Tag: legal

Freelancer and the sugar daddy problem

Attempts to create hands off marketplaces fail as the realities of managing millions of users becomes apparent

Last week Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced the social media platform will be hiring three thousand content moderators following a string of shocking incidents on the company’s live streaming service.

Facebook were the most successful of the generation of businesses promising algorithms and the user community – coupled with common sense – would act as gatekeepers.

That was handy for their business models, as the reduced administration costs would mean a much more scalable and profitable business.

Managing users’ sins

Along with Google, AirBnB and Uber, Facebook found that relying on users’ feedback and their own algorithms wasn’t enough to cover the myriad of sins humans commit or one in a million edge cases which occur a thousand times a day when you have a billion daily users.

Even the biggest of the web2.0 companies, Google, found their core business being shaken as the limits of algorithmic advertising were explored and advertisers didn’t like where their brands were appearing.

Most striking was AirBnB who quickly found ignoring aggrieved landlords didn’t work when you’re a billion dollar company. Uber, Facebook and Google have similarly found the “we’re just an agnostic distribution platform” doesn’t fly when you’re boasting millions of users.

Freelancer and the sugar daddies

Which brings us to Freelancer, the labour sites were always problematic in this space as services are rife with ripoffs, misunderstandings and inexperienced operators – on both the seller and buyer side.

Another problem though which seems to be appearing is the advertising of adult services on this site, such as this advert which appears to be either an advert for a sugar daddy or a webcam performer – the mangled English makes it hard to tell.

Bizarrely a Freelancer administrator has removed some of the advert’s content but has left the post itself up.

Clicking on the related links brings up a whole range of strange projects including someone who needs a photoshop expert to insert an individual into sex photographs.

Holding the service harmless

It’s hard to say whether these posts comply with Freelancer’s Terms and Conditions as they are the usual vaguely written screeds seeking to shift all responsibility away from the company which have become the norm with online services.

The reputational risk to Freelancer though is real, as company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange it has public investor base and, given its competitive market, it has to appear respectable to user – becoming a Tindr for adult performers – is probably not where organisation would like to be positioned.

Hitting the profit margin

Ultimately though Freelancer’s problem in this space is the same as most online platform services, the promise of negligible administrative costs is an illusion as managing a large user base brings up legal, regulatory, reputational and even political risks as Facebook is finding.

Like many of the early promises of the internet, the idea of a hands off platform where users do the work while owners sit back and pocket profits has gone. Where there’s people and edge cases, there’s risk and those profits may not be as great as they appear.

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Enemies of the state

Governments around the world are resorting to common malware tools to harass and watch dissidents warns the Electronic Frontier Foundation

One of the sad truths of today’s online world is that dissidents, lawyers and journalists are ripe targets for governments that want to suppress who they perceive to be their enemies.

At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Eva Galperin and Cooper Quintin gave a demonstration of just what lengths governments will go in hacking their opponents.

In When Governments Attack, Galperin and Quintin illustrated how Syria, Ethiopia and Vietnam are all countries whose hacking campaigns they’ve encountered but the particular focus was on Operational Menul, which resolved around the Kazakhstan regime’s attacks on its opponents.

The government of Nursultan Nazarbayev is well known for its corruption, intolerance and global harassment of its opponents as Quintin and Galperin showed. What’s of particular interest to them is the use of off the shelf malware tools.

Using cheap commodity tools has the advantage of not leaving distinctive patterns that may give investigators hints to who has developed the malware. The downside of course is that most anti-viruses can detect these tools.

For the regimes this is not such a problem as most of their targets are relatively unsophisticated, as most of the activists, lawyers and journalists targeted by government agencies or their contractors do not have high level tech skills or use advanced security tools.

Another concern is how private contractors are employed by these governments. An interesting tactic used by the EFF is to commence legal proceedings against US based corporation for operations they’ve conducted against dissidents visiting or living in the United States.

Galperin and Quintin have three conclusions from examining these attacks.

  • Attacks don’t need to be sophisticated to work
  • None of this research is sexy
  • The tools and actors are not sophisticated

While the tools and actors in these sad tales are not sophisticated, the costs to the targets are usually high as they and their families can be subject to terrible consequences.

As we increasingly see both simple and sophisticated software tools available to be used against citizens we can expect to see more abuses by governments around the world. The job of organisations like the EFF is not going to get easier any time soon.

We citizens though need to do what we can to demand safeguards and legal protections from our governments. Those of us in democracies should be making that clear at the ballot box.

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Breaking the APIs

Access to APIs is going to be critical in the connected world, but what if a service closes down?

One of the truisms of modern business is we live in an API economy where open Application Programming Interfaces allow software companies to connect their platforms that builds an ecosystem of developers and extends the functionality of their products.

But what happens when an API shuts down or a company starts applying the web2.0 principles of draconian legal terms and conditions to its data feeds? Pinboard, “the social bookmarking application for introverts” is illustrating how serious legalese can be for developers.

Maciej Cegowski, Pinboard’s founder, decided the terms and conditions imposed by popular automation site If That Then This (IFTTT) were too demanding and pulled his service from the platform.

In a blog post he lays out exactly why, citing IFTTT’s demands for rights over his service along with the option of  the plaftorm being able to assign those rights to third parties.

For developers, IFTTT’s terms are almost impossible as the platform strips them of their intellectual property rights and restrains their trade. It’s a classic case of legal over-reach which is all too common in the control obsessed tech industry.

As we’re seeing software vendors releasing platforms to manage IoT devices through APIs and cloud services making their plethora of APIs a selling point, access to these becomes a serious matter for the software industry.

