Alec Muffett Profile picture
Jul 30, 2018 9 tweets 3 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
<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!"

Value: about $3/month:
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.

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More from @AlecMuffett

Oct 5, 2018
Re: @timberners_lee's #Solid / @SolidMit

Hi @robertscammell!

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.

*themineproject.org
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.
Read 7 tweets
Sep 4, 2018
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…
Read 13 tweets
Aug 5, 2018
Hey! You remember that piece where I was randomly asked to respond in a 2…3 hour window, about "fixing" Facebook? Well, it's out, and I've found it!
And, of course, like every other Associated Press piece, it is broadly republished in many newspapers, under mostly-the-same-headlines:
You get the same copy at CTV in Canada:
Read 11 tweets
Jul 27, 2018
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…
And it has received reasonable praise, commentary, and dad-jokes from the usual crypto suspects:
And it quotes the highly respectable @mattblaze who as-ever properly demolishes the argument on its own terms of groundless aspiration:
Read 15 tweets
Jul 9, 2018
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

prnewswire.com/news-releases/…
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.
Read 5 tweets
Jul 7, 2018
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…
Read 23 tweets

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