First Amendment Platforms

Dave Winer recently, and probably unwittingly, coined a beautiful neologism: 1st Amendment Platforms.

The term refers to platforms1 that are ultimately bound by the constitution and the rule of law, rather than the Terms of Service of the platform provider.

As such the term is tremendously valuable for drawing the distinction between “non-first amendment-platforms” and first amendment platforms, whereas the former are governed by commercial interests and your interaction with and on the platform can be constrained by the platform operator on grounds of Terms-of-Service violations.

With the recent push to bring people towards blogging on their own blogs again, I think this is the valuable distinction to make.

But it has larger implications, precisely because it doesn’t just refer to stuff happening on the web. When we look at the growing trend of public-private partnerships that govern our cities, we have to ask: do we maintain enough first amendment platforms? Zuccotti Park, the epicenter of last-years Occupy efforts in New York, is not a public venue and thus First Amendment Rules, strictly speaking, do not apply.

The concerns can be levied against many of the Smart City concepts, in which Infrastructure is increasingly being built out by private entities and leased back to the cities. Which rules do apply here? Are these First Amendment Platforms, or aren’t they?

  1. Please note that this means “platforms” in the widest sense. It applies to Facebook equally as it does to your local strip-mall. ↩

The Importance of Agenda Setting in Open Source Hardware →

Brandon Stafford of Rascal Micro was attending an Open Source Hardware event in Washington DC and has this great quote of Michael Weinberg, of Public Knowledge:

“If you’re a legislator and the first time you ever hear about 3-D printing is someone coming into your office saying, ‘This horrible pirate box is ruining my business,’ you would have one world view of 3-D printing. If the first time you hear about 3-D printing is someone saying, ‘Wow, look at all these new businesses and people who are coming together around technology and creating all these amazing things,’ you have a different world view about the subject.”

Certainly applies to more than just Open Source Hardware, and is one more reason why here in the EU we have to be more vocal about the propositions of IoT.

Sensor Ghosts

If you have been following the discussion about the ”New Aesthetic” you are no doubt familiar with the concept of render ghosts, those renderings reminiscent of human beings used to not only fill out and liven up architectural drafts and concepts, but increasingly visions of the future themselves.

As such, render ghosts are a proxy, static renderings of what are supposed to be living subjects, with agency, dynamic in making whatever draft includes them their own. Yet they don’t, as they are only a representation, a static picture of what is meant to be there.

Sensors, in the way they are deployed now, suffer much of the same conceptual limitations of the render ghosts. They are there, and they sense, but they don’t have agency.

As much as you can’t ascribe intent to the render ghosts, you can’t know exactly what is meant by data. As much as an architectural sketch is meant for interpretation, data gathered by sensors needs interpretation.

We’re currently building out all those systems that promise us a better, brighter future, on the premise that once we have access to all this data that is present in the world, something new and glorious will emerge. We are deploying the sensor ghosts into the field, hoping to sell with it our particular vision of the future.

And as much as I am keen on envisioning the future, maybe even help build it, we are well advised remembering the limitations of the sensor ghosts.

We should stay humble in what we try to achieve. Because even our humble visions are revolutionary.

“smart” isn’t just about efficiency →

Usman Hague, of Pachube, for Wired UK:

[…] smartness is not just about efficiency (e.g. using less power) but crucially also about creating a flexible system that can dynamically adjust to changes, one that responds to unpredictable phenomena in a way that is not planned, and that harnesses the creative capacity of inhabitants.

Citizens should be able to adjust and rewire the smart city as needed to solve problems and overcome obstacles in their own lives. Smart systems cannot just be installed atop a city, and then maintained as the unchanging status quo forever. The smart city gets reconfigured every day.

Damn right.

Nest: Introducing Big Shifts Slowly →

Cliff Kuang interviews Tony Faddell, the maker of the Nest Learning Thermostat, for Fast Magazine. Among the discussion about the evolution of the device and its connected services, this stood out to me:

“If we’d come out with the iPhone of home-energy management, people would just get confused,” Fadell told us previously. Meaning that if the very first Nest thermostat had boasted all of the functionality and features that Nest plans for it, it would have been too confusing a product to get mainstream adoption. You have to let people buy into a device first, before building a world of functionality around it.

I think this is what a great many entrenched utility companies get completely wrong. They want to offer the whole solution in one go, debate endlessly about the deliverables and how to extract the most value, but almost never bother to think about how to place the customer in the picture. In Europe, we have a legal mandate to introduce Smart Meters, for example, so if the customers are forced to use this thing, why make them buy in? This is in large part the reason why Smart Meter adoption has been sluggish.

