Category: Privacy and Anonymity

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Nationalism, capitalism and the Indian App Store

A Swadeshi App Store. It may well happen.

It began with the temporary removal of the Paytm app from Google’s Android Play Store. And snowballed with Google’s announcement that it would enforce its existing policy of a 30% commission on the in-app sale of all digital goods (with some exceptions). We discussed this a couple of weeks ago.

Soon after, the founders of some of India’s best-known tech companies put out statements not just condemning Google’s policy but also its intent, calling it a new Lagaan, after the tax that the British occupation of the 19th and 20th centuries levied on Indian peasants.

Vivek Wadhwa, a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program, lauded the banding of Indian entrepreneurs and likened Silicon Valley giants’ hold on India to the rising days of East India Company, which pillaged India. “Modern day tech companies pose a similar risk,” he told TechCrunch.

And they called for a local, all-Indian app store, piggybacking on the new term Atmanirbhar, one that the current government has coined to promote local manufacturing and services.

“This is the problem of India’s app ecosystem. So many founders have reached out to us… if we believe this country can build digital business, we must know that it is at somebody else’s hand to bless that business and not this country’s rules and regulations.”

Inevitably, as is the case in India, at least some heads turned to the government for help:

Even though Google said it will allow developers to sell their services through other app stores, or websites, the industry doesn’t see this as an option either. Naidu suggested that unless the government chooses to intervene, there may be no other solution. According to tech policy analyst Prasanto K. Roy, the government’s Mobile Seva Appstore has over a thousand apps and 85 million downloads, yet it is unknown among Indian users.

To which the government, of course, responded with a why nothttps://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/centre-open-to-launching-an-indian-app-store/articleshow/78438620.cms:

Weighing in on the issue, union minister for electronics and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad said in a post on Twitter that he is happy to receive notable suggestions from Indian app developers on how to encourage the ecosystem. “Encouraging Indian app developers is vital to create an #AatmanirbharBharat app ecosystem,” he tweeted on Thursday.

The Indian government “is not averse to the idea” of launching its own app store, officials said. The existing digital store for government apps, developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), hosts a slew of applications such as e-governance app Umang, health app Aarogya Setu and storage app DigiLocker.

Paytm has since created and advertised heavily what it calls a mini-app-store, but is in reality a catalog of shortcuts to 3rd party web apps. Google has postponed the implementation of its policy to 2022.

In this tale, everyone’s actions and responses have been predictable. Google’s been tone-deaf and has immediately switched to appeasement. Tech company founders have been cynically opportunistic. They have been happy with Google’s (and Apple’s) stores for distribution, even advertising heavily on them, until the moment it worked against them and they switched immediately to victim mode, some even raising the spectre of neocolonialism. Though they’re among the most visible figures of India’s capitalists, they’ve quickly appealed to the government for a solution favourable to them, further pushing the nationalist angle. And of course the Indian government, regardless of its political learnings, is happy to intervene and get into the business of running business.

(Featured image photo credit: Mika Baumeister/Unsplash)

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Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity The Dark Forest of the Internet Wellness when Always-On

Different Time Bubbles

Recently I’d been dealing with some unexpected developments that required me to take a break from a few communities I was part of. When I returned I asked one community member what I’d missed. She remarked that everything I’d missed was “all captured in a different time bubble” that I could catch up on “at some point or the other”.

Beautiful.

But it’s also how I’ve thought of the many Alternate Realities we all inhabit online now. I described how I use Twitter Lists to privately follow different interests – space and astronomy, the Indian Forest Service, other wildlife, crypto, internet infrastructure, the Twitter handles of a community of startup founders I’m part of, and many others. I explicitly think of these as parallel universes running on their own time, universes I can teleport into and out of by simply toggling between list views. Ditto with Reddit’s many subreddits, Discords & Telegram groups.

Some timelines are slow, such as the small writing group I’m part of. You can return to it after a month and pretty easily connect what’s happening now with last time. Others are dizzyingly fast, like river rapids of content. A South East Asia tech community, and Crypto Twitter are like this – you can at best take in the latest snapshot, abandoning the rest for all time. Still other groups aren’t even timelines, like Wildlife Twitter. There’s no narrative. What you see before you at any point is also like what you’ve missed. They are the most peaceful and often the most rewarding to dip into.

