Daily Archives: July 6, 2008

More on Viacom’s data-heist

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Rory Cellan-Jones has an uneasy feeling.

The YouTube case seems to show that, despite those promises, we have no real control over our data once it is lodged on a corporate server. Every detail of my viewing activities over the years – the times I’ve watched videos in the office, the clips of colleagues making idiots of themselves, the unauthorised clip of goals from a Premier League game – is contained in those YouTube logs.

All to be handed over to Viacom’s lawyers on a few “over-the-shelf four-terabyte hard drives”, according to the New York judge who made the ruling. I may protest that I am a British citizen and that the judge has no business giving some foreign company a window on my world. No use – my data is in California, and it belongs to Google, not me.

The other troubling aspect about this case was that it was only the blogs that seemed to understand the significance of the ruling when it emerged on Wednesday night. Much of the mainstream media ignored it at first, seeming to regard it as a victory for Google, because the judge said the search firm didn’t have to reveal its source code.

“I’ve never worried too much about the threat to my privacy”, Rory continues.

I’m relaxed about appearing on CCTV, happy enough for my data to be used for marketing purposes, as long as I’ve ticked a box, and have never really cared that Google knows about every search I’ve done for the last 18 months. But suddenly I’m feeling a little less confident. How about you?

Body language

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On Friday evening last, Charles Arthur was invited to 11 Downing Street (where the Chancellor of the Exchequer lives). While there, he chanced to look out of the window down into the garden that runs behind Numbers 10 and 11 and saw Gordon Brown talking to an unidentified man. Below is a snippet from his account…

Brown listened intently. Once or twice he took a note, dragging a piece of paper from a jacket pocket. Once the other guy pulled out a single piece of A4, folded twice, blank on the back, and gestured at it as though it were a short list of things that weren’t quite right. Neither drank from the wine glasses while I was there. Brown sometimes leant forward, sometimes sat back. His body language was listening; then he began talking, and his hand movements were also shovelling, but they seemed like defensive shovelling: the palms turned outwards, as if trying to get something away from him. And then he too did the move-and-shovel routine. Take it from here, put it over there. Shovel, shovel, push and push.

There was something about the tableau that felt fragile. I could have taken a picture with my mobile, but it would have felt intrusive, rude -especially since we’d been asked not to take any pictures inside No.11. (Describing it here is different from a picture, which is just wrestled out of its context; here you have to imagine the scene yourself rather than have it presented.). It was a beautiful summer’s evening, the sun forcing through the trees wet with the heavy showers that had fallen earlier on. And two men discussed.. something, surely important…

There’s something fascinating about these details. Years ago when I was doing some consultancy work in Whitehall I went to a meeting in No 10 Downing Street. When you get into the hallway you are requested to leave your mobile phone on the hall table and given a post-it note on which to write your name. After my meeting I went to collect my phone and noticed that the Post-It on the Nokia next to it said “First Sea Lord”.

Show Them A Better Way

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Charles Arthur pointed me to a really interesting idea. Here’s how BBC News describes it:

The UK government has launched a competition to find innovative ways of using the masses of data it collects.

It is hoping to find new uses for public information in the areas of criminal justice, health and education.

The Power of Information Taskforce – headed by cabinet office minister Tom Watson – is offering a £20,000 prize fund for the best ideas.

To help with the task, the government is opening up gigabytes of information from a variety of sources.

This includes mapping information from the Ordnance Survey, medical information from the NHS , neighbourhood statistics from the Office for National Statistics and a carbon calculator from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

None of the data will be personal information, the government is keen to stress. Ho!

Bill Thompson has a post about this.

iCasting as digital literacy

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Thoughtful post by my colleague Martin Weller. He and I are members of the OU’s Broadcast Strategy Group, the deliberations of which have led to the university advertising for a Director of Multi-Platform Broadcasting. In his post Martin reflects on what he’s been doing last week. The list includes:

* Record a talking head piece for the launch of the OU’s YouTube channel
* Record and synch the audio and upload a slidecast of a talk I gave last week
* Upload an educational video I had created to YouTube and add annotations
* Write two blogs posts
* Finish off a Camtasia video for a project

Reflecting on this, he writes:

I was never much of a fan of the term ‘digital literacies’ – to me it seemed like an excuse to say people needed training and development in using new tools, rather than just encouraging them to use them, e.g. we needed to create courses on becoming digitally literate before we would let our students use them, and then we could tick a box saying this was covered, like basic numeracy. I still think encouraging people to play is the best approach, but my recent dabbling with making videos has made me appreciate that this may be approaching a digital literacy.

This is about more than technical or design skills, more significant is the mental shift to thinking of iCasting as the route for distributing ideas. We have so long been subject to the tyranny of paper, that to conceive of an output in any other form takes a real effort. In fact, we often mistake the production of a paper artefact for the actual output of a project. So my message to the incoming Director is this – help us become iCasters.

YouTube: why no porn?

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One of the most intriguing things about YouTube is that it isn’t over-run by porn. I’ve often wondered why — after all, every other unmoderated publishing opportunity on the Net seems to have succumbed. This thoughtful piece in the NYT explains that YouTube’s founders shrewdly anticipated the danger and installed sophisticated filtering software that spots and refuses porn — with interesting effects.

By keeping obscenity in check, YouTube teems with video of near infinite variety, stuff that thrives when pornography, which is hard to contain once it takes root, has been banished. YouTube risked losing millions of viewers when it made rules against pornography. But it has gained radical variety, the kind that defines the most robust ecosystems. YouTube’s dizzying diversity, in fact, now makes online porn sites that purport to cater to a broad range of tastes look only obsessive and redundant…

A handbag?

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This morning’s Observer column…

Regardless of what happens on appeal, these lawsuits, and others like them, are bad news for eBay. It now seems likely that at least some of the jurisdictions in which the company operates will insist that it becomes much more rigorous in policing activity on its site. And that spells trouble for the company’s business model because policing is expensive, and eBay relies on skimming modest fees from billions of transactions run entirely by software with no human intervention. The key to its success is scale – it has 84 million active users, handles more than 500 million auctions every quarter and last year the total value of everything sold on its sites approached $60bn.

Policing is a labour-intensive business, so eBay’s profitability would be drastically impaired if it were compelled to do it on any realistic scale…