An InformationWeek post today by Thomas Claburn is entitled "Google Defuses Street View Privacy With User Photos". It's hard to think of a more misleading way to characterize the situation. Adding user-generated content cannot defuse any issues regarding the still available satellite or panoramic photos of people's homes, windows, front porches, pets and the like. Presenting that kind of content in a commercial setting, where it is detailed and the main subject of the photo, normally requires individual, signed photo releases. Google has managed to get around that, most recently in a flawed decision by a Pennsylvania court. You can get an idea of Google's view of physical privacy in general in their court brief, an excerpt of which was published by The Smoking Gun. Essentially, Google argues (a) that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy for your real property, unless you have taken extraordinary measures to protect it; (b) that the property in question can already be viewed from one perspective or another on publicly available web sites (such as that operated by the County Assessor's office); (c) that while Google photographers did briefly enter a private driveway to make the photograph, that driveway would ordinarily be accessed by many people, such as delivery persons and neighbors, and is not therefore "private" in the way needed to exclude photographs; and (d) that the defendants cannot reasonably claim to have suffered psychological harm from the publication of the photograph and did not take immediate steps to have it removed.
Personally, I think all these arguments are fallacious, because they all overlook two obvious and highly pertinent facts:
(1) Google set out deliberately, and without regard to the preferences of society as a whole or any individual on the planet, to take panaoramic "street view" photographs of every piece of real property in several major cities. This was an unprecedented and extremely ambitious venture, and cannot be compared to the casual, accidental or occasional intrusion by an individual photographer. That is not to say that an individual photographer who deliberately enters a private driveway to photograph someone's house is doing nothing wrong; but it is not comparable to the methodical nature of Google's "street view" program, which might be seen as deliberately and egregiously intrusive even if the wandering photo opportunist is not.
(2) Google's purpose in photographing private homes is purely commercial. Although Google self-righteously pontificates about its "mission" in the court statement ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"), the fact is that Google is a profit-making enterprise, and any ideological motives they may have has to take a back seat to the fact that they are publishing more and more content with the intention of making more and more money. No one asked them or designated them to carry out any "mission"; they do it in the hope of increasing advertising revenue, licensing fees and other sources of income. So when Google hires photographers to stop by your house and take panoramic pictures of it which they can post on the Internet, they are not acting as artists, journalists, casual snapshot takers or any other disinterested party. They are using your property to indirectly generate income for themselves, to which you are not entitled, though you are the owner of the property. They are not fulfilling any (alleged) security mission, as NASA or the Pentagon might be when they point their satellite at your block; if anything, they are providing potentially dangerous information which would otherwise be quite challenging for terrorists or rogue states to obtain. As I said, the deliberate commercial use of a detailed photograph in which your property is the main subject normally requires a signed photo release; but decisions like those of judge Amy Reynolds Hay of the U.S. District Court for Western Pennsylvania have helped Google to evade that requirement.
Aside from that, it is just obvious, and should be to any court, that previous publication of unlicensed photos of you or your property is no justification whatsoever for another instance of that to take place. The County Assessors office may actually have no right, or legitimate official interest, in putting your property on display. All the same, if they do, that does not mean that Google's pursuit of profit is an equally legitimate interest in that regard.
Now, back to the latest news bite: Google has not "defused" any privacy concerns with its addition of user photographs, obtained through its Panoramio service. Google is just helping itself to a bunch of free content, assuming vanity will convince enough amateur photographers to turn themselves into an unpaid, worldwide, roaming Google staff. There is some suggestion that the privacy concerns Claburn thinks this will address are more along the lines of the Google photographers' off-color photos of people picking their noses or peeing in public than the photos of people's private property, but privacy is invaded when a compromising photo is published, regardless who the photographer is. Contrary to Claburn's view, Google is not somehow exonnerated, nor are the victims less entitled to redress, because a compromising photo is selected and presented rather than originally taken by Google.
In fact, rather than fix anything, the new idea only raises questions about Google's use of user-generated content in search results that are part of Google's regular commercial activity. Google's Terms of Service seem to make it clear that they do not own the content you upload (see paragraphs 9.4 and 11). But their TOS are strangely similar to those of Facebook, whose latest ethics fiasco has much to do with their entitlement to uploaded content. Facebook claims the right to make "derivative" use of your content, while Google is a bit more vague. Google says that you grant them an "irrevocable" license to distribute, copy and present the work; they suggest that some rights you grant them to some content may be revoked, but only as specified under unspecified "Additional Terms of those Services". They say you may "terminate your legal agreement with Google" by closing your account and writing to them, but not that this revokes their right to your content. Personally, I would be very wary of uploading any photo to Google that you might ever want to either use commercially, or keep private. The pix of you and your girlfriend or boyfriend by the Statue of Liberty may seem like just about the most innocuous thing to put on Panoramio. Well, think ahead my friend. That irrevocable display license you granted to Google may just bite you in the rear end someday when you no longer want that particular association exposed to everyone on the planet.
My own view is that Google's so-called "mission" is on a collision course with basic values we have always had, and it is mainly the naivete and glib attitude of a certain technobrat, IT-snob crowd that makes it seem as if the values have just dispappeared. how convenient for Google, not to mention several other privacy-invading profiteers from surveillance and information-sharing technology. It is reassuring that so far, practically every incursion they make into privacy rights gets some kind of pushback; but power, money, and the shallow acceptance of every new social networking opportunity are pushing even harder on the other side. Which means privacy is constantly losing ground, and often court battles. Well, this blogger at least is not going gentle into that good night.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Is Microsoft Doomed?
I admit I got a little frustrated after no one commented on my Dell post, but now I understand - I just have to post three times a day and carry my laptop with me to the bathroom and I might get some attention, like all those best-selling technology blogs that get high Technorati ratings. Or maybe I should write about nifty gadgets instead of ethics. Well, I don't think it's going to happen. So here I go again, after a brief 8 months or so, with my overly lengthy posts, stubbornly focusing on rights and wrongs in the digital world.
But my topic this time is as much historical as ethical. It is a matter of fact as well as a matter of justice. I guess that amounts to poetic justice, as in the giant who ate so much that he finally exploded. I am talking about that formidable giant Microsoft. I've been in IT since the days when MS's main products were GW Basic (officially "Gee Whiz Basic", I think, but everyone knew it was Gates, William). You could say, I suppose, that at that time they were a reasonable company with a few reasonably competitive products - MS COBOL was one of the earlier microcomputer COBOL products, and I think it worked on mainframe and midrange systems too, which gave it some advantages over Ryan McFarland and other products. Then they struck it rich by beating out CPM to make MS-DOS the OS for the IBM-PC, and made themselves a key player in the small computer market.
Still they were nothing like what they are today. MS-DOS was, by most accounts, not really an operating system, but an incomplete I/O manager. In any case, you needed half a dozen supplementary utilities (Norton, Sidekick, Xtree, etc.) to make it even minimally user friendly. The first couple of versions of Windows were complete non-starters; we ignored it and used DeskView for multitasking and window-switching. Early versions of Word had only one reason for existence, the ability to utilize built-in graphical capabilities in some of the early laser printers. People used WordPerfect for ordinary word processing, or XyWrite for more technical stuff, or maybe DisplayWrite if they were big IBM ideologues, or Wordstar 2000 if they wanted more power and more frustration (it had plenty of both).
But my topic this time is as much historical as ethical. It is a matter of fact as well as a matter of justice. I guess that amounts to poetic justice, as in the giant who ate so much that he finally exploded. I am talking about that formidable giant Microsoft. I've been in IT since the days when MS's main products were GW Basic (officially "Gee Whiz Basic", I think, but everyone knew it was Gates, William). You could say, I suppose, that at that time they were a reasonable company with a few reasonably competitive products - MS COBOL was one of the earlier microcomputer COBOL products, and I think it worked on mainframe and midrange systems too, which gave it some advantages over Ryan McFarland and other products. Then they struck it rich by beating out CPM to make MS-DOS the OS for the IBM-PC, and made themselves a key player in the small computer market.
Still they were nothing like what they are today. MS-DOS was, by most accounts, not really an operating system, but an incomplete I/O manager. In any case, you needed half a dozen supplementary utilities (Norton, Sidekick, Xtree, etc.) to make it even minimally user friendly. The first couple of versions of Windows were complete non-starters; we ignored it and used DeskView for multitasking and window-switching. Early versions of Word had only one reason for existence, the ability to utilize built-in graphical capabilities in some of the early laser printers. People used WordPerfect for ordinary word processing, or XyWrite for more technical stuff, or maybe DisplayWrite if they were big IBM ideologues, or Wordstar 2000 if they wanted more power and more frustration (it had plenty of both).
It was Windows 3.1 that finally put MS over the top and created that great sucking sound whereby all new apps had to write to the Redmond API. Soon computer vendors were being forced into MS-only deals. Excel, a ripoff of (Lotus 1-2-3) a ripoff (Visicalc) of a software program, got bundled with Word, which was beginning to resemble a real word processor, and soon MS Office was making a play to be an industry standard, not without some strongarm tactics to help it along.
The rest of the story is pretty well-known: Word elbowing WordPerfect (a 10 times better and more intuitive word processor) out of the market, Foxpro (once purchased by MS) knocking dBASE IV and Clipper out of the water, NT blowing Novell away, IE pushing Netscape to the brink of non-existence... all marketing, my friends, not a single one of these stories is an outright victory for quality. Though we did discover (in case IBM hadn't taught us earlier) that once you own the OS, and thereby pretty much control the industry, you can (a) become big enough to acquire a huge staff of high-end technical people and lure industry bigshots (b) buy up anybody who has an interesting technology, or simply steal it and fight them in court for 10 years with your huge legal staff, and make subtle improvements, and (c) bloat your products with features that 99% of your customers don't really need but that make for good sales pitches. I suppose some people might actually see this as a victory for quality. I see it as the way an unimaginative but unscrupulous corporation fought its way to become the Apollo of the computer industry, holding the sun in its chariot and determining the course of your day whether you like it or not.
The rest of the story is pretty well-known: Word elbowing WordPerfect (a 10 times better and more intuitive word processor) out of the market, Foxpro (once purchased by MS) knocking dBASE IV and Clipper out of the water, NT blowing Novell away, IE pushing Netscape to the brink of non-existence... all marketing, my friends, not a single one of these stories is an outright victory for quality. Though we did discover (in case IBM hadn't taught us earlier) that once you own the OS, and thereby pretty much control the industry, you can (a) become big enough to acquire a huge staff of high-end technical people and lure industry bigshots (b) buy up anybody who has an interesting technology, or simply steal it and fight them in court for 10 years with your huge legal staff, and make subtle improvements, and (c) bloat your products with features that 99% of your customers don't really need but that make for good sales pitches. I suppose some people might actually see this as a victory for quality. I see it as the way an unimaginative but unscrupulous corporation fought its way to become the Apollo of the computer industry, holding the sun in its chariot and determining the course of your day whether you like it or not.
So it is not without some sense of relief - call it poetic justice if you like - that I am able to write the headline above. "Some sense of wishful thinking", you might say. After all, in the last few days I have seen numerous pieces in the press alleging that Windows 7 is going to save MS from the ongoing commercial and publicity disaster known as Vista. A piece by David Pogue in the NY Times, several recent pieces in InformationWeek (this one, for example, or check out this alleged Intel endorsement) - they're pretty much all over the place. Windows 7 will save the day. What is the truth of this?
