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<title>Why selling personal data is a bad idea</title>
<link>https://doc.searls.com/2024/03/27/why-selling-personal-data-is-a-bad-idea/</link>
<comments>https://doc.searls.com/2024/03/27/why-selling-personal-data-is-a-bad-idea/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Doc Searls]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 27 Mar 2024 20:18:43 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[adtech]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[advertising]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Business]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[intention economy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[money]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Personal clouds]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[personal data]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[privacy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[regulation]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Subscriptions]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[VRM]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://doc.searls.com/?p=16684</guid>
<description><![CDATA[This post is for the benefit of anyone wondering about, researching, or going into business on the proposition that selling one’s own personal data is a good idea. Here are some of my learnings from having studied this proposition myself for the last twenty years or more. The business does exist. See eleven companies in […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure id="attachment_16685" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-16685" style="width: 1024px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-16685" src="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/people-data-harvesting.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="653" srcset="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/people-data-harvesting.jpg 1024w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/people-data-harvesting-300x191.jpg 300w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/people-data-harvesting-768x490.jpg 768w " sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-16685" class="wp-caption-text">Prompt: “a field of many different kinds of people being harvested by machines and turned into bales of fertilizer.” Via Microsoft CoPilot | Designer.</figcaption></figure>
<p>This post is for the benefit of anyone wondering about, researching, or going into business on the proposition that selling one’s own personal data is a good idea. Here are some of my learnings from having studied this proposition myself for the last twenty years or more.</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>The business does exist</strong>. See eleven companies in <a href="https://cyber.harvard.edu/projectvrm/VRM_Development_Work#Markets_for_personal_data">Markets for personal data</a> listed among <a href="https://cyber.harvard.edu/projectvrm/VRM_Development_Work">many other VRM-ish businesses</a> on the <a href="https://cyber.harvard.edu/projectvrm/">ProjectVRM wiki</a>.</li>
<li><strong>The business category harvesting the most personal data is <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=adtech&ia=web">adtech (aka ad tech</a> and “programmatic”) advertising, which is the surveillance-based side of the advertising business</strong>. It is at the heart of what <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshana_Zuboff">Shoshana Zuboff</a> calls <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism">surveillance capitalism</a>, and is now <a href="https://www.marketingcharts.com/advertising-trends/programmatic-and-rtb-111372">most of</a> what advertising has become online. It’s roughly a trillion-dollar business. It is also nothing like advertising of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Men">Mad Men</a> kind. (Credit where due: old-fashioned advertising, aimed at whole populations, gave us nearly all the brand names known to the world). As I put it in <a href="https://dsearls.medium.com/separating-advertisings-wheat-and-chaff-47858adfcb20#.i6msx57rv">Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff</a>, <em>Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself</em>.</li>
<li><strong>Adtech pays nothing to people for their data or data about them</strong>. Not personally. Google may pay carriers for traffic data harvested from phones, and corporate customers of auctioned personal data may pay publishers for moments in which ads can be placed in front of tracked individuals’ ears or eyeballs. Still, none of that money has ever gone to individuals for any reason, including compensation for the insults and inconveniences the system requires. So there is little if any existing infrastructure on which paying people for personal data can be scaffolded up. Nor are there any policy motivations. In fact,</li>
<li><strong>Regulations have done nothing to slow down the juggernaut of growth in the adtech industry</strong>. For Google, Facebook, and other adtech giants, paying huge fines for violations (of the GDPR, the CCPA, the DMA, or whatever) is just the cost of doing business. In fact, the GDPR compliance services business is itself n the multi-$billion range, and growing fast. In fact,</li>
<li><strong>Regulations have made the experience of using the Web worse for everyone</strong>. Thank the GDPR for all the consent notices subtracting value from every website you visit while adding cognitive overhead and other costs to site visitors and operators. In nearly every case, these notices are ways for site operators to obey the letter of the GDPR while violating its spirit. And, although all these agreements are contracts, you have no record of what you’ve agreed to. So they are worse than worthless.</li>
<li><strong>Tracking people without their clear and conscious invitation or a court order is wrong on its face</strong>. Period. Full stop. That tracking is The Way Things Are Done online does not make it right, any more than driving drunk or smoking in crowded elevators was just fine in the 1950s. When the Digital Age matures, decades from now, we will look back on our current time as one thick with extreme moral compromises that were finally corrected after the downsides became clear and more ethically sound technologies and economies came along. One of those corrections will be increasing personal agency rather than just corporate capacities. In fact,</li>
<li><strong>Increasing personal independence and agency will be good for markets, because</strong> <strong>free customers are more valuable than captive ones</strong>. Having ways to gather, keep, and make use of personal data is an essential first step toward that goal. We have made very little progress in that direction so far. (Yes, there are lots of good projects listed <a href="https://cyber.harvard.edu/projectvrm/VRM_Development_Work">here</a>, but there we still a long way to go.)</li>
<li><strong>Businesses being “user-centric” will do nothing to increase customers’ value to themselves and the marketplace</strong>. First, as long as we remain mere “users” of others’ systems, we will be in a subordinate and dependent role. While there are lots of things we can do in that role, we will be able to do far more if we are free and independent agents. Because of that,</li>
<li><strong>We need technologies that create and increase personal independence and agency</strong>. Personal data stores (aka warehouses, vaults, clouds, life management platforms, lockers, and pods) are one step toward doing that. Many have been around for a long time: <a href="http://projectvrm.org">ProjectVRM</a> currently lists thirty-three under the <a href="https://cyber.harvard.edu/projectvrm/VRM_Development_Work#Personal_Data_Stores">Personal Data Stores</a> heading. Some have been there a long time. The problem with all of them is that they are still too focused on what people do as social beings in the Web 2.0 world, rather than on what they can do for themselves, both to become more well-adjusted human beings and more valuable customers in the marketplace. For that,</li>
<li><strong>It will help to have <em>independent</em> personal AIs</strong>. These are AI systems that work for us, exclusively. None exist yet. When they do, they will help us manage the personal data that fully matters:
<ul>
<li>Contacts—records and relationships</li>
<li>Calendars—where we’ve been, what we’ve done, with whom, where, and when</li>
<li>Health records and relationships with providers, going back all the way</li>
<li>Financial records and relationships, including past and present obligations</li>
