Microsoft’s China crisis

Mar 102013
 
Skype_Home_Office_Page_Microsoft_china_problem

That the Chinese Public Security Bureau is blocking your messages – and may even be reading them – would make anyone pause before they used a service.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports Microsoft Skype is doing exactly this with its Chinese customers. Anything deemed inappropriate is censored and referred to servers belonging to TOM Online, the company that runs the Skype service on behalf on Microsoft in China.

The Bloomberg story goes onto detail how one Canadian researcher is reverse engineering the Chinese blacklists, giving us a wonderful insight into the petty and touchy minds of China’s censors and political leaders.

What raises eyebrows about this story is how nonchalant Microsoft is about this issue, in a wonderful piece of corporate speak the software giant answered Bloomberg’s question with the following bland statement;

“Skype’s mission is to break down barriers to communications and enable conversations worldwide,” the statement said. “Skype is committed to continued improvement of end user transparency wherever our software is used.”

Microsoft’s statement also said that “in China, the Skype software is made available through a joint venture with TOM Online. As majority partner in the joint venture, TOM has established procedures to meet its obligations under local laws.”

Microsoft have to fix this problem quickly, glibly saying the Chinese government eavesdropping on conversations is a matter for partners is not going to be accepted by most customers.

It would be a shame should Microsoft’s Skype investment fail – Skype is a very good fit for Microsoft, particularly when the technology is coupled with the Linc corporate messaging platform, so squandering goodwill over protecting users’ conversation seems counterproductive.

One of the great business issues of this decade is the battle to protect users’ privacy. Those who don’t do this, or don’t understand the imperatives of doing so, are going to lose the trust of the marketplace.

Twenty years ago, Microsoft could have risked this. Today they can’t as they struggle with a poor response to their Windows 8 operating system and their mobile phone product.

Losing the trust of their customers may be the final straw.

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Privacy is not someone else’s problem

Dec 202012
 
peeping-tom-and-the-problems-of-privacy

Early this year a storm broke out about privacy in the United States when a computer rental company was caught spying on its customers.

Technology website Ars Technica has an excellent story describing what the company was doing and the software they were using.

What the story of PC Rental agent shows is that even small businesses have the tools to run serious surveillance on their customers and some will do so simply because they can.

The days when privacy could be dismissed as the concern for a few sensitive celebrities, sports people and politicians with something to hide are over – privacy is now your problem.

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Guarding your words

Oct 012012
 
phone-recording-conversations

US presidential candidate Mitt Romney and Australian radio commentator Alan Jones have in one thing in common – not understanding that almost every person they know is carrying a listening device.

The smartphone is a powerful tool and one of its great features is how it makes a great dictation device, you can use the built in recording applications to jot down ideas or make a record of important conversations.

Political events are a great opportunity to record the candidates’ or speakers’ talks and this is what has caught both Jones and Romney.

The 47% dependent on welfare slur has probably sunk Romney’s presidential campaign. At the very least it’s exposed the contradictions at the heart of the Republican agenda as they try to demonise those receiving government entitlements while trying to win the votes of older Americans who rely on state subsidies to survive.

In many ways the US Republicans are facing the problem of electorates that believe their entitlements are sacred that all Western politicians will be grappling with over the next quarter century.

This contradiction isn’t something either the media or the Western political classes have the intellectual capacity to deal with, so there is little chance of a rational debate on the economic sustainability of the entitlement culture.

For Romney, this contradiction now threatens to sink his campaign.

The Jones problem is somewhat different, this nasty little man was speaking to the next generation of Australian Liberal Party apparatchiks and the controversy about his tasteless comments will probably improve his standing in the sewer in which he floats. In the wider community outside Jones’ increasingly narrow circle of influence his comments only confirm the low opinion decent people have of this man.

Jones though is not naive when using the media, the real naivety is among his guests. It’s been reported that before the event the audience were asked “if there were any journalists present”.

That question being asked betrays any claim that the organisers didn’t know Jones’ comments would be offensive. It also shows how the modern political fixer misunderstands the nature of today’s media. It’s likely a recording of proceedings would have leaked out through an enthusiastic supporter showing off.

What’s really instructive is how the kindergarten apparatchiks of the Young Liberals believe that shutting down recording devices will remove the risk of being held accountable. That mentality is pervasive through government and politics – shut down discussion and lie about what happened.

All of these politicians have to understand something Alan Jones has known all along; that a microphone should be treated like a loaded weapon and never assumed to be turned off and safe.

