Quicken spending spam - alert "feature"

In my mail this morning…

During a machine transition I reinstalled Quicken 2015, so I at first thought we’d unwittingly enabled Quicken Mobile and put our finances into Intuit’s Cloud. We hadn’t, but there’s an alerting “feature” I didn’t know about that can be changed in preferences. I’ve now disabled all alerts. 

I’d prefer Intuit (current owner, but Quicken has been abandoned) not know anything about me at all. I suspect knowing about me is, unfortunately, a significant part of their failing business model.

If you don’t want this, then stay away from Intuit and Quicken.

How Google can save itself - sell privacy.

It's been 3 years since the Google-Apple divorce, eight months since Google 1.0 died, and six months since I tried divorcing Google.

Divorcing Google, but planning to go out with something else. That hasn't worked out so well; Apple in particular is exploring new domains of pain.

Meanwhile, the less-facebooky parts of Google+  are improving, even as Twitter enlists with the Sith (don't they know there can only be two?).

So I'm thinking about trying to reconcile with Google - assuming she's still into geeks. How could Google win us/me back?

Google could sell privacy.

Let me explain. In the modern world two populations have privacy. One is poor, lives on cash and checks, and doesn't have a cell phone. The other is Romney-class wealthy. The rest of us are the Transparent Society. We can't buy privacy.

That is, we can't buy it now, but Google could sell it.

Google could sell a yearly G+ privacy subscription for something like $200 year per person or $400 year per family (wild ass guesstimates). For that amount we'd have full control over what we share, and we'd opt out of all advertising and marketing. We'd still be able to opt in to ads if we wanted, and of course there'd be no shield from subpoena. We'd be able to turn on the parts of G+ we want, and disable those we don't want. We might even have the optional use of disposable avatars or identities.

It sounds like a lot of infrastructure to build for a few users, but Google needs to sell into the German and EU market. Their privacy laws are much stricter than America's privacy "suggestions". Google would also like to provide services for the under 13 group, and even in the US that requires enhanced privacy protection. So they have to build this infrastructure anyway.

At a stroke, this would rebuild Google's geek appeal. Most would decide not to pay the price, but there would be no grounds for objections -- because Google's contract with its users would be transparent.

Some of us would pay.

You can do it Google. Save yourself and we'll be happy again.

Is labor lumpish in whitewater times?

Krugman is famously dismissive about claims of structural aspects to underemployment (though years ago he wasn't as sure). DeLong, I think, is less sure.

Krugman points to the uniformity of underemployment. If there were structural causes, wouldn't we see areas of relative strength? It seems a bit much to claim that multiple broad-coverage structural shocks would produce such a homogeneous picture.

Fortunately, I fly under the radar (esp. under Paul's), so I am free to wonder about labor in the post-AI era complicated by the the rise of China and India and the enabling effect of IT on financial fraud. Stories like this catch my attention ...

Fix Law Schools - Atlantic Vincent Rougeau  Mobile

... the jobs and high pay that used to greet new attorneys at large firms are gone, wiped away by innovations such as software that takes seconds to do the document discovery that once occupied junior attorneys for scores of (billable) hours while they learned their profession..

Enhanced search and discovery is only one small piece of the post-AI world, but there's a case to be made that it wiped out large portions of a profession. Brynjolfsson and McAfee expand that case in Race Against the Machine [1], though almost all of their fixes [1] increase economic output rather than addressing the core issue of mass disability. The exception, perhaps deliberately numbered 13 of 19, is easy to miss ...

13. Make it comparatively more attractive to hire a person than to buy more technology through incentives, rather than regulation. This can be done by, among other things, decreasing employer payroll taxes and providing subsidies or tax breaks for employing people who have been out of work for a long time. Taxes on congestion and pollution can more than make up for the reduced labor taxes.

Of course by "pollution ... tax" they mean "Carbon Tax" [1]. The fix here is the same fix that has been applied to provide employment for persons with cognitive disabilities such as low IQ and/or autism. In the modern world disability is a relative term that applies to a larger population.

If our whitewater times continue, we will either go there or go nowhere.

[1] They're popular at the "Singularity University" and their fixes are published in "World Future Society". Outcasts they are. Their fan base probably explains why the can't use the "Carbon" word, WFS/SU people have a weird problem with letter C. 

