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Posts Tagged ‘Google’

On Data and Disclosure

December 15th, 2009
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I like to think about ways to customize my world, and the digital world writ large, in ways that support and help us explore our unique selves. It is in our very diversity that individual strengths can play out to become our personal best, to help each other grow, and create fertile new worlds.

However, under the guise of “increased security,” we are increasingly surrounded by tools and technologies that minimize and standardize us, including video surveillance and data storage and analysis. About that last link to Google, CEO Eric Schmidt recently said “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

This indiscriminate personal data hoarding is both an individual and a societal problem. Schmidt’s argument that we shouldn’t have anything to hide is specious (not to mention a double standard: it doesn’t apply to Schmidt). In a 2007 paper called ‘I’ve Got Nothing to Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy, George Washington University Law School’s Daniel J. Solove convincingly critiques that argument. Indeed we have many things to hide, like our passwords and credit card numbers, certain personal habits and preferences, things that contribute to human dignity and respect. As noted security expert Bruce Schneier writes in his essay The Eternal Value of Privacy, “Too many wrongly characterize the debate as “security versus privacy.” The real choice is liberty versus control.”

Ironically, Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly host a blog called The Quantified Self where they report about people exploring ways to keep track of themselves. It’s a significant difference between curiosity, personal need, and voluntary disclosure that’s driving data sets, and corporate ventures like Facebook (nod to jerking you around again with recent privacy policy changes), Google (Schneier’s response to Schmidt’s quote above), and damned near every corporate site you make an account with and that tracks your every move these days.

I’m looking for examples of sites that encourage liberty and demonstrate some respect for its users/clients. I will be reporting on what I find. If you have suggestions, I welcome them.

Coaching moment: Here’s a little thought exercise. Think about a typical day in your life.

What kind of things do you do in private? These might be taking a shower, brushing your teeth, thinking about the day. Some things might be really private as in just you by yourself, and other things may be private in some context, like thinking about your day out loud with your spouse or partner. Once you get a good list, which of those things would make you uncomfortable if they were made public in some way?

Now think of the kind of things you do in public, like driving to work or the store, walking around, having a conversation over lunch. Think about stories that might be told about you from the perspective of not knowing what you were really doing. You might take clues from signs that you walk by, or maybe other people (posture, groupings, facial expressions). Can you think of any stories that are not only wrong but might hurt you?

Finally, think about your online tools. Have you actually looked at the Terms of Service or Privacy Policies that you’re agreeing to? If you knew they were disrespectful to you or even abusive of your personal self and liberty, would you stop using them? Since the answer is “probably not,” what would you suggest these companies change?

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Future Imperfect

May 15th, 2009
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This post is going all geeky on you. There’s a mission and a method to my madness, and I mean madness in the most forward thinking way. After all, if we don’t have a vision or a dream, what makes up the color in our future?

First up is Fred Wilson’s presentation from a talk that he gave at Google. Note that even though these are just the slides, Wilson gives you a clear idea that there’s something disruptive going on.

Second up is a report from JD Lasica and the Aspen Institute entitled Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing (PDF, purchase). Lasica points out that the disruption is all about identity, personal empowerment, and benefits to society and commerce all around. From his report:

Excerpt: Why the Cloud Matters

According to Newsweek: “At the end of August [2008], as Hurricane Gustav threatened the coast of Texas, the Obama campaign called the Red Cross to say it would be routing donations to it via the Red Cross home page. Get your servers ready—our guys can be pretty nuts, Team Obama said. Sure, sure, whatever, the Red Cross responded. We’ve been through 9/11, Katrina, we can handle it. The surge of Obama dollars crashed the Red Cross website in less than 15 minutes.”

The New York-based tech start-up Animoto, which lets users create professional-quality, MTV-style videos using their own images and licensed music, was averaging 5,000 users a day until it suddenly received a burst of new users who discovered it through Facebook. Its traffic surged to 750,000 visitors over three days. The number of servers Animoto was running on jumped from 50 to 3,500 during that span of time. “It was just numbers we never imagined we would ever see,” chief technology officer Stevie Clifton told a Seattle newspaper. “It was fun and scary and pretty cool.” Thanks to AmazonWeb Services, Animoto’s servers did not crash, because Animoto does not have any servers. It outsources its computing power to Amazon.comand pays only for what it uses. The ten-employee company is now expanding. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos touts Animoto as the poster company for cloud computing.

