Category: Wellness when Always-On

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Privacy and Anonymity Wellness when Always-On

The ad-free plan

We recently discussed how it was shortsighted to delete Whatsapp in regard to changes to its privacy policy and potential sharing of data with its parent Facebook: your data’s being sucked up by Facebook in so many other ways that your Whatsapp activity is just a small part of it.

Why you shouldn’t delete Whatsapp and move to Signal

On a chat group, one of my friends asked

Do you think someday Facebook could charge someone to keep all their data private? Do you think it’s possible for any of these tech companies to say “pay USD 50 per month or we’ll reveal your truth?”

To that,

That’s ominous and I don’t rule it out. It has one, possible major, possibly fatal downside – it can be only pulled off once because it’s a bait and switch. Once the switch is public, fewer people – if any – will bite the bait, no?

But we’re also seeing a less obvious but perhaps equally insidious: the free plan and the ‘ad-free’ paid plans. If one had to describe this arrangement in more plain terms, it’s one that demands a continuing payment to stop the hijacking of privacy and attention.

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Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Life Design Privacy and Anonymity Wellness when Always-On

The Custodial Internet

This New York Times article talks to people who own bitcoin but cannot access them because they’ve forgotten the keys to their bitcoin wallets. Some of these people have all but lost thousands of bitcoin, which are worth hundreds of millions of dollars today. I personally know someone who was gifted a hundred or so bitcoin when they were worth a dollar each, and has since been unable to recall how to access them.

The genius of bitcoin – and therefore the problem – is that has no issuer, like a central bank. Inherently, there is no equivalent of a bank account that holds bitcoin, and no bank that you can visit or call to have your password restored. It is as decentralised as the Internet is, and people have over and over extolled bitcoin as being able to be your own bank.

But one man’s freedom is another man’s overhead. As more people hold bitcoin and other cryptocurrency, they will turn to entities to manage it for them. Specialised cryptocurrency custodial services have existed for years now, and mainstream financial institutions like Fidelity already offers it. J P Morgan is seriously evaluating it; a solution from the 130 year old Northern Trust is pending approval. It’s likely that between new and old world financial entities, most cryptocurrency will be held in custody like more traditional securitised assets.

Digitally-native things are alike in this regard. You can own them if you like, but it’s a lot easier to have a third party hold them in custody for you.

Twenty years ago it was highly uncommon for the entity that gave you your email address to give you any sort of storage service for your email. You’d download your email to your computer through POP3 and it’d be wiped off the email provider’s servers . You truly owned your email – and were responsible for it. Today most people don’t even have a email client on their laptops or desktops, preferring to use web-based email with data stored entirely online. Even the email app on your phone doesn’t store all email offline, only the most recent. Your email provider is also your email custodian.

IRC messaging was similar. Many private/hobbyist IRC servers simply didn’t have the capacity to store chats. It was your IRC client stored chat logs offline, limited only by your computer’s hard drive size. But today, chat apps like Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp store chat logs entirely online, even if they claim they are end to end encrypted.

In the early days of digital cameras – the 1990s and 2000s, your photo library would exist solely on your hard drive. You had total control over the import and organisation of your photos – and consequently had total responsibility. My desktop machine crashed in 2008, leaving me with no photos from before that time – a terrible loss. Now, chances are you use either iCloud Photos or Google Photos for the massive amounts of photos your phone takes, and leave organisation to their AI while paying for online storage. They are your photo and memory custodians.

Finally, your documents, contacts, calendars all have online custodians, usually but not always Apple or Google. This is even though you could store them on your hard drive or self-host your sync server, it’s just too much work for most people.

Whether we realise it or not, whether we like it or not, we live in the Custodial Internet. We pay our custodians in cash or in data, often both.

Like people will doubtless do with bitcoin, we should evaluate custodians for our other data carefully. That data holds our relationships, our memories, our creative output, our wealth, our plans – in sum, our life.

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Data Custody Privacy and Anonymity Products and Design The Dark Forest of the Internet Wellness when Always-On

Why you shouldn’t delete Whatsapp and move to Signal

The Ars Technica website has a solid explanation of Whatsapp’s new privacy policy changes, which involve sharing extensive data about your Whatsapp usage with Facebook, Whatsapp’s parent company.