<li>Property we have and where it is, including all the small stuff</li>
<li>Shopping—what we’ve bought, plan to buy, or might be thinking about,</li>
<li>Subscriptions—what we’re paying for, when they end or renew, what kind of deal we’re locked into, and what better ones might be out there.</li>
<li>Travel—Where we’ve been, what we’ve done, with whom, and when</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ol>
<p>Personal AIs are today where personal computers were fifty years ago. Nearly all the AI news today is about modern mainframe businesses: giants with massive data centers churning away on ingested data of all kinds. But some of these models are open sourced and can be made available to any of us for our own purposes, such as dealing with the abundance of data in our own lives that is mostly out of control. Some of it has never been digitized. With AI help it could be.</p>
<p>I’m in a time crunch right now. So, if you’re with me this far, read <a href="https://doc.searls.com/2018/09/18/data/">We can do better than selling our data</a>, which I wrote in 2018 and remains as valid as ever. Or dig <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Intention-Economy-When-Customers-Charge/dp/1422158527"><em>The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge </em></a>(Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), which Tim Berners Lee says inspired <a href="https://solidproject.org/">Solid</a>. I’m thinking about following it up. If you’re interested in seeing that happen, let me know.</p>
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">16684</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>The Online Local Chronicle</title>
<link>https://doc.searls.com/2024/03/19/the-online-local-chronicle/</link>
<comments>https://doc.searls.com/2024/03/19/the-online-local-chronicle/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Doc Searls]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 19 Mar 2024 22:00:22 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Bloomington]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Journalism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[News Commons]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://doc.searls.com/?p=16667</guid>
<description><![CDATA[After we came to Bloomington in the summer of 2021, we rented an apartment by Prospect Hill, a quiet dome of old houses just west of downtown. There we were surprised to hear, nearly every night, as many police and ambulance sirens as we’d heard in our Manhattan apartment. Helicopters too. Soon we realized why: […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure id="attachment_16668" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-16668" style="width: 1024px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-16668" src="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/2022_10_15_bloomington-hospital-demolition-1024x523.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="523" srcset="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/2022_10_15_bloomington-hospital-demolition-1024x523.jpg 1024w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/2022_10_15_bloomington-hospital-demolition-300x153.jpg 300w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/2022_10_15_bloomington-hospital-demolition-768x392.jpg 768w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/2022_10_15_bloomington-hospital-demolition-1536x785.jpg 1536w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/2022_10_15_bloomington-hospital-demolition-2048x1046.jpg 2048w " sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-16668" class="wp-caption-text">Bloomington Hospital on October 15, 2022, right after demolition began.</figcaption></figure>
<p><em>After we came to Bloomington in the summer of 2021, we rented an apartment by <a href="https://www.prospecthillneighborhood.org/">Prospect Hill</a>, a quiet dome of old houses just west of downtown. There we were surprised to hear, nearly every night, as many police and ambulance sirens as we’d heard in our Manhattan apartment. Helicopters too. Soon we realized why: the city’s hospital was right across 2nd Street, a couple blocks away. In 2022, the beautiful new <a href="https://iuhealth.org/find-locations/iu-health-bloomington-hospital">IU Health Bloomington Hospital</a> opened up on the far side of town, and the sounds of sirens were replaced by the sounds of heavy machinery slowly tearing the old place down.</em></p>
<p><em>Being a photographer and a news junkie, I thought it would be a good idea to shoot the place often, to compile a chronicle of demolition and replacement, as I had done for <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/infrastructure/albums/72177720297048648">the transition of Hollywood Park to SoFi Stadium</a> in Inglewood, California. But I was too busy doing other things, and all I got was that photo above, which I think <a href="https://twitter.com/chronicallydave">Dave Askins</a> would <a href="https://thebloomingtonchronicle.org/index.php/Main_Page">categorize</a> as a small contribution to <a href="https://thebloomingtonchronicle.org/index.php/Category:Topical_History">topical history</a>.</em></p>
<p><em>Dave is a highly productive local journalist, and—by grace of providence for a lifelong student of journalism such as me—the deepest and most original thinker I know on the topic of what local news needs in our time—and going forward. I’ve shared some of Dave’s other ideas (and work) in the <a href="https://doc.searls.com/news-commons/">News Commons</a> series, but this time I’m turning a whole post over to him. Dig:::::</em></p>
<hr />
<p>In the same way that every little place in America used to have a printed newspaper, every little place in America could have an online local chronicle.</p>
<p>Broadly speaking, an online local chronicle is a collection of facts organized mostly in chronological order. The “pages” of the chronicle can be thought of as subsets of a community’s universal timeline of events. These online local chronicles could become the backbone of local news operations.</p>
<p>First a word about what a local chronicle is not. It is not an online encyclopedia about the little place. It’s not a comprehensive history of the place in any conventional sense. Why should it not try to be those things? Because those things are too hard to think about building from scratch. Where would you even start?</p>
<p>It is at least conceivable that an online local chronicle could be built from scratch because you start by adding new facts that are newsworthy today. A new fact added to the chronicle is a touchstone, about which anyone can reasonably ask: What came just before that?</p>
<p>A working journalist in a little place with an online local chronicle will be in a good position to do two things: (1) add new facts to the local chronicle (2) help define sets of old facts that would be useful to include in the online local chronicle.</p>
<p>A journalist who is reporting the news for a little place would think not just about writing a report of new facts for readers today. They would keep this question in mind: What collection of old facts, if they were included in the local chronicle, would have made this news report easier to write?</p>
<p>Here’s a concrete example. A recent news report written for The B Square Bulletin included a mention of a planned new jail for Monroe County. It included a final sentence meant to give readers, who might be new to that particular topic, a sense of the basic reason why anyone was thinking about building a new jail: “A consultant’s report from two and a half years ago concluded that the current jail is failing to provide constitutional levels of care.”</p>
<p>About that sentence, a reader left the following comment on the website: “I know it’s the last sentence in an otherwise informative article, but at the risk of nit-picking that sentence seems inadequate to the task of explaining the context of the notion of a new jail and the role of the federal court and the ACLU.”</p>
<p>The comment continues: “It would have been better, Dave, to link to your own excellent previous work: <a href="https://bsquarebulletin.com/2023/02/20/monroe-county-sheriff-commissioners-square-off-at-committee-meeting-aclu-lawyer-says-look-you-need-a-new-jail-everyone-knows-that/">https://bsquarebulletin.com/2023/02/20/monroe-county-sheriff-commissioners-square-off-at-committee-meeting-aclu-lawyer-says-look-you-need-a-new-jail-everyone-knows-that/</a>”</p>
<p>What this reader did was to identify a set of old facts that should be a collection (a page) in Bloomington’s local chronicle.</p>
