Facebook Opens Server Farm in Sweden

Facebook's server farm in Sweden
(photo: facebook.com)

With an exquisitely ironic sense of timing, Facebook today began processing data from a new server farm outside the United States. The opening comes on the heels of Facebook's first public meeting for its equity shareholders, and revelations suggesting Facebook cooperated in the American security state's data sweeps. (How many "likes" did the NSA get today, eh?)

According to a story in siliconvalley.com, Facebook's Swedish server farm is located on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Mark Zuckerberg's version of Green Acres happens to be near major hydroelectric dams, an essential need for energy-hungry servers. Sweden's northern reaches also happen to be chilly, and high performance servers require constant, cool temperatures to run at maximum efficiency.

The siliconvalley.com piece noted some Swedes questioning their Facebook data's privacy. European laws tend to be far more restrictive than American regulations regarding data privacy. The Swedes may have reason to worry. One critic claimed that the data Facebook collects in Sweden is "mirrored" on US-based servers. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we have a more definitive sense of just how private American data is.

MOOC Inroads Stir Cal University Faculty Protest Letter

Image: insidehighered.com

The insular world of higher education was overdue for an institutional earthquake. When faculty of elite universities, such as Harvard and Stanford, began their commercial foray into online education initiatives such as MOOC, the ground under smug tenured faculty throughout Academia shook. The packaging of courses available to a worldwide audience, provided by intellectual stars across the academic firmament, led to the potential destabilization of higher ed's lesser lights' stature and value. Given Academia's cynical, relentless tuition and fee increases over the years, any doubt about the financial value of a tenured professor's "required" course and autocratic program requirements would be problematic to those whose "workload" includes paid summer-long vacations, paid sabbaticals, business development activities beneficial to the university and to the prof (a/k/a grants), and other activities that do not directly involve (heaven help us) instructing a generation of students.

For university administrators, tech's high priests, and the shadow world of "privatized" higher ed, the weakness of a professor's value proposition screamed for a profit-oriented "solution." MOOCs were, in some ways, made to order to resolve this conundrum. While positioned as game changers by well-intentioned university-based educators, the notions of profit and control were rarely discussed. Rather, MOOCs were characterized as the 21st Century version of "power to the people." Did anyone say "lifetime learning?"

Reporter Katy Murphy(photo: twitter.com)

Well, Academia' professorial B-list finally woke up to MOOC's implications for their jobs, their institutions, and (ahem) students. Recently, San Jose State University's philosophy department sent an open letter protesting their school's embrace of MOOC. The downloadable letter, included in Oakland Tribune reporter Katy Murphy's story on the topic,  provides cogent points regarding the MOOC encroachment into what had been the philosophy department's once-sacred grove. The story was picked up by the Mercury News, based in San Jose and in the heart of Silicon Valley.

While I don't agree with all positions the letter asserts, the document does present issues that should be considered, argued, and openly considered.

Understanding the impact and implications of MOOC leads to a broader inquiry into some of high tech's darker corners. Data mining, privacy usurpation, education as a handmaiden to business imperatives, depersonalized intellectual development -- all of these issues are at the heart of a data-driven nightmare that triumphalist technophiles are trumpeting as desirable directions for our society.

While it's difficult to sympathize with the San Jose State philosophy staff, they have raised the battle flag. What's needed is an articulate, persuasive position that questions tech's breezy assumptions regarding human behavior and the industry's dismissive preference for total power. It is individuals who should be in control of their destiny, not an algorithm written by someone who values data architecture and statistically-based mumbo jumbo over the human heart's poetic mysteries and our infinite realizations of beauty.

Feds Extend Spy Probes Into Citizens' Banking Data

For some time, the privacy rights of Americans has been depicted as a "fringe" issue. Its strongest advocates have tended to be connected to the Tea Party or to the Occupy movement. The Occupy crowd found out just how quickly their privacy wasn't worth a damn. What really mattered was social control and the perpetuation of a fraudulent sense of class harmony, notably in the supposedly liberal bastion of New York City.

