Un-appiness over Facebook ‘friend’ who never goes home
Critics may be wrong not to like this, says Jamie Bartlett
FACEBOOK is planning to listen in to your every conversation, your every background move. Its new feature — currently only in the US — will ask users whether they would like to have their phone microphones listen to what is happening around them. This would allow Facebook to identify songs playing or television being watched automatically, which the user could then post to their profile.
“Not only is this move just downright creepy,” reads the online petition that has been set up to oppose it, “it’s also a massive threat to our privacy. Talk about Big Brother!” More than 500 000 people have signed it to “tell Facebook not to release its creepy and dangerous new app feature that listens to users’ surroundings and conversations”.
It does feel a little creepy and I will not be turning it on. If I want people to know what is going on in my background — although I cannot imagine when I would — then I will tell them myself. But it’s not a massive threat to our privacy. It’s an opt-in feature, for starters.
Yet it’s a sign of the times that, after it announced the new feature, Facebook took the unusual step of addressing several fears about the new software: “Nope, no matter how interesting your conversation, this feature does not store sound or recordings. Facebook isn’t listening to or storing your conversations.”
It was one year ago this week since Edward Snowden blew the whistle about US National Security Agency spying. As a result, public concern about internet privacy has risen dramatically and we are far more sceptical about governments and big business collecting our personal information today — for good reason.
But there is a danger that we start to see every attempt at collecting information or data — even when optional — as being part of some kind of grand Orwellian nightmare (a much overused word, especially given that Orwell also passed names to the British intelligence agencies in 1949) and stop sharing anything.
The vitality of the internet and the thousands of companies that depend on it relies on people sharing information: that was the whole point of the net when it began as an academic project in the late 1960s.
In 1979, a team of academics were at work developing a function called “Finger”, which would allow users of TALK (a sort of prototype e-mail system on the internet’s forerunner, the Arpanet) to know what time other users logged on or off the system.
Ivor Durham from Carnegie Mellon University proposed a widget to allow users to opt out of Finger, in case they preferred to keep their online activity private. Durham was widely attacked by other users of the Arpanet, who believed privacy compromised its open, transparent nature.
The more you share, the more you get back. And there are many beneficial uses of data. The Open Data Institute, which examines how open data can help us to make smarter decisions, says Google has been extremely successful at using search terms to understand how epidemics spread. Satellite navigation technology is getting better at avoiding traffic jams because of drivers agreeing to share their progress.
Analysing our energy consumption patterns could cut down bills dramatically. And the reason that Facebook gives us a slick, functioning social networking site with free server space is because, in exchange, it can use our data.
If you’re not paying, as the saying goes, you’re the product. — ©