January 17, 2019 – Pixel Envy

January 17, 2019 ⌥

How Secrecy Fuels Tech Paranoia ⇥ nytimes.com

John Herrman, New York Times:

The biggest internet platforms are businesses built on asymmetric information. They know far more about their advertising, labor and commerce marketplaces than do any of the parties participating in them. We can guess, but can’t know, why we were shown a friend’s Facebook post about a divorce, instead of another’s about a child’s birth. We can theorize, but won’t be told, why YouTube thinks we want to see a right-wing polemic about Islam in Europe after watching a video about travel destinations in France. Everything that takes place within the platform kingdoms is enabled by systems we’re told must be kept private in order to function. We’re living in worlds governed by trade secrets. No wonder they’re making us all paranoid.

This was published a day after an op-ed in Wired theorized that the “2009 vs 2019” comparison really exists to teach artificial intelligence how human ageing works. I think that piece is utter nonsense, but I get where that sentiment comes from.

January 17, 2019 ⌥

Jack Dorsey Has No Clue What He Wants ⇥ huffingtonpost.ca

Ashley Feinberg of the Huffington Post interviewed Jack Dorsey recently, and came away with the titular conclusion:

In other words, the most the CEO of Twitter was able to tell me about specific steps being taken to solve the rampant, site-wide harassment problem that’s plagued the platform for years is that they’re looking into maybe making the report button a little bigger, eventually.

Or consider later, when I asked whether Trump tweeting an explicit call for murder would be grounds for removal. Just as he seemed about to answer what seemed like an easy question, he caught himself. “That would be a violent threat,” he started. “We’d definitely … You know we’re in constant communication with all governments around the world. So we’d certainly talk about it.”

They would certainly talk about it.

Feinberg’s question is, of course, questioning Twitter’s rules at their limits. But it’s baffling that something so clearly beyond the realm of what Twitter should support prompts such an uncertain and confused answer from Dorsey.

The rest of this interview is more of the same.

January 17, 2019 ⌥

Pew: 74% of Facebook Users Have No Idea How Its Ads Work ⇥ techcrunch.com

Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch:

Pew found three-quarters (74%) of Facebook users did not know the social networking behemoth maintains a list of their interests and traits to target them with ads, only discovering this when researchers directed them to view their Facebook ad preferences page.

A majority (51%) of Facebook users also told Pew they were uncomfortable with Facebook compiling the information.

While more than a quarter (27%) said the ad preference listing Facebook had generated did not very or at all accurately represent them.

This is one reason why I think a legislative approach is critical to protecting user privacy. Users don’t know how these things work because Facebook buries the truth and its handful of privacy controls in abstruse language beneath layers of menus and controls. They have reached the size where there simply isn’t any incentive for them to be more transparent, and existing regulatory agencies are either unwilling or unable to take action.

January 17, 2019 ⌥

Tim Cook’s Time Magazine Editorial on Privacy ⇥ time.com

Tim Cook in Time:

Meaningful, comprehensive federal privacy legislation should not only aim to put consumers in control of their data, it should also shine a light on actors trafficking in your data behind the scenes. Some state laws are looking to accomplish just that, but right now there is no federal standard protecting Americans from these practices. That’s why we believe the Federal Trade Commission should establish a data-broker clearinghouse, requiring all data brokers to register, enabling consumers to track the transactions that have bundled and sold their data from place to place, and giving users the power to delete their data on demand, freely, easily and online, once and for all.

Setting aside the actual point of this essay — which, by the way, is an excellent summary of why privacy legislation for user data is sorely needed — something that’s kind of interesting is how it reads in a very Tim Cook kind of way. Much as Steve Jobs had a unique voice in both his speaking and writing, so, too, does Cook. It doesn’t feel like it’s an essay produced by some copywriter to which Cook’s name is later affixed; it’s clear to me that this is something that truly matters to him, and which he probably wrote himself.

Nilay Patel linked to the essay on Twitter and attached a screenshot of the top apps in the App Store, clarifying in a reply:

The iPhone’s value is built on these services. Pushing for a law is great, but it is telling that they won’t use their own platform dominance to forbid these practices.

