Zuckerberg’s ‘pivot’

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Zeynep Tufekci isn’t taken in by the Supreme Leader’s latest cant:

The platitudes were there, as I expected, but the evasions were worse than I anticipated: The plan, in effect, is to entrench Facebook’s interests while sidestepping all the important issues.

Here are four pressing questions about privacy that Mr. Zuckerberg conspicuously did not address: Will Facebook stop collecting data about people’s browsing behavior, which it does extensively? Will it stop purchasing information from data brokers who collect or “scrape” vast amounts of data about billions of people, often including information related to our health and finances? Will it stop creating “shadow profiles” — collections of data about people who aren’t even on Facebook? And most important: Will it change its fundamental business model, which is based on charging advertisers to take advantage of this widespread surveillance to “micro-target” consumers?

Stockpile loo paper now?

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Well, well. This from the august pages of Foreign Policy:

While Brexit preppers have stirred headlines in recent months with their preemptive purchases of essential items, the stockpiling of large manufacturers—and the lack thereof—matters most. For goods with short shelf lives, such as medicine and fresh produce, the limitation is quality: Store an apple or an antibiotic for too long and it will go bad. For goods that are large and bulky, such as toilet paper, the problem is quantity. And in the case of the United Kingdom, where the average resident uses an unrivaled 110 rolls of toilet paper per year, the highest figure in Europe, any meaningful measure of forward planning would require more real estate than is currently available.

This is just one of the terrible challenges that the paper industry—and the public—may face in the coming months, said Andrew Large, the director general of the Confederation of Paper Industries, the leading trade association for the U.K.’s paper-based industries.

“It’s very bulky and light in weight for its volume, which means you need an awful lot of warehousing space in order to be able to put down meaningful stocks of the material,” he said. While there has been some stockpiling—several weeks of finished rolls and perhaps months of unfinished pulp, according to Large—the practical limitations to stockpiling leave a great deal of uncertainty. This uncertainty, more than anything, is most worrying for the industry. “The thing that will cause a crisis,” Large said, “is if people do panic and they empty the shelves preemptively, whereas if normal buying patterns are continued, there would have been enough supply in the system for everybody to be fine.

This might be good news for the British tabloids. I mean to say, if there’s no toilet paper we’ll have to resort to Leopold Bloom’s strategy of cutting up newspapers and hanging the pieces on a hook.

AI hype

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From the Financial Times earlier this week.

I’m tempted to say that this blog is “powered by AI”. Except of course that it’s powered by, er, organic intelligence.

Facebook’s vassal state

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Since the late 1950s, my native land’s grand strategy — initially for survival and later for prosperity — was to be welcoming to foreign multinational companies. For half a century, that strategy worked well. But now it’s become problematic. Why? Because some of the giant multinationals which have made Ireland their European bases have become toxic.

Chief among these is Facebook, the leading data-vampire. Until the other day, we had our suspicions about the subservience of the Irish government to the wishes and requirements of the Zuckerberg empire. Now — thanks to two remarkable pieces of reporting — we have some evidence of the cosy relationship that developed between Facebook’s second-in-command, Sheryl Sandberg (the ‘Typhoid Mary’ of surveillance capitalism, as Shoshana Zuboff describes her) and the previous Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Enda Kenny.

The first breakthrough came from my Observer colleagues Carole Cadwalladr and Duncan Campbell and was based on a leaked internal Facebook document which described, among other things, Facebook’s

“great relationship” with Enda Kenny, the Irish prime minister at the time, one of a number of people it describes as “friends of Facebook”. Ireland plays a key role in regulating technology companies in Europe because its data protection commissioner acts for all 28 member states. The memo has inflamed data protection advocates, who have long complained about the company’s “cosy” relationship with the Irish government.

The document also noted

Kenny’s “appreciation” for Facebook’s decision to locate its headquarters in Dublin and points out that the new proposed data protection legislation was a “threat to jobs, innovation and economic growth in Europe”. It then goes on to say that Ireland is poised to take on the presidency of the EU and therefore has the “opportunity to influence the European Data Directive decisions”. It makes the extraordinary claim that Kenny offered to use the “significant influence” of the EU presidency as a means of influencing other EU member states “even though technically Ireland is supposed to remain neutral in this role”.

The second revelation comes from a terrific investigation by the Irish Independent newspaper. This tells how, two days after the meeting the Taoiseach in Davos (where else?), Sandberg wrote to Kenny, warning him how changes to taxation or privacy laws might lead Facebook to consider ‘different options for future investment and growth in Europe’.

Her email reads:

“I also want to commend you once again for your leadership during your Presidency of the EU. You made enormous progress. When it came to the European Data Protection Regulation, you and your staff really internalised our concerns and were able to present them in a reasonable way, which has had a positive impact …We hope we can rely on you for your continued leadership on this regulation since we still have more work to do here. Along the same lines, I was pleased to hear that you are so involved in the OECD working group process on tax reform. These discussions will be very complicated and important, and we hope to be helpful to you identifying the implications with different options for future investment and growth in Europe. We are keen to collaborate with your office on this, just as we have on the DPR.”

