Tag: surveillance capitalism

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If not Facebook, What? Part 1

This is the third post in a series. Since it has been months since the last post you can review the previous posts here and here.

Is it possible to have a Facebook-like experience on the internet for free without becoming the raw material for a massive data-gathering and analysis operation and then becoming the ignorant target of manipulation by entities using the results of that operation? In short, no. There is no economic model that would enable a site trying to implement Facebook’s user experience — minus the manipulation — while offering the service for free.

There is a movement afoot to force the hands of large corporations that provide web-based internet services so that they can no longer collect behavioral data from users without their knowledge. In 2018 California enacted a law, the California Consumer Privacy Act, that gives consumers the right to obtain from internet service providers any personal information the provider has collected about them, including inferences made about the consumer derived from analysis, opt out of having that data collected or sold to third parties, or have any or all of the existing data deleted. That law technically went into effect on New Year’s Day, but California is still working on the regulatory framework.

This law is likely to have a significant impact on the business models employed by most of the large companies that provide internet services. First, even though it is only a state law, many popular websites are likely to change their privacy policies nationwide and perhaps globally so they don’t have to customize the site’s code based on the legal residence of the connecting user. Second, revealing the results of their proprietary analysis algorithms to consumers will at least partially undercut the competetive advantages enjoyed by Google and Facebook, for exampe, in the war to develop the most accurate predictions about future consumer behavior. This will likely force the companies to modify their business model. It may even topple them from their dominant place in the field. Many other companies that specialize in consumer behavior analysis or the (re)sale of this proprietary data could take major financial hits as well.

Needless to say, the companies affected by this legislation will not take the change lying down. Furthermore, as more states adopt similar laws congress will face increasing pressure to preempt them with a federal law that will standardize data privacy rights so that internet service providers aren’t swamped trying to comply with several different requirements. Don’t expect a federal law with any teeth to pass in the current political environment, however. There may be hope for something substantial in 2021, depending on the outcome of this year’s election, so if you are concerned about data privacy and aren’t already motivated to get to the polls this year, find out the positions of potential candidates for the house, senate and president and vote accordingly.

In any event, unless you happen to live in California, you may not be able to manage data collected about you any better this coming year than in the past, depending on what internet services you use. Some consultants are already telling internet service provider companies not to guarantee any enhanced data privacy protections to users who are not residents of California. Otherwise, they are likely to face unnecessary lawsuits for violation of the terms of service from people who live outside of California. That doesn’t mean they customize their site code; it just means that their terms of service specify the enhanced privacy protections only apply to residents of California and if you try to use those protections they will ignore your requests.

Absent the type of legal changes that would force major internet service providers into a different economic model that did not depend on exploiting our online behavior to make it easier for others to manipulate us, how can you protect yourself from Facebook, Google, etc? The most effective method is to stop using their platforms, and the rest of this series will provide you with several ways to do just that.

Since this series focuses on Facebook’s abuses, I will concentrate on ways to replace the Facebook experience. What to do about Google, Twitter, Bing, Youtube, etc. will have to wait. First, I assume you still want to have some kind of presence online. Is there any way to replicate the features of Facebook you like while avoiding the drawbacks? People’s reasons for being on Facebook differ, of course, and alternatives may meet some people’s needs and not others. In general though the short answer is “Not easily.”

For that reason I intend to present a staged series of alternatives, starting in this post with those that involve the least effort and most closely resemble Facebook. The closest Facebook competitors I can find that offer the type of privacy and absence of behind-your-back personal data manipulation practiced by Facebook are Diaspora pods, MeWe, Minds, and Sociall.io, arranged in alphbetical order. The major drawback to these alternative platforms is that none of your Facebook friends probably has an account on any of them. Since these are social networking sites, no account means no privileged access, means even if you get your friends to your page on one of these alternate platforms, they won’t be able to see it unless you make it available to the general public. Of course you are already limiting who gets to see what you post on Facebook, right? Right … ? (Face palm!) How about if we wait while you take care of that ….

All good now? Let’s say you create an account on one of these platforms and just as on Facebook you create rules to limit access to your posts. The only way your Facebook friends will get to see your posts is if they create an account and you let that account into one of your privileged access groups, whether it’s called “friend,” “contact,” etc. Now you have to convince your Facebook friends to create and use that account. They don’t have to move their Facebook presence onto the other platform, but they do have to maintain that account and log in to it to see your posts. As long as your friends maintain their pages on Facebook you will all have to split time between the two platforms. Some people won’t stand for the inconvenience, friend or not.

Moving to an alternate social networking platform would work best if an entire group of people who wanted to keep in touch did it together, or if you, as the group leader/inspiration/provocateur, convinced the bulk of the group to migrate over. And the move is not just a matter of following the leader’s pages but each member of the group moving their Facebook presence to the other platform. That way the entire group can abandon Facebook, at least as a means for interacting with the other members of the group.

