A Little Privacy Please

Focker!!!

Tom Cruise was once in a wacky little movie called Minority Report. I distinctly remember a scene where he strolls through a mall and the shops fling pitches at him … using his name. Creepy! Apparently the stores were able to scan his retina, retrieve his preferences and so forth, and all literally in the blink of an eye with time to tailor a persusion attempt tailored just for him.

“Psst. Tommy boy! Over here, over here! Listen, between you and me, we both know you read Fifty Cups of Earl Grey. Come on, man. There’s no sense in denying it. If that’s the way you roll, come on in! Don’t worry, we’ll keep it on the D-L. Check out this new all-leather KitchenAid Mixer complete with eye-bolts and D-ring snap ons, if you know what I mean.”

I don’t know about you but that kind of technology scares the shit out of me.

“Psst. Tom!! Over here. Did you know it has been over six months since your last purchase of Depends Brand Incontinence Products? It’s way past time for refill, buddy!!!”

Oh shit.

T-shirt ideas circa 2002

My wife has suggested I put less juice into my posts on the weekend, so here goes…

I’ve been cleaning out some old data. It’s a big job since I’ve accumulated a lot over the last two decades. Today I found a little snippet of a text file from September 2002 and felt it was quite telling in light of how my blog has turned out.

Apparently I haven’t changed all that much.

Hyppo and Critter: Dealing with loss

Scientists discover Google

In the spirit of Don’t Be Evil, I’ve got something to say.

My bad reputation

First I had bad credit. It seems I wasn’t consuming in quite the right way.

Now I’ll have the opportunity to improve on that. Woots for me.

WTF is credit, anyway? I like to think of it like this:

Your neighbor sits on his porch and writes down every time he sees you do something. What a douchebag. He writes down when you pick up your newspaper, get the mail, mow the lawn, leave for work, get home from work, and anything else he might be able to see.

He’s not breaking any laws. He just sits on his porch and records information that you’ve chosen to share with the public. You know, by being alive and doing things and shit.

Additionally, he’s doing this for every house on the street within his field of view. He can’t see everywhere, though, so he hires people to do it on every street in your town.

He does this every day, 24/7, 365 days a year.

All of this data he has collected gets fed into a massive computer and creates something he calls your “file.” If you pay him a fee, he’ll allow you to look at it. If anyone else pays him a fee, he’ll allow them to look at it, too. He’s not discriminating as long as you bring the green stuff.

And that’s pretty much credit. A sleazy, greedy neighbor recording information that is, by necessity, considered to be “public” but is really none of their bloody business.

But that’s old skool. Old and busted, Experian! (One of the “Big 3″ credit bureaus and the wonderful folks who bring you shitty mortgage ads on the internet and sneaky “free” credit report commercials on TV.)

What could be newer than credit?

Consider the world that eBay brought us. (Now a little old and busted themselves.) The feedback world.

If you were buying and selling on eBay, how in the world could you know who to trust? After all, these were strangers, not stores.

Those little feedbacks (positive and negative) became a reputation system that enabled people to determine if they could trust each other – or not.

Reputation and identity on the internet is about to become a very big deal. I’m guessing your online persona along with your avatar and publicly-identifiable information (harvested by the likes of Google, Facebook, and their ilk) will form your new “file,” a reputation “credit” score for the future.

Want to participate in the next big thing, like co-ops that share cars to produce organic crops used to produce gluten-free beer? You’ll need to bring your online reputation if you want to play well with others.

Imagine. Your every status update, blog post, and tweet will be recorded and live on. The record you create today will be online and last longer than it would take for Yucca Mountain to be a vacation spot. And the way you perform on every social media, barter, buy, sell, trade transaction will become a part of your permanent reputation file.

Remember the joke about trying to buy a pizza but the debit card knew your cholesterol score? That’s going to seem like small potatoes.

Gee, I wonder. Should I give a flying shit about my online reputation or not?

Anyone have examples of this reputation thing coming down the pike? Share it in the comment section below…

Cloud Ceding

A representation of The Cloud

cede
verb [trans.]
give up (power or territory)

The Cloud.

Here’s your first clue about what you need to know about the so-called Cloud. They want it, they want you using it, they want you relying on it, and they want you paying for it. And they want it bad.

That’s pretty much all you need to know.

