Private Conversations

Over the last 20 years, people have adapted to conversing online. You can send messages to anybody anywhere and anytime, and they in turn can message back in real time or when they are free. With the Covid-19 outbreak this has become even more common. Distributed families in even in the same cities haven't seen each other for months, and instead use web and mobile applications to keep in touch.

There has been one aspect that has been continuously evolving - security. Initially the internet was designed as an open protocol, made more for sharing and referencing information, rather than locking it down. However as people's digital signature became larger and they share more details about themselves, the aspect of control has been evolving. Some of the early internet companies (yes I'm considering you - Google and Facebook) based their entire business model on ads with the exploitation of individual data, thus distorting the ethical fabric of the internet. As I wrote in a previous blog 7 years ago, any centralised accumulation of user data becomes a target for other agencies, mostly unethical. 

Notably, companies like Apple have realised this and pivoted towards enabling individual control of their data. It probably helps that their business model does not depend on selling your data. There are many aspects to modern tech usage that need to be re-engineered towards a more private and secure model. 

In the end, if you were to whisper something into someone's ear, you don't intend that to be available openly on the internet - forever. Digital reputations are something not easily reset.

What brings me back to this topic, is a WhatsApp application terms-of-reference update that stipulates that users are now required to share their data with the parent company Facebook. If one has been following Facebook over the years, then one can see they originate from a hacker mentality and culture - "better to seek forgiveness later, than ask permission". Thus their aim has been to exploit all data at their disposal to advance themselves competitively and financially, at the expense of a moral compass. It is funny to see former employees of Facebook, now becoming older, coming out and being apologetic and advising caution in using Facebook. On the other hand online users have been happy to give away their privacy in exchange for ease of use and dopamine driven programming. 

Starting in Feb, WhatsApp will begin sharing all kinds of data with Facebook. They just killed their best feature - privacy.

Please no longer text me on WhatsApp. Download @signalapp

— Chamath Palihapitiya (@chamath) January 10, 2021

WhatsApp's founders intended for it to be an ad-free completely privacy-driven messaging service. Most of us in Information Tech sector knew that was over once Facebook bought WhatsApp. Somehow WhatsApp's founders fooled themselves that their original intentions for the application would be maintained. I'm sure the enormous pay-out they received helped cement the illusion.

In my globally distributed family, we have been big users of WhatsApp, but now I'm advocating for everyone to shift to something else. It can be hard to do. Not everyone is tech-savvy, and once they have overcome the learning curve of one application, most are reluctant to switch.

There are more evolved privacy-conscious messenger candidates out there. The one I'm switching to at the moment and advocating is Signal. It cannot be purchased by another big player. It is secure, open-source, and end-to-end encrypted. It is also endorsed by most of the smart players - Edward Snowden, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk among others. A more detailed look is provided in the following video:

Here's how to set it up on Android:

And how to set it up on Apple:

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How to: Add comments to Google Photos

Google photos is one of the best organizing, sharing and collaborating apps for your photo library.

Seeing old photographs can trigger recall of lost memories, details around the events captured in he photograph. Best thing to do is to note these associated memories down immediately before they get lost again in the hurried mindscape of everyday living. The easy method of doing this noted below:

While on computer

1. Go to the particular photo on the Google Photos site. You'll probably already be looking at it.

2. Move the mouse down to the 'comments' icon as show in above pictures, and click on it
3. Write your comment down in the text box and click the send or Arrow button.

On a Mobile or Tablet

1. Go to the particular photo on the Google Photos App.
2. You'll probably already be looking at it
3. Find the 'comment' icon, and click on it (see pictures above)

4. Write your comment and click 'Send' button, same as you would for a 'text' or 'SMS' message

* * *

Avoid getting repackaged as a social product

Both Facebook and Google+ are competing to use your inputs on their social platforms for endorsing their ads (see article). They provide you with a free service and then use you to sell stuff.

Fortunately, there are mechanisms to opt out, which for most will not be enabled by default.