UN Global Pulse report on crises and real-time information →

The UN’s Global Pulse project, which focuses on using close to real-time data to faster react to unfolding crisis situations posted the results of a study they did with other UN bodies. From the blog:

To get a cross-sectoral understanding of how vulnerable populations cope with the impacts of global crises, Global Pulse partnered with research teams from 11 UN Agencies to look at the 2008/2009 Global Economic Crisis through the lens of eight different sectors in 38 countries – under the umbrella of RIVAF.

Head over for the full report. And keep an eye on this project. Something tells me this is worth following.

The Age of General Purpose Data

Introduction

This post has been lingering in the back of my mind for quite some while. The developments are so fast-paced at the moment, that it’s hard to keep up with it, let alone writing a post on the topic.

This post is heavily inspired by Cory Doctorow’s talk at the 28th Chaos Communication Congress aptly titled “The Coming War on General Purpose Computation” (the transcript of which can be found here.)

At the core of my argument lies the analogous application of Doctorow’s argument in regard to computation of data, that is: Data is not easily constricted in purpose without fundamentally crippling that which we understand as computation. It is essentially reversing the vector of ”The War on General Purpose Computation,” not aiming at our use of copyrighted material and industry’s attempts to censor that use, but rather looking how we’re unable to effectively restrict Governments and industries (and even each other) in their use of “our” data.

And while similar arguments have been made by critics of “Big Data,” they themselves massively underestimate the magnitude of changes to come. It is my conviction that Big Data, although very useful in laying out the fundamental shifts, is a concept too small in scope to appropriately describe the world we’re building.

Everything is Data, Data is Everything

In the United States, Congress is currently deliberating on a privacy bill, which tries to balance legitimate business needs with regard to data harvested on the internet, and users legitimate and — in the US especially important — reasonable expectations of privacy.

The types of data talked about in the public debate are revealing. The New York Times recently made headlines detailing Targets GuestID system, which allowed for a comprehensive profiling and predictive targeting of its customers. Google is increasingly coming under scrutiny with regard to its new privacy policy, which abandons the walls between user data collected on its many properties which were meant to prevent the capabilities of detailed and comprehensive profiling of the users of its service.

Adding to that, an app called “Girls around me,” which extracted the location check-ins of female users of foursquare and facebook, combined them with publicly accessible profile information, and packaged them into an app targeted essentially at the male “pick up” clientele, sparked a controversy over its “creepy factor.”

And this is just what’s happening now. Data is being collected, harvested, hoarded and analysed at seemingly every corner. As last year’s visualisation of German politician Malte Spitz’ cell phone location data for the newspaper “Die Zeit” has shown, this data alone can paint a comprehensive picture of his movements. Similarly, legislation requiring British telecommunications companies to save almost all aspects of its customers online communication is currently under discussion at the House of Commons.

Add to that a multitude of additional data sources, from the location data of your shared photographs to how well you slept last night. And we’re just getting started.

The “Quantified Self” is just about to break into the mainstream, with products like the Jawbone UP, the Nike Fuelband (and it’s predecessor/companion, the Nike+), the Withings scale and a plethora of other sensor-equipped hardware currently aiming to conquer first the fitness market, and then the everyday.

And it doesn’t stop there. We’re analysing our attention data, how many phone calls we make, and when, how many emails we write and how productive we are. And if we zoom out, we see this happening on a large scale, too. The Air Quality Egg, a crowdsourced approach to measuring air quality, reached its Kickstarter funding goal in a mere three days, accompanying other initiatives like Safecast.org, which is a volunteer organisation that measures radioactivity levels or the New York based project, which measures the sewer levels, trying to, by making this information publicly available, avoid sewage spill-over into the river water.

The scope and size of data being collected right now is unimaginable and unprecedented. And it’s growing.

Data-Driven Modelling

Add to that the fundamental shift we are witnessing right now in the way in which data gets collected, stored and analysed.

Collecting, storing and analysing data used to be so expensive and time-consuming that the only reasonable way to go about it was to do it when it was necessary. You wanted to have a model and a hypothesis about how that thing worked you were looking into.

You would build a model with a hypothesis in mind, and gather the data to analyse and then either confirm or refute the hypothesis.

We’re now in an age where collecting data is the new normal, where storing and processing have come down in price so much, that in a lot of cases simply adding storage is now cheaper than deleting data.

