Tag: privacy

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, General Commentary, privacy, Shel's Personal Life, Technology, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , ,

A lot of people tend to get upset when they see an article about governments spying on their citizens. For instance, this article in Common Dreams, ‘Highly Disturbing’ Pentagon Document Shows US Military Surveilling Groups Protesting Family Separation.

Surveillance cameras. Photo by Pawe? Zdziarski [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]
Surveillance cameras. Photo by Pawe? Zdziarski [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]

But this is not exactly a surprise. Government spying on activists has been a thing since at least the 1920s, and the more we develop tech tools, the easier it is to spy. This article cites a spy report that sure looks to me like the Attending/Interested numbers were simply copied off a Facebook event page.

But don’t let Big Brother scare you off activism. Privacy is an illusion. If you have a bank account, credit card, driver’s license, medical record, or even a salaried job, you gave up your privacy long ago. These days, even walking down the street puts you on “candid camera.”

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t protest intrusions on our privacy. But we have to live our lives as if we’re under constant surveillance–because we probably are.

In the 1970s, I was suspicious enough that my phone was tapped that every once in a while, I’d say things like, “FBI agents, get your pencils. I’m going to give you my recipe for three-minute chocolate mousse.” And then I’d tell them to melt chocolate chips, mix it into ricotta cheese, add cinnamon and cocoa powder, vanilla extract, and maybe a bit of rum.

To me, this was a really empowering way to handle it. It said that I was aware of the possibility that someone was listening, and that I wasn’t disclosing any sensitive information–not that I even had any–so they ay as well not bother to listen. And it brought a little humor to my day, and hopefully, to theirs.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Innovation, privacy, Technology, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

In all the buzz about Google Glass, some people are raising deep concerns about privacy. Mostly about the privacy the wearer of Google Glass will sacrifice.

But the issues go well beyond that. Mark Hurst’s very thoughtful article, “The Google Glass feature no one is talking about,” for instance, brings up the disturbing spectre of Google creating a world where everyone is watching YOU. In other words, non-users could be deeply impacted, and human behavior may actually shift in response to the Big Brother phenomenon of being under constant surveillance, person-to-person as opposed to camera-to-location.

Yet I think privacy concerns may be far less significant than something I don’t hear anyone discussing AT ALL: the question of whether literally seeing the world through Google Glass’s technology is essentially a radical shift in the human experience: an engineered electromechanical “mutation” that could have results as far-reaching and unforeseen as genetic engineering.

Already, we live in a world where centuries-old patterns of communication have been blown apart by computers, mobile phones, and other disruptive technologies. And for the most part, this is positive–despite idiocies like the pedestrian I saw the other day who couldn’t stop texting long enough to see if it was safe before he crossed the street. But when a device becomes an extension of our bodies to such an extent, I have to wonder: What are the consequences of seeing the world through the Internet and Google Glass, rather than through our own eyes, as we walk down the street? What happens when governments or corporations start filtering and controlling our very sensory input, even when we’re in the “natural” world away from our computers?

I’m not a Luddite. But I do believe in the Precautionary Principle, which states that we should not engage in actions that have potentially harmful consequences if we don’t know what those consequences are. Violating the Precautionary Principle has led to many calamities, from catastrophic climate change to ecosystems being thrown out of balance to the 250,000-year threat of global contamination by nuclear waste leaks. In other words, we should keep our assorted genies in the bottle until we know what we’re about to unleash. And I think Google Glass could be one such genie. Particularly if future iterations in totalitarian states make Google Glass or similar technology less optional, and less easy to remove.

Love to get your comments on this.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, privacy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

Acording to no less a source than London’s well-respected Financial Times, Facebook has admitted hiring a PR agency to spread stories questioning Google’s privacy policies.

I’m no fan of Google’s approach to privacy, and one of the reasons I still keep Eudora, my “throwback” e-mail system where the e-mail resides on my own hard drive, is that I don’t particularly want Google to have access to my outbox (I do filter some incoming mail through GMail). However, I’ve never particularly trusted Facebook on that score either. I simply stick to a policy that assumes anything I post anywhere is public knowledge, and I try to not post anything, anywhere, that would come back to bite me. Fortunately, I live a pretty transparent and ethical life, and I don’t really have much to worry about. And I’ve never been afraid to be controversial, or to be “ahead of my time.”

I’m also willing to stand up for what’s right. If Facebook chooses to “get even” with me for expressing outrage over this action, and suspends my account, so be it. I managed to live my first 50 years without any help from Facebook. At 54, I could live another 50 years without it if I had to.

