Automation isn’t just about technology

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This morning’s Observer column:

Ideology is what determines how you think when you don’t know you’re thinking. Neoliberalism is a prime example. Less well-known but equally insidious is technological determinism, which is a theory about how technology affects development. It comes in two flavours. One says that there is an inexorable internal logic in how technologies evolve. So, for example, when we got to the point where massive processing power and large quantities of data became easily available, machine-learning was an inevitable next step.

The second flavour of determinism – the most influential one – takes the form of an unshakable conviction that technology is what really drives history. And it turns out that most of us are infected with this version.

It manifests itself in many ways…

Read on

How Facebook got into trouble, and why it can’t fix itself

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My Observer OpEd about the Zuckerberg Apology Tour:

Ponder this … and weep. The United States, theoretically a mature democracy of 327 million souls, is ruled by a 71-year-old unstable narcissist with a serious social media habit. And the lawmakers of this republic have hauled up before them a 34-year-old white male, one Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, the sole and impregnable ruler of a virtual country of about 2.2 billion people who stands accused of unwittingly facilitating the election of said narcissist by allowing Russian agents and other bad actors to exploit the surveillance apparatus of his – Zuckerberg’s – virtual state.

How did we get into this preposterous mess?

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Fixing Facebook: the only two options by a guy who knows how the sausage is made

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James Fallows quotes from a fascinating email exchange he had with his friend Michael Jones, who used to work at Google (he was the company’s Chief Technology Advocate and later a key figure in the evolution of Google Earth):

So, how might FB fix itself? What might government regulators seek? What could make FaceBook likable? It is very simple. There are just two choices:

a. FB stays in its send-your-PII1-to-their-customers business, and then must be regulated and the customers validated precisely as AXCIOM and EXPERIAN in the credit world or doctors and hospitals in the HIPPA healthcare world; or,

b. FB joins Google and ALL OTHER WEB ADVERTISERS in keeping PII private, never letting it out, and anonymously connecting advertisers with its users for their mutual benefit.

I don’t get a vote, but I like (b) and see that as the right path for civil society. There is no way that choice (a) is not a loathsome and destructive force in all things—in my personal opinion it seems that making people’s pillow-talk into a marketing weapon is indeed a form of evil.

This is why I never use Facebook; I know how the sausage is made.

  1. PII = Personally Identifiable Information ↩

Facebook is just the tip of the iceberg

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This morning’s Observer column:

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a good metaphor must be worth a million. In an insightful blog post published on 23 March, Doc Searls, one of the elder statesman of the web, managed to get both for the price of one. His post was headed by one of those illustrations of an iceberg showing that only the tip is the visible part, while the great bulk of the object lies underwater. In this case, the tip was adorned with the Facebook logo while the submerged mass represented “Every other website making money from tracking-based advertising”. The moral: “Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what’s coming for all of online publishing.”

The proximate cause of Searls’s essay was encountering a New York Times op-ed piece entitled Facebook’s Surveillance Machine by Zeynep Tufekci. It wasn’t the (unexceptional) content of the article that interested Searls, however, but what his ad-blocking software told him about the Times page in which the essay appeared. The software had detected no fewer than 13 hidden trackers on the page. (I’ve just checked and my Ghostery plug-in has detected 19.)

Read on

Why Zuckerberg is safe

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From Nils Pratley in the Guardian:

Facebook’s board has heard the calls for the appointment of an independent chair, from New York City’s pension fund for example, and decided to ignore them.

In doing so, the board seems to have accepted Zuckerberg’s bizarrely loose version of accountability. Allowing the data of up to 87 million people to be “inappropriately shared” with Cambridge Analytica was “my responsibility”, he said in answer to a later question. It was also a “huge mistake” not to focus on abuse of data more generally. But, hey, “life is about learning from the mistakes and figuring out what you need to do to move forward”.

This breezy I-promise-to-do-better mantra would be understandable if offered by a school child who had fluffed an exam. But Zuckerberg is running the world’s eighth largest company and $50bn has just been removed from its stock market value in a scandal that, aside from raising deep questions about personal privacy and social media’s influence on democracy, may provoke a regulatory backlash.

In these circumstances, why wouldn’t a board ask whether it has the right governance structure? The motivation would be self-interest. First, there is a need to ensure that the company isn’t run entirely at the whim of a chief executive who is plainly a technological whizz but admits he failed to grasp Facebook’s responsibilities as the number of users exploded to 2 billion. Second, outsiders, including users, advertisers and politicians, want reassurance that Facebook has basic checks and balances in its boardroom.

