S05E09: Your privacy isn't my privacy

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Hello & welcome to the influx of new readers this week. I'm curious — where did you stumble upon this newsletter? Why don't you hit reply & say hi! 👋

I'm sending this a day earlier than usual. This is a light week, and a short one in Berlin, too: As of 2018, International Women's Day is a public holiday in Berlin. Hooray on so many levels!

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Personal updates

Since my fellowship at the Mozilla Foundation wrapped up, I was invited to a small debrief and feedback group conversation the other day: What worked, what could be improved for the next five years of fellows, that kind of thing. It's good and helpful to have these conversations while memories are still fresh.

Most of it is what you'd expect: Some optimization here, some new idea there. One of the question, though, kind of hit me like a brick: What did you have to give up to join this fellowship, and was it worth it for you? (I'm paraphrasing.)

(Just for the protocol, the answer for me is "the risk was to have to start over the company I've been building for 5 years" — which was a big and real risk — and "yes".)

But the thing that jogged my brain the way it did was that the other fellows in the room said they had been in transition phases more or less, when starting the fellowship. I had not been in such a phase, quite the opposite. I had been in a pretty steady mode with the intention to go back to the pretty much straight-up commercial consulting work I'd done before.

During the course of the fellowship, a kernel of a need to shift gears, to re-focus, started growing. (See "transition phases" in S05E01 of this newsletter, a couple of months back.) I came into the fellowship knowing where I was and where I wanted to be, and by the time I left I had entered some kind of transition phase. Everybody is on their own journey and all that, but it hadn't occurred to me that I might be on a fully inverted roadmap than my fellow fellows. TIL… something!

In related news, are you part of an alumni network that works particularly well? I'm looking for examples of what works, and why... 🙏

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Zuck's privacy isn't my privacy

Zuckerberg went on a long, rambling thing about Facebook's new privacy focus. In it, he lays out how FB is now all about private and secure communications. And hey, if FB starts end-to-end encryption, power to them; but credibility of truly protecting (or even just respecting a baseline of) privacy is something that this organization has zero credibility with.

And yet, here's an interesting quote near the end:

"Doing this means taking positions on some of the most important issues facing the future of the internet. As a society, we have an opportunity to set out where we stand, to decide how we value private communications, and who gets to decide how long and where data should be stored."

The funny thing is, I agree 100% with these words. However, it's also painfully clear that Zuck means something entirely different than I (want to) read into it.

The idea of FB Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram being merged into one giant, messy blob of a communications backend even more than now is a very special kind of nightmare. I have a hard time even coming up with a metaphor for the kind of unhealthy it is to have one company control so much communications infrastructure.

So why don't we take Zuck by his word, and just take FB out of the equation completely? After all, we have an opportunity to set out where we stand, to decide how we value private communications, and who gets to decide how long and where data should be stored.

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Are algorithms keeping the prices up artificially?

Now this is an interesting angle to algorithmic pricing: It seems that pricing algorithms are colluding to keep prices high. It may not be on purpose, but hey, unintended consequences are still consequences. Also, it's not super surprising that analytics tool built to optimize profit end up... optimizing profit. 

But still, it brings me back to wondering why we can't have individual shopping algorithms that do the haggling for me? If they have algos doing their bidding, why do I still have to do the heavy lifting myself? As users, we're out-gunned pretty badly in this arena after all. So, algorithmic e-commerce sousveillance, anyone?

(I bet that it's a matter of time, if not already a reality, that those exist in super rich circles. Let the arms race begin.)

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More algo overlords

The Guardian reports that China now bans 23 million from buying travel tickets as part of their social credit system. And so it begins. Make no mistake: Slightly different flavors of this, maybe less bluntly named (or translated?), will find their ways into Western democracies, too. Predictive policing and insurance pricing based on big data are but first forays into this space.

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Miscellanea

Germany's veeeery slow good-bye to coal. Germany is moving away from coal at glacial slowness, aiming at being coal free by 2038. I'd be positively surprised if this 20 year horizon wasn't connected to retirement ages of the bulk of current coal miners, which in some states in Germany probably mean a lot of votes. 20 years? Come on, this is ridiculous.

Building the Universal Quantum Computer (or not). A few installments ago I linked to an excellent Twitter thread by Katia Moskvitch about the state of universal quantum computing. Moskvitch just wrote up her findings in an equally excellent WIRED article. (Contrast this also with the European Commission's goal to see the world's first universal quantum computer built in Europe.)

This cam knows you'll steal, maybe. Meet the startup whose image recognition cameras identify supposedly identify who will attempt to shoplift. Pre-crime algorithms without accountability, transparency or oversight? What could possibly go wrong.

The Net balkanizes further. Russia is intent on also controlling the Net, China-style. It seems to be about physical more than digital control, according to Andrei Soldatov, author of The Red Web: "It’s about being able to cut off certain types of traffic in certain areas during times of civil unrest." Yuck.

Cars no more? Unlikely, but Regine Günther, Berlin's senator for Environment, Transport and Climate Protection, made a bit of a splash (DE) when she said that "we want that people get rid of their car". Turns out (and I wasn't even aware!) that Berlin just published a new mobility concept (DE) that aims to get a grip on urban transportation by de-emphasizing cars in favor of public transport, bikes, pedestrians, etc. I won't hold my breath just yet, but it sounds like an ace initiative.

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If you'd like to work with me in the upcoming months, I have very limited availability, so let's have a chat!

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I wish you an excellent weekend.

Yours truly,
Peter

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Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores the impact of emerging technologies — like Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence. He is the founder of The Waving Cat, a boutique research, strategy & foresight company. He co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that fosters the creation of a responsible Internet of Things. In 2018, Peter is a Mozilla Fellow. He tweets at @peterbihr. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.

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Pictures: Unsplash (Annie Spratt); Public Domain.