Rainblog

I recently came across a post in which John Scalzi explains why he deleted his Klout account. To paraphrase his argument in my own words, Klout creates an artificial anxiety about your Klout score, which leads to you behaving in ways that are presumably in Klout’s interest, not yours.

I’m a little surprised that anyone takes Klout seriously, given that Klout scores are notably arbitrary. I signed up for Klout, looked at my score once and then immediately lost interest. Klout attempted to get me back by sending me emails I hadn’t asked for and from which I couldn’t unsubscribe (their software was broken) but eventually I managed to wriggle off their mailing list, and that was it as far as I was concerned.

Klout’s … let’s call it a psychic model … is a variant of what I call ‘leaderboard anxiety’. The idea is that some service sets up a metric by which you can evaluate your status. You are then supposed to obsess over this number and - the goal of the whole thing - keep coming back to the service to check on your score. Klout scores, Facebook friends, Twitter followers, Foursquare mayorships, Reddit karma, all work on the same principle: get more, improve your score, earn worthless badges, feel bad about yourself if you don’t ‘measure up’.

Closely related is ‘attention anxiety’. Again, there’s a ‘score’ to track, but this time it’s a local score linked to a specific action that you have taken: Tumblr reblogs, Twitter retweets, Facebook likes, upvotes on Digg or Reddit, Pinterest repins. You do something - tweet something witty, blog something insightful - and then you check back obsessively to find out how many people have liked or repeated what you said.

The infamous Zynga, maker of Facebook games, invented another anxiety to keep you coming back. Call it ‘tamagotchi anxiety’, or ‘spinning plates anxiety’. You have an unstable system - a Farmville farm - that requires constant attention. Unless you attend to it continuously, everything goes rapidly to hell, and your virtual pets reprove you pathetically for your heartlessness, tongues lolling and little x’s stamped on their tiny eyes. It’s rather like being a system administrator, but with less lifting heavy servers into racks.

These features aren’t accidental: they’re deliberately engineered and their common goal is to get you to keep coming back to the service and keep participating. Maybe if I do this, I can improve my Klout score. Maybe if I post a funnier tweet, more people will retweet it. It’s an artificial addiction based on our need for constant validation.

Anxieties aren’t the only tool social media has up its sleeve to keep us hooked. Another is what you might call “distraction satisfaction”. We’re drawn to look for new stimuli, for little crumbs of new information that give us something to think about or act on. Twitter and Facebook play on this. It’s very easy to think “I’ll just check my Twitter/Facebook/email/phone messages to see if anything new has come in; it’ll only take a second.” But of course it doesn’t just take a second. If there is something new, it leads us off down a procrastinatory rabbit hole. If there is nothing new, we’re left feeling dissatisfied, so we try again. If Twitter didn’t deliver, try Facebook. If Facebook didn’t deliver, there’s email, Reddit, Digg, text messages, Twitter again …

Catering to our natural urge to procrastinate might be a little more benign than deliberately inducing anxieties but it’s equally insidious. Moreover, the end goal is the same: to keep us coming back and to get us to participate. As a bonus, our own involvement makes the service more effective at dragging our friends into a similar spiral. As we send out our tweets and post our Instagram photos, we’re baiting the trap for others. When we mention someone’s Twitter handle, or tag them in a photo on Facebook, we’re passing out a little packet of distraction. The designers know this. Each new feature added to a social media service is designed not to increase the utility of the service for its users, but to increase the utility of its users to the service.

The lesson to take away? Social media is not your friend. You are being manipulated in ways that are harmful to you.

Speaking for myself, I’m mostly immune to leaderboard anxiety, but I do worry about how many people repost or retweet what I say (although based on my performance to date, I should just give up). And, I will admit it, I check my email and Twitter far more often than I should.