The tales of the Red Cross and Animoto neatly sum up the contrast between the former economy and the emerging cloud economy. If the Internet economy is an apt descriptor of the changes taking place around us today, then the term cloud economy could justly be ascribed to the still larger global disruptions ahead. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has called this “the cloud computing age.”

Coaching moment: Sometimes people I talk with say that they feel like a lone wolf howling at the moon. Most of the time these people are visionaries or idealists that don’t have a common public voice. The crowd hasn’t discovered the conversation yet. Identity is one of those conversations. It’s a relatively small group talking about a subject that everyone will be impacted by, and that the future will be shaped by (one way or another).

If you’re one of the lone wolves, take heart. Keep up the good work. The more we tell the story, the better we get. The better the story becomes, the more people will want to hear it. The time is good to explore, discover, think, discuss, and practice telling the story. Not everyone is ready to hear it yet, which is ok. All things in time.

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Reputation Management

April 17th, 2009
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We have many ways to view our identity. One way that we are known is by our reputation. Our friends and colleagues know who we are. They know us from our acts and activities. They know generally what kind of person we are. For example, we might be known as a kind or loving person, or maybe a jerk, a know-it-all, or a scoundrel.

smileFor a business, the employees are the first line of the company’s reputation. Sometimes employees are not the most diplomatic representatives. In one recently publicized case, a video posted to YouTube by two playful employees caused a public relations nightmare for the company (and later regrets by the ex-employees).

It’s worth noting that while one event can do damage, it’s not the entire picture. Our real reputation is made up of what we do and say over time, what we are consistent about.

Coaching moment: There’s a great lifehacker article, The Importance of Monitoring Your Online Reputation, that talks about this:

These days, if you want to know more about someone, the first thing most of us do is Google them. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that monitoring your online reputation is extraordinarily important.

Go ahead and Google and Yahoo yourself, see what’s out there. Note how much is about someone whose name you share. What picture does this paint? Are you happy with it?

You can’t change the past, but you can change your future reputation. What will you do to paint a better picture of yourself?

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On Connecting with Friends

December 5th, 2008
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Yesterday Google announced Friend Connect, and Facebook announced Facebook Connect. These are two different ways of opening the social network. John (The Real) McCrea has a great article on these two services. ReadWriteWeb also has a great article (thanks Alex K for this link).

With some mixed* feelings, I’m implementing Google’s Friend Connect on this blog. In the right column, you’ll see a box… Read more…

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Google Apps: Problems with Identity

November 20th, 2008
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CNN is running an article, The hidden cost of Google Apps, which describes a familiar problem. Seems that due to the combination of cookies, “remember me” settings, and other hidden recall devices, users have a hard time using Google Apps for more than one user, more than one account, or more than one application. This is a serious problem!

The author laments:

The confusion gets worse if you share PCs. For three months, Google Talk was convinced that I was Nick, my assistant. We finally figured out that we had shared that test computer – he had once logged in as himself on the machine that I was now using, and logging in as myself to Google Apps hadn’t cleared out that setting in the browser’s memory. We had to fully wipe the cache to allow me to switch back to … well, me.

Linda, my head of operations, had her personal Google Calendar account swapped for her business identity on my Google Calendar about the same period. Until we figured out the goof, she missed a bunch of meetings. And to this day, after more than six months of using Google Apps, I still get e-mail invitations addressed to Dan, our intern. Somehow, Google thinks I am him. He missed last week’s meeting in part because he never got an invitation.

This problem represents a shift from using your own computer to do all things, to using your computer to do context-sensitive things. For example, are you doing things for work? Personal use? for someone else? You had better remember to stop and log out each time you want to change your context, or better yet (as in Google’s case), never use more than one computer for one user and one purpose. (Ouch!)

Coaching moment: This is another example of a push to define and keep separate our relationships between home and work computing. In practice, our lines are blurred. Have you ever checked your home email while at work? Many people have. Has it ever happened that someone that you know sent an email message from the wrong account? While the learning curve is steep and harsh, the separation isn’t always a bad thing.

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