Category: Privacy and Anonymity

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Data Custody Privacy and Anonymity

More on the inherent temporariness of internet-connected devices

About a month ago, we saw how you never really own your internet-connected smart devices, how you’re essentially just renting them until it becomes inconvenient for the provider. This Wall Street Journal article I read has more examples of such devices and the consequences of them ceasing to work:

  • An automated pet feeder that stopped dispensing food even though its reservoir was topped up because the company was facing pandemic-related trouble.
  • A stationary bike, whose main selling point was live workout competitons with other owners, disabled all of its tech because it lost a legal dispute, leaving its bikes no different from traditional ‘dumb’ exercycles.
  • An in-vehicle diagnostic tool from 2016 that promised 5 years of 3G connectivity shut down along with the company itself, again because of pandemic-related business challenges.

These couple of lines towards the end of the article sum up the issue well

That’s the cost of the pace of technology today. The vinyl record has gone mostly unchanged for over 50 years, and my record player has never required a firmware update. All of our newer gadgets will likely be obsolete within three, four, or five years, depending on the abilities and willingness of the companies that make them. We pay for new gear, gumming up landfills with our retired, defunct cyber curios when we fail to recycle them properly.

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Data Custody Privacy and Anonymity The Next Computer

Renting storage while being storage-rich

Something I wrote a few days ago has stayed with me. In describing my re-adoption of the P2P file-syncing tool Resilio Sync, I had said

It seems strange to me that I’m paying to rent a few dozen GB on some company’s servers far away when I have already paid for hundreds of GB of high-performance storage on all my devices: my iPhone has 128GB, my iPad 256GB, my Macbook 250GB – all solid-state…

I also have two spinning-desk WD external hard drives: one 2TB another 1TB. Taken together that is a lot of storage. And yet I pay for 200GB for iCloud every month at INR 219 in India, which is roughly the USD 2.99 Apple charges in the US. The 2TB drive now costs INR 5700, which is just 26 months of my iCloud fees. Put another way, I could buy a new drive roughly every two years, even assuming prices don’t drop, for what I’m paying Apple to host my data.

My iCloud storage looks like this:

So there’s still a lot of free space, most of the used space is Photos, and the next biggest contributor is iCloud Drive followed by Backups.

Now I have always wanted to find a better way of managing my photos. In terms of data custody, Apple Photos stores all photos in its proprietary library database, so while my photos are on-disk they are not in open format. In addition, syncing with iCloud is near-hopeless – even leaving my external hard drive (where my Library resides) into my Macbook Pro overnight doesn’t complete the sync, and causes my external drive to heat up uncomfortably. To the point where it once shut down. So while this is not yet a solved problem, I now have one more incentive to solve photo management.

Back with I had an iPod Touch (2008), iPhone 4 (2011), iPhone 5 (2012), I used to diligently back up to disk with iTunes. Some time after, though, I probably gave in to iOS prompting and switched to iCloud backups. There’s more than enough free space on my Macbook Pro to back up my iPhone and iPad, and I can always move the backup file to an external hard drive. The Macbook Pro itself is backed up to an external Time Machine drive, so the backups are safe. Plus of course my iTunes collection is backed up as well. And, if I move them off iCloud, my photos too. At some point in the past I had set up rsync to one-way mirror my Time Machine disk to the other (larger) external drive, so I can have that extra layer of redundancy if I like (the drives are mostly unused).

Finally, iCloud Drive. On Mac OS, the sync service doesn’t really matter. Files are files, in a hierarchy of directories. It does matter on iOS though. But as I wrote in the previous post that I quoted from at the beginning, Resilio Sync is now a first-class file provider and not that different from using iCloud Drive. My devices are mostly on the same Wifi network for most of the day and in any case are linked to fast, cheap 4G internet.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to try and migrate my data off iCloud to I can get my storage needs back to the free 5GB tier. And as a happy side effect, be more responsible about data custody.

End note: I used iCloud storage because it is easy to be lazy. As I said, I used to be diligent about backing up my iPhone to my Mac via iTunes and my Mac to a drive via Time Machine. At some point I opted in to have both backed up to iCloud [1], because signing up to a paid plan was as easy as an in-app purchase, and it was reassuring seeing all your devices backed up:

I traded time and discipline, both of which I have, for money. For many people it is the right choice to make. For me, it’s not. And that needs to change.

[1] Well, the Mac through the Desktop and Documents sync with iCloud.

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Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity

Warfare has changed and we don’t know it yet

Written nearly two years ago, the blogger and writer Venkatesh Rao makes the case that the rules of engagement for warfare have changed from attacks on physical infrastructure to manipulation of information. That the nature of the attackers has changed, their objectives have changed – from destruction of assets to hijacking of opinion and emotions, and that governments in particular and society in general has not yet fully understood this:

Cyberwar, most people thought, would be fought over infrastructure — armies of state-sponsored hackers and the occasional international crime syndicate infiltrating networks and exfiltrating secrets, or taking over critical systems. That’s what governments prepared and hired for;

[But] In a warm information war, the human mind is the territory. If you aren’t a combatant, you are the territory. And once a combatant wins over a sufficient number of minds, they have the power to influence culture and society, policy and politics.