I’m hugely excited by how inhabiting multiple personal universes, forming many lightweight and deep connections is now the norm, something we explored in our Alternate Reality series. But viewed another way, this extreme fragmentation is also cause for loneliness – it’s even harder for anyone to know the full you.

(Featured image photo credits: Christian Palmer/Unsplash)

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Privacy and Anonymity

Trackers that link to other trackers

From a post on The Markup, “a nonprofit newsroom that investigates how powerful institutions are using technology to change our society”. The Markup worked with a site to evaluate its trackers. Their discoveries were disappointing but not surprising:

She said she only allowed three trackers on spartapride.org: cookies from Twitter and Facebook that accompany their “like” buttons on the site, and one from Disqus, a commenting platform she got through a prepackaged website theme she bought off the internet for $59 to build the site.

But when The Markup scanned spartapride.org using our new instant privacy inspector, Blacklight, we found 21 different ad-tech companies tracked visitors to the site, sending possible signals about people’s gender identities to advertisers—without the users’ knowledge or consent.

Among them were the marketing and advertising arms of Google, Amazon, and Oracle’s BlueKai consumer data division, which reported a massive data exposure this summer, leaving billions of records—including personally identifiable information—accessible to the open internet without a password. Oracle did not respond to questions about whether data gathered from spartapride.org’s users was included in the exposure.

The trackers loaded because Disqus sells ads on the free version of its commenting portal, and that ad space comes with third-party tracking. Disqus discloses those trackers on its own website, but the company wouldn’t comment about tracking SPART*A’s users.

The information asymmetry is so vast between people who set up websites, and those that provide those sites and tools for those sites that there can be no informed consent.

No-code is another major trend will very likely lead to privacy issues. With the ecosystem of easy-to-use, plug-and-play services that is organically emerging and expanding fast, people with no or little programming experience can create fairly complex experiences online – landing pages, commerce stores, information processing, even with AI capabilities. But because some of the most innovative services are from small companies who’re focused on execution, either they will take short-sighted data collection decisions, or will themselves build on top of infra that has poor data and tracking policies.

As we saw on our post on The New Middle (Part 1, Part 2), there will be an opportunity for a whole set of privacy-focused tools. Over the last week, Cloudflare announced a privacy-focused website analytics tool to rival Google Analytics. Over time, there will be enough general awareness that people will choose these over others that don’t make privacy and reasonable choice a priority. Through this site and its small set of readers, I hope to push a little to hasten this.

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Privacy and Anonymity

Running pi-hole on Google Cloud for $0

I’ve spoken a number of times about pi-hole, the open-source ad-blocking software that I run on a Raspberry Pi machine at home. The Pi computer is so small it’s physically attached to my router with a piece of twine; the whole setup is tucked away out of sight.

I wasn’t kidding. This is a smaller than palm-sized. And invisible behind a couch.

Since all DNS queries from my router go to the Pi, all devices that connect to the house wifi are protected from ads and trackers by pi-hole – phones, tablets, laptops, my other Pi machine.

The big limitation is that this protection only applies as long as I am home and connected to wifi. If my ISP’s facing problems and I switch to 4G, or I’m simply out of the house and connected to another wifi, I’m out of luck. I have a backup [1], but it’s not as good as the Pi. I can’t have the Pi accessible from outside of the home network, even behind a firewall, because my ISP is a PPPOE connection behind a NAT. Setting up dynamic DNS for this has been impossible for me.

Now. I had come across this guide on setting up a pi-hole on Google Cloud such that the usage would fall under the Google Cloud free tier, making it essentially free. I loved the idea. My concern was that the pi-hole instance would be open to the Internet. I’d have to set up my own firewall and VPN, and it always slipped down my todo list.

Recently I learnt that the author had updated the guide, in responses to concerns just like mine, with a script that installed the Wireguard VPN and pi-hole together. It also included instructions (rather simple) on how to set up firewall rules in the Google cloud virtual machine instance. It took me well under an hour to read through and set things up end to end: my Google Cloud account, setting up and configuring my VM, installing pi-hole and Wireguard on it, setting those up, and setting up my iPhone and iPad as Wireguard clients.