The truth is that MS has tolerated some rejections before, and has the same tried and true methodology for dealing with them: phase out support for older products so that users have no choice but to switch. And fear not, they have already announced the termination of support for Windows XP, the operating system that, despite all its flaws - absurd lack of registry control, endless security holes, occasional BSOD crashes, dubious handling of memory leaks and memory hogs (Outlook being a prime example of both) - was certainly their "greatest hit", especially with businesses who were looking for an improvement over NT Workstation.
It is typical of Microsoft, and of them alone, that a "hit" in the OS business, while supporting their stock price in the short term, is a kind of disaster for them in the long term. MS alone thinks of the OS as something you sell over and over again to the same computer user. For IBM and Sun, for example, when they were heavily invested in the proprietary the OS business, the OS was essentially something you buy with a new computer and then support with a maintenance contract. For MS, the OS is a huge revenue generator; it is supposed to be thrown out and replaced after a few service packs, to the tune of millions of licenses. (I will not get diverted into talking about their increasingly obnoxious licensing schemes, but keep in mind that they went from providing a full, re-installable copy of the OS on floppy disks, to copy-protected versions that would only re-install on the same computer - on a good day - to the current Vista "license" which is pre-installed, must be backed up by the user, and cannot be backed up or restored if a mistake is made in the backup process. Shameful, but typical.) So when one of those OS versions proves stable enough and flexible enough that businesses (especially) think to themselves, "You know, this OS really does just about everything I need it to do, I think I could save the money and an enormous distribution headache and just stick with it", it's a disaster for MS.
I wish more of the professional commentators, the ones who (unlike yours truly, so far at least) get paid for their opinions or make money from their blogs, would just get off the bus and say this in plain English. MS wants desperately for the OS to be obsolete, and it is a plain old catastrophe for them if the rest of the world thinks they actually did a good enough job with the last one that a few maintenance tweaks and a couple of utilities (you know, the much-ballyhooed support for new devices and all that) would carry it through day. This of course does not apply only to their OS; it applies to their Office suite. I mentioned the horribly reconfigured, visually confusing implementation of Word in Office 2007, all for no tangible gain whatsoever except to make it look like a new product so they can re-sell it to you. The same is true of most MS products. Every new version of MS Access caused us to have to rewrite a good portion of our Access apps, while keep the same extremely kludgey implementation of client-server. .Net framework 2.0 makes some things easier than 1.1 (database connectivity, for example), and provides a built-in membership class (which, without extensions, is good for only the simplest apps) but it is mainly there to sell Visual Studio upgrades. Every product MS makes is the same: the upgrade cycle is what makes or breaks the company. It is not consumer-oriented. Yes, consumers ask for this or that feature, computers and networks evolve, etc. A well constructed OS can go on for a long time being upgraded and patched to keep up with current standards. That model, however, ends up making very little money. MS never intended to follow the model where they provide basic OS functionality and sell service. They just want to resell the product over and over again, repackaged and made more nifty to suit current tastes.
That is, essentially, what Vista is. I am not talking about code-level Vista vs. XP vs. Windows 7. You can debate that all day. I am talking about functionality, performance, compatibility. It is not a new OS, except in the sense that trading this flaw for that flaw while having essentially the same functionality counts as something new. It is a new interface; it allegedly still has a lot of NT code in the kernel; it rewrites the I/O features (e.g., how it handles audio files) but not in a way that universally improves performance. See the Slashdot debate referenced above regarding the audio delivery system; it sounds extremely sophisticated, but here I am writing this post using Vista Home Premium 32-bit with 2GB RAM, listening to the Dandy Warhols on Lala.Com, and I get audio dropouts. As I did last night playing another album on Lala. For that I need to buy a new OS?
As for performance, also extremely debatable, it depends so much on the total configuration of hw and sw and drivers and what tweaks you do or don't apply. As for compatibility, Vista is totally incompatible with all 16-bit apps, does not support a lot of 32-bit apps, denies rights to a lot of drivers, etc. The one area in which it actually improves things is in the area of security, but at what cost? For example, the driver-signing rules are supposedly there to prevent rootkits from installing, and the numerous required user-acknowledgment dialogues are to keep viruses and trojans from loading. 'Scuse me, but I have anti-virus and anti-spyware sw installed, and I didn't pay for them. So how many of those millions of PC's with the "downadup" worm have Vista installed? A few? Oh, is that because with all those annoying dialogues, most users haven't got the slightest idea which processes should be allowed and which should be denied? Please take a letter: "Dear Steve/Bill/Whoever'sListening: the same unsophisticated users you talk down to by putting in dozens of auto-correct (or as I prefer to call them "auto-annoy") features in Word are the ones who are going to be responding to millions of those dialogues. How awkward is that?"
I cannot go on and on here trying to analyze and compare every feature of Vista, W7 and XP, and it is kind of beside the point. The OS rewrite, if it helps anyone, helps people for whom the main purpose of a computer is to play games. With all due respect to the Wii and Guitar Hero crowd, and the flight simulators who are now busily practicing their water landings, that should not be what drives the PC OS. Not in the least. Not even the consumer OS.
Windows XP was not, in spite of what they say, a great OS. The taskbar is extremely problematic and gets corrupted easily, causing huge headaches. The registry fills up over time with thousands of unreferenced entries, slowing down or crashing the system, and then you can take your life in your hands using some registry cleaner and hope you don't get rid of something you need. BSOD crashes are too common. Errant drivers can crash the system on bootup. Security was pitiful until SP2, and merely bad afterward. There are a lot of things you could say about XP that would recommend some improvements. But they do not need to be much more than XP without the bad features. Don't tell me you have to totally rewrite an OS to keep the registry clean, much less to deliver streaming audio so that it (allegedly) hits both your ears at the same time! That is bullshit, the kind of BS that lets MS sell millions of copies of each new version of Windows.
This blog is about ethics, not technical arguments over the virtues of 32-bit vs. 64-bit or this audio codec vs. that one. But here we have a case where the putative technical virtues of the OS are supposed to justify forcing the entire computer world into a huge project involving billions of dollars, millions of man-hours of installation, and millions more dollars and hours in software and hardware upgrades and application rewrites, and the supposed technical virtues are either not there, or they are gratuitous for most users, or they could have been done in a much less costly way. What right does one company have to create this sort of havoc for the sake of debatable or ephemeral improvements? It is absolutely an unethical business practice to change a widely used and understood interface and I/O standard for the purpose of supporting your own bottom line. It is also unethical to conclude deals with every single major retailer - Circuit City (RIP), Best Buy, Staples, Office Max, etc. - to carry only systems with an OS that nobody really wants. (I asked both CC and BB to sell me a system with XP installed and both of them refused.) MS's whole concept of how to do business is unethical, which is one reason they have ended up in court so often on restraint-of-trade charges (or something very similar). It starts with strongarm tactics with smaller sw companies, PC vendors and retailers. It extends to the development and marketing of their OS and all their products. It should be recognized for what it is by journalists and bloggers. That's what objectivity is, calling a spade a spade.
Now that they have suffered their most embarrassing defeat in the marketplace with Vista, and lost further ground to Linux and Apple on the desktop, what is their answer? They will push even harder for W7, cut the XP support lines, and pretend Vista never happened. And unfortunately, a lot of the tech-savvy journalists and bloggers are going along with this. That has an enormous influence on the industry, as corporate buyers read the buzz and think they have no choice and might actually gain something by moving to W7. But will that be enough? I have my doubts. W7 is scheduled for release early next year, and some analysts are suggesting that MS may move up the release date to save their necks. Meanwhile, we are in the midst of one of the worst financial crises in the history of western civilization. Nothing is stabilizing at this point, not housing, not banking, not technology (bye-bye Nortel, you did give it the old college try, didn't you? is Sun next in line for closeout sales?), not employment, and certainly not government, which will soon have committed (by my count) more than a trillion and a half dollars in one form or another to pulling us up by the bootstraps. So is corporate America, and faltering economies worldwide, going to sign up, in the next year or two, for a massive, expensive upgrade to a new desktop OS that is still not really necessary? And what if they don't?
There is indeed a serious question whether they will have a choice. Nothing strikes fear into the heart of corporate system administrators more than the idea of using "unsupported" sw/hw. So MS will make good on the threat to desupport XP, and it doesn't matter if the company has not called MS in three years for support - no more security patches, no more compatibility packs for new devices or hw interface standards - OMG, can't live with that, gotta bite the bullet and go with W7. But what if there is finally a critical mass of companies who decide to turn to open source, SaaS (Software as a Service) or "cloud computing", i.e., hosted apps on a remote Internet site, and other such options? And what if in response to this the level of support for coprorate use of these technologies grows? What if more users conclude that they don't need a PC OS at all, and can make do with tablets and other devices? In case you think MS is not the least bit concerned, note for example the pre-emption attempt with the "Tablet PC" feature in Vista, under Accessories. MS has been offering a thin client OS for something like 12 years (Windows CE) and is now positioning the little-known XP Embedded for service on older PC's that can't run Vista or W7. They are increasingly doing the open-source shuffle without actually committing to much.
Nevertheless, I'm not here to tell you that Linux desktops, thin clients, Android devices, OpenOffice and Joombla/PHP/Perl/etc. are your future. I don't think anyone can predict the future. But as the saying goes, the harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all. And this giant is due for a comeuppance the size of Mt. Rainier. You know, that's the active volcano which tops off at 14,411 feet above sea level, and which according to Google maps is a 99-mile drive from Redmond. A little less as the crow flies. That's a lotta Java, I mean lava. Come to think of it, Pompeii was very important at one time too.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Dell Financial Services: Encore?
With revisions, 5/17/08 10:30 a.m.
The very day I posted my previous note about Dell Financial Services and their unscrupulous collection practices, I picked up a copy of the previous Thursday's (4/24) NY Times and found this article on debt collection outsourcing to India, focusing in particular on Encore Capital Group, the very company that services Dell and is apparently responsible for most of those junk calls I've received. The article, unfortunately, is essentially an apology for these vipers. The author, Heather Timmons, paints debt collection outsourcing as some sort of growth industry. She apparently thinks it's a wonderful thing that these folks have "a sophisticated automated system that dials tens of thousands of Americans every hour". You get the impression that she is smiling as she depicts the lengths they go to track down their victims. J. Brandon Black, who is identified as the CEO of Encore, is quoted uncritically, as in the following:
Ms. Timmons states that Indian debt collectors are trained in qualities like "sympathy"; but no example of such sentiments is provided. Instead, we find examples of how they handle "abusive" clients by telling them, "This attitude is not going to get you anywhere." This exactly mirrors my own experience with these agents. When I answered the phone and was asked for a person who does not live with me, I told them that, and added that they had better stop calling me or I would take action. "This will not help" came the reply; and indeed, it did not - only the agency was the abusive party, not me. The calls continued, hundreds of them, day and night, even though I had given them all they had a right to know: the person they were looking for is not at my number.
Talk about a great sucking sound - the article documents how the offshore collection agents have been trained to use the U.S. tax rebate, which is meant to jumpstart the ailing U.S. economy, as a weapon against recalcitrant debtors. "This gives you an advantage so you can increase your wallet share", a collection team leader says. Bye-bye, stimulus, hello trade deficit. These companies are, as I suggested, paid by commission. Encore also "files sheaves of lawsuits against customers who do not respond".
