going to deal with this? Especially in light of the fact that the data…

The problem here is not that " DRM in general is impossible " and I fail to see how DRM could solve the issue with Instagram, even if DRM wasn't totally broken. Facebook can access your phone contacts and Instagram can access your photos only with your consent . You're willingly giving them that data. The far bigger issue here is that services like Instagram can take and use your data without your consent indirectly.…

You don't own somebody's phone number because you have it in your contact DB. You are willingly giving them the phone numbers of everyone in your phone book... your contacts are not giving their consent to having their data sent wherever.

DRM would, hypothetically, solve the problem of giving your phone number to somebody but not allowing them to share it further without your consent. Except, of course, it doesn't.

By the way, because after years on the net I can see this coming from miles away, let me draw a distinction in advance between "I personally don't care about my number being shared without my knowledge out of other people's contact book to arbitrary third parties", and "I don't think anybody else should ever care about having their number shared out of somebody else's contact list with arbitrary other third parties." They aren't the same thing, and if you want to argue the latter point, that can be done without trying to argue that there isn't any consent issue at all, which is simply false. Whether you consider it right or wrong, some things are happening that some people don't want to occur.

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