The bare minimum, done under duress Facebook's anemic new pro-privacy measures don't impress me much

In a week which started with the UK Parliament condemning Facebook as "digital gangsters," it appears that Zuck & Co. have decided that they have to do something to turn back the tide of negative PR, and have chosen to make a couple of changes that, frankly, should have been made months ago.

First, as reported by TechCrunch, they're finally going to shut down their spyware-disguised-as-VPN "service," Onavo:

Facebook will end its unpaid market research programs and proactively take its Onavo VPN app off the Google Play store in the wake of backlash following TechCrunch’s investigation about Onavo code being used in a Facebook Research app the sucked up data about teens. The Onavo Protect app will eventually shut down, and will immediately cease pulling in data from users for market research though it will continue operating as a Virtual Private Network in the short-term to allow users to find a replacement.

Facebook has also ceased to recruit new users for the Facebook Research app that still runs on Android but was forced off of iOS by Apple after we reported on how it violated Apple’s Enterprise Certificate program for employee-only apps. Existing Facebook Research app studies will continue to run, though.

With the suspicions about tech giants and looming regulation leading to more intense scrutiny of privacy practices, Facebook has decided that giving users a utility like a VPN in exchange for quietly examining their app usage and mobile browsing data isn’t a wise strategy. Instead, it will focus on paid programs where users explicitly understand what privacy they’re giving up for direct financial compensation.

Second, as reported by TechZim, Facebook are also making changes to their app which will allow users to opt out of having Facebook collect their location data even when the app was not in use:

To address user concerns about the extent to which Facebook’s Android app can access location data, Facebook has now updated its location controls. The new privacy settings will enable Android users to opt out of location tracking when they aren’t actively using the app and have greater control over how much of their location data is saved by the social media giant. With a new option in place, Android users will now be able to decide whether or not they want Facebook to be aware of their location at all times.

Again, while both of these are good changes, they're also obvious changes which should have been implemented months ago. If they'd announced these changes immediately after these scandals broke, I'd have been impressed with the speed of their response, even if it took them a little while to actually patch the changes into their app; instead, I can only cynically assume that they've been keeping these in their back pocket, ready to deploy in a week where Facebook desperately needed some good PR.

Uber apologizes to London while giving Quebec the finger

Only Uber can go from this:

In a letter of apology to Londoners on Monday, Uber’s new chief executive moved to repair his company’s reputation after the city’s transport authority said it would scrap the ride-hailing service’s operating license.

Dara Khosrowshahi issued a letter to London's Evening Standard newspaper acknowledging that the San Francisco company “got things wrong along the way” as it expanded. He said the company will appeal the London decision but will do so “with the knowledge that we must also change.”

“We won't be perfect, but we will listen to you; we will look to be long-term partners with the cities we serve; and we will run our business with humility, integrity and passion,” he wrote.

to this:

On Tuesday, Uber Quebec's director general Jean-Nicolas Guillemette announced that the company is leaving the provinceon October 14, citing too-tough regulations there. The planned move was first reported by the CBC and confirmed by Uber on Tuesday. Several days before the company's announcement, it had warned that new rules proposed by the provincial Ministry of Transportation would force Uber to exit Quebec. Uber has a history of threatening Quebec lawmakers with leaving if the company's policy demands aren't met, but has only now followed through.

By all accounts, Quebec has been reasonable with Uber, especially considering that the city of London in the UK just banned the company entirely for not being a "fit and proper" taxi service. (Uber plans to contest the London ban.) Although Quebec has faced consistent pressure from taxi companies to regulate Uber like a traditional taxi firm, the province has declined to do so. Instead, last year the province granted Uber a temporary license to operate as part of a pilot project.

in only 24 hours. [Excerpts from the LA Times and Motherboard, respectively.]

Uber's new CEO is going to try to convince you that they've changed; that they've reformed, or learned the errors of their prior ways, or discovered the value of the communities that they're attempting to invade, but it's 99% horse shit. Seriously, it's almost pure manure; or pure PR, which is the same thing. Don't be fooled.

How can we miss you, if you won't go away?

[Update to this blog entry.]

So, those early comments by TADE (and no, I'm still not going to feed his ego by naming him on this blog) that he was examining all his legal options? You can ignore them. He is, 100% for certain, not suing Google or anybody else.