If you need more, consider this. Potentially tens of thousands of Gmail users were affected earlier this week when they lost their emails stored in The Cloud. Google said the outage was caused be a “faulty software update.”

Restoration of lost emails took a bit of extra time because Google had to use an old-fashioned tape backup. It seems that even though several electronic copies of emails are made, they were also wiped out by the glitch. Luckily there were also tape backups that were unaffected by the glitch since they were stored offline.

From the Wall Street Journal:

This is a black eye for companies like Google, which is actively trying to convince businesses and governments to switch their on-premise email systems to online services, which it promotes as less expensive and more reliable. In a blog post a year ago, Google boasted about how its Google Apps customers don’t need to worry about protecting their data. “They get best-in-class disaster recovery for free, no matter their size.”

So what is this so-called “cloud?” Basically it mans your applications and/or data are stored on remote servers on the internet. As opposed to your applications and/or data being stored physically on your own computer.

As with most things in computing (and life) there are pros and cons to the scheme.

The pros include things like accessibility and data security. On the cloud you can access your stuff from most any computer in the world. Want to check your email while at the airport? No problem. Listen to your music library while out of the home? That’s possible, too. And the services that perform these functions usually do things like automatically backup your data, too. They maintain all equipment and perform sofware updates, too.

The cons are not that trivial, despite what they want you to believe. What if your internet connection goes sideways? As long as it’s out you have no access to anything. It is extremely frustrating when I try to access something on the cloud and it doesn’t work. It is a very helpless feeling. Is the problem my computer? The operating system? The browser? The ISP? The internet routing? The application server? Good luck figuring that out. Meanwhile you just sits.

Another con is privacy. Sure, we can trust companies like Google with our emails, but the point is, they have the access. They can literally do what they want. Companies in the cloud have buried in their terms clauses that give them the right to share your data to trusted third parties and “partners.” And every once in a while there are stories in the news about renegade employees with access to data who did something they shouldn’t. Or companies may change policies and do things with our data that we don’t want. Or hackers can get in and steal our information. The larger the database the more attractive the target to hackers.

Recently I’ve been noticing another element of the cloud that has been causing me frustration. This is the distributed nature of most everything on the internet.

When you load a typical web page, what do you see? It might look like a page hosted on your favorite service, like WordPress, but in reality pieces of that page may be served from other locations. Big web sites distribute load to other servers. They might have one server for web pages, another for images, another for applications, and another for databases. The architecture is such that each server may be protected by its own physical firewall. (Depending on the size of the web site.)

It’s also common for cookies and other little applications, like advertising, to be originate from servers that are remote to the page you are viewing.

I actually experienced this yesterday. WordPress pages were working but there was some stange and undefinable problem on the internet that prevented Gravatar images from loading. Some of those distributed remote pieces weren’t working for me.

So when the internet gets goofy, you may only partially be able to surf, and all of the distributed pieces might not work and everything will look wonky.

If I remember correctly, Microsoft was a visionary when it came to the cloud, although I don’t think they called it that back then. What Microsoft wanted was your applications, like Word and Excel, hosted on the internet. No longer would you have to buy and install these applications on your own computer. Instead you’d sign up and use the applications as a service. With a monthly fee, of course. In the end, Microsoft would stand to make a lot more money than by merely having customers pay for a one-time purchase of software.

“Microsoft applications” would then become just another item in your monthly budget. Gas, phone, electric, water, and oh yeah, Microsoft. “Honey? Did we pay the Microsoft Word bill this month, yet?”

Horrors!

Here I am already hip deep in the cloud. In addition to Gmail there is also Google Docs, Dropbox, Toggl and more.

Gmail is a free service. Which begs the question: Who is the “customer?” I bet it’s not you, the humble user. Nope, the true customer of Gmail is the advertisers. They pay the bills. In fact, does Google make any guarantees or warranties at all about the service to the end user? I just read their terms and I couldn’t find anything about. I did notice, however, these little tidbits:

YOU EXPRESSLY UNDERSTAND AND AGREE THAT YOUR USE OF THE SERVICES IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK AND THAT THE SERVICES ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE.”