“These services” refers to apps like Gmail and Instagram, both of which are run by companies that show virtually no respect for users’ privacy. This seems to come up frequently in conversations about Apple, and it’s something lots of people mention, so I don’t mean to single out Patel here. But I think it’s a horribly lazy take.

Can you imagine the scale of the shit fit that would be thrown if Apple completely prohibited apps from Google and Facebook in the App Store? Not just from users, either: tech publications, mainstream newspapers, and regulators would be apoplectic, given the obvious antitrust questions that would likely be provoked by this kind of power move.

For what it’s worth, Apple has strict guidelines on the collection and use of users’ data. These rules require that developers collect opt-in permission, prohibit apps from requiring personal data unless it’s necessary for the app’s core functionality, and encourage minimization of data collection overall. That’s not to say the company is perfect. For example, you cannot post photos to an Instagram story if you’ve denied microphone access to Instagram, despite Apple’s developer guidelines using basically this scenario as a prohibited example. I wish Apple were stricter in enforcing the rules they already have, but their reluctance to create a PR and antitrust catastrophe is understandable.

In general, however, enforcement of online privacy should not be Apple’s job. Cook is right in stating that this should be dealt with in policy, not on individual companies’ terms. Frankly, Apple’s ability to use privacy as a differentiating characteristic is embarrassing for the tech industry and its regulators. Users should not have to be wary of compromising their privacy or worried that they will lose control over their personal details every time they use a tech product, an app, or a website.

January 17, 2019 ⌥

Fine, I Admit I Have Some Thoughts About Slack’s New Branding ⇥ underconsideration.com

Given a few prods from readers, Armin Vit of Brand New posted his mostly positive review of the new Slack branding:

As mentioned in Slack’s blog post, their logo was designed before it even launched; it doesn’t specify what year but even if it were 2012 or 2011, it was a time before the hash tag had become the ubiquitous symbol it is today. At the time it may have seemed unique and appropriate — as it tied in with Slack’s “channel” system — but today every single social platform uses hash tags in a significant way. Not as their logo, sure, but as an integral part of their content and, to me, that has always been the most significant aspect holding back the old Slack logo. It was simply too generic of a mark and that’s why it was drenched in 11 colors and rotated at an angle — a sort of extreme measure to own the symbol. The variation where the symbol was a single color and placed in a heavily rounded-corner square was the most successful and had the possibility of outpacing the ubiquity of the hash tag on its own. However, it was the super colorful version that most people associated Slack with. All this to say, as much as many people had grown accustomed to the hash tag symbol, I don’t think it had enough depth to build a multi-billion-dollar public brand with.

Vit is absolutely right: Slack doesn’t own the hash. In fact, if the hash were associated with any specific company, I’d say Twitter is probably most associated with the mark, with Instagram just behind it. Dropping the hash was not a bad choice.

That doesn’t mean that the new brand is any good, though. At best, it looks completely generic — put just about any word beside its logo and it could easily be that company’s brand. If you told me that this was the new logo for some accounting software or the city of Miami or Wellbutrin, I’d totally believe you.

Setting that aside, the quality of craft on this project also leaves a lot to be desired. One of the apparent possibilities that Pentagram considered was the waving hand emoji that, in draft form at least, used Apple’s emoji artwork; another was a serif adorned with coloured dots that would have looked more at home on the packaging of an early 1990s educational game. Notably, not a single possibility is shown with a tilt in Pentagram’s drafts. Maybe levelling out the logo was a requirement for Pentagram; if so, that’s unfortunate, as I’ve come to associate the tilt with Slack’s brand as much as its signature plaid.

Also, the flattened counter of the “a” in the wordmark makes it look unrefined and incomplete.

All of these things can be true: Slack probably could have used a rebrand, lots of people worked hard to put this together, the result is ultimately unsatisfying, and I do not know the constraints faced that ultimately produced this. And it’s not just a logo. Slack is on the first home screen of my iPhone, and that’s probably true for many of you. I see this thing every day. I didn’t love the old logo and I don’t miss it, per se, but I think this is a regression.