The first thing that any competent lawyer will tell you, once they agree to represent you on any matter, is to stop talking; your lawyers do all the necessary talking for you. This is partly because they get to bill you hundreds of dollars for every hour in which they do any work at all on your case, including media appearances, but it's also because judges, one of whom will preside over your lawsuit, tend to take a dim view of attempts by a complainant to try their case in the court of public opinion, rather than trying their case in, you know, an actual courtroom.

The fact that TADE still talking publicly (to the Wall Street Journal, on Reddit, and presumably to anyone else who'll listen, while he's still infamous enough make for an effective clickbait headline) is all the evidence you need that he has not yet secured legal representation. Which means either (a) that his talk of doing so was just talk, because he lacks the necessary resources to retain a lawyer, or (b) he tried to hire a lawyer, only to be turned away because his case is not winnable.

So, what's TADE trying to accomplish, with his "charm" offensive? I have no idea. I can't imagine he's making himself look any more attractive to future potential employers, though, almost all of whom would also have fired him for the level of insubordination that he displayed towards his last employer, and none of whom will be wanting to take someone onboard who's simultaneously unwilling to adhere to company policies, and highly likely to try to burn the place down behind him, when he leaves.

Oh, and Julian Assange's noises about offering him a job at Wikileaks? You can ignore that, too.

My thoughts on the topic of freedom of speech

For some time now, I've been assiduously avoiding posting about the politics of the day on this blog.

It's not because I'm not interested in politics. The members of my family are almost all political junkies; I've never failed to vote in any election where I was eligible to do so, and I check the day's political news, in both Canada and the U.S., several times each day, including Sundays and holidays. It's not because I don't have opinions on the topics of the day, either; if you've read any significant part of this blog, you know that I have plenty of opinions, and that I'm not terribly shy about sharing them. That is, after all, why I started a blog in the first place: to share my opinions on various topics of interest to me.

The reason that I've been avoiding posts about politics is twofold. One, political discussions on the internet tend to turn to shit very quickly, with toxic comment sections, personal attacks, gratuitous doxxing, and death threats, and who the fuck needs that in their lives? No, thank-you; I'll stick to bashing big corporations, which (a) provides plenty of material to write about, and (b) generally involves less of the typical internet unpleasantness.

The second reason, though, is both simpler and less selfish: I prefer not to post on topics where I have little, if anything, to add to the discussion. Whenever possible, I restrict myself to posts on topics where (a) I have something to say, that (b) I'm not seeing expressed elsewhere. More than once, I've deleted a partially-drafted post because I realized partway through that I wasn't saying anything of worth.

Yes, I've been guilty of the odd "+1" post that's little more than a link to an article that I liked and a comment that I agreed with it, but I try to keep that to a minimum. I'm basically a dilettante, well-read on a wide range of topics, with interests that are broad but shallow. I feel comfortable bringing together tidbits about statistics, public relations, history, and technology, synthesizing them into what I hope is a coherent world-view that minimizes the effect of hype culture on my behaviour and my life.

Politics feels different, though. It so often gets really personal, really quickly, with people mistaking arguments about identity for arguments about policy (and vice versa) in a way that makes them resistant to facts that contradict their worldviews, and unwilling to listen to people from the "other side." I like to think that I'm reasonably well-informed about politics and current events, but I'm not usually not an expert in either the issues involved, or the details of the relevant political processes; I'm certainly not likely to be recognized as an expert by either side of a political debate.

Every once in a while, though, I feel compelled to step out of my comfort zone. And the blowup around Google's firing of the "anti-diversity" engineer (a.k.a. TADE) feels like one of those times... in part because the discussion around the event seems to be revealing a fundamental misunderstanding about what free speech is and isn't, why democratic societies have and need it, and why and when it's perfectly acceptable to limit it... limitations that are already enshrined in law, and not particularly controversial.

First, let's start with what free speech is, and why democracies need it.

Selection bias in action: Windows 10's data collection policies really haven't been as positively received as they'd like you to think.

From Wikipedia:

Selection bias is the bias introduced by the selection of individuals, groups or data for analysis in such a way that proper randomization is not achieved, thereby ensuring that the sample obtained is not representative of the population intended to be analyzed.^[1] It is sometimes referred to as the selection effect. The phrase "selection bias" most often refers to the distortion of a statistical analysis, resulting from the method of collecting samples. If the selection bias is not taken into account, then some conclusions of the study may not be accurate.

Keep this definition in mind when reading ZDNet's latest reportage on Microsoft's Windows 10 privacy officer's latest press release (and, OMG, did that ever become a bear of a sentence):

After being pummeled by critics and regulators for Windows 10's overzealous personalization efforts, Microsoft says it's received "positive" feedback about privacy-enhancing changes it introduced in the Windows 10 Creators Update.

