Category Archives: Observer

Why is WhatsApp founder quitting Facebook? You can guess the answer

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This morning’s Observer column:

Early in 2009, two former Yahoo employees, Brian Acton and Jan Koum, sat down to try and create a smartphone messaging app. They had a few simple design principles. One was that it should be easy to use: no complicated log-in and authentication procedures; instead, each user would be identified by his or her mobile number. And second, the app should have an honest business model – no more pretending it’s free while covertly monetising users’ data: instead, users would pay $1 a year after a certain period. Searching for a name for their service, they came up with WhatsApp, a play on “What’s Up?”

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So are the Democrats ready to unfriend Facebook?

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Nice Observer piece by Thomas Frank, reminding us of how Obama & Co drank the Facebook Kool-Aid:

Seated with a panel of entrepreneurs from around the world, the president [Obama] lobbed his friend Zuckerberg an easy question about Facebook “creating this platform for entrepreneurship around the world”. In batting it out of the park, the Facebook CEO, clad in his humble costume of jeans, T-shirt and sneakers, took pains to inform everyone that what animated him were high-minded ideals. “When I was getting started,” he burbled, “I cared deeply about giving everyone a voice, and giving people the tools to share everything that they cared about, and bringing a community together …”

No rude senator spoke up to interrupt this propaganda. Instead, Zuckerberg went on to describe his efforts to connect everyone to the internet as a sort of wager on human goodness itself.

“It’s this deep belief that you’re trying to make a change, you’re trying to connect people in the world, and I really do believe that if you do something good and if you help people out, then eventually some portion of that good will come back to you. And you may not know up front what it’s going to be, but that’s just been the guiding principle for me in the work that we’ve done …”

That’s how it works, all right. Gigantic corporate investments are acts of generosity, and when making them, kind-hearted CEOs routinely count on Karma to reward them. That’s the “guiding principle”.

Reader, here is what the president could be heard to say as Zuckerberg ended this self-serving homily: “Excellent.”

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Facebook’s Terms & Conditions in human-readable form

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This morning’s Observer column:

One of the few coherent messages to emerge from the US Senate’s bumbling interrogation of Mark Zuckerberg was a touching desire that Facebook’s user agreement should be comprehensible to humans. Or, as Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana put it: “Here’s what everyone’s been trying to tell you today – and I say it gently – your user agreement sucks. The purpose of a user agreement is to cover Facebook’s rear end, not inform users of their rights.”

“I would imagine probably most people do not read the whole thing,” Zuckerberg replied. “But everyone has the opportunity to and consents to it.” Senator Kennedy was unimpressed. “I’m going to suggest you go home and rewrite it,” he replied, “and tell your $1,200 dollar an hour lawyer you want it written in English, not Swahili, so the average American user can understand.”

Since Zuckerberg’s staff are currently so overworked, the Observer is proud to announce that it has drafted a new, human-readable user agreement that honours Zuckerberg’s new commitment to “transparency”. Here it is…

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Automation isn’t just about technology

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This morning’s Observer column:

Ideology is what determines how you think when you don’t know you’re thinking. Neoliberalism is a prime example. Less well-known but equally insidious is technological determinism, which is a theory about how technology affects development. It comes in two flavours. One says that there is an inexorable internal logic in how technologies evolve. So, for example, when we got to the point where massive processing power and large quantities of data became easily available, machine-learning was an inevitable next step.

The second flavour of determinism – the most influential one – takes the form of an unshakable conviction that technology is what really drives history. And it turns out that most of us are infected with this version.

It manifests itself in many ways…

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How Facebook got into trouble, and why it can’t fix itself

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My Observer OpEd about the Zuckerberg Apology Tour:

Ponder this … and weep. The United States, theoretically a mature democracy of 327 million souls, is ruled by a 71-year-old unstable narcissist with a serious social media habit. And the lawmakers of this republic have hauled up before them a 34-year-old white male, one Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, the sole and impregnable ruler of a virtual country of about 2.2 billion people who stands accused of unwittingly facilitating the election of said narcissist by allowing Russian agents and other bad actors to exploit the surveillance apparatus of his – Zuckerberg’s – virtual state.

How did we get into this preposterous mess?

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Facebook is just the tip of the iceberg

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This morning’s Observer column:

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a good metaphor must be worth a million. In an insightful blog post published on 23 March, Doc Searls, one of the elder statesman of the web, managed to get both for the price of one. His post was headed by one of those illustrations of an iceberg showing that only the tip is the visible part, while the great bulk of the object lies underwater. In this case, the tip was adorned with the Facebook logo while the submerged mass represented “Every other website making money from tracking-based advertising”. The moral: “Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what’s coming for all of online publishing.”