All this is very disturbing material is neither is not not even delivered by Ms. Timmons in a tone that is cleared biased. For example, she manages interviews a U.S. debt collector who states some specific problems with overseas debt collectors, like the added annoyance of having someone who does not speak understandable English harassing you for money. But the same person is then alleged to have said that he "had not run into any specific problems with overseas debt collectors" and that they "are very well spoken". Can anyone believe that this was not coaxed for the sake of legitimizing the offshore vampire approach to debt collection? What sort of reporting this is, I don't know; I'm a mere blogger, unskilled in the journalistic ways of Times correspondents.
One of "Encore's best collectors", a gum-chewing 27-year-old, is said to be one who "wheedles work and cellphone numbers out of debtors' relatives to track them down". If this isn't enough to make your skin crawl, you have to read the article and get a load of the self-congratulatory spirit of these collection teams, which operate like sales forces and applaud each other when they elicit a commitment - relishing the thought that someone halfway around the world who can't pay their bills will be lining their pockets with commissions. Still not enough? These people make only $425 a month, plus commissions; sounds like all told their incomes range to about $300 a week - about 20% of what U.S. collectors are said to make. It's a tried and true technique: get the exploited to do the exploiting for you, and don't forget to give them a sense of purpose and a belief that they are doing a good thing. And if you can keep them 12,000 miles from the people they are abusing, so much the better.
People should pay their debts, or not incur them in the first place. But aside from the impossibility of predicting a disaster that will render you unable to do so, or the lack of alternatives when you cannot afford basic necessities, there are the usurious interest rates still charged by credit card companies, the exploitative schemes built into the structure of debt (the right of banks to charge you up front for the interest due on a long-term loan, for example), and outright mistakes, such as the ones that many customers say Dell made in their billing. In my experience, a great many so-called debts referred for collection are simply charges that the customer disputes or has already paid, and result from either aggressive billing practices or careless record keeping. None of the collector's concern, though; they get a referral and start cranking out the nuisance calls on their wonderful high-tech automated calling system. It seems to be part of the financial system that you are responsible for taking the time and effort to prove that you paid something, even though it is the company's fault that they do not have a record of it. This is why I don't feel like debt collection is a completely legitimate business. Outsourcing it makes it even worse, adding a glib disregard for ethical norms of conduct and the frustration of dealing with automated calling systems and heavily accented staff. This is not a charming cultural phenomenon to be viewed as a growth opportunity amid stagnation. It's a depressing deterioration of both the moral integrity of U.S. business practices and the ability to reign in the outflow of capital. Why the Times would see fit to do anything but lament this is beyond me.
The very day I posted my previous note about Dell Financial Services and their unscrupulous collection practices, I picked up a copy of the previous Thursday's (4/24) NY Times and found this article on debt collection outsourcing to India, focusing in particular on Encore Capital Group, the very company that services Dell and is apparently responsible for most of those junk calls I've received. The article, unfortunately, is essentially an apology for these vipers. The author, Heather Timmons, paints debt collection outsourcing as some sort of growth industry. She apparently thinks it's a wonderful thing that these folks have "a sophisticated automated system that dials tens of thousands of Americans every hour". You get the impression that she is smiling as she depicts the lengths they go to track down their victims. J. Brandon Black, who is identified as the CEO of Encore, is quoted uncritically, as in the following:
Although the stereotype of a collector may be “some guy with chains and a cut-off shirt,” Mr. Black said, collectors in India are “very polite, very respectful, and they don’t raise their voice.” He added, “People respond to that.”Another promoter of this scurrilous business tells us how lovely it is to be chased down by an Indian collector:
In the past, the prevailing wisdom about wringing money from late payers has been “if you’re calling the Midwest, you want someone from the Midwest to twist their arm,” said Mark Hughes, an analyst with Sun Trust Robinson Humphrey who covers the industry. That theory is changing as the pool of trained phone professionals in India and other locations deepens, and companies look outside the United States for lower costs.This is definitely one of the most uncritical and least-researched articles I've seen in the Times with regard to something that is obviously an ethically questionable business practice. Ms. Timmons tries to paint it as a fascinating cultural and business phenomenon and does not want to sully the reputation of the industry by bothering to look into the numerous complaints about them that can be found on the web (see my previous post).
Ms. Timmons states that Indian debt collectors are trained in qualities like "sympathy"; but no example of such sentiments is provided. Instead, we find examples of how they handle "abusive" clients by telling them, "This attitude is not going to get you anywhere." This exactly mirrors my own experience with these agents. When I answered the phone and was asked for a person who does not live with me, I told them that, and added that they had better stop calling me or I would take action. "This will not help" came the reply; and indeed, it did not - only the agency was the abusive party, not me. The calls continued, hundreds of them, day and night, even though I had given them all they had a right to know: the person they were looking for is not at my number.
Talk about a great sucking sound - the article documents how the offshore collection agents have been trained to use the U.S. tax rebate, which is meant to jumpstart the ailing U.S. economy, as a weapon against recalcitrant debtors. "This gives you an advantage so you can increase your wallet share", a collection team leader says. Bye-bye, stimulus, hello trade deficit. These companies are, as I suggested, paid by commission. Encore also "files sheaves of lawsuits against customers who do not respond".
All this is very disturbing material is neither is not not even delivered by Ms. Timmons in a tone that is cleared biased. For example, she manages interviews a U.S. debt collector who states some specific problems with overseas debt collectors, like the added annoyance of having someone who does not speak understandable English harassing you for money. But the same person is then alleged to have said that he "had not run into any specific problems with overseas debt collectors" and that they "are very well spoken". Can anyone believe that this was not coaxed for the sake of legitimizing the offshore vampire approach to debt collection? What sort of reporting this is, I don't know; I'm a mere blogger, unskilled in the journalistic ways of Times correspondents.
One of "Encore's best collectors", a gum-chewing 27-year-old, is said to be one who "wheedles work and cellphone numbers out of debtors' relatives to track them down". If this isn't enough to make your skin crawl, you have to read the article and get a load of the self-congratulatory spirit of these collection teams, which operate like sales forces and applaud each other when they elicit a commitment - relishing the thought that someone halfway around the world who can't pay their bills will be lining their pockets with commissions. Still not enough? These people make only $425 a month, plus commissions; sounds like all told their incomes range to about $300 a week - about 20% of what U.S. collectors are said to make. It's a tried and true technique: get the exploited to do the exploiting for you, and don't forget to give them a sense of purpose and a belief that they are doing a good thing. And if you can keep them 12,000 miles from the people they are abusing, so much the better.
People should pay their debts, or not incur them in the first place. But aside from the impossibility of predicting a disaster that will render you unable to do so, or the lack of alternatives when you cannot afford basic necessities, there are the usurious interest rates still charged by credit card companies, the exploitative schemes built into the structure of debt (the right of banks to charge you up front for the interest due on a long-term loan, for example), and outright mistakes, such as the ones that many customers say Dell made in their billing. In my experience, a great many so-called debts referred for collection are simply charges that the customer disputes or has already paid, and result from either aggressive billing practices or careless record keeping. None of the collector's concern, though; they get a referral and start cranking out the nuisance calls on their wonderful high-tech automated calling system. It seems to be part of the financial system that you are responsible for taking the time and effort to prove that you paid something, even though it is the company's fault that they do not have a record of it. This is why I don't feel like debt collection is a completely legitimate business. Outsourcing it makes it even worse, adding a glib disregard for ethical norms of conduct and the frustration of dealing with automated calling systems and heavily accented staff. This is not a charming cultural phenomenon to be viewed as a growth opportunity amid stagnation. It's a depressing deterioration of both the moral integrity of U.S. business practices and the ability to reign in the outflow of capital. Why the Times would see fit to do anything but lament this is beyond me.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Dell Financial Services: Please Hold for Further Harassment
"This is Dell Financial Services. Thank you for your patience. I will be with you momentarily."
For several months now, I have been the object of attention of a notorious gang of highway bandits that goes by the name of Dell Financial Services. This firm, an arm of Dell Computer, "facilitates customer financing of products and services sold by Dell through consumer and small business revolving loans and fixed-term business loan and lease financings in the U.S.", according to their web site. In other words, they extend credit to buy Dell computers. It stands to reason, then, that I must either be an outstanding potential marketing opportunity for them (perhaps I need to set up a data center in my walk-in?) or that I owe them large amounts of money (my own personal dot-com bust?). Why else would they be calling me 10-20 times a day, on two different lines?
The problem is, I have no thought, actually, of setting up a data center. Nor have I ever taken a loan to buy anything from Dell. Nor will I ever buy anything from Dell, even if they are the last computer company on earth. The one thing I ever bought from Dell was a computer, several years ago, which I finally managed to return. It was, at the time, a pretty high-end PC, with a brand new Turtle Beach sound card to fulfill my aural fantasies. The computer failed to boot about one out of three times. Every night I was on the phone with Dell technicians, who took me through a dizzying array of built-in troubleshooting utilities and had me do everything from rebooting to opening up the box and checking wires. After spending what I considered to be a ridiculous amount of time with perhaps four or five technicians, I asked them to honor their putative on-site service contract and take care of the problem. Many phone calls and complaints later, they finally agreed to send someone. He came when I was not home (my wife let him in), replaced the hard drive (which I had repeatedly told them was not the problem) and left. When I came home and turned it on, the system failed to boot. It was not the on-site guy's job to check out the system, I was told, just to install the drive. Actually the drive worked okay, but the problem was the same as before.
After weeks of these shenanigans I asked Dell to replace the computer. No, they insisted, we are known for service, and we would not dream of withdrawing that support. Our highly rated technicians are more than happy to spend hours and hours with you on the phone. Finally, after going through endless, useless reboots and technical routines which they frankly would not have had a prayer of getting a non-technical user to do, I demanded my money back. Oh no, says Dell, we can't do that, it's beyond the two week return period! So, a few days before the end of the 60 day period in which you can challenge a credit card charge, I called my credit card customer service line and protested Dell's charge. Now, I am not going to become a cheerleader for credit card companies, but to their credit (lol) they actually forced Dell to take the computer back and give me a full refund.
Last note, before I get to the present situation. Before contacting Dell's illustrious technicians I had set the BIOS to display the boot-up sequence, and I knew full well that the system often hung after loading the sound card drivers. This fact was conveyed to Dell's highly rated service group from the beginning. Nevertheless, I was assured that this had nothing to do with the problem. Just before Dell agreed (under pressure) to accept the computer back I found a review of the Turtle Beach sound card online. The guy who wrote the review, which was several pages in length, must have been one of the world's leading experts in sound cards, because he knew stuff about them that only a sophisticated acoustic engineer could know. And he mentioned that he had had exactly the problem I was having at first, and had downloaded an updated driver that solved the problem. So I did the same, and booted the PC about 20 times without an error. Be that as it may, I was so furious with Dell by that point that I decided never to deal with them again, and returned the PC anyway. (Sad to say, the Micron system that replaced it wasn't much better - I still have it, and it still tends to freeze in hot humid weather.)