To opt out of appearing in Google+ Ads

1. Go to https://plus.google.com/settings/endorsements
2. Un-tick the checkbox that says "Based upon my activity, Google may show my name and profile photo in shared endorsements that appear in ads."
3. Click 'Save'

To opt out of appearing in Facebook Ads

1. Go to https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=ads
2. click the 'Edit' link for 'Ads and Friends'
3. under 'Pair my social actions with ads for', choose 'No one'
4. Click 'Save Changes'

Online Screening

My law firm, sends out a useful information newsletter every few weeks. This time they have covered the topic of employee screening. There are some important tidbits worthy of note:

Recent media reports have shown an increase in cases of employee fraud. This may be due to the greater financial difficulties people are facing during the recession. ...

One important way to reduce the risk of fraud by employees is through the pre-employment screening process. ...

Some employees are even screening prospective employees by “googling” them or looking into their Facebook or other social networking sites. Often these can provide an insight into an employee that they may be reluctant to reveal at an interview.

Here's a law firm confirming it - your online profile matters more than you think, and with sites such as Facebook disrespecting their users' privacy and opening up their details to the public web, it pays to be mindful of what you put up online. The web is a reflection of the real world, and not an escape from it.

Related post:

• Book: Future of Reputations

Facebook beats Google in U.S.

Unimaginable that any website would be a more visited online destination than the ubiquitous Google. However, in U.S. where the online revolution began, it seems that the social website Facebook, which also contains its own application platform, now attracts more internet traffic than Google.



The rise of Facebook according to the graph, has been spectacular. I've noticed that friends which until recently I found only on other platforms such as Orkut (popular in India) and Yahoo are now to be found in Facebook.

Facebook was launched just in 2004, for just Harvard students, then expanded outwards in later-2006 to anyone holding a valid email address. At that time myspace.com was the leader site in online personal web pages, and the two became rivals. Myspace allowed its users to design their pages in any way they liked, while Facebook kept control on the look and feel. This ended up making myspace a very wild and noisy online space filled with the participants' creativity, but confusing for the casual user. Facebook reduced your design choices, but that made it simpler and recognisable. Myspace has reduced in profile, but still popular among musicians and artists. Now, Facebook has moved far beyond myspace and seems to be competing with status-update micro-blogging site Twitter.

In 2007, Facebook launched a platform, f8 for creating applications that ran on its website. There was also an associated Facebook Markup Language. This allowed developers to create their own games and experiences that user could share with each other on the website. The experience moved beyond simple communication between community members to participating in shared activity. This can be very addictive especially where elements of competition and public achievement are introduced into the application, such as in multi-player games. This is especially helping to keep people locked into the Facebook website.

While Facebook has no hope of beating Google as a way of searching on the web, the shift in traffic share, does mark a change in the way people are now using the Internet - to participate in communication and shared experiences rather than a convenient source of information.

Digitized Society

A collegue passed a very interesting article from the New York times about the changing dynamics of social relationships when experienced via internet applications and services (i.e. emails, Internet Messengers, Facebook, Blogs, Twitter etc.).

[...] When students woke up that September morning and saw News Feed [on Facebook], the first reaction, generally, was one of panic. Just about every little thing you changed on your page was now instantly blasted out to hundreds of friends, including potentially mortifying bits of news — Tim and Lisa broke up; Persaud is no longer friends with Matthew — and drunken photos someone snapped, then uploaded and tagged with names. Facebook had lost its vestigial bit of privacy. For students, it was now like being at a giant, open party filled with everyone you know, able to eavesdrop on what everyone else was saying, all the time. [...]

Within days, the tide reversed. Students began e-mailing Zuckerberg to say that via News Feed they’d learned things they would never have otherwise discovered through random surfing around Facebook. The bits of trivia that News Feed delivered gave them more things to talk about — Why do you hate Kiefer Sutherland? — when they met friends face to face in class or at a party. Trends spread more quickly. [...]

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. [...]

But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they’d scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day. [...]

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life. [...]

In 1998, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued that each human has a hard-wired upper limit on the number of people he or she can personally know at one time. [...] Sure enough, psychological studies have confirmed that human groupings naturally tail off at around 150 people: the “Dunbar number,” as it is known. Are people who use Facebook and Twitter increasing their Dunbar number, because they can so easily keep track of so many more people?

