Living with the surveillance state

Their business model could really be "deceive ad agencies how useful our made up numbers really are".

> Care to elaborate on this? Calling all the metrics "a complete fabrication" is kind of incompatible (IMHO) with "businesses that depend on these advertisements"... or I didn't parse it right.

Hrm.

'businesses that depend on these advertisements'. I mean like toilet paper companies, vacuum cleaner salesmen, car companies, movie producers, and other people that purchase ads online and provide the money that 'social' websites need to thrive off of. They depend on advertisements to sell their products. They give money to advertising agencies that then buy space on popular websites.

That's the money that pays for all the bandwidth, servers, etc that companies like facebook use to attract the demographics that the advertisers want.

One thing to always keep in mind with these companies is that the primary business of companies like Google or Facebook or Twitter or whatever isn't the online services they provide you. Their primary business is selling you, the user and every bit of personal info they can get their hands on, to the advertisers. Bundling you up and creating packages that the advertisers can pick and choose from.

I used to work for a company that did this sorts of stuff successfully pre-internet. They depended on mortgage companies selling your personal data. State governments selling your personal data. Drivers license info, credit card spending habits, and all that stuff for tracking people and carving them up into demographics and worked with the Post Office to make sure that they had accurate information on people living at various addresses. Used it for junk mail.

Now that information combined with your online habits and email history they can paint a much more complete picture of you and figure out how to bundle you with other people and sell you.

It seems likely to me that there is a widespread and epidemic practice of generating false metrics in order to drive up prices for advertisers. Not just by people like Google or whatever, although they are part of it, but all the people that get kick-backs from google. Youtube users, people advertising crap on facebook, people trying to drive traffic to their blogs, etc etc. It goes top to bottom. Ranging from small time BS, to organized crime and botnets.

Once the advertising agencies, or the companies that spend the money on the advertising agencies, figure out how to accurately gauge the effect of those advertisements on the buying habits of the public then I figure there will be a significant constriction in the online service industries.

Especially if at around the same time we enter into a new stage of 'recession' in the economy. As long as people have big budgets then sometimes the main problem is just figuring out how to spend it. However that can change if corporations start having to penny pinch.

I agree with your technical points. Also consider the amount of money that companies like Facebook and Google spend on their datacentres. If we all start hosting our own data is some distributed/p2p way then not only will mobile battery life start taking a hit but essentially we're paying for the hosting ourselves, in terms of bandwidth and electricity, and redundancy and so forth. And because it's being done by individuals, you operate at lower efficiency, don't get economies of scale etc. For much of the world where the cost of energy is not negligible, this could become significant.

And indeed, no doubt some surveillance is reasonable. Which means that ultimately we're back to requiring laws to stop people from doing things which they technically can do. Which I find very amusing as it's essentially the same sorts of laws as DMCA and DRM. The only difference is that here we want such laws to be passed in order to protect citizens rather than protect "rights holders". Which explains everything about the order in which such laws were passed...

> if we accept that some surveillance is reasonable, the government will want to have a backdoor

I think we should accept that some is reasonable but only with heavy public oversight, not in secret, that is what the whole concept of warrants is trying to achieve. Any kind of government intervention or surveillance should be done in the open as a matter of public record so that we can independently scrutinize it's justification and methods.

I don't think that should require devices or services to have a backdoor, there is no requirement to make it easy or convenient to perform surveillance, I think it should be exactly the opposite. I would prefer data retention rules to prevent service providers from storing un-redacted logs and encourage them to design systems where they don't have the capability to access private keys and decrypt customer data. Safety mechanisms which protect against insider attack or data breaches should also protect against lawful surveillance.

You can still search a persons stuff with a warrant, you can still follow them around with a microphone to see who they communicate with, without jimmying all the worlds technology with backdoors.

We can share whole movies and TV series in a P2P fashion but would fail at some pictures? I don't buy it. It's starting to become trivial to add a USB hard drive to a wireless router and run Bittorrent on it or just buy a NAS and be done with it. Why would it be so hard to add some distributed social network software? The always on, always connected, distributed devices are already there. Protocols are there. Technically, this should not be that hard a problem. And even if we don't want to go the full P2P way, email is a great example for a distributed social service. Even though there are huge players in that market, they are far from the only ones and it's simple to find a small, trustworthy provider.

That leaves the social part which is also the hard part. Even with a perfectly distributed system like email, people like going to the big names.

> I guess this implies lots of data upload which doesn't work that well with current asymmetric wired connections and would "needlessly" drain the battery of mobile devices.

The data is already being uploaded, no?

Also it does not need to be a all or nothing situation. If you don't care about controlling your information then you can use whatever service. Right now all the social media stuff is 'walled gardens'. If you do things P2P and open protocols then anybody can provide any service they like and users can use whatever software they like.

Also the amount of data that people like Facebook save in their 'big data' clusters is a hell of a lot more than people actually care about or want shared. If all you want shared is your posts or pictures or links to this or that then that really isn't a whole lot.

> For a distributed community network, not only friends are required, but enough well-connected (in this case, technically) friends. That's an additional hurdle to clear.

Yes. This is the big problem.

Needs to be something like Email, that is very distributed, but have a built in way to make sure the communication is always coming from the same person/persons.

The actual identity of the person controlling the account can be confirmed or discovered through side channels if that really matters to you and the person you are communicating with. Just have to make sure that the messages are unadulterated and whatnot.

> An other problem is that if we accept that some surveillance is reasonable, the government will want to have a backdoor and then we're back to square one - what if the three letter agencies abuse the backdoor?

Screw them. I don't think that surveillance is reasonable, but I do think it's unavoidable. As long as governments continue to give these bozos money they will continue to use it to undermine our security. But that's their problem. So let them figure out how to do their job. They don't need our or anybody else's help.