Connection Problem S03E20: Cities, fish & algo tags
Sitrep: It's the Easter weekend, which means a public holiday and a long weekend. (Fun fact: In parts of DE, Good Friday also means tanzverbot, or a dancing ban. Is this enforced elsewhere, too?) In the meantime, the little one's playing on his rug in the next room. It's sunny outside, and mild. Spotify plays Chris Barber. Spring has finally arrived.
Today marks 20 consecutive newsletters in this season so far. A small anniversary! You might notice I've been playing with formatting. Don't over-interpret it: It's just me playing with workflows. I write these newsletters often, so I need the workflows to be quick. Sometimes that means I get formatting wrong, or something might look a little wonky because I experimented with something. Also, the mostly public domain images are interesting and it's a lot of fun poking around in the historical archives: "People who liked this image might also like _________!"
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As always, a shout out to tinyletter.com/pbihr or a forward is appreciated!
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PERSONAL UPDATES
Mozilla Fellow / IoT Trustmark
I'm happy to share that Mozilla invited me to join as a Mozilla Fellow for a year, to develop a trustmark for IoT under the ThingsCon umbrella. There will be capital-A Announcements I'm sure, but in the spirit of transparency we wanted to share this as quickly as possible, so here's a brief blog post over on thingscon.com. Also in the spirit of transparency, the usual full disclosure: My partner works for Mozilla.
As many of you are surely aware, I've been doing a lot of work on trustmarks over the last year or so, including some for Mozilla and less-than-I-intended-but-at-least-some with the London-based #iotmark group initiated by my friend Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino. So to put this all into action will be good and interesting. I recently wrote up some first thoughts on the approach for the trustmark, but in the next few weeks I'll be able to share a lot more and then to start gathering more feedback. As of today my thinking says: pledge-based, decentralized and as open as possible, built around transparency more than anything.
ThingsCon Salons
In case you're either in Berlin or Antwerp, I'll be hosting a ThingsCon Salon Berlin on April 4th and MCing one in Antwerp on May 8th (thanks, Dries, for the invite!). Come say hi!
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GDPR: Mo data mo problems
GDPR: I joked on Twitter that GDPR in a sentence can be summed up as mo data mo problems. But I've also been asking a lot of folks from various industries how they think they'll be impacted by GDPR. And the surprising (or not?) result is that those organizations that have solid data governance regimes in place are very relaxed about this, and those who have been sloppy are panicking.
Image: Poster by Dries de Roeck
Interestingly this applies across all kinds of industries: I've heard credibly from someone in machine learning that they've always been careful about what data to capture and what to avoid (and employing best practices like working with hashes, etc. etc.) and so they're pretty much compliant as is. The same goes for a large company that works with user data in marketing: They were positively happy to see GDPR come into effect as it'll shake out the less savory actors in the market and effectively will boost their business.
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Expat city
Strolling through Berlin's Kreuzberg and Neukölln districts on this sunny, mild spring holiday, I was reminded of just how much of this city is happening through expats and immigrants. (The distinction always struck me as somewhat odd—is it a question of privilege and choice, of socio-economic status, of ethnicity or nationality?) This city would be nothing without both. Or if not nothing, then certainly nothing interesting.
And while I'm personally also not a fan of big groups of drunk party tourists (of which these neighborhoods get more of their fair share), I say welcome & thank you to all the folks coming here to build their lives, or just spend some time, and add some flavor to the city. FWIW, I can't believe this is even worth mentioning. But after conservative "young hopeful" CDU populist and now health minister Jens Spahn recently came out against The Other, in this case coffeeshops where the barista might speak English and not German, and after even-more-hardcore-conservative CSU politician Horst Seehofer took over the ministry of the interior and—as of this goverment—minstry of heimat, it seems appropriate to state the obvious, and welcome people here. Because these two certainly won't. So fuck 'em.
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Scaredrones
Scarecrows, but for drones. Gizmodo has a piece on some Amazon drone patent. The article is pure Gizmodo; it doesn't matter. I just found the illustration pretty hilarious. After all, patent drawings are a true artform in and of themselves.
Image: Amazon
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Bikesharing, China, No Business Model
We had the absolutely fantastic opportunity to witness the full boom-and-bust cycle for rental bikes in China during the trips to Shenzhen and Shanghai over the last year or two. When we went first to Shenzhen, the rental bikes had just started to propagate through the city; by the second time they were ubiquitous-bordering-on-a-pest. We had meetings with smart bike lock manufacturers and designers of some of these services. We even made a fun video about it.
I'm not sure if I'd be allowed to use one of the images there, but I highly recommend checking out this Quartz piece because it's interesting but also OMG THE PHOTOS over there are so worth it:
Bike sharing in China has been a roller coaster of boom and bust. While several services have caught on with consumers, the bubble has been marked with outpaced growth and rampant mismanagement. Tangled piles of unused bikes with no where to go have been a familiar site on streets of major Chinese cities. Bluegogo, once the third largest service, shut down a few months ago and was acquired by China’s leading ride hailing company Didi, which also runs a bike sharing service.
