Schneier on the Facebook Riots

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Thoughtful article by Brice Schneier in Wired News…

As the Facebook example illustrates, privacy is much more complex. It’s about who you choose to disclose information to, how, and for what purpose. And the key word there is “choose.” People are willing to share all sorts of information, as long as they are in control.

When Facebook unilaterally changed the rules about how personal information was revealed, it reminded people that they weren’t in control. Its 9 million members put their personal information on the site based on a set of rules about how that information would be used. It’s no wonder those members — high school and college kids who traditionally don’t care much about their own privacy — felt violated when Facebook changed the rules.

Unfortunately, Facebook can change the rules whenever it wants. Its Privacy Policy is 2,800 words long, and ends with a notice that it can change at any time. How many members ever read that policy, let alone read it regularly and check for changes?

Not that a Privacy Policy is the same as a contract. Legally, Facebook owns all data that members upload to the site. It can sell the data to advertisers, marketers and data brokers. (Note: There is no evidence that Facebook does any of this.) It can allow the police to search its databases upon request. It can add new features that change who can access what personal data, and how.

But public perception is important. The lesson here for Facebook and other companies — for Google and MySpace and AOL and everyone else who hosts our e-mails and webpages and chat sessions — is that people believe they own their data. Even though the user agreement might technically give companies the right to sell the data, change the access rules to that data or otherwise own that data, we — the users — believe otherwise. And when we who are affected by those actions start expressing our views — watch out.

Hmmm… I’ve been looking at the Facebook privacy statement and it seems to me to be more reasonable that I had expected from reading Schneier’s piece. Also — unusually — it is written in plain English rather than legalese.

Nevertheless, I agree with Schneier’s general conclusion:

The lesson for Facebook members might be even more jarring: If they think they have control over their data, they’re only deluding themselves. They can rebel against Facebook for changing the rules, but the rules have changed, regardless of what the company does.

Whenever you put data on a computer, you lose some control over it. And when you put it on the internet, you lose a lot of control over it. News Feeds brought Facebook members face to face with the full implications of putting their personal information on Facebook.

Laffer effect? What Laffer effect?

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Well, well! The Observer reports that

Flat taxes fail to boost revenues, as their advocates claim, and are likely to be abandoned by the countries that have introduced them, according to research published by the International Monetary Fund.

‘The question is not so much whether more countries will adopt a flat tax, as whether those that have will move away from it,’ the study says, after examining the experience of eight economies that have introduced the policy since the mid-Nineties.

Sweeping away variable tax bands and replacing them with a single rate has long been a dream of right-wing economists. Since a number of Eastern European governments introduced flat taxes, support for them has grown in the UK, and shadow Chancellor George Osborne has flirted with the idea.

But the IMF analysts who carried out the research cast doubt on the main advantage claimed for flat taxes: that they increase revenues by allowing people to pocket more of their hard-earned cash, and thus persuade them to work harder.This is the so-called ‘Laffer effect’ named after US economist Arthur Laffer. But the authors say: ‘In no case does there appear to have been a Laffer effect: these reforms have not set off effects strong enough for them to pay for themselves.’

St Moritz

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Nice profile of Micheal Moritz…

Michael Moritz has a few simple rules for investing in internet start-ups: look for people who are pursuing their own ideas for doing something better; prefer youth to maturity; ignore business plans looking a few years ahead; and avoid anyone wearing Armani T-shirts, loafers with no socks or who uses words like ‘synergy’, ‘no-brainer’ or ‘slam-dunk’.

Moritz is worth listening to. The 51-year-old Welshman is one of the duo running Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has just made an estimated $480m profit in less than a year by backing YouTube, the video-sharing business this week acquired by Google. And it is not the firm’s only success: it was one of the only two venture capital firms to back Google itself, investing $12.5m in the start-up business; its 10 per cent stake is now worth more than $12bn. Its other investments read like a who’s who of the technology business: PayPal, Yahoo, eBay, Apple, Cisco.Small wonder that Moritz tops the list of technology deal-makers produced by Forbes, the US business magazine – or that his own wealth, estimated at £518m in the Sunday Times Rich List, makes him the sixth richest internet millionaire….

