Monthly Archives: April 2017

Hypocrisy on stilts

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Now here’s something you couldn’t make up — unless you have plumbed the depths of surveillance capitalism. Unroll.me is a ‘service’ that promises to help you clean up your inbox. You give it permission to access your Gmail, for example, and: “Instantly see a list of all your subscription emails. Unsubscribe easily from whatever you don’t want.”

Unroll.me is owned by an analytics outfit called Slice Intelligence. And last week the New York Times (in a profile of Uber’s controversial boss, Travis Kalanick) revealed that Unroll was collecting its subscribers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and selling the anonymized data to Uber — which used the data as a proxy for the health of its competitor’s business.

Embarrassing, eh? Not at all. Unroll’s boss, Jojo Hedaya, has published a post on the company blog under the headline “We Can Do Better”. “Our users are the heart of our company and service”, it begins,

So it was heartbreaking to see that some of our users were upset to learn about how we monetize our free service.

And while we try our best to be open about our business model, recent customer feedback tells me we weren’t explicit enough.

Note (i) “heartbreaking” and (ii) “recent customer feedback”. Translation: (i) disastrous; (ii) good investigative journalism by the New York Times.

Crocodile tears having been duly shed, Jojo continues:

So we need to do better for our users, and will from this point forward, with clearer messaging on our website, in our app, and in our FAQs. We will also be more clear about our data usage in our on-boarding process. The rest will remain the same: providing a killer service that gives you hours back in your day while protecting your privacy and security above all else.

I can’t stress enough the importance of your privacy. We never, ever release personal data about you. All data is completely anonymous and related to purchases only. To get a sense of what this data looks like and how it is used, check out the Slice Intelligence blog.

Thank you for being such an important part of our company. If there’s more we can be doing better, please let me know.

George Orwell would have really enjoyed this. Schmucks are “such an important part of our company”, for example. And he “can’t stress enough” the importance of said schmucks’ privacy.

But — as Charles Arthur points out — there’s nothing in Jojo’s FAQs about selling the data.

Facebook: the Psychopaths ‘R Us channel

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Yesterday’s Observer column:

The old adage “be careful what you wish for” comes to mind. A while back, Facebook launched Facebook Live, a service that enables its users to broadcast live video to the world. Shortly after the service was activated, the company’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said that the service would support all the “personal and emotional and raw and visceral” ways that people communicate. Users were encouraged to “go live” in casual settings – waiting for baggage at the airport, for example, or eating at a restaurant.

Note the phrase “raw and visceral”. Facebook Live has already broadcast a live stream of a young disabled man being tied up, gagged and attacked with a knife. In March, two Chicago teenage boys live-streamed themselves gang-raping a teenage girl. And around 40 Facebook users watched the video without reporting it either to Facebook or the police.

That’s pretty raw and visceral, you might think. But it turns out that it was just a prelude…

Read on

Digital realities

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From an interesting NYT piece on how Google is coining money by allowing firms to put product information in the space immediately below the search bar.

Product ads that appeal to shoppers are also strategically important because consumers are starting their online shopping at Amazon.com. Last year, a survey of 2,000 American shoppers found that 55 percent turn to Amazon first when searching for a product, while only 28 percent start with a web search.

Shattering the mask of the benevolent tech company

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My Observer review of Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things:

Much has been made in previous histories of Silicon Valley’s counter-cultural origins. Taplin finds other, less agreeable roots, notably in the writings of Ayn Rand, a flake of Cadbury proportions who had an astonishing impact on many otherwise intelligent individuals. These include Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman who presided over events leading to the banking collapse of 2008, and [Peter] Thiel, who made an early fortune out of PayPal and was the first investor in Facebook. Rand believed that “achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life”. She had no time for altruism, government or anything else that might interfere with capitalism red in tooth and claw.

Neither does Thiel. For him, “competition is for losers”. He believes in investing only in companies that have the potential to become monopolies and he thinks monopolies are good for society. “Americans mythologise competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines,” he once wrote. “Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away.”

The three great monopolies of the digital world have followed the Thiel playbook and Taplin does a good job of explaining how each of them works and how, strangely, their vast profits are never “competed away”. He also punctures the public image so assiduously fostered by Google and Facebook – that they are basically cool tech companies run by good chaps (and they are still mainly chaps, btw) who are hellbent on making the world a better place – whereas, in fact, they are increasingly hard to distinguish from the older brutes of the capitalist jungle…

Read on

What happens when free trade’s ‘losers’ realise that Trump can’t help them?

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Sombre column by Dani Rodrik on the new conventional wisdom that’s evolved as a response to the populist surge. “Gone are the confident assertions”, he writes, “that globalization benefits everyone: we must, the elites now concede, accept that globalization produces both winners and losers”. He quotes Nouriel Roubini’s assertion that the backlash against globalization “can be contained and managed through policies that compensate workers for its collateral damage and costs. Only by enacting such policies will globalization’s losers begin to think that they may eventually join the ranks of its winners.”

The problem is that even if one accepts that Trump was genuinely concerned by the plight of the victims of globalisation who voted for him (a big ‘if’, given his narcissism), he cannot actually do anything to help because he is himself a prisoner of a Republican Congress that has no intention of doing anything other than buttressing the interests of the wealthy.

Conventional wisdom about finding ways of helping those ‘left behind’ by globalization, writes Rodrik,

presumes that the winners are motivated by enlightened self-interest – that they believe buy-in from the losers is essential to maintain economic openness. Trump’s presidency has revealed an alternative perspective: globalization, at least as currently construed, tilts the balance of political power toward those with the skills and assets to benefit from openness, undermining whatever organized influence the losers might have had in the first place. Inchoate discontent about globalization, Trump has shown, can easily be channeled to serve an altogether different agenda, more in line with elites’ interests.

As far as the US is concerned, the game’s up. What happens, one wonders, when the angry brigade realise that they have been royally screwed?