Whatsapp has been sharing data with Facebook since 2016, but earlier you had one chance to opt out of it. With the prompt you saw last week, it’s now mandatory – if you didn’t opt in this time, you won’t be able to use the app after 8 Feb 2021.

Now. Whatsapp claims it cannot read the actual contents of your chats – the company says those are encrypted end to end, in a way that even Whatsapp/Facebook can’t unscramble, in fact using technology from the privacy-focused app Signal.

But metadata – “data about data” – is not encrypted. This is your activity in the app:

  • Who you chat with
  • When and how often you chat with them
  • Whether you send multimedia,
  • Whose profiles you search and look at,
  • Whose statuses you check,
  • who you call on the app, when and for how long

All of this is sent as one long, continuous stream of data. The plan is almost certainly to match this with similar data collected by the Facebook and Instagram apps, and the thousands of other apps that use the Facebook ‘SDK’ for ads/tracking, to build a detailed picture of you.

So. Now that you know this, should you move off Whatsapp to Signal, as Elon Musk suggested on Twitter?

In general, no. You shouldn’t move off Whatsapp and move to Signal.

Is this you?

  • You have a Facebook account
  • You stay logged into it on one tab while you browse other sites on the web
  • You run the Facebook app on your phone
  • You have an Instagram account
  • You’ve given either or both FB and Instagram access to your contacts when they asked you at signup
  • You’ve used Log In With Facebook to sign into other apps
  • You hadn’t opted out of sharing Whatsapp data with Facebook when asked a few earlier

If you’ve answered Yes or even I’m not sure to some of these questions,, the Whatsapp policy change really doesn’t make much difference. You’re already sharing data – lots of it – with the Facebook family. Deleting WhatsApp is plugging a few squares in a sieve.

I’m not judging you. Our relationship with technology, especially social media, is highly asymmetric. It isn’t practical for you and me to understand the average privacy policy fully, leave alone that the onus of tracking frequent changes to it is on us. Repeat for each app that we use, and the tracking code from different other companies that that app uses.

Even if you’ve wisened up, even if you’re now uncomfortable with the amount of data the Facebook family of apps collects about you, chances are your friends, family, professional groups don’t care as much – they’ll still happily use them, and they’ll expect you to ‘be’ on these apps too.

Quitting Whatsapp is most effective when you quit the rest of Facebook too. It’ll take time. It’ll take some convincing, it’ll take some re-evaluation of relationships. But you can make it work.

It’s taken even Facebook a few years to hook you enough to get the sheer amount of data it has on you. Give yourself time to rid yourself of it too.

Update: A friend asked me if Facebook was able to collect any less data if one used Instagram in a browser as opposed to the app:

“I signed up [on Instagram] using an email address I created specifically for IG, but it doesn’t take Zuck to figure out that the overlap between the people I talk to on Whatsapp and those that this IG account interacts with means that we’re the same person.”

“Your interaction on Instagram the service reveals more about you than the specific devices you use it on. Sure, the IG app can tell your location more accurately than IG in a browser window can, because the former uses GPS and the latter looks up your IP in a database. But IG in the browser still knows when you log in and for how long, whose profiles you lurk on, what your friend network is and suchlike.”

“When you upload a photo, IG can tell a lot from the photo’s EXIF data: the precise model of the camera you used, phone or otherwise, where you were when you took it, when you took it, among other things. IG can run facial recognition algorithms on them to draw an even more detailed picture of your network. But both of these have little to do with whether you use the app or the browser.”

“If someone spots you at a cafe, you aren’t better hidden if you pulled up to the cafe in an uber as opposed to drove there. The fact remains that you were there and someone saw you. (I am rather bad at analogies but I think this one might actually work)”

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Markus Spiske/Unsplash)

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Privacy and Anonymity Wellness when Always-On

Privacy and agency

From the abstract of a paper from eight years ago:

Privacy shelters dynamic, emergent subjectivity from the efforts of commercial and government actors to render individuals and communities fixed, transparent, and predictable. It protects the situated practices of boundary management through which self-definition and the capacity for self-reflection develop… [a] society that values innovation ignores privacy at its peril, for privacy also shelters the processes of play and experimentation from which innovation emerges.

