A few days ago, I posted a quick tweet before bed with an idea that struck me after weeks of thinking about GamerGate and online harassment.
It seemed to strike a nerve. It was even retweeted by Marco Arment, which is officially a point of pride in my life on Twitter.
The only reason tools like this aren’t in the arsenal of social networks and their users, is that fighting online harassment isn’t a priority. Companies hire contractors to sort out porn and violence, but simple analysis of posts to identify users causing trouble and violating the terms of service is not a priority. Even more frustrating is that, as I’ve mentioned before, content analysis tools already exist on most social networks, they’re just used to figure out what ads to display.
Moderation for porn and violence is also for the benefit of advertisers over users. No company wants to see their promoted tweet or Facebook post next to someone’s engorged genitalia. The brands don’t have to worry about being attacked, so all the angry young men threatening women with rape can hide in the shadows, while Twitter identifies them as being more interested in seeing ads for Nintendo. The liability risk is greater if some unsuspecting minor sees naked people and severed heads (or both) than if someone commits suicide from abuse on social media.
No matter how many times it happens.
And it has happened many, many times.
Sure, Facebook is trying to “create empathy among [its] users”, but instead of coming at it after the fact, why not use all this data to stop it at the source? If you can identify a post as containing threats, or harassment, don’t allow it to be posted. Force the user to take a time out. Read their post aloud back to them. Do something, anything, to change the balance of power on social media away from the abusers and harassers, because anything is better than what we have now.
If anyone is going to break the hegemony of Twitter and Facebook for being the focus of our online social lives, they’re going to have to do what Twitter and Facebook—and Ello—are not doing. They’re going to need a understanding of how human social interactions work offline, and find a way to reflect that in interactions. The closest implementation of this is Google+’s Circles, though Google+ failed by requiring a huge amount of cognitive overhead to build and maintain them. Google at least understood that we don’t share everything about us with everyone we know. The binary nature of Facebook friends is not even close to representative of human friendship.
Getting this right goes a long way in solving most of the problems in social. It’s a huge step in preventing both violations of privacy, and preventing abuse. If Facebook understood this, gay students wouldn’t be outed to their homophobic families by joining a Facebook Group. Our relationships with our families, our friends, and our coworkers are all different. We even have different relationships with certain groups of friends. There are things I would tell my partner that I wouldn’t tell my parents. There are things I would tell my parents that I wouldn’t tell my friends—and vice-versa. There are things I would tell my real life friends, but not my online friends. There are things I would tell all those groups, but not my coworkers.
If you feel that you can be free and open with all the people you know, you have a luxury that most people don’t have. There’s always the risk that something you say or do online will become public. It shouldn’t be easy for this to happen. When a secret told to a friend leaks out, it’s a violation of trust, and that person should not be your friend. The structure of most social apps makes it all the more likely someone will make a private statement public. It’s caused by a mix of apathy in implementation, failure to understand the nuances of real social structures, and the needs of advertisers to see data before they give you money.
This is why it’s so bothersome that Ello is considered the vanguard of “private” social networking when its idea of privacy is just to not sell your data for ads. For real privacy, you’ll have to pay for it. If the choice came down to an ad-supported social network with fine-grained personal privacy controls, versus an ad-free social service that forced users to live in public (even with a pseudonym), I’d take the former any day. If half of the effort that went into Ello’s artistic site design and manifesto went into trying to find a smart way to incorporate the same nuances, filters, and limits in our online social lives that we have in real life, this is a debate we wouldn’t be having. “Friends” and “Noise” are not enough.
Understanding is the start. Implementing it the next step. With all the machine learning algorithms we have applied to our social graphs, it strikes me that it would be possible to algorithmically determine the relationship between two users—to a certain extent. If you’re friends with someone who shares your last name, for example, but is a few decades older than you, chances are they’re a parent or other older relative. So, the theoretical network can say “this person may not be someone you want to share everything with. Can I put them in your ‘relatives’ group?” The analytical tools used to target ads can be used to help users target the audiences of their posts. It would take some machine learning and trial and error, but at least they’d be doing something new in a moribund space.
Modeling real life, pre-Internet relationship models combined with strong and usable privacy controls that put real people in control of who sees what, when, and how. This is the real future of social networking. Getting it right, so it doesn’t require much more thought than just clicking “Post” is the hard part, but we have all those smart programmers and designers out there wasting their time on slicing and dicing data for marketers. There has to be a group of them somewhere willing to turn the tables. Once someone rolls out a service like that, I’ll be first in line to sign up—and I’ll bring as many friends as I can with me.
So, a new social network has been getting a lot of buzz. It’s called Ello, and with Facebook’s real name policy raising hackles—and rightfully so—it’s been getting a fair amount of buzz. So many people are unhappy with the existing social network offerings, that Ello seems like a breath of fresh air. Especially since, it has no ads and collects no data.
One thing we all need to learn: if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Ello seems to be no exception.
The first thing I read about Ello was enough to make me suspicious. It turns out that Ello profiles and all user data, as stated in their privacy policy are 100% public.
Ello is a platform built for posting and sharing public content. You should assume that anything you post on Ello other than private messages will be accessed by others.
Search engines will be able to see the content you post. Content you post may be copied, shared, or re-posted on Ello and on other parts of the internet in ways that you and we cannot control.
If you’re looking for a private place to talk and share with people you can trust, Ello is not your place. For anyone leaving Facebook because they’re worried they’ll be outed to friends, family, or employers, Ello is the last place you’ll want to go. They don’t go out of their way to say it, though I will give them points for writing their privacy policy in plain English. (N.B. this may be out of date, as I have heard from that you can set a “private” profile on Ello. As I lack an account, I cannot verify if this is true, or to what extent Ello considers a “private” account to be private.) As a number of Facebook exiles in this controversy are leaving for privacy, I imagine Ello will have a bit of trouble on their hands once this becomes public knowledge. In the meantime, caveat emptor.