There is a point here that is not irrelevant to my present issue. Dell built their reputation largely on getting top ratings for service from PC Magazine and its readers. Perhaps it says something about these kinds of ratings - they don't dig deep enough, and lack the ability to discern the superficially good from the really good. That Dell support was available to me is beyond dispute. That "support" of this sort was in my interest, or that of any consumer, is another story. After a couple of hours on the phone, if a system won't boot normally, the normal reaction should be: "Here's an RMA #, please send it back and we'll ship a new one." There is absolutely no justification for keeping a customer on the phone every night for days on end, and forcing them to run all kinds of tests, to solve a problem that should not be there in the first place. Dell did not ship a working system; that was their problem, and however they decided to fix it, they had no right to utilize excessive amounts of my time in doing so. Obviously, Dell likes to put on a user-friendly face, but has no issue with intruding themselves in an extremely annoying way into the lives of their customers.
Turn the page. It is five years later. I pick up my home phone, and get what I recognize as a junk call. The telltale sign: you say "Hello", and then you hear nothing for a second or two, until someone says, "Hello, am I speaking with...?" I usually hang up before that voice comes on. But this goes on for several days, until I get quite annoyed, and wait for the voice to see who it is. Now I hear, with those recognizable trained-actor intonations, "This is Dell Financial Services. Please hold..." Excuse me? You're calling to sell me some garbage and you want me to hold? Is this a joke?" I hang up. Days more, and the calls increase. They are coming at 8:00 a.m., in the evening, on weekends - I normally screen my home phone calls, but this is getting very annoying. Finally I decide, if I can end this by answering one call, I'll do it. So I answer. To my surprise, the person on the other end asks for a name I do not recognize. I tell them there is no such person here, and that if they call me again I will report them to the FCC. And perhaps I utter an expletive or two. The Indian voice on the other end informs me that "This will not solve the problem." I hang up.
The calls continue. In fact, several days later, I begin to get calls on my cell phone from a number I do not recognize: 908-854-1973. It turns out to be the same company. I recall that a long time ago, when I recorded my home phone message, I put my cell phone number on it for people who wanted to reach me right away. The company had finally gotten a human being to call my number, who did what a calling robot cannot do: recognize another number in the message.
Go ahead and Google 908-854-1973. You Google most phone numbers and what do you get? For public numbers, you get a listing; for cell or unlisted numbers you get maybe one or two direct hits, and then some partial stuff, or maybe nothing. For 908-854-1973 you get three pages of direct hits, almost all of them complaint forms: this one, for instance. Not only that, try Googling Dell Financial Services. You get not only their web site, but this page of users threatening a class action suit against DFS for harassment of consumers who aver that they do not owe Dell a penny or are being unfairly asked to pay extremely high interest rates that they did not agree to. Indeed, some of these people complain of "threatening phone calls day and night", "someone in India that was rude and kept talking around the issue", and the like. There appear to be few dozen people who want to sign on to this suit, most of them complaining either about telephone harassement, or incompetent accounting practices, or bills and hardware sent to the wrong address, resulting in demands for immediate repayment or usurious interest rates. One person points to a previous lawauit against DFS. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that Dell has put DFS up for sale, and has already received bids. The only question is whether the bidders are aware of not only the potential class action liabilities, but the fact that DFS is involved with a company called CIT that is being hit hard by the subprime mortgage mess.
What appears to be going on, then, is that Dell has a troubled lending unit that is attempting to protect its shaky financial situation by hitting individual consumers, who can least defend themselves, as hard as possible for every penny. Their own accounting practices appear to be very lax. They have employed call centers, onshore or offshore, largely staff by persons of Indian background, who are trained to threaten and harass Dell's U.S. customers, employ calling robots that dial phones day and night. DFS apparently does not keep accurate records of their accounts, and has been the subject of lawsuits and possibly a future class action suit. This is the financing arm of the same company that, as I said, built its reputation on its alleged superiority in customer service!
What is wrong with this picture? Everything. But at bottom, the problem is our own notion of business ethics and what we allow technology companies to get away with. First, I tried calling Verizon and Verizon Wireless, and asked if they could block these harassment calls. No, we don't do that, they said. Why not? They should be required to do that. No one should be subjected to this kind of abuse without having a simple remedy. All phone companies should be responsible for following up and dealing with telephone harassment. This is a no-brainer. ISP's should be responsible for blocking spam; very simple algorithms could get rid of 90% of it, by targetting the servers that forward it. These companies (including Verizon) are making $billions off of their customers, but our lax model of business ethics lets them watch as their networks are used for illicit purposes. Napster can be taken down for allowing users to share files, though Napster itself did not engage in any illegal activity; but Verizon can pass along the most insidious crap without penalty. It is appalling.
Second, back to my earlier problem, computer hardware and software companies have to be responsible for shipping products that work, or for getting them working without undue effort on the part of the user. This is obvious and indisputable, yet it is a principle that is basically ignored in the regulation of U.S. technology businesses. I am not, of course, underestimating the level of sophistication involved in producing even an ordinary laptop or word processor. But that is not the issue. The technology issues are handled hierarchically, at each level of manufacture, so that by the time Dell or any other company snaps together its PC's, they do not have to be responsible for what happened in the clean rooms where the chips or disks were manufactured. If they send me something that does not work, they are tacitly stating that they are confident enough in the technology to sell it to me. If it does not work as it should, they have to do something about it. To the extent that it helps me to avoid shipping things back and forth I am happy to sit in front of a screen and try a couple of things; and when it is no longer in my interest, it should be their problem to deal with. And this goes for software too; but that is such a long discussion it needs its own post.
Third, we have a cheap labor issue, and the Indian subcontractors are being exploited just as much as we are. It is not cost effective to pay top dollar to people who are supposed to collect money, since collection is by nature an uncertain enterprise. So you look for the most cost efficient way of doing that, and perhaps you pay for the service on a commission basis. In any case, the subcontractor is given an interest in producing results, and if they are willing to engage in practices that would be considered unethical by our normal social standards, like calling people constantly, at odd hours, and taking their cell numbers off voicemail messages, then the company (Dell, in this case) is insulated from the charge of unethical practices while reaping the benefits. Of course, by exploiting cheap Indian labor for this purpose, U.S. private enterprise also helps cause enmities among the people who are all victims of this system. Some of the perpetrators are indeed Indian - the Indian businessmen who are greedy enough to agree to do Dell's dirty work. But the people we talk to on the phone are just hungry grunts who are not trained in customer service or to act professionally; indeed doing so could probably cost them their jobs. They are the frontline soldiers who are supposed to do the dirty work while absorbing all the verbal abuse that their irate victims give them. The ultimate responsibility lies with our own government and legal system: its lax communication laws, and lax regulation of collection practices. Secondarily, with Dell and their competitors, who are never satisfied with the $billions they make and always need to exploit every opportunity for increasing their relatively thin margins. Third, with the exploitative subcontractors in India or elsewhere who act like they are training attack dogs and feel immune to basic ethical standards that are at least sometimes observed by similar U.S. companies.
And fourh, with us, for putting up with this garbage over and over again, year after year, election after election. As political interest groups go, technology users must be one of the largest there is. Yet which one of the candidates has offered anything remotely resembling a comprehensive platform for technology policy (or finance policy, in spite of the mess we're now in) - from acceptable uses of bioletric identification to responsibility for post-sale consumer support, from telephone harassment to 30% financing rates for PC purchases? Nobody, and no one but a few small privacy and technology user groups is demanding that they do. That is a travesty. Nearly every single person in the U.S. has an interest in proper regulation of technology, but we don't raise our voices about this. So it will be the case that we have to put up with shoddy products and unethical practices, until we get serious about cases like Dell Financial Services.
Finally, I have a personal moral dilemma. I recently discovered that the person Dell is trying to reach is someone who lives in my building. I actually have a contact number for him, though I've met him only once and never tried using it. There is a good possibility that this individual intentionally gave Dell my number; perhaps he owes them money and wanted to throw them off. Should I get Dell of my back, and give this individual what he probably deserves? It is tempting. So far, I have not. (Indeed, the few times I have answered the cell phone calls, the party on the other end terminates the call after putting me on hold, so I cannot even give them information it I want to.) Between the corporate abuse practiced by Dell and its partners, and the unethical action by an individual with whom I am slightly acquainted, I find the former by far the more obnoxious, and do not want to further their cause. They may have a problem I can help them with, but I do not wish to do so, because they do not deserve to have their techniques legitimized. And I trust that eventually, some lawyer or state attorney general or other entity will put a stop to DFS and their practices; or, as an act of poetic justice, they may just go under. That would warm my heart a bit, but it would be better to fix what is broken in both technology and financial policy in this country. As for my dubious friend in the building, he will get his comeuppance too. This kind of person does not need assistance to get himself in trouble. Then again, assisting him might be a worthy act nonetheless.
For several months now, I have been the object of attention of a notorious gang of highway bandits that goes by the name of Dell Financial Services. This firm, an arm of Dell Computer, "facilitates customer financing of products and services sold by Dell through consumer and small business revolving loans and fixed-term business loan and lease financings in the U.S.", according to their web site. In other words, they extend credit to buy Dell computers. It stands to reason, then, that I must either be an outstanding potential marketing opportunity for them (perhaps I need to set up a data center in my walk-in?) or that I owe them large amounts of money (my own personal dot-com bust?). Why else would they be calling me 10-20 times a day, on two different lines?
The problem is, I have no thought, actually, of setting up a data center. Nor have I ever taken a loan to buy anything from Dell. Nor will I ever buy anything from Dell, even if they are the last computer company on earth. The one thing I ever bought from Dell was a computer, several years ago, which I finally managed to return. It was, at the time, a pretty high-end PC, with a brand new Turtle Beach sound card to fulfill my aural fantasies. The computer failed to boot about one out of three times. Every night I was on the phone with Dell technicians, who took me through a dizzying array of built-in troubleshooting utilities and had me do everything from rebooting to opening up the box and checking wires. After spending what I considered to be a ridiculous amount of time with perhaps four or five technicians, I asked them to honor their putative on-site service contract and take care of the problem. Many phone calls and complaints later, they finally agreed to send someone. He came when I was not home (my wife let him in), replaced the hard drive (which I had repeatedly told them was not the problem) and left. When I came home and turned it on, the system failed to boot. It was not the on-site guy's job to check out the system, I was told, just to install the drive. Actually the drive worked okay, but the problem was the same as before.
After weeks of these shenanigans I asked Dell to replace the computer. No, they insisted, we are known for service, and we would not dream of withdrawing that support. Our highly rated technicians are more than happy to spend hours and hours with you on the phone. Finally, after going through endless, useless reboots and technical routines which they frankly would not have had a prayer of getting a non-technical user to do, I demanded my money back. Oh no, says Dell, we can't do that, it's beyond the two week return period! So, a few days before the end of the 60 day period in which you can challenge a credit card charge, I called my credit card customer service line and protested Dell's charge. Now, I am not going to become a cheerleader for credit card companies, but to their credit (lol) they actually forced Dell to take the computer back and give me a full refund.
Last note, before I get to the present situation. Before contacting Dell's illustrious technicians I had set the BIOS to display the boot-up sequence, and I knew full well that the system often hung after loading the sound card drivers. This fact was conveyed to Dell's highly rated service group from the beginning. Nevertheless, I was assured that this had nothing to do with the problem. Just before Dell agreed (under pressure) to accept the computer back I found a review of the Turtle Beach sound card online. The guy who wrote the review, which was several pages in length, must have been one of the world's leading experts in sound cards, because he knew stuff about them that only a sophisticated acoustic engineer could know. And he mentioned that he had had exactly the problem I was having at first, and had downloaded an updated driver that solved the problem. So I did the same, and booted the PC about 20 times without an error. Be that as it may, I was so furious with Dell by that point that I decided never to deal with them again, and returned the PC anyway. (Sad to say, the Micron system that replaced it wasn't much better - I still have it, and it still tends to freeze in hot humid weather.)