<p>It’s one thing to identify a need to add a specific collection of facts to the local chronicle. It’s quite another to figure out who might do that. Working journalists might have time to add a new fact or two. But to expect working journalists to add all the old sets of facts would, I think, be too tall an order.</p>
<p>The idea would be to recruit volunteers to do the work of adding old facts to the online local chronicle. They could be drawn from various segments of the community—including groups that have an interest in seeing the old facts about a particular topic not just preserved, but used by working journalists to help report new facts.</p>
<p>I think many community efforts to build a comprehensive community encyclopedia have foundered, because the motivation to make a contribution to the effort is mostly philosophical: History is generally good to preserve.</p>
<p>The motivation for helping to build the online local chronicle is not some general sense of good purpose. Rather it is to help working journalists provide useful facts for anyone who in the community who is trying to make a decision.</p>
<p>That includes elected leaders. They might want to know what the reasons were at the time for building the current jail at the spot where it is now.</p>
<p>Decision makers include voters, who might be trying to decide which candidate to support.</p>
<p>Decision makers also include rank-and-file residents—who might be trying to decide where to go out for dinner and want to know what the history of health inspections for a particular restaurant are.</p>
<p>For the online local chronicle I have set up for Bloomington, there are very few pages so far. They are meant to illustrate the general concept:</p>
<div></div>
<div><a href="https://thebloomingtonchronicle.org/index.php/Main_Page">https://thebloomingtonchronicle.org/index.php/Main_Page</a></div>
<div></div>
<div>
<p>The pages are long on facts that are organized in chronological order, and short on narrative. Here are the categories that include at least one page.</p>
<p>Category: People<br />
Category: Data<br />
Category: Boards, Commissions, Councils<br />
Category: List<br />
Category: Topical History</p>
<p>==========</p>
<p>–Dave</p>
<hr />
<p><em>By the way, if you’d like to help local journalism out, read more about what Dave is up to—and what he needs—here: <a href="https://bsquarebulletin.com/about/">https://bsquarebulletin.com/about/</a></em></p>
</div>
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<item>
<title>The end of what’s on, when, and where</title>
<link>https://doc.searls.com/2024/03/19/the-end-of-whats-on-when-and-where/</link>
<comments>https://doc.searls.com/2024/03/19/the-end-of-whats-on-when-and-where/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Doc Searls]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 19 Mar 2024 15:01:09 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Art]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[data]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[history]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[radio]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[tv]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/?p=13809</guid>
<description><![CDATA[But not of who, how, and why. Start by looking here: That’s a page of TV Guide, a required resource in every home with a TV, through most of the last half of the 20th century. Every program was on only at its scheduled times. Sources were called stations, which broadcast over the air on […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>But not of <em>who</em>, <em>how</em>, and <em>why</em>. Start by looking here:</p>
<p><img decoding="async" class="aligncenter" src="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/1998_06_17_tv-guide-1024x773.png" alt="tv guide page" width="70%" height="image" /></p>
<p>That’s a page of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Guide"><em>TV Guide</em></a>, a required resource in every home with a TV, through most of the last half of the 20th century.</p>
<p>Every program was on only at its scheduled times. Sources were called stations, which broadcast over the air on channels, which one found using a dial or a display with numbers on it. Stations at their largest were regional, meaning you could only get them if you were within reach of signals on channels. To get those signals you needed an antenna on “rabbit ears” on your TV. Signals came from high on towers, buildings, or mountains, but were thwarted by other buildings, mountains, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law">the inverse square law</a>, and the inconvenient fact that the Earth is round.</p>
<p>By the time TV came along, America had already devoted its evenings to consuming scheduled</p>
<p><img decoding="async" src="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/continental-transistor-radio.jpg" alt="Continental transistor radio" width="259" height="194" align="right" hspace="7" /></p>
<p>programs on AM radio, which was the only kind at the time. After TV took over, America whole populations sat in rooms bathed in soft blue light from TV screens. Radio was repurposed for music, especially rock & roll. My first radio was the one on the right. My stations were WMCA/570, WMGM/1050, WINS/1010, WABC/770, and WKBW/1520. All of those are still on the air, but playing talk and sports. Many fewer people know that fact, or care, or listen to AM radio, or over-the-air anything, anymore. They watch and listen to glowing rectangles that connect to the nearest router, wi-fi hot spot, or cellular data site. Antennas exist, but wavelengths are so short that the antennas fit inside the rectangles.</p>
<p>The question “what’s on?” is mostly gone. “Where?” is still in play, because nobody knows what streaming service carries what you want. All the “guides”—Apple’s, Google’s, Amazon’s, everyone’s—suck, either because they’re biased to promote their own content or because there’s simply too much content and no system can cover all of it. Search engines help, but not enough.</p>
<p>The age we’re closing is the one Jeff Jarvis calls <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Gutenberg-Parenthesis-Print-Lessons-Internet/dp/1501394827"><em>The Gutenberg Parenthesis</em></a>. The age we’re entering is the <strong>Age of Optionality.</strong> It began for print with blogging, for TV with VCRs and DVRs, and for radio with podcasting and streaming. And it began to obsolesce all the media we knew, almost too well, by putting it in hands Clay Shirky told us about in 2009 with <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody_(book)">Here Comes Everybody</a></em>.</p>
<p>So what we make of it is up to all of us. We are <em>who</em>, <em>how</em>, and <em>why</em>.</p>
<p> </p>
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">13809</post-id> </item>
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<title>Happy Birthday, Mom</title>
<link>https://doc.searls.com/2024/03/13/happy-birthday-mom/</link>
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Doc Searls]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 14 Mar 2024 01:03:50 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[family]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://doc.searls.com/?p=16654</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Mom would have been 111 today. She passed in ’03 at 90, but that’s not what matters. What matters is that she was a completely wonderful human being: as good a mother, sister, daughter, cousin, friend, and teacher as you’ll find. There is a thread in Facebook (which seems to be down now) on the […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure id="attachment_16655" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-16655" style="width: 800px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-16655" src="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/mom-fish.jpg" alt="" width="800" height="687" srcset="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/mom-fish.jpg 800w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/mom-fish-300x258.jpg 300w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/mom-fish-768x660.jpg 768w " sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-16655" class="wp-caption-text">Eleanor Oman, Alaska, circa 1942</figcaption></figure>
<p>Mom would have been 111 today. She passed in ’03 at 90, but that’s not what matters.</p>
<p>What matters is that she was a completely wonderful human being: as good a mother, sister, daughter, cousin, friend, and teacher as you’ll find.</p>