As I interviewed some of the most aggressively social people online — people who follow hundreds or even thousands of others — it became clear that the picture was a little more complex than this question would suggest. Many maintained that their circle of true intimates, their very close friends and family, had not become bigger. [...] But where their sociality had truly exploded was in their “weak ties” — loose acquaintances, people they knew less well [...] — maintained via technology. [...]

Psychologists have long known that people can engage in “parasocial” relationships with fictional characters, like those on TV shows or in books, or with remote celebrities we read about in magazines. Parasocial relationships can use up some of the emotional space in our Dunbar number, crowding out real-life people. [...]

What is it like to never lose touch with anyone? [...]

“It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already,” Tufekci said. “The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the 20th century.” [...]

Cartoon by Peter Steiner. The New Yorker, July 5, 1993 issue (Vol.69 (LXIX) no. 20) page 61

She laughed. “You know that old cartoon? ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’? On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog! If you don’t want people to know you’re a dog, you’d better stay away from a keyboard.”

Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. [...]

In an age of awareness, perhaps the person you see most clearly is yourself.

- from Brave New World of Digital Intimacy

Book: Future of Reputations

An interesting book The Future of Reputation, by Daniel J. Solove is now available for free online. It describes itself in the introduction:

This is a book about how the free flow of information on the Internet can make us less free. We live in an age drenched in data, and the implications are both wonderful and terrifying. The Internet places a seemingly endless library in our homes; it allows us to communicate with others instantly; and it enables us to spread information with an efficiency and power that humankind has never before witnessed. The free flow of information on the Internet provides wondrous new opportunities for people to express themselves and communicate.

But there’s a dark side. As social reputation–shaping practices such as gossip and shaming migrate to the Internet, they are being transformed in significant ways. Information that was once scattered, forgettable, and localized is becoming permanent and searchable. Ironically, the free flow of information threatens to undermine our freedom in the future.

These transformations pose threats to people’s control over their reputations and their ability to be who they want to be.

More on this topic

• Case of John Seigenthaler Sr.,who was alarmed to find a biography of himself on Wikipedia that claimed that he was involved in the J.F.Kennedy assassination. Read more
• "I'm on Wikipedia, get me out of here "

It is often thought that a team of editors or moderators could go through each item of information submitted to verify the veracity. But then the volume of information submitted in an open online environment has the potential to easily overwhelm the resources (particulary human resources) we deploy. Even more difficult are the cases where conclusions submitted online can be a single side in an unresolved debate.

The solutions to these problems probably lie in the very openness of the environment that is setup. First of all a disclaimer can be published that the information given is not necessarily verified. After that, self-assessing mechanisms can be enabled that contributors use to assess and qualify the authority of information objects found online, such as ratings.

There has been the emergence of certain organisations that offer reputation-monitoring services. They keep an eye on every online manifestation relevant to your interest and keep you informed if anything untoward takes place. One such is distilled.

Family Net

The New York Times featured a very amusing story illustrating how the Internet is rapidly becoming a basic essential of life. It tells the story of the effect on the dynamics of a family gathering.

That was my first inkling of how the vastly expanded electronic and informational needs of houseguests would flavor our time together. Soon guests were positioning themselves to get dibs on one of the three computers in our Long Island house the way they would otherwise line up to jump in the shower.

...

Oy! Couldn’t we all stop the keying/ringing/texting/e-mailing and just talk? Mea culpa, on that score. My own escape from an overstuffed house was to sneak away to my office, where I pecked away at the mounting e-mail and checked Yankees scores. But my solace didn’t last long.

“I hate to bother you,” came a small voice from behind me. “The downstairs printer is jammed up. If I send you an attachment as a Zip file, can you unstuff it and print it up here?”

