It’s a pleasure to be here. I would love to think that the reason that we’re all here on a Friday night is that my speeches are so good. I actually have no idea why we’re all here on a Friday night but I’m very grateful for the invitation. I am the person who had no date tonight so it was particularly convenient that I was invited for now.
So, of course, I didn’t have any date tonight. Everybody knows that. My calendar’s on the web.
The problem is that problem. Our calendar is on the web. Our location is on the web. You have a cell phone and you have a cell phone network provider and if your cell phone network provider is Sprint then we can tell you that several million times last year, somebody who has a law enforcement ID card in his pocket somewhere went to the Sprint website and asked for the realtime location of somebody with a telephone number and was given it. Several million times. Just like that. We know that because Sprint admits that they have a website where anybody with a law enforcement ID can go and find the realtime location of anybody with a Sprint cellphone. We don’t know that about ATT and Verizon because they haven’t told us.
But that’s the only reason we don’t know, because they haven’t told us. That’s a service that you think of as a traditional service - telephony. But the deal that you get with the traditional service called telephony contains a thing you didn’t know, like spying. That’s not a service to you but it’s a service and you get it for free with your service contract for telephony. You get for free the service of advertising with your gmail which means of course there’s another service behind which is untouched by human hands, semantic analysis of your email. I still don’t understand why anybody wants that. I still don’t understand why anybody uses it but people do, including the very sophisticated and thoughtful people in this room.
And you get free email service and some storage which is worth exactly a penny and a half at the current price of storage and you get spying all the time.
And for free, too.
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It is here, of course, that Mr. Zuckerberg enters.
The human race has susceptibility to harm but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record: he has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age.
Because he harnessed Friday night. That is, everybody needs to get laid and he turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality and he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal. Namely, “I will give you free web hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time”. And it works.
That’s the sad part, it works.
How could that have happened?
There was no architectural reason, really. There was no architectural reason really. Facebook is the Web with “I keep all the logs, how do you feel about that?” It’s a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a panopticon built out of web parts.
And it shouldn’t be allowed. It comes to that. It shouldn’t be allowed. That’s a very poor way to deliver those services. They are grossly overpriced at “spying all the time”. They are not technically innovative. They depend upon an architecture subject to misuse and the business model that supports them is misuse. There isn’t any other business model for them. This is bad.
I’m not suggesting it should be illegal. It should be obsolete. We’re technologists, we should fix it.
Apparently four students from New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences were inspired to bring Mr. Moglen's vision of a peer-to-peer social networking platform to fruition, and are developing Diaspora to that end. I'm looking forward to trying it out!
Thanks, from:
Adam (11-01-2010), But (10-31-2010), Qingdai (10-31-2010)
Or, well, so Facebook says -- for all we know, when you try to delete a conversation thread, your friend's picture will pop up with a note that says "Lisa will miss this message if you delete it "
Apparently four students from New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences were inspired to bring Mr. Moglen's vision of a peer-to-peer social networking platform to fruition, and are developing Diaspora to that end. I'm looking forward to trying it out!
Hopefully it will displace Facebook.
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Allan Glenn. 1984-2005 RIP
Under no circumstances should Quentin Tarantino be allowed to befoul Star Trek.
Might've been mentioned, but try out Diaspora. Any self-respecting geek will have a webserver/a computer connected to the interbutts 24/7, and that has facebook integration now, as far as I remember.
So you can opt out of being tagged if you're a member, but what if you're not? Are you just fair game then?
Is Facebook even OPTIONAL anymore? I mean, if there were any way that you could just avoid it entirely, that'd be fine; but there isn't.
It's bad enough that people can just go put shit about you on Facebook without your permission already, but now they're going to have robots doing it too?
Facebook is fucking creepy as shit. They're not just giving people a forum for pathological oversharing, they're actually normalizing pathological oversharing to the point that people don't know it's creepy; and as such, I am changing my "lol whatever and ha ha to you when you get screwed over on Facebook" policy to "Facebook is a horrible shitmonster that picks my pocket and breaks my leg."
I'm going to go set up my router to redirect Facebook to something less repulsive like goatse or something.
(Oh, man. I should re-open my wireless and totally do that, though, for real!)
Form the linked article, it appears that what they are actually going to do is, when someone uploads a photo and is currently asked (paraphrase, b/c I can't be arsed to go upload a photo and check) "Would you like to tag friends in this photo?", it will instead say something like "It looks like Adam is in this photo. Would you like to tag him?" So, no robots are going to be tagging you, but if you know anyone who has already tagged you, robots may notice when they post new pictures of you and suggest that those be tagged as well.
