Connection Problem S03E10: Privacy, Pleats & Public Infrastructure

Sitrep: Planning for the year is in full swing. By the end off the week I'll be off on the first work trip to San Francisco this year for a work week with Mozilla. For me, the first trip, more than anything else, always feels like I'm truly kicking off the work year.

The thread that ties all of this week's reads together might best be described as "making infrastructure work for the public". We'll run the whole gamut from urban planning to trustworthy media to consumer data protection.

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Capacity planning
First a note about my own work. As mentioned before, this year's capacity is going to be slightly reduced because we have a toddler at home and I don't want to be Absent Dad. This slightly reduced capacity is almost accounted for (pleasant but unheard of, in January!). That's of course super nice. That said, I prefer to be working on a few things in parallel—it truly helps unlock whole new potential—and am happy to take on a couple of smaller things in addition to what's already planned. So if you're considering something for Q1 or Q2, now's the time to have a chat! (Just hit reply.)

Now let's go, shall we?

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WTF is GDPR?

TechCrunch's Natasha Lomas has a bit of a top-level explainer of GDPR, Europe's General Data Protection Regulation that goes into effect in May this year. It's being widely lauded in Europe (except by the usual suspects, like ad-land), and been unsurprisingly criticized in Silicon Valley as disruptive regulation. (See what I did there?)

So it came as a pleasant surprise to me that TechCrunch of all places finds GDPR to be a net positive:

• "the EC’s theory is that consumer trust is essential to fostering growth in the digital economy. And it thinks trust can be won by giving users of digital services more information and greater control over how their data is used. Which is — frankly speaking — a pretty refreshing idea when you consider the clandestine data brokering that pervades the tech industry. Mass surveillance isn’t just something governments do."
• "Ultimately, it may be easier (and less risky) for businesses to treat GDPR as the new ‘gold standard’ for how they handle all personal data, regardless of where it comes from."
• "GDPR inflating the financial risks around handling personal data should naturally drive up standards — because privacy laws are suddenly a whole lot more costly to ignore."

This is pretty ace. It also reminds me of a conversation I had the other day with a friend who is in the business of making apps that use a fair amount of machine learning: Something I'd have expected to collect a lot of user data from beginning to end. When we chatted about GDPR and I asked if he's afraid of what it might do to his business. His response (I'm paraphrasing): "We treat user data as a liability; we collect practically nothing and keep nothing". What a damn refreshing take! Straight out of the privacy by design playbook. And shows that you can very well build a solid business—even a digital/data driven one—without being a data creep. I expect and hope we'll see a lot more of this.

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Image from page 508 of "American homes and gardens" (1905). Public commons.

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Facebook ranks media outlets by trust

Bow here's a fun thing to ponder: Facebook will now ask users to rank news organizations they trust [Washington Post]

In an environment in which the trustworthiness of journalism is systematically undermined by the forces that thrive on chaos and deception, it makes total sense to rank news sources by trustworthiness. In a very disappointing (but rather unsurprising) announcement, Facebook made it clear that they will try to crowdsource that ranking. Now of all the options on the table, this might easily be the worst to solve this issue (and inversely, the best approach to turn it up to 11). After all, we know that we see more-or-less coordinated efforts to undermine journalism and trust in established media, and this plays out across certain media platforms and social media bots (both the machine and the human kind of bots). In other words, this plays right into the dynamic of those trying to undermine, rather than those trying to stabilize, journalism and trustworthy media as the basis of democratic debate.

Look, it's no secret that I fall on the more liberal/democratic side of the spectrum. But my opinion on this isn't personal, it's a professional assessment as someone who studied and majored in media studies: Some journalistic outlets are inherently more trustworthy than others because they follow certain processes. Others (aka "bad actors") try to hide behind a similar language but do not follow the same processes, and so they're not trustworthy. It shouldn't (and in fact, doesn't) matter which of these you personally like or trust or prefer: A New York Times with their investigative teams and code of conduct and ethics boards and whatnot are better media than Fox, which is a hodgepodge mix of opinion and reporting. CNN is politically pretty much in the middle of the road and has higher credibility than, say, your average clickbait site. It's not rocket science.

Here's Washington Post quoting Zuckerberg:

"The hard question we've struggled with is how to decide what news sources are broadly trusted," Zuckerberg wrote. "We could try to make that decision ourselves, but that's not something we're comfortable with. We considered asking outside experts, which would take the decision out of our hands but would likely not solve the objectivity problem. Or we could ask you -- the community -- and have your feedback determine the ranking."

Now, letting users (which in the age of digital campaigns, click farms and bot networks is a rather relative term) rank news outlets will simply highlight established divisions. That's interesting for research but will do absolutely nothing to increase the trustworthiness of "news served". In fact I wouldn't be surprised if we saw 4chan right up there at the top of this "user"-generated list, because that's a crowd that knows how to manipulate a good crowdsourcing if ever there was one.

This seems to be a move to get Facebook out of regulatory hot water, but certainly not to fix anything. It's essentiall yZuck saying "Let's not discuss politics over dinner, please?" Two thumbs down, Facebook.

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Urban planning in the age of corporations & informality

Two pieces that clicked just to nicely side by side:

In Embracing the Paradox of Planning for Informality, Next City shares how we can elevate—rather than erase—the strong qualities of community-built neighborhoods, even if they're considered slums. Finding the balance between these strengths on one side, and the neglect, insecurity, and other weaknesses on the other, is a tricky path no doubt. But it seems worth giving it a serious try.

The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, reports how To Woo Amazon, Cities Tackle Everything From Traffic to Housing. In a somewhat (for me) unexpected plot twist, cities across the US seem to demonstrate that they are able to address their worst problems that they had been struggling with for years if not decades—from affordable housing to public transport to legislative gridlock. How come? They're all competing for Amazon's second HQ which would bring up to 50.000 jobs and 5 billion dollars of investment over the next 20 years. So they're all scrambling to get their shit together after, well, apparently not getting their shit together for decades. This is absurd, delightful, terrifying. I mean, good it appears possible to get stuff done. But my god, only when a tech company moves their staff onsite? Come on!

This makes me wonder if we can a) make sure that all these Amazon Applicant Cities can get their houses in order, and b) if so, can we throw Berlin into that race just for kicks so we can get a functional airport. Or functional schools. Or functional public housing.

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Newsletter of the week: If you pleats by Melvin Backman

I like to keep my reading diverse and allow for serendipity. It is in this very sense that I'm highly recommending this newsletter that otherwise doesn't fit in at all with the topics I usually deal with: If You Pleats by Melvin Backman, described as "Thoughts on clothes and other things."

Melvin Backman is a writer, & journalist at the New Yorker (among other outlets) who writes about fashion and style in ways and framing that I find so fresh it's become a Saturday morning ritual for me to skim his newsletter (it's sent out Friday US time)—and I've never come away without at least following some of his links or saving them for later. The stories he shares seem unconnected at first, but clearly he finds a connection; it just works.

To give you just an example, the most recent installment features a story about the narrator's Chinese family and its struggles to fit into its suburban environs; a meditation on two things that are way more alike than they're given credit for (fashion & coding); and a scathing rant on a recent Mar-a-Lago celebration and the emotional and moral toll this presidency has been taking, "not to mention the collective moral abdication all the people who, like the evening's band, wrapped themselves and their craven priorities in the flag in order to justify a payday, no matter its toll."

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If you think this might be of interest to a colleague of friend, please feel free to forward this email or point them to tinyletter.com/pbihr. Thank you!

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I wish you the best start to the week.

Yours sincerely,

Peter