A somewhat much milder version of this happens in our family as well. In the last 3 years, our very geographically extended family got together twice, after a long time, for a couple of weddings (including mine). At some of the venues where we stayed, there was obviously no internet. Those of us who have become habitually connected into the online world, felt very fidgety about being unplugged. There was an element of restlessness and feeling helpless. One's eyes inevitably seek some sort of monitor, fingers itch for buttons to press. And wherever there's a computer, usually it's only one without Wi-Fi, everybody takes turns checking their emails, making sure all is well with their online world. People upload their digital photographs and everybody gathers around to see them again and again. Conversations drift towards discussing latest software, hardware and digital exploits. Yes, I did load some old movies & photos and show them off to relatives - to various reactions of embarrasment and laughter.

There were other aspects - everybody carried cellphones (and their chargers), everybody carried digital cameras (and their chargers, memory cards etc. ). Some moments in our wedding felt like walking into a field of paparazzi - there were so many continous flash bulbs from so many digital cameras.

Our family is still safe - there are not that many confirmed techies among us. We are still able to talk to each other in person. Our recent gatherings turned out to be a lot of fun (after the digital withdrawal symptoms had dissipated) and there were many lively conversations and sharing of experiences.

Nevertheless, I feel more connected to those who are online. Those I cannot email, seem to be living in an unreachable place. I can't tell whether this is the new 'normal' or the digitally obsessive.

The New York times story is here.

You can also try the quiz below (thanks, Praz), to see how geeky you are

80% Geek

Video Guides: Social Bookmarking

Here's another useful video from the Common Craft Show explaining another internet concept. This time it's 'social bookmarking'. Forget the 'social' for a while and think of bookmarking. Most of us bookmark our favorite sites using the browser menu, but this then keeps the bookmarks on just our local computer. If we were to go and work on some other computer, we would lose all that information. This is about saving your bookmarks on the internet so you can access them on any computer connected to the net. Very very useful to those who mostly frequent the internet using Cyber Cafes. The social part comes at a later stage, when you share your bookmarks with other people and access other people's bookmarks to gather more information.

I use del.icio.us, which is what this video is about, and my place of work has also launched into this sphere by having an account.

Video tutorial


Note that it is also possible to download add-on features to integrate this bookmarking service into your browser. Links to these are available below

Relevant Links

• del.icio.us website
• Firefox browser extension
• Internet Explorer 7 browser extension

Debate - Anarchy vs. Authority online

Seeing that history turns in cycles, I always wondered, that after the overall demise of extreme socialism in the form of communism, if the victorious individualistic driven world of capitalism would have to reckon with a new socialism ideology.

Here's a delicious online debate on the Wall Street Journal that a colleague kindly forwarded. Whenever there's a contentious topic at which we are seeking definition, it's useful to get the experts to have a duel to decide for us. The debaters are

• Andrew Keen, an outspoken critic of the new social direction of the internet - Web 2.0 and author of The Cult of the Amateur.


• and David Weinberger, philospher, technologist, professional speaker and author of Everything is Miscellaneous.

Keen kicks of the debate with:

[...] Mainstream media's traditional audience has become Web 2.0's empowered author. Web 2.0 transforms all of us -- from 90-year-old grandmothers to eight-year-old third graders -- into digital writers, music artists, movie makers and journalists. Web 2.0 is YouTube, the blogosphere, Wikipedia, MySpace or Facebook. Web 2.0 is YOU!
...
Yes, the people have finally spoken. And spoken. And spoken.
Now they won't shut up. The problem is that YOU! have forgotten how to listen, how to read, how to watch. Thus, the meteoric rise of Web 2.0's free citizen media is mirrored by the equally steep decline in paid mainstream media and the mass redundancies amongst journalists, editors, recording engineers, cameramen and talent agents. Newspapers and the music business are in structural crisis, Hollywood and the publishing business aren't far behind. We've lost truth and interest in the objectivity of mainstream media because of our self-infatuation with the subjectivity of our own messages. It's what, in "Cult of the Amateur," I call digital narcissism. A flattened media is a personalized, chaotic media without that the essential epistemological anchor of truth. The impartiality of the authoritative, accountable expert is replaced by murkiness of the anonymous amateur. When everyone claims to be an author, there can be no art, no reliable information, no audience.

