Posts about google

NY Times technobias

March 13, 2013 by Jeff Jarvis
, , , , ,

nytimesp1From the headline to the lede to the chosen sources to the writing to the page-one placement, today’s New York Times coverage of Google’s $7 million settlement for the drive-by capture of wifi data is one-sided, shallow, and technopanicky.

First, let’s remind ourselves of the facts. Google’s Street View cars captured wifi addresses as they drove by as a way to provide better geolocation on our phones (this is why your phone suggests you turn on wi-fi when using maps — so you can take advantage of the directory of wifi addresses and physical addresses that Google and other companies keep). Stupidly and for no good reason, the cars also recorded other data passing on *open* wifi networks. But that data was incredibly limited: just what was transmitted in the random few seconds in which the Google car happened to pass once by an address. There is no possible commercial use, no rationally imagined nefarious motive, no goldmine of Big Data to be had. Nonetheless, privacy’s industrial-regulator complex jumped into action to try to exploit the incident. But even Germany — the rabid dog of privacy protectors — dropped the case. And the U.S. case got pocket lint from Google.

But that didn’t stop The Times from overplaying the story. Neither did it stop a CNN producer from calling me to try to whip up another technopanic story about privacy; I refused. I won’t pay into the panic.

Let’s dissect the Times story from the headline down:

* The Times calls what Google did “prying.” That implies an “improper curiosity” and an intentionality, as if Google were trying to open our drawers and find something there. It’s a loaded word.

* The lede by David Streitfeld says Google “casually scooped up passwords, e-mail and other personal information from unsuspecting computer users.” Later in the story, he says: “For several years, the company also secretly collected personal information — e-mail, medical and financial records, passwords — as it cruised by. It was data-scooping from millions of unencrypted wireless networks.”

The cars recorded whatever data was passing on these — again — *open* and *public* networks, which can be easily closed. Google was obviously not trying to vacuum up passwords. To say “unsuspecting computer users” is again loaded, as if these were victims. And to list particularly medical and financial records and not mention bits employed in playing Farmville is loaded as well.

* Here’s the worst of it: Streitfeld says unnamed “privacy advocates and Google critics characterized the overall agreement as a breakthrough for a company they say has become a serial violator of privacy.” A “serial violate or privacy”? Really? Where’s the link to this long and damning rap sheet? Facebook, maybe. But I doubt even Google’s vocal and reasonable critics would characterize the company this way. If Streitfeld found someone who said that, it should be in quotes and attributed to someone, or else he and the paper are the ones issuing this judgment.

* If anyone would say such a thing, it would certainly be the people Streitfeld did quote in the story, for he sought out only the worst of the company’s critics, including Scott Cleland, “a consultant for Google’s competitors” [cough] and Marc Rotenberg, self-styled protector of privacy at the so-called Electronic Privacy Information Center. Streitfeld also went to the attorneys general and a former FTC bureaucrat who went after Google. Nowhere in this story is there any sense of another side, let alone of context and perspective. That’s just not good reporting.

I have made it clear that I’m generally a fan of Google; I wrote a book about that. Nonetheless, I have frequently called Google’s recording of this data as its cars passed by — and this is my technical term — a fuckup. It was stupid. It was damaging to Google’s reputation. It played into the hands of the critics. That’s what I can’t stand.

I’m tired of media’s and governments’ attempts to raise undue panic about technology. Look at the silly, preemptive, and panicky coverage of Google Glass before the product is even out. A Seattle dive bar said it would ban Glass and media picked it up all over (8,000+ references at last check on Google News) — though the bar admitted, as any fool could see, that it was just a publicity stunt.

There are plenty of serious issues to discuss about protecting privacy and there is certainly a need to educate people about how to protect their privacy. But this simplistic, biased, anti-technology, panicked coverage does neither. I might expect this other outlets. But I’m sad to see The Times join in.

Note that as part of its settlement, Google will educate people to close their open wifi networks. The Times found someone to ridicule even that when its ink would have been better put to telling people how to close their networks.

: See also Phillip Dampier on the topic.

