The Unknown Studio

After giving it considerable thought over the last few weeks, and with the advent and somewhat-demise of Beacon, I’ve decided that I’m going to go through the pain-in-the-ass process of deleting my Facebook account tonight. Some of the reasons include what Amy Tiemann said in this CNET piece:

You remember the old story about the frog placed in a pot of water that was slowly heated up, until it was cooked? When I read the about Facebook’s reaction to the anti-Beacon protests, my first impression is that Facebook’s concessions are essentially along the lines of, “OK, we turned up the heat a bit too much on this one, so we’ll turn it back down a little bit–for now.” Are marketers counting on the fact that we’ll get used to the warm bath, then the hot tub, calibrating their fine-tuned ability to stop just short of the lobster pot?

Moreover, while the web allows a largely indiscriminate flow of information, which has benefitted millions, certainly, the door swings both ways. And what little information I’ve been able to glean and share about my friends and acquaintances (willingly or not) during my short stint on Facebook (about a year), I’m growing old and curmugeonly, and am far less interested in what some douche from grade school is up to these days than I might have been a few months ago.

Ultimately, I just don’t feel comfortable with the lack of transparency around what Facebook is up to. If they were just straight and honest with their users, I might stick around. But right now, the risk of having my personal info up there, surrounded by all the uncertainly with what’s happening with that info, is unsettling.

I’ll just stick to emailing my close friends, thanks.

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Michael Geist is stepping up and asking the tough questions on copyright. Since Jim Prentice is unwilling to be interviewed by the CBC before the Canadian DMCA bill is introduced, Michael has crafted his own questions he wants to put to the minister.

Snippet from Michael’s blog:

7.   The Conservative Party of Canada pledged to “eliminate the levy on blank recording materials” in its 2005 policy declaration.  Why has that pledge been abandoned?  Similarly, the 2005 policy declaration stated that “the Conservative Party believes that reasonable access to copyright works is a critical necessity for learning and teaching for Canadian students and teachers, and that access to copyrighted materials enriches life long learning and is an essential component of an innovative economy.”  Why has the party abandoned this position with copyright reform that will make it more difficult for teachers and students to access copyright materials?

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Wired has an excellent article on the state of the music industry, as viewed through the eyes of Universal Music’s CEO Doug Morris.

A snippet:

Easy profits ended up blinding the industry to the threat of MP3s. Throughout the ’90s, a handful of insiders warned of the need to get out in front of digital music, but for the most part they were ignored. The big corporations that had snapped up record labels in the ’80s and ’90s continued to focus on short-term financial results, even as it become [sic] amply clear that the advantages of CDs — control, convenience, durability, flexibility — were even more pronounced with digital files. “There’s this mentality of always needing to make the numbers for the next quarter,” says Ted Cohen, a former exec at EMI and Warner Bros., now managing partner at the consulting firm TAG Strategic. “It kept me up at night. Some of us could see that something needed to be done, but no one wanted to do anything that wouldn’t maximize profit for that quarter.”

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There’s been a huge buzz lately about Facebook’s attempt to roll out Beacon, an application that would effectively track anything you purchase online, and then post the purchase to your Facebook newsfeed. What I find most astonishing is that Facebook’s creator, Mark Zuckerberg, seems surprised at the backlash against Beacon.

First Coca-Cola jumped ship (though it’s not really clear how the Coke deal would work; every time I buy a soda from a vending machine people on my newsfeed will know? And they’ll know I’m drinking—gasp!—vanilla coke? Sweet shit!). Then Overstock. Now it sounds like Travelocity is getting the fuck out of Dodge.

How could Zuckerberg not have seen this? Duh. He’s surrounded himself with a group of people hell-bent on monetizing a largely useless web service. Yes it brings people together and allows them to share photos and wall posts. Then what? Yeah, exactly. That’s what big Z and his cronies are struggling with right now. They sit in the Barad-dûr penthouse, right beneath the eye of Sauron, smack dab in the centre of Mordor, and wouldn’t you know it? They’ve completely lost touch with the most important part of the entire Facebook network: the user.

The concept of social networks, as codified in web 2.0 format, is fairly new. And it’s easy to lose sight of what Facebook was trying to do in the first place (connect people better than MySpace or Friendster ever could), especially when they have a team of billion-dollar investors demanding to know just how the hell Z-berg’s going to make money.

Meanwhile, you have a bunch of mouth-breathers willing to fork over the most mundane and questionable details about their piddly little lives, and it seems like it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to invade their privacy just a touch more. But Facebook isn’t a Legion of Idiots. Some deeply intelligent people use it as well. To play Scrabulous.
And stalk their girlfriends.

And we… uh, I mean, those people are worried about privacy. They use Facebook out of necessity. Because everyone else does. Just like everyone else uses the telephone. It’s not that these people love Facebook. Some of them eventually grow to resent it, and abandon their accounts. But those who don’t have taken it upon themselves to protect the aforementioned mouth-breathers from their own feeblemindedness.

That’s where groups like Moveon.org come in. These excellent people fought the good fight and called to task the creators of Beacon and their Facebook progenitors. They pointed out some of the fatal flaws inherent in the application, and companies like Coke and Overstock took notice.

At its most basic, this means that Facebook friends in your network won’t be able to find out what you got them for Christmas. And it’s more important, it means people’s privacy will be violated only if they want it to be.

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James Barber, best known to Canadian cooking enthusiasts as the Urban Peasant, died suddenly at his farm in Duncan, BC on Thursday, November 29, 2007 at the ripe old age of 84.

His legacy, [Barber's wife] said, would be the lives he’s changed for the better. “People came up to him all the time and told him that. He couldn’t go out without people coming up and saying that. I think he made people feel that they could do things they didn’t realize they could. He did it with his enthusiasm and passion. People would think they couldn’t cook, that it was a chore but he made it a pleasure.”

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The Canadian House of Commons is set to roll out new copyright legislation that essentially panders to American lobbyists’ demands that Canada do something about its alleged couterfeiting and IP theft problem. Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa, and one of my favourte intellectual property bloggers, tells you what you can do to make sure the Canadian Government listens to its citizens and doesn’t serve the interests of the US.

A snippet from Michael’s post:

The unfortunate reality is that there is nothing can be done about what the bill will look like when it is introduced – Industry Minister Jim Prentice has simply decided discard consumer, education, research, and privacy interests, ignore his own party’s policy platform, and the cave into U.S. pressure.  Once the bill is introduced, however, Canadians can send a message to their MPs, the Ministers, and others, calling for a fair copyright bill that addresses Canadian concerns (those in Calgary can do so in person on December 8th as Prentice hosts an open house).

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