Below are two articles to deepen your understanding of today's policies and trends. The first article introduces you to a new cell phone that quite frankly is frightening in all it's built-in functions. The horror is that most of these do not serve the user/owner, but provide moment-to-moment and extensive information on the life of the user to the corporation behind the phone.
What I pay attention to is the fact that, " The company’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, has been fairly candid about the primary purpose of Amazon’s hardware: to get the device’s owner to buy more stuff."
The second article reveals that in 2010, a 25 year old Mark Zuckerburg announced that at his company, they'd decided that, "Privacy was no longer a social norm". Do you get what I'm saying? A 25 year old....pretty wise guy huh?
Anyway, read the article....I don't need to say anymore. I mentioned sometime ago that from time to time, I'd share articles that I'd categorize under the heading, 'The Way Some People Think'. Beloveds, add these two to the file.
lovu~
Kendke
Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos presents the company's first smartphone, the Fire Phone, on June 18,
2014 in Seattle, Washington. (Photo / AFP)
Amazon's New Phone is Not Your Friend
Online retail giant double-charges customers by selling a phone that is simply a portal to its shopping service
With last week’s introduction of Amazon’s Fire phone, many are
wondering whether the online retail giant’s long-anticipated foray into
the mobile market will be able to compete with entrenched competitors
such as Apple and Samsung. But the new device raises a more profound
question: What happens when the phone in your pocket — a machine holding
intimate details about your life and relationships — becomes a tool of
consumption in service to a single corporation?
We tend to consider computers tools that act as extensions of our will. Just as we wouldn’t expect a new car to have an agenda beyond allowing us to travel from point A to point B, we traditionally assume that the electronic devices in our homes, in our pockets and, more and more, on our bodies simply follow orders — that ultimately we are the ones behind the steering wheel.
With the rise of the smartphone, this idea of computers as general-purpose machines fully under our control has quickly fallen by the wayside. Many mobile devices are becoming more akin to household appliances, deliberately crafted to perform a handful of functions while arbitrarily discouraging or disallowing others. Today’s mobile operating systems, such as Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, orbit around centralized app stores, walled gardens that push participation in the company’s larger software ecosystem. When you buy a phone or tablet from Apple or Samsung, you are not just buying a product; you are buying into a captive platform that controls your private data and incentivizes certain patterns of user behavior that benefit the manufacturer’s bottom line.
Amazon’s Fire phone is perhaps the most ambitious realization of this captive consumer dynamic. The company’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, has been fairly candid about the primary purpose of Amazon’s hardware: to get the device’s owner to buy more stuff. Whereas computers were once impartial tools that made it easier to do things, Bezos wants the smartphone, that most personal of devices, to become an interface for the Amazon shopping service — to wit, a dedicated point-of-sale system.
So where does Amazon end and your device begin? It’s a distinction that is increasingly and worryingly hard to draw.
Mike Kane / Bloomberg / Getty Images
We tend to consider computers tools that act as extensions of our will. Just as we wouldn’t expect a new car to have an agenda beyond allowing us to travel from point A to point B, we traditionally assume that the electronic devices in our homes, in our pockets and, more and more, on our bodies simply follow orders — that ultimately we are the ones behind the steering wheel.
With the rise of the smartphone, this idea of computers as general-purpose machines fully under our control has quickly fallen by the wayside. Many mobile devices are becoming more akin to household appliances, deliberately crafted to perform a handful of functions while arbitrarily discouraging or disallowing others. Today’s mobile operating systems, such as Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, orbit around centralized app stores, walled gardens that push participation in the company’s larger software ecosystem. When you buy a phone or tablet from Apple or Samsung, you are not just buying a product; you are buying into a captive platform that controls your private data and incentivizes certain patterns of user behavior that benefit the manufacturer’s bottom line.
Amazon’s Fire phone is perhaps the most ambitious realization of this captive consumer dynamic. The company’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, has been fairly candid about the primary purpose of Amazon’s hardware: to get the device’s owner to buy more stuff. Whereas computers were once impartial tools that made it easier to do things, Bezos wants the smartphone, that most personal of devices, to become an interface for the Amazon shopping service — to wit, a dedicated point-of-sale system.
So where does Amazon end and your device begin? It’s a distinction that is increasingly and worryingly hard to draw.
Mike Kane / Bloomberg / Getty Images
Panopticon in your pocket
It’s not the first time Amazon has pushed the boundaries of gadget
ownership. In 2012 it released a new line of Kindle tablets running a
special operating system based on Google’s Android. As part of its
normal functioning, the device tracks and records user activity
(including how long users spend reading each page of an e-book) and
shows advertisements for Amazon products on the basis of the data it
harvests. After complaints, the company offered the ability to turn off
the ads for $15. The result, I noted at the time, was like buying a high-tech shopping cart flanked by pesky salespeople you had to pay to leave you alone.