We know this is coming, and yet we’re doing very little to get ahead of it. No one is responsible for getting ahead of it.

He draws the analogy to the infamously ineffective Maginot Line built by the French in the 1920s, for future WW1-style attacks that left the Ardennes forest unprotected because it was thought to be impenetrable.

Academic leaders and technologists wonder if faster fact checking might solve the problem, and attempt to engage in good-faith debate about whether moderation is censorship… The combatants view this as a Hobbesian information war of all against all and a tactical arms race; the other side sees it as a peacetime civil governance problem

Powerfully,

What made democracies strong in the past — a strong commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas — makes them profoundly vulnerable in the era of democratized propaganda and rampant misinformation.

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Data Custody Privacy and Anonymity

Privacy, and a centuries-long stand

No doubt as part of the promotion around Apple’s WWDC, Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi gave an interview to Fast Company magazine about Apple’s relationship with Privacy. It contained this curious quote:

“But in the fullness of time, in the scope of hundreds of years from now, I think the place where I hope people can look back and talk about the places where Apple made a huge contribution to humanity is in helping people see the way of taking advantage of this great technology without the false tradeoff of giving up their privacy to do it.”

There exist companies that have multi-year business strategies. But there are very few companies that are willing to go against prevalent norms for extended periods of time on principle because they believe they will be vindicated years, decades – if you believe Federighi – centuries later.

Similarly, it is rare for a company to take a stand that is not opportunistic. Taking a stand against racism or for LGBT+ rights has become expedient today. Taking a stand against climate change will soon become expedient globally. But advocating for privacy, making major investments in an area that does not even have mainstream awareness, much less the momentum of public opinion, is admirable.

In terms of data custody for the 21st Century, Apple as of today is far ahead of Google and Microsoft, the other mainstream services ecosystems.

See: Apple’s main public-facing page for Privacy, which terms privacy a fundamental human right, and this page on how services tied to a user’s Apple ID keep data private.

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Data Custody Privacy and Anonymity Product Management

Open-washing and Category Pollution

This week I learnt of the concept of open-washing, labelling a project ‘open’ without any actual substantial openness. Mozilla responded to India’s IT ministry’s call for feedback about its Strategy for National Open Digital Ecosystems:

…the current white paper also leaves much to be elucidated on both the need and manner of implementation of such ecosystems before a national strategy can be finalized. In addition to a distinct lack of clarity on how governance mechanisms of NODEs would operate within existing and upcoming regulatory frameworks, the paper also creates the potential for ‘open-washing’ of projects. 

because

The white paper leaves the definition of “open” vague and at the complete discretion of individual implementers. Consequently, implementers are not required to adhere to any minimum baseline of “open”. This risks empowering private parties to develop closed ecosystems that are only open in appearance while being closed in practice.

The response recommends that the ministry define 

a clear minimum baseline for “openness,” guided by internationally accepted best practices and the Indian government’s own policies. Adherence to this minimum baseline should be made a mandatory criterion for a project to be considered a NODE.

Having read this, it sounded analogous to what I call Category Pollution. 

This occurs when a company or its product runs a high-visibility awareness or distribution campaign claiming to be part of a new field, but in fact does only the bare minimum to qualify. 

People who experience the product are inevitably let down, but it also sours them on even considering other players in this new fields whose product are in fact deserving of the new label. The company’s campaign has polluted the new term, the new category itself. 

I have most recently seen this in the ‘wealth tech’ or ‘digital wealth’ space in India. Products that do little more than offer mutual funds claim to provide Wealth services. People who sign up for what they think is a new way to invest in a range of assets are disappointed and are unlikely to trust others truly different products in the space.

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Data Custody Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity

Data Ownership vs Custody for the 21st Century – Part 2

(Part 1)

The question is which party/parties you trust. It’s a question of who the right custodian of your data is. Because that is the question we are dealing with here:

Our terms of engagement in the connected world make it impractical and even unnecessary for you to have sole ownership and control over the sharing of the data your actions and transactions generate. But you do have agency over who you transact with. Whether you allow Google to build your social graph as a result of your email, video chat and text messaging or whether you allow Facebook is up to you. Whether you subscribe to Apple Music or Spotify is up to you. Whether you buy groceries from Amazon’s Whole Foods or from Trader Joe’s is up to you. So is who you bank with. All companies will use your data to enrich themselves directly or indirectly. But whether they will do it at your cost is something you can evaluate.

The question is Custody for the 21st Century.

For example as of May 2020, you can argue that it makes business sense for Apple to protect your data with them because their revenue – whether from hardware or from services – does not depend on selling your data to advertisers who may build harmful, incomplete, incorrect profiles on you. It makes logical sense then for you to entrust your personal information, say that generated by your everyday usage of your phone, to Apple instead of other companies. Extend that to the other places where you share your data or get your media.

The decision is also simplified – in many cases it may not be who to trust, it may just be that I don’t care enough.

Viewed as a choice of custody, it becomes an issue that people in tech, maybe even the broader public, can be coaxed to consider the importace of.

Endnote: Framing the issue as a choice of custody also makes it easy for people to realise where they have little or no practical choice: One’s ISP. One’s choice of phone. One’s choice of online store.