– What Privacy Is For, Harvard Law Review

The need for agency over one’s privacy is something we examine on a regular basis on this site. What about privacy from the state? This is less clear. For instance, avoiding being surveilled by pervasive security cameras in a city is a lot more difficult than being surveilled on the Internet. Covering one’s movements in the real world from a state that has access to your phone’s cell tower connections is less practical than covering one’s movements on the Internet from one’s ISP.

One of the books I read this year was Why Nations Fail. The authors describe how governments across the world and across time evolve either inclusive or extractive political – and economic – institutions, and that these are what determine whether a nation’s development is sustainable. States have a predilection to extractive institutions because the process of making them inclusive leads to what the authors call creative destruction – certainly not an original term – in which established powers lose influence at the expense of others. Surveillance, especially in this age of digital information flows, is uniquely extractive and uniquely consolidates powers in the hands of the entities doing the surveilling. Hence the extreme reaction to, say, the revelations by Snowden.

I bring this up to make the point that it is unrealistic in the short to intermediate term to expect any voluntary curtailment of surveillance by governments – neither the country nor the form of government matters. Governments inexorably find themselves controlling the “processes of play and experimentation from which innovation emerges” that the paper abstract refers to, and thereby controlling privacy. Similarly, they are incentivized not to roll back data collection by internet companies, but to regulate them in a way that gives the government access to collected data, usually ostensibly justified under national security or its synonyms.

I have no position personally on how much privacy is “good” – the implied absoluteness betrays its naivete. I do hold strongly that you should know and have control over how much privacy you give up. This knowledge is important because of what the paper says; the only safe way to explore boundaries internal and external to you is privately. This knowledge is necessary because privacy typically slips away slowly and, as we have reasoned above, is hard to win back.

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Audience as Capital Data Custody Discovery and Curation Making Money Online The Dark Forest of the Internet Wellness when Always-On Writing

For content platforms, revenue and moderation are inextricably interlinked

The newsletter platform Substack, on its revenue model:

A lot of people suppose that we started Substack to be the next big thing in journalism. But what we’re actually trying to do is subvert the power of the attention economy.

When engagement is the holy metric, trustworthiness doesn’t matter. What matters more than anything else is whether or not the user is stirred. The content and behaviors that keep people coming back – the rage-clicks, the hate-reads, the pile-ons, the conspiracy theories – help sustain giant businesses. When we started Substack to build an alternative to this status quo, we realized that a tweak to an algorithm or a new regulation wouldn’t change things for the better. The only option was to change the entire business model.

Substack’s key metric is not engagement. Our key metric is writer revenue. We make money only when Substack writers make money, by taking a 10% cut of the revenue they make from subscriptions. With subscriptions, writers must seek and reward the ongoing trust of readers.

Substack does two things differently from typical social platforms: one, by encouraging paid publications, readers pay to receive their information fix, which naturally caps the number of newsletters a person receives and by extensions the attention they capture. Two, it has aligned its revenues with these paid publications. These two by themselves are a significant departure from the norm, for the better.

There is always the likelihood, perhaps the inevitability that deliberately divisive, disingenuous polemical publications will publish on Substack for free, making money off sponsorships instead of reader payments, and they may amass large followings too. And Substack too has declared that they will be light with censorship:

we commit to keeping Substack wide open as a platform, accepting of views from across the political spectrum. We will resist public pressure to suppress voices that loud objectors deem unacceptable.

This will be something that Substack will have to reckon with, and perhaps soon. Yes, apublication with a generous enough sponsor – whether public or not – and a large enough audience is better off simply hosting their own newsletter infrastructure, which is not complicated. But they may also simply continue on Substack. What is the company to do then?

The possible answers are for another time. In any case, Substack’s approach to revenue and moderation, its recognition that they are interlinked, and its willingness to publicly articulate it, is commendable.

