吃瓜大本营

Instagram has in just one month as a result of all the bad publicity over its new terms of service, according to a story in the International Business Times. That is a stunning report鈥攑erhaps the most surprising indication of mass rebellion over an online policy issue since the defeat of SOPA. Perhaps I am overly conditioned to thinking that these kinds of seemingly obscure issues about the distribution of power on the internet鈥攑rivacy, openness, intellectual property, etc.鈥攁re the provenance of geeks and policy nerds and reporters looking for stories. But losing half their daily users in one month? I think that鈥檚 a reminder that for all the assaults on our privacy by internet advertisers and others, people do still want and demand a sense of control when it comes to their online lives. Especially when it comes to services that people have made a part of their daily existence鈥攚hich they feel they have a relationship with. Many privacy and other internet issues seem abstract and removed, and may not trigger a passionate backlash, but sometimes (as with this story, SOPA, and ) they do.

鈥淭here were so many innovations on this plane that it is hard to fathom how it got approved so quickly.鈥� That was the comment of an aviation consultant on the troubles faced by Boeing鈥檚 787 Dreamliner in this Guardian on how the plane was a 鈥渘ightmare waiting to happen.鈥� It鈥檚 funny to hear rapid innovation framed as a negative in that way鈥攂ut on reflection it makes sense. A modern jetliner, with more than 2 million parts, is a highly complex piece of machinery. Other highly complex things often require a period of 鈥渟easoning鈥� and very extensive testing by very large numbers of people鈥攕oftware, for example. Another highly complex thing, of course, is our legal system, which has evolved slowly over time, tempered by experience and slowly seasoned through years of common-law evolution. And as with jetliners, the rapid pace of innovation鈥攑articularly innovation in surveillance technologies鈥攊s overstraining the system鈥檚 ability to digest that innovation, to integrate it with our values.

I鈥檝e written several times about the interesting鈥攁nd fast-changing鈥攂oundary between humans and machines. For example, how when one is dealing with a customer-service agent who has no discretion, one is really dealing with a computer program that happens to have a human interface. Or a fake human interface. I鈥檝e also argued that when it comes to privacy, it makes no difference whether one is dealing with a human or a machine. The latest wrinkle on this front comes from Twitter, which has (via this ) that it is building what it calls a 鈥渞eal-time human computation engine鈥� to help it identify the meaning behind new trending search queries and use that understanding to serve ads. Twitter鈥檚 systems automatically identify popular new queries and send them to human beings who answer questions about them鈥攖hey, unlike a computer, being able to parse what a tag such as #bindersfullofwomen or #bigbird likely refers to in that day鈥檚 news. Then, Twitter鈥檚 automatic systems, having been informed by the humans that these queries are related to politics, use that knowledge to serve relevant ads. It鈥檚 fascinating to think how such hybrid human-computer systems for creating meaning out of data could evolve鈥攁nd how, in many applications, they will make the computer-human distinction even less relevant when it comes to privacy.