Following the meeting in Davos, Facebook’s Senior Policy team, comprising 15 executives from Washington, California, Dublin, and across Europe, requested a personal meeting with the Taoiseach in Government Buildings, Dublin on February 6 2014.

Kenny did not meet the delegation but instead sent his special adviser, Paul O’Brien, the Secretary General to the Government, Martin Fraser, and two of the Taoiseach’s experienced assistant secretaries with responsibility for international economic matters, Lorcan Fullam and John Callinan.

But then Kenny was given the treatment that generally suborns impressionable technically-illiterate politicians: an invitation to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, in June 2014, where he was granted a 43-minute audience with Sandberg.

According to the Independent report, the mogul and her awestruck visitor discussed the need for one tax regulator in the EU, and also the issue of who would replace Billy Hawkes as the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (who was due to retire on August 31 that year). And a follow-up letter to the Taoiseach in June 2014 specifically mentions Billy Hawkes and the need for his replacement to be “a strong candidate”.

“While Mr Hawkes’s independence and integrity are undisputed”, says the Independent — with an attentive eye to legal niceties — “there is no doubt that Facebook would have been relieved in 2013, when Mr Hawkes refused to investigate claims that Facebook Ireland had transferred data to the States for examination by the NSA”.

Background: Hawkes had refused the investigation on the legal grounds that Facebook was entitled to send data from the EU to the US under EU Commission Safe Harbour provisions. Interestingly, though, when Sandberg was being granted personal access to the Taoiseach, a judicial review of Hawkes’s decision had been initiated in the Irish High Court. And of course, in the end, the European Court ruled that the ‘Safe Harbour’ agreement was invalid.

These are extraordinary revelations, though I suspect they will surprise nobody familiar with the servile cringe that Irish politicians habitually adopt when dealing with their corporate ‘guests’. Note particularly, the tone and content of the leaked emails. For example:

  • Referring to the tricky challenge (for Facebook) of European Data Protection Regulation, you and your staff internalised our concerns and were able to present them in a reasonable way, which has had a positive impact. …We hope we can rely on you for your continued leadership on this regulation since we still have more work to do here.

  • And, on tax reform, I was pleased to hear that you are so involved in the OECD working group process on tax reform.

Emphasis added. Pass the sickbag, Alice.

Distant Folly

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View of the Folly from the interior of Wimpole Hall. Click to enlarge. There’s something almost surreal about the appearance of the garden in the image. I’m reminded of Peter Greenaway’s film The Draughtsman’s Contract — though hope to escape the fate of said draughtsman.

The dark side of recommendation engines

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This morning’s Observer column:

My eye was caught by a headline in Wired magazine: “When algorithms think you want to die”. Below it was an article by two academic researchers, Ysabel Gerrard and Tarleton Gillespie, about the “recommendation engines” that are a central feature of social media and e-commerce sites.

Everyone who uses the web is familiar with these engines. A recommendation algorithm is what prompts Amazon to tell me that since I’ve bought Custodians of the Internet, Gillespie’s excellent book on the moderation of online content, I might also be interested in Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism and a host of other books about algorithmic power and bias. In that particular case, the algorithm’s guess is accurate and helpful: it informs me about stuff that I should have known about but hadn’t.

Recommendation engines are central to the “personalisation” of online content and were once seen as largely benign…

Read on

Brexit: Thatcherism 2.0

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Andrew Marr made an interesting speech at a business conference in Dublin the other day. His argument: the prevailing liberal view of the philosophy underpinning enthusiasm for Brexit as imperial nostalgia is wrong. There is, he maintained, an “underlying logic” to wanting to leave the EU in order to pursue an alternative economic model – something Brexiteers referred to as Thatcherism 2.0 – which is under-appreciated in the liberal media and in Ireland. And it was not much discussed in public because of the (accurate) perception that it would “frighten the horses”.

Marr’s summary of this neo-Thatcherite ideology didn’t seem particularly original: it’s the Singapore-on-Thames fantasy — deep cuts to corporation tax and a wholesale jettisoning of regulations to attract inward investment. etc. etc. “You slash corporation tax right down, way below where it is right now, you slash regulations, you tear up your environmental and worker protections and you go for broke, you go for bust.” This is a transcript of Liam Fox talking in his sleep. It may be what some of these crazies believe, but a rational plan for the future it ain’t. And that’s apart altogether from the fact that Singapore is a tiny statelet, not a nation of 60m+ people.

Still, there is one thing that Marr’s conjecture might explain: the volume of dark overseas money that flooded in to fund the Leave campaign. If there’s one thing that the Mercers, the Koch brothers and others are unlikely to finance it’s imperial delusions.

Quote of the day

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“When it’s impossible to distinguish facts from fraud, actual facts lose their power. Dissidents can end up putting their lives on the line to post a picture documenting wrongdoing only to be faced with an endless stream of deliberately misleading claims: that the picture was taken 10 years ago, that it’s from somewhere else, that it’s been doctored.

As we shift from an era when realistic fakes were expensive and hard to create to one where they’re cheap and easy, we will inevitably adjust our norms. In the past, it often made sense to believe something until it was debunked; in the future, for certain information or claims, it will start making sense to assume they are fake. Unless they are verified.”

Zeynep Tufecki