Nonetheless, I am deeply appalled. Don’t we have anything better to do than to take our opponents down? I’m much more a believer in cooperating with our competitors (something I discuss extensively in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green). And if you are going to attack your competitors, at least have the decency to do it out in the open. This kind of smear campaign is what I expect from the lunatic fringe that has hijacked the US Republican Party, not from a company that has built its entire business model on cultivating surprisingly deep openness among its users.

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By Posted on Posted in privacy, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with ,

Seth Godin blogged something that I’ve long said. We live in a world where privacy is not a given. If you have a credit card, your life is an open book (one example among many). What Seth pointed out is that the lack of privacy isn’t what bothers us—it’s the ability of companies to take the information and draw conclusions about our lives and how to market to us. He gives a fascinating example. I won’t spoil the surprise; go visit.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International, Media Ethics, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Uncategorized, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , ,

If you search on Google for the word Google plus the exact phrase “Don’t Be Evil”, you get 366,000 hits. The company’s motto has been used at least since 2001, according to Wikipedia.

As someone who has been writing and speaking about business ethics for seven years, I applaud this motto. But I question its authenticity as it applies to some of Google’s actions. In other words, I see Google occasionally violating the motto with at least three sets of policies that–intentionally or not–certainly do evil.Read more »

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics: General, Marketing Trends/News, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Perry Marshall has a really good article about online privacy concerns, the Google experience yay and nay, and Google’s first real competitor in general search–Bing. It’s getting a lot of comments, including this one from me. I discuss not only transparency vs. secrecy, but also the Google user experience, talk about the USP (Unique Selling Proposition) I think Google might operate under, and point out the business opportunity that grows out of our society’s lack of privacy.

One point I didn’t make is that in dystopian-totalitarian novels like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, the very tools that provide information and entertainment also eliminate our privacy. While at least in the US, this information gathering has been used primarily for commerce rather than social control, the potential is very real.

The rest of this post is what I posted to Perry’s site:

You write, “Google has done a glorious job of doing what I encourage all my customers to do: Create offers that are so sensationally irresistible that you can’t help but use their search engine. They’ve beat all comers fair and square.”

This is sooo true. If ever there was an example of a huge USP, it would be Google’s. I don’t know how they phrase it, but it may as well be “we let you actually FIND what you’re looking for…in nanoseconds.”

And because they honor and deliver this USP, and because they were smart enough to make ads user-friendly, they have a vast revenue stream. But remember that search was there before ads, a couple of years before, in fact.

As pointed out above, we haven’t had privacy for decades anyway.

–>I feel the lack of privacy is actually an *opportunity* for entrepreneurs. Since we have no privacy anyway, why not run your business with a high degree of transparency and turn it into a marketing advantage? Why not do the right thing and be thoroughly ethical, and then demonstrate this to the world so they beat a path to your door? (This is something I advocate heavily in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First )

Back to Google: my concern is not *privacy*, but *piracy.* Google’s respect for others’ copyrights is often in conflict with its desire to index the world’s knowledge. As someone who creates a lot of intellectual property (including eight books), it concerns me deeply that Google assumes the right to index first and ask permission later. I could definitely see circumstances where work created (say, for a high-paying corporate client) should not be placed in the public stream. Google claims to be and for the most part acts as a highly ethical company, but on the issue of intellectual property control, I disagree with their approach.

Still, I’ve been an avid Google user, because it does deliver that USP, and that’s something I need.

I wasn’t familiar with Bing prior to reading this article. Did a search for “shel horowitz” and saw very different results than Google. 1,100,000 hits versus about 23,400 on Google (a number that shifts daily between 14,000 and 54,000). Bing’s results heavily skewed toward big portal sites like Facebook (very first result) and Amazon Subsequent pages (I looked through page 3) include a lot of the blogosphere/podcast interviews I’ve done for others, and some of my major media hits. Only three of the top ten were my own sites. Google’s results skew heavily toward my own sites. I love the popup feature on Bing, and expect that Google will implement something similar; this may be Google’s first real competitor for generalized search. (For specialized search, I’ve often turned to Clusty, Ask, and portal-specific search tools.)

By contrast, on Google, I have 7 of the 12 results on page 1. Google itself has positions 4 (Google book search) and 12, and my twitter and Facebook profiles, along with a book review on an outside blog that was published this week, fill out the page.

GMail is still the best web-based e-mail client I’ve used, but that ain’t saying much. I vastly prefer download-based email such as Eudora. Surprisingly, my biggest gripe with GMail is that its search function is just plain horrible. Something you’d think they of all companies could have figured out better. My other gripe is that you can’t do much in the way of batch processing, and dealing with one e-mail at a time, especially over the web, for anything except delete is frustratingly slow.

Shel Horowitz, ethical/effective marketing specialist
https://shelhorowitz.com

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