Daily Archives: March 15, 2015

Privacy: who needs it? Er, Zuckerberg & Co

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Who said irony was dead? The tech zillionaires are so blasé about how their users are relaxed about privacy and what is quaintly called “sharing”. But they are not at all blasé when it comes to sharing information about themselves. Google’s Exec Chairman, Eric Schmidt, for example, believes that “privacy is dead”, but went apeshit when some enterprising journalist dug up lots of personal information about him simply by using, er, Google.

And then there’s young Zuckerberg, the Facebook boss, who is likewise relaxed about other people’s privacy, but paranoid about his own. See, for example, this Forbes report on his need to buy up an entire neighbourhood block in palo Alto to ensure that he isn’t overlooked:

So much for Zuckerberg only making a big digital footprint. Now the online empire maker owns nearly an entire neighborhood block, just because he can.

According to property records, the Facebook CEO has spent $30 million over the past year buying the pricy homes of four of his neighbors. It’s within his right, and within his budget, especially with Facebook stock finally starting to march up in value after its controversial and lackluster IPO.

Now the NYT is reporting that he’s updating a house in San Francisco, where even he might not be able to persuade his neighbours to clear out. But builders and tradesmen working on this nouveau palace find that they have to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements lest the world should know which kind of bidet the infant zillionaire favours.

So what kind of time will you get from the iWatch?

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This morning’s Observer column:

A few months ago I bought a “smartwatch”. I did so because there was increasing media hype about these devices and I don’t write about kit that I haven’t owned and used in anger. The model I chose was a Pebble Steel, for several reasons: it was originally funded by a Kickstarter campaign; a geek friend already had one; and, well, it looked interesting. Now, several months on, I am back to wearing my old analogue watch. The Pebble experiment turned out to be instructive. The watch was well made and well presented. It had reasonable battery life and the software was easy to install on my iPhone. The bluetooth link was reliable. Its timekeeping was accurate, and it could display the time in a variety of ways, some of them humorous. One could download a variety of virtual watch-faces, and so on.

So why is it not still on my wrist? Well, basically most of its “features” were of little or no actual use to me; and for much of the time, even apps that I would have found useful – such as having the watch vibrate when a text message arrived – turned out to be flaky: sometimes they worked; more often they didn’t. Which of course led to the thought that if anybody can make the smartwatch into a successful consumer product that “just works” it would be Apple. And indeed it was amusing to note how many people who, upon seeing the Pebble on my wrist, would ask me: “Is that the new Apple Watch?”

Well, now the Apple Watch is here and we will find out if the world really was waiting for a proper smartwatch to arrive…

Read on

How politics gets hollowed out

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From Brewster Kahle’s blog:

A recent paper from Princeton evaluated of over 1700 federal government policy decisions made in the last 30 years and found “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” Therefore, according to this research, the vast majority of the population has little or no say in how the federal government makes policy decisions. Similarly discouraging is the economic analysis over the last 30 years that found that the increase in American wealth went to only the wealthiest 1% of the population, with the other 99% essentially staying even. Therefore, there has not been equal opportunity for economic success in the United States for the vast majority of the population.