The Privacy Myth

By | November 22, 2011
1 Comment

If there’s one myth that endures in this age of online participation, blogs, shared photo albums and Web 2.0, it’s that we’ve overcome our concerns about privacy. It sounds on the surface, logical: We must have gotten over this weird paranoia, or else why would we share so much online? Why would we bother about privacy issues when there’s no real evidence that people, companies, governments and the NSA are out to get us? This, for example, from Web 2.0 blog TechCrunch guest contributor Steve Poland:

I’m sure there’s data to back me up on this, but today compared to 10 years ago — people are way more comfortable with the Internet and have less privacy concerns. Or at least the younger generations that have grown up with the Internet aren’t as concerned with privacy — and spew what’s on their mind to the entire world via the web.

I can’t speak for the younger generation, having been kicked out of it some years ago. But if we’re talking more generally about folk who have embraced the Net in the past 10 years, I’d have to say I don’t think it’s that we don’t care about privacy. We just don’t understand it. In that sense nothing has changed. I think what is happening is the same as before: People don’t really understand the privacy issues of what they’re doing, because the technology, and its liberating sensuality, are moving faster than we can assimilate to our culture. This is not new: Technology has always outpaced our intellectual grasp. If you don’t believe me think radio, TV, cars and cellphones. We were lousy at predicting the impact of any of these technologies on our environment. Lousy.

Usually, it’s because we just don’t stop to think about the privacy implications, or we don’t stop to ask deeper questions about the sacrifices we may be making when we buy something, give information to a stranger, register for something, accept something, invite someone in to our digital lives, install software, sign up for a service, or simply accept an email or click on a link. The speed of communication – click here! register here! — makes all this easier. But I don’t really blame the reader. Often it’s us journalists who are to blame for not digging enough.

Take, for example, a new service called reQall from QTech Inc in India. On the surface, it sounds like a great service: phone in a message to yourself and it will appear in your email inbox transcribed with 100% accuracy. Great if you’re on the road, on the john or at a party and don’t want to start jabbing away or scrawling the note on the back of your spouse’s neck.

Rafe Needham of Webware initially enthuses about it on his blog. But then he later finds out that

Update: I’m told that ReQall’s speech-to-text engine isn’t wholly automated. “We use a combination of automated speech recognition technology and human transcription,” a company co-founder told me. Which means there may be someone listening to your notes and to-do items. Yikes!

Yikes indeed. Who would record a message knowing that a stranger is going to be transcribing it, and a company storing it on their servers? To be fair to Rafe he’s not the only one not to initially notice this privacy angle. And at least he bothers to write it up. Dean Takahashi didn’t mention it in his (admittedly) brief Mercury News piece, for example. The company’s press release makes no mention of it either, saying only that

reQall is patent-pending software technology that uses a combination of voice interface and speech-recognition technology to record, log and retrieve your tasks, meetings and voice notes.

(The same press release appears on Forbes’ own website, which I always think looks a bit odd, as if there’s no real difference between a story and a press release. But that’s another rant for another day.) That, frankly, would leave me thinking there was no human interaction either.

But then again, there are clues here and if we (by which I mean us hacks) were doing our job we should probably follow them. Any Google search for reqall and privacy throws up an interesting trail. A CNN report on memory quoted Sunil Vemuri talking about reQall but says issues about privacy and keeping such records free from subpoena have yet to be worked out. When a blogger called Nikhil Pahwa quoted CNN on ContentSutra someone from QTech wrote in:

Please note that there is an inaccuracy in the post. QTech is not “currently working on sorting out issues related to privacy laws, and how to prevent these recordings from being subpoenaed.” Can you correct this?

The text was duly crossed out, so now it reads:

According to the report, they’re currently working on sorting out issues related to privacy laws, and how to prevent these recordings from being subpoenaed are still to be worked out.

So we’re none the wiser. Are there issues? Are QTech working on those issues? Or are there issues that other people are working on, not QTech? Their website sheds little light. There’s nothing about human transcription on any of the pages I could find, nor in the site search. Their privacy policy (like all privacy policies) doesn’t really reassure us, but neither does it explicitly scare our pants off. A brief jaunt through it (I’m not a lawyer, although I sometimes wish I was, and I think John Travolta in “A Civil Action” makes a good one) raises these yellow flags:

  • QTech can use your location, contact details etc to “send you information related to your account or other QTech Service offerings and other promotional offerings.” I.e. the company knows where you are, your phone number and home address and could spam you.
  • QTech may “include relevant advertising and related links based on Your location, Your call history and other information related to Your use of the Services.” I.e. The company could send you stuff based on what information you’ve given in your messages, and any other information you carelessly handed over during the course of using the service.
  • QTech can use the content of your audio messages (and your contact information) for, among other things, “providing our products and services to other users, including the display of customized content and advertising,  auditing, research and analysis in order to maintain, protect and improve our services … [and] developing new services.” I.e. the company can mine the contents of your messages and other stuff and spam other customers. Somehow this seems more scary than actually spamming you.
  • QTech will hold onto those messages “for as long as it is necessary to perform the Services, carry out marketing activities or comply with applicable legislation.” I.e. don’t think your messages are going to be deleted just because you don’t need them anymore.

