Doc Searls's Blog, page 35

Why is the “un-carrier” falling into the hellhole of tracking-based advertising?

For a few years now, T-Mobile has been branding itself the “un-carrier,” saying it’s “synonymous with 100% customer commitment.” Credit where due: we switched from AT&T a few years ago because T-Mobile, alone among U.S. carriers at the time, gave customers a nice cheap unlimited data plan for traveling outside the country.

But now comes this story in the Wall Street Journal:

T-Mobile to Step Up Ad Targeting of Cellphone Customers
Wireless carrier tells subscribers it could share their masked browsing, app data and online activity with advertisers unless they opt out

Talk about jumping on a bandwagon sinking in quicksand. Lawmakers in Europe (GDPR), California (CCPA) and elsewhere have been doing their best to make this kind of thing illegal, or at least difficult. Worse, it should now be clear that it not only sucks at its purpose, but customers hate it. A lot.

I just counted, and all 94 responses in the “conversation” under that piece are disapproving of this move by T-Mobile. I just copied them over and compressed out some extraneous stuff. Here ya go:

“Terrible decision by T-Mobile. Nobody ever says “I want more targeted advertising,” unless they are in the ad business.  Time to shop for a new carrier – it’s not like their service was stellar.”

“A disappointing development for a carrier which made its name by shaking up the big carriers with their overpriced plans.”

“Just an unbelievable break in trust!”

“Here’s an idea for you, Verizon. Automatically opt people into accepting a break on their phone bill in exchange for the money you make selling their data.”

“You want to make money on selling customer’s private information? Fine – but in turn, don’t charge your customers for generating that profitable information.”

“Data revenue sharing is coming. If you use my data, you will have to share the revenue with me.”

“Another reason to never switch to T-Mobile.”

“Kudos to WSJ for providing links on how to opt-out!”

“Just another disappointment from T-Mobile.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“We were supposed to be controlled by the government.”

“How crazy is it that we are having data shared for service we  PAY for? You might expect it on services that we don’t, as a kind of ‘exchange.'”

“WSJ just earned their subscription fee. Wouldn’t have known about this, or taken action without this story. Toggled it off on my phone, and then sent everyone I know on T Mobile the details on how to protect themselves.”

“Just finished an Online Chat with their customer service dept….’Rest assured, your data is safe with T-Mobile’…no, no it isn’t.  They may drop me as a customer since I sent links to the CCPA, the recent VA privacy law and a link to this article.  And just  to make sure the agent could read it – I sent the highlights too.  the response – ‘Your data is safe….’  Clueless, absolutely clueless.”

“As soon as I heard this, I went in and turned off tracking.  Also, when I get advertising that is clearly targeted (sometimes pretty easy to tell) I make a mental note to never buy or use the product or service advertised if I can avoid it.  Do others think the same?”

“Come on Congress, pass a law requiring any business or non-profit that wants to share your data with others to require it’s customers to ‘opt-in’. We should(n’t) have to ‘opt-out’ to prevent them from doing so, it should be the other way around. Only exception is them sharing data with the government and that there should be laws that limit what can be shared with the government and under what circumstances.”

“There must be massive amounts of money to be made in tracking what people do for targeted ads.  I had someone working for a national company tell me I would be shocked at what is known about me and what I do online.  My 85 year old dad refuses a smartphone and pays cash for everything he does short of things like utilities.  He still sends in a check each month to them, refuses any online transactions.  He is their least favorite kind of person but, he at least has some degree of privacy left.”

“Would you find interest-based ads on your phone helpful or intrusive?
Neither–they’re destructive. They limit the breadth of ideas concerning things I might be interested in seeing or buying. I generally proactively look when I want or need something, and so advertising has little impact on me. However, an occasional random ad shows up that broadens my interest–that goes away with the noise of targeted ads overlain and drowning it out. If T-Mobile were truly interested, it would make its program an opt-in program and tout it so those who might be interested could make the choice.”

“Humans evolved from stone age to modern civilization. These tech companies will strip all our clothes.”

“They just can’t help themselves. They know it’s wrong, they know people will hate and distrust them for it, but the lure of doing evil is too strong for such weak-minded business executives to resist the siren call of screwing over their customers for a buck. Which circle of hell will they be joining Zuckerberg in?”

“Big brother lurks behind every corner.”

“What privacy policy update was this?  Don’t they always preface their privacy updates with the statement: YOUR PRIVACY IS IMPORTANT TO US(?) When did T-Mobile tell its customers our privacy is no longer important to them?  And that in fact we are now going to sell all we know about you to the highest bidder. Seems they need at least to get informed consent to reverse this policy and to demonstrate that they gave notice that was actually received and reviewed and  understood by customers….otherwise, isn’t this wiretapping by a third party…a crime?  Also isn’t using electronic means to monitor someone in an environment where they have the reasonable expectation of privacy a tort. Why don’t they just have a dual rate structure?   The more expensive traditional privacy plan and a cheaper exploitation plan? Then at least they can demonstrate they have given you consideration for the surrender of your right to privacy.”