Everything becomes miscellaneous. And miscellany is a euphemism for anarchy.

then, Weinberger responds with:

[...] We also agree that the Web is a problem. ... is that because anyone can contribute and because there are no centralized gatekeepers, there's too much stuff and too many voices, most of which any one person has no interest in. But, the Web is also the continuing struggle to deal with that problem. From the most basic tools of the early Internet, starting with UseNet discussion threads, through Wikipedia, and sites that enable users to tag online resources, the Web invents ways to pull together ideas and information, finding the connections and relationships that keep the "miscellaneous" from staying that way.
...
that raises one other myth that I think runs under your comments. You say "the intellectual authority able to help people understand the world is indeed endangered." Then you ask if I'm convinced that the Web benefits intellectuals. Yes, I am. And that's because, while some talent is indeed solitary, many types of talent prosper in connection with others. That is especially true for the development of ideas. Knowledge is generally not a game for one. It is and always has been a collaborative process. And it is a process, not as settled, sure, and knowable by authorities as it would be comforting to believe. ... Consider how much more we know about the world because we have bloggers everywhere. They may not be journalists, but they are sources, and sometimes they are witnesses in the best sense. We know and understand more because of these voices than we did when we had to rely on a single professional reporting live at 7.

And so on it goes. There are further links below to follow up, if you are interested.

Links:

• The complete debate on Wall Street Journal


• Previous Scio-sphere post on Everything is Miscellaneous


• Time Magazine 2006 Person of the Year Issue
  Article - Time's Person of the Year: You - by Lev Grossman

Evolving Language

Some time ago, I had a brief conversation with a colleague (who happens to be Canadian) on languages. He overheard me talking on the phone with an Indian friend in Hindi, combined with English shortcut phrases. Overcome with curiosity, he couldn't help asking me which language I was thinking in, while I was having this bilingual conversation. It was a good question for I couldn't tell.

Language is a carrier of the human consciousness, and like it, it's continually evolving. Divided by geography, our ancestors each evolved their own separate languages. Now due to the amplification of our transportation and communication abilities, the world is shrinking, languages and cultures are coming together.

English is the primary language in many countries, mostly the nations that arose after the dissipation of the British Empire. As it was the last great empire - 'on which the sun never sets', so English is the widest understood tongue today. In India, the favoured language of commerce and education is English. Another recent example is the Soviet Union - nations that now constitute the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) still largely support Russian. For example, on my visit to Armenia, I encountered Russian still to be the favoured language of business and government. The current adult generation was educated in Russian medium.

Language is affected by the manner in which it is used. Traditionally, it was used for discourse and expression of feelings, it could become very poetic and beautiful. However, when used for formal workflows - business, science, law, government etc. - it tends to become very fixed, industrial and inhuman. That's when we have to start memorizing book-loads of vocabulary.

Enter the digital age - English is the language of computer science. If you wanted to do computer programming, you have to do so in English. One of the reasons that India enjoys such an advantage in Information Technology. I had the very strange experience of learning BASIC computer language in Spain, in Spanish. That was another multi-lingual experience I didn't fully realise until later.

Language is evolving still, with the Internet it's become a medium as well as a technology itself. The rest can probably be explained by the video below, which has been circulating for some time in my work place, and being shown in an awful lot of presentations.

Facebook v MySpace - defining a 'cool' site

Facebook, MySpace and their ilk are websites where you can put up your profile, details, blog and invite friends. These days with the denizens of the world in greater transience, people keep moving all over the place. These are useful tools to keep in touch, promote your interests etc.

MySpace is a very configurable platform - you can turn your web page into almost any form. There's been a flurry of activity recently from Facebook too - to make it's web page more malleable by releasing the Facebook Platform. However, there continues to be a difference in the culture of these two online communities. See below:

Video from CNET

Note-starts with an advertisement


Cartoon from BLaugh



At this stage MySpace is the leader by far, but this market can swing unpredictably.

Other interesting links
Feature Comparison between MySpace and Facebook
Tipping Point for Facebook
Related BBC Article, passed on to me by a colleague