The proximate cause of Searls’s essay was encountering a New York Times op-ed piece entitled Facebook’s Surveillance Machine by Zeynep Tufekci. It wasn’t the (unexceptional) content of the article that interested Searls, however, but what his ad-blocking software told him about the Times page in which the essay appeared. The software had detected no fewer than 13 hidden trackers on the page. (I’ve just checked and my Ghostery plug-in has detected 19.)

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The ethics of working for surveillance capitalists

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This morning’s Observer column:

In a modest way, Kosinski, Stillwell and Graepel are the contemporary equivalents of [Leo] Szilard and the theoretical physicists of the 1930s who were trying to understand subatomic behaviour. But whereas the physicists’ ideas revealed a way to blow up the planet, the Cambridge researchers had inadvertently discovered a way to blow up democracy.

Which makes one wonder about the programmers – or software engineers, to give them their posh title – who write the manipulative algorithms that determine what Facebook users see in their news feeds, or the “autocomplete” suggestions that Google searchers see as they begin to type, not to mention the extremist videos that are “recommended” after you’ve watched something on YouTube. At least the engineers who built the first atomic bombs were racing against the terrible possibility that Hitler would get there before them. But for what are the software wizards at Facebook or Google working 70-hour weeks? Do they genuinely believe they are making the world a better place? And does the hypocrisy of the business model of their employers bother them at all?

These thoughts were sparked by reading a remarkable essay by Yonatan Zunger in the Boston Globe, arguing that the Cambridge Analytica scandal suggests that computer science now faces an ethical reckoning analogous to those that other academic fields have had to confront…

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Why Facebook can’t change

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My €0.02-worth on the bigger story behind the Cambridge Analytica shenanigans:

Watching Alexander Nix and his Cambridge Analytica henchmen bragging on Channel 4 News about their impressive repertoire of dirty tricks, the character who came irresistibly to mind was Gordon Liddy. Readers with long memories will recall him as the guy who ran the “White House Plumbers” during the presidency of Richard Nixon. Liddy directed the Watergate burglary in June 1972, detection of which started the long chain of events that eventually led to Nixon’s resignation two years later. For his pains, Liddy spent more than four years in jail, but went on to build a second career as a talk-show host and D-list celebrity. Reflecting on this, one wonders what job opportunities – other than those of pantomime villain and Savile Row mannequin – will now be available to Mr Nix.

The investigations into the company by Carole Cadwalladr, in the Observer, reveal that in every respect save one important one, CA looks like a standard-issue psychological warfare outfit of the kind retained by political parties – and sometimes national security services – since time immemorial. It did, however, have one unique selling proposition, namely its ability to offer “psychographic” services: voter-targeting strategies allegedly derived by analysing the personal data of more than 50 million US users of Facebook.

The story of how those data made the journey from Facebook’s servers to Cambridge Analytica’s is now widely known. But it is also widely misunderstood…

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Why you can’t believe what you see (or hear)

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This morning’s Observer column:

When John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on 22 November 1963, he was on his way to deliver a speech to the assembled worthies of the city. A copy of his script for the ill-fated oration was later presented by Lyndon Johnson to Stanley Marcus, head of the department store chain Neiman Marcus, whose daughter was in the expectant audience that day.

The text has long been available on the internet and it makes for poignant reading, not just because of what happened at Dealey Plaza that day, but because large chunks of it look eerily prescient in the age of Trump. JFK was a terrific public speaker who employed superb speechwriters (especially Theodore Sorensen). His speeches were invariably elegant and memorable: he had a great eye for a good phrase, and his delivery was usually faultless. So his audience in Dallas knew that they were in for a treat – until Lee Harvey Oswald terminated the dream.

Last week, 55 years on, we finally got to hear what Kennedy’s audience might have heard…

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In surveillance capitalism, extremism is good for business

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This morning’s Observer column:

Zeynep Tufecki is one of the shrewdest writers on technology around. A while back, when researching an article on why (and how) Donald Trump appealed to those who supported him, she needed some direct quotes from the man himself and so turned to YouTube, which has a useful archive of videos of his campaign rallies. She then noticed something interesting. “YouTube started to recommend and ‘autoplay’ videos for me,” she wrote, “that featured white supremacist rants, Holocaust denials and other disturbing content.”

Since Tufecki was not in the habit of watching far-right fare on YouTube, she wondered if this was an exclusively rightwing phenomenon. So she created another YouTube account and started watching Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’s campaign videos, following the accompanying links suggested by YouTube’s “recommender” algorithm. “Before long,” she reported, “I was being directed to videos of a leftish conspiratorial cast, including arguments about the existence of secret government agencies and allegations that the United States government was behind the attacks of 11 September. As with the Trump videos, YouTube was recommending content that was more and more extreme.”

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