The odd thing is that following people on Twitter gives me a quite different anxiety, one that I don’t think has been designed by the social psychologists. It’s that all the people I follow seem to be doing such cool stuff - building web applications, staying on the cutting edge of their discipline, writing novels, taking photos, traveling to exotic places, making art. When I read about their projects and their successes, I start to feel anxious about how little I’m doing in comparison.

Maybe it’s because I spend too much time using social media …

Who decides what you see on the Internet? 

The short answer: not you.

A little while back, I wrote a post suggesting that micro-messaging systems such as Twitter needed to add typing to their message streams to help users manage the flood of information they receive.

Today, Facebook announced their new Subscriptions feature, which allows users to control how much information they receive from each source that they subscribe to - all messages, most messages, or only the most important messages. Interestingly, it also includes typing - Facebook identifies 4 types, namely ‘Life Events’, ‘Status Updates’, ‘Photos and Videos’, and ‘Games’.

Just 4 types doesn’t seem like very many, but the fine-grained, open-ended typing system that I originally proposed may be too complex for most people’s needs. Facebook may have done well to pick just 4 types that make sense in the context of the (closed) Facebook platform. Most people don’t want to spend all day fine-tuning their message feed: they just want to block those annoying Farmville updates and the endless kitten pictures. Facebook has probably made a good trade-off between flexibility and ease of use.

I don’t think we’ve seen the end of this particular evolution, though. Facebook status updates and Twitter tweets (among others) represent an ecosystem of information that may be as rich and important as the web itself. Unlike the web, which was at least partially designed (although it has since hugely outgrown Tim Berners-Lee’s original conception), micro-messaging has emerged in a largely ad hoc and unguided fashion. There’s still plenty of work to be done on structuring this information space to make it manageable and searchable.

More on that later.

Whenever a government wants to justify its latest intrusion into people’s electronic privacy, it usually does so by appeal to one of the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse. Membership of this prestigious group is a little ill-defined, but the usual formulation is that it is made up of terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers and organized criminals. As no one could possibly be in favor of any of these groups - so the logic goes - the government is justified in proposing whatever measures it wants to deal with them.

In recent years, the four have been joined by a fifth, copyright pirates. This is a harder sell because while most people aren’t pedophiles or terrorists, you have to look quite hard before finding someone who has never downloaded music or movies. People who might not blink when you tell them that you need to read everyone’s email to protect us all against Osama bin Laden and the international pedophile conspiracy are not quite so ready to believe that extreme measures are needed to deal with everyone who downloaded an illegal copy of “Born this Way”.

Now the five have been joined by a sixth and it is … wait for it … Internet trolls.

Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Mark, has recently declared that online anonymity “has to go away”. The reason? Antisocial behavior on line. If everyone were forced to use their real name, there’d be no more cyber-bullying and no more trolls. Apparently, Internet trolling is now a threat of the same order of magnitude as terrorism and child molesting, which is either very bad or very good news, depending on how you interpret it.

Facebook isn’t alone in calling for anonymity to be stripped away. Eric Schmidt of Google has also proposed an end to anonymity as a cure for the ills of the Internet. Schmidt actually goes further than Zuckerberg, predicting that a ‘verified name service’ will eventually be required to protect against ‘asynchronous threats’ (the Horsemen, presumably) and calling for ‘true transparency and no anonymity’. And Google’s newly-launched Plus service has recently lost some of its shine after a ham-fisted attempt to enforce a ‘real names’ policy. 

While I would be the last person to question the truth of John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, I have some doubts about these proposals. For one thing, as any child can tell you, lack of anonymity has never been an obstacle to real world bullies. For another, short of the Orwellian ‘verified name service’ proposed by Mr Schmidt, it will always be possible to circumvent attempts to force users to use their ‘real names’. For still another, it’s pretty much certain that all this transparency is only going to flow one way. It will be individuals who are required to live by Mr Schmidt’s rules of ‘true transparency and no anonymity’. Governments and corporations, as ever, will be exempt.