“A very useful article! I was able to log in and remove my default to receive such advertisements “relevant” to me.  That said all the regulatory bodies in the US are often headed by industry personnel who are their to protect companies, not consumers. US is the best place for any company to operate freely with regulatory burden. T-mobile follows the European standards in EU, but in the US there are no such restraints.”

“It’s far beyond time for the Congress to pass a sweeping privacy bill that outlaws collection and sale of personal information on citizens without their consent.”

“Appreciate the heads-up  and the guidance on how to opt out. Took 30 seconds!”

“Friends, you may not be aware that almost all of the apps on your iPhone track your location, which the apps sell to other companies, and someday the government. If you want to stop the apps from tracking your locations, this is what to do. In Settings, choose Privacy.   Then choose Location Services.  There you will see a list of your apps that track your location.  All of the time. I have switched nearly all of my apps to ‘Never’ track.  A few apps, mostly relating to travel, I have set to “While using.”  For instance, I have set Google Maps to ‘While using.’ That is how to take control of your information.”

“Thank you for this important info! I use T-Mobile and like them, but hadn’t heard of this latest privacy outrage. I’ve opted out.”

“T-Mobile is following Facebook’s playbook. Apple profits by selling devices and Operating Sysyems. Facebook & T-Mobile profit by selling, ………………… YOU!”

“With this move, at first by one then all carriers, I will really start to limit my small screen time.”

“As a 18 year customer of T-Mobile, I would have preferred an email from T-Mobile  about this, rather than having read this by chance today.”

“It should be Opt-In, not Opt-out. Forcing an opt out is a bit slimy in my books. Also, you know they’ll just end up dropping that option eventually and you’ll be stuck as opted in. Even if you opted in, your phone plan should be free or heavily subsidized since they are making dough off your usage.”

“No one automatically agrees to tracking of one’s life, via the GPS on their cell phone. Time to switch carriers.”

“It’s outrageous that customers who pay exorbitant fees for the devices are also exploited with advertising campaigns. I use ad blockers and a VPN and set cookies to clear when the browser is closed. When Apple releases the software to block the ad identification number of my device from being shared with the scum, I’ll be the first to use that, too.”

“It was a pain to opt out of this on T-Mobile. NOT COOL.”

“I just made the decision to “opt out” of choosing TMobile as my new phone service provider.  So very much appreciated.”

“Well, T-Mobile, you just lost a potential subscriber.  And why not reverse this and make it opt-in instead of opt-out?  I know, because too many people are lazy and will never opt-out, selling their souls to advertisers. And for those of you who decide to opt-out, congratulations.  You’re part of the vast minority who actually pay attention to these issues.”

“I have been seriously considering making the switch from Verizon to T-Mobile. The cavalier attitude that T-Mobile has for customers data privacy has caused me to put this on hold. You have to be tone deaf as a company to think that this is a good idea in the market place today.”

“Been with T-Mo for over 20 years because they’re so much better for international travel than the others. I don’t plan on changing to another carrier but I’ll opt out of this, thanks.”

“So now we know why T-Mobile is so much cheaper.”

“I have never heard anyone say that they want more ads. How about I pay too much for your services already and I don’t want ANY ads. We need a European style GDP(R) with real teeth in the USA and we need it now!”

“So these dummies are going to waste their money on ads when their service Suckky Ducky!   Sorry, but it’s a wasteland of T-Mobile, “No Service” Bars on your phone with these guys.  It’s the worst service, period. Spend your money on your service, the customers will follow.  Why is that so hard for these dummies to understand?”

“If they do this I will go elsewhere.”

“When will these companies learn that their ads are an annoyance.  I do not want or appreciate their ads.  I hate the words ‘We use our data to customize the ads you receive.'”

“Imagine if those companies had put that much effort and money into actually improving their service. Nah, that’s ridiculous.”

“Thank you info on how to opt out. I just did so. It’s up to me to decide what advertising is relevant for me, not some giant corporation that thinks they own me.”

“who is the customer out there like, Yeah I want them to advertise to me! I love it!’? Hard to believe anyone would ask for this.”

“I believe using a VPN would pretty much halt all of this nonsense, especially if the carrier doesn’t want to cooperate.”

“I’m a TMobile customer, and to be honest, I really don’t care about advertising–as long as they don’t give marketers my phone number.  Now that would be a deal breaker.”

“What about iPhone users on T-Mobile?  Apple’s move to remove third party cookies is creating this incentive for carriers to fill the void. It’s time for a national privacy bill.”

“We need digital privacy laws !!!   Sad that Europe and other countries are far ahead of us here.”

“Pure arrogance on the part of the carrier. What are they thinking at a time when people are increasingly concerned about privacy? I’m glad that I’m not currently a T-Mobile customer and this seals the deal for me for the future.”

“AT&T won’t actually let you opt out fully. Requests to block third party analytics trigger pop up messages that state ‘Our system doesn’t seem to be cooperating. Sorry for any inconvenience. Please try again later’.”

