Tag: Social Media

You can leave at any time

The New Wilderness (Idle Words) (idlewords.com)

The large tech companies point to our willing use of their services as proof that people don’t really care about their privacy. But this is like arguing that inmates are happy to be in jail because they use the prison library. Confronted with the reality of a monitored world, people make the rational decision to make the best of it.

I disagree. This analogy is false.

It’s more like you’ve come to my house for a party. You notice all the cameras outside the hose, and a few inside the house. I tell you that I have recording devices in my living room.

You express your discomfort but I’ve told you that the devices are staying. I’ve told you that you are free to leave at any time. But yet, you decided to hangout in my lounge complaining to all my guests about how I should offer more vegan options.

It’s my house. It’s my party. Please leave if you don’t like the house rules. You need my permission to stay. You can choose to leave any any time.

I think the author is conflating privacy and anonymity.

Perhaps it’s good enough

Thoughts on Chris Hughes’ call to break up Facebook by Nitin Khanna (Nitin Khanna)

I took my own sweet time to read this story, collecting some of my ideas and publishing them here. I’ve already had a lot of online and offline conversations around the topic, but posting these thoughts here for posterity and discussion makes sense to me.

Nitin, I enjoyed the article. I can see that you put careful thought into his writing.

I would have liked for you to expound on this one point.

Just recently an Instagram replacement was kickstarted. It took a long while to get it to the bare minimum it needed to fund successfully.

I think you were referring to Bokeh, which has 229 backers and barely raised the minimum funds required. Why, if we (a collective we) believe that the multitudes are looking for an alternative, was it so hard to raise money?

In contrast, the Peak Design travel tripod Kickstarter has 14,493 backers and raised ten times their funding. Presumably, a travel tripod for helping photographers create images is more important to more people than an alternative social media platform for sharing those images.

What will the U.S. do about Facebook and Google?

Will Antitrust Action Against Big Tech Resolve Anything?

What will the U.S. do about Facebook and Google?

Some people would like to see the companies broken up. They propose surgical cuts: Facebook must relinquish WhatsApp and Instagram, while parent company Alphabet could spin off feeder products from advertising-funded search.

On what grounds? We know that bigness per se is no crime. Are these companies "essential facilities" that left fewer, more expensive options for consumers?

The problem is that many of these companies' products cost us nothing, at least in terms of dollars. It doesn't look like Facebook or Google have been lowering product quality, either. In general, there's a lot of competition when it comes to social media platforms and search, even if people choose not to use them very much.