I see you: The technopanic over Google Glass

March 7, 2013 by Jeff Jarvis
, , , , ,

Screenshot 2013-03-06 at 2.45.02 PM
Google Glass isn’t available yet. Even so, the technopanic it’s inspiring is rising to full swivet. But I say there’s no need to panic. We’ll figure it out, just as we have with many technologies—from camera to cameraphone—that came before.

The greatest compilation of worries to date comes from Mark Hurst, who frets: “The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience— it’s the experience of everyone else. The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.” [His typography]

This is the fear we hear most: That someone wearing Glass will record you—because they can now—and you won’t know it. But isn’t that what we heard when cell phones added cameras? See The New York Times from a decade ago about Chicago Alderman Edward Burke:

But what Mr. Burke saw was the peril.
“If I’m in a locker room changing clothes,” he said, “there shouldn’t be some pervert taking photos of me that could wind up on the Internet.”
Accordingly, as early as Dec. 17, the Chicago City Council is to vote on a proposal by Mr. Burke to ban the use of camera phones in public bathrooms, locker rooms and showers.
His fear didn’t materialize. Why? Because we’re civilized. We’re not as rude and stupid—as perverted—as our representative, Mr. Burke, presumed us to be.

How will we deal with the Glass problem? I’ll bet that people wearing Glass will learn not to shoot those around them without asking or they’ll get in trouble; they’ll be scolded or shunned or sued, which is how we negotiate norms. I’d also bet that Google will end up adding a red light—the universal symbol for “You’re on!”—to Glass. And folks around Glass users will hear them shout instructions to their machines, like dorks, saying: “OK, Glass: Record video.”

That concern raised, Hurst escalates to the next: that pictures and video of you could be uploaded to Google’s servers, where it could be combined with facial recognition and the vastness of data about you. Facebook can’t wait to exploit this, he warns. But this is happening already. Every photo on my phone is automatically uploaded to Google; others do likewise to Facebook, each of which has facial recognition and information about us. Hurst acknowledges that we’re all recorded all day in public—remember: it is public—by security cameras. But the difference here, he argues, is that this data is held by a companies. Big companies + Big Data = Big problems, right? That’s the alarm Siva Vaidhyanathan raises:

But what’s to investigate? Should governments have investigated Kodak cameras when they came out? Well, Teddy Roosevelt did briefly ban cameras in Washington parks. In 2010, Germany’s minister of consumer protection, Ilse Aigner, decreed that tying facial recognition to geolocation would be “taboo”—though one could certainly imagine such a combination being useful in, for example, finding missing children. To ban or limit a technology before it is even implemented and understood is the definition of short-sighted.

Hurst also fears that the fuzz and the Feds could get all this data about us, these days even without warrants. I fear that, too—greatly. But the solution isn’t to limit the power of technology but to limit the power of government. That we can’t is an indication of a much bigger problem than cameras at our eyelids.

I agree with Hurst that this is worth discussing and anticipating problems to solve them. But let us also discuss the benefits alongside the perils, change to welcome balancing change we fear—the ability to get relevant information and alerts constantly, the chance to capture an otherwise-lost moment with a baby, another way to augment our own memories, and other opportunities not yet imagined. Otherwise, if we manage only to our fears, only to the worst case, then we won’t get the best case. And let’s please start here: We are not uncivilized perverts.

Yes, I’m dying to get a Google Glass and get my head around it and vice versa. But rest assured, I will ask you whether it’s OK to take a picture of you in private—just as I ask whether it’s OK to take or share your picture now or to tweet or blog something you say to me. We figured all that out. We will figure this out. We have before. No need to technopanic.

Screenshot 2013-03-06 at 2.41.47 PM

Clippings from The New York Times

Cross-posted from Medium.

LATER: A good post from Jürgen Geuter that raises the point I also wrote about in Public Parts: let’s concentrate on the use over the gathering of data; if we do the latter, we regulate what we’re allowed to know.

Voluntary media

March 3, 2013 by Jeff Jarvis
, , , , , ,

Two important but too-unsung women in media — performer Amanda Palmer and Google ad exec Susan Wojcicki — met at an idea this week: that media and advertising are becoming voluntary.

