Christopher Mackay's Blog

I’ve read Wake, the first of Sawyer’s WWW (Wake, Watch, Wonder) trilogy, and am nearly finished Watch. They are, as always with Sawyer, excellent.

In the WWW trilogy Sawyer’s exploring the meaning and consequences of several varieties of consciousness — human, primate and artificial. Throw in BlackBerrys, EyePods [not a typo], a LiveJournaling blind-from-birth teenage math-wiz protagonist transplanted from Texas to Kitchener-Waterloo and artistically-inclined webcam-chatting primates, and you’re getting the idea.

It’s a little weird seeing a trailer for a novel that isn’t also the trailer for a movie, but Sawyer’s work is such a natural fit for the screen, that it only makes sense:

Plus it makes it look like the web’s made of electic jellyfish, so how cool is that?

Visit Sawyer’s website: sfwriter.com.

It might be handy to keep my bookmarked articles about Facebook’s recent troubles regarding the backlash against their heavy-handed and arrogant approach to their members’ privacy. These are roughly in chronological order, starting on May 7th:

• May 7, 2010 — Wired kicks things off with “Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative”. Best lines:
  

  Facebook thinks that your notions of privacy — meaning your ability to control information about yourself — are just plain old-fashioned. Head honcho Zuckerberg told a live audience in January that Facebook is simply responding to changes in privacy mores, not changing them — a convenient, but frankly untrue, statement… In Facebook’s view, everything (save perhaps your e-mail address) should be public. Funny too about that e-mail address, for Facebook would prefer you to use its e-mail–like system that censors the messages sent between users….

  I’d like to make my friend list private. Cannot.

  I’d like to have my profile visible only to my friends, not my boss. Cannot.

  I’d like to support an anti-abortion group without my mother or the world knowing. Cannot.

• “Facebook Executive Answers Reader Questions” — The New York Times publishes Elliot Schrage’s answers to readers’ questions about Facebook privacy (Schrage is vp for public policy at Facebook).
• May 11 — I deactivate my Facebook account.
• Why I’ve (re)joined the 6,400,000,000 people who aren’t on Facebook, my post explaining my reasons for deactivating my Facebook account.
• The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook — an infographic showing changes over time in Facebook’s privacy settings.
• Leo Laporte publically leaves Facebook. (But he likes Google Buzz, so what does he know?
• “Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options”, The New York Times publishes an infographic depicting Facebook’s Byzantine configuration options. Money quote: “Everything is opt-in on Facebook”; in the limited sense that if you opt-in to Facebook at all, then it’s open season on you and your privacy, in other words. The mind boggles. (I especially liked John Gruber’s response to this article: “Or you can manage it my way, by never having signed up for it.”)
• Diaspora, an open, distributed (vaporware) alternative to Facebook gets a lot of attention and some funding for their project. Keep an eye on this one.
• Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant) by danah boyd of apophenia. Favorite quote:
  

  What I find most fascinating in all of the discussions of transparency is the lack of transparency by Facebook itself.

  Boyd puts her finger on Facebook’s core issue, for me:
  

  A while back, I was talking with a teenage girl about her privacy settings and noticed that she had made lots of content available to friends-of-friends. I asked her if she made her content available to her mother. She responded with, “of course not!” I had noticed that she had listed her aunt as a friend of hers and so I surfed with her to her aunt’s page and pointed out that her mother was a friend of her aunt, thus a friend-of-a-friend. She was horrified. It had never dawned on her that her mother might be included in that grouping.

  If too many people come to this realization, Facebook’s in serious trouble.

• TidBITs, the venerable Mac-focused tech journal, publishes “How to Protect Your Privacy from Facebook”
• “‘Firestorm of anger’ hits Facebook after EU condemns privacy policy”. Opening paragraph:
  

  A friend of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg asked him, back in 2004, after the 19-year-old had casually mentioned in an online conversation that 4,000 people had uploaded their personal information to his fledgling website: “How did you manage that?” He typed back: “They just submitted it. I don’t know why. They ‘trust me’,” then indiscreetly described them as “dumbfucks”.

• A bookmarklet that can scan your Facebook account‘s privacy settings is launched.
• quitfacebookday.com launches.
• From Facebook, answering privacy concerns with new settings, Mark Zuckerberg’s Washington Post op-ed in which he says he’s sorry. He also writes to Scoble.
• Adopted children face anguish as birth parents stalk them on Facebook — in case anyone doubts that people have good reasons to care about their privacy.
• Tim O’Reilly’s “My Contrarian Stance on Facebook and Privacy” — he’s willing to give Facebook a chance, for now.
• Macworld Quit Facebook Day was a success even as it flopped | Security

Put me down as unimpressed.

It has been suggested that Facebook will be regulated, and that might make everything okay. The oil industry is regulated; how’s that working out?

