Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams

In its early days Facebook was run like a fraternity, with little respect for how it would impact the world. It was all about maintaining engagement. Government relations only came later as a reluctant necessity. The author of this book came from a diplomatic background. She liked Facebook and thought she could make a difference. Things did not go well. Facebook was not ready for her and she was not ready for Facebook. The book is a hatchet job on Facebook, with attacks especially on Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg. Her ire is especially strong on Sandberg. As an executive, Sandberg preaches female empowerment and mixing motherhood with work. However, in practice she wants work to dominate. She mandated international travel late in pregnancy and required her to get a nanny. Zuckerberg is portrayed as a clueless guy who doesn't get the importance of political hobnobbing - until he decides he wants to run for president.

There are legitimate concerns exposed in the book. However, there is also a significant clash of culture and personalities. I'm sure the other side would have plenty of valid counterpoints. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

The Future of Us

A girl (Emma) in 1996 gets a new computer. Josh, her next-door neighbor friend brings over an AOL CD and they go on the internet. However, instead of the AOL of that day, they end up seeing her facebook page - 15 years in the future. Every small thing they do can impact their future.

In spite of all the changes she makes, Emma still finds herself in rotten relationships in the future. She attempts to "change" her life to avoid one loser husband or situation, but then simply ends up with another one that is bad in a different way.

Josh, on the other hand, is shown to be married to one of the super-hot girls at school who was thought to be way out of his league. His changes seem to change some of the details of their life together (number of kids, vacation spots, etc.) However, they seem to remain together. With this knowledge in the background, he actually speaks up to defend her in one of their classes. This leads to them actually going out together.

I was hoping that Josh would actually stay with his "future bride". It would make a great story of a boy overcoming his feelings of inferiority to reach his dream situation. The prodding of the future event helps him to accomplish what he may have otherwise thought was impossible.

However, this is a teen book, more likely targeted towards the female audience. So, Josh has to end up with Emma at the end. Sigh. Sappy and not quite as interesting. However, this doesn't happen until the very end. Skip the last chapter and you can picture this better type of ending.

The ending we get is Emma realizing that she must live in the day, rather than trying to needlessly try to optimize some imagined future. The depressed her of the future eventually exits facebook altogether, leaving the her of the present to go on with her life. Some of their friends bring Josh and Emma together to have fun. They realize that they are really meant for each other. (The end of their "relationship" 6 months ago was a mistake. They have had the friendship thing down since grade school. The relationship thing will work out with some more work.)

The concept reminds me of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. If you know a little about the future, that may give you the strength to do what you need to do to make it happen. The book also did a nice job of capturing the spirit of the mid 90s and contrasting that with today. It was a fun read, in spite of the sappy ending.

Facebook, Zillow and Trulia

I was on my phone learning some facts on Memrise, when all of a sudden I get a message that I need to login. I was annoyed, because it looked like facebook had expired its login. But, I couldn't remember the local password I had set up, so I went to use the facebook login. Facebook, alas, decided that I was logging on from some new location. (Ummm, this is the same location I was using 5 minutes before...) In its security minded approach, it asked me to validate some things. It gave three options:

1) Answer "Secret questions"
2) Get text on phone
3) Identify people in photos.

I have know idea what phone I used with facebook, but since it has been a while, I am guessing it is and old one that I don't have anymore. "Secret questions" are always problematic, especially if it has been a while. What was my favorite movie back then? It depends on when "then" was.

I opted for "identify people in photos."

This had its own set of problems. I primarily use facebook as a convenient way to sign in to various apps. If I need a login, and there is not anything super valuable there, facebook is a convenient option. Fewer passwords to remember. As for accessing facebook, well, I think I posted something myself a few years ago. About the only activity I get is produced by various acts. (Hence my sister asking why I was listening to Katy Perry on Spotify.)

I'll also occasionally go in there and respond to friend requests and add a few suggested friends. This turned out to be my downfall.

It is easy to identify pictures of my family or current friends. But, facebook doesn't stick with those. It gives me a wonderful picture of somebody that I haven't seen since elementary school. Uh, perhaps process of elimination will help. Even worse, it will show the extended family of somebody that I haven't seen in years. I guess this is their encouragement to be actively involved in facebook. My first try, I failed out the identification. On the second try, the final picture was of my mom. Whew! Made it.

It would be a little helpful if they would actually show photos of the person. When they ask me to identify an adult friend, and I get a picture of a six year old, I know something is up. It would also be useful if they would tell me why they think there is a login from a new place. I did go to their logs, and didn't see anything that looked unusually. There was me on the work network. And there was my phone and computer on the home network. Why was there an issue?

I've also run into another annoyance with Real Estate sites. I was interested in seeing house values for some condos. Sites like Zillow are very good at showing values of single family homes. You can zoom into a neighborhood and see numbers next to each of the houses. Alas, for condos, it gets confused. Really confused.

It shows some jumbled text at the building. Ok. I can deal with that. However, the details, can be even more bizarre. It shows some of the units in the building. But not others. I see a couple apartment 2s. Only, one has one address and once has a different one. Eventually I got a listing that seemed to have everything - maybe. This was a condo complex that had about 6 different addresses, with 3 units per address. I finally found one address that where I could get all the units. The only problem was that they were labeled as "apt 1. apt 1. #1. Apt 2" etc. Eventually digging down could get some sales prices.