They also touch on ideas I’ve been trying to write about: that media should be in the relationship business, not just the content business. In other words, media’s value isn’t necessarily intrinsic in content — as in, “you should pay for this product because the work to create it has value” — but can be realized in the relationships that form around content.

First, the amazing Amanda: She gave a rousingly received TED talk that has been seen almost half a million times already in which she argues that artists should not be afraid to ask for support, a lesson she learned as a street and stage performer and on Kickstarter. The nut of it via BoingBoing: “By asking people, you connect with them, and by connecting with them, they want to help you. ‘When we really see each other, we want to help each other. People have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, How do we make people pay for music? What if we started asking, How do we let people pay for music?'”

Value comes to Amanda through relationships. Given the opportunity, people want to support her. In a very good post today, Reuters’ Felix Salmon contrasts her model with Andrew Sullivan’s. His purposefully mimics big media’s — from The New York Times to The Times of London: building a pay wall around content because content is valuable, damnit.

I’ve been arguing to media that relationships are more valuable. Knowing people because you have their trust and give them value builds a rich and deep relationship — builds data about that relationship — that can be far more valuable for far longer than a mere transaction.

The problem in media is that we are not built for that. We are built to serve the masses. Hell, we made the masses. Our manufacturing and investment and technology and business models have all been aimed at serving people in bulk, never as individuals because that wouldn’t scale, not in the age of presses and broadcast towers.

But now relationships do scale. See: Google. Now serving individuals scales even better and is even more valuable than mass media. Enter Susan Wojcicki, senior VP of advertising at Google, who wrote an important post on Google+ about the future of advertising. The nut of it: “In years to come, most ad views will effectively become voluntary.” Or as she also put it, choice shifts to the user in both content and advertising.

Just as it becomes difficult — in an abundance-based media world — to force people to pay for content, which is no longer scarce, it also becomes impossible to force them to see advertising, which may become more scarce (and perhaps more valuable). That means it won’t be advertising. It will be something no one — including Google — has invented yet. But Wojcicki’s thinking about what that can be. I’d bet on her finding it over a legacy media company just as I’d bet on Palmer finding a new model faster than a record company can.

The argument about paywalls — and copyright and the value of content — is the wrong argument. It’s an argument about trying to preserve old, industrial media model in a very different technological reality. I get accused of trying to kill paywalls or free content. I’m not. I’m just arguing that we need to recognize new opportunities because if we don’t, someone else will. Read: Google. Read: a street performer.

The discussion we should be having is how better to build valuable relationships of trust with people as people, not masses, and then how to exploit that value to support the work they want us to do. We can’t force them to do what we want anymore. For now, media are voluntary.

January 2, 2013 by Jeff Jarvis
, ,

In What Would Google Do? I wrote this about the idea of the Googley car company, using Zipcar — just sold to Avis — as a jumping off point to the idea of a car company as a service that gets you where you want to go (more than a manufacturer that sells you steel). Little could I know that Google was developing the self-driving car. So this morning, I fantasized that Google had instead bought Zipcar as the start of a service that just gets you where you want to go (serving you entertainment and advertising along the way). Here’s what I wrote in WWGD?:

I discussed my rationale for the open-source car platform with Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist you’ll hear from shortly, and asked him what a Googley car company would look like. He said it already exists. It’s Zipcar, which provides 5,000 cars to 200,000 drivers in various cities and campuses. Drivers join Zipcar for $50 a month, then make reservations online and pick up a car in any of a number of garages, paying $9 an hour or $65 a day in New York, including insurance, gas, and 180 miles. I can get similar rates from traditional rental companies but with less flexibility and convenience. Zipcar says each of its cars replaces 15 privately owned cars and that 40 percent of its members decide to give up owning a car. Similarly, Paris’ mayor announced in 2008 that the city would follow its successful bike-sharing program by making 4,000 electric cars available to residents to pick up and drop off at 700 locations. The goal is to get Parisians to buy fewer cars.