See also:

• Slavery, technology, and the future of the weak 2/2012. What do you do with a labor surplus?
• DeLong, Mankiw and the Problem of the Weak 10/2006. When Mankiw was almost readable.
• Mass disability and the middle class 9/2011

The evolution of spam: Nordstrom and mandatory spam acceptance

We've come a long way baby.

A year ago Nordstrom's began offering optional email receipts as "a convenient, environmentally friendly alternative to paper receipts."

Of course there are alway a few skeptics who doubted Nordstrom's integrity, but USA Today was reassuring

Retailers ditch paper and pen, use email for receipts - USATODAY.com

... no retailer serious about building a relationship with its customers would consider taking advantage of email access, said John Talbott, assistant director of Indiana University's Center for Education and Research in Retailing.

That's because for the retailer, the most significant benefit is being able to offer a service customers appreciate, he said. It isn't about cutting costs, he said, as less than 1% of a retailer's total revenue goes toward paper and ink for receipts.

Instead, the driving force is providing an option that makes the store a more appealing place to shop...

Yesterday Emily bought a shirt at Nordstrom's. The email receipt, she was told, was mandatory. No, of course there'd be no spam. She doesn't have a spam account, so she gave them her gmail account.

She got her first Nordstrom spam a few hours later. I'll show her how to use filters later today.

Not to worry though, paper receipts are not long for this world. Soon we'll be buying things with our phones. No spam there, since of course there's no tie between our phone's unique identifier and our email and phone number.

Facebook and financing a new Vikings stadium: it's a messy world

My Facebook stream has been telling me what my friends read and the movies they watch. 

So far, nothing too surprising.  I'm tempted to click on some of them.

Some of them are click-safe. Others are wee traps. By clicking on them I'm authorizing the apps to share some of the things I read or watch. Robert Wright at The Atlantic has the details.

Take a friend's whale video for example. His post doesn't look like an "app post". There's no "hide this app" option for it. Alas, those cues are so 2011. Apps are more covert now. When I click on the link I get this this dialog from "Chill.com"

Note the blue button doesn't say "run this app". It says "Okay, Watch Video". 

If I did click it however ...

• Everything I watch from Chill going forward would be Public on my timeline. (I periodically run the FB app that sets all my posts to friends-only; that's what I want. FB has ways to work around that.)
• Chill would get my private email address and my profile info
• Chill will post all videos I watch, all that I react to, "and more" -- on all my friends feeds. From their privacy policy "When you use our Service, all of the information that you submit, which may include name, email address, photographs and comments, will be publicly available to third parties and we may not have control over what they do with it. By using our Service, you consent to such disclosure. "

Chill isn't breaking any rules. It's "How Apps Work Now" - frictionless "Social Running".

Facebook, like Google+, is incorrigible. There will be a bit of an upset about this, but not as much as with their last 50 violations.

So why do I stick with Facebook when most of my geek friends have left it?

Because it's still where the non-geeks are. The kids on my son's baseball team don't all have email (or don't use it). They don't all have mobile phones with text plans (and besides, mass texting is a pain). They do all, however, use Facebook. So to communicate them I put up a Facebook Page for the team. Same thing with our inline skating club and our special hockey team.

I put Facebook in the same bucket as the state gambling operations we're using to fund a new football stadium for the Minnesota Vikings (just in time for the twilight of American football). State lotteries and the like are a tax on people who are bad at math -- or who just need a bit of hope. We'd never get stadium funding by taxing income or real estate, but voters are willing to tax the poor. Facebook is just another annoying part of the imperfect world we make the best of.

Strata big data Santa Clara - should be interesting

I'll be in Santa Clara CA next week (2/27-3/2) attending the Making Data Work: Strata 2012 - O'Reilly Conference.

I believe this is the first non-healthcare conference I've ever attended [1], and it will be my first visit to the heart of geekdom. Big data is fashionable these days, and it's always fun to attend fashionable things. Lots of interesting commercial and ethical aspects, since the most profitable use of big data seems to be finding ways to exploit the vulnerable.

It's hard on my family for me to be away that long, so I'd better use the time well. I'm hoping to put out a summary post when I'm done.

