Chasing wild geese in search of privacy
There's been a bit of stir recently concerning the behaviour of Samsung televisions. Samsung's privacy policy for its Smart TVs was reported to allow voice captured by the television to be sent to a third party for processing. The open-ended wording of the policy led to some speculation that the television could be used like the "telescreens" used to watch over citizens in Nineteen Eighty Four.
According to The Conversation's David Glance, there's really nothing to worry about; the television just sends the recording to an on-line system able to perform voice recognition, which the television does not have sufficient resources to do itself. Other well-known voice recognition systems for consumer electronic devices do the same. Samsung itself quickly revised its privacy policy to clarify this point.
The episode illustrates weaknesses in two very different, but well-publicised, approaches to privacy: the privacy policy, and privacy-as-secrecy. The first are notorious for being unread by users who have no real choice but to accept them anyway. The second, which focuses on secrecy as the proper way to deal with data, led to fantasies of Big Brother setting up shop in a Korean television factory.
I suppose that folks who hold that privacy is secrecy see themselves as ever-vigilant against the kind of abuse that might result from exploiting loopholes like that created by Samsung's open-ended wording. This might be fair enough as far as it goes. But a large part of the problem with the original privacy policy was a preoccupation with where data is stored rather than what is done with it. The original wording told us that data would be sent to a third party, permitting everyone to imagine the third party that most exercised their minds, instead of explaining the actual functioning of the system.
So far as I know, no one has suggested that anyone at Samsung exploited the loophole, only that Samsung's privacy policy needed clarification. But since hardly anyone reads or takes action on privacy policies anyway, will anyone benefit from the clarification? What users really need is trust that data will only be used to provide the service they've asked for, not a technical guide to distributed computing.
Imagine that, every time you bought an item of food, you were expected to peruse the grower's and/or cook's "edibility policy" to determine whether or not it was up to your personal standards of non-poisonousness. (People with allergies do do something like this, and I don't envy them.) Personally, I much prefer the system of regulation by which eaters can trust that all food offered for sale is edible.
I suspect that most of us are hoping that privacy works much the same way when we click through privacy agreements: we presume that any reputable company is only going to use data in ways that we'd expect. Maybe they actually do, most of the time, but no one would ever know because it's buried in legalese.
A funny sort of progress
The Conversation's David Glance outlined a curious theory this week, suggesting that "part of Apple's success comes from giving us a sense of progress". Glance conjectures that providing workers with updated hardware and software every year might give them a sense of progress that contributes to job satisfaction, and suggests that companies might even consider paying their staff bonuses with which they can upgrade their own devices in bring-your-own-device schemes.
Glance doesn't address the question of whether or not upgrading devices makes any actual progress towards the goals of either a company or an individual worker. For Apple's purposes, it's enough to give a sense of progress if it keeps the customers coming back for more upgrades. As Erich Heinzle's comment points out, this strategy is generally known as planned obsolescence and it's an old strategy that serves car and computer manufacturers well but has some questionable benefits for the rest of us.
A student once told me that he'd grown tired of constantly updating his phone to the latest model, and had given up doing it. I told him, slightly tongue-in-cheek, that it was a sign of maturity. Where a child might grasp for the latest toy, an adult chooses the device that best meets his or her needs at a price that he or she is able to pay. (Indeed, he was studying a subject in which students are supposed to learn how to make informed judgements about what kind of computer equipment meets a set of needs.)
Matthew Tucker's comment alludes to what psychologists call an hedonic treadmill (though Tucker doesn't use the term), in which people chase goals and possessions in the expectation that achieving them will improve their lot, only to find that their happiness shortly returns to its usual level. My student recognised that he was on an hedonic treadmill, and got off it.
I can nonetheless see where Glance is coming from when he writes about the feeling of being left behind when one has to use old equipment while everyone else has, or is presumed to have, the latest model. And upgrading hardware and software can lead to progress if the new versions increase productivity, improve reliability and/or create new opportunities.
Still, serious companies and mature individuals probably want to exercise some caution in interpeting Glance's advice lest they end up on a corporate version of the hedonic treadmill. Glance's article is, after all, mostly about how Apple succeeds, not how its customers succeed. Suppose a company has some money to spend on bonuses. Would the company prefer its bonuses be spent by staff who rush out and buy the latest gadget, or by staff who carefully choose tools that improve the quality, breadth and ease of their work?
The temptations of the Ministry of Truth
Re-reading George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) recently, I couldn't help but wonder how much easier Winston Smith's job might be if his employer, the Ministry of Truth, had computers. I doubt that many people would want Smith's job to be any easier, since it involves re-writing historical documents to reflect the current official view. But my engineering brain nonetheless realised that doing this would be so much cheaper and easier if the Ministry of Truth had only to change entries in a central database rather than destroy all of the existing physical copies of a document, then re-print new ones reflecting the new view.
I have no plans to build a system for the Ministry of Truth. In fact one might argue that I don't need to, because we already have tools that could be made to meet the Ministry's needs: Wikipedia and Google. Might Orwell's novel have uses other than as the go-to reference for fantasies of surveillance and totalitarianism?
