Skip to main content

Vacuous Social Data Sharing

It's the not so secret, dirty secret of our modern lives. We live in a golden age of free services that make our lives interconnected on levels that our ancestors couldn't even fathom. Instantaneous realtime interactive updates and vision of someone on the other side of the planet. For free!! We really do live the utopian lifestyle, or do we? 




We are being monetized. The really insidious thing is, we like it. We crave it. Likes, follows, subscribers, retweets, pins, shares, the list goes on. We're subsumed in a culture of instant gratification and constant engagement. These "free services" have hijacked the way we think and live, all while making copious amounts of money from the personal data we all but throw at them. 

Whilst there is an innate understanding in all of us about the nature of how insidious and conniving these services are. We still gobble up every morsel of social media's bright lights and flashy features, mostly without a single thought of who or more aptly how the bill is being paid. Of course we all know how the bill is being paid, but what are we going to do? Stop using social media?! Ha! Not a chance. Encrypt our data? Sure, maybe a small handful of us use a VPN to protect from snoops and those dreaded hackers. When using a VPN our data is all safe and unsellable right? Only sort of.

VPNs are the latest placebo safety blanket we wrap ourselves in. They do encrypt your data, however only when your data is traveling from your computer or phone to the VPN server. Once your data reaches the VPN server, it's decrypted and sent on to Facebook (and the like) completely unencrypted and ripe for the selling. After all it would be a huge undertaking for social media services to establish an encrypted connection & data storage protocol for every single user...right? 


Client side encryption - from Amazon AWS infosec blog


There is no silver bullet, a first step being to anonymise the user from their data. This would allow big data to still squeeze every penny from selling and analysing our data through aggregation & on selling, but would offer at least a modicum of privacy and protection for we the digital slaves now wholly dependent on the dopamine hit from this flashy likes etc. The second would be a much more radical shifting of the monetisation model for these services to be wholly advertising based or (horror of horrors) we the end users might actually have to pay a tiny amount for the pleasure of using the admittedly brilliant services. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Reason Based Text Alignment Discovery Model

The hottest topic currently is fake news and the proliferation of disinformation. Though it would be counter to the wishes of corporations more interested in profits than human collective good, a system is sorely required to analyse text content that is shared as & undistinguishable from facts. Small statements with no backing and linking to articles written based on pure emotion rather than concrete evidence, backed by nothing aside from straw man arguments or espousing opiníon and rhetoric as law or common decree. An outline for a model that would generate a small visual graph which would allow for a glance into the substance of the content before consumption: Emotive language ratio to detailing of findings and reason based "disprove first" approach Inference of subtext and agenda of the content Links + source references count & meta score of their own merit Ratio of steel man or straw man arguments Count of balacing statements and justification/testing of hypothesi...

Galliventurer - Dreaming of a Universe

n. Galliventurer - one who adventures whilst gallivanting. We have a name. A compound of the words gallivanter & adventurer it fits the game quite nicely. It will also be the name of the player's ship (though, you may be able to have many ships throughout the game). Also trying something a little different for this project, practicing what I preach as it were. I'm actually going to plan this out a little bit before I ever actually write any code. Oddly I feel that most of my hair brain schemes of previous years have had a fast paced "rush to market before someone else thinks of this" attitude. So obviously there was no time to stop and take a moment to put any thought in before code went into editor. None of those projects ever made it out of the proof of concept phase oddly enough, no prizes for working out why. In the spirit of all this, things are different this time around. Having given it even two minutes of thought there are several issues....

My Shout - App Idea

With everyone working from home a lot more these days, especially in the face of a global pandemic with self isolation in effect in most place still, it becomes tricky to make good on that old "buy you a coffee" promise to your friends &/or coworkers. My Shout is the idea for a service to send things to people by alias only. The service would leverage home delivery services such as Menu Log, Favour, etc. but aimed at sending things to other people rather than ordering for yourself, though that would be an obvious function of the service. The address and location details of the person are only known to the service and hidden from others, it would be a breeze to then be able to gift things to your friends, coworkers, or even favourite creator, etc. that is halfway across the country or even the world without knowing their address.  Once a "gift" has been sent the recipient gets a notification and can schedule when to get the gift, or even exchange to an equal valu...