Joining the 21st Century

18. December 2011 · Comments Off · Categories: Computers, Internet, Technology · Tags: , , , ,

So I finally got a smart phone, and let me tell you, going from a phone that only does voice and text to the Galaxy Nexus is like being shotgunned into the next century. We call the Galaxy Nexus a mobile phone for historical reasons only. It’s really a mobile computer that happens to do voice and text messaging, among other things. I think there are enough reviews of the Galaxy Nexus that I don’t have to give another rundown of its features here, but I do have a few thoughts on the smart phone phenomenon.

First, my “phone” has 1 GB of RAM and 30 GB of storage. My laptop from five years ago had 512 MB of RAM and a 40 GB hard drive. My desktop computer from ten years ago had 128 MB of RAM and a PIII 133 MHz processor. I don’t know how that compares to the ARM Cortex 9 on standard benchmarks, but it’s not just hardware. Browsers today can render JavaScript 10 times faster than the same browsers just three years ago, and probably 50 times faster than Internet Explorer 6, on the same hardware.

So what will our “phones” be like in another five or ten years? In five years, they will probably have the computing power of today’s commodity desktops and laptops, and in ten years they will far surpass them. On top of that, protocol and software improvements like SPDY, Dart, NaCl, etc. (well, maybe), will push performance much farther than hardware improvements alone. I believe the future looks bright, at least from a purely technological perspective.

Of course, the changes we see are not just technological. My phone has GPS that can geolocate me to “within 30 meters” of my actual location. When I turned it on at home, the address that it gave me was my next door neighbor’s house, which is close enough. That’s really convenient when I want directions to the closest Chinese restaurant, but I’m also keenly aware that Google will never delete that data. Ever.

This always happens with technology — there’s always some catch, some unintended (or intended) side effect to our technological marvels. The combustion engine created the industrial revolution and allowed us to build cities (because it made rail and transport affordable), but it also pumped megatons of toxins and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. For all the problems we solve, we create many new ones, but we keep going because usually the marginal benefits outweigh the costs, all things considered.

It’s just another thing to keep in mind. Email allows you to communicate easily with other people, but that doesn’t mean you should use it for every conversation. Some conversations should be reserved for face to face communication, but that fact doesn’t mean we should abandon email either. Likewise, we don’t have to abandon smart phones because we have (valid) privacy concerns. We just have to remember sometimes to turn off the GPS.

Google and digital data integrity

24. July 2011 · Comments Off · Categories: Internet, Technology · Tags: , , ,

The recent controversy over deleted Google+ accounts got me thinking again about the ephemeral nature of our digital lives. My mantra is that life is full of trade offs, and this seems to be one of them. Digital content is much easier to distribute than physical content. The trade off is that your entire digital life can be wiped out in an instant. What do you do then?

Over the last six months I have been systematically scanning old pictures that were, up until now, stored away at my parents’ house. Many of these pictures are from the 80s, when I was a kid, but some are from the 50s and 60s, when my parents were kids. Although the pictures are 25-50 years old, they are in surprisingly good condition. The pages of the albums have yellowed and the glue decomposed over time, but the pictures are as vivid as the day they were made. With continued care, they will outlast me.

That’s a guarantee that we don’t get with our digital content. The first problem is the instrumental fact that hard drives crash. One of the main reasons we sign up for “the cloud” is automation of back ups. When you upload your images to Picasa, they make redundant copies across geographically separated data centers. However, the second and bigger problem is the one we’re witnessing now: Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy violations.

Of course, some people (like Eben Moglen and Richard Stallman) have been warning us for years that turning our digital lives over to the whims of capricious third parties is a bad idea. Most people don’t care, because online services are so easy to use. I think the first time a significant number of people became aware of this problem was last year when WikiLeaks got booted off Amazon’s servers and bounced around several hosts. Amazon claimed that WikiLeaks had violated their AUP, but it’s not entirely clear that they had. It’s hard to argue that they were engaged in criminal activity when they still haven’t been charged with a crime.

The real problem here is that the new gatekeepers of our digital lives can do whatever the hell they want. They can inconsistently apply their AUPs when a Congressman calls them up, just as G+ is inconsistently applying its policy on real names now. If all your media are digital, then it’s just your lifetime of memories that’s at stake.

I have 750 pictures in my Picasa Web account, most of which were scanned during my recent project. If Google deleted my account without explanation (as is usually the case), what would I do? Well, ironically, I have the physical pictures, which are the ultimate back up. Short of that, the best solution is simply to make as many back ups as you can, in as many different places: multiple hard drives, different hosts, etc. If you know a little scripting, this can be automated, but it’s a nontrivial solution for most people.

The other thing that we must impress on our new gatekeepers is that, if they expect us to turn our digital lives over to them, they need to start taking their responsibilities seriously.