[1] In my real life I work in applied clinical informatics in the depths of a large publicly traded corporation -- and before that I was an academic family physician and country doc.

I deleted my Google G+ Profile

I visited my Google Profile today. It includes G+ posts, and more was public than I'd expected.

There's no longer a way to disable the Posts tab in Google Profile. I recall that was once optional.

I can, however, delete my Profile:

Downgrade from Google+

... Delete Google+ content or your entire Google profile If you delete Google+, Google attempts to restore your experience of other Google products to the way it was before you joined Google+ and to permanently delete your Google+ circles, posts, and comments. If you delete your Google profile, you delete Google+ as well as other services and their data that depend on a Google profile...

I'm going to give this a few days, but I expect I'll delete my TrueName Google Profile. I'll take the opportunity to take another step away from Google 2.0.

It's interesting to reread my first post on my Google Profile in 2007.

Today I have been re-christened 113810027503326386174. It is the ID Google assigned to the persona associated with Gordon's Notes and other blogs. I assume it will be the foundation for Google's future identity management services...

...I will need to add this new number to the page where I park all my public and related personas.

I really didn't expect Google to choose its current path.

In its place, at least for the moment, I have created a John Gordon profile, a companion to my blogs.

Update 12/6/2011: I've deleted my G+ Profile and G+ Content. The dialog I received said ...

Over the next few days, Google will attempt to delete all Google+ features and your Google+ data from your Google Account:

Your circles will be deleted, but people in your circles will remain in your Contacts.

Your +1's will be deleted.

Your posts and comments will be deleted and won't be available to anyone you shared them with.

Any profile information that you did not make public will be deleted.

Many Google+ social and sharing features will be disabled for you on other Google sites.

Content from other services, such as videos, will no longer be visible to people in those circles.

However:

No photos will be deleted: you can still access them in Picasa. To delete them, go to Picasa Web Albums.

Your connections to third-party services will not be affected. To manage them go to Connected accounts settings.

Your chat buddies in Google Talk and Gmail will not be deleted.

Your public Facebook posts - try this Google search

If you've ever used Facebook, log out of Facebook then try this search:

site:facebook.com "your name"

I don't share publicly - but I do post and comment on "Pages" which belong to organizations.Those pages are always public, so what I have written there is also public.

You can't make these posts non-public, but you can delete them. Log in to Facebook, then repeat the search. You should now see a delete box.

I found some posts could not be deleted. I got the "failed to hide minifeed story" bug on one.

PS. In the midst of this exercise my (true and unusual) name was registered as a Tidbits author with a 1996 article. This was a puzzling experience, because it was at first completely unfamiliar. As I read it, however, it became vaguely familiar. I remember the ideas, if not the article. I'm pretty sure it is mine. Weird.

LinkedIn's bozo move

LinkedIn's home page always shows a few headlines that reference LinkedIn.

This is what I saw this evening ...

Yep, that about says it all. 100 million LinkedIn users private information is now public.

I'm very surprised. Why would LinkedIn opt us all into being used in advertisements? Who thought this was a sane move? How could they forget who their customers are?

They have just made themselves vulnerable.

Epsilon breach: the iStealer and CyberGate mystery

A marketing (legal spam) firm was hacked and a bunch of our "private" (hah!) information was stolen. We can now expect more personalized phishing attacks (yawn). We might see more identity theft, but I've read that the identity reseller market has collapsed -- perhaps because there was too much cheating going on. (This is why civilization can win -- crooks can't trust each other).

Yawn. Another day, another semi-legal enterprise hacked. it's a boring story [1], not nearly as interesting as the far more sensitive, and far less discussed, RSA hack.

The story is boring, but there's a curious angle. The attack was prosaic ...

Epsilon breach used four-month-old attack - Security - Technology - News - iTnews.com.au

...The link in the body of the email took the user to a page that downloaded three malware programs – one that disables anti-virus software, another (iStealer) that is a Trojan keylogger to steal passwords, and a third (CyberGate) which offers hackers remote administration of the infected machine....

But the curious angle is how the attack trio are described: iStealer, CyberGate and an anonymous tool for disabling system defenses. I can't find out anything about them!

A google search on iStealer turns up lots of hits -- but they're obviously from shady sites I wouldn't visit without a VM constrained self-destructing browser. The only Wikipedia hits are on Russian language pages. In fact, as of today, this blog post is probably going to be the only legit result in many searches! (Sorry, I don't know anything.)