Still considering this option? Here’s a quick, beginner-level review of the platforms mentioned above. Diaspora is not really a social networking platform. It’s a software suite used to create social networking “pods.” A “pod” is a group of people who share some common interest or connection that motivates them to form an online group so they can share information with each other. Members of the “pod” can communicate with one another online because someone with technical skill has installed the Diaspora software and used it to create a social networking platform on one or more physical or virtual computers accessible to members of the “pod”. There are many, many existing Diaspora “pods.” Whether you and your Facebook friends would find any of them to be a suitable online home is anyone’s guess. If not, you would need to create a new “pod,” and there is the major drawback; you need someone with technical skill to create and maintain the “pod.” No, I won’t do it for you, unless you and your Friends all commit to pay for it. If you don’t want to investigate costs yourself, wait for some of the following posts, where I will address costs.

MeWe is purpose-built as a Facebook replacement platform. Its major selling point is that it intentionally eschews doing anything with data about you except using it to improve its own services. No sales of your behavioral data to third parties, no behind-your-back research on what makes you tick, no targeted advertising. The site has been around for about 3 years and is attracting more users, but it is still dwarfed by Facebook, and many of the new users of the site were kicked off Facebook for promoting racism, violence, conspiracy theories, or terrorism. Fortunately, you can quite easily isolate yourself from their absurdities. MeWe doesn’t push unrequested material into your feeds and doesn’t run algorithms against the information for which you do request access to proactively feed you other information their “algorithms” say you might be interested in. (I put “algorithms” in quotes because many of us suspect we get selected to receive some of the posts showing up in our Facebook news feeds because someone paid Facebook big bucks, not because Facebook’s algorithms actually singled us out as interested parties.)

Minds and Sociall.io are also meant to be Facebook replacements, but with a twist. Both of these social networking platforms use a technology called “blockchain.” In Sociall.io’s case, the “blockchain” technology is used to eliminate the need for a centralized server/server farm to host the platform. Instead, the entire social network community’s activities are processed distributively by all the computers of the members. This is no place to go into the details of how “blockchain” works, except to voice one fundamental objection to the entire project. The computers participating in a blockchain consume massive amounts of energy due to the cryptographic demands of the technology. The amount of energy consumed grows exponentially as the blockchain increases in size. All that computing power would be put to better use trying to solve more critical problems.

Minds uses blockchain for the limited purpose of generating crypto-currency. Why? The founders of Minds wanted to develop a business model that rewards users. As I pointed out in my earlier post, Facebook extracts valuable information from your online behavior and sells it, but gives you no cut. Minds also gets value from your online behavior, but they pay you for it. That’s where the crypto-currency comes in. Rather than sending you a check in the mail, they deposit crypto-currency in your online account and let you use that crypto-currency to “buy” advanced features or exclusive content. They are working on integrating their crypto-currency with other existing crypto-currencies, such as Bitcoin. Someday the crypto-currency from Minds may be convertible to dollars. This positive feature of the Minds platform is offset by the fact that crypto-currencies are a form of “blockchain” and are subject to the same criticism regarding wasteful energy use. My advice? Don’t go there.

If none of these options appeal to you, wait for my following posts where I offer more alternatives.

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Why I won’t post on Facebook, part 2

A few years ago Erika invited a horse trainer to teach her how to train our horses to be more cooperative. I witnessed some of his training sessions and learned enough to try using the same techniques on our horses afterwards. I won’t bore you with all the details, but much of what we learned is directly relevant to Facebook’s relation to its users.

Our trainer pointed out that the goal of training is to get the horse to do things that benefit us, despite the fact that the horse has no natural inclination to do these things because they would be of no benefit to a horse in its ancestral environment. He pointed out how we can use the horse’s natural inclinations to teach it to do things that we want it to do. For example, we learned how to position ourselves in a circular arena in such a way that the horse would continuously trot around the inside edge of the arena to avoid having us in a location that made it nervous, and then reposition ourselves in such a way that the horse would stop or fluidly reverse course and trot in the opposite direction. Developing this trotting behavior benefitted us because Philip would be competing in horse events requiring sustained arena trotting. It just so happens that the exercise also benefitted the horse.

When it comes to Facebook, and by extension much more of the online world, we users are in the position of a horse. Most of the websites that most of us visit are designed at least partly to get us to do things that benefit the owners of the website, some of which we would otherwise not be inclined to do. Shoshana Zuboff’s book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, is again the best thorough examination of how the web became like this. You can find brief introductions to her work at many places on the web, including here.