Defenders of privacy have pointed out that while trolls and bullies may shelter behind anonymity, so too do opponents of repressive governments, political activists, corporate whistleblowers and battered wives. And so do ‘ordinary’ users: in a world of ‘total transparency’ where every utterance can be tied to a name and a real-world identity, how many people would dare to post so much as a bad restaurant review or a dissenting opinion? There’s no shortage of people, on the Internet or off it, who are willing to lash out against anyone who disagrees with them or calls them out on their own bad behavior. Anonymity might indeed facilitate misbehavior online, but to a still greater extent it protects us against the thugs and the bullies. (A friend of mine recently told me that she wants to create a Facebook account for her young daughter, using a fake name and an untraceable email address. Why? Because she sees a fake identity as the only effective way to protect the girl from cyber-bullying).

So why do the Zuckerbergs and the Schmidts of this world want to strip it away? It’s not that they’re unaware of the value, even the necessity of anonymity online. It’s not that they really believe that ‘real names’ or ‘total transparency’ are useful or that they could be enforced without state control over the Internet so pervasive and intrusive that it would make the RFP for the Total Information Awareness project look like an EFF ‘best-practices’ document. They’re too smart to drink that particular Kool-Aid. 

The various interested parties who have decided that online anonymity and privacy must die always claim that such measures are necessary to ‘protect’ us (as far as I can remember, none of them have ever taken the time to ask us if we want to be protected). But that isn’t really what’s at stake. For companies like Google and Facebook, your real identity is a salable commodity: clinching that would put the capstone on the vast information-gathering exercise that has been sold to us as ‘social networking’. Simply put, the end to anonymity serves their interests.

Not ours.

Unless you actually live in Tunisia … or Egypt … or Yemen … or take more interest in world affairs than most Americans, probably not much.

Or so you might think. But if you use Facebook, the revolution in Tunisia has had one consequence that will affect even you.

As protests against the government gathered strength, politically-active Tunisian users discovered that someone was deleting their Facebook accounts. The finger of suspicion quickly pointed to Tunisian state security, popularly personified under the name “Ammar”. Faced with mounting evidence that Ben Ali’s cyber-stasi were stealing an entire country’s passwords, Facebook - not normally known for being on the side of the angels where privacy is concerned - turned on secure connections for Tunisian users.

Now, Facebook over HTTPS is available to everyone. So even if you’ve never heard of Firesheep, do yourself a favor. Go to your Account Settings page, click ‘Account Security’ and then check the checkbox next to ‘Secure Browsing’. You’ll be glad you did.

mikehudack:

soupsoup:

You wanna freak out over Facebook? OK, here’s one for you.

Anyone using the Xobni plug in for Outlook, which these days, many Fortune 500 companies do, will see your main Facebook profile photo pop up when you email them.

I’ve seen some pretty hilarious ones from clients I work with, and it really might be one of the biggest cautionary tales of why you shouldn’t be on Facebook, or at least be a little more careful about what you put on it.

The other day I went through my Facebook account and stripped out all the email addresses that Facebook had somehow deduced for me, leaving just the address that I used when I signed up for Facebook. That’s a ‘tagged’ address that has only been used for Facebook. I certainly won’t be using it when I send out any business email.

Of course, using an address that isn’t used anywhere else means that people won’t be able to search for me on Facebook by my email address, but that’s probably also a win. And at least future business contacts won’t be startled by a picture of me swinging an axe (actually, it’s a splitting maul).

Tagged disposable email addresses make more sense than ever. If you don’t want to use a commercial service, drop $10 on a domain name from a registrar that throws in email forwarding as part of the service. Or, if you want to get fancy and you have your own server, use Mail::Audit and roll your own custom mail-handler.

