Is Facebook Evil? January 15, 2008
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Internet, Politics , add a commentA thinkpiece by Tom Hodgkinson in the Guardian yesterday raises some interesting points about Facebook, and he certainly makes his biases very clear with his opening sentence. “I despise Facebook”.
To the prejudices first. Hodgkinson is clearly one of those people who thinks that Facebook is somehow seeking to replace normal human contact. If I send a little ungrammatical note to a friend one day, I will probably be down the pub with them the next. Except of course, my mother in New Zealand who loves playing scrabble and my mate in Glasgow with a penchant for sheep-tossing. If Facebook helps me keep in touch with friends outside London, is that really so bad? Yes, there probably are sad people who spend too much time with it instead of going out, but then I spent Saturday night with YouTube, a glass of wine and the cat. It’s January. It’s cold. Noone’s got any money. And I found a very good, if rather disturbing play starring the exceptionally gorgeous David Tennant. Worked for me, but I digress.
Some people may compete about the number of friends they have, or ‘construct artifical representations of who I am in order to get sex or approval’. If Hodgkinson thinks Facebook is unusual in that, then he’s not spending enough time in bars.
That Facebook is fundamentally a way of collecting users and data about them to allow well-targetted marketing is not news, though there is a definite danger in people allowing too much data to be freely available. It’s free for users, is not a charity and so has to make money somehow. In fact, Facebook knows a lot less about me than Amazon does. Amazon has huge amounts of data about my reading, music and film-watching preferences, and it uses this to send me emails about books, CDs and DVDs I might like to buy. Its emails are sufficiently on the mark and interesting that I read them. I also take its suggestions and buy them from Foyles. If Facebook can do that, rather than send me advertisements for products to increase the size of organs I do not possess, its fine by me, and a small price to pay for the service they provide.
If you give all your ‘id card information and consumer preferences’ to Facebook, you are opening yourself up to advertisers, of course. Facebook doesn’t even have my address. It knows I’m a ‘fan’ of Dr Who, but I wouldn’t touch the ill-fated Beacon. It knows less about my buying habits than Amazon or House of Fraser. It does have access to my Pandora and StumbleUpon accounts, so it perhaps knows my music tastes and has some idea of sites I like. If it can construct a well targetted campaign out of that, all power to it. At least its ads are small and easily ignored.
Hodgkinson makes a big deal out of the privacy policy on Facebook. It would be worth his looking at a few other website’s privacy policys. Outside the remit of the Data Protection Act, noone on a free site is going to take responsibility for guaranteeing that your data is secure or that the government can’t look at it. And its rather sensible of them to explain that deleting something on the internet is not what it seems. Stuff is cached all over the place - in the browser, in google and other search engines where sites are open to them (which Facebook is not), in proxy servers, in other machines on your ISP or employer’s network. If you want to opt out of privacy policies like facebook’s, you probably have to opt out of the internet.
And finally, we come to the point of the article. The venture capitalists funding Facebook are a pack of ultra-libertarians with some fairly extreme views. Is this really surprising? Its venture capitalism, where people with money take big risks to make more. I imagine a great many venture capitalists operating in internet based businesses are down that end of the spectrum. Take a look at the other companies supported by the VCs funding Facebook, Accel Partners, and Peter Theil who manages Founders Fund. Without the firms these people fund, the web would be a very different place. No flash, no real audio, for starters.
Worse still, Accel PArtners shares a director with the CIAs venture capital firm. This isn’t a covert operation, sneaking arms into petty dictatorships. Its an outfit which explains on it’s website that the CIA fund it, and that it is about ‘accelerating information for the intelligence community’. Not sure I’d want them investing in my company, but that’s academic, and they’re very open about what they are. And they haven’t invested in Facebook.
The fear is that sites like Facebook are somehow replacing the ‘real’ world with a virtual world in which mega-capitalism controls everything.
Do they replace the real world, or do they enhance it? Surely, that depends on how you use them. If all your friends are on Facebook, and your main way of interacting with them is via Facebook then you would have a big problem. But if you use it, as most people seem to, as just another tool, then it is hardly such an issue.
Companies which provide the software infrastructure which others use, like Facebook, Ebay, aspects of Google, Myspace and all the rest are building the web, and yes, some people are making enormous amounts of money from it. They are assuming a level of power which is not desirable in a liberal society.
This is a serious problem, but opting out of Facebook won’t make any difference. It is far deeper than Facebook, and to really insulate oneself from it, one would have to opt out of the web. And probably banking, Oyster card use and most interaction with the government. Now, there’s a libertarian position.
There’s a lot to think about in here, but loading it onto Facebook isn’t the answer when the problem is in fact with the whole system. Personal ownership of personal data would be a good first step, as would better acceptance of non-advertising based models for website use.