But the critical issue with Facebook — and most other websites or platforms that offer you internet services for “free” — is not just that the company is trying to manipulate you, but also that you must be kept ignorant of what is happening to you. We are all very familiar with some of the manipulative methods used by older forms of media, such as pictures of rugged cowboys smoking cigarettes while riding their horses on the range or shapely young women in bikinis draped over cars. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the implicit message being sent. These forms of influence may be crass and tasteless, but most of us don’t regard them as a threat because we can tell we are being manipulated, even if in the end we do what the advertisers want. Likewise, few of us are likely to be horrified by news sites loaded with articles with headlines like, “Newly-released Video May Show Trump Propositioning Mrs. Putin,” because we have been seeing that kind of clickbait in grocery store check-out lines for decades.

What if you are no more aware of how you are being manipulated by Facebook than my horse was when I got it to continue trotting in a circle? What if cues you are receiving in the design, layout, graphics, workflow, and interactions with Facebook and its other users are meant to provoke behaviors that you would never in your wildest dreams imagine could be stimulated by those cues. Well, there is no what if. It happens online all the time. For comparison, you can reference the use of color and other atmospheric modifications in restaurants to stimulate hunger in the patrons so they will order more food. The difference in online platforms like Facebook is that they are also collecting volumes of data on your behavior and using that data to customize your online environment, in expectation that you will be motivated to do things like buy items advertised on the site, click on links that take you to places on the web favored by advertisers, or do things in your real life that will increase your exposure to products favored by advertisers.

Google had discovered the power of using data culled from users of its websites to manipulate their behavior before Facebook even existed. I say this at least partly to stop you from speculating that I have some personal grudge with Facebook, but also because lessening exposure to Facebook doesn’t solve the problem. It happens across the web now. And it is fundamentally immoral, and should be illegal.

If that strikes you as an extreme reaction, maybe you need to consider in more detail how this works. Let’s say that you are a consultant with Cambridge Analytica, to take just one known example, and using data obtained from Facebook you determine that there is a class of potential voters with the following online behavioral characteristics: 1.) when perusing their timeline, they are almost guaranteed to like or comment on any post from friends more recent than 2 days ago, and almost guaranteed not to view any posts older than that, 2.) when commenting, they are almost guaranteed to post no more than 2 sentences and use an emoji or accompanying image over 60% of the time when commenting, 3.) tend to browse their “People You May Know” list at least once per week, and 4.) when browsing that list are almost guaranteed to a.) make a friend request to at least one person in the list with whom they already have 2 or mutual friends and b.) have a large enough list to span at least 3 pages and browse through at least the first 2 pages. Furthermore, you learn that this class of users are 63% more likely to get to a polling place and vote for the candidate Cambridge Analytica wants to promote if for at least two months before the election they are shown a set of advertisements and links to online content that promote anti-bacterial lotions and sprays or female country-music artists placed on their Facebook timelines between 5:00-6:30 AM or 9:45 -11:00 PM. Furthermore, these promotions must occur in combination with other online content attacking Nancy Pelosi, the Federal Reserve Board, or the Walt Disney Company and placed in such a way that the targeted users are likely to click on at least 75% of the content and links provided, based on their color preferences, mouse-moving habits, and instant reactions to specific topics and themes.

Even this example is too generic. For you personally, they also know that you have a persistent habit of over-clicking (for example, clicking on a link more than is necessary to follow it), are more likely to click on links highlighted in dark purple than other dark colors, and spend on average less than 2 minutes away from Facebook after clicking on a link before returning and performing further actions on Facebook. They already have learned from latitudinal studies of people exhibiting this combination of behaviors how to tailor the presentation of the content mentioned in the previous paragraph to increase the odds of you voting for their desired candidate. All they need now is sufficient resources to make enough changes to the appearance of your timeline to get the results they desire. After all, this is what they are paying Facebook for, and Facebook without that money wouldn’t exist.

In my case, at least, I have nowhere near the level of self-awareness necessary to recognize that these types of subtle clues could be manipulating my behavior. In fact, it is entirely possible that at least some groups with access to Facebook data were attempting to manipulate me to get off Facebook! Certainly they wouldn’t tell Facebook that’s what they were using the data they paid for to do, but I can imagine certain right-wing groups with that data considering me a lost cause and wanting to limit the exposure of my ideas on the Facebook platform, placing content on my timeline to chase me off the platform. No doubt Facebook would have means to catch and limit this type of customer behavior. Again, they are still in business.

Regardless, why should I expose myself to an environment where I am in effect a lab rat? Where I participate in a game in which not only do I not know the goal or the rules but I don’t even know what game is being played? If you have a good answer to this question you are welcome to post a comment. It had better be a very good answer if you want it to change my mind about Facebook.