<pops open bonnet of car>
Mark: "There you go, there's the engine. 4 cylinder petrol engine" @CommonsCMS: "Where are the horses?"
Mark: "Horses?"
CMS: "We heard it's a 100 Horsepower engine."
Mark: "That's just a metaphor…?"
.@CommonsCMS: "No, we know there are horses. That engine is a black box. You're not being transparent about where the horses are."
Mark: "But that's not how cars really work…"
CMS: "Everyone knows that cars are driven by horsepower. We want to see the horses." #algorithms
Author's Note: this may sound like whimsy, but it's only a few years since I had the following conversation with a member of a London-based "civil society" campaigning organisation:
Me: "…if someone's organising a heavy metal festival, they might bid to show adverts to people who like `Metallica`…"
Them (triumphant) "A-HA! BUT HOW DOES FACEBOOK KNOW THAT I LIKE METALLICA?!"
Me: "There's a button. On the Metallica page. Marked `Like`."
Them: "That's it?"
Me: "Yes. That's it."
…and then there was this sort of iceberg-crashing facial expression of "but, wait, what?" and desperately grappling to find something complicated and X-Files-Conspiracy-Like onto which they could grab.
In terms of poorly-informed & misconceived myths that power criticism of social media in general & Facebook in particular, it's right up there with "if people knew the VALUE of their personal data they'd take MORE CARE of it!"
There are bound to be a bunch of committee meetings that come out of this paper; I'm considering making bingo cards:
- chortling joke re: dialing-down the number of baby photos you see
- assertion that Facebook sells data
- "the Daily Mail is obviously different from Fake News"
Why do I care? Well, (a) I don't like Policy which is founded on misapprehension, "something must be done!"-ism, or "to send a message"; also (b) I worry about the brake that even well-intended, supposedly-balanced regulation will have upon innovation.
More interesting that Facebook, I used to work on TheMine!Project*, a highly influential, much-plagiarised & ultimately unsuccessful stab at personal information stores, from 2006-2011.
If you want to know my opinion of how @timberners_lee's #Solid will impact "tech giants", watch this video (actually, x3) from 2010; the bulletpoints are:
- facebook killers, aren't
- there's plenty of room for alternatives
- first it must grow
The media loves zero-sum, david/goliath stories, and thereby often causes doom ("ello") & even tragically suicidal levels of stress ("diaspora*") to people who are foolish enough to pitch themselves/their platforms as the antithesis of "social media giantism; so do please beware.
Australia: "The Assistance and Access Bill 2018" - the people of Australia have SIX DAYS in which to register their feelings on encryption back doors: homeaffairs.gov.au/about/consulta…#straya#endtoend
A Bill for an Act to amend the law relating to telecommunications, computer access warrants and search warrants, and for other purposes #otherPurposes
A technical capability notice may require the provider to do acts or things by way of giving help to ASIO or an interception agency in relation to…
HEREWITH: a _different_ argument about why it's easier to put a man on the moon than to have backdoorable cryptography at scale. This fine article got posted by Techdirt a couple days ago…
While we're on the topic of scale: every so often I have the misfortune of having to listen to some politician or former civil servant* demanding that people "NEED TO LEARN THE VALUE OF THEIR PERSONAL DATA, GODDAMNIT!".
*eg: ex-GCHQ
This one can be quite quick:
- Facebook
- About 2 Billion users
- Annual revenue 2017: $40.653 Billion
Here's simple division as a rough guide: your data is worth about $20
About $20 per annum per user.
Let's implausibly assume that you're a heavy user, and are worth double that, so that you're actually worth $40; that means your value to Facebook would be (40/12) = $3.33/month.
Regards #Article13, I wrote up a little command-line false-positive emulator; it tests 10 million events with a test (for copyrighted material, abusive material, whatever) that is 99.5% accurate, with a rate of 1-in-10,000 items actually being bad.
For that scenario - all of which inputs are tuneable - you can see that we'd typically be making about 50,000 people very upset, by miscategorising them as copyright thieves or perpetrators of abuse:
But let's vary the stats: @neilturkewitz is pushing a 2017 post by very respected fellow geek and expert @paulvixie in which Paul speaks encouragingly about a 1-to-2% error rate; let's split the difference, use 1.5% errors, ie: 98.5% accuracy: circleid.com/posts/20170420…