PanoptiBurgh Progressing

In an earlier post (Protecting the Port of Regent Square, 7/29/2012) we discussed how DHS was installing license plate scanners in Swissvale and Edgewood, funded by the federal Port Security Grant Program. (Post-Gazette)

That sentence has so many phrases that warrant parsing. Why Swissvale and Edgewood? (hint: small towns, small politics, unlikely to object) Port Security in landlocked communities? Don't obsess about details. How long is the data stored? What is it used for? If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

Update: ArsTechnica reports that the Feds are soliciting a contractor to build a datacenter to connect all the little license-plate scanner nodes into a national scanner grid.

If you think the PanOpticon reference is a stretch too far, note how the very public police effort to investigate the double-murder in East Liberty has focused on video surveillance from a PAT bus and from a Sunoco station.

Via EB Misfit.

Facebook's Information Bubble

Economists generally warn us about bubbles, where the pressure of growth exceeds underlying fundamentals; once speculation sets it the bubble becomes an attractive nuisance, and when the bubble pops it leaves a lot of people suffering, except for the smart ones who know enough to get out early.

Facebook has become an information bubble. It knows so much about so many people, but the real treasure is that it knows who your network is. This accumulation of glommed data is a marketer's fantasy come true. And yet, Facebook has not found a way to make money.

This week's New York Times artice, The Three Facebook Settings Every User Should Check Now, is notable for a few reasons. To myself it's notable in that it's lifted, word for word, from its original position on Read Write Web. Usually the Grey Lady does not simply repurpose content from another source without explicitly acknowledging the provenance, but perhaps times are changing.

The most important thing about the article is its urgency and its degree of specificity; click this, hover there, choose this. This sort of specific guidance from a source with geek credibility is commendable.

IANAF (I am not a Facebook-er), but I've had friends show me what they do on Facebook. I haven't tried it because I'm concerned it's a lot like doing heroin, one flirtation and you're hooked. That seems to be the case among people I know.

Last week a friend of mine sent me a link to his Facebook page so I could see his avatar image. I also saw the avatars of a dozen of his friends. Being somewhat geeky, I pressed Shift/F5, the page refreshed, and I saw another dozen friends. I did that a few times and realized that anybody can sequence through all of any Facebooker's friends.

I followed a few of the links, because I know some of his friends. On their Facebook pages, I found other people I knew among their friends - these would be "co-friends". I found I could even drill down to friends-cubed, third-level friends. This is sort of the opposite of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.



The thing that concerns me is that people are loading their information about themselves and their friends into Facebook, assuming that FB is (1) benign, (2) cost-free, and (3) sustainable. The problem is that eventually, Facebook is going to have to make money.

When a guy with a forest needs money, he sells firewood.
When an Afghan farmer needs money, he sells opium.
When a company with your information needs money, they sell your information.

In his new book, Jarod Lanier writes regarding Facebook, "The real customer is the advertiser of the future, but this creature has yet to appear at the time this is being written. The whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers—we might call them messianic advertisers—who might someday show up".

"The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view," Lanier writes, "is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable."

Facebook users are giving this Corporation most of their key information. Facebookers that take surveys and complete profiles give even more information that helps FB assign them to various demographic profiles.

When Facebook goes bankrupt, a few interesting things will happen. Their assets will be reorganized and used in the most financially beneficial way. What's interesting is that the Facebook privacy policy and privacy guarantee evaporate into vapor at the moment of bankruptcy. When the Facebook bubble bursts, the privacy policy pops too.

There will be a bidding war for FaceBook's database, which will become more valuable in bankrupcty (free of the privacy policy) than it ever was during Facebook's tenure.

The smartest thing for the buyer of the database to do would be to immediately reintroduce the Facebook service, encouraging Facebookers to continue contributing and updating their information, only now without the same privacy policy.

GPS Road Tax and Big Brother

Traditionally consumers pay for roads through a gasoline tax. The more you drive, the more you pay (at a linear rate). There are two perceived problems with this approach:

(1) as we move into electric/hydrogen cars, the tax base supported by gasoline-fueled vehicles diminishes, and
(2) the gasoline tax is a rather blunt instrument, which doesn't support nuanced applications like congestion-based pricing (city centers or crowded highways during peak hours).

