December 2011

The technology industry is absolutely bent on reinventing television. But nobody seems to be able to answer the big question: what exactly is so broken about TV anyway?

It's true that the TV guide in most cable systems is pretty awful -- it looks like Yahoo circa 1994. It's a pain fiddling with a bunch of different remotes. It might be kind of nice to watch YouTube videos on a big screen in the living room. But I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that most TV viewers simply won't care enough about any of this stuff to shell out $1,500 for a new Apple TV, or spend a few hundred bucks and countless hours fiddling around adding a new box to their TV set and figuring out how it works. All of these are destined to be niche products at best -- just like every other attempt to improve TV over the last 20 years.

At first glance, Facebook appears to have conceded quite a lot of ground to the Federal Trade Commission in the agreement it negotiated with the agency over its handling of user data. Among other things, the social network will now be required to obtain users’ affirmative express consent before making changes to the platform that override the user’s privacy settings. It will be barred from making false representations about the privacy and security of user data; it must establish and maintain a comprehensive privacy program; and, perhaps most significant, it must submit to an independent privacy audit every two years for the next 20 years. Taken together, the new measures have the potential to constrain significantly Facebook’s ability to provide marketers with the sort of fine-grained ad-targeting data that could support premium ad prices, as well as the social network’s strategy of making content and information sharing by its users as seamless and friction-free as possible.

In reality, Facebook had little choice but to cut a deal with the FTC. But the deal it cut could end up paying dividends in the future. Apart from the every-two-year privacy audits, Facebook in all probability did not agree to implement any procedures it wasn’t already going to face significant pressure to implement — not from any U.S. authority but instead from the European Union.

There are a variety of proposed solutions to let people assert control over how their online personal information is used. Here are five popular options and the strengths and weaknesses of each: Class Actions and the Courts; Technology To Control Our Own Data; Have the Federal Government Step In; Leave Privacy Issues to the Market; and Industry Self Regulation.

There is no question that we love our mobile devices. There’s also no question that we are paranoid about how much of ourselves we pour into the most personal computers ever created, which is why that even if some of the initial concerns were overblown, this week’s flap over the Carrier IQ software shows that the mobile industry still hasn’t learned its lessons about honesty, disclosure, and respect for its users and that those users still don’t understand that their mobile experience is controlled by data-hungry corporations.

There is only one way to operate a mobile business in a paranoid age: full and complete disclosure written in plain language as to what data is being collected along with clear options for how to control the data your customers share. Installing clandestine software on devices that rarely leave one’s person is simply not a long-term strategy for building trust, especially for a carrier like Sprint that needs every customer it can get. (Verizon gleefully pointed out this week that it has never used Carrier IQ, and people expect this sort of underhanded thing from AT&T.) It’s not hard to feel like a pawn of big business in the 21st century. Mobile computers have the potential to unlock so much human potential by giving us access to the world’s information nearly anywhere we go, but more and more people are starting to wonder about the cost of having access to that information. After all, you don’t really own a smartphone in the U.S.: you’re essentially leasing a subsided device based on the promise that you’ll pay back the acquisition cost over a two-year period. One day component costs will come down to the point where someone can make money selling a capable low-cost smartphone that doesn’t require a two-year contract and a data-mining operation to make money. Those days are not here yet. And if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product. It’s a little scary to imagine what the modern-day Internet would be like had we all been forced to buy subsidized PCs from Internet service providers.