There is a point here that is not irrelevant to my present issue. Dell built their reputation largely on getting top ratings for service from PC Magazine and its readers. Perhaps it says something about these kinds of ratings - they don't dig deep enough, and lack the ability to discern the superficially good from the really good. That Dell support was available to me is beyond dispute. That "support" of this sort was in my interest, or that of any consumer, is another story. After a couple of hours on the phone, if a system won't boot normally, the normal reaction should be: "Here's an RMA #, please send it back and we'll ship a new one." There is absolutely no justification for keeping a customer on the phone every night for days on end, and forcing them to run all kinds of tests, to solve a problem that should not be there in the first place. Dell did not ship a working system; that was their problem, and however they decided to fix it, they had no right to utilize excessive amounts of my time in doing so. Obviously, Dell likes to put on a user-friendly face, but has no issue with intruding themselves in an extremely annoying way into the lives of their customers.
Turn the page. It is five years later. I pick up my home phone, and get what I recognize as a junk call. The telltale sign: you say "Hello", and then you hear nothing for a second or two, until someone says, "Hello, am I speaking with...?" I usually hang up before that voice comes on. But this goes on for several days, until I get quite annoyed, and wait for the voice to see who it is. Now I hear, with those recognizable trained-actor intonations, "This is Dell Financial Services. Please hold..." Excuse me? You're calling to sell me some garbage and you want me to hold? Is this a joke?" I hang up. Days more, and the calls increase. They are coming at 8:00 a.m., in the evening, on weekends - I normally screen my home phone calls, but this is getting very annoying. Finally I decide, if I can end this by answering one call, I'll do it. So I answer. To my surprise, the person on the other end asks for a name I do not recognize. I tell them there is no such person here, and that if they call me again I will report them to the FCC. And perhaps I utter an expletive or two. The Indian voice on the other end informs me that "This will not solve the problem." I hang up.
The calls continue. In fact, several days later, I begin to get calls on my cell phone from a number I do not recognize: 908-854-1973. It turns out to be the same company. I recall that a long time ago, when I recorded my home phone message, I put my cell phone number on it for people who wanted to reach me right away. The company had finally gotten a human being to call my number, who did what a calling robot cannot do: recognize another number in the message.
Go ahead and Google 908-854-1973. You Google most phone numbers and what do you get? For public numbers, you get a listing; for cell or unlisted numbers you get maybe one or two direct hits, and then some partial stuff, or maybe nothing. For 908-854-1973 you get three pages of direct hits, almost all of them complaint forms: this one, for instance. Not only that, try Googling Dell Financial Services. You get not only their web site, but this page of users threatening a class action suit against DFS for harassment of consumers who aver that they do not owe Dell a penny or are being unfairly asked to pay extremely high interest rates that they did not agree to. Indeed, some of these people complain of "threatening phone calls day and night", "someone in India that was rude and kept talking around the issue", and the like. There appear to be few dozen people who want to sign on to this suit, most of them complaining either about telephone harassement, or incompetent accounting practices, or bills and hardware sent to the wrong address, resulting in demands for immediate repayment or usurious interest rates. One person points to a previous lawauit against DFS. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that Dell has put DFS up for sale, and has already received bids. The only question is whether the bidders are aware of not only the potential class action liabilities, but the fact that DFS is involved with a company called CIT that is being hit hard by the subprime mortgage mess.
What appears to be going on, then, is that Dell has a troubled lending unit that is attempting to protect its shaky financial situation by hitting individual consumers, who can least defend themselves, as hard as possible for every penny. Their own accounting practices appear to be very lax. They have employed call centers, onshore or offshore, largely staff by persons of Indian background, who are trained to threaten and harass Dell's U.S. customers, employ calling robots that dial phones day and night. DFS apparently does not keep accurate records of their accounts, and has been the subject of lawsuits and possibly a future class action suit. This is the financing arm of the same company that, as I said, built its reputation on its alleged superiority in customer service!
What is wrong with this picture? Everything. But at bottom, the problem is our own notion of business ethics and what we allow technology companies to get away with. First, I tried calling Verizon and Verizon Wireless, and asked if they could block these harassment calls. No, we don't do that, they said. Why not? They should be required to do that. No one should be subjected to this kind of abuse without having a simple remedy. All phone companies should be responsible for following up and dealing with telephone harassment. This is a no-brainer. ISP's should be responsible for blocking spam; very simple algorithms could get rid of 90% of it, by targetting the servers that forward it. These companies (including Verizon) are making $billions off of their customers, but our lax model of business ethics lets them watch as their networks are used for illicit purposes. Napster can be taken down for allowing users to share files, though Napster itself did not engage in any illegal activity; but Verizon can pass along the most insidious crap without penalty. It is appalling.
Second, back to my earlier problem, computer hardware and software companies have to be responsible for shipping products that work, or for getting them working without undue effort on the part of the user. This is obvious and indisputable, yet it is a principle that is basically ignored in the regulation of U.S. technology businesses. I am not, of course, underestimating the level of sophistication involved in producing even an ordinary laptop or word processor. But that is not the issue. The technology issues are handled hierarchically, at each level of manufacture, so that by the time Dell or any other company snaps together its PC's, they do not have to be responsible for what happened in the clean rooms where the chips or disks were manufactured. If they send me something that does not work, they are tacitly stating that they are confident enough in the technology to sell it to me. If it does not work as it should, they have to do something about it. To the extent that it helps me to avoid shipping things back and forth I am happy to sit in front of a screen and try a couple of things; and when it is no longer in my interest, it should be their problem to deal with. And this goes for software too; but that is such a long discussion it needs its own post.
Third, we have a cheap labor issue, and the Indian subcontractors are being exploited just as much as we are. It is not cost effective to pay top dollar to people who are supposed to collect money, since collection is by nature an uncertain enterprise. So you look for the most cost efficient way of doing that, and perhaps you pay for the service on a commission basis. In any case, the subcontractor is given an interest in producing results, and if they are willing to engage in practices that would be considered unethical by our normal social standards, like calling people constantly, at odd hours, and taking their cell numbers off voicemail messages, then the company (Dell, in this case) is insulated from the charge of unethical practices while reaping the benefits. Of course, by exploiting cheap Indian labor for this purpose, U.S. private enterprise also helps cause enmities among the people who are all victims of this system. Some of the perpetrators are indeed Indian - the Indian businessmen who are greedy enough to agree to do Dell's dirty work. But the people we talk to on the phone are just hungry grunts who are not trained in customer service or to act professionally; indeed doing so could probably cost them their jobs. They are the frontline soldiers who are supposed to do the dirty work while absorbing all the verbal abuse that their irate victims give them. The ultimate responsibility lies with our own government and legal system: its lax communication laws, and lax regulation of collection practices. Secondarily, with Dell and their competitors, who are never satisfied with the $billions they make and always need to exploit every opportunity for increasing their relatively thin margins. Third, with the exploitative subcontractors in India or elsewhere who act like they are training attack dogs and feel immune to basic ethical standards that are at least sometimes observed by similar U.S. companies.
And fourh, with us, for putting up with this garbage over and over again, year after year, election after election. As political interest groups go, technology users must be one of the largest there is. Yet which one of the candidates has offered anything remotely resembling a comprehensive platform for technology policy (or finance policy, in spite of the mess we're now in) - from acceptable uses of bioletric identification to responsibility for post-sale consumer support, from telephone harassment to 30% financing rates for PC purchases? Nobody, and no one but a few small privacy and technology user groups is demanding that they do. That is a travesty. Nearly every single person in the U.S. has an interest in proper regulation of technology, but we don't raise our voices about this. So it will be the case that we have to put up with shoddy products and unethical practices, until we get serious about cases like Dell Financial Services.
Finally, I have a personal moral dilemma. I recently discovered that the person Dell is trying to reach is someone who lives in my building. I actually have a contact number for him, though I've met him only once and never tried using it. There is a good possibility that this individual intentionally gave Dell my number; perhaps he owes them money and wanted to throw them off. Should I get Dell of my back, and give this individual what he probably deserves? It is tempting. So far, I have not. (Indeed, the few times I have answered the cell phone calls, the party on the other end terminates the call after putting me on hold, so I cannot even give them information it I want to.) Between the corporate abuse practiced by Dell and its partners, and the unethical action by an individual with whom I am slightly acquainted, I find the former by far the more obnoxious, and do not want to further their cause. They may have a problem I can help them with, but I do not wish to do so, because they do not deserve to have their techniques legitimized. And I trust that eventually, some lawyer or state attorney general or other entity will put a stop to DFS and their practices; or, as an act of poetic justice, they may just go under. That would warm my heart a bit, but it would be better to fix what is broken in both technology and financial policy in this country. As for my dubious friend in the building, he will get his comeuppance too. This kind of person does not need assistance to get himself in trouble. Then again, assisting him might be a worthy act nonetheless.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Like Most Know-It-Alls, He Doesn't Know What He Doesn't Know
"Some Brand-Name Bloggers Say Stress of Posting is a Hazard to Their Health" reads one headline. "In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop", warns another. Not here, babe - I post when I have the time, to three separate blogs. And I don't have the time when I'm doing my taxes, dealing with my kids, or preparing to speak at philosophy conferences. Not to mention grabbing some R&R on the Monterey coast. Which is what I've been up to lately, in more or less reverse order, so there you go. The stress-free blogger. It won't make me rich on advertising links, but neither will having a nervous breakdown.
Then again, I do want to post more frequently than I have since I started this blog, mainly because I have this nagging feeling that the subject is actually important. Maybe not quite up there with famine or terrorism, but significant to people's lives. So at first glance it is rewarding to see that some stalwarts of the technology literati have been running a column on matters ethical. Sort of. I refer, of course, to WIRED, that low-tech vehicle for high-tech advertising, pop science sound bytes, technopop culture and occasional light porn. Sometimes they also print some stuff about digital technology (most of it wireless, but whatever).
WIRED has offered some key articles on information ethics in its time, standouts for me include John Perry Barlow's famous piece on digital patent and copyright issues, and the exposure of clandestine biometric imaging practiced at the 2001 Tampa Superbowl. But their more recent descent into yuppie lifestyle reporting and geek fantasy entertainment is, as they put it, tired, if not expired, IMHO. This rag has definitely lost direction, or found a direction that is so vapid it seems quite lost - doing superficial pieces on genetic research and cognitive science like some Omni-wannabe, or lauding their favorite films and rock groups, often without even giving lip service to things like innovative uses of digital technology in the popular arts. They could do a whole magazine on that but it might make people think they really are geeks, and distract from the cool-to-be-techno image they are trying to uphold. Nine Inch Nails, Joy Division and Radiohead... er, that is, Blade Runner, Donnie Darko and Manga. Sheesh. How did they miss Smash Bros Brawl? Oh, by getting it on with Halo 3. Is this supposed to be an encyclopedia of pop iconography or a technology magazine with something resembling a social conscience?