There is a worrying aspect for users in this as well, as those relying on Pinboard services driven through IFTTT are now effectively stranded and have to look for another site that provides similar functions.

While Pinboard is quite small, a larger service shutting down its APSs could have dramatic effects. This is even truer with Internet of Things devices that could use a service like IFTTT to run key functions.

Designing devices and services to cater for the possibility an API or web service may become unavailable needs to be priority for IoT vendors while for developers and users, the risk a service may stop is something that should never be far from their minds and factored into the business and purchasing decisions they make.

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Acting beyond the law

Startups need to be careful about being too arrogant in the face of laws, conventions and plain old good manners

Uber and other car services are claiming US disability laws don’t apply to them The Daily Beast reports.

It’s hard to think of how Uber can do more to alienate the community with the service pushing legal boundaries in many cities, avoiding taxes and trying to skirt employment laws.

The danger for all the new wave of companies in their trying to dodge laws is they are inviting restrictive legislation, particularly if they’ve alienated the community and electorate.

It may well be time for companies like Uber, SideCar and Lyft to start showing a bit of humility and tact. Hubris and arrogance may come back to haunt them.

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Ethics and profitable business

Having a relatively clean society and ethical business cultures should be a massive advantage. It’s best not to squander it.

Does being an ethical business pay off? Transparency International found in 2014 that New Zealand come in only second to Denmark in being the least perceived corrupt country in the world, while Australia comes in as tenth out of 174 countries.

Suzanne Snively, chair of the New Zealand branch of Transparency International, believes this is an opportunity for both countries and their businesses as emerging nations deal with reforming their institutions and management cultures as she told me today at the Open Source, Open Society conference in Wellington.

“Companies do better when they are not corrupt,” Snidely states. “Energy can be used in much more productive way when you don’t have the overhead of corruption.”

Having a relatively clean society and ethical business cultures should be a massive advantage. It’s best not to squander it.

 

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Who owns a smartcar’s smarts?

The question of software ownership in a smartcar opens a range of difficult questions about the internet of things.

Automakers Say You Don’t Really Own Your Car states the Electronic Frontiers Foundation.

In their campaign to amend the US Digital Millenium Copyright Act to give vehicle owners the right to access and modify their automobiles’ software the EFF raises an important point.

Should the software licensing model be applied to these devices then purchasers don’t really own them but rather have a license to use them until the vendor deems overwise.

Cars, of course, are not the only devices where this problem arises. The core of the entire Internet of Things lies in the software running intelligent equipment, not the hardware. If that software is proprietary and closed then no purchaser of a smart device truly owns it.

Locking down the smarthome

This raises problems in smarthomes, offices and businesses where the devices people come to depend upon are ‘black boxes’ that they aren’t allowed to peer into. It’s not hard to see how in industrial or agricultural applications that arrangement will often be at best unworkable.

Four years ago tech industry leader Marc Andreessen pointed out how software is eating the world; that most of the value in an information rich economy lies in the computer programs that processes the data, not the hardware which collects and distributes it.

That shift was flagged decades ago when the initial fights over software patents occurred in the 1980s and 90s and today we’re facing the consequences of poorly thought out laws, court decisions and patent approvals that now challenge the concepts of ownership as we know it.

Is ownership outdated?

However it may well be that ‘ownership’ itself is an outdated concept. We could be entering a period where most of our possessions are leased rather than owned.

If we are in a period where ownership is an antiquated concept then does it matter that our cars, fitness bands, kettles, smoke alarms and phones are in effect owned by a corporation incorporated in Delaware that pays most of its tax in the Dutch Antilles?

Who owns the smartcar’s data?

The next question of course is if the software in our smart devices is secret and untouchable then who owns the data they generate?

Ownership of a smartcar’s data could well be the biggest issue of all in the internet of things and the collection of Big Data. That promises to be a substantial battle.

In the meantime, it may not be a good idea to tinker too much with your car’s software or the data it generates.

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Driverless cars outrun the law

Governments are going to face a number of challenges as autonomous vehicles become common on the road.

Tesla founder Elon Musk believes there will be driverless cars on US roads by the summer, the New York Times reports.

One of the key factors in whether Musk’s prediction comes to and driverless cars are on the road by the middle of the year is the law with most people assuming autonomous vehicles are currently illegal.

Some experts however believe current laws don’t prevent driverless cars, with the New York Times quoting one industry leader who suggests there’s no legal barrier to autonomous vehicles taking to the road.

Tesla is not alone in pushing the envelope. Chris Urmson, director of self-driving cars at Google, raised eyebrows at a January event in Detroit when he said Google did not believe there was currently a “regulatory block” that would prohibit self-driving cars, provided the vehicles themselves met crash-test and other safety standards.

This view raises an interesting legal argument, who is the recognised driver of an autonomous vehicle? In the event of an accident or dispute does liability rest with the owner, the manufacturer or the passengers?

What this debate over driverless vehicles illustrates is how laws specific to today’s society aren’t always applicable to tomorrow’s technologies; certainly many of the laws designed for the horse and buggy era became redundant as the motor car took over a hundred years ago.

Another consequence of autonomous vehicles are the changes to occupations supporting the motor industry; it’s obvious that panel beaters and insurance lawyers may have their jobs at risk but Jay Zagorsky in The Conversation suggests nearly half of US police numbers would be redundant if there are no more car drivers.

Given how the funds local and state governments raise from traffic offences, a shift to driverless technologies could even have an effect on city budgets.

The motor car was the most far reaching technology of the Twentieth Century in the way it changed the economy and society over those years, it’s hardly surprising that we are only just beginning to comprehend how a shift to driverless vehicles may change our lives this century.

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