The Obama Administration has been something less than progressive regarding privacy rights. The federal government's ambivalence comes across in matters of "national security," the boundaries of which remain as ill-defined as the more remote areas of the Mexico-US border. The basic notion appears to be that just about anything in one's personal life is fair game to investigate, collect, and keep indefinitely. Anything labeled "national security" trumps due process.

This disturbing trend is only gathering momentum. A Reuters story picked up (ironically) in today's Chicago Tribune claims the Obama Administration is creating a plan that would allow US spy agencies "full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country..."

The Big Brotherish scheme is unsurprisingly cloaked in national security imperatives. The idea is to follow the money and snag the forces of evil. This is hardly a novel idea. The question isn't whether the proposed snooping will be effective; the doubt stems from the plan's erosion of fundamental democratic rights. Relying on a government's good intentions, from those who think they know what's best, is a dangerous road for a democracy to travel.

FAA Plans Six Domestic Test Sites for Drones

Someone who invested in drone manufacture must be very happy these days. The unmanned flying devices, once the military's newest and quite effective toy, has become embraced by domestic law enforcement constituencies, corporate interests, and institutional users. The demand for drones is so hot that the FAA is ready to open the gates to widespread use in the United States.

According to a report in The Washington Post, the federal agency has requested permission to open a half-dozen drone test sites across the country. Apparently, the FAA plan is to have states compete for the "honor" of housing a drone test site.

Drone prototype/United Kingdom
(photo and related video: guardian.co.uk)

The Post article notes the enormous amount of money behind the "must have a drone" movement. "Industry experts," the Post observed, "predict the takeoff of a multibillion-dollar market for civilian drones as soon as the FAA completes regulations to make sure they don't pose a safety hazard to other aircraft."

The FAA has supposedly cared about individual privacy in this matter, including a stipulation that each test center follow relevant federal and state laws "and make a privacy policy publicly available."

That tricky tray of regulations and good intentions is unlikely to offer a great deal of tangible privacy. In the meantime, people will experience a continued erosion of their privacy. What happens, for example, when a tabloid hires a drone to photograph celebrities? Or a private detective agency rents some time to document the movements of a suspect? Or a social media firm decides to provide "real time" images from public areas, such as a sports stadium? (Air rights could become a significant legal issue in those cases.) While one could argue the FAA would simply deny access to sensitive or high-profile venues, one could also suggest that everything has a price. What would you pay for drone-free privacy?

Mark Zuckerberg's Sister Posts "Private" Facebook Photo That Became "Public"

Oops :)

Recently, Randi Zuckerberg (a/k/a "Mark's sister") posted a photo she intended for viewing only with her Facebook "friends." Well, thanks to Facebook's new "poke" device, a person one degree of separation from Ms. Zuckerberg saw the photo. Before you could say "privacy policy," the photo became the principal message of a tweet.

In a delicious twist of irony, Mark's sister was, ahem, unhappy with this alleged breach of social network etiquette. She apparently was less unhappy with the opaque rigamarole known as Facebook's privacy policy, a situation that contributed to Ms. Zuckerberg's contretemps.

The story, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, was picked up in today's siliconvalley.com. Who said the day after Christmas was a "dead" news day?

Targeted Advertising and Personal Data

This is an important topic that I can only address in the briefest form tonight. A post in siliconvalley.com notes that Amazon and MasterCard are beginning to sell user data to advertisers. Both firms claim their data is aggregated and anonymous. We'll see.

The post's author, Levi Sumagaysay, accurately analogized data to 19th Century oil. That comparison is spot on.

Trust Lost: From Nixon to Google

Earlier today, a widely circulated report noted a Stanford University researcher's findings regarding Google's circumvention of Apple privacy safeguards. To put it mildly, the episode adds to Google's collective black eye over privacy. (Google's ex-CEO Eric Schmidt's announcement today of his intention to sell over two billion in Google stock seemed particularly ill-timed.) However, it would be fatuous to assume such privacy violations were unique to the Mountain View search giant. The sense, from Facebook's outrageous rape of privacy to the everyday data mining that American technocrats are convinced are their entitlement, is that Silicon Valley finds privacy rights simply inconvenient to their firms' ambitions.