How reassuring to see that they actually have an ethics column. Sort of. God forbid WIRED should ever hire me as editor in chief, I'd put in a "lifestyle" column and say "you're welcome, and the rest of the issue is about technology and real life". But at least it is something of an attempt to address an important question or two. Something - but what, exactly? What is an ethics column doing with a byline like "Mr. Know-It-All"? That self-deprecating title reads like an indication that the current WIRED editors get agita every time they feel compelled to print anything that might be thought of as socially significant. Somebody might think we're preaching to them; better let them know we don't take ourselves too seriously. "Mr. Know-It-All" indeed! Anyway, let's look at the column on its own merits and then decide whether to go wiredless.
"Mr Know-It-All" is the sort of question-and-answer type column that began (to my knowledge) with Ann Landers-type personal advice columns. Several years ago the New York Times handed a byline to Randy Cohen as "The Ethicist". This was something like the equivalent of giving Dick Cavett a byline as "The Art Critic", as Cohen was mainly known previously as a copy writer for t.v. jokesters like Letterman and Rosie O'Donnell, according to his Wikipedia entry. It used to be written by Clive Thompson, about whom I Know-Nothing (though someone by that name who writes on technology and culture runs this bloggy web site). But now Brendan I. Koerner is Mr. Know-It-All. Like Cohen, he is a somewhat known a quantity. He contributes stuff to Slate and The New York Times (including the Magazine section; so, no stranger to Cohen's column, I daresay) - an eclectic output roughly along the lines of "new technology" or "new ideas".
It is notable, if not quite disturbing, that Koerner is also a member of the so-called New America Foundation, a slightly fuzzy thinktank that includes such not-so-fuzzy Reagan/Bush conservatives as Frances Fukayama and Christine Todd Whitman. (Just as it is notable, if not quite disturbing, that WIRED editor Chris Anderson did a stint at the basically conservative journal The Economist.) Does this mean WIRED is giving an ethics podium to some quietly right-wing ideologue? Not necessarily; NAF is politically diverse, allegedly "non-partisan", "radically centrist", perhaps vaguely environmentalist. I do wonder, though, what any progressive individual might hope to accomplish in this menagerie; which leads me in turn to wonder whether Koerner is not basically a conservative with a soapbox in the form of a geek-chic pop science venue.
So what does Koerner have to say? Rather than going back through a year or so of columns I'll just start with his entry as Mr. Know-It-All in last month's issue (April 08), "Juicing on the Job". A reader (I'll take it to be a male) writes that a coworker is making him look bad by "using unprescribed modafinil to work crazy hours". The boss wants him to keep up. Should he report the drug use, or maybe do the same? According to Koerner, both of these would be the wrong move. No argument from me there. As for practical advice, Koerner has some good ideas (talk to the guy first), some bad ones ("consider dropping some background information on modafinil in your boss's inbox" - without telling him why?) and some slightly idealistic ones (think about whether you really want to be in this cutthroat company. Maybe get a nice low pressure job working for the Post Office?)
But what is really the ethical problem here? First, let's get rid of "unprescribed" - how the hell does the reader know that the modfinil is "unprescribed"? The coworker is obviously not his best friend, so we can't take the qualifier "unprescribed" as known information. This puts things in a different light. We don't have an ethical issue with a person who is working his butt off and is taking some medication he may actually need. (Modanifil is not really a stimulant, from what I read, but a drug that increases wakefulness and attention for people who have a tendency to nod off during the day. Hmmm, gotta talk to my doctor about this...)
On the other hand, does this company have any standard for the work hours to which people can be held accountable? Nobody signs an employment contract to be a 24x7 slave. If your hours are effectively unlimited then you'd better be making enough money to quit at some point and live on the Riviera for a year or two. Maybe it's time. If not, the ethical problem here looks to be with the employer who expects everyone to keep up with the most insanely driven overachiever; the coworker is not at fault for anything, really. Suppose the coworker was pulling your leg; he is not actually taking any drugs at all, he is just a workaholic who needs little sleep and wants to get ahead. What's the problem? The problem is your greedy boss, who figures he'll use this as a standard that was not really established when you accepted the position. Changing the rules mid-game, or just not publicizing them at all, is an ethical problem - it's called unfairness. Finding the source of the problem does not mean it is easy to solve, but it at least gets us clear on how to judge people, and ourselves.
Let's move on. Another reader asks the important question whether it is alright to use his laptop while sitting at a bar. Koerner and I agree that in one sense at least, it is not alright - for even if isopropyl alcohol swabs may be good for cleaning your keyboard, grain alcohol spills are not. But said reader is being given the evil eye by the bartender. Should he tell the bartender to take a flying leap at a Rolling Rock? Koerner quotes a guy in Oregon who blogs about bartending to the effect that the bartender should not have an issue with it. So, who am I to argue with such expertise? But picture that your job is to run around all night planting pints of pilsner and drippy daiquiries from one end of this polished wood surface to the other - do you really want to have to worry that you, or a patron, are going to spray some guy's $4000 notebook with sticky strawberry liqueur, and watch him start screaming for a manager? Come on. If you're at the bar to find a hot date, put the cpu back in the bag if you know what's good for you; and if not, go get a table and order some nachos. The bartender has enough to worry about without dancing around your laptop.
In the current (May 2008) issue, a concerned parent asks if it is bad for her 1 month old son to be held while she is watching t.v. Mr KIA (no relation to the car) treats this as a scientific question (no, it probably won't harm him) but then suggests that the real issue is not to use the t.v. as babysitter. Which Mr. KML (that's knows-much-less, yours truly) has certainly never done. This week. (But smoking pot in the 70's depleted my short-term memory cells, and they still haven't grown back - as far as I can recall.) Of course our columnist could have sent the lady a polite note that "you are factually misinformed about the risks, so this is not a topic for a KIA column, thanks anyway". Or he could have asked why the woman doesn't just put the little thing on her shoulder, facing away from the t.v., or cradle it in her arms looking up - the most natural positions anyway. But if there is an ethical issue here, isn't it really this: supposing that there is reliable evidence that having a tot in front of the t.v. causes it harm, is it okay to do it anyway if you really want to watch the show and hold the tot? And you don't need a know-it-all to answer that, just a little common sense.
Now this one I have to quote: "Am I obligated to share my laptop password with my wife?" Let's spend some time on this, as it is really a very significant question in contemporary culture. Mr. KIA quite reasonably points out that marriage does not eliminate a right to privacy, but it does imply trust. Trust is the issue, but the sound byte format is not sufficient for dealing with the question. You could deal with the practical side of it very quickly. For example: "No, you don't have to show her your password; or the code for your bank card; what's in your will; or the amounts or beneficiaries on your insurance policies. Then again, there are some private things she doesn't have to show you either." There's a practical answer. It just avoids morality altogether (or introduces a negative moral sentiment: revenge).
Koerner suggests a mutual agreement to keep certain folders off limits. This unanalyzed suggestion is a good example of why moral analysis is a lot more complex than it seems. No one has asked, so far, whether the wife has a computer of her own to use; whether there has been any breach of trust in the relationship already; whether you have any independent reasons to password- protect your computer; or even what level of computer users you both are. Lets go through the ramifications and see where we end up.
1. Suppose your wife wants access to the laptop for purely practical reasons, to use some picture editor you have, or check the family budget spreadsheet you set up. And suppose further that neither of you has any reason to distrust the other, and you both already respect one another's privacy. Then the following questions arise:
a. Why do you need a password at all? Is it to protect it from someone else's prying eyes? Then give her the password, period. I have never password protected my computer at home. Even if there were times when I was not a model husband I would rather keep computer content as innocent as possible and explain any apparent indiscretions than tell her, "sorry honey, off limits".
b. Does she have a computer to use? If so, why does she want your password? If she wants content or functionality that can be transferred to hers, that is what she should be asking for.
c. If she doesn't have one, maybe she should be asking for that; or, assuming again that she has no reason to question your intentions in having a private password, why doesn't she ask you to sign her on?
d. Maybe you're not home, and she needs access right away. Fine, you can give her the password, and change it later. She should not even know that you did if she doesn't require ongoing access. If she does, see c. above. And if she needs to use it only occasionally, then you can explain that you change your password every once in a while for general security purposes, and she can have it any time she wants, but she shouldn't expect to just get in any time without telling you.
2. If your wife complains about any of these arrangements, then perhaps she has some other agenda and is just using this as an excuse to check up on you. Then, as Koerner says, there may be other problems in the marriage. Let's assume, then, that there has already been a breach of trust, and further, that you both know that she feels there has. Again there are various possible angles:
a. If she mistrusts you, then telling her, "okay, but don't go to this folder" will only increase the mistrust. It is no different, really from saying, "here, use this other computer I have, but don't go to this one". Once the trust is broken, it is not limited by folders.
b. Has the breach of trust been acknowledged by both sides? Suppose she correctly suspects you of something dishonest but you have not admitted it. Your password protection is just a bandaid to keep you out of trouble. But suppose you break down and give her access, but tell her "just don't go to My Documents/Cindy"; what good will that do? She already mistrusts you, and you already know that, so what reason do you have to think she'll stay out of /Cindy? She is probably using the password issue to see if your reaction confirms her suspicions.
c. There may be a difference in the level of expertise that significantly affects your negotiations. Suppose you each have computers, but you are basically a Word, Excel and Picasa user and she is a UNIX guru with Brainbench certification in network security. You might feel that even if there were some compromising stuff on her system, she could easily hide it so that with your superficial computer skills you wouldn't have a prayer of finding anything. Whereas your system is an open book to her. Not fair, you say - my password is virtually the only level of privacy I have, whereas you have privacy by virtue of my lack of expertise. Of course, this will lead to an argument: "You have no reason to suspect me, but I have a reason to suspect you!" Maybe - but that's today. The situation could be reversed in the future and you would not have the recourse she has. This will not solve the problem of trust, but it might be a legitimate reason to deny her access anyway. And if the skills are reversed, her getting access to your system might be reasonable, but pretty useless. Unless you are a complete dunderhead.
d. If you both agree that you have deceived her, then at least one issue is settled, and she does not need access to your PC to prove it. But there is still a problem. If you did it once, will you do it again? And how far do her legitimate rights to monitor your activities extend? Is this going to be a Charles and Camilla type affair? How can she know? You've been dishonest, why should she believe you when you say it's over, or that it's the last time? The truth is, though, checking your laptop periodically is not going to solve anything. Unless, as I say, you're a complete dunderhead (or you are trying to end your marriage, which is perhaps a hidden motivation here). Because you will simply arrange your next indiscretion to take place without office automation support. Perhaps she wants to check your cell phone messages too? Maybe you should let her, if you have nothing to hide anymore. Maybe she'll even shadow you after work. After a relatively short time, all the checking she can possibly do will get to be so tedious and time-consuming that she will realize she either has to trust you or dump you. And then the question of whether she has or doesn't have your password becomes moot.
e. Assuming she does have a right to check up on you from time to time, there is still the question of whether you are to be informed of it, and how. You are not, after all, a member of an international spy ring, or a suspected serial killer. You presumably have some kind of right to know you are being monitored. A woman I was once in a relationship with decided at some point see if she could do a little better on Match.com. When I found out I was devastated. She shut down her page and her search immediately and swore it was over. Nevertheless, I checked her laptop and her cell phone for several months after this incident. Often I did it right in front of her, and I told her I intended to do it. I reported to her anything that I found that I thought was suspicious and gave her a chance to explain it. After a few months it was clear that she really did not have any inclination to do this again, and the matter was over. If your wife is going to monitor your devices, you have a right to know about it. Maybe this alone will be enough to discourage the behavior and everyone will be happier for it. In any case, there have to be some limits, and you have to know what they are, or else the whole concept of a relationship built on trust is just gone.