<p>There is a thread in Facebook (which seems to be down now) on the subject of Mom as a third and fourth grade teacher in the Maywood New Jersey public school system. Students who inhabited her classes more than half a century ago remember her warmly and sing her praises. Maybe I’ll quote some of those later. (I’m between flights right now, but getting ready to board.)</p>
<p>Once, sitting around a fire in the commune-like place where I lived north of Chapel Hill in the mid-’70s, discussion came around to “Who is the sanest person you know?” I said “My mother.” Others were shocked, I suppose because they had issues with their moms. But I didn’t. Couldn’t. She was too wise, good, and loving. (Also too smart, quick-witted, tough, and unswayed by bullshit.)</p>
<p>Perhaps I’m idealizing too much. She had flaws, I’m sure. But not today.</p>
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">16654</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>Ripples</title>
<link>https://doc.searls.com/2024/02/21/ripples/</link>
<comments>https://doc.searls.com/2024/02/21/ripples/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Doc Searls]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 21 Feb 2024 23:15:42 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[audio]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[money]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[music]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[radio]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://doc.searls.com/?p=16613</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The song “Ripple,” by the Grateful Dead, never fails to move me. Here’s a live performance by the Dead, in 1980, on YouTube. My favorite version, however, is this one by KPIG’s Fine Swine Orchestra, recorded by Santa Cruz musicians sheltering in place during the pandemic. That’s a screen grab, above. I am pretty sure […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-bCftZG0NI"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-16614" src="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-21-at-5.19.01 PM-1024x614.png" alt="" width="1024" height="614" srcset="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-21-at-5.19.01 PM-1024x614.png 1024w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-21-at-5.19.01 PM-300x180.png 300w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-21-at-5.19.01 PM-768x461.png 768w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-21-at-5.19.01 PM-1536x921.png 1536w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-21-at-5.19.01 PM-2048x1228.png 2048w " sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a></p>
<p>The song “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_(song)">Ripple</a>,” by the Grateful Dead, never fails to move me. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yJmBC7cMTM">Here’s a live performance by the Dead, in 1980, on YouTube</a>.</p>
<p>My favorite version, however, is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-bCftZG0NI">this one</a> by <a href="https://www.kpig.com/">KPIG’s</a> Fine Swine Orchestra, recorded by Santa Cruz musicians sheltering in place during the pandemic. That’s a screen grab, above.</p>
<p>I am pretty sure I’ve blogged about “Ripple” before, but can’t find evidence of that right now, perhaps because I published it somewhere obscure, or perhaps because we have <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task">entered the Enshittocene</a>. Whatever the case, it doesn’t hurt to re-hear a classic.</p>
<p>KPIG, long one of my favorite radio stations, is no longer live streaming for the world, but for subscribers only. (It’s free<a href="https://www.kpig.com/streaming-free-trial.htm"> only for a week</a>.) I know they need the money. But so does <a href="https://radioparadise.com/music/what-is-playing">Radio Paradise</a>, which has KPIG ancestry, is free, and supported by donations.</p>
<p>Toward normalizing the donations for every worthy thing, see <a href="https://projectvrm.org/2024/01/28/an-approach-to-paying-for-everything-thats-free/">what I wrote here</a>.</p>
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">16613</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>On Blogs</title>
<link>https://doc.searls.com/2024/02/21/on-blogs/</link>
<comments>https://doc.searls.com/2024/02/21/on-blogs/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Doc Searls]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 21 Feb 2024 20:08:46 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Blogging]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Journalism]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://doc.searls.com/?p=16606</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Thoughts I jotted down on Mastodon*: 1) Blogs are newsletters that don’t require subscriptions. 2) Blogrolls are lists of blogs. 3) Both require the lowest possible cognitive and economic overhead. 4) That’s why they are coming back. I know, they never left. But you get my point. *I just learned that my Mastodon account is […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure id="attachment_16607" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-16607" style="width: 1024px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-16607" src="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2022_06_18_vonnegut-museum_01-1024x650.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="650" srcset="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2022_06_18_vonnegut-museum_01-1024x650.jpg 1024w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2022_06_18_vonnegut-museum_01-300x191.jpg 300w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2022_06_18_vonnegut-museum_01-768x488.jpg 768w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2022_06_18_vonnegut-museum_01-1536x976.jpg 1536w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2022_06_18_vonnegut-museum_01-2048x1301.jpg 2048w " sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-16607" class="wp-caption-text">Kurt Vonnegut’s typewriter (and glasses), at the Vonnegut Museum in Indianapolis. Shot by me with a phone.</figcaption></figure>
<p>Thoughts I jotted down on Mastodon*:</p>
<p>1) Blogs are newsletters that don’t require subscriptions.</p>
<p>2) Blogrolls are lists of blogs.</p>
<p>3) Both require the lowest possible cognitive and economic overhead.</p>
<p>4) That’s why they are coming back.</p>
<p>I know, they never left. But you get my point.</p>
<hr />
<p>*I just learned that my Mastodon account is only for followers. I hope to fix that.</p>
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">16606</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>Mom’s breakfast</title>
<link>https://doc.searls.com/2024/02/17/moms-breakfast/</link>
<comments>https://doc.searls.com/2024/02/17/moms-breakfast/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Doc Searls]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 17 Feb 2024 21:16:09 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[food]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[recipe]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://doc.searls.com/?p=16583</guid>
<description><![CDATA[As a cook, my Swedish mother was best known for her Swedish meatballs, an indelicacy now familiar as the reward for completing the big-box retail maze called Ikea. Second-best was the limpa bread (vörtbröd) she baked every Christmas. She once won an award for that one. Maybe twice. But her most leveraged dish was the […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><img decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-16584" src="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/6428AE49-3FC7-44BF-B707-1700EC8F9081_1_105_c.jpeg" alt="" width="60%" height="image" srcset="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/6428AE49-3FC7-44BF-B707-1700EC8F9081_1_105_c.jpeg 768w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/6428AE49-3FC7-44BF-B707-1700EC8F9081_1_105_c-225x300.jpeg 225w " sizes="(max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px" /></p>
<p>As a cook, <a href="https://flickr.com/photos/docsearls/albums/72157627459328424">my Swedish mother</a> was best known for her <a href="https://www.ikea.com/us/en/cat/meat-25217/">Swedish meatballs</a>, an indelicacy now familiar as the reward for completing the big-box retail <a href="https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/consumer/2018/08/28/ikea-design-store-experience">maze called Ikea</a>. Second-best was the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limpa">limpa bread (vörtbröd)</a> she baked every Christmas. She once won an award for that one. Maybe twice.</p>