As we move into an increasingly online age, that’s a problem that needs resolving.
Moving lanes on the info superhighway December 18, 2007
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Being Freelance, Internet , 1 comment so farEvery now and again, I find myself looking back on over twenty years working in information technology, and am truly amazed at how far we’ve come. When I started working, 300 baud (about 300 bits per second, or less than 40 characters per second) was still very common. Only geeks had home computers, and even as a programmer, I didn’t have a terminal on my desk. One of my early projects was to buy the first PCs for the NZ Ministry of Transport’s head office.
And today, I sit in Cafe Nero on Parkway in Camden, patched into the net using a mobile phone modem, happily surfing away at speeds which would have been very good for home use only a couple of years ago. Its all over the 3G mobile phone network, and might just put the overpriced cafe-based wifi services out of business. For £20 per month, I have enough bandwidth and download capacity to do everything I normally do, except perhaps my recent addiction to watching the BBC online. Its also great insurance if the broadband at home disappears - something which seems more common now that Virgin have taken over Telewest / NTL.
In the last few weeks, I’ve been working much more flexibly, based between home, a client’s offices and a supplier’s. It’s insurance if my broadband goes down and means I don’t need to rely on client’s or supplier’s to give me access to their networks. Most of my work is online now - project team collaboration sites, email and other tools - so to be disconnected for any length of time is difficult.
I decided to use TMobile for this, despite a very similar offering from Vodafone, who have my mobile contract. It was the difference made by a salesperson who talked sense and didn’t try to tell me that having a maximum download of 3Gb per month was the same as unlimited surfing. Yes, 3Gb is a lot, but infinity is more. That maths degree comes in handy sometimes, it really does.
Now, if someone could just invent a way of charging the laptop over the mobile network. The nice people here are going to get tired of me nicking their power.
BBC iPlayer to be reworked? September 14, 2007
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Internet , add a commentLast week, it was reported that the government was asking the BBC to make iPlayer available on a wider range of operating systems, rather than just on Windows. There has been a lot of comment on the desirability (or not) of this Microsoft tie-in, DRM issues and the use of peer-to-peer networking, but all of that misses the point.
The real issue with the iPlayer the random selection of available programmes. Even for an iconic BBC series like Dr Who, they aren’t able to consistently make episodes available as promised. As I write, iPlayer tells me that the two episodes which screened in the last two days are available, but when I go to download it changes it’s mind. They’re stopped loading up Mock the Week, Cosmos has been erratic, and the messageboards are full of frustrated users asking what is going on, while conspicuously lacking replies from the ‘iPlayer host’ BBC staffers who normally respond.
Utterly unsubstantiated rumour from a girl in the pub with a developer mate who’s been working on the iPlayer project suggests that they are going to ditch the whole sorry experiment and try again. I hope they do. The BBC is far too important to allow this to blight its excellent online reputation.
The Doctor and the PC next door September 4, 2007
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Internet , add a commentThanks to the BBC’s new iPlayer service, I’ve been watching the reruns of Dr Who which are screening on BBC3 four nights a week, and boring my friends silly with how great it is and how David Tennant is wonderful thinking girls crumpet. They all, being TV owning people, saw it a couple of years ago.
The iPlayer is a great idea, works well and quickly, though it does have a few foibles. They missed putting the last two episodes of the second series up last week, so I had to watch Daleks over London through my shaky laptop freeview card, and missed the second to last one completely. Its a beta programme though, so the odd glitch is fair enough.
More importantly, and something I think the BBC (and for that matter, Channel 4 with their 4oD product) should be a lot more clear about when you sign up, is the way the downloads work. I imagine that most people believe that they are downloading programmes from the BBC itself, but this is not the case. The system uses peer-to-peer networking, meaning that everyone with iPlayer is providing bandwidth and space for others to download, using a piece of software called kservice. While I’m watching the Doctor battle Cybermen, my neighbour may be getting the programme from my PC. In theory, this isn’t such a bad idea, and is perhaps a fair price to pay for a free service, but it does cause problems. If you’re on a capped service, where you are limited to a maximum amount of bandwidth used each month, it may not be long before you exceed this limit and are charged more or perhaps even cut off. It also uses up bandwidth and space on your PC which you may want for something else. Worse still, it runs all the time, even when you’re not using the iPlayer, unless you explicitly turn it off in the Windows Task Manager.
Personally, I don’t have an issue with it because my Virgin / Blueyonder 4Mb cable can chew through just about anything and I’m grateful enough for the Doctor to be happy to donate, but for many people it may be a problem. TV companies need to be much more open about this when they release iPlayer
into general use, and provide a way for non-technical users to switch
it off easily.