"Amazon wants to turn every moment of your life into an opportunity to buy stuff."
The new Fire phone runs the same operating system as the Kindles do,
and it goes a step further by boosting Amazon’s shopping service in more
novel (and unsettling) ways. It’s ironic that a year after former
National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden sparked international
anxieties about government spying, Bezos is selling a phone that
features not one or two but six cameras. Four of those cameras are
forward facing and are capable of advanced head tracking and face
detection, something Bezos said
took the company four years to develop. They support an
innocuous-sounding app called Firefly, which uses the phone’s cameras
and microphone to watch, scan and listen to everything around the user.
If you’re listening to music or watching a movie, the app will
automatically identify and log your selections. Firefly even uses the
phone’s camera mode to identify and save all the objects you come across
in the physical environment, such as the books in your house, the
landmarks you visit while sightseeing and the paintings you see at the
museum. (Bezos says the app can recognize up to 100 million items.)
It may seem novel and quirky, but the message is clear: Amazon wants to turn every moment of your life into an opportunity to buy stuff. And crucially, it wants you to do so on a $649 device that channels that urge directly to its storefront, all the while gathering more precious data points about your communications, relationships and movements.
It may seem novel and quirky, but the message is clear: Amazon wants to turn every moment of your life into an opportunity to buy stuff. And crucially, it wants you to do so on a $649 device that channels that urge directly to its storefront, all the while gathering more precious data points about your communications, relationships and movements.
Double-charging customers
Amazon is not uniquely at fault for this trend, even if its
implementations are the most explicit and unabashed. Facebook, for
example, has a long history of slowly changing its default privacy
settings so that users unwittingly share more data with more people — an
obvious benefit to the company, whose business model depends on
monetizing user data with targeted advertising. Commenting on an
infamous privacy bait and switch
in 2009 that left millions of Facebook profiles exposed to the entire
Internet, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “We decided that these would be the
social norms now, and we just went for it.”
This is in some ways to be expected from free services such as Facebook and Google, which we grudgingly use knowing their true cost is in the data they collect from us. But it’s quite another thing for Amazon to charge money for devices that surveil and monetize their users and, moreover, serve as portals to the company’s online shopping mall.
Such double-charging of customers is becoming common practice in the technology space. In 2012, Verizon Wireless began selling data about its customers as part of a service called Precision Market Insights, including their smartphone Web browsing habits, geolocation information and app usage. Earlier this year it expanded the program to collect Web-browsing data from users when they log onto Verizon’s website to pay their bills.
This flies in the face of the common mantra about Big Data’s business model that if you’re not paying for it, you are the product being sold. Companies such as Amazon and Verizon want to have their cake and eat it too, making us both the customer and the product. And too often, they’re finding they can get away with it.
The market will determine whether Amazon’s Fire phone succeeds in a crowded field. What should be a far greater concern are the implications of a corporation’s having this much influence over consumers’ dollars and data. As computing devices fall more in step with the routines of our lives, we should scrutinize the motives and biases coded into the software that runs on them. Otherwise, our tools risk becoming not really ours at all.
This is in some ways to be expected from free services such as Facebook and Google, which we grudgingly use knowing their true cost is in the data they collect from us. But it’s quite another thing for Amazon to charge money for devices that surveil and monetize their users and, moreover, serve as portals to the company’s online shopping mall.
Such double-charging of customers is becoming common practice in the technology space. In 2012, Verizon Wireless began selling data about its customers as part of a service called Precision Market Insights, including their smartphone Web browsing habits, geolocation information and app usage. Earlier this year it expanded the program to collect Web-browsing data from users when they log onto Verizon’s website to pay their bills.
This flies in the face of the common mantra about Big Data’s business model that if you’re not paying for it, you are the product being sold. Companies such as Amazon and Verizon want to have their cake and eat it too, making us both the customer and the product. And too often, they’re finding they can get away with it.
The market will determine whether Amazon’s Fire phone succeeds in a crowded field. What should be a far greater concern are the implications of a corporation’s having this much influence over consumers’ dollars and data. As computing devices fall more in step with the routines of our lives, we should scrutinize the motives and biases coded into the software that runs on them. Otherwise, our tools risk becoming not really ours at all.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own ( and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.
Privacy No Longer a Social Norm, says Facebook Founder
People have become
more comfortable sharing private information online, says Facebook
founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Photograph: Eric Risberg/AP
The rise of social networking online means that people no longer have an expectation of privacy, according to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Talking at the Crunchie awards in San Francisco this weekend, the 25-year-old chief executive of the world's most popular social network said that privacy was no longer a "social norm".
