Day: 18 December 2018

The Danger of Data Brokers ⇥ nytimes.com

The New York Times editorial board (via Sarah Jeong):

But search engines put the home addresses of the entire nation a few keystrokes away. And there’s an entirely legal industry that peddles that and other personal information for a price. Search for a name in Google, and you may very well find a number of data brokers offering to sell information for a couple of dollars — if not offering it up for free.

The data comes from a number of places, including property and voting records, which are often public. (In some states, voters may apply to have their information in public voter rolls concealed by filing a form stapled to a copy of a restraining order or an affidavit that they fear for their safety.) But the data also could have been sold through the private sector — harvested, for instance, from a grocery store rewards card.

Once the information is out, it spreads — sometimes scraped, sometimes bought and sold — among data brokers. Some are sites that operate as low-touch private detectives, hanging their shingle on the first page of Google results. Anyone trying to remove information must contact dozens of different services to do so. Some remove information only for a fee.

It’s wild to me that the White Pages has been made available online, and that it — like pretty much every other people searching website — requires you to opt out of having your address, phone number, and family connections publicly-available to anyone.

Sleeping Rough in the Mattress Economy ⇥ thebaffler.com

Ed Burmila, the Baffler:

Why do so many business and marketing types believe that the model podcast listener — a young, hip thirtysomething who needs a new fix since NPR went down the shitter — is clay waiting to be molded into a mattress buyer? On the surface it makes no sense. This demographic traditionally wants to make purchases that have, bluntly, some show-off value. This is the upwardly mobile, striving, status-seeking social climber. Not too long ago these people were pitched BMWs, Rolexes, and exotic vacations. The kind of stuff that tells the world you’ve Arrived.

How did that segment of the market become a combat zone for, of all things, mattress retail? Well, if you listen to a lot of podcasts, marketing data suggests you stand at the confluence of two powerful trends: high anxiety and lowered expectations.

I like the way this piece confronts the second trend of lowered expectations, but the anxiety of buying products like these is something that I’m fascinated by.

What makes Casper’s products and approach so different? A similar question can be asked of any of the large number of companies that sell specialized products directly to consumers: Warby Parker, et al., for glasses; Indochino for suits; Quip for toothbrushes — fashionable toothbrushes! — Allbirds shoes, and so on.

It’s not solely in the products’ marketing. I considered that it was perhaps that there are no physical retail locations, but all of these companies have either opened brick-and-mortar stores, or are selling through other retailers. It’s not home delivery; that’s not a new invention. And, even though they’re mostly selling directly to consumers, these companies aren’t necessarily charging substantially less.

I think the allure is the generally bullshit-free sales approach that helps lower buyers’ anxiety. Choice can be good, but every time I’ve visited a mattress store, I’ve felt completely overwhelmed. Same with eyeglasses — not only are there typically hundreds of frame options, but all sorts of coatings and lens options are available as well. Nobody wants glare in their glasses, so just build the cost into the lens.

I fully recognize how stupid this is, but my personal irritant is the oral care aisle in my grocery store. I don’t need fifty toothbrush choices at price points ranging from three to eight dollars, or a hundred toothpaste choices.

Google Isn’t the Company to Which We Should Be Ceding Control of the Web ⇥ arstechnica.com

Jack Wellborn:

Switching to Chromium in particular contributes to the problem that gave us awfulness of Internet Explorer – lack of diversity. Chrome controls somewhere between 60 and 70% of browser share, and while that’s no where near Internet Explorer’s former dominance, there have already been a handful sites that are Chrome-only/Chrome-first. Even more worrisome is the number of other Web Developers that disdainfully treat non-Chrome browsers as aberrations.

Edge used to be an independent voice in the web standards community. Now that voice will be lost in such a way that empowers the most powerful.

Peter Bright, Ars Technica:

This is a company that, time and again, has tried to push the Web into a Google-controlled proprietary direction to improve the performance of Google’s online services when used in conjunction with Google’s browser, consolidating Google’s market positioning and putting everyone else at a disadvantage. Each time, pushback has come from the wider community, and so far, at least, the result has been industry standards that wrest control from Google’s hands. This action might already provoke doubts about the wisdom of handing effective control of the Web’s direction to Google, but at least a case could be made that, in the end, the right thing was done.

But other situations have had less satisfactory resolutions. YouTube has been a particular source of problems. Google controls a large fraction of the Web’s streaming video, and the company has, on a number of occasions, made changes to YouTube that make it worse in Edge and/or Firefox. Sometimes these changes have improved the site experience in Chrome, but even that isn’t always the case.

JoshuaJB on Hacker News was, according to his resume, an intern for the past two summers at Microsoft:

I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn’t keep up. For example, they recently added a hidden empty div over YouTube videos that causes our hardware acceleration fast-path to bail (should now be fixed in Win10 Oct update). Prior to that, our fairly state-of-the-art video acceleration put us well ahead of Chrome on video playback time on battery, but almost the instant they broke things on YouTube, they started advertising Chrome’s dominance over Edge on video-watching battery life. What makes it so sad, is that their claimed dominance was not due to ingenious optimization work by Chrome, but due to a failure of YouTube. On the whole, they only made the web slower.

Now while I’m not sure I’m convinced that YouTube was changed intentionally to slow Edge, many of my co-workers are quite convinced – and they’re the ones who looked into it personally. To add to this all, when we asked, YouTube turned down our request to remove the hidden empty div and did not elaborate further.

Chromium is, by all accounts, an excellent rendering engine. It is not inherently bad for Microsoft to switch its rendering engine, and it is not even necessarily bad that there is less diversity amongst rendering engines. The concern is that Google’s rendering engine is not separate from Google as a company, and its manipulative and self-preferential tactics for directing the web in a direction it favours.

The web is not a Google product. We ought to do everything we can to spoil their attempts to make it one.

Twitter’s Reverse-Chronological Timeline Toggle Is Rolling Out on iOS Today ⇥ theverge.com

Casey Newton, the Verge:

Twitter began ranking the timeline almost four years ago. It was an effort to increase usage at a time when Facebook had pulled dramatically ahead of Twitter, raising doubts about the company’s future and setting it on a course to reinvent itself. Many users griped about the change, even though Twitter has always allowed users to switch back to the reverse-chronological feed temporarily.

The latest incarnation of the original Twitter feed can be accessed by tapping the cluster of small stars — the company calls it the “sparkle” and now so shall we all, forever — and switching to see the latest tweets. Over time, the company will learn your behavior. If you routinely switch to the latest tweets, Twitter will default you to them. This marks a change from the past, when the app would switch you back to the ranked timeline at unpredictable intervals.

This is unnecessarily complicated, especially when compared to the current behaviour. All anyone wants who uses the reverse-chronological timeline is to be able to set that as their preferred — and only — view. The app doesn’t need to “learn” a user’s preference over time. It just needs one setting. It shouldn’t be this difficult.