<p>But her most leveraged dish was the breakfast she made for us often when my sister and I were kids: soft-boiled eggs over toast broken into small pieces in a bowl. It’s still my basic breakfast, many decades later.</p>
<p>Mine, above, are different in three small ways:</p>
<ol>
<li>I cut the toast into small squares with a big kitchen knife. (For Mom the toast was usually white bread, which was the only thing most grocery stores sold, or so it seemed, back in the 1950s. I lean toward Jewish rye, sourdough, ciabatta, anything not sweet.)</li>
<li>Mom boiled the eggs for three minutes. I poach mine. That’s a skill I learned from my wife. Much simpler. Put the eggs for a second or two into the boiling water, take them out, and then break them into the same water. (Putting them in first helps keep them intact.) Make sure the water has some salt in it, so the eggs hold their shape. Pull them out with a slotted spoon when the white gets somewhat firm and the yolk is still runny. Lay them on the toast.</li>
<li>I season them with a bit of hot sauce: sriracha, Tapatio, Cholula, whatever. That way they look like this before I chow them down—</li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-16585" src="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/4231A6F2-7555-486A-BD50-8A88E7DC0CBA_1_105_c.jpeg" alt="" width="60%" height="image" srcset="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/4231A6F2-7555-486A-BD50-8A88E7DC0CBA_1_105_c.jpeg 768w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/4231A6F2-7555-486A-BD50-8A88E7DC0CBA_1_105_c-225x300.jpeg 225w " sizes="(max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px" /></p>
<p>The hot sauce also makes the coffee taste better for some reason.</p>
<p>Thus endeth the first—and perhaps last and only—recipe post on this blog.</p>
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">16583</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>Assassinations Work</title>
<link>https://doc.searls.com/2024/02/16/assassinations-work/</link>
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Doc Searls]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 16 Feb 2024 22:54:38 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[history]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Politics]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://doc.searls.com/?p=16577</guid>
<description><![CDATA[On April 4, 1968, when I learned with the rest of the world that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, I immediately thought that the civil rights movement, which King had led, had just been set back by fifty years. I was wrong about that. It ended right then (check that last link). Almost […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-16578" src="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/assassinated-1024x482.png" alt="" width="1024" height="482" srcset="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/assassinated-1024x482.png 1024w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/assassinated-300x141.png 300w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/assassinated-768x362.png 768w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/assassinated-1536x724.png 1536w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/assassinated.png 1596w " sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><br />
On April 4, 1968, when I learned with the rest of the world that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.">Martin Luther King Jr.</a> had been <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Martin_Luther_King_Jr.">assassinated</a>, I immediately thought that the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement">civil rights movement</a>, which King had led, had just been set back by fifty years. I was wrong about that. It ended right then (check that last link). Almost fifty-six years have passed since that assassination, and the cause still has a long way to go: far longer than what MLK and the rest of us had imagined before he was killed.</p>
<p>Also, since MLK was the world’s leading activist for peace and nonviolence, those movements were set back as well. (Have they moved? How much? I don’t have answers. Maybe some of you do.)</p>
<p>I was twenty years old when MLK and RFK were killed, and a junior at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilford_College">Guilford College</a>, a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testimony_of_peace">Quaker</a> institution in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro,_North_Carolina">Greensboro, North Carolina.</a> Greensboro was a hotbed of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Civil_Rights_Center_and_Museum">civil rights activism</a> and strife at the time (and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Greensboro_uprising">occasionally</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_massacre">since</a>). I was an activist of sorts back then as well, both for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. But being an activist, and having moral sympathies of one kind or another, are far less effective in the absence of leadership than they are when leadership is there, and strong.</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny"> Alexei Navalny</a> was one of those leaders. He moved into the past tense today: (1976-2024). His parentheses closed in an Arctic Russian prison. He was only 47 years old. At age 44 he was poisoned—an obvious assassination attempt—and survived, thanks to medical treatment in Germany. He was imprisoned in 2021 after he returned to Russia, and… well, you can read the rest <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny#Imprisonment">here</a>. Since Navalny was the leading advocate of reform in Russia and opposed Vladimir Putin’s one-man rule of the country, Putin wanted him dead. So now Navalny is gone, and with it much hope of reform.</p>
<p>Not every assassination is motivated by those opposed to a cause. Some assassins are just nuts. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hinckley_Jr.">John Hinkley Jr.</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_David_Chapman">Mark David Chapman</a>, for example. Hinkley failed to kill Ronald Reagan, and history moved right along. But Chapman succeeded in killing John Lennon, and silence from that grave has persisted ever since.</p>
<p>My point is that assassination works. For causes a leader personifies, the setbacks can be enormous, and in some cases total, or close enough, for a long time.</p>
<p>I hope Alexei Navalny’s causes will still have effects in his absence. Martyrdom in some ways works too. But I expect those effects to take much longer to come about than they would if Navalny were still alive. And I would love to be wrong about that.</p>
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">16577</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>Cluetrain at 25</title>
<link>https://doc.searls.com/2024/02/16/cluetrain-at-25/</link>
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Doc Searls]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 16 Feb 2024 21:20:29 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Cluetrain]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[history]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://doc.searls.com/?p=16560</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The Cluetrain Manifesto will turn 25 in two months. I am one of its four authors, and speak here only for myself. The others are David Weinberger, Rick Levine, and Chris Locke. David and Rick may have something to say. Chris, alas, demonstrates the first words in Chapter One of The Cluetrain Manifesto in its […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure id="attachment_16564" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-16564" style="width: 188px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-16564" src="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/dillo2.jpg" alt="" width="188" height="258" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-16564" class="wp-caption-text">Chris Locke found this on the Web in early 1999, and it became the main image on the Cluetrain Manifesto homepage. We’ve never found its source.</figcaption></figure>
<p><a href="https://cluetrain.com/">The Cluetrain Manifesto</a> will turn 25 in two months.</p>
<p>I am one of its four authors, and speak here only for myself. The others are <a href="https://weinberger.org/">David Weinberger</a>, <a href="https://cluetrain.com/rick.html">Rick Levine</a>, and <a href="https://doc.searls.com/2021/12/21/rage-in-peace/">Chris Locke</a>. David and Rick may have something to say. Chris, alas, demonstrates the first words in <a href="https://cluetrain.com/book/apocalypso.html">Chapter One</a> of <a href="https://cluetrain.com/book/index.html"><em>The Cluetrain Manifesto</em> in its book form</a>. Try not to be haunted by Chris’s ghost when you read it.</p>