I now have a globally accessible but secure personal Pi-hole whose web interface I can access via a private address as long as I’m connected to the VPN. And because I’m on the VPN, my devices’ DNS queries are encrypted – all of these independent of the network I am on. It has nothing to do with my home wifi, or the pi-hole on my Raspberry Pi anymore.

This still hasn’t sunk in as I write this a couple of hours after I set it up. I’m looking at this new pi-hole’s web admin, and the VM’s terminal over SSH, and it’s weird that now, years after I began using the original pi-hole installation on my local network, I’ve just upgraded it to work anywhere in the world.

[1] I use the DNS sink Adblock on my iPhone and iPad, which are the two main devices I use.

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300

7th October marks three hundred days since I began writing daily on this website.

While I have written on and off on the site from late 2002, this is the longest publishing streak the site has had. The streak began in December 2019 as something I wanted to do for myself at a time I felt low. It has now become a habit. If I remember correctly, Seth Godin had said on Tim Ferriss’ podcast that at some point after he started writing regularly on his blog, his thinking changed from ‘should I write tomorrow?’ to ‘what should I write about tomorrow?’.

I’ve gotten somewhat comfortable with drafting, writing and scheduling posts for the week ahead. Now I plan to build a healthy information consumption habit. My reading is too scattered, both in subject and in time. It doesn’t leave me with enough time to absorb things and think them through. I plan to trim my reading sources and structure my week so there are distinct chunks for reading, thinking and writing.

Community
This site has always explored questions about how you and I deal with technology in our lives. Those questions are so much more important in 2020 than they were eighteen years ago. My framework to understand this are the Five Megatrends and Five Big Questions.

Ultimately I’d love for the readers of this site to be a community that discusses and helps each other navigate opportunities that tech brings to our lives, and the challenges we face to our mental and physical health and to our relationships: by being conscious that tech serves us instead of us serving tech, or serving those that control tech. About Living Well in the Always-On.

Interested in being an early community member? Get in touch: Email or Twitter.

(Featured image photo credit: Jeff Golenski)

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On legal cover for independent journalists, censorship and self-hosting

I just discovered this – “legal support for Substack writers”

Important writing holds the powerful to account – and quite often, that’s an arrangement that the powerful would rather not support. In some cases, antagonists use threats of legal action in an attempt to stop the work that makes them uncomfortable. Recently, for instance, a high-powered lawyer representing a politician threatened a Substack writer for his coverage of the lawmaker’s questionable business ties. The threats disappeared when the writer, backed by our support program’s lawyers, stood his ground. At Substack, we want to make it crystal clear that anyone who uses such intimidation tactics will also have to reckon with us. We will use our financial and legal resources to vigorously oppose any bad-faith efforts to dissuade Substack writers from doing their work. 

Substack will make the ultimate choice on who is accepted into the [Defender] program and which cases to support. Once a case has been taken on by the program’s lawyers, Substack, at our discretion, will cover fees up to $1 million (in exceptional cases, we may cover even more). 

This is a bold, brave move by the company, and I would definitely rather this program exist than not. There are several major journalists (one, two, three are just highlights) moving to Substack, and they will need this sort of institutional cover to form 21st Century Media.

However, it puts Substack in the position of determining what opinions and positions should be defended and what not. Specifically, it puts Substack’s founders in that position. While the scale is very different today, the situation is little different from the Facebook leader being ultimately in the position of what is censored and what is promoted on the service and what isn’t.

In fact in Facebook’s case, we are taking about censorship of content. The Substack legal support program is not just about censorship but about the personal, potentially physical freedom of the writer – that is what writers are choosing to outsource, for lack of an alternative.

End-note: independent of legal protection, journalists should also invest time and effort in figuring out how to be uncensorable. We examined it a few months ago: Part 1, Part 2. If you publish on your own site and encourage your readers to read you over the open web, or subscribe to your writing via RSS, and pay you in cryptocurrency, you become a lot more difficult to shut down. You can of course continue to publish that content over Substack, and share it on Twitter and engage wit your followers there. Ultimately the truly censorship-resistance platform is the one you host.

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Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity Products and Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Work, tools and agency

From the writer Anne Helen Petersen, on “How Work Became An Inescapable Hellhole”:

 Like email, Slack allowed work to spread into the crevices of life where until that point it couldn’t fit. In a more efficient, instantaneous manner than email, it brings the entire office into your phone, which is to say, into your bed, when you land on the plane, when you walk down the street, as you stand in line at the grocery store, or as you wait, half naked, on the exam table for your doctor.