"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people," he said. "That social norm is just something that has evolved over time."
Zuckerberg said that the rise of social media reflected changing attitudes among ordinary people, adding that this radical change has happened in just a few years.
"When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was, 'why would I want to put any information on the internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'."
"Then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way, and just all these different services that have people sharing all this information."
His statement may not be a surprise, particularly since it helps to justify the company's recent – and highly controversial – decision to change the privacy settings of its 350 million users.
But it also represents a remarkable shift from where the Californian company originally started out.
Launched in 2004 as an exclusive network for Ivy League students, the site grew in part because allowed people to communicate privately – or at least among small groups of friends.
The constant tug of war between public and private information that ensued led to a series of embarrassing incidents where individuals published information online thinking it was private, only to have it reach the public.
These episodes are partly the result of the way people use Facebook, which has changed its service on several occasions in recent years. Each time the site brings more information into the public domain – and at each point it faces a series of protests and adverse reactions from users.
Moves included the decision in 2006 to introduce the "news feed" – an update of people's activities that is now central to Facebook's service. A year later it launched Beacon, a contentious advertising system that allowed advertisers to track your activities online. That eventually led to the company settling a lawsuit for $9.5m, but it did not prevent it from bringing in new privacy changes in December that one campaign group called "plain ugly".
In his talk, however, Zuckerberg said it was important for companies like his to reflect the changing social norms in order to remain relevant and competitive.
"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built," he said. "Doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do.
"But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."
Not everybody agrees. Marshall Kirkpatrick, of the technology industry blog ReadWriteWeb, said Zuckerberg's statement was "not a believeable explanation" and pointed to the company's complicity in changing the way people think about online privacy.
Meanwhile, others have rejected the idea that younger people, in particular, are less concerned about privacy. Last month Microsoft researcher and social networking expert Danah Boyd told the Guardian that such assumptions often misunderstood the reasons that people put private information online.
"Kids have always cared about privacy, it's just that their notions of privacy look very different than adult notions," she said.
"As adults, by and large, we think of the home as a very private space … for young people it's not a private space. They have no control over who comes in and out of their room, or who comes in and out of their house. As a result, the online world feels more private because it feels like it has more control."
Talking at the Crunchie awards in San Francisco this weekend, the 25-year-old chief executive of the world's most popular social network said that privacy was no longer a "social norm".
"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people," he said. "That social norm is just something that has evolved over time."
Zuckerberg said that the rise of social media reflected changing attitudes among ordinary people, adding that this radical change has happened in just a few years.
"When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was, 'why would I want to put any information on the internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'."
"Then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way, and just all these different services that have people sharing all this information."
His statement may not be a surprise, particularly since it helps to justify the company's recent – and highly controversial – decision to change the privacy settings of its 350 million users.
But it also represents a remarkable shift from where the Californian company originally started out.
Launched in 2004 as an exclusive network for Ivy League students, the site grew in part because allowed people to communicate privately – or at least among small groups of friends.
The constant tug of war between public and private information that ensued led to a series of embarrassing incidents where individuals published information online thinking it was private, only to have it reach the public.
These episodes are partly the result of the way people use Facebook, which has changed its service on several occasions in recent years. Each time the site brings more information into the public domain – and at each point it faces a series of protests and adverse reactions from users.
Moves included the decision in 2006 to introduce the "news feed" – an update of people's activities that is now central to Facebook's service. A year later it launched Beacon, a contentious advertising system that allowed advertisers to track your activities online. That eventually led to the company settling a lawsuit for $9.5m, but it did not prevent it from bringing in new privacy changes in December that one campaign group called "plain ugly".
In his talk, however, Zuckerberg said it was important for companies like his to reflect the changing social norms in order to remain relevant and competitive.
"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built," he said. "Doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do.
"But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."
Not everybody agrees. Marshall Kirkpatrick, of the technology industry blog ReadWriteWeb, said Zuckerberg's statement was "not a believeable explanation" and pointed to the company's complicity in changing the way people think about online privacy.
Meanwhile, others have rejected the idea that younger people, in particular, are less concerned about privacy. Last month Microsoft researcher and social networking expert Danah Boyd told the Guardian that such assumptions often misunderstood the reasons that people put private information online.
"Kids have always cared about privacy, it's just that their notions of privacy look very different than adult notions," she said.
"As adults, by and large, we think of the home as a very private space … for young people it's not a private space. They have no control over who comes in and out of their room, or who comes in and out of their house. As a result, the online world feels more private because it feels like it has more control."
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