Two honest Google employees: our products don't protect your privacy
I think this sums up the defining economic growth story of our generation. Business models are being built around the loss of privacy, the exchange of privacy for convenience and free services. Note that this is only a concern when there is an understanding by the user that their actions are private by default: Google searches, Facebook posts to friends only, and everything in Gmail and Google Docs. This isn’t a concern when the user assumes publicness: Tumblr posts, Tweets, etc. Monetization can’t come from an exploitation of privacy when there is no privacy.
“In one set of experiments, just published in a paper ominously entitled A little bird told me, so I didn’t believe it: Twitter, credibility, and issue perceptions, survey respondents were asked to rate the credibility of the same news story as delivered by a handful of sources, including the Twitter feed of the New York Times and the homepage of the same newspaper. Twitter came in dead last in terms of believability, behind even the same story linked from a completely random and anonymous blog. And this, mind you, was a tweet from the Times’s own Twitter account.”
This is pretty wild.
Interview with @ev, @jack and @biz in Dec 2006 when Twitter was operating inside of Obvious Corp
i smiled during the part when Jack says that he now has 90 followers.
Almost four years later and it sounds like the number of features they’ve removed (separate friends list vs those you’re following, nudges, 20 less characters) is similar to the number they’ve added (retweets, lists, search, now link wrapping). Such a focused product. It’s funny to me that they talk about how it’s not useful and that’s what makes it fun. Now it’s so useful I think they’ve forever changed information consumption.
“Most UGC sites try to spend time converting lurkers to contributors. Don’t. 90% of all users will never contribute anything to your company. They are there to ingest content.
I wish Twitter understood this better. If they did then they would run marketing campaigns to let users know that “it’s OK to turn up and just consume content. Twitter’s great for that, too. You don’t ever need to send a Tweet to love Twitter.” I never understood why they don’t communicate that more broadly because I think most people’s fear of Twitter is that they don’t want to tell the world what they ate for lunch.”
“My challenge to you, the average citizen, is simply to care. Believe me, I’d love to hang up my tweetin’ trousers sometimes. I’ve already posted 440 tweets about bp and I’m ready to write about other things, but we can’t let BP slide. We have to keep shining a light on them. Look at the way they’ve acted thus far! Do you think they’re going to change now that the well is capped? They are going to keep trying to play it down, shirk their responsibilities and in the meantime, they’re going to pursue bigger and potentially more dangerous drilling operations. We have to pay attention, we have to care or this could happen again.”
