Blown To Bits

Archive for September, 2008

Google Chrome Privacy Update

Thursday, September 4th, 2008 by Harry Lewis
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Google has changed its terms of service for its new Web browser so that it no longer claims the right to use your content in its advertising. This fixes a problem about which we blogged yesterday. CNET story here. It seems the old language was just cut and pasted — with specific intention or not — from those for some other Google services.

Getting Your Postal Mail by Email

Thursday, September 4th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

Fewer and fewer people pay their bills by writing checks and putting them in the mail; the payments go electronically. The bills themselves arrive electronically if you want; that’s certainly the way your utility and credit card companies would prefer, given the price of postage. Your daughter in Omaha certainly doesn’t send you a postal letter, unless you are both quite mature; she sends you email, or texts you.

But postal mail still arrives. From your plumber, probably. Your real estate tax bill hasn’t gone electronic either. Official legal and business communications aren’t trusted to email, for very good reasons. Unless email is encrypted, it’s not secure, and it’s spoof-able.

Of course, paper mail demands postage and the slaughter of trees. But another problem, more serious sometimes, is that you may not be there to receive it. You could be at your summer place, or on a long business trip, or even on an extended stay in a hospital. And that creates a business opportunity.

As David Pogue reports in a terrific column in today’s New York Times, there are now services to turn your incoming postal mail into bits and deliver the bits to you electronically (not by insecure email, but through log-in to a secure web site). Bingo. One of the services,¬†earthclassmail.com, scans just the envelope first and asks you whether you want them to open the envelope and scan the contents. You can have the physical mail forwarded to you, recycled, or shredded.

Of course, you have to give your correspondents your earthclassmail address, which can be a P.O. box, or a nice office address in New York or San Francisco. (That costs a little more money, but not nearly as much as a nice office would cost in New York or San Fran.)

These services (the competing service is¬†paperlesspobox.com) fill a special niche. Depending on the price, I might consider using one of them myself, so I don’t miss anything important while I’m away on vacation. But the niche seems to be a momentary fracture caused by the digital explosion — in five years, I’d guess, business and even personal correspondence practices will have evolved in some way that will make these services irrelevant. Right now we’re at a sort of wrinkle in time, where the physical world has not fully evolved into its parallel bits universe.

A Privacy Surprise in Google’s New Browser

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 by Harry Lewis

Google has released a new web browser, called Chrome. I haven’t tried it yet (at the moment only the Windows version has been released). David Pogue has a rundown in the New York Times. It sounds great.

In the spirit of watching what your bits are doing, I thought I’d note one interesting clause in the Chrome Terms of Service (the legal prose to which you have to agree before you can download the software):

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.

Perhaps there are similar clauses in the agreement you have to click before you can use Internet Explorer; I don’t know. But my non-lawyerly reading of that says: If you use our browser to upload to Picasa the cute picture you took¬†of your roommate¬†at the party¬†with a jug in each hand, we can use that photo in our national advertising campaign. Not privacy-friendly, and I’m surprised that Google thinks it’s necessary to assert such a sweeping right to use your text and images for commercial purposes without asking your permission at the time.

Thanks to Ina Fried of CNET for pointing this out.

Bits Change the Campaign

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 by Harry Lewis

In important ways, this is really the first digital presidential campaign, and the news about Sarah Palin provides some thought-provoking examples.

First, the McCain campaign explains that the disclosure of her daughter’s pregnancy was required to dispel the wild rumors being circulated by liberal Internet bloggers about who was the mother of her own four-month-old. Someone needs to trace back who started this on the Internet. I quickly looked at the Daily Kos and both the rumor and skepticism about the rumor are discussed there. (By the way, wouldn’t a birth certificate have sufficed to put that rumor to rest? But I digress.)

The official reaction of the McCain campaign is that this is the sort of thing that happens to families. Some conservative columnists are turning this news into another way in which the Republicans can identify with ordinary Americans. That is post-Internet Republicanism. At another time, they surely would have done there best to hide it.

But you can’t hide stuff any more, as we repeatedly explain in Blown to Bits. Not your silly college-dorm photos (that’s Sarah Palin looking like the college student she was, with a T shirt that reads “I may be broke but I’m not flat busted”). Not the Facebook silliness of the boy who got your daughter pregnant (from the NY Post; thanks to Richard Bradley for point this out). We are all silly when we are young, but having all the silliness permanently recorded and universally accessible is something new.

The spread of this kind of stuff can be childish and mean. It raises the question of whether McCain’s staff was aware of the Internet materials like these that turned up very quickly after the announcement of his VP pick.

But the exposure of these personal details does seem to be making politics less distant. This campaign has so much else going on with it that it’s going to be hard to separate out the effect of the Internet from other factors. But it seems certain that politicians are going to be unable to be quite so pretentious in the future. Too much will be known about them too quickly — especially if they, like Sarah Palin, were born after 1960.

And the public is going to have to decide what it thinks about the disclosure of things it rarely used to find out about. As we say in the book, we really don’t know what we think about privacy any more.

ISPs Back Away From Packet Inspection

Monday, September 1st, 2008 by Harry Lewis

We’ve blogged before about the advantages to advertisers to know your search habits, and more generally, what sort of thing interests you, as those preferences are revealed by your Internet usage. NebuAd is a pioneer in “deep packet inspection,” opening the “envelopes” of data being sent to you to report back to the ISP what’s in them. The privacy issues surrounding this practice have come up for congressional scrutiny; see previous blog posts here and here.

The AP reports good news today: the pressure is working. ISP’s are deciding not to renew their arrangements with NebuAd in such numbers that the company’s financial status is touchy. Boston Globe story here: Privacy concerns may derail web tracking venture.

Once again, if there were competition and full disclosure, the federal government would not have to get involved. But neither operates robustly enough to restrain the industry, and the technology for this kind of unexpected snooping on our behavior is getting better and better. So laws are going to be needed, in spite of this apparent short-term victory.