You can't opt out of being tagged as it is. If you're a member, and someone tags you, you can delete the tag that links to your profile, but anyone is free to enter any arbitrary string as a tag, including the names of people who may not be members.
ETA to include my usual disclaimer that I wouldn't particularly care if robots automatically tagged me anyway, so there's that. Also, I see your "pathological oversharing" and raise you "privacy fetishism", so nyah!
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"Trans Am Jesus" is "what hanged me"
Form the linked article, it appears that what they are actually going to do is, when someone uploads a photo and is currently asked (paraphrase, b/c I can't be arsed to go upload a photo and check) "Would you like to tag friends in this photo?", it will instead say something like "It looks like Adam is in this photo. Would you like to tag him?" So, no robots are going to be tagging you, but if you know anyone who has already tagged you, robots may notice when they post new pictures of you and suggest that those be tagged as well.
YOU form the linked article!
TYPOWNED!
But also thank you for the splaination.
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ETA to include my usual disclaimer that I wouldn't particularly care if robots automatically tagged me anyway, so there's that. Also, I see your "pathological oversharing" and raise you "privacy fetishism", so nyah!
OK, but that right there is the problem. The fact that you wouldn't mind something is irrelevant to whether someone else would. I would mind that a lot, therefore you are objectively incorrect for not having a problem with it.
Which brings us to what I think the root of the problem is. The type of people who don't mind everyone knowing everything about them--who would be happy to live under constant surveillance and who don't really have many personal boundaries or filters--are overwhelmingly the same type of people who tend to project their own preferences onto others, and they're also the types of people most prone to try to codify that, so they're not just projecting their lack of boundaries, but forcing them.
People who want to be left alone are far more likely to also leave other people alone. So I don't care that other people have different interests and different personal boundaries than I do, and I'm not readily inclined to try to dictate to them what they can do with their own lives. It's none of my business, and I don't really care. I only care when they start forcing their preferences into others.
And while I certainly don't think anyone should need to defend their desire for some privacy, I can think of far more logical reasons to maintain your personal boundaries than I can think of reasons not to.
What are the benefits of making your private life public? Do you really require constant input from acquaintances, even strangers, about everything you do or say or think? What practical purpose does it serve to relinquish control over the access that others have to your private life?
There have been gossipy busybodies around forever, and they have always been the weakest link. What makes Facebook and other oversharing services so insidious, though, is that the stigma of being a gossip and a busybody is disappearing, and it's actually gotten to the point that you can accuse me of being a 'privacy fetishist' for taking exception to people posting personal information about me without my permission.
You probably go hide in the deepest darkest closets you can find, where no one will ever find you and perform all sorts of depraved sexual acts, getting off on the fact that no one will ever find out about it!
OK, but that right there is the problem. The fact that you wouldn't mind something is irrelevant to whether someone else would. I would mind that a lot, therefore you are objectively incorrect for not having a problem with it.
I don't think the fact that I don't mind is relevant to whether or not someone else minds. You shouldn't be unconcerned about robots tagging you because I don't mind robots tagging me, you should be unconcerned about robots tagging you because robots will not be tagging you (at least, not in this iteration of the feature...). I just threw that disclaimer in there to preempt people pointing out that I am an information sharing zealot and therefore my opinion is invalid.* Also, as a lead in to the line about privacy fetishism.
* - Note to mick: That would be an actual ad hominem.
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"Trans Am Jesus" is "what hanged me"
You probably go hide in the deepest darkest closets you can find, where no one will ever find you and perform all sorts of depraved sexual acts, getting off on the fact that no one will ever find out about it!
Yeah, like you have a fetish for thinking I have a fetish!
So I don't care that other people have different interests and different personal boundaries than I do, and I'm not readily inclined to try to dictate to them what they can do with their own lives. It's none of my business, and I don't really care.
Except that you totally do care, as evidenced by your totally zealotous rageouts every time anybody overshares anything or whenever facebook changes anything even though you totally don't even belong to facebook.
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I only care when they start forcing their preferences into others.
Who is doing that? Nobody is making you have a facebook account, and if you don't have a facebook account, nobody can tag pictures of you in such a way as to link them to your account. Yes, people can put a picture of you with your name next to it. They can also put a picture of you with someone else's name, or someone else's picture with your name. You know where else they can do that? The whole internet. Anybody can buy lisapea-pics.com and put pictures of you or anybody else on it all day. That's not unique to facebook.
Also, I agree with everything you say about how since busybodies make the most noise, their behavior is codified and considered the default, and people who want to be left alone have to suffer for it. It sucks.
Re: Bend Over, Facebook is Back
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). I just threw that disclaimer in there to preempt people pointing out that I am an information sharing zealot and therefore my opinion is invalid.* Also, as a lead in to the line about privacy fetishism.
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