Daily Archives: May 3, 2015

Sociopathy, Facebook style

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BoingBoing introduced the EFF’s sobering timeline of the evolution of Facebook’s ‘privacy’ policy between 2005 and 2012 thus:

Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kurt Opsahl has gone spelunking in the history of Facebook’s privacy policies over the past five years, presenting a timeline that starts with something fairly moderate and reasonable in 2005 and moves to the … 2010 version which basically says, “By using Facebook, you agree to let us film your life 24/7, sell it to advertisers, ridicule it, or make a reality show from it.”

As Kurt says, “Viewed together, the successive policies tell a clear story. Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it’s slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users’ information, while limiting the users’ options to control their own information.”

The post-election future

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Nice post by Paul Mason:

The polls have not moved, so we’re about to get the second hung parliament in succession, in a system that never used to produce them. Only this time we don’t just get a coalition government. We get an existential crisis of the constitution, and of the UK as a political entity, that no political party is currently geared up to deal with.

To understand why, you have to recognise the demographic tribalism that an economic system in crisis has produced. I’ve written about this before: the division of England into an asset-rich south, a post-industrial north and the emergence of a positive national consciousness in Scotland linked to the rejection of neo-liberal economics.

Worth reading in full.

Magical thinking in surveillance circles

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This morning’s Observer column:

The power of magical thinking – the notion that you can make something happen merely by thinking about it – has been much in evidence in the current election campaign. And that’s not entirely surprising, because as politicians get desperate, rationality goes out of the window. What is surprising, however, is when high government officials – for example, heads of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies – begin to show clear signs of the syndrome.

Exhibit A in this respect is James Comey, the current director of the FBI. Mr Comey has become so exercised by the decisions of Apple and Google to implement strong encryption in their devices and services that he appears to have lost his marbles. “I am a huge believer in the rule of law,” he told reporters last September, “but I am also a believer that no one in this country is above the law. What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves above the law.”

It’s good to know that the FBI director believes that nobody should be above the law. Except, of course, for his colleague, the former NSA director, James Clapper, who lied under oath to the US Congress about the existence of bulk data collection programs and yet remains at large. But we will let that pass: after all, as Oscar Wilde observed, consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative, and Mr Comey is nothing if not imaginative….

Read on