“One of the more salient articles I’ve read anywhere recently. Google I understand, we get free email and other stuff, and it’s a business. But I already pay a couple hundred a month to my phone provider. And now they think it’s a good idea to barrage me and my family? What about underage kids getting ads – that must be legal only because the right politicians got paid off.”

“Oh yeah, I bet customers have been begging for more “targeted advertising”.  It would be nice if a change in privacy policy also allowed you to void your 12 month agreement with these guys.”

“Thank you for showing us how to opt out. If these companies want to sell my data, then they should pay me part of the proceeds. Otherwise, I opt out.”

Think T-Mobile is listening?

If not, they’re just a typical carrier with 0% customer commitment.

The eventual normal

One year ago exactly (at this minute), my wife and I were somewhere over Nebraska, headed from Newark to Santa Barbara by way of Denver, on the last flight we’ve ever taken. Prior to that we had put about four million miles on United alone, flying almost constantly somewhere, mostly on business. The map above traces what my pocket GPS recorded on various trips (and far from all of them) by land, sea and air since 2007. This life began for me in 1990 and for my wife long before that. Post-Covid, none of this will ever be the same. For anybody.

We also haven’t seen most of our kids or grandkids in more than a year. Same goes for countless friends, business associates and fellow (no longer) travelers on other routes of life.

The old normal is over. We don’t know what the new normal will be, exactly; but it’s clear that business travel as we knew it is gone for years to come, if not forever.

I also sense a generational hand-off. Young people always take over from their elders at some point, but this handoff is from the physical to the digital. Young people are digital natives. Older folk are at best familiar with the digital world: adept in many cases, but not born into it. Being born into the digital world is very different. And still very new.

Though my wife and I have been stuck in Southern California for a year now, we have been living mostly in the digital world, working hard on that handoff, trying to deposit all we can of our long experience and hard-won wisdom on the conveyor belt of work we share across generations.

There will be a new normal, eventually. It will be a normal like the one we had in the 20th Century, which started with WWI and ended with Covid. This was a normal where the cultural center was held by newspapers and broadcasting, and every adult knew how to drive.

Now we’re in the 21st Century, and it’s something of a whiteboard. We still have the old media and speak the same languages, but Covid pushed a reset button, and a lot of the old norms are open to question, if not out the window completely.

Why should the digital young accept the analog-born status quos of business, politics, religion, education, transportation or anything? The easy answer is because the flywheels of those things are still spinning. The hard answers start with questions about how we can do all that stuff better. For sure all the answers will be, to a huge degree, digital.

Perspective: the world has been digital for a only few years now, and will likely remain so for many decades or centuries. Far more has been not been done than has, and lots of stuff will have to be improvised until we (increasingly the young folk) figure out the best approaches. It won’t be easy. None of the technical areas my wife and I are involved with personally (and I’ve been writing about) —privacy, identity, fintech, facial recognition, advertising, journalism—have easy answers to their problems, much less final ones.

But we like working on them, and sensing some progress, which doesn’t suck.

 

 

 

Enough with the giant URLs

A few minutes ago I wanted to find something I’d written about privacy. So I started with a simple search on Google:

The result was this:

Which is a very very very very very very very very very very very very very way long way of saying this:

 https://google.com/search?&q=doc+searls+…

That’s 609 characters vs. 47, or about 13 times longer. (Hence the word “very” repeated 13 times, above.)

Why are search URLs so long these days? The didn’t used to be.

I assume that the 562 extra characters in that long url tell Google more about me and what I’m doing than they used to want to know. In old long-URL search results, there was human-readable stuff there about the computer and the browser being used. This mess surely contains the same, plus lots of personal data about me and what I’m doing online in addition to searching for this one thing. But I don’t know. And that’s surely part of the idea here.

This much, however, is easy for a human to read:

Giant URLs like this are cyphers, on purpose.You’re not supposed to know what they actually say. Only Google should know.There is a lot about your searches that are Google’s business and not yours.Google has lost interest (if it ever had any) in making search result URLs easy to copy and use somewhere else, such as in a post like this.

Bing is better in this regard. Here’s the same search result there:

That’s 101 characters, or less than 1/6th of Google’s.

The de-crufted URL is also shorter:

 https://bing.com/search?q=doc+searls+pri…

Just 44 characters.

So here is a suggestion for both companies: make search results available with one click in their basic forms. That will make sharing those URLs a lot easier to do, and create good will as well. And, if cruft-less URL are harder for you to track, so what? Sometimes it’s better to make things easy for people than harder. This is one of those times. Or billions of them.

 

 

 

A toast to the fools standing high on broadcasting’s hill

In Winter, the cap of dark on half the Earth is cocked to the north. So, as the planet spins, places farther north get more night in the winter. In McGrath, Alaska, at close to sixty-three degrees north, most of the day is dark. This would be discouraging to most people, but to Paul B. Walker it’s a blessing. Because Paul is a DXer.