This reverses how we view data and interact with it. The sensible approach now is to collect the data now and see what you can find in it later. And a lot of the time, you can even let machines to that job for you. Machine learning is already at the point where it can extrapolate fundamental laws of physics from just watching a pendulum for two hours.

This means that I don’t necessarily have to have an idea of what I want to look for in the data. And it means that I don’t necessarily have to expect to find anything in the data — most likely someone will. This means that any sort of data is potentially valuable, even if the value is only recognised and realised much later, as we’re building models out of the data we have, not looking for data to fit our models.

Recontextualization

This collected data is not easily constricted in purpose. The data you gather now can be used in a multitude of purposes and contexts, none of which might have even existed at the moment of actually gathering the data.

What this development implicates that value I’m extracting from the data, the insights I glean, have nothing to do with the circumstance and context in which the data was collected. Think, for instance of the San Francisco parking system that is currently under construction. On the face of it, it is an elaborate sensor system which tries to identify empty parking spaces and communicate them to drivers looking for parking, while at the same time by using flexible parking rates maximise the income potential for the municipality. This sounds like a reasonable and innocent use of technology. But then you realise that you have profiles of movement for many of the participants in the system.

And if you look at a recent story in the UK, where it has been proposed that drivers that have not paid the road taxes be identified at gas stations by the omnipresent CCTV and be denied filling their vehicles, you get how easily this data can be bent in its use.

It is indeed not the data itself which we are concerned with. It is the recontextualisation of this data that worries us. It’s not check-ins on foursquare which are objectionable, it’s the repurposing this data for use in potentially crime-inviting packaging, be it in the form of “Girls Around Me,” or the previous “Please Rob Me.”

It is this recontextualization of data which gets privacy advocates up in arms, and which is not easily constricted. There’s no technical system which allows us to say: you can use this data for these purposes, but not for those, just as there is no easy fix in hindering me in copying a sound file.

We can’t control where the data goes that we share, or that we don’t even know exists about us. We should work towards rules that at least let us know what’s being done with it.

Climate at the Core of the Arab Spring? →

Thomas Fuchs, in an Op-Ed for the New York Times, argues that the Arab Spring is a result of worsening climatic conditions in the Middle East:

“Syria’s current social unrest is, in the most direct sense, a reaction to a brutal and out-of-touch regime,” write Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell, in a report for their Center for Climate and Security in Washington. “However, that’s not the whole story. The past few years have seen a number of significant social, economic, environmental and climatic changes in Syria that have eroded the social contract between citizen and government.

This gives the predominant narrative of the “Internet Revolution” considerably more depth as it might help explain the underlying motivations that have been facilitated by Internet based communications. Further, it provides a chilling outlook of the path that may lie ahead.

EU Public Consultation on IoT Governance →

From the European Commission:

The Internet of Things holds the promise of significant progress in addressing global and societal challenges and to improve daily life. It is also a highly promising economic sector for sustainability, growth, innovation and employment. But it is likely to have a profound impact on society, in areas like privacy, security, ethics, and liability. The policy challenge is to assess the right trade-off between the potential economic and societal benefits and the control that we want to retain over an environment where machines will gather, exchange, process and store information automatically. The effects on our private and public space require that people and their governments debate the appropriate governance and management of the Internet of Things in the future. To this end the European Commission envisions a recommendation addressing the main issues, of which a number are outlined in the questions below.

If you work on the Internet of Things, it’s probably a good idea to participate in this public consultation.

OPower Social launched →

The thinking behind all this, of course, is that it’s not so much factual information that motivates behavioral change — knowing that smoking is bad for you, or that most electricity generation emits heat-trapping carbon dioxide – but the way that such information plays off social relationships and creates peer pressure. Now the company is looking to harness social media to further that kind of psychological connection as well.

Opower has teamed with Facebook, energy conservation advocates and the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, on a new app.

Here’s a project I’ve been eagerly awaiting for a while now.

Back when I still was at Verivox, I was working on something similar, albeit of course not in that breadth, and of course not with Facebook. I’m excited about this launch and very curious how usage will turn out. OPower itself has a pretty consistent track record in guiding people towards energy savings, and showcases the importance of good behavioral design in energy efficiency matters. 1

However, I remain skeptical about the Facebook integration. While the benefits of having the “social graph” are immediately obvious, I imagine this could further spur fears about privacy in the area of smart metering, which is already riddled with questions about data use and ownership.

  1. It further showcases that Energy Efficiency is indeed the low hanging fruit in restructuring energy infrastructure. ↩