Tag: privacy

I am not Richard Stallman

Posted on August 22, 2013 by Doug Belshaw

Introduction

Yesterday I headed to Lifehacker to get my weekly dose of their excellent ‘How I Work’ series. However, this week they decided to hand it over to readers using their blogging platform (Kinja). I decided to take part and you can see my response here (warning: includes photo of my messy study!)

Marc Scott picked up on this via Twitter and wrote a masterful post entitled How I Do My Computing by !=Richard Stallman. A sample:

The Internet on my laptop runs really slowly and it’s quite difficult to see sites because of all the toolbars that take up half of the screen. Also when I load the Internet I get annoyed by all the pop-ups that suddenly appear for adult dating sites and on-line gambling. I used to get lots of annoying messages on the Internet about things like ActiveX, but a friend showed me how to change my security settings so they don’t come any more.

Class.

I am not Richard Stallman

At the end of Marc’s post he linked to original post by Stallman (of which his was a parody).

Wow. Stallman is hardcore:

I occasionally use X11 for tasks that need graphics, but mostly I use a text console. I find that the text console is more efficient and convenient for the bulk of the work I do, which is editing text.

and:

I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see git://git.gnu.org/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it.

That’s as close to tinfoil hat-wearing as it actually gets.

The Moral

As Seth Godin often says, we need to surround ourself (intellectually, if we can’t physically) with outliers in order to challenge our thinking:

The crowd has more influence on us than we have on the crowd. It’s not an accident that breakthroughs in music, architecture, software, athletics, fashion and cuisine come in bunches, often geographic. If you need to move, move. At least change how and where you exchange your electrons and your ideas.

After all, as they say, bad habits are like a comfortable bed: easy to get into but hard to get out of.

There’s a political theory called the Overton window that is used to describe the narrow range of ideas that the public will accept. The degrees of acceptance goes like this:

Overton assigned a spectrum of “more free” and “less free”, with regard to government intervention, oriented vertically on an axis. When the window moves or expands along this axis, an idea at a given location may become more or less politically acceptable as the window moves relative to it. The degrees of acceptance^[4] of public ideas can be described roughly as:

Unthinkable
Radical
Acceptable
Sensible
Popular
Policy

So at the start of the year, before the NSA revelations, it would be Unthinkable for an ‘ordinary’ person to adopt anything close to Stallman’s approach. Now, however, it’s at least Radical if not Acceptable or Sensible.

Conclusion

I’m not suggesting that we crypto everything or become paranoid to the extent that it consumes us. What I am suggesting (and what I’m doing myself) is to review the connected technologies and services I’m using. If you want to do something similar then I highly recommend you check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Who Has Your Back? 2013 and, if you’ve never used Linux before, give elementaryOS a spin.* It’ll probably be an upgrade from what you’re using.

Questions? Comments? I want to read them. Add yours below!

Image CC BY-NC Maurizio Scorianz

*Want to go a step further? Try Tails.

Reality check: in light of the NSA revelations, just who do we need to fear?

Posted on June 9, 2013 by Doug Belshaw

Like everyone else, I’m shocked yet not really surprised at the revelations that the US National Security Agency (NSA) have access to, well, basically anything they want. Since the news broke, I’ve been thinking about what would constitute an appropriate response.

I could, for example, attempt to lock down everything in an attempt to prevent the NSA spying on me. But, to be quite honest, this isn’t really an option: I haven’t got the skills to do so. It would also make my life significantly less enjoyable.

So, stepping back for a moment, I’ve been thinking about who I should be worried about. The current concerns seem to be directed at the US government for having access to people’s data. Now, while I don’t for one second like the fact that my data can (and possibly is being) triangulated, at least the ostensible aim of the NSA’s snooping is to protect people and save lives. Meanwhile, the aim of those allegedly involved in PRISM – companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft – is to maximise shareholder value. Remember, it’s data these companies collected about their users that the US government deems important enough – and extensive enough – to capture.

In a democracy, we can do something about governments: we can replace them by means of elections. But where’s our recourse with private companies? Where are their checks and balances? While it would be easy to argue that we can replace services provided by Company X by those with Company Y, the problem comes with scale and cultural norms. I could (and probably should), for example, decide to swear off Facebook, Google+ and Twitter as they are private public spaces. But not only is there no viable alternative that respects my privacy, I would be a social outcast.

We need more transparent government, certainly. We need to resist secret laws that infringe our privacy to satisfy politicians’ whims and fancies. But it’s also important to keep some perspective here. We are all complicit. We voluntarily give up our privacy to get discounts and deals at supermarkets. We submit to tracking and data mining for the sake of shiny services. Every day we choose (or willingly allow) the sharing of our personal information with companies who host it on servers we do not control.