It is ironic that Silicon Valley -- a hotbed of libertarian political philosophy -- should treat privacy so cavalierly. A previous generation understood how profoundly invasive and erosive electronic "data collection" -- a/k/a snooping -- can be. I was reminded of this when I read a rather truculent opinion piece in today's Miami Herald. The article, by Glenn Garvin, complained about what the author claimed were the less than virtuous motives of Richard Nixon's nemesis, Deep Throat.

Garvin alleged that Deep Throat, who was the FBI's numero due at the time of the Watergate incident, wanted to become the next J. Edgar Hoover. To that end, Deep Throat used his leaks to reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to as leverage to ease out DT's bureaucratic obstacles. At that time, privacy was still something Americans of any political persuasion guarded. The notion that a widespread invasion of privacy, managed by a Mafia-like network within the federal government's executive branch, could seize control of the nation was a shivering thought. It was as if the very foundation of American political freedom and hope was being slowly strangled.

Nixon was stopped, though not easily and especially not without resentment from conservatives who saw Tricky Dick's denouement as a plot hatched in the editorial offices of "liberal" newspapers. The current situation, in which fabulously rich enterprises apparently simply flout any inconvenient privacy statutes in their lust for advertising and data dominance, is much more upsetting than Nixon's attempted overthrow of the Constitution.

Who will stand up to Silicon Valley?

Verizon Wireless Joins Web Tracking, App Usage Party

A Server Room

According to a report in today's LA Times Technology blog, Verizon Wireless has changed its privacy policy so that users have precious little privacy remaining.

The revised Verizon Wireless guidelines enable the carrier to track a customer's "Web surfing, location, app usage, and other data-consuming behaviors...." This was done, according to Verizon Wireless, with people like you in mind. Uh-huh.

The stated rationale was that the data sharing would help Verizon Wireless (and presumably other advertisers) make "'mobile ads you see more relevant.'" Subscribers are automatically included in the "all ads, all the time" scheme; it's possible to opt-out.

Clearly, that should be the other way around, with opt-out as the default choice. I don't know about you, but my principal interest in my mobile devices is not the reception of "more relevant" ads. Of course, the behavioral information Verizon Wireless gathers is pure gold. The phone carrier isn't alone in this pursuit: data-driven firms such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon are profoundly skilled at creating algorithmically-based information gathering.

It makes me appreciate a postal letter, and its still-active privacy protections.

Study Finds Popular Websites Share User Info, E-Mail Addresses Despite Privacy Promises

The integrity of online privacy always feels wobbly. Assertions that your data is "anonymous" sounds like the cliched line "I'll respect you in the morning." Little wonder data gold miners, such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, can publicly maintain that privacy is a quaint, largely obsolete concept.

However, in this era of the data-driven nightmare, it's tough to obtain facts to substantiate anecdotal evidence or intuitive "hunches" about online privacy invasion. That's why a recent Stanford University study on the topic offers some useful, disturbing, and frankly unsurprising, findings.

The study was released at an online privacy forum in Washington today, and was covered by the San Jose Mercury News.

Among the sites noted in the study were Home Depot, NBC's main site, and Bleacher Report. Are you surprised that I didn't hot link or label those sites for my post?

Dept of Justice: Cellphone Companies Storing User Data For Years

According to a report in TheHill.com's Hillicon Valley technology blog, a Department of Justice (DOJ) report has noted that US-based cellphone carriers retain personal usage data for at least one year, and in most cases, for a far longer time.

The report was brought to light thanks to a Freedom of Information Act inquiry initiated by the American Civil Liberties Union. Ironically, the DOJ document notes that those consumers who pay their cell bills on a monthly basis have their records held longer than those who use pre-paid cards.

One reason to care about this report is the potential for hush-hush government privacy invasion via data mining. Also, cell phone providers can sell retained geographic location information to firms that base advertising on positioning patterns of individuals and defined groups. Yes, your data is very valuable. So is your privacy.