An alternative to a gasoline-based road tax is a mileage tax utilizing GPS. The Netherlands has announced their intention to implement a GPS mileage tax, and in the US there's interest in Oregon, California, and Massachusetts.

One of the problems with GPS-based road taxes is that there's no infrastructure to support it. We'd have to install a GPS in each car, establish a reporting system, and build a new agency to administer the program.

Another problem is privacy; I may not want Big Brother to have records of where my car has been. Advocates of a GPS-based road tax are quick to promise that the GPS data will only be used for revenue, and possibly for some criminal investigations.

That's what leads me to this week's news about how in the United States, Sprint/Nextel's Electronic Surveillance Department has provided GPS location data about its wireless customers to law enforcement over 8 million times in 13 months.

Paul Taylor, the Sprint/Nextel Electronic Surveillance Manager, said: We turned on the web interface for law enforcement about one year ago last month, and we just passed 8 million requests. So there is no way on earth my team could have handled 8 million requests from law enforcement, just for GPS alone. So the tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement. They also love that it is extremely inexpensive to operate and easy (to use).

That's just one telecom company, giving up location info 8 million times over 13 months, without any interaction with the courts. No checks and balances - the police go to the web portal, submit their request, and they get the info.

This blog describes how "the government routinely obtains customer records from ISPs detailing the telephone numbers dialed, text messages, emails and instant messages sent, web pages browsed, the queries submitted to search engines, and geolocation data, detailing exactly where an individual was located at a particular date and time."

Personally, I'm not pleased about my cellphone reporting my whereabouts to the authorities without a court order. It's not that I live a Tiger Woods lifestyle, but I believe I have a right to be left alone, free from surveillance unless a court issues a warrant.

Conn. Politicians Play Onan's Game of Solitaire

House Minority Leader Lawrence F. Cafero Jr., R-Norwalk, far right, speaks while colleagues play solitaire on their computers as the House convenes to vote on a new budget for the fiscal year in the Capitol, in Hartford, Conn., Monday, Aug., 31, 2009. (JESSICA HILL/ASSOCIATED PRESS / August 31, 2009)

The two card sharks have been identified as state representative Barbara Lambert, D-Milford, and John Hennessy, D-Bridgeport. Here's what they look like from the front:

John (Jack) Hennessy, D- Bridgeport CT, Solitaire playing Legislator

Barbara L Lambert, D- Milford CT, Solitaire playing Legislator

Solitaire?

The card game on their screens is not, strictly speaking, Solitaire — which is a collection of single-player card games — rather, their game is Klondike Solitaire.

Klondike Solitaire, which was originally included in the Windows computers as a "how to use a mouse" training game, is now so ubiquitous that it's become a synedoche for all Solitaire games (synedoche is the term for when a part is used to refer to the whole, such as mustering sailors by calling for "all hands on deck").

What's the Context of this Card Playing?

The nattily dressed lawmaker who is standing in the photo is the leader of the minority party (Republicans). The two Solitaire playing legislators are in the majority party (Democrats). What's really happening is the Minority is delivering a rhetorical screed which will have no effect on the outcome of the day's voting, and two members of the Majority turned to other amusements. The former speaker of the Legislature said, Good thing they didn't pan the camera around the room, they'd have found a lot more Solitaire.

It's not just Legislators

Laptops are a Distraction

It's not fair to put a laptop or a computer in front of somebody and then be shocked, shocked and appalled to find that they're using it as a distraction. Laptops are an addicting distraction. It's like putting jelly beans in front of kids and being surprised when they eat some. With multitasking and ubiquitous computing, work is a struggle against distraction.

Computer Privacy

It's curious that when we worry about computer privacy, we usually think about privacy in terms of what's behind the monitor, not what's behind the user/playa.

This didn't have to happen

The bright folks at 3M provide privacy filters for laptops, monitors, and cellphones (their motto: Practice Safe Text) that would have prevented this unfortunate scandal:

For Laptop-Lugging Luddites