In my opinion, the best thing we can do in the wake of these revelations is to be more intentional about where we put our data. If we’re making a trade-off between ease-of-use (and shininess) and privacy, then we should be mindful of that. We should realise that we’re involved in a compromise. At the end of the day, it’s not about breaking out the tinfoil hat, it’s about being an informed, responsible, and literate citizen – whatever your position on the privacy spectrum.

I’m fortunate to work for Mozilla, a non-profit that doesn’t track people and, indeed, builds tools for users to be able to track the trackers. If you’d like to see who’s tracking you online, check out Collusion.

Image CC BY Sean MacEntee

Why we need open, distributed social networks.

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

An article by Michael Erard has been doing the rounds recently. Entitled What I Didn’t Write About When I Wrote About Quitting Facebook, it simultaneously pokes fun at the growing genre of ‘social media exile essay’ whilst raising an interesting issue about the ways in which social networks mediate relationships. Erard concludes (my emphasis):

In the standard Social Media Exile essay, one doesn’t mention or announce when one returns to blogging or Twitter. For each platform or network one leaves, there’s another one to return to. Sometimes they’re the same. So I’m going to close this piece by breaking that convention and mentioning how easy it turns out to be to reactivate Facebook. When you sign back in, all your stuff is there, as if you’d never left. It’s like coming back to your country after a month in a foreign land, and it makes one feel that the whole reason for leaving is to make the place seem strange again. Being away from Facebook was certainly that. But I had to come back. That’s where all the people are. I’ve got a book coming out, and I need to let my friends know. Anyway, you know where to find me and what to talk about when you do. I’ll have some cookies baked.

Let’s cut to the chase: for better or worse, online, we currently act like brands. We can (and do) consider things like using a standardised avatar to increase recognition; we’re careful about what we say in certain kinds of company; we align ourselves with other brands (people, organizations, objects) to gain social capital. The trouble is that, in a similar way to a mall, we’re setting up shop on private property. We can be (and sometimes are) kicked out of spaces for violating lengthy, arcane user agreements written in legalese that few of us take the time to read. On various levels we control our digital identity, sometimes by self-censoring. This is problematic.

Some of us can play the game; Twitter and my online networks and reputation certainly helped me gain my last two jobs. But playing this game can be tiring. Each medium has its own vocabulary and syntax that one has to learn, as Erard demonstrates:

Instead of writing about any of this, once I was not on Facebook anymore, I found myself sending emails with some witty insights or photos of my baby, but it just wasn’t the same; a request for housing help for a friend via email got no responses.

Despite my impending Black Ops period, I’m actually not of the opinion that everything would just be alright if we all just got offline and talked to one another face-to-face. I remember reading recently that talking about the superficiality of social media is more than slightly disingenuous given the type of weather-related chat and insincere ‘how are you?’ questions that make up much of our offline interaction. There was no golden period of offline communication. Updating your Facebook status probably not time you would have otherwise spent in deep philosophical face-to-face conversation with your next-door neighbour.

But, nevertheless, there is a problem with online communication. Superficial conversations are (usually) neither recorded nor commodified in the ways they can be online. Erard again:

I hadn’t written about feeling like Facebook was a job. Like I was running on a digital hamster wheel. But a wheel that someone else has rigged up. And a wheel that’s actually a turbine that’s generating electricity for somebody else. That’s how I felt, which is what I should have written.

What we’re doing, in effect, is akin to renting houses when we should be buying them. The tools that commercial operations such Facebook, Twitter and Google+ give us are ‘free’ so we often don’t think through the issues clearly. Like a low-income people forced into dealing with a disreputable car dealers, we’re forced into hire-purchase with no real prospect of ownership.

Let’s run a quick thought experiment. Imagine Facebook started charging and, instead of a mass exodus, people (for whatever reason) kept using it. What would change? I think, for one, we’d question where our data was going and we’d want to get rid of the advertising. It’s been repeated so many times that it’s almost become a cliché, but if we’re not paying for something then we’re not customers. And if we’re not customers, we bring something to the marketplace that’s being sold on our behalf. We’re being tracked, packaged-up and sold to the highest bidder.

All this sounds alarmist, and it is, but all I’m trying to do is lift the veil a little. Discontent leads to a search for alternatives, so I suppose I’m trying to stoke the fires of discontent. We’re all in the same position: we need open, distributed social networks to avoid the above. But we’re in a Catch-22: no-one wants to make the first move to Identi.ca or Diaspora because it’s not social until all your friends are there, right?

Image CC-BY-NC-SA [ jon ]