 It didn’t just accelerate communication; it standardized a new, far more addictive form of communication, with a casualness that cloaked its destructiveness. When you “shoot off a few emails” on a Sunday afternoon, for example, you might convince yourself you’re just getting on top of things for the week ahead—which might feeltrue. But what you’re really doing is giving work access to be everywhere you are. 

… the technology writer John Herrman… predicted the ways in which Slack would screw with our conception of work: “Slack is where people make jokes and register their presence; it is where stories and editing and administrating are discussed as much for self-justification as for the completion of actual goals. Working in an active Slack … is a productivity nightmare, especially if you don’t hate your coworkers. Anyone who suggests otherwise is either rationalizing or delusional.”

While I fully agree with tools like Slack breaking down of boundaries between your work sphere and your other spheres, the state of mind that the writer describes is one of a poor pre-existing relationship with work.

It’s important to recognise that the normalisation of remote work and the ubiquity of work tools that are model led on addictive hyper-communicative social media have made this relationship worse, not caused it. Unless you are a bottom-of-the-rung worker drone with no flexibility and no voice, you have the ability, however little, to push back against a 24×7 work culture, a culture that causes enough anxiety that people need to show off their input instead of their output. As the writer herself says,

Many of us still navigate the workplace as if getting paid to produce knowledge means we’re getting away with something, and have to do everything possible to make sure no one realizes they’ve made a massive mistake. No wonder we spend so much time trying to communicate how hard we work.

If it weren’t for these tools, distributed work would have been much more difficult – in many cases impossible. For those companies that have been distributed for a while, it’s given employees the opportunity to optimise their location and time for their other interests and constraints. It’s lowered the overhead of building and scaling an organisation of people. It’s reduced the friction of communication – just five years ago your only option as a smallish company was email, with long chains, lost contexts and renamed file attachments as some form of version control. Today you’re split for choice with Slack, Google Docs, Trello, Notion, Airtable, Zapier and thousands more tools, free and paid.

But no matter how good they get, they are tools meant to serve us. Never the other way around. Regardless of whether you’re a founder or CEO, part of the leadership, or in some position of authority in the company. Be aware of your relationship to work. Make it easier for the ones whose work time your control to immerse themselves in their other sphere. Push back when people above you intrude into your non-work spheres. It’s not always going to result in you getting fired.

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The Social Dilemma and Software as Tools

I am watching the recent Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. Obviously, it discussed many of the issues I write about regularly on this site. So I have a few opinions about it that I will think about and post here later. For now, this bit from Tristan Harris stood out:

… we’ve moved away from having a tools-based technology environment to an addiction and manipulation-based environment. That’s what’s changed. Social media isn’t a tool that’s just waiting to be used. It has its own goals. And it has its own means of pursuing them by using your psychology against you.

He’s articulated what have felt for a long time. Software used to be tools. Some were free and open-source, others were paid. Either way, business was separate from product, in the same way that business and editorial are separate in a well-run news organisation. Now some of the companies that we depend on every day no longer make money by customer paying for their software, they make money from other software paying for their customers.

You can see this with open source software. When you use the email client Thunderbird with an email account from your domain name provider, you’re using it as a tool. The relationship is simple and straightforward. You owe Thunderbird nothing; Thunderbird takes nothing from you. When you use Gmail.com with your Gmail email address, it’s a lot less simple. If you were old enough to use IRC, it was simply a tool you used to chat with friends and strangers online. Whatsapp on the other hand is hardly a tool. The relationship is much more unequal, in Whatsapp’s and Facebook’s favour.

While it may be already too late to live your existing life and maintain your existing relationships without using software from companies like Google and Facebook, you can learn from documentaries like this and make much more deliberate choices about these same tools – specifically, are you getting what you want from them, or are you doing what they want you to do?

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Wishlist: iOS 15 and privacy

Ars Technica has a succinct overview of the many privacy-oriented features in the recently-released iOS 14.

Regardless of whether you are actively concerned about privacy or are in the ‘but I like my ads’ camp, it’s worth reading about the actions of a company that has a very clear view on this issue.

As with iOS 13 in 2019, this year’s release also has prominent notices in its built-in apps about Apple’s stance on privacy.