Why this curious silence?

[1] The firm is called Epsilon -- a silly name right out of a Bond flick. I think that's why this got so much attention.

Transparent society: automated monitoring of employees

I own Minority Report. I need to watch it before it's entirely passe.

For example, Social Intelligence is marketing employee behavior data mining to corporations. Forget spotting terrorists with Total Information Awareness (oh, you've already forgotten?), it's much more profitable to spot employees with a substance problem. Plus, it doesn't freak out the Tea Party if corporations do it.

If corporations don't buy, SI argues, they'll be sued the next time an employee goes postal. They should have known, lawyers will argue (and they will).

SI is also opening a subsidiary that will use bots to generate optimal online identities; burying the signal in noise. This service will be sold to employees. (I'm pretty sure Stross covered this in Accelerando, but there's lots of prior art here.)

I was joking about the employee service. SI might as well do it though. If they don't, someone else will.

There are several business opportunities here. I'm particularly looking forward to the related hire-a-hacker fund. Ten thousand people will anonymously donate a dollar for an SI related initiative.

(via Schneier).

PS. The Schneier comment thread includes some examples of name collisions and identity errors. I have one of those. My true name is somewhat unusual, and one time I flew in to give a talk only to be met by two police officers. They were looking for me as a material witness in an arson investigation. I was dressed for the presentation, so their expressions were funny to watch. Evidently I didn't look like the guy they expected ...

The Transparent Society - 1920 edition

I've mentioned David Brin's prescient 1999 book, The Transparent Society, a few times. In today's panopticon it's a premature cliche, but he deserves credit for working through so many of its implications.

Credit is also due a work I learned of through a throwaway comment of Melvyn Bragg in a 1999 (30 min!) program on Utopias (Anthony Grayling, John Carey). Lord Bragg mentioned a 1921 novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin called "We". The novel is described in an Amazon review by Leonard Fleisig ...

... WE takes place in the twenty-sixth century where a totalitarian regime has created an extremely regimented society where individual expression simply does not exist. All remnants of individuality have been stripped from its inhabitants including their names. Their names have been replaced with an alpha-numeric system. People are not coupled. Rather, each individual is assigned three friends with whom they can have intimate relations on a rigid schedule established by the state. Those scheduled assignations are the only times the shades in a citizen's glass houses can be closed. Apart from those hourly intervals everyone's life is monitored by the state. As in Orwell's 1984, language has been turned on its head. Freedom means unhappiness and conformity and the submission of individual will to the state means happiness...

Yes, rather like Huxley or Clockwork Orange or 1984. Orwell was a fan but Huxley denied having read We. 

We certainly belongs in a "panopticon" reading list. Glass houses are the ultimate transparent society.

See also:

• We - full text pdf

After the Google Hack: Life in the transparent society

My Google Account (Gmail and more) was hacked on 9/3/10, a day before I wrote about the risks of online backup.

I had a 99th percentile password. It had six letters, four numbers, no words or meaningful sequences. It wouldn't be in a dictionary. On the other hand, like Schneier and other security gurus, I didn't change it often. I also had it stored locally on multiple desktop and iPhone apps. As far as I know it wasn't stored on any reasonably current web app.

If my password had been a bike lock, it would have been one of those high end models. Enough to secure a mid-range bike on the principle that better bikes with cheaper locks were easy to find.

That wasn't enough. For some reason a pro thief [2] decided to pinch my mid-range bike. They didn't do any damage, they didn't seem to send spam [1]. They seem to have unlocked my bike, peaked around, and locked it again.

Why would a pro bother? Trust me, I lead an intensely narrowcast life. It's interesting to only a few people, and boring to everyone else.

On the other hand, it wasn't always so. "I coulda been a contendah." I knew people who have had interesting lives, I still correspond with some. If a pro was interested in me, it was most likely because of someone like that. My visitor was probably looking for correspondence. Once they found it, or confirmed my dullness, they wouldn't have further interest in me.

Fortunately even that correspondence is quite dull.

I've changed my password. The new one is 99.9th percentile. Doesn't matter, I doubt I'm much more secure.