As a first step, be responsive to your users. We hear over and over again about accounts being deleted, and the universal problem (at Facebook, Google and elsewhere) is that you can’t reach anyone. They’re asking us to put all our eggs in their basket. We’re “betting on them”, as Vic Gundotra said to one of the recent victims of a random deletion. That power comes with responsibility. Take it seriously, and create a mechanism where problems are reported and addressed quickly.

Their apparent insouciance on this point is creating a lot of doubt. Maybe Eben Moglen was right, and a plug server in every home is the safest mechanism for storing your data. First, we would own the bare metal, so there wouldn’t be AUPs to worry about. Second, there would be no spying, like all cloud services currently do. Only a court order or warrant would give third parties access to your data. Third, distributed, encrypted backups (with version control, even) would ensure the integrity of your data. People are already working on this solution. You can read more here:

http://freedomboxfoundation.org/
http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox

Privacy is about protecting the data dandruff of life

06. February 2011 · Comments Off · Categories: Internet · Tags: , , , , , , ,

Eben Moglen, from his talk, Freedom in the Cloud:

[People] still think of privacy as “the one secret I don’t want revealed” and that’s not the problem. Their problem is all the stuff that’s the cruft, the data dandruff of life, that they don’t think of as secret in any way but which aggregates to stuff that they don’t want anybody to know. Which aggregates, in fact, not just to stuff they don’t want people to know but to predictive models about them that they would be very creeped out could exist at all. The simplicity with which you can de-anonymize theoretically anonymized data, the ease with which, for multiple sources available to you through third and fourth party transactions, information you can assemble, data maps of people’s lives. The ease with which you begin constraining, with the few things you know about people, the data available to you, you can quickly infer immense amounts more.

My friend and colleague Bradly Kuhn who works at the Software Freedom Law Center is one of those archaic human beings who believes that a social security number is a private thing. And he goes to great lengths to make sure that his Social Security is not disclosed which is his right under our law, oddly enough. Though, try and get health insurance or get a safe deposit box, or in fact, operate the business at all. We bend over backwards sometimes in the operation of our business because Bradly’s Social Security number is a secret. I said to him one day “You know, it’s over now because Google knows your Social Security number”. He said “No they don’t, I never told it to anybody”. I said, “Yeah but they know the Social Security number of everybody else born in Baltimore that year. Yours is the other one”.

When you enter a search term like “symptoms of herpes” or “abortion clinics in Illinois” into Google’s search box, you’re potentially revealing information about yourself that you may not want others to know. You may think that your queries are automated — no human eyes read them — and Google does have better privacy policies than most companies, but is it a good idea for your privacy to rely on the good faith of third parties? Especially when simple and useful solutions exist (like accessing the SSL encrypted Google page through Tor).

But that’s still thinking about privacy as “the one big thing I don’t want anybody to know”. A more insidious problem is the increasing aggregation of data — including patterns of behavior — by third parties. It’s been with us for a long time. Your bank knows where you go and what you like. It only needs to look at your purchase history. Your credit card is a tracking cookie that you’ve been carrying for years. But at least there are strong banking privacy laws. That is not the case for our activities online, where we sometimes reveal far more sensitive information.

Facebook has a dubious history on privacy, and its tentacles have spread across the Internet. If you have a Facebook account, and therefore a Facebook cookie on your computer, then Facebook can track your activities across any site that has a Connect or Like button on it, which is a lot of sites these days. A single site or a single data point doesn’t reveal much, but patterns in large data sets allow third parties to make inferences that you probably don’t want them to know. For example, researchers have demonstrated that Facebook can predict whether someone is gay even before they are out.

Don’t rely on their good graces. Protect yourself.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt on privacy

23. January 2011 · Comments Off · Categories: Internet, Technology · Tags: , ,

SocialTimes highlights some of Schmidt’s past comments on privacy:

Describing how Google technology could be used to track and identify people:

“If you have 14 pictures on the Internet, within a 95 percent confidence interval we can predict who you are. You say you don’t have 14 pictures? You have Facebook pictures, so there.”

Referencing, at the 2010 Washington Ideas Forum, Google’s ability to know your thoughts:

“We know where you are… with your permission. We know where you’ve been with your permission. We can more or less guess what you’re thinking about.”

Speaking out about anonymity online at the 2010 Techonomy conference:

“No anonymity. And the reason is that in a world of asymmetric threats, true anonymity is too dangerous. … I think it’s reasonable to say that you need a name service for humans. … The governments are going to require it in some form. They just are going to.”

Touting Google’s power to predict your movements:

“With products like Google Latitude, you can tell us where you are and then you can tell your friends where you are. Well, we can, using [artificial intelligence], then predict where you’re going to go.”

Describing what people you don’t like having their homes photographed for Google Street View should do:

“With Street View, we drive by exactly once, so you can just move.”

Responding to questions about Google’s privacy policies in a 2009 CNBC interview:

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Even if some of that was bluster, I’m glad he’s leaving.