<p><em>Cluetrain</em> is a word that did not exist before we made it up in 1999. It is still tweeted almost daily <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=cluetrain&src=typed_query&f=live">on X (née Twitter)</a>, and often <a href="https://bsky.app/search?q=cluetrain">on BlueSky</a> and <a href="https://www.threads.net/search/?q=cluetrain">Threads</a>, the Twitter wannabes. And, of course, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=cluetrain">on Facebook</a>. Searching <a href="https://books.google.com/">Google Books</a> no longer says how many results it finds, but the last time I was able to check, the number of<a href="https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=cluetrain"> books containing the word <em>cluetrain</em></a> was way past 10,000.</p>
<p>So by now <em>cluetrain</em> belongs in the <a href="https://www.oed.com/">OED</a>, though nobody is lobbying for that. In fact, none of the authors lobbied for Cluetrain much in the first place. Chris and <a href="https://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/">David</a> wrote about it in their newsletters, and I said some stuff in <em>Linux Journal.</em> But that was about it. Email was the most social online medium back then, so we did our best with that. We also decided not to make Cluetrain a Thing apart from its website. That meant no t-shirts, bumper stickers, or well-meaning .orgs. We thought what it said should succeed or fail on its own.</p>
<p>Among other things, it succeeded in grabbing the interest of <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB84487048080236000">Tom Petzinger</a>, who devoted a column in <em>The Wall Street Journal</em> to the manifesto.* And thus a meme was born. In short order, we were approached with a book proposal, decided a book would be a good way to expand on the website, and had it finished by the end of August. The first edition came out in January 2000—just in time to help burst <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble">the dot-com bubble</a>. It also quickly became a bestseller, even though (or perhaps in part because) the whole book was also<a href="https://cluetrain.com/book/index.html"> published for free on the Cluetrain website</a>—and is still there.<a href="https://www.amazon.com/s?k=cluetrain"><img decoding="async" src="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cluetrain-778476.jpg" alt="Cluetrain cover" width="40%" height="image" align="right" hspace="7" /></a></p>
<p>You can’t tell from the image of the cover on the right, but that orange was as da-glo as a road cone, and the gray at the bottom was silver. You couldn’t miss seeing it on the displays and shelves of bookstores, which were still thick on the ground back then.</p>
<p>A quarter century after we started working on Cluetrain, I think its story has hardly begun—because most of what it foresaw, or called for, has not come true. Yet.</p>
<p>So I’m going to visit some of Cluetrain’s history and main points in a series of posts here. This is the first one.</p>
<hr />
<p>*A search for that column on the WSJ.com website brings up nothing: an example of <a href="https://doc.searls.com/2023/08/18/we-need-deep-news/">deep news</a>‘ absence. But I do have the text, and may share it with you later.)</p>
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">16560</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>If Your Privacy Is in the Hands of Others Alone, You Don’t Have Any</title>
<link>https://doc.searls.com/2024/01/29/if-your-privacy-is-in-the-hands-of-others-alone-you-dont-have-any/</link>
<comments>https://doc.searls.com/2024/01/29/if-your-privacy-is-in-the-hands-of-others-alone-you-dont-have-any/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Doc Searls]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 29 Jan 2024 15:40:27 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[adtech]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[advertising]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Business]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[personal data]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[privacy]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://doc.searls.com/?p=16543</guid>
<description><![CDATA[In her latest Ars Technica story, Ashley Belanger reports that Patreon, the widely used and much-trusted monetization platform for creative folk, opposes the minimal personal privacy protections provided by a law you probably haven’t heard of until now: the Video Privacy Protection Act, or VPPA. Patreon, she writes, wants a judge to declare that law (which dates […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure id="attachment_16544" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-16544" style="width: 1024px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-16544" src="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/OIG-5.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="1024" srcset="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/OIG-5.jpg 1024w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/OIG-5-300x300.jpg 300w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/OIG-5-150x150.jpg 150w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/OIG-5-768x768.jpg 768w " sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-16544" class="wp-caption-text">Prompt: “A panopticon in which thousands of companies are spying on one woman alone in the center with nothing around her.” Via Microsoft Bing Image Creator</figcaption></figure>
<p>In <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/patreon-attacks-law-that-keeps-platforms-from-sharing-your-video-views/">her latest</a> <em>Ars Technica</em> story, <a href="https://arstechnica.com/author/ashleybelanger/">Ashley Belanger</a> reports that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patreon">Patreon</a>, the widely used and much-trusted monetization platform for creative folk, opposes the minimal personal privacy protections provided by a law you probably haven’t heard of until now: the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act">Video Privacy Protection Act, or VPPA</a>. Patreon, she writes, wants a judge to declare that law (which dates from the videotape rental age) unconstitutional because it inconveniences Patreon’s ability to share the personal data of its users with other parties.† Naturally, the EFF, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the ACLU of Northern California, and the ACLU itself all stand opposed to Patreon on this and have filed <a href="https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Stark-v-Patreon-Amicus-Curiae-Brief-12-20-2023.pdf">an amicus brief</a> explaining why.</p>
<p>But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to bring up the inconvenient fact that <em>Ars Technica </em>is also in the surveillance business. A PageXray of Ashley’s story finds this—</p>
<ul>
<li>360 adserver requests</li>
<li>259 tracking requests</li>
<li>131 other requests</li>
</ul>
<p>—which it visualizes <a href="https://pagexray.fouanalytics.com/q/arstechnica.com%2Ftech-policy%2F2024%2F01%2Fpatreon-attacks-law-that-keeps-platforms-from-sharing-your-video-views%2F?f=">with this</a>:</p>
<p><a href="https://pagexray.fouanalytics.com/q/arstechnica.com%2Ftech-policy%2F2024%2F01%2Fpatreon-attacks-law-that-keeps-platforms-from-sharing-your-video-views%2F?f="><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-16546" src="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Screenshot-2024-01-29-at-10.31.38 AM-1024x694.png" alt="" width="1024" height="694" srcset="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Screenshot-2024-01-29-at-10.31.38 AM-1024x694.png 1024w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Screenshot-2024-01-29-at-10.31.38 AM-300x203.png 300w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Screenshot-2024-01-29-at-10.31.38 AM-768x521.png 768w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Screenshot-2024-01-29-at-10.31.38 AM-1536x1041.png 1536w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Screenshot-2024-01-29-at-10.31.38 AM.png 2048w " sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a></p>
<p>And that’s just one small part of it.</p>