In the radio world, DX stands for for distance, and DXing is listening to distant radio stations. Thanks to that darkness, Paul listens to AM stations of all sizes, from Turkey to Tennessee, Thailand to Norway. And last night, New Zealand. Specifically, NewsTalk ZB‘s main AM signal at 1035 on the AM (what used to be the) dial. According to distancecalculator.net, the signal traveled 11886.34 km, or 7385.83 miles, across the face of the earth. In fact it flew much farther, since the signal needed to bounce up and down off the E layer of the ionosphere and the surface of the ocean multiple times between Wellington and McGrath. While that distance is no big deal on shortwave (which bounces off a higher layer) and no deal at all on the Internet (where we are all zero distance apart), for a DXer that’s like hauling in a fish the size of a boat.

In this sense alone, Paul and I are kindred souls. As a boy and a young man, I was a devout DXer too. I logged thousands of AM and FM stations, from my homes in New Jersey and North Carolina. (Here is a collection of QSL cards I got from stations to which I reported reception, in 1963, when I was a sophomore in high school.) More importantly, learning about all these distant stations sparked my interest in geography, electronics, geology, weather, astronomy, history and other adjacent fields. By the time I was a teen, I could draw all the states of the country, freehand, and name their capitals too. And that was on top of knowing on sight the likely purpose of every broadcast tower and antenna I saw. For example, I can tell you (and do in the mouse-over call-outs you’ll see if you click on the photo) what FM and TV station transmits from every antenna in this picture (of Mt. Wilson, above Los Angeles):

As a photographer, I’ve shot thousands of pictures of towers and antennas. (See here.) In fact, that’s how I met Paul, who created and runs a private Facebook group called (no kidding) “I Take Pictures of Transmitter Sites.” This is not a small group. It has 14,100 members, and is one of the most active and engaging groups I have ever joined.

One reason it’s so active is that many of the members (and perhaps most of them) are, or were, engineers at radio and TV stations, and their knowledge of many topics, individually and collectively, is massive.

There is so much you need to know about the world if you’re a broadcast engineer.

On AM you have to know about ground conductivity, directional arrays (required so stations don’t interfere with each other), skywave signals such as the ones Paul catches and the effects of tower length on the sizes and shapes of the signals they radiate.

On FM you need to know the relative and combined advantages of antenna height and power, how different numbers of stacked antennas concentrate signal strength toward and below the horizon, the shadowing effects of buildings and terrain, and how the capacitive properties of the earth’s troposphere can sometimes bend signals so they go much farther than they would normally.

On TV you used to care about roughly the same issues as FM (which, in North America is sandwiched between the two original TV bands). Now you need to know a raft of stuff about how digital transmission works as well.

And that’s just a small sampling of what needs to be known in all three forms of broadcasting. And the largest body of knowledge in all three domains is what actually happens to signals in the physical world—which differs enormously from place to place, and region to region.

All of this gives the engineer a profound sense of what comprises the physical world, and how it helps, limits, and otherwise interacts with the electronic one. Everyone in the business is like the fool on the Beatles’ hill, seeing the sun going down and the world spinning round. And, while it’s not a dying profession, it’s a shrinking one occupied by especially stalwart souls. And my hat’s off to them.

By the way, you can actually hear Paul Walker for yourself, in two places. One is as a guest on this Reality 2.0 podcast, which I did in January. The other is live on KSKO/89.5 in McGrath, where he’s the program director. You don’t need to be a DXer to enjoy either one.

Welcome to the 21st Century

Historic milestones don’t always line up with large round numbers on our calendars. For example, I suggest that the 1950s ended with the assassination of JFK in late 1963, and the rise of British Rock, led by the Beatles, in 1964. I also suggest that the 1960s didn’t end until Nixon resigned, and disco took off, in 1974.

It has likewise been suggested that the 20th century actually began with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the start of WWI, in 1914. While that and my other claims might be arguable, you might at least agree that there’s no need for historic shifts to align with two or more zeros on a calendar—and that in most cases they don’t.

So I’m here to suggest that the 21st century began in 2020 with the Covid-19 pandemic and the fall of Donald Trump. (And I mean that literally. Social media platforms were Trump’s man’s stage, and the whole of them dropped him, as if through a trap door, on the occasion of the storming of the U.S. Capitol by his supporters on January 6, 2021. Whether you liked that or not is beside the facticity of it.)

Things are not the same now. For example, over the coming years, we may never hug, shake hands, or comfortably sit next to strangers again.

But I’m bringing this up for another reason: I think the future we wrote about in The Cluetrain Manifesto, in World of Ends, in The Intention Economy, and in other optimistic expressions during the first two decades of the 21st Century may finally be ready to arrive.