The days of what was said to the Poughkeepsie Chamber of Commerce or the Cootamundra Country Womens Association not being reported outside the local community are long gone. If you don’t want something broadcast nationally, then don’t say it.

On balance, this is good for democracy and leadership as it makes all politicians – and business leaders – far more accountable and transparent.

Accountability and transparency are anathema to the apparatchiks who run the political parties of the Western world. These people, despite their access to power, are ultimately going to be found wanting in a world where there is a recording device in almost every person’s pocket.

There are genuine privacy concerns with smartphones but for business and political leaders the days of “speaking with a forked tongue” are over. This is not a bad thing.

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Facebook’s final fail

Jul 032012
 
the global traffic map of social media service Facebook

We’ve come to expect Facebook storing and manipulating our personal data, but is changing our contacts’ email addresses the final straw for the social media service?

Last week Facebook started changing users’ default email addresses to their inbuilt @facebook accounts.

This was irritating for many users, but now it appears the social media service has gone too far with changing the address books of their users.

If you have connected your iPhone, Android or Windows smartphone address books to the Facebook App, there is a chance that your contacts’ email addresses are now set to send to the user’s Facebook address rather than their “normal” email account.

When you synch your phone with your PC or laptop these changes will also be made in your main address book.

Given most people don’t use their Facebook supplied email this means many people won’t see messages sent to that address. This is a serious problem

You can check if your address book has been changed by simply looking at your contacts’ email addresses.

If it has, let your contacts know their addresses may have been changed as they can change the settings on their accounts. Read Write Web has instructions on fixing the address book problem.

Facebook’s behaviour on this is seriously worrying, it’s bad enough they store all of our data but altering our personal information is for me a bridge too far.

Given most mobile phone users would rather have their wallet stolen than lose their handset, Facebook’s messing with phones address book is going to shake their confidence in the service far more than the myriad privacy issues.

If the IPO was Facebook’s peak, it could well be this poorly thought out tactic that marks the beginning of the company’s decline.

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Triangulating privacy out of our lives

Jun 062012
 
can triangulating social media data tell you about your customers

Lost among the noise of Facebook’s rumoured plans to launch a kids’ network, there’s quiet pressures developing as consumers start to realise the value of their data – the pressure to regulate social media.

In his Rethinking Privacy in an Era of Big Data, New York Times writer Quentin Hardy raises some of the issues about the data which is being collected about us.

One of the big areas is triangulation – building a picture of somebody based upon seemingly unrelated data. Quentin explains it in the example of somebody who might be looking for a job.

There other ways in which we can lose control of our privacy now. By triangulating different sets of data (you are suddenly asking lots of people on LinkedIn for endorsements on you as a worker, and on Foursquare you seem to be checking in at midday near a competitor’s location), people can now conclude things about you (you’re probably interviewing for a job there) that are radically different from either set of public information.

The key word of course is “conclude” – we base an assumption on what we think we know. It could turn out those LinkedIn endorsements could be part of a performance review and the competitor’s location could right next door to a hot new lunch spot.

We should also keep in mind the value of this data is asymmetric as the value of this data to a third party is low, if anything. But to the individual it could mean losing a job and other major consequences.

A good example of this is the story of how a UK hospital trust lost highly sensitive health records of thousands of patients, including those being treated for HIV.

The trust ended up being fined £325,000 but that fine is trivial compared to the massive individual cost from just one of those records being released.

Fines are a lousy way of enforcing privacy anyway, as the financial penalties are just passed onto shareholders or taxpayers.

The only meaningful sanction for failures like the Brighton General Hospital breach are holding individuals, particularly managers, personally responsible.

As we saw in the successive Sony security breaches last year, most organisations aren’t interested in holding their senior managers responsible for even the most egregious data failures.

This failure of the corporate sector to protect consumer data will almost certainly drive calls for government regulation and sanctions.

Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd  flags this regulation issue in Quentin Hardy’s New York Times piece, saying “Regulation is coming,” she says. “You may not like it, you may close your eyes and hold your nose, but it is coming.”

Danah also makes an important point that users – particularly kids – have developed tactics to obscure their ‘digital footprints’.

For Danah, and others trying to understand what is happening online, this causes a problem, “When I started doing my fieldwork I could tell you what people were talking about. Now I can’t.”

These tactics of creating dummy social media profiles and using euphemisms are a huge threat to the business plans of social media services and the “identity services” desired by Google’s Eric Schmidt.

As data becomes less reliable, or more difficult to triangulate, the value of it to advertisers falls.

It may well be that regulation of social media and web services ends up not being necessary as users become more net savvy. For medical and other personal data though, it’s clear we have to rethink the way we use and store it.

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