There have been rumours about Apple launching its own search engine in the next iOS. The evidence seems to be how iOS 14 already retrieves information that is displayed in Spotlight searches – that it seems to be using Apple’s own crawlers.

While this would be welcome, I’d like Apple to

  1. Roll its own privacy-centric encrypted DNS service built into the next iOS.
  2. Allow device-wide traffic routing via the Tor network.Taking this even further, I’d like it to
  3. Offer a full-fledged VPN as part of its Apple One subscription bundle

Combined with iOS’ own privacy features, this’d give those that wanted and cared about privacy to get it, even at a price.

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Alternate realities – Part 3

(Part 2)

8/ And its why real-world consequences of online behaviour, such as the people jailed for merely like-ing a Facebook post critical of politicians, is distressing. As George on Seinfeld cried, World Are Colliding.

9/ All of this works both ways. Communities of fringe loonies will use the same tools to block you from injecting reason into their online dialogue. And when reporting online harassment results in a real-world arrest we are gladdened.

This is a plot point in several movies or books that involve virtual worlds. They are never fully independent of the physical world, and their interaction with the physical isn’t always sanguine. It’s often the case in the real real world. People have been jailed for writing their mind, for sharing videos in jest, even simply liking Facebook posts – usually pricking the fragile ego of a person in power. Mere anonymity is often not enough. Even when you’re all wearing masks, your virtual town square can be invaded by the real-world Basij.

However benevolent and forward-looking the authorities online may be, they’ll clash with – and usually lose against – authorities in the real world. Just look at Twitter’s transparency report regarding data requests from governments. According to themselves, they complied with four out of every ten such requests. Facebook complied with 3 out of every 4 requests, and nearly 90% of requests from the US and the UK.

10/ In any case, this kaleidoscope theory accommodates more of what we are seeing happening than the more common polarisation theory. It posits that polarisation is a special case of the sharding of reality.

Most reporting frames the problem as one of polarisation – like a dumbbell, there is a concentration of people around two diametrically opposite viewpoints.

This is not new: most of the US’ 20th century relationship with the world outside through the lens of communism versus capitalism, never mind those that didn’t care, didn’t matter, were explicitly non-aligned, or had widely varying interpretations of each economic system. It has resulted in a with-us-or-against-us mindset. If you weren’t a committed communist, you were a capitalist pig. If you weren’t for the Vietnam war, you had to be against it – and therefore unpatrioric. Ditto with the 21st century Iraq occupation. Then it was Christianity versus Islam. Today the country’s much more insular, so it’s supposed to be Democrat versus Republican.

In India you’re either a secular, used as a pejorative term, or a mindless devotee of the Hindu right, never mind what secularism was supposed to mean or the many schools of Hinduism. The definitions of each now form narrow edges meant to cleave.

But online, while the war of polar opposites is fomented and waged, myriad cultures form, thrive and die, each with their own biases and rivalries. For the first time they can exist freely and openly without having to pick sides in someone else’s battle. This freedom is important – so far only the privileged have been able to declare themselves against ‘the world’. Now any group that feels marginalised in real life can do so.

11/ Either way, we’d entered this age of infinite realities sometime in the 2010s. The diminishing of the physical space this year marks an inflection point, when a critical mass of us begins defecting into our online realities and being shaped by their cultures.

The pandemic has cause the diminishing of our real world public spaces, making online ones all that much more important. New types of closed communities hog attention – Houseparty, Clubhouse – and several other similar apps – but the other inevitable shift will be to true public spaces. Today there is little other than Twitter.

It’s going to be fantastic to look back in ten years’ time at the movement of people’s social lives to such online worlds – all run by private entities. In a decade, 2020 is going to seem as quaint as the web of twenty five years go – Lycos, DMOZ, Photobucket, Kozmo – seems today.

End note: The other development we haven’t explored in this series is the increasing popularity of game-oriented virtual worlds like Animal Crossing and Minecraft. They fall somewhere between closed communities like groups & subreddits on the one hand and town squares like Twitter. World-building is more deliberate, more visual, more explicit. But they also provide the same sort of open endedness of Twitter and the creation of communities. In fact, as we have seen, of entire economies.

(end)

Featured image photo credit: William Álvarez/Unsplash