Koerner's suggestion of keeping some folders off limits clearly underplays the difficulties involved in evaluating the situation. One other thing I should mention about his responses - most of them appeal, in good journalistic fashion, to an opinion uttered by some expert he gave a shout to. It raises the question of whether Mr. Know-It-All really knows even as much as what's contained in these short-answer quizzes.
But my ultimate point is not really about Koerner, but about WIRED's approach to computer ethics. InformatiomWeek, a far more staid and "uncool" IT industry magazine, often carries serious articles on ethical issues in technology. WIRED seems to fear that their audience of IT enthusiasts lacks sufficient attention span to take in a serious discussion of these issues. Better to hire a journalist and stick with the 1-paragraph sound bite format than get an actual philosopher with some expertise in computer ethics and risk having someone yawn at WIRED in the local java joint. WIRED already sticks all its substantive articles as far back as possible, giving everyone a chance to page through the glitzy ads and the cutesy pictures and the single-page pop science and gadget profiles before they decide to commit to actually reading something. The longer pieces prior to the serious articles are broken up into discrete subjects and numbered, for those whose modafinil prescriptions have run out. And the articles in the back of the current (May 2008) issue are representative of WIRED's present commitment to IT ethics. Only one of them even addresses an issue that has significant digital ethics implications - the installation of a vast downtown surveillance system in the Big Apple - and that piece does not so much as mention the tiny little issue of privacy. The pop culture articles often barely mention technology; the technology articles barely mention ethics. What's wrong with this picture book?
I have nothing against an advice column. I have nothing against Brendan Koerner or anyone else publishing his opinions. I have a problem with a magazine that considers itself the mouthpiece of technically-minded members of Generation X, Y, Q, or whatever, the folks who grew up in the digital age and whose lives are shaped by technology, and makes its main contribution to the debates on the ethics of technology these 30-second blurbs from someone who has no background or training in analyzing ethical issues. That's not not wired, it's uninspired.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Anonymous, Eponymous, Pseudonymous: What's in a Name?
So, what excuse do I have for starting this blog last Monday and then not posting for a week? Er, just giving Google's squiddies time to find me, perhaps. It sounds good anyway. Being found is becoming more and more like, well, being, isn't it? Being ungooglable is worse than being anonymous, or maybe just the same thing; and being eponymous is just like being John Malkovich, at least in the scene where we go inside his head and everything says "Malkovich... Malkovich... Malkovich". No one can ever be 100% anonymous (as Eliot Spitzer just found out), or really eponymous (" 'Tony Alterman', the Google search result of the human being by the same name...") or synonymous with just about anything except perhaps your DNA code. And the last thing many people want today is to see "No results found for [your name here]." But there was a time, believe me, when people felt differently; say oh, about 7 or 8 years ago...
Not long after 9/11/01, every company that had any claim on imaging technology was trying to jump into the biometric identification fray, hoping to make a killing on terror (terrible pun intended). Not that the technology was anywhere near the task of correctly picking a known terrorist out of a crowd; but it sounded like the answer to our hopes and dreams of feeling safe again. Yet already, the prospect of having our imaged body parts encoded on ID cards and distributed to vendors of everything from burritos to airline tickets, was causing anxiety among those who did not want to see the tragedy of 2001 turned into an excuse to create the society of 1984. What happens to the right to privacy when the proliferation of biometric imaging turns your fingerprint, your face, your hand geometry and your DNA into commodities that can be demanded for identification, not to mention exchanged like social security numbers for fun and profit?
Sun Microsystems was one such company that was quick to rush in with an airport identification scheme. Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun, and a culturally sophisticated individual who is always ready with a pithy philosophical comment, was quoted as saying that we need new mechanisms to "govern privacy while at the same time resetting expectations about civil liberties"; and that "I'm for the right to privacy but not necessarily the right to anonymity". Now, let's ignore the crack about "resetting expections about civil liberties" so that Sun can more effectively market its products. My interest is more in the distinction between "privacy" and "anonymity" that is being drawn here. What exactly do they mean, in this context?
Suppose I am presenting myself in person to other individuals, who represent commercial or governmental interests, and to get what I want from them (an airline ticket, access to my bank account, or a burrito, for instance) I have to present some image - in abstract mathematical form, of course, since biometric id's are not stored as images but as points in a mathematical landscape - but it represents something that is supposed to be uniquely me. Is the idea supposed to be that what I give up here is just my anonymity, and not my privacy?
I think it is quite the opposite. When I am required to let someone do a digital scan of my face in order to get through the security check, so far as I can tell, I have not yet given up my anonymity - the staff who determine whether I passed the test don't even have to have my name, at least in theory, or any other identifying information about me whatsoever - but I think my privacy has surely been compromised, as I have already given up for public use and consumption the very thing I thought was sacrosanct, control over my own body. No, I am not in chains nor have I been tortured or otherwise subjected to pain or serious discomfort. Nevertheless, the details of what makes me unique as a human being were not simply copied, in their superficial aspect, for art or amusement, but were demanded, scanned, anlayzed, encoded, and stored in a database. I used to think that it's my damn business, thanks very much, whether you should know anything more about my body than I care to make visible in public. So much for that idea. (If you think this is just idle fussing, wait until the day it is discovered that some biometric information can be used to detect some disease or deformity that you'd rather not disclose.)
Not long after 9/11/01, every company that had any claim on imaging technology was trying to jump into the biometric identification fray, hoping to make a killing on terror (terrible pun intended). Not that the technology was anywhere near the task of correctly picking a known terrorist out of a crowd; but it sounded like the answer to our hopes and dreams of feeling safe again. Yet already, the prospect of having our imaged body parts encoded on ID cards and distributed to vendors of everything from burritos to airline tickets, was causing anxiety among those who did not want to see the tragedy of 2001 turned into an excuse to create the society of 1984. What happens to the right to privacy when the proliferation of biometric imaging turns your fingerprint, your face, your hand geometry and your DNA into commodities that can be demanded for identification, not to mention exchanged like social security numbers for fun and profit?
Sun Microsystems was one such company that was quick to rush in with an airport identification scheme. Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun, and a culturally sophisticated individual who is always ready with a pithy philosophical comment, was quoted as saying that we need new mechanisms to "govern privacy while at the same time resetting expectations about civil liberties"; and that "I'm for the right to privacy but not necessarily the right to anonymity". Now, let's ignore the crack about "resetting expections about civil liberties" so that Sun can more effectively market its products. My interest is more in the distinction between "privacy" and "anonymity" that is being drawn here. What exactly do they mean, in this context?
Suppose I am presenting myself in person to other individuals, who represent commercial or governmental interests, and to get what I want from them (an airline ticket, access to my bank account, or a burrito, for instance) I have to present some image - in abstract mathematical form, of course, since biometric id's are not stored as images but as points in a mathematical landscape - but it represents something that is supposed to be uniquely me. Is the idea supposed to be that what I give up here is just my anonymity, and not my privacy?
I think it is quite the opposite. When I am required to let someone do a digital scan of my face in order to get through the security check, so far as I can tell, I have not yet given up my anonymity - the staff who determine whether I passed the test don't even have to have my name, at least in theory, or any other identifying information about me whatsoever - but I think my privacy has surely been compromised, as I have already given up for public use and consumption the very thing I thought was sacrosanct, control over my own body. No, I am not in chains nor have I been tortured or otherwise subjected to pain or serious discomfort. Nevertheless, the details of what makes me unique as a human being were not simply copied, in their superficial aspect, for art or amusement, but were demanded, scanned, anlayzed, encoded, and stored in a database. I used to think that it's my damn business, thanks very much, whether you should know anything more about my body than I care to make visible in public. So much for that idea. (If you think this is just idle fussing, wait until the day it is discovered that some biometric information can be used to detect some disease or deformity that you'd rather not disclose.)
Now, what about anonymity? Most likely, that's gone too. It's gone in more or less the same way that it would be if I were required to carry around an RFID chip with my name and SSN encoded on it. (No surprise that these are two competing ideas for the design of the driver's license of the future.) Once I offer my fingerprints to the burrito place to scan, they can connect them with my name and other personal info. Why? Well, maybe I just give it to them to enter into their database. But all I really have to do is allow them to associate the biometric image with a credit card number, from which Bob's Burrito can glean everything from my name to my home address for the last 12 years (at least if they're willing to pay enough for it). And of course with the EZPass-like airport card, the very point is to identify me. When the FBI or the Police Department sets up security cameras that can scan faces in a crowd and compare them with a database of known criminals or terrorists, the point, again, is to identify not merely the face but the name and background of the individual. So, really, anonymity is out the door too.
Now, all of this is just a bit of a preliminary to some recent discussions about anonymity and the Internet, for example, this piece by Andrew Kean. Kean is a fairly widely published technology writer, but his opinion piece here is not exactly a paradigm of subtlety or measured judgment. His subject is "The Curse of Internet Anonymity", and though he states that the issue " is actually a lot more complicated than it first appears" he does not really treat it as very complicated at all. Children, who he refers to as "Generation Facebook", are taught "to lie about who they are". Parents collaborate in this to protect kids from "the social scum –- the sexual predators, the financial scammers, the con artists, the bullies, and the gossips –- who are corrupting the Internet with their criminality, perversions, and incivility". Aside from lumping together sexual predators and "gossips" he manages to throw in a barb at people who use music-sharing sites for "killing the recorded music industry"! (If someone is in the midst of committing suicide as they are rapidly dying from a terminal disease, doesn't poisoning them count as euthanasia?) Kean does not fail to remind us that "real lives have been wrecked by the evil actions of anonymous Internet users" and that "vulgar and irresponsible anonymous Internet users are souring public discourse", etc. You get the general tenor of it.
There certainly has been a lot of bruhaha about anonymity lately, but IMHO it is almost all just as misplaced as Joy's comment. That is because, if there is a problem about anonymity, it is the lack of it that should trouble us, not it's alleged proliferation. People are not anonymous when they use a pseudonym; they are pseudonymous, which is hardly an offense. Until the Internet age, no one ever called anyone on the carpet for adopting a pseudonym or going by two different names. Cicero and Tully turn out to be the same guy, Mark Twain is exposed as really Samuel Clemens, Marian Evans turns out to have paraded as George Eliot - get out the torch let's burn their books, let's throw darts at their effigies; beter yet, let's delete their Wikipedia entries! Does it sound ludicrous? Okay. So that's what I think of this garbage about anonymity. There is nothing wrong with adopting a psuedonym, and never has been. I adopted one on my first blog; now I don't, but I respect anyone's right to do so.
People have all sorts of reasons for not wanting their written words to be associated with their live persona. Picture this: a guy writes a novel full of all sorts of passages that are loosely based on the intimate details of his relationship with his wife. But he has children, some of them still young, but old enough to read his book. Feeling that in spite of the fictionality of many of the passages his children would be shocked at the recognizable connection with their mother, he decides to publish under a different name, which he will protect carefully from being publicly associated with him. That's one example; let your imagination run wild and think of others.