At least that’s the feeling I get when I listen to an interview I did with Christian Einfeldt (@einfeldt) at a San Diego tech conference in April, 2004—and that I just discovered recently in the Internet Archive. The interview was for a film to be called “Digital Tipping Point.” Here are its eleven parts, all just a few minutes long:

01 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_…
02 https://archive.org/details/e-dv039_doc_…
03 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_…
04 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_…
05 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_…
06 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_…
07 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_…
08 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_…
09 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_…
10 https://archive.org/details/e-dv039_doc_…
11 https://archive.org/details/e-dv039_doc_…

The title is a riff on Malcolm Gladwell‘s book The Tipping Point, which came out in 2000, same year as The Cluetrain Manifesto. The tipping point I sensed four years later was, I now believe, a foreshadow of now, and only suggested by the successes of the open source movement and independent personal publishing in the form of blogs, both of which I was high on at the time.

What followed in the decade after the interview were the rise of social networks, of smart mobile phones and of what we now call Big Tech. While I don’t expect those to end in 2021, I do expect that we will finally see  the rise of personal agency and of constructive social movements, which I felt swelling in 2004.

Of course, I could be wrong about that. But I am sure that we are now experiencing the millennial shift we expected when civilization’s odometer rolled past 2000.

Radio 2.x

On Quora, somebody asks, How can the radio industry stay relevant in the age of streaming music and podcasts? Here’s my answer:

It already is, if you consider streaming music and podcasting evolutionary forms of radio.

But if you limit the meaning of radio to over-the-air broadcasting, the relevance will be a subordinate one to what’s happening over streaming, cellular and Internet connections, podcasting, satellite radio, digital audio broadcast (DAB) and various forms of Internet-shared video (starting with, but not limited to, YouTube).

The main way over-the-air radio can remain relevant in the long run is by finding ways for live streams to hand off to radio signals, and vice versa. Very little effort is going into this, however, so I expect over-the-air to drift increasingly to the sidelines, as a legacy technology. Toward this inevitable end, it should help to know that AM is mostly gone in Europe (where it is called MW, for MediumWave). This follows in the tracks of LW (longwave) and to some degree SW (shortwave) as well. Stations on those bands persist, and they do have their uses (especially where other forms of radio and Internet connections are absent); but in terms of popularity they are also-rans.

BUT, in the meantime, so long as cars have AM and FM radios in them, the bands remain relevant and popular. But again, it’s a matter of time before nearly all forms of music, talk and other forms of entertainment and sharing move from one-way broadcast to every-way sharing, based on digital technologies. (Latest example: Clubhouse.)

Why the Chiefs will win the Super Bowl

I think there are more reasons to believe in the Bucs than the Chiefs today: better offensive line, better defense, Brady’s unequaled Super Bowl experience, etc. But the Chiefs are favored by 3.5 points, last I looked, and they have other advantages, including the best quarterback in the game—or maybe ever—in Patrick Mahomes.

And that’s the story. The incumbent GOAT (greatest of all time) is on his way out and the new one is on his way in. This game will certify that. I also think the Chiefs will beat the spread. By a lot. Because Mahomes and the Chiefs’ offense is just that good, and that ready.

Disclosures… In 2016, I correctly predicted, for the same reason (it makes the best story) that Lebron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers would beat the Golden State Warriors for the NBA championship. Also, a cousin of mine (once removed—he’s the son of my cousin) is Andy Heck, the Chiefs’ offensive line coach. So, as a long-time fan of both the Patriots and Tom Brady, I’ll be be cool with either team winning.

But I do think a Chiefs win makes a better story. Especially if Mahomes does his magic behind an offensive line of injuries and substitutes outperforming expectations.

[Later…] The Chiefs lost, 31-9. Their worst loss ever in the Mahomes era, I think. Looked and felt like it. But hey: congrats to the Bucs. They truly kicked ass.

 

 

Just in case you feel safe with Twitter

Just got a press release by email from David Rosen (@firstpersonpol) of the Public Citizen press office. The headline says “Historic Grindr Fine Shows Need for FTC Enforcement Action.” The same release is also a post in the news section of the Public Citizen website. This is it:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Norwegian Data Protection Agency today fined Grindr $11.7 million following a Jan. 2020 report that the dating app systematically violates users’ privacy. Public Citizen asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state attorneys general to investigate Grindr and other popular dating apps, but the agency has yet to take action. Burcu Kilic, digital rights program director for Public Citizen, released the following statement:

“Fining Grindr for systematic privacy violations is a historic decision under Europe’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), and a strong signal to the AdTech ecosystem that business-as-usual is over. The question now is when the FTC will take similar action and bring U.S. regulatory enforcement in line with those in the rest of the world.

“Every day, millions of Americans share their most intimate personal details on apps like Grindr, upload personal photos, and reveal their sexual and religious identities. But these apps and online services spy on people, collect vast amounts of personal data and share it with third parties without people’s knowledge. We need to regulate them now, before it’s too late.”

The first link goes to Grindr is fined $11.7 million under European privacy law, by Natasha Singer (@NatashaNYT) and Aaron Krolik. (This @AaronKrolik? If so, hi. If not, sorry. This is a blog. I can edit it.) The second link goes to a Public Citizen post titled Popular Dating, Health Apps Violate Privacy.