Over the past few days, I’ve been loosely following some of the discussion of Facebook’s Open Graph API and the Like button, as well as their ever-eroding privacy policy. I’ve started to think about alternatives not just to Facebook, but also to the rather anaemic and underwhelming OpenLike proposal. And I’ve gone through the usual ritual of revisiting my Facebook page, trimming down my personal data still more, and setting any privacy options I can find on Facebook’s maze of twisty little settings pages to their most restrictive settings.

That last exercise seems particularly pointless. Facebook has finally identified their business model, and it appears to be to leak your personal data as widely and as often as possible. It’s reached the point where trying to limit who can view your information looks like an exercise in comic futility. Don’t run Facebook apps because you don’t want the developers of MafiaFishFarmVille to have access to all your personal information? Nice try, but all it takes is for one of your friends to sign up - and they will - and you’re busted. Unless, of course, you can find the magical checkbox that says not to share your information, in which case you’re safe … until Facebook changes their policy again.

Even when Facebook isn’t trying to be evil, there are the bugs. One recently-disclosed Facebook bug secretly added apps to your profile when you visited certain websites. Another bug exposed private chat sessions. And these are just the tip of the iceberg (icebug?). I don’t think Facebook are in control any more. The platform is too big and too complex, with too many interacting permissions and features. The constantly changing policies and the management’s drive to build a business around selectively allowing access to personal data must add up to a nightmare for the engineers who have to try to keep things consistent. When the pressure from higher up is to constantly open loopholes in what might once have been a simple and solid privacy architecture, something has to give. I expect to see at least one truly spectacular exposure before the end of the year.

All this was brought to the forefront of my consciousness this morning by three things that happened almost simultaneously. The first was a message from one friend saying that he was leaving Facebook for more or less the reasons outlined above. The second was the following tweet from my friend and colleague Nathan. And the third was going to CNN’s website and seeing a sidebar that said “Chan _____ recommends this story”. I blinked at that one for a moment, and thought “How the fuck? Oh, right. Facebook.”

I didn’t pick the page apart to see how that one was engineered. I didn’t need to. The mere fact that I could see a friend’s name on a CNN web page meant that someone now knew more about me than they needed to. It doesn’t matter if it’s done on the back end or the front. If a web page can greet you in the name of a friend, it means that it knows who you are and a good deal more besides.

So I’m seriously considering leaving Facebook as well. I don’t even like Facebook, or use it very much. It’s not just that I find the interface clunky and hard to navigate. It’s that I don’t want to give worthless (but costly) imaginary presents, I don’t want to nurture lonely brown cows in Farmville, and I’m not even particularly inclined to wallow in the stream of distractabilia poured out by all my friends. I like my friends, I really do, but I don’t need to know every fleeting thought that passes through their minds or keep up with the latest in funny kitten videos.

What Facebook does offer - aside from a place to spam links to my own non-Facebook Internet projects - is a way to keep in touch with a network of friends scattered across the globe. I like the fact that I can count on finding a reasonably-current contact address for folks with whom I’d like to stay in touch. I like the serendipitous rediscovery of old friends. That is the part of Facebook’s value proposition that makes me reluctant to cut the cord. But that may not be all.

I’ve long been a fan of Roger Zelazny’s book “My Name is Legion”, whose hero enjoys the privileged position of being the only person on Earth whose identity is not indexed in the central computer. In reality, however, his power comes not from his anonymity but from his ability to create new identities at will. As Facebook and its imitators increasingly insert themselves into the structure of the Web, those who opt out of the network may find themselves not liberated but limited. That’s certainly Facebook’s goal: to make their offering so compelling, so ubiquitous, so essential that un-citizens - legionnaires? - without a Facebook identity will be cut off from important slices of functionality.

So we need alternatives. I’d like to do an end run around all that. I’m starting to think increasingly about how to build open systems that offer all the social features that we enjoy from Facebook, from Twitter, from Tumblr, and all the rest of them, but do so in a way that is distributed and removed from central control. It’s pretty clear that companies like Facebook can’t be trusted to store and manage our personal information. The obvious conclusion is that we should do it ourselves.