Over the last month or so, Phorm has faced quite a bit of scrutiny. The London-based company has partnered with a number of major British ISPs (British Telecom, Virgin Media and Talk Talk) to track the websites people visit in order to serve more precisely targeted ads. Of course, the digital privacy sirens were sounded full blast at first mention of this joint venture. Phorm argues their “technology doesn’t store any personally identifiable information or IP addresses”. Their site explains that a “random number” is assigned to each user and it’s impossible to connect that number back to a person’s identity. But we all know what happened to No. 4417749. If AOL’s fiasco taught us anything, it’s that the information being associated with these random numbers can frequently contain more information about an identity than the information being concealed by the random number in the first place.
Similar to the Phorm/BT partnership, Charter Communications, the fourth-largest cable operator in the US, announced this week that they’ll be tracking every site their customers visit and selling that data to ad-placement company NebuAd. What I think people find so objectionable with Phorm and NebuAd is they don’t seem to be offering anything of much value back to the consumer. If they were somehow enabling free/cheaper internet access (a la NetZero of the late-90s) or offering any sort of service of value that’s not strictly ad related, it might be a completely different story. But all they seem to be doing is introducing a privacy risk for what will most likely amount to a negligible increase in advertising relevance.
Anyhow, more interestingly, it’s time for me to ask my favorite question: What changes once a handful of ISPs begin tracking everything people look at online, when everything is recorded? The first behavioral response to Phorm’s technology has appeared in the form of software called AntiPhormLite…continue reading »
About 3 weeks ago CNN experienced a Denial-of-Service attack from computers thought to be located in China. Briefly, DoS attacks are a method of making a website or service unavailable to its intended users by flooding it with traffic from automated systems (or to put it in more personal terms, imagine someone setting up an auto-dialer to constantly call your mobile phone so as to prevent your friends and family from reaching you – that’s a DoS attack). However, more interesting than the attacks on CNN are the ones that targeted SlideShare, the YouTube of PowerPoint presentations, only a day later. These attacks, also based out of China, were thought to be in response to some politically oriented presentations hosted on the site. And while it’s hard not to sympathize with the assailants of a site working to make business presentations ubiquitous in ways they probably shouldn’t be, it’s startling to consider that these cyber-militants found user generated content hosted on SlideShare credible enough to warrant attacks equal to those that targeted a major international news corporation. continue reading »
The Supercollider: A Hero of the Social Network set out to understand what influence the well-connected have on the formation and usage of social web services. The intended conversation about “Supercolliders” wasn’t particularly interesting, but panelists Ben Cerveny and Matt Jones did drive a more compelling sub-plot about flow-based social networking. While neither attempted an explicit classification, both seemed to paint an impression of two types of social apps: The first class being services where the distribution of information is informed by pre-defined relationships – you receive photos I uploaded because we had previously declared each other as friends. And the second class of services are ones where the flow of information is what defines relationships – we are friends because we regularly send each other photos we’ve uploaded. The general consensus of the panelists was that the first, more “traditional”, model is proving increasingly ill-suited to support the activities of these extra-social, collision-prone users. Jen Bekman, qualifying herself as a Supercollider, described her network fatigue as a consequence of the inadequacies of this first class of services. She described the frequent problem she faces of forgetting what personal informational and media is being sent to whom as a result of having to define relationships long-before the need to share information arises. And she described the handicapping of services she uses as a result of tailoring her use to suit the least-common denominator relationships in her diluted, hyperextended social networks. continue reading »
Now that Facebook’s Beacon has had a couple months to lead its ad-partners’ ships into the unknown shoals of social advertising, it might be worthwhile to attempt better understanding why Zuckerberg’s once-a-century, “less commercial” ad program seems so ill-fated. To be clear, I don’t think Beacon’s underlying concept is inherently flawed. In fact, I’m fairly certain in the near-future we’ll see a more successful version of Beacon appear elsewhere – or maybe even on Facebook. But with that said, I don’t see any chance of Beacon’s current incarnation taking hold without some restructuring of Facebook’s mechanics. I’m not exactly breaking new ground with my forecast of Beacon’s impending failure, but all the explanations I’ve come across have been fairly shallow – citing an intrusiveness of advertising or breach of privacy. I think it’s important to realize that these are just the effects of Beacon’s poor implementation, not the causes. I believe cause to be something I’ve been referring to as the “signal vs. noise” problem in social networking. Lemme explain…
Based on the successes of its predecessors, Facebook crafted an information ecosystem in which it’s desirable to have as many friends as possible. Not surprising. When trying to build a social network, it certainly seems sensible to incentivize the primary form of investment users make in the network. However, the natural consequence of this dynamic is that the large majority of Facebook friendships exist at the edges of real-world social networks. That is most Facebook friendships are in fact just acquaintances. The introduction of the News Feed and Mini-Feed gave these edge relationships a daily presence. Here we see the first instance of the signal vs. noise issue. With each friendship given equal weight, the large majority of items populating the News Feed are generated by fringe friends. The News Feed’s “signal” is drowned out by “noise” broadcast from the edge. In theory, the excessive noise should have driven users to terminate some of these auxiliary relationships. But it didn’t. And if I had to wager, I’d bet it’s because users are already familiar with the day-to-day activity of their real friends, and it’s the fringe broadcasts that are actually equally valuable. The desire to carefully monitor the periphery of one’s social network shouldn’t come unexpected. It’s induced by the same voyeurism that was tapped to encourage amassing hundreds of friends in order to gain access to media hidden by Facebook’s privacy controls. I think it’s this balance of private information and public broadcasts that drove Facebook’s astounding growth. Enter Beacon. continue reading »
The ongoing discussion on social network portability cascaded into a bit of playground drama the last couple days. Fortunately, it’s all been sorted out and Facebook was kind enough to play nice with the Data Portability Workgroup and it’s cheerleaders. Don’t get me wrong, portability is certainly a compelling cause. And I genuinely hope significant progress is made in developing standards for easy migration of personal information across different applications and services. But it’s worth taking a slightly deeper look at the situation and understanding that portability is only a Band-Aid on the broken limb that is the social web.
As Umair Haque puts it, and as Yochai Benkler discusses more rigorously in the The Wealth of Networks (which I’d recommend taking a look at), the marginal cost of information is $0.00. That is, beyond the initial cost of producing information, there’s no additional cost incurred in reproducing it. So all that’s accomplished by the introduction of portability in social networking is the elimination of a fairly minor cost inefficiency. One that inevitably would’ve been eliminated in an information economy spiraling towards hyper-efficiency.
So the question is, once portability is solved, then what? continue reading »
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