The Impact on Local Innovation

Let’s be blunt: barring some strange vagary, Facebook Zero is going to be a hit. Facebook is already popular in Africa, and in other developing countries, such as Indonesia, we know that usage is overwhelmingly through mobile devices. The success of MXit in South Africa, as well, is strong evidence of the viability of mobile-based social networking, and with free access to 0.facebook.com, the proposition is even stronger.

What does this mean for Africa’s burgeoning technology entrepreneurs? The mobile phone is an exciting, preexisting platform for services and applications. CellBazaar in Bangladesh and M-PESA in Kenya are standout examples of the value that can be created from building new mobile services. Competing with Facebook is going to be very difficult, especially when so many carriers are picking them and giving them the ability to not charge for data usage on 0.facebook.com. To be clear, I’m not opposed to Facebook competing in this regard. They are clearly doing good business.

But in the midst of doing good business, they could cannibalize African jobs. For example, Safaricom, who has not partnered with Facebook, just announced they are working with MXit to bring the South African service to Kenya. Erik Hersman sees this as a missed opportunity for local entrepreneurs. The real problem, though, is that the operators in Africa can choose winners and losers on their proprietary networks. New entrants (the proverbial “next Google or YouTube”) face very steep transaction costs that limit their scale.

A Caveat?

As Prabhas Pokharel of MobileActive points out, though, there is more to this story. Speaking recently at the GSMA World Congress, a Facebook representative showed that when Vodafone in the UK offered one week of free Facebook, not only did data usage shoot up, it stayed up: “the number of people paying and using data plans increased by 20% from the people that tried it.”

No wonder Facebook was able to partner with so many operators: in time, they will phase out the free access and will have convinced more users to sign up for the lucrative data plans. Is this a good thing? As Steve Song and others have argued, mobile usage costs in Africa can be very high. There might be reasons to worry that people are spending money recklessly on mobiles, to the detriment of savings or “better” consumption.

But there could be a silver lining. Data services provide more flexibility and capability. Oftentimes people do not even know their phone is capable of anything more than SMS and voice. If Facebook Zero encourages people to responsibly use the mobile Internet, there will be opportunities for many more entrepreneurs and delivery of richer services.

Facebook Zero as Africa’s Agora?

Steve Song is more bullish on Facebook Zero, despite having well-founded critics of both Facebook and African telcos. He says,

I think the potential for innovation with Facebook Zero is really about people having conversations, exchanging ideas about any and every aspect of their lives. Those conversations will spawn innovations. Right now, Facebook Zero only covers ten countries in Africa but supposing in covers all or most of them. Think of the scope for new ideas to find their way across the continent or across the road.

This is an interesting angle. Though it is starting to change, Africa lacks participatory media. Facebook, despite being used for plenty of inane purposes, does have the potential to encourage both innovative thinking and, perhaps more likely, political activity and awareness.

But, again, I think there are reasons to be pessimistic. Is Facebook really the platform we want for this? For one, it is another intermediary on which pressure can be placed. Even worse, it is an intermediary that does not have a good track record on safeguarding political speech within its bounds (see Rebecca MacKinnon’s recent post on the human rights implications of content moderation and account suspension). Frustratingly, Facebook has also not joined the Global Network Initiative, an effort by corporations and NGOs to promote self expression and privacy in a digital world through corporate best practices. Entering places like Tunisia with Facebook Zero demands thoughtful reflection on a company’s role in facilitating political activity.

So, it is, of course, too early to tell the implications of what was certainly a big week for mobile and development, but for this specific initiative, there are plenty of reasons to be concerned.

[As always, I'm speaking only for myself on this blog.]

Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ve probably heard that Facebook has an abhorrent record on privacy protection. Stemming from its founder’s quixotic views and a financial incentive to expose user information, Facebook has used frequent policy changes, byzantine controls and double-speak to push the nearly 500 million users to a situation where they have far less ability to control who has access to their personal information. In the U.S., and even more so in Europe, there are institutional manners in which this is partially combated. Regulatory agencies can direct behavior, advocacy organizations can promote change, and the media can raise awareness. While we are certainly not in a perfect situation, I fear the developing world is in far worse shape.