In the emailed press release, the text is the same, but the links are not. The first is this:

https://default.salsalabs.org/T72ca98...

The second is this:

https://default.salsalabs.org/Tc66c38...

Why are they not simple and direct URLs? And who is salsalabs.org?

You won’t find anything at that link, or by running a whois on it. But I do see there is a salsalabs.com, which has  “SmartEngagement Technology” that “combines CRM and nonprofit engagement software with embedded best practices, machine learning, and world-class education and support.” since Public Citizen is a nonprofit, I suppose it’s getting some “smart engagement” of some kind with these links. PrivacyBadger tells me Salsalabs.com has 14 potential trackers, including static.ads.twitter.com.

My point here is that we, as clickers on those links, have at best a suspicion about what’s going on: perhaps that the link is being used to tell Public Citizen that we’ve clicked on the link… and likely also to help target us with messages of some sort. But we really don’t know.

And, speaking of not knowing, Natasha and Aaron’s New York Times story begins with this:

The Norwegian Data Protection Authority said on Monday that it would fine Grindr, the world’s most popular gay dating app, 100 million Norwegian kroner, or about $11.7 million, for illegally disclosing private details about its users to advertising companies.

The agency said the app had transmitted users’ precise locations, user-tracking codes and the app’s name to at least five advertising companies, essentially tagging individuals as L.G.B.T.Q. without obtaining their explicit consent, in violation of European data protection law. Grindr shared users’ private details with, among other companies, MoPub, Twitter’s mobile advertising platform, which may in turn share data with more than 100 partners, according to the agency’s ruling.

Before this, I had never heard of MoPub. In fact, I had always assumed that Twitter’s privacy policy either limited or forbid the company from leaking out personal information to advertisers or other entities. Here’s how its Private Information Policy Overview begins:

You may not publish or post other people’s private information without their express authorization and permission. We also prohibit threatening to expose private information or incentivizing others to do so.

Sharing someone’s private information online without their permission, sometimes called doxxing, is a breach of their privacy and of the Twitter Rules. Sharing private information can pose serious safety and security risks for those affected and can lead to physical, emotional, and financial hardship.

On the MoPub site, however, it says this:

MoPub, a Twitter company, provides monetization solutions for mobile app publishers and developers around the globe.

Our flexible network mediation solution, leading mobile programmatic exchange, and years of expertise in mobile app advertising mean publishers trust us to help them maximize their ad revenue and control their user experience.

The Norwegian DPA apparently finds a conflict between the former and the latter—or at least in the way the latter was used by Grinder (since they didn’t fine Twitter).

To be fair, Grindr and Twitter may not agree with the Norwegian DPA. Regardless of their opinion, however, by this point in history we should have no faith that any company will protect our privacy online. Violating personal privacy is just too easy to do, to rationalize, and to make money at.

To start truly facing this problem, we need start with a simple fact: If your privacy is in the hands of others alone, you don’t have any. Getting promises from others not to stare at your naked self isn’t the same as clothing. Getting promises not to walk into your house or look in your windows is not the same as having locks and curtains.

In the absence of personal clothing and shelter online, or working ways to signal intentions about one’s privacy, the hands of others alone is all we’ve got. And it doesn’t work. Nor do privacy laws, especially when enforcement is still so rare and scattered.

Really, to potential violators like Grindr and Twitter/MoPub, enforcement actions like this one by the Norwegian DPA are at most a little discouraging. The effect on our experience of exposure is still nil. We are exposed everywhere, all the time, and we know it. At best we just hope nothing bad happens.

The only way to fix this problem is with the digital equivalent of clothing, locks, curtains, ways to signal what’s okay and what’s not—and to get firm agreements from others about how our privacy will be respected.

At Customer Commons, we’re starting with signaling, specifically with first party terms that you and I can proffer and sites and services can accept.

The first is called P2B1, aka #NoStalking. It says “Just give me ads not based on tracking me.” It’s a term any browser (or other tool) can proffer and any site or service can accept—and any privacy-respecting website or service should welcome.

Making this kind of agreement work is also being addressed by IEEE7012, a working group on machine-readable personal privacy terms.

Now we’re looking for sites and services willing to accept those terms. How about it, Twitter, New York Times, Grindr and Public Citizen? Or anybody.

DM us at @CustomerCommons and we’ll get going on it.

 

Toward new kinds of leverage

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” Archimedes is said to have said.

For almost all of the last four years, Donald Trump was one hell of an Archimedes. With the U.S. presidency as his lever and Twitter as his fulcrum, the 45th President leveraged an endless stream of news-making utterances into a massive following and near-absolute domination of news coverage, worldwide. It was an amazing show, the like of which we may never see again.

Big as it was, that show ended on January 8, when Twitter terminated the @RealDonaldTrump account. Almost immediately after that, Trump was “de-platformed” from all these other services as well: PayPal, Reddit, Shopify, Snapchat, Discord, Amazon, Twitch, Facebook, TikTok, Google, Apple, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. That’s a lot of fulcrums to lose.