I don’t actually expect Facebook to make any serious, long-term improvements to privacy. It’s in their members’ interest for them to do so, but it opposes their own financial interests. Guess which will win? I don’t expect many people will abandon their accounts over this, either. It has long been shown that people don’t value their privacy, and Facebook knows this.

I’ve had it with Facebook.

Seriously. I’m out.

Wired has an article on Facebook privacy that articulates a number of my reasons.

Fundamentally, I think people are missing the big picture with regard to online services such as those offered by companies like Google or Facebook. Yes, they offer services, and those services have value.

And while they might be free, they also have a cost. Whether or not they’re worth the cost is a decision you have to make for yourself.

Facebook, like Google, makes its money selling advertising, and the more they know about the users of their services, the more they can charge for their ads.

The members are the product. (Marshall McLuhan would love it.)

This isn’t my idea (I’ve forgotten where I came across it now), but it’s a powerful one. It explains fully why (Facebook founder) Zuckerberg has zero interest in protecting anyone’s privacy.

His best interests are directly at odds with his site’s members’.

For me, Facebook became more nuisance than it was worth when I started wasting more and more of my time trying to locate settings that would allow me to opt-out of whatever it was that they’d just decided everyone on the planet needed to know about me that they have previously allowed me to share only with Friends.

Enough.

That’s why I’m out.

People talk dismissively about Twitter, about how insignificant it is since it only has an estimated 100 million users* compared to Facebook’s 400 million.

How many hundred million “friends” does any one person need?

The last straw was how Facebook taunted me by telling me that my friends were going to miss me, and how none of them would be able to contact me any more. Unbelievable arrogance.

Count me in with the 6.4 billion people who aren’t on Facebook.

11 pm Update: The New York Times interview with Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at Facebook, underscores my reasons: Facebook is opt-in, he claims, because if you’re a member, you’ve opted-in for whatever the hell they decide. No, thanks.

11:07 pm update: NY Times’ Facebook privacy infographic: “A Bewildering Tangle of Options”. Via DaringFireball.net. [Also added "Privacy" tag.]

Banner day for EMI: “OK Go Ditches Label Over YouTube Embedding Rights“

(Via @johnsgunn.)

PinkFloyd.co.uk has won a court ruling against EMI in their suit preventing EMI from selling individual tracks online.

Should they choose to enforce the ruling (they might simply have wanted to prevent EMI from stepping outside of their agreement, thereby establishing precedent, or they might be using the ruling as a bargaining position come renegotiation time), I can’t see how this doesn’t amount to Pink Floyd cutting off their noses to spite their faces.

A few things come to mind:

1. While it’s true that the Gilmour/Mason/Wright version of Pink Floyd did perform Dark Side as a set during the latter half of Division Bell tour in 1995, as did Roger Waters on his 2007 tour, they’ve both regularly played songs from many of their ‘concept albums’ individually, too. This implies that the suit was ether about money or control, or both.
2. If it’s about money, I wish them luck. Die-hard fans will, of course, buy the full albums either way, if they haven’t already bought multiple copies over the years (my Dark Side of the Moon collection is ridiculous), but casual fans will want to buy Money, Comfortably Numb and Wish You Were Here. Which group do you suppose represents the larger market?
3. This sounds like an attempt to control how people listen to their music. A) Why bother? B) Get over yourselves. I like Pink Floyd and Roger Waters’ music more than most, but I certainly don’t listen to it the way it was released. Who has that kind of time? (It must be said, though, that Wish You Were Here is the greatest rock album ever made, regardless of what fans of Exile on Main Street might say)

But why is this futile? Because people don’t want it.

Adam Engst, of TidBITS (@tidbits), wrote a thoughtful opinion piece called The Rise and Fall of Bundle-based Business in which he states:

All this unbundling happened due to customer demand and because new technology, largely the Internet, made it possible. After all, who hasn’t felt slightly cheated after buying an album and discovering that some of its songs are far less appealing than others, or realizing that none of the articles in a magazine were compelling enough to read? This shouldn’t be surprising: enabling each member of a family to order a completely different meal in a restaurant has long been seen as “better” than a home-cooked meal where everyone is forced to share the same dishes, whether or not they are equally well liked. Unbundling promotes choice, and, within reason, people like choice.

Are David Gilmour and Nick Mason (Pink Floyd’s surviving members) within their rights to demand that their contract with EMI be upheld? Absolutely. Do they (together with former member Roger Waters) have the right to exert control over how their creative work is disseminated? Of course they do.

And will their fans, both die-hard and casual, continue to ignore all this when it suits them? To quote everyone’s favourite quitter, “you betcha!”

Awesome animated ad for Google Chrome:

(Via Official Google Mac Blog.)