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Personal Finance Products and Design Wellness when Always-On

Herd mentality

I read recently about the USA investing app Robinhood being charged with “gamifying” investing and not putting in place “proper controls to safeguard inexperienced investors.” I was curious about what gamification techniques the service actually uses. Here’s what I found:

“Robinhood’s Role in the ‘Gamification’ of Investing: QuickTake”, Bloomberg, Dec 2020

Investors are congratulated for their first trade with a confetti animation. They’re offered a (tiny) chance of snagging a share of a high-price glamour stock such as Apple Inc. if they get a friend to sign up. They can browse the 100 most-held stocks among fellow users for inspiration. An entertainment ecosystem has risen up alongside Robinhood; TikTok videos under #robinhoodstocks have millions of views.

“Robinhood’s Addictive App Made Trading a Pandemic Pastime”, Bloomberg, Oct 2020

Robinhood’s app emphasizes social interaction by using the possibility of getting a free share of stock in exchange for inviting friends to sign up. You have a tiny chance of snagging a high-price glamour stock such as Apple Inc., Robinhood says, if your friend signs up and links a bank account. If you find your well of investment ideas running dry—or perhaps don’t know where to start—you can browse the 100 most-held stocks among fellow Robinhood users for inspiration.]

Robinhood and the Gamification of the Stock Market, McGill Business Review, Jul 2020

Through a Candy Crush-esque UX design with additions like confetti showers to celebrate transactions, the app gamifies the stock market, sending millions of bored-in-the-house millennials into a trading frenzy through a seemingly playful environment with dangerously real consequences.

Robinhood Has Gamified Online Trading Into an Addiction, Scott Galloway, Jun 2020

Confetti falls to celebrate transactions.
Colorful Candy Crush interface.
Users can tap up to 1,000x per day to improve their position on the waitlist for Robinhood’s cash management feature (essentially a high-yield checking account on the app).

Designed to distract: Stock app Robinhood nudges users to take risks, NBC News, Sep 2019

When smartphone owners pull up Robinhood’s investment app, they’re greeted with a variety of dazzling touches: bursts of confetti to celebrate transactions, the price of bitcoin in neon pink and a list of popular stocks to trade.

A critique of Robinhood’s gamified interface, Georgetown Collegiate Investors, Aug 2020

For starters, the flashing green and red lights, as well as the confetti, often lead users to act on their emotions instead of keeping a calm and level head. The green lights and confetti serve as subtle but prevalent psychological rewards for users. Likewise, the red numbers on the screen invoke feelings of anxiety and fear that may drive users to make irrational choices.

It’s surprising how over the course of a whole year and more, all the articles criticising Robinhood about its gamified interface don’t go beyond the confetti and a detail-less reference to Candy Crush-like design.

Further, nearly every post I’ve read on this topic follows a familiar narrative: that Robinhood encourages poor investing decisions because it doesn’t charge commissions, that it turns investing into a game, that it is disingenuous about how it makes money (payment for order flow to high-speed trading firms), that a customer once took his life after misinterpreting a large negative balance, quotes from ‘industry experts’ about Robinhood being the vanguard of a disturbing trend towards casual DIY investing. It’s astonishing how similar these articles are.

Ironically, the only post with any more detail and actual screenshots is this one, which praises Robinhood interface:

Robinhood is gamified from the start. They reward users that have just signed up with one free share of a stock, chosen by chance. The app doesn’t simply present the free stock to the user from the beginning. The process is similar to something you’d see at a casino. Users are presented with three blank cards, and are prompted to choose one. When chosen, the card flips and the free stock is revealed, with confetti and all…
The black background and bright primary accent colors are reminiscent of a Pacman game. Red is used when a stock has moved down, and green when a stock is up, creating a sense that the user is winning or losing

Obviously, this isn’t about what I think of Robinhood the service. It’s that the onus of understanding an issue in depth seems to be on the reader. And it doesn’t seem to be practical – the only reason I read over a dozen articles on the specific topic of Robinhood’s gamification of stock investing was because that was what I was curious about. The average reader’s just going to read one of these and form an opinion, unaware that all the other coverage of this issue is identical and narrow.

Ultimately this means that we, as individuals, need to choose carefully what topics we are interested in, since, as we’ve seen, the quality of online coverage leaves the duty of diligence to us. And finally, curators will almost certainly become even more important, moving beyond their role as tastemakers and influencers to shapers of world-views.