Sucking down

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This morning’s Observer column…

Before he hit the jackpot with YouTube, Jawed (like Hurley and Chen) had made a pile from his earlier involvement in PayPal, the online payment system bought by eBay in 2002 for $1.5bn. His share of the $1.65bn paid by Google for YouTube will reportedly be less than theirs, but it should still be sufficient to fund a private squadron of F-16s. And yet the lad chooses to bank the cash and return to considering ‘algorithms for edit distance on permutations’ and other arcane matters engaging students on the Stanford CS300 course. His one concession to the events of the last week was to cancel the seminar he had been scheduled to give on Thursday on ‘YouTube: from concept to hyper-growth’.

If Jawed has started a trend, who knows where it will end? Traditionally, university professors in elite US institutions find students a tiresome distraction from important work like private consulting, appearing on television and testifying before Congressional committees. For these superprofs, the really important people – the folks they have to suck up to – are rich alumni who have made good in the corporate world. But now a terrible prospect looms – US academics may in future have to pander to their students. Perhaps it will eventually become known as sucking down?

Ballmer and the Windows end-run

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Funny interview with Steve Ballmer in the New York Times. Excerpt:

Q. What was the lesson learned in Windows Vista? After all, it wasn’t supposed to ship more than five years after Windows XP.

A. No. No, it wasn’t. We tried to re-engineer every piece of Windows in one big bang. That was the original post-Windows XP design philosophy. And it wasn’t misshapen. It wasn’t executed, but it wasn’t misshapen. We said, let’s try to give them a new file system and a new presentation system and a new user interface all at the same time. It’s not like we had them and were just trying to integrate them. We were trying to develop and integrate at the same time. And that was beyond the state of the art.

Q. In the future, will the software model change? Will the Internet, for example, be the way most software is distributed?

A. That will happen. It’ll happen from us. It’ll happen from everybody.

Q. Doesn’t that mean that software product cycles are going to be much shorter, months instead of years?

A. Things will change at different paces. There are aspects of our Office Live service, for example, that change every three months, four months, six months. And there are aspects that are still not going to change but every couple of years. The truth of the matter is that some big innovations — and it’s a little like having a baby — can’t happen in under a certain amount of time. And, you know, Google doesn’t change their core search algorithms every month. It’s just not done…

Speed-reading

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Sebastian Faulk’s technique:

Place a sharp knife pointing out at right angles to the kitchen counter, then stand with your back to it and don’t move until you’ve finished a whole book.

Quoted by Anthony Quinn in today’s Daily Telegraph.

uTube’s woes

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From Good Morning SIlicon Valley…

If there’s any company even less happy with YouTube than the entertainment outfits, it’s Universal Tube and Rollerform Equipment Corp. near Toledo, Ohio, which has the misfortune of doing business on the Web at utube.com, its site since 1994. Since the video-sharing site took off, Universal Tube has had trouble keeping its site up under the load of misguided searchers (68 million page views in August alone). “It’s killing us,” said Ralph Girkins, president and owner, told CNNMoney. “All my worldwide reps use our Web site. Customers all over the world use it to bring up photos of the machinery, descriptions and specifications there. … And a customer who can’t find my $3-$400,000 machine online will just keep searching the Web until they find it elsewhere.” Also troublesome — do a Google search for “utube,” and links to YouTube come up first (one at the moment titled “lazyboy – underwear goes inside the pants”), which tends to put off potential customers. Girkins hasn’t been able to find anyone at YouTube or Google to ask for help, and I don’t think they owe him any, unless as a goodwill gesture. But then again, he may want to follow the lead of the entertainment companies and try threat-of-litigation negotiation.

Iraqi deconstruction

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This tasteful image shows part of the police station in Mosul as rebuilt by Iraqi contractors. Note the tree which, according to the NYT report, “was allowed to remain standing, and its trunk was cemented into the building’s structure”. It brings to mind T.E. Lawrence’s famous dictum:

“It is better that they do it imperfectly than that you do it perfectly. For it is their war and their country and your time here is limited.”