What makes them fulcrums is their size. All are big, and all are centralized: run by one company. As members, users and customers of these centralized services, we are also at their mercy: no less vulnerable to termination than Trump.

So here is an interesting question: What if Trump had his own fulcrum from the start? For example, say he took one of the many Trump domains he probably owns (or should have bothered to own, long ago), and made it a blog where he said all the same things he tweeted, and that site had the same many dozens of millions of followers today? Would it still be alive?

I’m not sure it would. Because, even though the base protocols of the Internet and the Web are peer-to-peer and end-to-end, all of us are dependent on services above those protocols, and at the mercy of those services’ owners.

That to me is the biggest lesson the de-platforming of Donald Trump has for the rest of us. We can talk “de-centralization” and “distribution” and “democratization” along with peer-to-peer and end-to-end, but we are still at the mercy of giants.

Yes, there are work-arounds. The parler.com website, de-platformed along with Trump, is back up and, according to @VickerySec (Chris Vickery), “routing 100% of its user traffic through servers located within the Russian Federation.” Adds @AdamSculthorpe, “With a DDos-Guard IP, exactly as I predicted the day it went offline. DDoS Guard is the Russian equivalent of CloudFlare, and runs many shady sites. RiTM (Russia in the middle) is one way to think about it.” Encrypted services such as Signal and Telegram also provide ways for people to talk and be social. But those are also platforms, and we are at their mercy too.

I bring all this up as a way of thinking out loud toward the talk I’ll be giving in a few hours (also see here), on the topic “Centralized vs. Decentralized.” Here’s the intro:

Centralised thinking is easy. Control sits on one place, everything comes home, there is a hub, the corporate office is where all the decisions are made and it is a power game.

Decentralised thinking is complex. TCP/IP and HTTP created a fully decentralised fabric for packet communication. No-one is in control. It is beautiful. Web3 decentralised ideology goes much further but we continually run into conflicts. We need to measure, we need to report, we need to justify, we need to find a model and due to regulation and law, there are liabilities.

However, we have to be doing both. We have to centralise some aspects and at the same time decentralise others. Whilst we hang onto an advertising model that provides services for free we have to have a centralised business model. Apple with its new OS is trying to break the tracking model and in doing so could free us from the barter of free, is that the plan which has nothing to do with privacy or are the ultimate control freaks. But the new distributed model means more risks fall on the creators as the aggregators control the channels and access to a model. Is our love for free preventing us from seeing the value in truly distributed or are those who need control creating artefacts that keep us from achieving our dreams? Is distributed even possible with liability laws and a need to justify what we did to add value today?

So here is what I think I’ll say.

First, we need to respect the decentralized nature of humanity. All of us are different, by design. We look, sound, think and feel different, as separate human beings. As I say in How we save the world, “no being is more smart, resourceful or original than a human one. Again, by design. Even identical twins, with identical DNA from a single sperm+egg, can be as different as two primary colors. (Examples: Laverne Cox and M.Lamar. Nicole and Jonas Maines.)”

This simple fact of our distributed souls and talents has had scant respect from the centralized systems of the digital world, which would rather lead than follow us, and rather guess about us than understand us. That’s partly because too many of them have become dependent on surveillance-based personalized advertising (which is awful in ways I’ve detailed in 136 posts, essays and articles compiled here). But it’s mostly because they’re centralized and can’t think or work outside their very old and square boxes.

Second, advertising, subscriptions and donations through the likes of (again, centralized) Patreon aren’t the only possible ways to support a site or a service. Those are industrial age conventions leveraged in the early decades of the digital age. There are other approaches we can implement as well, now that the pendulum is started to swing back from the centralized extreme. For example, the fully decentralized EmanciPay. A bunch of us came up with that one at ProjectVRM way back in 2009. What makes it decentralized is that the choice of what to pay, and how, is up to the customer. (No, it doesn’t have to be scary.) Which brings me to—

Third, we need to start thinking about solving business problems, market problems, technical problems, from our side. Here is how Customer Commons puts it:

There is … no shortage of of business problems that can only be solved from the customer’s side. Here are a few examples :