Facebook is already popular in much of Africa. Users already access it from their mobile phones. But free mobile access is likely to even further drive adoption and use throughout the continent. Over the years, Facebook has made its lack of commitment to privacy clear; 0.facebook.com is not going to change that. But do African nations have sufficiently capable consumer protection agencies? Do they have NGOs focused on the emerging issues of digital life? Is the media providing informative commentary on the implications of the Internet? More fundamentally, are there African researchers examining privacy from a local context? And do users of new media have the literacies they need?

It is essential that Africa takes on this issue on its own terms. Privacy norms, practices and expectations may differ between Nigeria and Nebraska; tackling privacy policy should, too. That being said, international NGOs, and even wealthier countries or donor agencies can play a role.

Take, as a comparison, the issue of gay rights. Homosexuality is illegal in at least 37 African countries and two men were just sentenced to 14 years in Malawi. Amnesty International has taken up the case and is drawing public attention to it globally, the independent Center for the Development of People was formed by Malawians to promote change, and the government is fearful of losing donor funding over the issue.

This is the type of confluence of forces that are likely needed for positive change, whether on gay rights or privacy protection. Will Africa reach it for the latter?

[*Apologies, as always, for grouping "Africa" together as one entity. It's not. I know; I'm guilty.]

• Elucidate how surveillance is dehumanizing: although the information obtained through surveillance (broadly defined) is personal, its use is impersonal and de-contextualized. For example, although Visa has access to vast amounts of information about me, it is hardly a definitive account of who I am. Take Michael Phelps – one photo of him doing drugs (surveillance) is taken out of context and comes to define him in the public eye; his humanity is lost to one fact.
• Explain the paradoxical, self-reinforcing cycle of surveillance: in order to find this dehumanization, people must provide context – they must provide more information, thus adding to the lack of privacy. Lipartito realized this when filling out a job application that asked if he had ever been in trouble with the law but provided no space to explain that it was a minor traffic violation. His instinct was to provide this information, but it only adds to the surveillance. The same phenomenon can be seen with the push for more financial transparency.