Andy Baio is skeptical of Ello for other reasons, and they all have to do with money.
Unless they have a very unique relationship with their investors, Ello will inevitably be pushed towards profitability and an exit, even if it compromises their current values. Sometimes, this push comes subtly in the form of advice and questions in emails, phone calls, and chats over coffee. Sometimes, as more direct pressure from the board. (FreshTracks’ Managing Director sits on their board.) Or, if things go bad, by replacing the founders.
Paul Budnitz, Ello’s founder seems to have a more cavalier take on the matter. He claims that it’s “silly” to think its investors, currently FreshTracks Capital, will ever pressure them to renege on their promises to their users. I don’t think he knows how VC works. Once that $435,000 in seed capital runs out, he and his co-founders, will have to give up a little more of their stake in the company. The pressure will be ramped up to make a return, or to sell out. Right now, there’s no monetization strategy, just the promise of “premium features.” In the meantime, they have runway, and they have user growth. It’s a regular pattern among companies in the social space.
I know we’re all desperate for another place to call home on the Internet that treats users like real human beings instead of eyeballs and data. I’m no fan of Twitter or Facebook. Hell, I even signed up for App.Net, which still could have potential. However, I’m not desperate enough to jump onto the first ship that passes by, especially one that’s not only untested, but raises a ton of red flags. In short, no monetization strategy, questionable privacy policies, and no clear plans for the future. The more I learn, the more Ello looks like a shit sandwich, served on an artisanal brioche bun.
More and more, I’m of the mind that “Internet” problems are just old problems happening in a new way. They can be larger in scale and scope, or occur in a way that confuses people not up on the world of technology, but they’re fundamentally the same old problems. The battle over privacy is one of these problems that has bubbled up in the public consciousness over and over again.
After all, domestic spying is nothing new, and arguably reached a peak in the US (before the current one) during the height of the Cold War. As long as there’s been ways to track what consumers are watching and buying, companies have been doing it. Even before Internet tracking was a thing, I came home from school at age 14 to find Gillette had mailed me a razor. I’m sure Photomat employees would develop copies of any vaguely pornographic pictures that customers dropped off for development. None of this is new.
What’s new is that we know more about it. The same technology that lets corporations and governments get all the data they want on us, also lets us share what we’ve learned—and do it without the news media as a go-between. The question is if people care. If you live in the bubble of technology, there’s two main opposing voices: the “embrace surveillance” view of Kevin Kelly and his ilk, and the lock yourself down view of privacy advocates. Though, truth be told, there’s also a spectrum of middle positions in the tech world.
But for ordinary people? Many of them aren’t even in the discussion. They don’t care what Facebook does with their data, if they get tracked by Google, or if the NSA is peeking through their phone records. Privacy for them is a matter among their social groups. If a nude pic gets sent to the wrong person, maybe to an ex-lover, that’s cause for alarm. When it comes to the systematic privacy violations they’re subjected to, I doubt many of them care.
And that’s just the way that Facebook and the NSA alike would like to keep it.
My social media sabbatical has ended, and with it comes the challenge of reintegrating the various services back into my life, without letting them overwhelm me. i can see this being an ongoing process of deciding what I use, when, and where, and setting limits. However, I know one service is going to get the most of my effort in determining its role in my life—Facebook. I tried giving up Facebook once before only to end up sucked back in. Why? It’s simple: Facebook is where all my friends are. If I want to keep in touch with them, in any way, I’ll have to be on Facebook.
I just don’t have to do it on Facebook’s terms.
It’s something I’d been thinking about over the past few weeks. I started by installing the DoNotTrackMe extension for Safari. This way, I don’t have to worry about Facebook building a shadow profile on me. After reactivating my account, I started removing identifying personal information. I plan to strip it down to just my name, and my relationship. They don’t need to know anything else. I don’t know how effective it will be, but I hope that by explicitly removing information from my profile, it’s less information Facebook will have to track me. I’m also using AdBlock to hide what whatever advertising Facebook would show me anyway. A friend suggested I go all out with a pseudonym as well, but that won’t stop the beast from tracking me.
Then, as I prepared to return to the Facebook world, in whatever form, I listened to Episode #2 of Analog(ue) on Relay.fm. In it, Myke Hurley described how he used Facebook: for Messenger, and Events… and not much else. He does not feed the beast. Myke’s Facebook strategy went well with Elan Morgan’s piece about giving up the “Like.” Facebook’s algorithm feeds on the data we give it, from status updates, to comments, to—yes—likes. I may comment to let my friends know I exist, but posting is verboten, let alone hitting the “Like” button.
Not hitting “Like” should help reduce the amount of nonsense in my stream, meaning I should get more relevant information from and about the people I care about, and not just clickbait. Combine that with Social Fixer to hide the excess Facebook chaff, and clear my news feed of all the stuff I’ve read (or just don’t care about), I’m able to have a much more relaxed experience. And, of course, I’m not using it at all on my phone. I don’t need the distraction while I’m out. Except for Messenger—i’m one of the rare people for whom decoupling the Messenger app makes life better. It keeps me away from the uncontrolled stream of nonsense.
I’m sure Facebook is getting enough data on me, even with the limitations I’ve imposed. Not to mention the years of data I’ve given it that it will not give up easily. But, if I can be in control, even just a little bit, of how much Facebook infiltrates my online life, it’ll make me feel better about it. Recognizing that Facebook is a communication tool, and not a way of life, goes a long way to gaining control. I plan to use it only as such from here on out. If I do not feed the beast, it loses strength.