Privacy documents are written by lawyers, so they’re about as weaselly as they can be. And QTech’s is no different. But there is some cause for concern here, and we journalists should at least try to explore some of these issues. I looked for any acknowledgement that there’s a human involved in the transcription, and some reassurance that the content of those messages is not going to be mined for advertising purposes, and that it would be possible for customers to insist their messages are deleted. I couldn’t find anything, although to their credit QTech do say they won’t “sell, rent or otherwise share Your Contact Information or Audio Communications with any third parties except in the limited circumstance of when we are compelled to do so by a valid, binding court order or subpoena”. But if QTech are doing their own advertising then does that really make any difference?

I’m seeking comment from QTech on this and will update the post when I hear it. And this isn’t really about QTech; it’s about us — citizens, readers, bloggers, journalists — thinking a little harder about our privacy before we throw it away for a great sounding service. Do you want, for example, your personal memos (“Calling from the pub. God I really need a holiday. I think I’m cracking up”) mined for advertising (“Hi! Can I interest you in Caribbean cruise? I hear you’re cracking up!” “Hi, need psychological counselling? I’m told you do” “Hi! Need Viagra? I hear from that last message you left you probably do”)?

What a CEO Would Really Write in His Blog

By | November 22, 2011
3 Comments

My fellow BBC World Service commentator, Lucy Kellaway, lays into Reuters CEO Tom Glocer as the worst case of vapid CEO blogging (via the BBC’s Richard Sambrook). Harsh, because Glocer seems to be a cut above the rest of the old media but she has a point: Blogs are about being honest and authentic, and I’ve seen few CEOs manage to do this. Although the results would be entertaining, if they for once did try not to please but to vent (which is the real distinction between a faux blog and a real one). Here’s an early draft of what a CEO like Mr. Glocer might have written if he could:

Had to fire half the news department today. Would have fired the other half too, had they actually been in the office. They weren’t; as it was 3.30 in the afternoon they were mostly unwell in The Ink Stained Spike so I had to get Mrs. Marpool, the Chief Hot Refreshing Beverage Delivery Officer (formerly the tea lady), to pass on the news to them. Doubtless the old fools will be telling each other war stories and mocking my blogging style. The savvier ones will be pulling up my MySpace page on their 3.5G enabled, beer-splattered laptops and making rude remarks about my dog. Bottom feeders. They’ve probably never heard of Debussy. Pffft.

God I hate journalists. The ones who were in the office sat staring at their Grecian 2000 editing terminals as I broke the news to them, either patheticlaly hoping I’d notice their dedication and spare them, or else because they couldn’t bear to look anywhere else. They’ve brought it on themselves. Ten years ago they could have bought a copy of Microsoft for Dummies from Dillons. But no. They thought they were all still safe, sacred cows in the face of the digital sandstorm (gosh, that’s good that. Might save that for the final version.) Journalists. They’re either gung ho foreign correspondents who can’t stop filing stories no one will read, or burned out subs with faces like a rhino’s armpit (gosh, that is good!) who take most of the afternoon to sub a palm oil report.

Anyway, good riddance to the lot of them. Nothing they could do that a floor full of eager Bangaloreans (Bangalorans? Bangalorii? Bangaloris? Bangalorish? Please check this before you post it on the blog, Edna) couldn’t do at a tenth the price.

Anyway, unlikely to see a CEO rabbiting on like that, so we should stop dreaming. Anyway, I’m still upset with Lucy for suggesting in the same piece that signing off an email with ‘best’ is somehow unacceptable. I do it all the time, although I fear it’s a throwback to my own hackish past, when we wrote our Reuters service messages (open wire emails, as it were, visible to all) in telegraphese, as if there was still a premium on word count. Hence “best regards” either became “brgds” or just good old “best”. I still do it, and will continue to do so until Lucy tells me not to.

Best, Jeremy

Podcast on Gadgets

By | November 22, 2011
0 Comment

Here’s something I recorded for the BBC World Service Business Daily show on gadgets. Email me if you’d like the transcript.

If you want to subscribe to an RSS feed of this podcast you can do so here, or it can be found on iTunes. My Loose Wire column for The Wall Street Journal Asia and WSJ.com, can be found here (subscription only; sorry.) 

Thanks for listening, and comments, as ever, welcome. 

To listen to Business Daily on the radio, tune into BBC World Service at the following times, or click here.

Australasia: Mon-Fri 0141*, 0741

East Asia: Mon-Fri 0041, 1441

South Asia: Tue-Fri 0141*, Mon-Fri 0741

East Africa: Mon-Fri 1941

West Africa: Mon-Fri 1541*

Middle East: Mon-Fri 0141*, 1141*

Europe: Mon-Fri 0741, 2132

Americas: Tue-Fri 0141*, Mon-Fri 0741, 1041, 2132. 