Inside the Corporate Panopticon

• Economic surveillance is the more important part of the surveillance
• Manifests in labor, management, credit, consumer knowledge
• Working on a book
• 1935 small town – total fingerprint surveillance
  • Had been controversial but was established by the ’30s. By this time there were 10 million files and and by ’45 there were 100 million. Young Hoover expanded it drastically.
  • The argument of “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” was made
  • 52,000 prints were collected and sent in after an enormous drive
  • Is this fear and paranoia in a small American town?
  • Yep. It happened in Berkeley, CA. These are broader
• Surveillance is not always imposed from the outside; it is often something we do to ourselves.
• Surv is a tool of social knowledge – gathering, sorting, maintaining of it is modern.
• Only over the past two hundred years have these demands arisen – a result of a distended society of relationships.
• Surv accompanied the shift from closeknit societies to urban ones of strangers
• We have little personal information, surveillance provides impersonal information
• Our lives are enabled via surv – birth cert, ssn, dmv, etc.
  • Those cut off from surv are cut off from the social benefits (illegal immigrants)
• Married women before the 70s were cut out from credit market because they couldnt get individual credit
• But we can be excluded via surv – police
• Memory hole in 1984 as dangerous because it is the lack of surveillance of the state. same story in kafka’s the trial because he cannot see the file.
• Surv’d facts are often limited and out of context
• Try to get the system to see us as we are, not as it wants to represent us. But in explaining ourselves, we are caught in the web.
• Mac 1984 ad plays to the myth that surv is easy to attack and see
• Modern economy runs on information. Much surv focuses on state, but commerce survs too
• Surv isnt brought about via one decider or technology. Surv grows on itself.
• Scientific knowledge can be transformed to surv, too (dna, etc.)
• Fingerprinting was taken to by eugenicists (Galton)
• Much of surv seeks to measure and categorize the human body
  • Anecdote about shoe sizing science (xray)
  • “needed level of exactitude”
  • Transfered authority from customer to shoe
  • What prevailed was not xray machines, but the branick foot measurers
  • “When surv is to be done on a large scale, the cheap and easy to use techs increase the spread of surv.”
  • Measuring of the body is implicated in far worse scenarios: slavery
  • “strange technologies of surveillance” and with surv, strange often meet soft – paper, bit/bytes.
  • Anything that augments memory/transfering info aids surv [what way does the flow happen? intentional tech or incidental?]
• Kodak brought archivable surveillnce to the masses
  • Newspapers brought wider circulation to photography, causing worse spread of private info
  • Prompted the first calls for privacy protection – Brandeis and Warren article – “right to be left alone”
  • privacy was now a matter for both government and private business
• corporations are giant information processing machines
• [short on time so moves on to labor]
• surv techniques were use in factories by a utopian welshman who sought “new harmony” where factory owned life and play, etc.
• by the 20th century, labor surv grew to facilitate info flow from floor to manager
• and personal lives were penetrated – ford.
• firms that invest in workers also raise the level of intrusion – efficiency experts, hr, drug tests, company towns, computer monitoring.
• calls into question those who think networked economy is more humane. he thinks it is a higher form of surveillance
• science of consumption – quant and psych methods
• “tell me what you buy and i will tell you who you are”
• focuses on predicting wants.
• surveillance categories capture the current zeitgeist – rice as female. muslim as terrorists.
• google continues a long time trend
• is surv a step towards panopticon or is it necessary to allow living in a globalized world
• credit reporting used to be investigation but in the 70s that started to change to constant surveillance
  • these investigations encoded the prejudices of the time
• credit rating ignored the complexities of local conditions. homogenized experience.
• the answer to criticisms of surveillance is often ‘more surveillance’
• FICO and other algorithms allowed them to say that the credit rating was objective [what about the values embedded in algorithms]
• epistemological conundrum of the marketplace
• information reduces uncertainty, but there is no way to determine reliability of information. which leads to more and more surveillance
• “1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual”

James Grimmelmann

• Google Book Search (GBS) started out as an indexing project
• The scale makes individual negotiation prohibitively expensive
• Hanging over all this is the orphan works prohect
• Google is becoming potentially the world’s largest book seller
• This is an elegant solution to breaking the orphan works logjam because it is opt-out
• “Google may become the only game in town for serious online access to many of these works.”
• Book Rights Registry
• Settlement makes almost no provision for the privacy of readers
• Privacy is at the hear of an intellectual history that libraries are at the center of
• No consumer-rights work
• First sale, etc. are shot
• All copyright owners are bound by this because of its class-action nature
• If this lawsuit was to try the copyright status of GBS, it didn’t need to be class-action
• Class-action was necessary to solve orphan works, but paradoxically throws all those unknown owners behind the worrisome provisions
• “This is not the way these types of things should be done in a democracy. We have public institutions to solve gigantic issues, not the courtroom. The courtroom’s adversarial approach is the wrong way to determine the future of information.”
• But the settlement is still a net positive