I know what you’re thinking (and can hear the peals of laughter all the way from Detroit): The last thing a car company should want is fewer cars. Are you nuts, Jarvis? Are you a communist or some tree-hugging fanatic? No. I’m just turning the industry upside-down. When I put the question to adman Rishad Tobaccowala, whose agency works in the auto industry, he said Detroit is not really in the business of making cars. He channeled the Googley car company and said: “I’m in the business of moving people from place A to place B. How can I do it in different ways? And as they are moving from place A to place B, how do I make them feel secure and connected?” He said that except for sleep, we spend more time moving around than at home. “Screw Starbucks as the ‘third place.’ The third place today is the automobile.” What is the automobile really about? “Navigation and entertainment,” he said—not necessarily manufacturing. Indeed, Tobaccowala said the most interesting parts of the General Motors business had been OnStar and—credit crunch aside—financing. Manufacturing is expensive, vulnerable to commodity pricing, labor-intensive, weighed down by gigantic benefit costs, and competitive. There’s the tyranny of atoms.

What if a car company became the leader in getting people around and used others’ hardware: planes, trains, and automobiles? You tell the system where you need to go—or with access to your Google Calendar, it just knows—and it gives you choices at various price points: Today, you can take the train for less. Tomorrow, you drive because you’re running errands. The day after, you carpool to save money. This weekend, you get a nice Mercedes for the anniversary dinner. Next week, you take a chauffeur-driven car to impress clients. Along the way, you can pay for options: your entertainment synced in the car, wireless connectivity on the train, alerts to your iPhone, navigation concierges who direct you around jams. This is the new personal transportation and connections company built on the old car company as a platform. Hop aboard the Googlemobile.

Taxes are an obligation, not a moral choice

December 4, 2012 by Jeff Jarvis
, , ,

In its tax fight with Google, Starbucks, and Amazon, the UK has in essence been demanding that they tax themselves: that they pay more tax than they are legally obligated to because lawmakers, in their hectoring, say that would be the “moral” thing to do.

Now see this discussion by Reuters’ brilliant Chrystia Freeland about the notion of plutocrats self-taxing. She says, quite rightly, that the concept of self-taxation is a challenge to the authority of governments: rich people are saying they can better spend their money to benefit society than society’s representatives in government can.

The irony, then: The UK’s lawmakers are undermining their own authority when they demand that Google et al meet different — perhaps higher — demands than their own laws’. They are abdicating their responsibility to write good tax laws and to negotiate tax treaties with other nations, which are attracting business and thus tax revenue from these multinational companies by offering them better deals than other countries (it’s called competition).

And therein lies another challenge to the authority of national governments: that multinational corporations can indeed play states against each other to get the best deal in minimizing taxes and thus maximizing profits (which, let’s remember, is their fiduciary raison d’etre: maximizing shareholder value). This is especially true in the digital economy, when companies can operate anywhere, even apparently nowhere (across distributed, virtual networks), and also find customers anywhere (that’s the subject of a Guardian story today lamenting the VAT taxes it loses to multinationals selling products directly to consumers, offering lower tax rates and thus better prices … which usually is seen as a good thing for consumers).

Taxation is not a moral question. It is a legal obligation. It is the role of government to write and enforce equitable tax laws for the benefit of society. In the current fight over taxes in the U.S. — which, of course, is what the fiscal cliff is all about — we see various sectors predictably acting in their own self-interest: the middle class wanting to tax the rich, the rich hoping to at least minimize that change. In the end, after much needless pain and struggle, Congress will have to pass a tax law and we will pay our taxes as is our legal duty. I would agree that is a moral duty: to serve and protect the rest of society, to give us services and to help those in need.

But if government makes taxation a matter of moral choice, then what of the law? Where is the certainty that both companies and individuals require to plan their lives if we are held to some unwritten standard? Where is the certainty of government revenue to do its work if taxes are a matter of taxpayers’ judgment?

In an age when borders are increasingly meaningless, when citizens can organize themselves, and when new and stateless armies of hackers bear new but damaging weapons, the authority of governments is being challenged on many fronts. Here governments challenge even their own authority.