The lack of interest in governance reform is explained, of course, by the fact that Zuckerberg has a stranglehold over Facebook’s voting shares. His economic interest is 16% but he has 60% of the votes and thus, for practical purposes, can’t easily be shifted from either of his roles…

QED.

This is the flip side of the determination of some tech founders to insulate themselves from the quarterly whims of Wall Street. The Google boys have the same arrangement. Given the malign short-termism of Wall St and the doctrine of maximising shareholder value, this might have seemed sensible or even enlightened at one time. Now it looks like bad corporate governance.

Trump vs Amazon

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From The National Review

Even the rich are underdogs against the government.

Libertarians can sometimes sound like Chicken Little screaming that the sky is falling whenever the government does anything. But President Donald Trump’s battle against Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos shows that they have a point.

Trump is furious with the Washington Post, which is owned by Bezos and has been highly critical of the president, and he wants to punish Bezos by going after Amazon. Trump is reportedly considering raising Amazon’s shipping costs through the U.S. Postal Service, canceling a pending Amazon contract with the Pentagon, pushing red states to investigate Amazon, and generally using antitrust and tax policy to punish Amazon.

The balance of power between Trump and Bezos shows that even if you’re skeptical of libertarians, you shouldn’t dismiss them altogether: Government power can be very dangerous.

Some point out that Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the world. But Bezos’s wealth does not exist in a vacuum; it exists because the government respects his property rights. It’s more relevant to compare Bezos’s power with that of the U.S. government, which Trump has at his disposal. No matter how rich he is, Bezos will always be the underdog.

Other countries show that rich people are no match for the government. In Russia, Vladimir Putin effectively eliminated the oligarchs who did not support him — seizing their wealth and driving them into hiding. In the process, he took control of the economy and the media through oligarchs who supported him. In China, president Xi Jinping used an anti-corruption campaign to drive out his enemies, which cleared the way to his becoming president for life. Just recently, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman imprisoned rich people in a hotel and reportedly had some of them tortured until he could extract their loyalty or their wealth. In all three countries, the story is the same: The only people who are rich and powerful are the people whom the government allows to be rich and powerful.

In America, everyone is supposed to be equal before the law. That is why Trump’s grudge against Bezos is so dangerous. When the government goes after political opponents, it undermines the rule of law.

Not that Trump is much interested in the rule of law.

“The business model of the Internet is surveillance” contd.

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This useful graphic comes from a wonderful post by the redoubtable Doc Searls about the ultimate unsustainability of the business model currently dominating the Web. He starts with a quote from “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine” — a NYT OpEd column by the equally-redoubtable Zeynep Tufecki:

“Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please.”

Doc then points out the irony of his Privacy Badger software detecting 13 hidden trackers on the NYT page on which Zeynep’s column appears. (I’ve just checked and Ghostery currently detects 19 trackers on it.)

The point, Doc goes on to say, is that the Times is just doing what every other publication that lives off adtech does: tracking-based advertising. “These publications”,

don’t just open the kimonos of their readers. They bring people’s bare digital necks to vampires ravenous for the blood of personal data, all for the purpose of returning “interest-based” advertising to those same people.

With no control by readers (beyond tracking protection which relatively few know how to use, and for which there is no one approach or experience), and damn little care or control by the publishers who bare those readers’ necks, who knows what the hell actually happens to the data? No one entity, that’s for sure.

Doc points out that on reputable outfits like the New York Times writers like Zeynep have nothing to do with this endemic tracking. In such publications there probably is a functioning “Chinese Wall” between editorial and advertising. Just to drive the point home he looks at Sue Halpern’s piece in the sainted New Yorker on “Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and the Revelations of Open Secrets” and his RedMorph software finds 16 third-party trackers. (On my browser, Ghostery found 18.) The moral is, in a way, obvious: it’s a confirmation of Bruce Schneier’s original observation that “surveillance is the business model of the Internet”. Being a pedant, I would have said “of the Web”, but since many people can’t distinguish between the two, we’ll leave Bruce’s formulation stand.

Ethics 101 for Facebook’s geeks

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”Ask yourself whether your technology persuades users to do something you wouldn’t want to be persuaded to do yourself.”

”Toward an Ethics of Persuasive Technology” By Daniel Berdichevsky and Erik Neuenschwande, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 42 No. 5, Pages 51-58 10.1145/301353.301410