This isn't a complete surprise. Passwords died as a high end security measure about ten years ago. What's more surprising, except in retrospect, is that you don't have to really do anything or be anybody to get some high end attention. You only have to be within 1-2 degrees of separation of someone interesting. Security and "interest" are "social"; even a dull person like me can inherit the security risk of an interesting acquaintance or correspondent.

Welcome to the transparent society. If you put something in the Cloud, you should assume it's public. Draw your own conclusions about the corporate Cloud business model and online backup, and remember your Gmail is public.

footnotes --

[1] Of course they could erase the sent email queue, but I haven't gotten any bounce backs. Anyway, there are much easier ways to send spam.
[2] Russian pro, Chinese government equivalent, etc. Why pro? Because the hacker didn't change my password after they hacked the account, they didn't trash anything obvious, they didn't send out spam, and the access was by an abandoned domain. I'm not vulnerable to keystroke logger hacks except at my place of employment and wifi intercepts are relatively infrequent. Still, it's all probabilities.

Google has Aspergers

The geek world has been debating whether Google's Buzz debacle arose from incompetence or malevolence. Did Google think they were doing something genuinely delightful, or is Buzz simple a cynical emulation of Facebook's "be evil" strategy?

I've been learning to the cynical and evil explanation, but a comment by Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, has changed my mind ...

Google boss says 'nobody was harmed' by Buzz debacle |Technology | guardian.co.uk

...talking to phone industry executives at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Schmidt said that nobody had been harmed by Buzz and that the problems were merely the result of poor communication...

This is an outrageous statement. Schmidt cannot know that nobody was harmed, either directly through the bonding of Buzz streams to public profiles or indirectly through inevitable misunderstanding. Even if he were omniscient, since many people have felt harm, it's a stupid thing for a CEO to say.

So why does this make me feel that Google is more incompetent than evil?

Because in my experience someone who says something that's obviously wrong most often believes what they are saying.

Which brings me to my corporate diagnosis. We can do that now that our courts have decided that corporations are people. I am a physician after all.

Google has Asperger(s) syndrome. For Google, people are an slippery and elusive concept. It explains a lot.

PS. I don't care what the DSM V says about Aspergers, it's a useful concept.

Update 2/22/2010: I think the person responsible for Buzz is also responsible for the obstinate Gmail message thread-by-subject-line model. Same sort of stubborn certainty.

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Google's latest inadequate Buzz patch - Profile deletion

Google claims to be trying to fix the Buzz Problem, but they're refusing to reduce the link between a public Google Profile and any Buzz activity.

For Google the public Profile is the great search prize. They won't give this one up easily.

So at the moment the only way to truly remove your public Buzz trail is to delete your Google Profile:

Edit your (Google) profile - delete profile:

... This will disable Google Buzz integration in Gmail and delete your Google profile and Buzz posts. It will also disconnect any connected sites and unfollow you from anyone you are following...

You can now do this from your Google Dashboard, from Profile settings, and possibly from the Buzz tab displayed in Gmail (which I no longer see).

There are side-effects to Profile deletion. It appears it will not only remove your Buzz followers, it will also remove your Google Reader followers. It may also remove your authentication with various connected sites and your Gmail OpenID credentials. It also removes any value attached to your Profile before Google attached the Buzz stream to it.

Google needs to do two things that they are extremely reluctant to do:

• Near term: allow users to remove Buzz streams from the public profile.
• Longer term: allow users to associate multiple Google Profiles with a single Google account and to control which ones ares associated with various Google properties, authentication and sharing services, etc.

Until they do these things, they have earned their new Gordon's Corporate Evil Scale score of '8' - average for a publicly traded company and in spitting distance of Microsoft's '10'.

Update 2/20/10: A week after I removed my full name from my Google Profile a search on my name still retrieves the profile and the few Buzz posts I've left undeleted. Quite a screw-up.

Good-bye Buzz – for now.

I’ve clicked the link at the bottom of my Gmail account to discontinue Google Buzz.

I was initially enthusiastic because of the value of Google Reader notes – a precursor to Buzz. I hoped Google would fix the notes confusion/neglect while also giving me a better version of Twitter.