There are important differences between the real Wikipedia and real Google and anything that the Ministry of Truth might like. For one, however well-known and influential they are, there are alternatives and there are people willing and able to point out their flaws. For another, Wikipedia's pages aren't controlled by a central authority, and there's a "view history" link on every page. So I'm not particularly worried by either.
Perhaps a better question to ask is: how often do people read the alternatives, or view the history of a page? How many people might instead be building filter bubbles ready for abuse by a twenty-first century Ministry of Truth?
Doing some research for an article this weekend, I was reminded of how frustrating searching the web for information can be. Not only are web pages frequently superficial and poorly maintained — Wikipedia included — but searching for information about a particular event or non-web document turns up a mountain of umpteenth-generation re-posts of information for which the original source is lost in time, or maybe just ranked very lowly by search engines. I can see the attractions of a Ministry of Truth.
Thanks to the efforts of teachers, librarians and others, perhaps people are more aware of the weaknesses of relying solely on Wikipedia and Google than they might have been a few years ago. Still, it takes a lot of effort to thoroughly research a topic — and, for casual purposes, you can get away with whatever Wikipedia and Google serve up. Let's just not get complacent.
On copyright and creativity
The Conversation began a series on creativity this week with Dan Hunter complaining that copyright is a poor mechanism for encouraging creativity since awarding money for effort is known to reduce the intrinsic desire to make the same effort. Many of the commenters were not impressed, pointing out that this is easy to say for those in publicly-funded university positions; the grant system that Hunter seems to favour has its own problems; Hunter uses very selective examples to assert the supposed success of amateur creation; and, perhaps most importantly, that copyright has never been about encouraging creativity in itself anyway but about protecting artists from exploitation.
A simple experiment, similar to one I've previously proposed on this blog, might illuminate the last two points. Consider one of the many media users who complain that the cost of blockbuster film and television series is too high or unfair. How would such a user respond to being told to just watch YouTube etc. instead?
I doubt that many such users would find this a very satisfactory suggestion. If it was, surely they'd already be watching YouTube instead of Hollywood blockbusters. The point is that, for better or worse, copyright rewards not just any creativity, but only creativity that has value to people other than the artist.
If we leave copyright out of it, Hunter is probably correct to reason that many people enjoy creating for its own sake, and that lawmakers therefore don't need to provide any extrinsic incentive for such people to express themselves. Supporting the intrinsic desire to create is more about providing citizens with reasonable access to the time, materials and skills required to pursue their creative interests. Some of Hunter's suggestions seek to do more or less this, and, indeed, governments already have plenty of programmes seeking to do things of this sort.
Coming back to copyright, perhaps the real question is: how and to what degree should the law encourage artists to create works that are of interest to other people? Would society lose anything if art was only produced to satisfy the creative (and possibly exhibitionary) urges of artists?
Those who complain about lack of access to blockbusters presumably believe that society would lose something if for-profit art were to cease being provided, though I don't know if they would recognise it. Of course it is not easy to know how we'd fare if the kind of art supported by copyright did not exist at all, since we have no recent experience of such a world or any obvious way of simulating one. But, being important enough to warrant fifteen years of loud debate, nor is it an easy thing to dismiss.
Not quite free
I noticed that both Wikipedia and Firefox have been asking for donations recently. They're welcome to do this, but I couldn't help wonder if a few curmudgeons might be thinking: I told you so. Having wowed folks like Chris Anderson with their part in destroying any incentive for people to pay for encyclopaedias and web browsers, they've now discovered that they do, in fact, need money to provide the services that they do.
In The Logic of Collective Action (1971), Mancur Olson observes that most citizens say that tax-supported services are a good thing, and yet no government ever got by on donations. Had he been writing today, he might have said the same about encyclopaedias and web browsers. The problem for governments is that, without compulsory taxation, individual citizens are far too tempted to leave the paying to someone else.
Of course I noticed this because I myself launched Firefox and visited Wikipedia. It's hard not to when Wikipedia enjoys special billing on both Bing and Google, and, while I bought Opera once upon a time, I now couldn't buy a web browser even if I wanted to. (Of course I could donate to Firefox but why would I while Opera and Chrome aren't even asking for donations, and all three of them seem to have become clones these days?)
Both Wikipedia and Mozilla make pleas that illustrate the depths of their users' unwillingness to pay. According to Wikipedia, "if everyone reading this right now gave $3, our fundraiser would be done within an hour". Put another way, Wikipedia has been reduced to this sort of begging by users' unwillingness to pay even a measly $3 for access to an encyclopaedia. But who led them to expect that the price of an encyclopaedia is $0?
Chris Anderson and others correctly observe that the marginal cost of electronic goods like web sites and software is very low, perhaps even "too cheap to meter" in the sense that setting up a metering and payment infrastructure for it might cost more than the good itself. But it isn't zero, and the fixed costs can be very high. "Free" can therefore only ever be part of a financially viable strategy for producing such goods.
What Wikipedia, Mozilla and others have achieved for very little money is nonetheless impressive in many respects. What we don't know is: how much more could have been achieved had some more funding been available? And how could such funding ever be raised while everyone expects these services to be provided free of charge?
