Even if you’re not on Facebook, you are still the product

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This morning’s Observer column:

The old adage “if the service is free, then you are its product” needs updating. What it signified was that web services (like Facebook, Google, Yahoo et al) that do not charge users make their money by harvesting personal and behavioural data relating to those users and selling that data to advertisers. That’s still true, of course. But a more accurate version of the adage would now read something like this: if you use the web for anything (including paying for stuff) then you are also the product, because your data is being sold on to third parties without your knowledge.

In a way, you probably already knew this. A while back you searched for, say, a digital camera on the John Lewis site. And then you noticed that wherever you went on the web after that John Lewis ads for cameras kept appearing on the site you were visiting. What you were witnessing was the output of a multibillion-dollar industry that operates below the surface of the web. Think of it as the hidden wiring of our networked world. And what it does is track you wherever you go online…

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The parenthood religion

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From an interesting contrarian rant by Astro Teller (head of Google X) and Mrs Teller. Both authors are, I believe, the grandchildren of Nobel laureates. Not sure what difference that makes.

The origins of the parenthood religion are obscure, but one of its first manifestations may have been the “baby on board” placards that became popular in the mid-1980s. Nobody would have placed such a sign on a car if it were not already understood by society that the life of a human achieves its peak value at birth and declines thereafter. A toddler is almost as precious as a baby, but a teenager less so, and by the time that baby turns fifty, it seems that nobody cares much anymore if someone crashes into her car. You don’t see a lot of vehicles with placards that read, “Middle-aged accountant on board.”

The phablet controversy

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iPad_Mini

Wading through the throng in an Apple store the other day, I had a look at the new iPhones. The iPhone 6 didn’t seem much of an advance on my 5s, but the even-bigger one, the 6 plus, seems odd. It’s far too big to be a credible phone, but too small to be a useable tablet. So why, one wonders, will people buy it?

One answer, I suppose, is that people buy preposterously large Samsung phones, even if they do wind up holding something the size of a dinner plate to their ears. (Or making calls surreptitiously, using headphones.)

Ages ago, I bought an iPad Mini with a SIM card for writing on the move, and kept my phone for texts and the occasional voice call. The Mini has turned out to be one of the most useful gadgets I’ve ever owned. Just big enough to be useful; just small enough to slip into a jacket pocket. The new iPhone isn’t a persuasive argument for abandoning that system. It ain’t broken, so I won’t be fixing it.

Hong Kong: two countries, one system

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From Larry Lessig, commenting on the way the demonstrations in Hong Kong are being ‘policed’:

But this time, please, without the self-defeating trope that somehow this is a Right/Left issue. It is not. This is a Right/Wrong issue. It is wrong to allow a democracy to be captured by a tiny fraction of cronies. It is wrong here. It is wrong in Hong Kong. It is the democracy that Boss Tweed birthed (“I don’t care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating.”) Which is to say, is the latest stage of a fundamentally corrupted democracy.

We should all stand with the students who launched the Hong Kong protests. And we should pray that it doesn’t become hijacked by violence — since this is China (Tiananmen) and because it is only ever nonviolent social movements that achieve the critical mass of support needed to win (that’s the brilliant conclusion of Erica Chenoweth’s work).

And the system is rotten to the core.

So is it good to talk… again?

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This morning’s Observer column.

To the technology trade, I am what is known as an “early adopter” (translation: gadget freak, mug, sucker). I had a mobile phone in the mid-1980s, for example, when they were still regarded as weird. It was the size of a brick, cost the best part of a grand and exposed me to ridicule whenever I took it out in public. But I didn’t care because the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, used the same phone and he was cool in those days. Besides, it had always seemed absurd to me that phones should be tethered to the wall, like goats. I still have that Nokia handset, by the way: it sits at the bottom of a drawer and I sometimes take it out to show my grandchildren what phones used to be like.

Over the decades since, I have always had latest-model phones – just like all the other early adopters. And of course I used them to make phone calls because basically that’s all you could do with those devices. (Well, almost all: one of mine had an FM radio built in.) And then in 2007 Steve Jobs launched the iPhone and the game changed. Why? Because the Apple device was really just a powerful computer that you could hold in your hand. And it was a real computer; its operating system was a derivative of BSD, the derivative of Unix developed by Bill Joy when he was a graduate student at Berkeley. (Note for non-techies: Unix is to Windows as a JCB is to a garden trowel.)

The fact that the iPhone could also make voice calls seemed, suddenly, a trivial afterthought. What mattered was that it provided mobile access to the internet. And that it could run programs, though it called them apps…

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