People have the right to be pseudonymous. All other things being equal, people have the right not to be directly associated with what they write; what counts is the content of what is written, not the authorship relation itself. Someone who writes a book exposing certain people as mafia members or corrupt law enforcement personnel may go to great lengths to keep his identity secret. Not only Marian Evans in the 19th c. but Wendy Carlos in the 20th adopted false names and hid their identities because they feared not being taken seriously if they went public as women. Whether they were right or not, it is clear that the moral weight for their contemporaries lay in protecting their pseudonyms, not outing them.
Publishing under a false name is not too different from being anonymous. But it is a little different: for "Anonymous", the most popular author in history, can publish an endless number of pieces which can only be linked together forensically; whereas "Joachim Pumpernickel" can, at least in principle, become a unique authorial persona, just not one that is tied to a known individual. This is another way in which the current flap about "anonymity" is off the mark. Someone who writes a blog or publishes reviews on Amazon under the name "Plexiglas" (made it up - apologies if there is anyone who actually does) can have a style, personality, history - in effect, an identity - over time, such that if they forget to sign one of their posts someone might conceivably be able to say, "Oh, that sounds like something Plexiglas would have said". (There was - is? - a mathematical group that published under the name "Bourbaki", though there was no person by that name in the group. "Bourbaki" had an identifiable perspective on mathematics. The name was apparently that of a French army officer.)
Psudonymous bloggers and posters are not violating anyone's trust, nor are they necessarily exercising undue caution or obscurity. People have a right to privacy, and they have a right to participate in public forums at the same time. I should be able to walk into a crowd without having my face scanned and matched with a biometric database. I should be able to speak in public without telling everyone my real name. Not being a criminal, nor having malicious intent, I should be able to use any name I want, or none, when doing so does not in itself harm anyone. When I say "in itself", I am comparing it with, for instance, someone who signs someone else's name on a check, or falsely prefixes "Dr." to his name, or claims to be a different person so he can get a second (third, fourth...) marriage license or access to additional government benefits. This is spoofing, or just plain fraud, for here, deceiving someone about the name is to deceive them about your entitlement to certain social benefits that you are not, in fact, entitled to. This sort of person does not want anonymity either; they want a false name. Their real name only matters insofar as it can help prosecute them. But they can be prosecuted under any name.
In the cases that Mr. Kean mentions - the woman who caused a little girl to commit suicide after pretending to be her friend, people whose reputations or sexual orientation are made the object of assault or derision in popular electronic forums - anonymity has nothing to do with the issue. Suppose the writers were named Jane Smith, John Brown and Bill Jones, and they posted their names; how would this make a difference? They would not be anonymous, but the moral problem with their obscure poisoned pen letters would be the same. Or, suppose they had easily identifiable names - wouldn't this be worse? Because at least some people would have the sense to write off the accusations of an obviously pseudonymous writer, or to take them with a grain of salt, whereas if people see a name that looks easily identifiable they are likely to give more credence to the allegations.
Objection: "But at least if you can identify them you can hold them responsible for their actions." Depends who "them" is here, because you can hold "the author of that particular nasty post" responsible for their actions too (this is called a "definite description", in the language of philosophy), though you don't know who it is that wrote it. Anonymity is never enough; people can be easily tracked down, too easily, from a single comment on a message board to a live human being in the back room of a fourth floor walk-up in Baltimore. Our lack or anonymity is scary. What is scary about the nasty creatures in cyberspace is not their anonymity, but their irresponsibility. They think they are safe from suffering the consequences of their actions, or indeed they desire bad consequences for the victim, and think they will not endure anything similar themselves. But it is not the fact that they fail to announce their names that makes their actions wrong. What is wrong is equally so whether they state their names, regular pseudonyms, ephemeral screen names or just post Anonymously. The post was, after all, written by a person, the same person regardless of the name(s) they use. They may be difficult to physically track down whether they are anonymous or not. Once they have been tracked down, they can be held accountable.
The anonymity issue is a red herring. A jerk is a jerk (that's eponymous, I think) - let someone use their name, a different name, no name, or ten names, what counts in the problem cases is that they are venal and cowardly, not that they are anonymous. I would bet there are hundreds of people named George Bush around the world. Let them all sign their posts "George Bush" - someone is sure to scream "anonymous blogger!", "spoofer!" etc. maybe we should all change our names to George Bush (please, whatever you're about to do, don't do it on your computer...) - then the anonymity business will go away and we can turn our attention to the people behind the names.
Indeed, multipseudonymity can be far more devastating than anonymity; one malicious individual can present as a whole community, and mount an attack on someone who feels the burden of agreement among several apparent authors. The unethical nature of this is clearly not tied to mudslinging alone. Suppose the owner of a bed and breakfast periodically logs into a popular travel site from a different email address and posts glowing reviews of their shabby, mildewy, boarding house. No one was dissed. But everyone has potentially been deceived, misled. Suppose the owner used her real name in one of these reviews; would it make a difference? Would people do enough research to figure out that it was the owner herself writing? Again, names in cyberspace are generally pretty meaningless, except for widely known personalities (and even then there's the George Bush problem, but I'll let that rest).
Anonymity makes no difference. The real problems have been around forever: deception, cruelty, dishonesty, irresponsibility. The author of a plagiarized book or term paper is more dishonest in their use of a name, and their actions more reprehensible, than any "anonymous" instant message user who does not deceive but merely hides their identity. Deceiving the person(s) on the receiving end of a communication is unethical, not because you hide your name but because you deceive. Dragging people's names through the dirt is obnoxious behavior, and doing it "anonymously" is cowardly behavior; hurting people intentionally is immoral, and doing it through anonymous posts, like spraypainting "Jill is a lesbian" on the side of the school, is disgusting. Anonymity is not new, and is in fact a right that we must hold on to. The fact that it can assist one in doing harm should not blind us to the value of this right. When anonymity goes out the door, so does privacy, to an extent, and the ability to exercise free speech and speak unpleasant truths without suffering evil consequences. Let's identify the problem correctly and stop moaning about anonymity, before the loss of it turns around and bites us in our virtual behinds.
Monday, March 3, 2008
Please Ignore This Headline About Cyber Attacks
While we wait for Wikileaks.org to come back online (unfortunately, reports of its rebirth are greatly exaggerated), the U.S. Air Force has partly filled the gap by leaking all sorts of interesting headlines in a mock-front-page full page ad in today's NY Times. Here's a sample:
This Could be a Headline About Cyber Attack Causing a Blackout
No, the text does not say that Wikileaks was blacked out by a DOS cyber attack, prior to a fire and then a court order shutting it down. Nor does it refer to the December 28 report of a lost Air Force laptop containing Social Security numbers and other information on more than 10,000 military personnel. Oh no, they are talking about serious stuff: a cyber attack on the government of Estonia in 2007. According to the pseudo-article, "today, America's military and government computers will be threatened by three million malicious code attacks. [Where did they get this number?] You don't see headlines about these attacks because none have caused the chaos they intended. Thankfully, someone saw them coming." Not, I guess, the guy who missed the hacker who grabbed 33,000 records from and Air Force computer on August 22, 2005. Not to mention all the other DOD data breaches and media losses and whatnot. Can't blame the sky guys for what the boat guys lose, can we?
New About a Rogue Leader Making Threats Could Go Here
No, this is not about George W. Bush threatening to bomb Iran or Israel threatening to knock of the next Hezbollah leader by firing rockets into Lebanon, or anything like that. It's about "rebel leaders" who "spew anti-American rhetoric". Right, we need the USAF to deal with the guys in the jungles of Columbia or the or the Sudan desert. "Little known fact" - I love this one - "no modern war has ever been won without air dominance." So, the Vietcong had "air dominance"? Interesting.
Or a Breaking Story on the Latest Terrorist Threat
Well, yes, they got this one right. Only eight pages later (A13) it's right there in b&w: "Utah Home Is Searched for Evidence in Ricin Case". This is about the guy who was found with vials of the deadly poison Ricin in a Las Vegas hotel. How close is that to the Nellis Air Force Base (part of the Air Force's huge, extremely high-security Nevada Test and Training Range? Oh, about 9.7 miles, according to Google Maps! Hey, I'd be worried too!
Well, thanks, USAF, for making me feel more secure with this ad. Just one question: does the timing of this have anything to do with your recently publicized contract for (at least) $40 billion for refueling tankers, which drew congressional ire because you awarded it partly to the European parent of Airbus? Are you trying to win our hearts and minds over for this expenditure of our tax dollars, which reportedly could rise to as much as $100 billion? Are you by any chance trying to wipe out those careless thoughts of schools, health care, affordable housing, and - er, computers? - and other programs which could be funded nationally for the price of your refueling tankers, by raising the spectre of cyber attacks, terrorism and "rogue leaders"? I hope not. Because scaring people in order to get them to support your political goals is generally considered unethical.
If "terrorism" is necessarily pursued by violent means, perhaps we need a just slightly milder term for this sort of nonsense, but I don't have one at hand at the moment. Any suggestions?
This Could be a Headline About Cyber Attack Causing a Blackout
No, the text does not say that Wikileaks was blacked out by a DOS cyber attack, prior to a fire and then a court order shutting it down. Nor does it refer to the December 28 report of a lost Air Force laptop containing Social Security numbers and other information on more than 10,000 military personnel. Oh no, they are talking about serious stuff: a cyber attack on the government of Estonia in 2007. According to the pseudo-article, "today, America's military and government computers will be threatened by three million malicious code attacks. [Where did they get this number?] You don't see headlines about these attacks because none have caused the chaos they intended. Thankfully, someone saw them coming." Not, I guess, the guy who missed the hacker who grabbed 33,000 records from and Air Force computer on August 22, 2005. Not to mention all the other DOD data breaches and media losses and whatnot. Can't blame the sky guys for what the boat guys lose, can we?
New About a Rogue Leader Making Threats Could Go Here
No, this is not about George W. Bush threatening to bomb Iran or Israel threatening to knock of the next Hezbollah leader by firing rockets into Lebanon, or anything like that. It's about "rebel leaders" who "spew anti-American rhetoric". Right, we need the USAF to deal with the guys in the jungles of Columbia or the or the Sudan desert. "Little known fact" - I love this one - "no modern war has ever been won without air dominance." So, the Vietcong had "air dominance"? Interesting.
Or a Breaking Story on the Latest Terrorist Threat
Well, yes, they got this one right. Only eight pages later (A13) it's right there in b&w: "Utah Home Is Searched for Evidence in Ricin Case". This is about the guy who was found with vials of the deadly poison Ricin in a Las Vegas hotel. How close is that to the Nellis Air Force Base (part of the Air Force's huge, extremely high-security Nevada Test and Training Range? Oh, about 9.7 miles, according to Google Maps! Hey, I'd be worried too!
Well, thanks, USAF, for making me feel more secure with this ad. Just one question: does the timing of this have anything to do with your recently publicized contract for (at least) $40 billion for refueling tankers, which drew congressional ire because you awarded it partly to the European parent of Airbus? Are you trying to win our hearts and minds over for this expenditure of our tax dollars, which reportedly could rise to as much as $100 billion? Are you by any chance trying to wipe out those careless thoughts of schools, health care, affordable housing, and - er, computers? - and other programs which could be funded nationally for the price of your refueling tankers, by raising the spectre of cyber attacks, terrorism and "rogue leaders"? I hope not. Because scaring people in order to get them to support your political goals is generally considered unethical.
If "terrorism" is necessarily pursued by violent means, perhaps we need a just slightly milder term for this sort of nonsense, but I don't have one at hand at the moment. Any suggestions?
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