These images are fantastic. They are also, alas, not the least bit surprising: In our meetings and conversations around the bike sharing boom, the numbers we were told simply didn't add up. There was no sustainable business models. The bikes were paid for through venture capital and through sign-up deposits (roughly two user signup deposits would pay for one bike), but they were deposits. It was clear that at least some of the actors weren't really operating on the mental model that this would have to be paid out again, that it was just a loan from the user. The rental rates were too low to support any business sustainably, let alone a hardware business. So yes—this was exciting and exhilarating. We'll also see many more photos just like these until the market is consolidated on one or two operators who either raise the rates, or subsidize this for some other purpose, or both.
Service announcement: Our buddies over at ThingsCon Amsterdam are considering a guided trip to Shenzhen this fall. If you want to experience this hardware ecosystem first hand, let them know!
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Social Credit / Social Bankruptcy
Adam Greenfield writes on The Atlantic on China's Social Credit score:
"This end-to-end grid of social control is still in its prototype stages, but three things are already becoming clear: First, where it has actually been deployed, it has teeth. Second, it has profound implications for the texture of urban life. And finally, there’s nothing so distinctly Chinese about it that it couldn’t be rolled out anywhere else the right conditions obtain. The advent of social credit portends changes both dramatic and consequential for life in cities everywhere—including the one you might call home."
Yes, turnkey solutions everywhere are too easily sold to administrations around the globe. The companies and governments behind them change (and implement different philosophies and agendas) but the lure of reducing complex social systems into simple numbers is strong.
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Don't scare me like that, colonizer!
Yes, I finally got around to watching Black Panther. Not an easy feat with a company and a baby; thanks to M for making it possible for me to sneak out for just long enough. Lots in there, and a really fun movie to watch, too.
In somewhat related notes of an overturning of an old and outdated world order, we'll see a first Chinese car to be built in Europe: Volvo (Chinese-owned these days) will be building one of their cars in Belgium. (Also, tbh I was ignorant of the fact that any cars were built in Belgium.)
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Facebook, continued
In the never-ending story that is Facebook breaches user trust, now this: Facebook Has Been Collecting Android Users' Cell Phone Data For Years
"Facebook acknowledged Sunday that for years it has been collecting the call and text history of users who own Android phones."
Another week, another piece of evidence that FB can't be trusted with data, or rather: can't be trusted, period. As is so often the case, there's not much to gain by looking at each individual breach of trust; they're systemic. The culture there is rotten to the core, and just like we only see the bloom of mold, the rot goes much deeper. I'd say #deletefacebook, but I've already suspended the account.
Eyes on the ball!
Also, as I pointed out on Twitter, I think it's important not to lose focus in the whole Facebook/Cambridge Analytica/election meddling scandal:
Remember, the question isn't: Did Facebook influence an election? The questions are:
- Did Facebook neglect to protect user data?
- Did any person or persons now inside the government collude with a foreign power trying to meddle in an election?
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Tim Cook: Regulate that privacy
Apple has been (seemingly?) pretty good about privacy. Most likely, I believe, because they're terrible at services and much better with hardware, so it's easier strategically. But it doesn't matter, they appear to be good for some aspects of privacy and data protection. I just wanted to get that out of the way, but the real money quote is this line, The Wall Street Journal quoting Tim Cook:
He said he is generally averse to regulation, “however, I think we're beyond that.
I think we're beyond that. Just let that sink in for a second. I think he's absolutely right! But to hear it put like that, that's not too shabby.
Also, he goes on to refer to meaningful consent (not using the word itself):
“Everyone should know what they’re giving up, not only the specific data point but the whole line people can draw: When I know this-plus-this-plus-this-plus-this, I can infer a whole bunch of different things,” Mr. Cook said. “That can be abused.”
Yes, the line people can draw by connecting and combining data sets. More accurately, the web of lines algorithms can presumably draw, now or in the near future—which is going to be dense.
And lastly, just because it made me laugh out loud, this:
When asked what he would do if he were Facebook’s chief, Mr. Cook replied: “I wouldn’t be in this situation.”
Zing. Well done, sir.
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Accountable algorithms
NiemanLab: Holding algorithms (and the people behind them) accountable is still tricky, but doable. Holding algorithms accountable is tricky first and foremost not because they're too hard to interrogate (although they can be) but because of deliberate intransparency as the example from Palantir shows. Also (highlights mine):
He also helps maintains the site algorithmtips.org as a resource for journalists parsing potentially newsworthy algorithms in the U.S. He advised interested journalists to be aware of missing information when governments are reluctant to share, to have an expectation of what an algorithm is supposed to do, and to know that it’s never one-and-done since algorithms can always be tweaked. And remember, it’s usually humans that are doing the tweaking. “As reporters, we really need to push to hold people accountable. Don’t let corporations say ‘it was the algorithm,'” Diakopoulos said. “You need to push on that more and find out where the people are in this system.”
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LIFE, annotated
LIFE Tags organizes over 4 million images from the LIFE magazine archives into an interactive encyclopedia using machine learning. This is a spectacular use of machine learning. Please run this on all public domain image archives everywhere. Like right now. What are you even waiting for? (Deeplink to the search for "fishmonger", because why not.)
This image isn't from LIFE. It's a public domain image from page 211 of "Breeder and sportsman" (1882). How awesome is that.
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Yours truly,
Peter
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