Saturday 4 July 2015

No Privacy No Way!

No Privacy No Way

Little things can tip the balance…

It’s very easy to look at the world the way it is today, warts and all, and make the mistake of thinking that things will be the same tomorrow. For most South Africans, for example, assuming that load shedding is simply a part of life and that we will just have to work around it is becoming a stark reality. But it’s so easy for change to tip one way or the other, that many people would probably be surprised (and also resentful that they invested in a R20k generator that they could have avoided).


Before you throw away your candles and battery lights, this is not a rant about changing the electricity supply, but more about how things change when they tip in a certain way. I’m also certainly not going to try to rewrite Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent take on this topic (“The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference” for those of you who haven’t read it). But this is an issue that we could become more mindful of in everyday situations, to realise that any small change has the power to bring about massive change, and it’s all about timing.

Take the latest proposal by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) to limit privacy for website owners. ICANN, for those not familiar with it, is an international organisation that pretty much controls the management of namespaces on the internet. We, members of the public, buy domain names from a registrar, like Enom or TuCows, and they in turn reserve name spaces with ICANN in order for them to be recognised. So, for example, they would reserve the TLD (top level domain) ninja.za and then I can go and register suvesh.ninja.za with a registrar I choose. So they’re pretty important in that space.

ICANN caused some grumbles last year when they introduced mandatory verification of contact details on certain top level domains. Now, despite these grumbles, this was mostly a good thing. To prevent rising internet fraud and domain squatting (a.k.a cybersquatting - a quick Google search will tell you how rockers Jethro Tull won the rights to jethrotull.com and pop star Sting lost the rights to sting. com due to cybersquatting). But ICANN recently angered the internet when it was revealed that they planned to end proxy registrations for any commercial website. Now, aside from the occasional blog, pretty much any website could or does have commercial applications - it would seem the definition would even extend to donations and fundraising. At the moment, a website owner wanting privacy can pay an additional fee to their registrar who will register the domain by proxy to keep their contact information private and only a court order can essentially compel them to reveal the owner’s information. While you may want to trade openly on the internet, you may want to hide your home phone number if you’re selling confederate flags in the US right now, for example.

The change is apparently being pushed by global entertainment companies, presumably to have more access to see who is selling content and to be able to quickly enforce copyright infringement action. However thousands of website owners, large and small, have taken exception to the move as it essentially opens them up to trolling, spam, intimidation, identity theft and possibly worse. In a recent edition of “Last Week Today”, one of my favourite people in the world, John Oliver, highlighted some of the scary and inexplicable stories of cyberbullying that plague the internet today, including very real death threats.

Now this alone may not be enough to tip the internet to a massive change, but I think we’re closer than we think. The privacy and anonymity of the internet  has been one of the biggest factors in terms of capturing youth, millennials and by extension, businesses who want to sell their products to them. The proliferation of social networks on the internet today, from major players like Facebook and Twitter to obscure networks like Tinder (a rather odd and at times brutally honest dating site), reddit, NING and many more springing up daily, is staggering. Social networks have grown so strong that many businesses now focus more resources on social than on traditional advertising and in some cases even client services. Facebook recently announced its Messenger App will eventually handle payments, VoIP calls and even an app platform for image and media sharing. The entire world is moving forward on the assumption that social networks are here to stay.

But a recent study showed that an incredible 55% of young people surveyed would do away with social media completely if they could start afresh. With growing concerns around privacy in light of social media networks being hacked, government spying (or collusion with networks) and all other manner of snooping, data mining and information trading, 73% percent of those surveyed said they were likely to deactivate their personal accounts if the trends continue. Now while the younger generation have traditionally been less guarded about trading information for functions and services they value, there is clearly and increasing mistrust of how their information is handled and especially government or regulatory involvement with their privacy. This should also raise a few eyebrows amongst the Zuckerbergs of the world, because if the youth leave, eventually so will the paying businesses and advertisers that make them their millions.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should cancel your Facebook account now, ‘cause it won’t matter in a year. Though if I had said that about  Foursquare two years ago I would probably been hailed as a tech or financial genius. Foursquare was launched at SXSW 2009 (Twitter is the other great Southby success story) and at its peak claimed at least 45 million users. Today, after several rebrands and a failed attempt to launch its own social network called Swarm, Foursquare is all but checked out. What changed? Little things. Location options on Google, Facebook and Twitter made some of its features redundant. They angered their users by trying to force their own social network on them, and people just didn’t like the way it worked or felt. Either way, it didn’t happen in a day. The important thing I take away is that once it started, there was almost no way back for them. Despite massive injections of funding and resources, I don’t think I have seen a single Foursquare post in 2015. So while your Facebook account is probably safe for now, who knows that the catalyst will be to spell the next era of the internet.