My pieces usually appear on Wednesdays.

Blog Off(line)

By | November 22, 2011
3 Comments

I know I’m old-fashioned, but I still like to edit my blogs from a client, not from the webpage itself. It’s probably something to do with the temperamental connections I get in this neck of the woods, but I’m always convinced my ramblings are going to disappear into the ether unless they’re somehow being saved on my computer,  not on someone else’s. What’s more, I hate the fact that Control+k doesn’t always mean insert a hyperlink. It should in every language, every situation. Really.

So it’s simple. A blogging tool (or client, if you want to be fancy) simply allows you to create, edit and update your blog postings without being online. You can fiddle with them, hone them, just as I’m not doing with this one, until you get a decent connection, and then you press the button and thwang, your post is posted. No openings of browsers; no waiting for connections before the muse strikes. Thwang. I love ’em.

Problem  is, there aren’t many of them and I’ve not seen a decent list of them in one place. So, I’ve updated my 2.5 year old directory of blogging software to fill this hole in the market, and even thrown in a Mac client or two too, to keep my friend Mark happy. What I didn’t do was to include any Linux ones; I know they exist but I couldn’t find one I liked last time. I’m sure I’ll hear from Ubuntu folks soon enough. Oh, and Microsoft Word 2007 has a built-in tool now; see this post and the comments for a perspective on this.

But I do tend to agree with the somewhat irritable sounding commenter called HolidayCornwall who complained back in December 2005 about the absence of ‘software which can organise my blogs posting schedule which are mostly related to english language’. Of course, I was too gallant to suggest they first focus on mastering the English language before they start looking for complex blogging clients. Besides, the link they posted from, Littlewood Farm in Bodmin, looks so inviting all feelings of being a churl are banished. (Can a churl be banished? What is churl, exactly? Apparently, according to the American Heritage dictionary, it’s a boorish, rude person, or, alternatively, a mediaeval English peasant. Or both, I suppose. Excellent; they didn’t mess about with their insults in those days. “Churl, bring me some more toner and two copies of Windows XP SP2. And stop looking so dang churlish. Honestly”)

Anyway, I seem to have gotten off track here. I was talking about blogging tools. Oh, and the lack of a really decent blog organizer. I would love to have one that kept all my postings in an offline database, that I could update when the feeling arose. Is there something like that, or am just Bodmin? (You’ll either have to live in Cornwall or watched Doc Martin to get that.)

Blog Off(line)

By | November 22, 2011
0 Comment

I know I’m old-fashioned, but I still like to edit my blogs from a client, not from the webpage itself. It’s probably something to do with the temperamental connections I get in this neck of the woods, but I’m always convinced my ramblings are going to disappear into the ether unless they’re somehow being saved on my computer,  not on someone else’s. What’s more, I hate the fact that Control+k doesn’t always mean insert a hyperlink. It should in every language, every situation. Really.

So it’s simple. A blogging tool (or client, if you want to be fancy) simply allows you to create, edit and update your blog postings without being online. You can fiddle with them, hone them, just as I’m not doing with this one, until you get a decent connection, and then you press the button and thwang, your post is posted. No openings of browsers; no waiting for connections before the muse strikes. Thwang. I love ’em.

Problem  is, there aren’t many of them and I’ve not seen a decent list of them in one place. So, I’ve updated my 2.5 year old directory of blogging software to fill this hole in the market, and even thrown in a Mac client or two too, to keep my friend Mark happy. What I didn’t do was to include any Linux ones; I know they exist but I couldn’t find one I liked last time. I’m sure I’ll hear from Ubuntu folks soon enough. Oh, and Microsoft Word 2007 has a built-in tool now; see this post and the comments for a perspective on this.

But I do tend to agree with the somewhat irritable sounding commenter called HolidayCornwall who complained back in December 2005 about the absence of ‘software which can organise my blogs posting schedule which are mostly related to english language’. Of course, I was too gallant to suggest they first focus on mastering the English language before they start looking for complex blogging clients. Besides, the link they posted from, Littlewood Farm in Bodmin, looks so inviting all feelings of being a churl are banished. (Can a churl be banished? What is churl, exactly? Apparently, according to the American Heritage dictionary, it’s a boorish, rude person, or, alternatively, a mediaeval English peasant. Or both, I suppose. Excellent; they didn’t mess about with their insults in those days. “Churl, bring me some more toner and two copies of Windows XP SP2. And stop looking so dang churlish. Honestly”)

Anyway, I seem to have gotten off track here. I was talking about blogging tools. Oh, and the lack of a really decent blog organizer. I would love to have one that kept all my postings in an offline database, that I could update when the feeling arose. Is there something like that, or am just Bodmin? (You’ll either have to live in Cornwall or watched Doc Martin to get that.)