Technorati Tags: iPlayer, kservice, bbc
Another timestealer July 17, 2007
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Internet, London , add a commentI have finally succumbed and joined facebook. In fact, you might even be reading this post through facebook, because the rss feed for this is displaying on my profile. If you know me, and are on facebook, then add me as a friend. I could see that once you had a few friends and acquaintances linked in, it would be quite addictive, especially if your mates spend a fair bit of time online. This evening, I’ve had a wee chat with my friend Craig, who was playing with X servers over at the bbc, and found a few other friends on it.
Amazingly, there are 775000 people in the London network, that’s nearly 10% of the population. Mind you, a good 10% of the London population is probably down the pub right now, which is a rather better form of social networking.
Good night!
Technorati Tags: facebook, pub
Happy Birthday Eniac - 60 years old today February 13, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Internet , add a commentEniac, the first electronic computer, was unveiled in February 1946.
Converted to Mozilla February 11, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Internet , add a commentA few months ago I finally followed the crowd to Firefox, and have never looked back. The only downside is that I need to keep IE going for a few sites I use regularly which don’t work under Firefox. Most of these are ones I need for clients, so I won’t mention them here, but RBoS, you really should do something about your appalling clunky business banking site. It’s easy to use, the tabs are great, and the various addins really make the product. Integration with Google and del.icio.us is easy, but the Smile Project does it for me. It may be my imagination, and I’ve no real evidence to support this, but it seems much more stable as well. My only gripe is that I can’t move the toolbars around, and that area does end up rather crowded.
Last week, I decided to abandon outlook as well. This was harder, because I do use the calendar but I’ve found since I’ve been freelance that my client prefers me to use their in-house calendar so I can be seen on their scheduler. For a diary, I’ve reverted to a moleskin, which superbly integrates all known meeting and calendar tools, and gives me a notebook too. It’s a bit slow and clunky, but battery life is infinite and the handwriting recognition very good. Backups are a problem though.
I’ve converted my email to Thunderbird, and so far that’s working perfectly. All my contacts came across, and the inbuilt RSS aggregator is much simpler than using Attensa for Outlook. It runs more quickly, and it was easier to set up multiple accounts and have them in their own folders rather than having to mess around with rules.
So, I’m a convert. Next stop, OpenOffice!
Welcome, Best Blog readers February 2, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Internet , add a commentOver the last couple of days, I’ve broken the fifty hit mark for the first time, and much of the traffic has been coming over from Best Blog, a compendium of the writers favourite blogs on WordPress.com. It’s an excellent way to find good blogs around here (if I say so myself) and a very useful service to those of us with rather smaller blogs a long way from the top 10 on the dashboard.
Thanks for popping over!
Bloggers are our protection against over-zealous corporations January 16, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Internet , add a commentThe minutiae of my life are online. There’s nothing very interesting, and I’m an ordinary person known only to friends, neighbours and colleagues. It’s very unlikely there is some detail about me which would be of the slightest interest to tabloids, police or even, I hope, the Inland Revenue. However, if the threads could be tied together, a very complete picture of my personal and business life could be assembled from data willingly given and, I think, gathered with no more nefarious intent than selling me something else.
To some extent, I don’t mind that, although I’ve almost never bought anything based on a ‘targetted marketing’ effort. I can see that part of the reason these corporations are able to deliver their marvellous products comes from knowing more about their clients and, so long as I agree to it, they keep it safe and its not a condition of my using the product, I’m normally quite happy to play the game.
There is a danger though, and it comes from the arrogance of corporations who believe that they somehow have a right to information about what I buy or, as in the case of Apple’s new version of iTunes, what I listen to. In this case, it does sound pretty innocent, but as someone far more eloquent than I once said ‘the price of freedom is eternal vigilence’, and it seems that today most of that vigilence is coming from bloggers. These ordinary citizens, who are often very technically savvy, broke the far more serious Sony DRM scandal, and are a vital element of the creative tension which keeps the corporations honest but able to keep doing what they do well.
Women and Men use the internet in much the same way as they do anything else. Ho hum. January 15, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Internet , add a commentAnother piece of research about the differences between male and female use of the internet. Despite trying quite hard to establish that there is a difference in internet usage, without reference to general, non-internet activities, it is difficult to be sure that the results are meaningful.
For instance ‘More men than women use the internet for some less predictable and even more risky transactions, such as doing auctions or trading stocks’ - but perhaps more men than women perform these kind of transactions anyway, on or off the net. Women tend to use the internet to ‘nuture’ relationships, men tend to know the technical terms. Men are more confident in their use of search engines (though confidence doesn’t necessarily mean competance). If the internet was replaced with just about any communications medium, the results would probably be similar.
Ho hum.