<p>But will Ashley, or any reporter, grab the third rail of their employer’s participation in the tracking-based advertising business? Or visit that business’s responsibility for what was already <a href="https://doc.searls.com/2015/09/28/beyond-ad-blocking-the-biggest-boycott-in-human-history/">the biggest boycott in human history</a> way back in 2015? The odds are against it. I’ve challenged many reporters to grab that third rail, just like I’m challenging Ashley here. In every case, nothing happened.</p>
<p>I never challenged Farhad Manjoo, but he did come through <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/23/opinion/data-internet-privacy-tracking.html">exposing</a> <em>The New York Times</em> (his employer’s) own participation in the privacy-opposed tracking-based adtech business, back in 2019. <a href="https://pagexray.fouanalytics.com/q/www.nytimes.com%2Finteractive%2F2019%2F08%2F23%2Fopinion%2Fdata-internet-privacy-tracking.html?f=">Here’s a PageXray of tracking via that piece today</a>:</p>
<p><a href="https://pagexray.fouanalytics.com/q/www.nytimes.com%2Finteractive%2F2019%2F08%2F23%2Fopinion%2Fdata-internet-privacy-tracking.html?f="><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-16550" src="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Screenshot-2024-01-29-at-10.53.59 AM-1024x498.png" alt="" width="1024" height="498" srcset="https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Screenshot-2024-01-29-at-10.53.59 AM-1024x498.png 1024w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Screenshot-2024-01-29-at-10.53.59 AM-300x146.png 300w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Screenshot-2024-01-29-at-10.53.59 AM-768x373.png 768w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Screenshot-2024-01-29-at-10.53.59 AM-1536x746.png 1536w , https://150108457.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Screenshot-2024-01-29-at-10.53.59 AM-2048x995.png 2048w " sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a></p>
<p>Better, but not ideal.</p>
<p>Five years ago this month, I wrote <a href="https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/if-your-privacy-hands-others-alone-you-dont-have-any">a column about privacy in <em>Linux Journal</em> with the same title as this post</a>. Here it is again, with just a few tiny edits. Amazing how little things have changed since then—and how much worse they have become. But I do see hope. Read on.</p>
<hr />
<p>If you think regulations are going to protect your privacy, you’re wrong. In fact, they can <em>make things worse</em>, especially if they start with the assumption that your privacy is provided only by other parties, most of whom are incentivized to violate it.</p>
<p>Exhibit A for how much worse things can get is the EU’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation">GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)</a>. As soon as the GDPR went into full effect in May 2018, damn near every corporate entity on the Web put up a “cookie notice” requiring acceptance of terms and privacy policies that allow them to continue violating your privacy by harvesting, sharing, auctioning off and otherwise using your data, and data about you.</p>
<p>For websites and services in that harvesting business (a population that rounds to the whole commercial web), these notices provide a one-click way to adhere to the letter of the GDPR while violating its spirit.</p>
<p>There’s also big business in the friction that it produces. To see how big, <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=gdpr+compliance">look up <em>GDPR+compliance</em> on Google</a>. You’ll get 232 million results (give or take a few dozen million).</p>
<p>None of those results are for you, even though <em>you</em> are who the GDPR is supposed to protect. See, to the GDPR, you are a mere “data subject” and not an independent and fully functional participant in the technical, social, and economic ecosystem the Internet supports by design. All privacy protections around your data are the burden of other parties.</p>
<p>Or at least that’s the interpretation that nearly every lawmaker, regulatory bureaucrat, lawyer, and service provider goes by. (One exception is <a href="https://hackylawyer.com/">Elizabeth Renieris</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hackylawyer">@hackylawyer</a>. Her <a href="https://hackylawyer.com/writing">collection of postings</a> is required reading on the GDPR and much else.) The same goes for those selling GDPR compliance services, comprising most of those 190 million GDPR+compliance search results.</p>
<p>The clients of those services include nearly every website and service on Earth that harvests personal data. These entities have no economic incentive to stop harvesting, sharing, and selling personal data the usual ways, beyond fear that the GDPR might actually be enforced, which so far (with <a href="https://martechseries.com/mts-insights/guest-authors/gdpr-six-months-and-counting/">few</a> <a href="https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=57355d0d-5d3a-40aa-8665-8366dcc9bd5a">exceptions</a>), it hasn’t been. (See <a href="https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2018/07/03/without-enforcement-the-gdpr-is-a-fail/">Without enforcement, the GDPR is a fail</a>.)</p>
<p>Worse, the tools for “managing” your exposure to data harvesters are provided entirely by the websites you visit and the services you engage. The “choices” they provide (if they provide any at all) are between 1) acquiescence to them doing what they please and 2) a maze of menus full of checkboxes and toggle switches “controlling” your exposure to unknown threats from parties you’ve never heard of, with no way to record your choices or monitor effects.</p>
<p>So let’s explore just one site’s presentation, and then get down to what it means and why it matters.</p>
<p>Our example is <a href="https://www.mirror.co.uk/">https://www.mirror.co.uk</a>. If you haven’t clicked on that site already, you’ll see a cookie notice that says,</p>
<blockquote><p>We use cookies to help our site work, to understand how it is used, and to tailor the adverts presented on our site. By clicking “Accept” below, you agree to us doing so. You can read more in our cookie notice. Or, if you do not agree, you can click Manage below to access other choices.</p></blockquote>
<p>They don’t mention that “tailor the adverts” really means something like this:</p>
<p><em>We open your browser to infestation by tracking beacons from countless parties in the online advertising business, plus who-knows-what-else that might be working with those parties (there is no way to tell, and if there was we wouldn’t provide it), so those parties and their “partners” can use those beacons to follow you like a marked animal everywhere you go and report your activities back to a vast marketplace where personal data about you is shared, bought and sold, much of it in real time, supposedly so your eyeballs can be hit with “relevant” or “interest-based” advertising as you travel from site to site and service to service. While we are sure there are bad collateral effects (fraud and malware, for example), we don’t care about those because it’s our business to get paid just for clicks or “impressions,” whether you’re impressed or not—and the odds that you won’t be impressed average to certain.</em></p>
<p>Okay, so now click on the “Manage” button.</p>
<p>Up will pop a rectangle where it says “<em>Here you can control cookies, including those for advertising, using the buttons below. Even if you turn off the advertising-related cookies, you will still see adverts on our site, because they help us to fund it. However, those adverts will simply be less relevant to you. You can learn more about cookies in our Cookie Notice on the site</em>.”</p>
<p>Under that text, in the left column, are six “Purposes of data collection”, all defaulted with little check marks to ON (though only five of them show, giving the impression that there are only those five). The right column is called “Our partners”, and it shows the first five of what turn out to be 259 companies, nearly all of which are not brands known to the world or to anybody outside the business (and probably not known widely <em>within</em> the business as well). All are marked ON by that little check mark. Here’s that list, just through the letter A:</p>
<ul>
<li>1020, Inc. dba Placecast and Ericsson Emodo</li>
<li>1plusX AG</li>
<li>2KDirect, Inc. (dba iPromote)</li>
<li>33Across</li>
<li><a href="http://7hops.com/">7Hops.com</a> Inc. (ZergNet)</li>
<li>A Million Ads Limited</li>
<li>A.Mob</li>
<li>Accorp Sp. z o.o.</li>
<li>Active Agent AG</li>
<li>ad6media</li>
<li>ADARA MEDIA UNLIMITED</li>
<li>AdClear GmbH</li>
<li>Adello Group AG</li>
<li>Adelphic LLC</li>
<li>Adform A/S</li>
<li>Adikteev</li>
<li>ADITION technologies AG</li>
<li>Adkernel LLC</li>
<li>Adloox SA</li>