[Addition 5 Jan 2021] The clearest description of Robinhood’s techniques to drive impulse-based purchases is from a Twitter thread. If you are at all curious about what Robinhood’s gamification means, read through this:

https://twitter.com/petershk/status/1344286419380916228?s=20

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Austin Distel/Unsplash)

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Life Design Wellness when Always-On

The confidence of no

I’m becoming more conscious about my attention on a day-to-day basis. Several times during the day I myself evaluating whether what I am engaged in at that moment is worth my attention.

It’s often most relevant to when I find myself skimming through quote-unquote content, or watching TV on the iPad, but also when I’m having phone or chat conversations at or outside of work: have we reached diminishing returns on this conversation? Is this important enough to hold my attention? There’s an awareness of the temptation of multi-tasking.

Contrastingly, when I find myself thinking through or dwelling on an idea, I ask whether I should continue to indulge it or make a note and get on with my day.

Today I came across this article titled “How to find focus“. The writer says that they have found focus by saying “no to obligations or opportunities that I would have easily accepted before”, but it’s what follows that’s more interesting:

The most significant change in my thinking has been that I have a lot of conviction now that the few things I’m spending my time on – university, writing, side projects – are right for me.

Bingo. It’s hard to answer the questions above if you don’t have some level of confidence in what’s important to you and what isn’t. In the absence of conviction, you’ll yo-yo between giving in to stimulus temptation – of which there’s no shortage in our information-suffused lives – or forcing yourself to focus on stuff that someone else wants you to: a friend, your manager.

But if you have a good enough awareness of what is worth your attention, then combined with awareness, you’ll have a much easier time deciding what to say yes or no to – that calendar invite, that new personal project, that new Twitter subscription or Netflix recommendation, that conversation segue.

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Life Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Screening relationships

via Shweta.

Maintaining an extended simulacrum of reality is hard when mediated through today’s state of the art video-conferencing technology:

Even some people whose values still align with those of their friends have found their relationships suffering during the pandemic.

The reason for their drift is not rooted in ideological differences, but rather distance.

While video calls over Zoom or Facetime have helped, many have said that after spending most of the year staring at a screen, they’ve had enough.

– The pandemic has destroyed friendships and divided families

Amidst the talk of work forever being altered by the pandemic and of the dawn of the remote work age, it’s worth acknowledging that the relationships built in the real world are going to be tough to maintain through screens and phone calls. That the relationships formed in the remote world are likely to be different – not necessarily better or worse, but different – from those in the real world.

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Life Design Wellness when Always-On

Signalling quantity

… how do I show that “in the office” when I’m far away, and two time zones behind the vast majority of my team? By dropping links to articles (to show that I’m reading); by commenting on other people’s links (to show that I’m reading Slack); by participating in conversations (to show that I’m engaged). Evidencing that I’m doing work instead of, well, doing work.

You can LARP [Live Action Role Play] your job in person (holding lots of meetings, staying late and getting there early as a show of ‘presentism’) and digitally (sending lots of emails, spending a lot of time on Slack, or whatever group chat platform your organization uses).

– LARPing your job

But at the same time, with the new flexibility with people relocating wherever they’ve wanted to, working on “knowledge work”

Sometimes I’m far more productive if I’m on a hike, without my phone or Slack, but just hanging out in my own mind; sometimes I’m more productive after goofing off on Twitter. When you’re working remotely, how do you “show” that you’re reading? That you’re thinking?

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Joshua Ness/Unsplash)

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Life Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Sitting

In an article on attention, this bit about physical strength:

“The damage done by sitting 8+ hours a day is underrated. You need a way to offset this damage, especially if you plan to work in this field for decades.”

– Attention Is My Most Valuable Asset for Productivity as a Software Developer

There are enough studies about the ills of sitting for extended periods of time that are a quick search away. We have also seen earlier this year how I use the Fitbit wearable device’s hourly reminder to get 250 steps in as a guard against sitting for too long.

But in terms of exercise, I have seen the most payoff from simply strengthening my core. A strong core means better posture, which means less slouching, which means less strain on your back. It means less tension on your shoulders as you use your keyboard and trackpad. And because you’re sitting straighter, it means you breathe better – coming full circle to attention. Strengthening a single area has significantly improved how tired and unfocused I feel by the time I wind up work.

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Anthony Riera/Unsplash)