Siva Vaidytanathan

• Most books will never pop out in GBS. Even rediscovered works will only make a couple cents a year.
• GBS will have minimal impact on out-of-print works – otherwise they would be in print
• Lessig, Doctorow, etc greeted GBS with much excitement. It was a big company fighting for fair use.
  • Copying was incidental and necessary – what mattered was the user experience
  • Siva disagreed with Doctorow over whether or not Google indexing would be a boon to authors
• Sony Betamax had created the general right to copy for personal uses and gave breathing room for technology companies
• Fair use isn’t supposed to be decided en masse. It need to be determined on a case-by-case basis
• Libraries should have done this, especially because they have special rights under copyright
• “Nothing about Google is just about what’s on the screen.” GBS was about gathering the lexicon of humanity – they want semantic analysis of text to improve search function. This was not simply about creating an index.
• Google was imposing the copyright norms of the web onto the rest of the world – the default is expecting copying by search engines
• If Google had lost, they would have been betting their whole business
• Deal with libraries was quid pro quo – libraries got a digital copy of everything they gave Google. That is payment for the use of the material. That was the APA’s silver bullet.
• Google needs to still care about this project in ten years.
• “Why are we betting everything on what may be a fly-by company in the scale of history.” We are sacrificing better options for expediency.
• The nondisclosure agreements are anathema to scholars and academics, but that’s how Google works
• Libraries are one of the few noncommercial places in America. Google’s vending machine is troubling because it changes that.
• Deeply troubled by lack of user confidentiality
• We need to know how book search algorithm works
  • It doesn’t reflect what experts consider the top books in a given field
• The gatekeeping function is about standard and term setting. That’s where winners and losers are picked. This is far subtler than it used to be.
• Not convinced we’ve missed the opportunity
  • Outlining the Human Knowledge Project (like Human Genome Project where scientists rejected Venter’s Solera – a private project. The two databases complement each other)
  • Pool resources globally – to preserve and extend the record of human knowledge

Q&A

• Budget setters may stop physical collections
  • Scans are not archive quality and have errors that may be undiscovered
• Because the libraries are not parties to the lawsuit, they have no real standing
• Google’s presence takes the air out of any other digitization plans
• Access medium, not a preservation medium.
• Rare materials should be digitized more because that’s what people cannot get access to
• Open Content Alliance is a “heartbreaking” story

Under the auspices of fighting crime and preventing terrorism, Chicago’s Police Superintendent Jody Weis is hyping CCTV as having “limitless” crime-fighting potential. The reality, as is evident to anyone who has actually researched this type of thing, is that studies have shown municipal surveillance cameras to have little to no positive effect on crime. Further, London is widely known to have the most extensive CCTV network in the world, but that served as little deterrent to the terrorists of July 2005. But instead of bringing this up, the Sun-Times and Chicago officials point to a test in which “live video was used to catch a petty thief in the act of sticking his hand in a Salvation Army kettle outside Macy’s State Street.” Given the cost in both dollars and civil liberties, it is hard to justify catching petty criminals stealing some coins from charity.

Head on over to check the rest of it out.

The contemporary ego is enormous, and suits for plagiarism are not uncommon. “I wrote this,” is the accusation. “You copied it.” How times have changed! Up through Shakespeare’s day, writers were more interested in basing their thoughts on older works than in writing something totally original. School children would compress the works of the classics or elaborate on them. They learned through imitation. Instead of having to guarantee to their professors that every word they uttered and every thought they conceived was theirs alone, they were expected to show that everything they said had been said before. Even Shakespeare’s plays were developed from histories and older plays and romances and stories, the authors of which are unknown in many cases.

Read on.

Cyberspace has clearly become one of the liveliest public forums in China, despite the efforts by the Chinese government to control online access and content. China’s netizens have become more skillful and assertive in utilizing the Internet to voice their opinions and, occasionally, force the Chinese government to become more responsive.  But the Internet has also allowed more nationalist and radical views to contend for influence and sway public opinion.  How is online public opinion changing Chinese society? Will the new freedoms found in the virtual world lead to greater political participation or help fuel resurgent nationalism? How is the Chinese government responding to online activism?

I was able to attend it and greatly enjoyed the event. Rebecca’s slides and my notes from the event are below. I embedded them with Scribd because the formatting was funky.

RMack Speech Notes

Update: Here is the link to the video of Rebecca’s speech.

Also, here’s the paper I wrote last semester about the role of American Internet companies operating in China. Rebecca’s work was instrumental in my research.
Freedom Fighters – The Role of Internet Corporations in Promoting Digital Freedoms by Kevin Donovan [Updated]

The argument, basically, is that people historically did not have a lot of privacy; the small communities into which we were born, where everyone knew everything, did not leave space for privacy. In fact, the much heralded “death of privacy” brought about by digital networks is really just a return to the traditional state of affairs. Laurent, the blogger in question, adds to this by saying that we are actually better off than our ancestors because:

“If you can’t control the conversation improve it! Become the one stop source of info about yourself. Have a profile, more active than any other profile for all matters related to you. This way your content will always beat others’ content, and you get your control back. Then it’s up to you to not being photographed while drunk at that Spring break party. But that was a good ideas (not being photographed) well before Facebook right?

