The most frustrating aspect of the entire privacy debate is that the most ardent advocates of an absolutist position tend to describe anyone who disagrees with them as a Facebook defender. My motivation, though, is not to defend Facebook; quite the opposite, in fact: I want to see the social networking giant have more competition, not less, and I despair that the outcome of privacy laws like GDPR, or App Store-enforced policies from Apple, will be to damage Facebook on one hand, and destroy all of its long-term competitors on the other.
I worry even more about small businesses uniquely enabled by the Internet; forcing every company to act like a silo undoes the power of platforms to unlock collective competition (a la Shopify versus Amazon), whether that be in terms of advertising, payments, or understanding their users. Regulators that truly wish to limit tech power and unlock the economic potential of the Internet would do well to prioritize competition and interoperability via social graph sharing, alongside a more nuanced view of privacy that reflects reality, not misleading ads; I would settle for at least admitting there are tradeoffs being made.
Tag: GDPR
Artists against Article 13: when Big Tech and Big Content make a meal of creators, it doesn’t matter who gets the bigger piece,Article 13 is the on-again/off-again controversial proposal to make virtually every online community, service, and platform legally liable for any infringing material posted by their users, even ve…
If companies were paying out damages commensurate with the social costs their data recklessness imposes on the rest of us, it would have a very clarifying effect on their behavior — insurers would get involved, refusing to write E&O policies for board members without massive premium hikes, etc. A little would go a long way, here.
The General Data Protection Regulation is coming into force.
These tougher rules on data protection were approved by the EU Parliament in April 2016, but a lot of us didn’t hear about them back then. Perhaps you first heard GDPR mentioned in discussions about recent controversies to do with the questionable use of people’s data.
Or maybe it was when you started receiving a deluge emails.
But what is GDPR, and why should we care about it? And could these new regulations impact our health? What happens with our medical data now?
To help answer these questions, Jordan Erica Webber is joined by the Guardian’s technology reporter, Alex Hern, and Dr Rachel Birch of the Medical Protection Society.
The good news for both advertising and publishing is that neither needs adtech. What’s more, people can signal what they want out of the sites they visit—and from the whole marketplace. In fact the Internet itself was designed for exactly that. The GDPR just made the market a lot more willing to start hearing clues from customers that have been laying in plain sight for almost twenty years.
Searls discusses what will be left of advertising — and what it supports — after the adtech bubble pops. This includes providing a picture of the current context, such as attempts by collectives to circumvent various changes. In conclusion he provides the following tips:
- Don’t bet against Google
- Do bet on any business working for customers rather than sellers
- Do bet on developers building tools that give each of us scale in dealing with the world’s companies and governments
- Do bet on publishers getting back to what worked since forever offline and hardly got a chance online: plain old brand advertising
The EU is responding to consumers who feel ripped off. They’re tired of having their data stripmined and their attention stolen … Marketers don’t have to race to the bottom. It’s better at the top.
(sebastiangreger.net)Originally intended to showcase a privacy-centred implementation of emerging social web technologies – with the aim to present a solution not initially motivated by legal requirements, but as an example of privacy-aware interaction design – my “social backfeed” design process unveiled intricate challenges for Indieweb sites, both for privacy in general and legal compliance in particular.
From an ethical design perspective, however, I still have a stomach ache thinking of publishing the name and image of unknowing Twitter users on an unrelated website, presenting a “like” potentially intended as a bookmark of a short tweet as a “like” for a long essay on some blog site they have never visited. Here, too, some kind of transparency/consent mechanism would be required; and while I am sorry to not have a ready solution to offer, the idea of simply warning about a backfeed in a sticky post on top of a timeline is not really something I consider sufficient. Likely, the solution for the silo backfeeds would have to come after a solution for Webmentions in general has been developed.
Just thinking about my own use, I usually use the ‘Like’ post-kind to recognise posts that I find interesting, but do not have anything to add (that would be a bookmark.) This does not mean I ‘like’ the post or agree with everything written. This is where confusion can occur.
I think this is one of those posts that I will come back to as my knowledge of webmentions and the #IndieWeb continues to grow and evolve.
Google is already buttoning up its data policies in anticipation of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which kicks in next month. The company restricted the number of third-party companies that can serve and track ads through its advertising exchange and on YouTube. Google is also requiring publishers to get user consent for targeted ads to comply with GDPR.