…

IN PARTICULAR, GOOGLE, ITS SUBSIDIARIES AND AFFILIATES, AND ITS LICENSORS DO NOT REPRESENT OR WARRANT TO YOU THAT DEFECTS IN THE OPERATION OR FUNCTIONALITY OF ANY SOFTWARE PROVIDED TO YOU AS PART OF THE SERVICES WILL BE CORRECTED.

Source: Google Terms of Service (linked from this page)

Doesn’t that make you feel all warm and fuzzy about trusting the cloud with years of your email data? In other words, Google is saying, “We don’t have to fix anything if we don’t want to.” Sure, this time they will fix the Gmail outage in the name of good public relations. Especially because they want you to buy into the cloud more and more. But what if it was something they couldn’t fix? Google would then say, “Too bad, so sad. What? Didn’t you have a backup? You have gots to have a backup!”

Look now who’s running a TV campaign promoting the cloud? Yep. Microsoft. To bring this back full circle, just remember two things: Who wants this and how bad do they want it?

Isn’t that really all you need to know about how good the cloud will really be for you?

To the cloud!

You shall not email

One of the primary functions of an ecommerce company is to take orders over the phone. These orders are placed by people who are too chickenshit and/or stupid and/or obstinate to do it themselves over the internet.

A common theme among these people is that they don’t like to tell you their email address. As if that could somehow be used against them in some terrible way or as if just a single extra piece of spam would be the tipping point to ruining their lives.

So these folks call up on the telephone to place their orders. And thus begins what I like to call a dance that leads to the creation of order records that are rife with errors. Did you say F or S? M or N? Another commonality these people have is that they like to speak quickly and don’t like repeating themselves. One thing is certain: By the time we’re done transcribing what was said there are errors.

Then we ask, “Can I have your email address? That is where we’ll send the order confirmation and the tracking number so you can track your own shipment.”

“What do you want that for?” the customer will ask warily.

Sigh. We’ve been down this road a million times. “I just explained all that.”

“Will you spam me? Will you sell it?”

“No,” I say for the 27th million time in my life. “We only send you emails pertaining to your order. We never sell, give away or lease email addresses to anyone. Ever.” The truth is we’re too horribly inept, unorganized and understaffed to do anything proactive like work our email lists. So by default your email is very safe with us whether you trust that or not.

“Well, you can’t have it! Won’t tells you, we will. Never!”

Fine. Whatever. Shut the hell up, okay?

The email enables, among other things, the order confirmation. This is a little bit of info, sent to the email address, that confirms things like what’s in the order, the amount charged, and where the order will be shipped.

Not once in my illustrious 10-year ecommerce career has a customer ever received this order confirmation, carefully checked it, then called in to report an error. At least not before the order has shipped. They’re real good about doing so the next day once it’s too late. “Wowie! You guys sure ship purdy fast.”

The order confirmation email is a vital part of the process to find, intercept and fix costly errors before an order has shipped. Before we ship fixes are free. After we ship fixes are expensive.

Then, these same people who claimed not to have an email address will call us every day for an update on their stuff. “Where’s my order now?” they’ll demand to know.

“If you provide your email address I could send the tracking information along and you could track it real-time all by yourself…” I helpfully suggest.

“No. We do not wants that! Just tell us where our precious is located now. Track it for us, you will. Yesssssssss!”

Nothing says job satisfaction like extra phone calls from idiots made possible through customer paranoia. All over their oh-so-sacred email address, of all things!

What gets me is that when you ask for the credit card information, they have absolutely no problem with that. They’ll hand it over like it’s a red-hot potato. They’ve been well trained to be efficient customers in the consumption machine. They know we need the number itself, the name on the card, the expiration date, the billing address, and the “security code” on the back. Har.

And they’ll willingly line up to hand over this information to a complete stranger on the phone. Yeah, like that’s any safer than transmitting the information across the internet.

A lot of customers call in out of fear of putting their credit card information into the computer and/or the internet. So they give it to us over the phone. We then promptly do two things that would probably fry their bacon. First, we write it down on a piece of paper. (Everything required to complete a credit card transaction on one handy document. Isn’t that nice? Which would never have happened if they just ordered themselves.) And the second thing: We then punch all of that credit card information right into that same damn computer and/or internet.

Ha ha! And they thought they were being safe. Not only did we just do the one thing they had hoped to avoid, but it passed through an extra human along the way. Talk about safety!

So here’s to you paranoid customers! Keep being magnificent.