<li>ADMAN – Phaistos Networks, S.A.</li>
<li>ADman Interactive SL</li>
<li>AdMaxim Inc.</li>
<li>Admedo Ltd</li>
<li>admetrics GmbH</li>
<li>Admotion SRL</li>
<li>Adobe Advertising Cloud</li>
<li>AdRoll Inc</li>
<li>adrule mobile GmbH</li>
<li>AdSpirit GmbH</li>
<li>adsquare GmbH</li>
<li>Adssets AB</li>
<li>AdTheorent, Inc</li>
<li>AdTiming Technology Company Limited</li>
<li>ADUX</li>
<li>advanced store GmbH</li>
<li>ADventori SAS</li>
<li>Adverline</li>
<li>ADYOULIKE SA</li>
<li>Aerserv LLC</li>
<li>affilinet</li>
<li>Amobee, Inc.</li>
<li>AntVoice</li>
<li>Apester Ltd</li>
<li>AppNexus Inc.</li>
<li>ARMIS SAS</li>
<li>Audiens S.r.l.</li>
<li>Avid Media Ltd</li>
<li>Avocet Systems Limited</li>
</ul>
<p>If you bother to “manage” any of this, what record do you have of it—or of all the other collections of third parties who you’ve agreed to follow you around? Remember, there are a different collection of these at every website with third parties that track you, and different UIs, each provided by other third parties.</p>
<p>It might be easier to discover and manage parasites in your belly than cookies in your browser.</p>
<p>Think I exaggerate? The long list of cookies in just one of my browsers (which I had to dig deep to find) starts with this list:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://1rx.io/">1rx.io</a></li>
<li><a href="http://247-inc.net/">247-inc.net</a></li>
<li><a href="http://2mdn.net/">2mdn.net</a></li>
<li><a href="http://33across.com/">33across.com</a></li>
<li><a href="http://360yield.com/">360yield.com</a></li>
<li><a href="http://3lift.com/">3lift.com</a></li>
<li><a href="http://4finance.com/">4finance.com</a></li>
</ul>
<p>After several hundred others, my cookie list ends with:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://zencdn.net/">zencdn.net</a></li>
<li><a href="http://zoom.us/">zoom.us</a></li>
<li><a href="http://zopim.com/">zopim.com</a></li>
</ul>
<p>I know what zoom.us is. The rest are a mystery to me.</p>
<p>To look at just that first one, <a href="http://1rx.io/">1rx.io</a>, I have to dig way down in the basement of the preferences directory (in Chrome it’s <a href="https://settings/cookies/detail?site=1rx.io">chrome://settings/cookies/detail?site=1rx.io</a>), where I find that its locally stored data is this:</p>
<blockquote><p>_rxuuid</p>
<p>Name<br />
_rxuuid<br />
Content<br />
%7B%22rx_uuid%22%3A%22RX-2b58f1b1-96a4-4e1d-9de8-3cb1ca4175b0%22%2C%22nxtrdr%22%3Afalse%7D<br />
Domain<br />
.<a href="http://1rx.io/">1rx.io</a><br />
Path<br />
/<br />
Send for<br />
Any kind of connection<br />
Accessible to script<br />
No (HttpOnly)<br />
Created<br />
Wednesday, December 12, 2018 at 4:48:53 AM<br />
Expires<br />
Thursday, December 12, 2019 at 4:48:53 AM</p></blockquote>
<p>I’m a somewhat technical guy, and at least half of that stuff means nothing to me.</p>
<p>As for “managing” those, my only choice on that page is to “Remove All”. Does that mean <em>Remove everything on that page alone</em> or <em>Remove all cookies everywhere</em>? And how can I remember what I’ve had removed?</p>
<p>Obviously, there is no way for anybody to “manage” this, in any meaningful sense of the word.</p>
<p>We also can’t fix it on the sites and services side, no matter how much those sites and services care (which most don’t) about the “customer journey”, the “customer experience” or any of the other bullshit they’re buying from marketers this week.</p>
<p>Even within the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer-relationship_management">CRM (customer relationship management)</a> world, the B2B customers of CRM companies use one cloud and one set of tools to create as many different “experiences” for users and customers as there are companies deploying those tools to manage customer relationships from their side. There are no corresponding tools on our side. (Though there is work going on. See <a href="http://projectvrm.org/">here</a>.)</p>
<p>So the digital world remains one where we have no common or standard way to scale our privacy and data usage tools, choices, or experiences across all sites and services. And that’s what we’ll need if we want real privacy online.</p>
<p>The simple place where we need to start is this: <em>p<a href="https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2018/11/privacy-is-personal/">rivacy is personal</a></em>, meaning something we create for ourselves (which in the natural world we do with clothing and shelter, both of which lack equivalents in the digital world).</p>
<p>And we need to be clear that privacy is not a grace of privacy policies and terms of service that differ with every company and over which none of us have true control—especially when there is an entire industry devoted to making those companies untrustworthy, even if they are in full compliance with privacy laws.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.moxytongue.com/">Devon Loffreto</a> (who coined the term <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=%22self-sovereign+identity">self-sovereign identity</a> and whose good work we’ll be visiting in an upcoming issue of <em>Linux Journal</em>) puts the issue in simple geek terms:<strong> we need <em>root authority</em> over our lives</strong>. Hashtag: <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/OwnRoot">#OwnRoot</a>.</p>
<p>It is only by owning root that we can crank up agency on the individual’s side. We have a perfect base for that in the standards and protocols that gave us the Internet, the Web, email, and too little else. And we need it here too. Soon.</p>
<p>We (a few colleagues and I) created <a href="http://customercommons.org/">Customer Commons</a> as a place for <a href="http://customercommons.org/home/tools/terms/">terms</a> that individuals can proffer as first parties, just by pointing at them, much as licenses at <a href="http://creativecommons.org/">Creative Common</a>s can be pointed at. Sites and services can agree to those terms, and both can keep records and follow audit trails.</p>
<p>And there are some good signs that this will happen. For example, the <a href="https://www.ieee.org/">IEEE</a> approached Customer Commons last year with the suggestion that we stand up a working group for machine-readable personal privacy terms. It’s called <a href="https://standards.ieee.org/project/7012.html">P7012</a>. If you’d like to join, please do.</p>
<p>Unless we #OwnRoot for our own lives online, privacy will remain an empty promise by a legion of violators.</p>
<p>One more thing. We <em>can</em> put the GDPR to our use if we like. That’s because <a href="https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj/eng">Article 4 of the GDPR</a> defines a data controller as “the natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body which, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data…” This means<em> each of us can be our own data controller</em>. Most lawyers dealing with the GDPR don’t agree with that. They think the individual data subject will always need a fiduciary or an intermediary of some kind: an agent of the individual, but not an individual with agency. Yet the simple fact is that we should have root authority over our lives online, and that means we should have some degree of control over our data exposures, and how our data, and data about us, is used—much as we do over how we control or moderate our privacy in the physical world. More about all that in upcoming posts.</p>
<p><em>The <a href="https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2018/12/if-your-privacy-is-the-hands-of-others-alone-you-dont-have-any/">original version of this post</a> was published on the <a href="https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/">Private Internet Access blog</a>. <a href="https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/">Private Internet Access</a> and </em>Linux Journal<em> at the time were both holdings of <a href="https://londontrustmedia.com/">London Trust Media</a>. </em></p>
<p><em>Also, check out the <a href="https://cyber.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Privacy_Manifesto"><strong>Privacy Manifesto</strong></a> at the <a href="http://cyber.harvard.edu/projectvrm/">ProjectVRM wiki</a>. I maintain it and welcome bug fixes.</em></p>
<p>† This is an example of what <a href="https://pluralistic.net/">Cory Doctorow</a> calls “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification">enshittification</a>” and Wikipedia (at that link) more politely calls “platform decay.” It’s a big trade-away of goodwill by Patreon. Says to me they must be making an enshitload of money in the adtech fecosystem.</p>
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