Now that you are back in the driver seat, you have your privacy back. Just of a different kind. You have built a space that could be called “publicy”, or “the plausible me”. It is a credible space where people expect to see information about you. Whatever credible information you say in there will be taken as true by the world.” [Emphasis pre-existing.]

It’s a seductive argument, right? “Stop complaining, and start doing something!” And he’s right, but only if he had stopped there.

Instead, he encourages people to actively mislead people on their public profiles to “build [their] private” self. However, the rise of ubiquitous sensors and citizen reporting will make your efforts futile, and as soon as your credibility is shot, your public profile you spent so much time building will be useless. In fact, it might be useless already, because we live in a world of gatekeepers, there is no guarantee that your active profile will out-rank those photos from Spring Break.

And finally, he ignores a whole class of people who need to be private – dissidents, journalists, etc. It is very simplistic to think that an individual can successfully lie about their activities when digital networks are becoming so pervasive. Although in the past we could tell our small community that we were doing something else, today, GPS, CCTV, RFID and a bunch of other acronyms make your activities known to a wide range of third parties who can suck all the data up and store it for far longer than the memory of a tight-knit community. And best of all? Today, you cannot leave the tight-knit community which is the world.

So, for my Science and Technology in the Global Arena course I wrote a paper about the role of American Internet companies operating in China. A lot has been written on the subject, of course, but I think the paper adds to the field by arguing that these companies could do much more beyond the Global Network Initiative (which is still laudatory). It is embedded below and a PDF is available here. Let me know what you think.

Freedom Fighters: The Role of Internet Corporations in Promoting Digital Freedoms

That is, until I realized that some of my political convictions were strongly against the politically correct positions high-powered politicians were expected to have. In middle school I was writing my Senators condemning China over its Tibet policies. More recently, my digital history is strewn with strongly worded denouncements of powerful interests like the big content industries. All of this is not even touching on the realities of friendships played out online – jokes that may strike third parties as off-color or unprofessional.

The reality of having lived a strongly opinionated and Internet-heavy life is that I have a history of content which could easily be dug up by opposition staffers after a would-be appointment. Luckily for me, for the most part I don’t think my skeletons will ever be worthwhile to dig up. But plenty of my generation’s closets will be searched. What to make of the coming storm?

The Economist jumps into this fascinating question with a very smart article discussing the future of politics and reputation. Astutely noting, “who has a closet without a skeleton?,” the article uses Obama’s intensive vetting process as a harbinger of things to come.

But I don’t think that covering up people’s unsavory pasts is likely to be sustainable. Instead, I think we are moving towards a society of disclosure and acceptance – Obama never had to confront breaking news that he tried cocaine because he disclosed it well before he was a Presidential candidate. Not everyone can have best-selling books, though.

Instead, I think the next forty years will be a roller coaster where my generation’s past will sink many a rising star. Only the most adept will be able to avoid the career-stunting attention paid to their youthful indiscretion, but, in the end, we’ll (hopefully) have a society more accepting of the human, in failure and success. We’ll turn the media spotlight on ourselves and recognize that we’ve all done things we’re not proud of and that it doesn’t mean we are unqualified for public office.

The Economist reaches much the same conclusion. Although it seems that, “Only the very blandest, most media-savvy and controlled people, who have never uttered a controversial sentence in their lives, will be deemed fit to hold public office…” another possibility is that “Perhaps, when dirt on almost everybody becomes readily available, politics will lose its hypocritical, moralistic tone… That could make people realise that politicians, too, are only human, and make them more forgiving of minor transgressions.”

What do you think? Are we destined for blandness or acceptance?