Instead, Google’s most senior leadership, the people leading and testing Buzz, blew it big time. They failed to understand the multiplicity of adult identities. All I can guess is that Brin et al are so wealthy and powerful that they have become fundamentally disconnected from mainstream reality.

I gave Google some time to recover, but they’re only playing around the edges. Google remains determined to tie all Buzz discussions directly to a user’s public Google Profile, perhaps as a way to manage spam and to drive search/marketing revenue.

Disappointing, but I’ll be back if they fix it.

Update: Even though I've removed Buzz via Gmail, my Buzz posts still appear on my Google Profile. Not funny Google.

Update 2: I've reversed the procedure that made my Profile searchable. It's non-intuitive, but the "Display my full name..." setting in "edit profile" toggles searchability. When unchecked a Google Search on a my name no longer returns my profile. The profile URL has not changed and prior links still show the public view. That public view still includes Buzz posts even though I've disabled Buzz support in Gmail. I've removed other information from my Google Profile and I expect I'll continue to trim the profile unless Google has a dramatic conversion.

Update 2/17/2010: In depth critique - with cartoon. Credit for focus on the Profile.

The Buzz profile problem: I am Legion

My name is Legion; for we are many many (Mark 5-9).

I am father, brother, in-law, son, and spouse. I am coach. I am volunteer. I am citizen and activist. I am a physician. I am an (adjunct) professor. I am an oddity in a large, conservative, publicly traded corporation. In the corporation I am a team member, known to some customers, occasionally publicly facing, known in various ways and various places. I have other roles and have had many more over time.

I am Legion. So are most middle-aged persons.

Only one person knows all the roles and all of the stories that are not excruciatingly boring (hi Emily).

That’s the problem with Google Buzz, and why my Google Profile doesn’t include my pseudonymous (John Gordon) blog postings or my Google Shared items.

Buzz is tightly linked to my Google Profile, and my Profile is trivially discoverable. I don’t want corporate HR or a customer or business partner to instantly know that I’m a commie pinko Obamafanboy with a dysfunctional Steve Jobs relationship.

I have LinkedIn as my bland corporate face, and, despite Facebook’s innate evilness, a FB profile for friends and family. Inside the corporation I’ve a blog that serves as a limited persona.

We all have many roles, identities, avatars, personae, limited liability personae, characters, facets and so on. The problem with Buzz today is that it’s tied to the Google Profile, and that profile is the closest thing to my unified public face. It crosses boundaries. So it can only hold the limited information channels that are available to all.

Google gets some things right, and a ton of things wrong. They take a statistical, loosely-coupled, evolutionary approach to technology development (the exact inverse of Jobs the Intelligent Designer). I’m looking forward to where Buzz goes, but I’ll be cautious for a time. They can start by giving us more control over what aspects of the overall Buzz connection stream appear on our public profiles.

Update 2/11/10: More on the mess-up. Google really didn't think this through very well. They may end up feeding the families of a number of lawyers. I'm sure they weren't dumb enough to roll this out in the EU, but if they did the fines may be significant.

Responding to Facebook’s lions: Stop friends using the apps

Facebook has made changes to their privacy settings that have two major consequences. The first is that the default settings now share much more information. The second is that users can no longer protect their social network from Facebook’s “Applications”.

Most of the media attention has been on how information is exposed to search engines such as Bing and Google. This is important, but there are complex workarounds. It’s not the most interesting or important consequence anyway.

The more important consequence is that Facebook’s shady App vendors (see: Scamville Furor, Facebook and the eBay disease) can no longer be blocked from accessing a player’s social network. So every App vendor has access to all player “friends” and all of the information they in turn make available in their public profiles. Remember that most of those public profiles now contain a great deal of personal data.

The Facebook Apps are “free”, but these vendors are not charities. They earn money by selling game goods, marketing extra-game services and products (some fraudulent), and by selling information. They will sell the social network information they harvest. They will also use that social network to find new “players” (aka “victims”).

To understand this it helps to think of Facebook as the African plains. In this metaphor Facebook users are rhinos and zebras and Facebook App vendors are lions.

Both rhinos and zebras graze on Facebook grass (photo sharing, social stories, contact information). They get along. So how are they different?

The rhinos don’t do Apps and they restrict access to their personal information. They’re tough and nasty; they don’t directly feed lions. The zebras, however, do Apps, and they travel in herds. They’re sleek, soft and vulnerable. Find one, you can find more. Lions eat zebras.