Identity. Logins and passwords are burdensome leftovers from the last millennium. There should be (and already are) better ways to identify ourselves, and to reveal to others only what we need them to know. Working on this challenge is the SSI—Self-Sovereign Identity—movement. The solution here for individuals is tools of their own that scale.Subscriptions. Nearly all subscriptions are pains in the butt. “Deals” can be deceiving, full of conditions and changes that come without warning. New customers often get better deals than loyal customers. And there are no standard ways for customers to keep track of when subscriptions run out, need renewal, or change. The only way this can be normalized is from the customers’ side.Terms and conditions. In the world today, nearly all of these are ones companies proffer; and we have little or no choice about agreeing to them. Worse, in nearly all cases, the record of agreement is on the company’s side. Oh, and since the GDPR came along in Europe and the CCPA in California, entering a website has turned into an ordeal typically requiring “consent” to privacy violations the laws were meant to stop. Or worse, agreeing that a site or a service provider spying on us is a “legitimate interest.”Payments. For demand and supply to be truly balanced, and for customers to operate at full agency in an open marketplace (which the Internet was designed to be), customers should have their own pricing gun: a way to signal—and actually pay willing sellers—as much as they like, however they like, for whatever they like, on their own terms. There is already a design for that, called Emancipay.Internet of Things. What we have so far are the Apple of things, the Amazon of things, the Google of things, the Samsung of things, the Sonos of things, and so on—all silo’d in separate systems we don’t control. Things we own on the Internet should be our things. We should be able to control them, as independent customers, as we do with our computers and mobile devices. (Also, by the way, things don’t need to be intelligent or connected to belong to the Internet of Things. They can be, or have, picos.)Loyalty. All loyalty programs are gimmicks, and coercive. True loyalty is worth far more to companies than the coerced kind, and only customers are in position to truly and fully express it. We should have our own loyalty programs, to which companies are members, rather than the reverse.Privacy. We’ve had privacy tech in the physical world since the inventions of clothing, shelter, locks, doors, shades, shutters, and other ways to limit what others can see or hear—and to signal to others what’s okay and what’s not. Instead, all we have are unenforced promises by others not to watching our naked selves, or to report what they see to others. Or worse, coerced urgings to “accept” spying on us and distributing harvested information about us to parties unknown, with no record of what we’ve agreed to.Customer service. There are no standard ways to call for service yet, or to get it. And there should be.Advertising. Our main problem with advertising today is tracking, which is failing because it doesn’t work. (Some history: ad blocking has been around since 2004, it took off in 2013, when the advertising and publishing industries gave the middle finger to Do Not Track, which was never more than a polite request in one’s browser not to be tracked off a site. By 2015, ad blocking alone was the biggest boycott i world history. And in 2018 and 2019 we got the GDPR and the CCPA, two laws meant to thwart tracking and unwanted data collection, and which likely wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been given that finger.) We can solve that problem from the customer side with intentcasting,. This is where we advertise to the marketplace what we want, without risk that our personal data won’t me misused. (Here is a list of intentcasting providers on the ProjectVRM Development Work list.)

We already have examples of personal solutions working at scale: the Internet, the Web, email and telephony. Each provides single, simple and standards-based ways any of us can scale how we deal with others—across countless companies, organizations and services. And they work for those companies as well.

Other solutions, however, are missing—such as ones that solve the eight problems listed above.

They’re missing for the best of all possible reasons: it’s still early. Digital living is still new—decades old at most. And it’s sure to persist for many decades, centuries or millennia to come.

They’re also missing because businesses typically think all solutions to business problems are ones for them. Thinking about customers solving business problems is outside that box.

But much work is already happening outside that box. And there already exist standards and code for building many customer-side solutions to problems shared with businesses. Yes, there are not yet as many or as good as we need; but there are enough to get started.

A lot of levers there.

For those of you attending this event, I’ll talk with you shortly. For the rest of you, I’ll let you know how it goes.

How we save the world

Let’s say the world is going to hell. Don’t argue, because my case isn’t about that. It’s about who saves it.

I suggest everybody. Or, more practically speaking, a maximized assortment of the smartest and most helpful anybodies.

Not governments. Not academies. Not investors. Not charities. Not big companies and their platforms. Any of those can be involved, of course, but we don’t have to start there. We can start with people. Because all of them are different. All of them can learn. And teach. And share. Especially since we now have the Internet.

To put this in a perspective, start with Joy’s Law: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” Then take Todd Park‘s corollary: “Even if you get the best and the brightest to work for you, there will always be an infinite number of other, smarter people employed by others.” Then take off the corporate-context blinders, and note that smart people are actually far more plentiful among the world’s customers, readers, viewers, listeners, parishioners, freelancers and bystanders.

Hundreds of millions of those people also carry around devices that can record and share photos, movies, writings and a boundless assortment of other stuff. Ways of helping now verge on the boundless.

We already have millions (or billions) of them are reporting on everything by taking photos and recording videos with their mobiles, obsolescing journalism as we’ve known it since the word came into use (specifically, around 1830). What matters with the journalism example, however, isn’t what got disrupted. It’s how resourceful and helpful (and not just opportunistic) people can be when they have the tools.

Because no being is more smart, resourceful or original than a human one. Again, by design. Even identical twins, with identical DNA from a single sperm+egg, can be as different as two primary colors. (Examples: Laverne Cox and M. Lamar. Nicole and Jonas Maines.)

Yes, there are some wheat/chaff distinctions to make here. To thresh those, I dig Carlo Cipolla‘s Basic Laws on Human Stupidity (.pdf here) which stars this graphic:

The upper right quadrant has how many people in it? Billions, for sure.

I’m counting on them.

If we didn’t have the Internet, I wouldn’t.

Bonus links: Cluetrain, New Clues, Customer Commons.)

And a big HT to my old buddy Julius R. Ruff, Ph.D., for turning me on to Cipolla.