Trulia could be even more bizarre. I would do a couple search for the address and get one result from Trulia. Then I'd try typing that into their search engine and get nothing. Huh? Oh well. All they need is a simple feature: "show nearby units." Alas, it is next to impossible to get it.

Also, it was interesting to see the different estimates. I saw estimates ranging from 130k to 210k for the units, depending on the site. After looking, it appeared that there was an attempt to sell one unit for about 210k a year ago, but the sale never went through. There was also an attempted short sell for about 130k recently. I guess that explains the wide range. The actual value is likely somewhere in between.

There are so many "junk" sites out there. It is hard to filter through all the "Spam" sites that google returns to get to ones that actually have relevant real estate data. Another curse of the ease of access to big data. If only these companies that make junk sites would spend their efforts making quality data rather than just trying to show up high on the search engine rankings.

Filter Bubble

Companies like Google, Facebook, Axiom and Blue Kai know a lot about you. They can use this to taylor websites and advertising to individual users. This can have serious impact on our society.

Huge amounts of information are produced every day. Determining what is relevant is a huge challenge. That is where algorithms come in. Google taylors search results to the individual users. Facebook's news feed is based on what it thinks users are interested in seeing. Advertisers and retailers also customize their online promotions based on what they think users will be interested in seeing. This can cause people to reside in a "bubble" where they only see things that they like. They may not see opposing viewpoints or anything that allows them to think. This is even more worrisome since most of this data filtering is done transparently without users knowing they are living in a bubble. (Perhaps this is a form of "mind control" where the big companies can gradually nudge people in a direction they would like.)

Personalization is treated as a "black box" by most companies. The companies themselves may not even know exactly what results are being returned. They can tweak algorithms based on feedback. However, they probably could not tell exactly what type of results would be returned. The algorithms can use various different data points to personalize. Thus, even if a user is not logged on, their location, computer or web browser could identify them and provide personalized results.

This book rambles on to sound the alarm against "filter bubbles" that allow individuals to live in their isolated worlds filtered to provide what they want. This will keep out information from opposing viewpoints. It will also tend to stock them up with the most "sensational" junk-food content rather than the "good for you content." This could result in a dumbing down of society as people don't work their brains to get around new thoughts. Also, it can make it more difficult for new thoughts and media to get out there. (Since discovery is often based on "likes", only things most like what already exist will tend to get more exposure. Thus, even though it is theoretically easier for new things to be discovered, it is actually much more difficult to find innovation.

The filter bubble is often transparent to users, and can gradually steer content to more extreme viewpoints. This can lead to highly cantankerous partisan discussions. (Since each side is not exposed to the opposing view, they not even understand how others can feel that way.) Even worse, people wont realize they are living in the filter bubble and assume that everybody else is receiving the same information. Discovering "new" ideas can actually be more difficult than it was in the days when everybody was force-fed the same broadcasts.

I was expecting this book to be a discussion of the difficulty we have today of "filtering" through all the information out there. Instead, it focussed on the danger of a personalized web. The two are tightly related. However, this book seemed to spend a lot of time rambling from bullet point to bullet point. It contained plenty of good ideas, but the connections where not very strong.

The amount of information out there is enormous. Discovering useful information is becoming more and more difficult. The quantity of "junk" out there seems to be growing at a faster rate than the amount of useful data. Fifteen years ago, it was easy to put a website out there and get visitors interested in the content. You might get a few random spammers or bots, but most traffic was legitimate. Similarly, if you wanted to search for something, you could use one of the numerous search engines and find relevant sites. The search results may contain a bunch of sites that you were not interested in, but this was more a result of bad algorithms than bad sites.

Today, however, there is so much junk out there. You may have to wade through numerous spam and junk sites to get to the site you want. People are much less likely to find a site that somebody just put up. I see more traffic on this blog than on my proto-blog from 1996. However, the quality of traffic seems to be much worse (at least judging from the ratio of real comments to spam comments.) It is harder to discover quality new content. And it is harder for quality new content to be discovered.

I find myself spending more time on "established" sites. They may occasionally guide me to independent sites. However, they are more likely to simply direct to other well-known commercial sites. With so much information out there, curation has to be done somewhere. I don't have the time to do it (or even to create an algorithm to do it.) I'm dependent on somebody to do it for me. Since this is a huge undertaking, these "somebodies" will likely be large corporations that need to earn money. Since I am cheep, putting up with advertising is my most likely "payment". This puts me in a position vulnerable to being influenced by whatever the corporation or the advertisers desire. (Ironically, at the same time the internet is giving away unlimited content for the price of advertising, broadcast media has become more reliant on "subscriber fees" as part of its business model.) Thus, we become subject to whatever whims the big algorithms have. Is this really much different from being beholden to the broadcaster's desires? At least with the broadcasters, we were likely to find something new we liked. With personalization we can find ourselves further ghettoized. (I'm often finding that problem with online radio. I can create a station that plays songs I like within a very narrowly defined range. However, I get sick of the same type of music and want more variety. However, it is difficult to get variety without a bunch of junk. I'd almost prefer to have a DJ picking the music for me.) I still haven't found a recommendation engine that does a really good job. With the glut of information out there, one of the big challenge is filtering the unique from the derivative. Perhaps now is the time to reinvent the web.