It’s messy for the zebras, but that’s how the market works. The Facebook ecosystem is a rich feeding ground, and lions have to eat.

Of course the Facebook ecosystem is more complex. Facebook rhinos and zebras are often friends and family. Even though lions don’t eat rhinos, FB lions find rhinos through their zebra friends. They then sell Rhino locations (information) to big game hunters (banks?) who sell Rhino horns for fertility potions (risk profiles).

The market world is different because rhinos and zebras can fight back. Not every vendor scores a 10 on Gordon’s scale of corporate evil; Google’s a mere 3 at the moment. There’s more than one way to make money – though the alternatives may mean a smaller IPO. On the other hand, Facebook’s current strategy runs the risk that IPO buyers will remember eBay.

It’s not clear that there’s anything to be done about Facebook. The corporate culture there is probably too much like 1990s Microsoft or 2010 Goldman Sachs for them to find another road. I’ve stopped encouraging my friends to join up with Facebook.

If you want to continue grazing Facebook’s grasslands however, and you don’t want to be lion fodder, there’s now only one possible response.

Convert your zebra friends to rhinos. Get them to stop using Apps. If they persist in using Apps, unfriend them. They’re leading the lions to you.

As of today, Facebook apps are the enemy.

Update: Great comment from Nettie. She refers us to Brad Stone's announcement of the EFF's complaint to the FTC - cosigned by ten other privacy organizations ...

... Ten other privacy organizations signed the complaint, including the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the American Library Association and the Consumer Federation of America. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner in Canada has also been looking into Facebook’s privacy guidelines...

I think it's fair to say that the fan has been hit. Like Nettie, I've noticed people drifting away from FB ...

Understanding secure systems: The Chromium extension example

This very brief Google Chromium blog posting gives a lovely view into modern secure system design ...

Chromium Blog: Security in Depth: The Extension System

... To help protect against vulnerabilities in benign-but-buggy extensions, we employ the time-tested principles of least privilege and privilege separation...

The original has wikipedia* links to relevant articles. These principles are broader than computer security. Think of them when you provide access to your Facebook information.

"Least privilege" and "Privilege Separation" should be a part of grade school and high school curriculum.

If you want lots more detail, the authors refer us to their academic treatise on securing browser extensions.

I love blogs.

*Yeah, Knol was a bad idea.
--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Facebook observations

I've been enjoying Facebook, though the iPhone client is overdue for an overhaul. My conclusions about what's interesting with FB are a bit different from what I usually read, so, inevitably, I'm compelled to share:

1. Internal identity - no anonymity. This means control over communications, which means spam is manageable. The FB equivalent of spam is metastatic "apps", but, for the moment, you can opt out of those. Spam free communication environments are worth much more these days than they were 7 years ago.
2. It's AOL 2.0. I remember when AOL was interesting, back when it was a Mac only spinoff of one of Apple's many failed online communities. I'll call that AOL 1.0. Of course in those days there was no spam, no phishing, no viruses -- essentially the proto-Net was risk free. That meant AOL didn't have an enormous amount to offer, but it still did quite well. Now the Net is extremely risky, especially for XP users. AOL 2.0 has a much bigger value proposition than AOL 1.0.
3. I love pub/sub, especially as implemented in feeds and readers. Unfortunately, this technology was a bridge too far for the vast majority of humanity. Only the uber-geeks knowingly use feed readers like Google Reader; all the good desktop XP feed readers have died. Facebook is all about pub/sub, but they've made the technology feel natural to their base. That's a real accomplishment.
4. Facebook has shown (sigh) that logic and usability are not all that important for a social application.

I've never paid much attention to the alleged role Facebook played in electoral politics. I'm still unsure how much of that is real, but there is some potential to gradually encourage specific memes in one's FB network. It has to be done judiciously. I actually streamed my Google Reader "notes/shares" into FB for a while and I think I about vaporized my friends. Now I restrict the meme injections to 1-2 a week.

The dark side of FB, of course, is data lock. (Privacy you say? Surely you've given up on that 20th century dream.) They're providing more APIs and sharing more identity information than they have, but I would never put my photo library on FB. It's a place to put things that are intentionally transient.