Those changes, which Microsoft rolled out in Windows 10 in recent months, include an online privacy dashboard and finer controls for location, speech recognition, diagnostics, tips and recommendations, and relevant ads.

It made those changes under the watch of European data-protection authorities, amid the French National Data Protection Commission's (CNIL) year-long probe over Windows 10's "excessive data collection" and tracking browser data without user consent.

CNIL in June lifted its formal notice on Microsoft, noting it had halved the volume of telemetry data collected under the Basic Diagnostic setting, and now provided "clear and precise information" about web tracking for personalizing ads.

With that episode in the rearview, Microsoft is now highlighting signs that customers do trust it with their data and that its responsiveness to customer feedback -- rather than just legal threats from watchdogs -- is driving Windows privacy improvements.

"Feedback we've received about the Creators Update has been positive. This is great news to us because what we hear from you directly impacts the improvements we make," says Marisa Rogers, Microsoft privacy officer for the Windows Devices Group.

Despite the basic Diagnostics setting collecting far less data than before, Rogers points out that 71 percent of customers select the Full option, which sends browser data, app and feature usage, and inking and typing data to Microsoft.

The setting is on Full by default, but can be toggled to Basic.

So, where's the selection bias here? you're probably asking by now.

Let's start with the fact that a significant number of the Windows users most likely to have objected to Microsoft's Windows 10 privacy regime are still using Windows 7. They never switched to Windows 10, precisely because of Microsoft's broken data collection and privacy policies, and that has not changed, even after the changes which Microsoft made while under threat of regulatory action by the Article 29 Working Party.

We'll continue with the fact that "Full" data collection is still the default, and that leaving it on may not represent approval so much as apathy on the part of those who have done so. The 71% of customers who are still set to "Full" data collection didn't select it; they just didn't care enough to change the setting. How many times have you clicked through an annoying pop-up screen to get to whatever you'd turned on your PC to do, intending to go back and look at it later... only to forget to go back later? Yeah, me, too.

And, about that positive feedback? All I can say is, "Duh."

Now, that's good PR...

I'm almost hesitant to talk about this, because it seems like every time I praise Microsoft for anything, they find some way to make me regret that praise almost immediately, but this particular thing they've done really is good, and deserves a mention. I'm talking, of course, about their recently-revealed new Eye Control feature, as described in dozens of articles by this point, like this one from The Verge:

Microsoft is planning to add native eye tracking support into Windows 10. The new support is primarily designed to help those suffering from neuro-muscular diseases like ALS and other disabilities to control the various interface elements in Windows 10 without a traditional mouse and keyboard. This ranges from gazing at apps to launch them, or using an onscreen keyboard to glance at characters and type out words.

Dubbed Eye Control in Windows 10, the new feature will require hardware like Tobii’s Eye Tracker 4C. Microsoft has worked closely with Tobii to enable this support, and existing devices like Tobii Dynavox PCEye Mini, PCEye Plus, EyeMobile Plus and I-series will all be supported soon. Eye Control in Windows 10 is in beta now, and participants will need to sign up to Microsoft’s Windows Insider program to get access. 

Now, to be clear, this isn't 100% unalloyed goodness. For one thing, the new hardware requirement isn't great; I would be more impressed if this could just with a standard (or HD) webcam, for example. And there's also the fact that it's a new Windows 10 feature, something that Microsoft's had trouble delivering on so far. That said, though, this is still a useful feature, with applications beyond increased accessibility (Tobii actually developed the tech for VR), and the story of how and why it made its way into Win10's feature list is pretty cool. There seems to be nothing bad, here, for a change, at least so far, and plenty of good to be had, especially since the feature had already been added to the latest Insider build.

So, why do I feel like I'm waiting for a shoe to drop?

Every once in a while, Microsoft do something praiseworthy. But it seems like they almost always follow that good news with some self-inflicted injury that stops their good PR in its tracks. It would be great if this latest good news story was the start of some new trend on Redmond's part, of some overt and deliberate push to win back the trust and goodwill of their customers, but Microsoft's history simply does not support that kind of optimism. I could be wrong; honestly, I wouldn't mind being wrong; but I'm still waiting for Microsoft to find the next rake that they've left in their own lawn. Maybe it sucks, but it is what it is, and they've definitely earned every bit of that skepticism.