Berkman Buzz: Week of May 24, 2010

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
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What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.

* Christian Sandvig intentionally calls Google out on their supposedly inadvertent data gathering.
* Harry Lewis questions Facebook's trustworthiness.
* danah boyd's six beliefs about the state of Facebook.
* Ethan Zuckerman works to get beyond isolation online.
* The Citizen Media Law Project on how, or how not to, dismantle a sucky website.
* ProjectVRM on the far way to go before both customers and vendors manage their relationship.
* Andrew McAfee takes on hidden Enterprise 2.0.
* Weekly Global Voice: Jamaica: Situation Improving?

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The full buzz.

"Google was trying to do the same thing that my wireless research group was doing — again, no ethical problems there. However, they claim to have “inadvertently” also listened to the content of communications. (This is called “payload” data.) Here’s the problem with the story we’re getting from Google: the word “inadvertently.” I see no way that this could be inadvertent. Continuing my earlier metaphor: If your plan is to count telephone poles how would you “inadvertently” tap telephone lines and transcribe everything that you hear?"
From Christian Sandvig's blog post Confessions of a Spy Car Driver

"A couple of days ago Mark Zuckerberg had an opinion piece in the Washington Post explaining that Facebook would be doing another rev on its privacy policies....There are two threads here. The first is that the privacy controls were too granular and too complex. Certainly true, as the NYT graphic beautifully illustrated. Second is that not everyone wants lots of stuff public. Certainly true also. Glad they are addressing both problems. Or are they? The tonal problem remains, I am afraid. The implication is that we geniuses at Facebook thought everything was cool, the problem was with the users. “Many of you thought our controls were too complex.” Well, no; they were too complex. The point of privacy settings is so people, ordinary people, can keep stuff private. It shouldn’t take hundreds of clicks to do that. You are a consumer oriented company now, and the customer is always right."
From Harry Lewis' blog post Facebook sort of apologizes, and fixes one problem

"I want to enumerate six beliefs that I have that I want to flesh out in this post in light of discussions about how “everyone” is leaving Facebook:
1. I do not believe that people will (or should) leave Facebook because of privacy issues.
2. I do not believe that the tech elites who are publicly leaving Facebook will affect on the company’s numbers; they are unrepresentative and were not central users in the first place.
3. I do not believe that an alternative will emerge in the next 2-5 years that will “replace” Facebook in any meaningful sense.
4. I believe that Facebook will get regulated and I would like to see an open discussion of what this means and what form this takes.
5. I believe that a significant minority of users are at risk because of decisions Facebook has made and I think that those of us who aren’t owe it to those who are to work through these issues.
6. I believe that Facebook needs to start a public dialogue with users and those who are concerned ASAP (and Elliot Schrage’s Q&A doesn’t count)."
From danah boyd's blog post Quitting Facebook is pointless; challenging them to do better is not

"Is the internet making us more partisan? This is one of the most persistent debates in the study of cyberspace... The reason to take serious, critical looks at scholarship about the internet and diversity – ideological and otherwise – is that we should be passionately committed to ensuring that the internet helps make the world wider, not smaller. If research shows evidence of increasing isolation online, it’s a call to action to make sure we’re building tools and infrastructures that make it possible to connect beyond our existing circles of friends and to ensure that we’re getting the information we need to live in this wide and connected world."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post The Partisan Internet and the Wider World

"But Mayor Lynch also is clearly ticked off about critical content appearing on the site, claiming that "previous posts were personal attacks on him, his wife and daughter, and a city police officer who suffers from a disability," according to the Trentonian article...There's so much wrong with Mayor Lynch's resolution that I can't quite get my head around it. Even if the gripe site has published false and defamatory statements about the mayor or his family, shutting down the entire site would not only be ham-handed, it would be blatantly unconstitutional."
From Sam Bayard's blog post for the CMLP, Bordentown Mayor James Lynch Seeks to Shut Down BordenTownMayorReallySucks.com

"During the Industrial Age, the power asymmetry between vendor and customer got so steep that vendors got to talking about customers as if the latter were cattle or slaves. Customers became “targets” that vendors “captured,” “acquired,” “locked in” and “managed.” As the Information Age dawned, however, customers gradually became more independent. So, midway into the second decade of the new millennium, customers were no longer the ones being managed. Nor, however, were vendors. Instead, relationship itself was managed by both parties. We’re not there yet."
From Doc Searls' blog post for ProjectVRM, Managing relationships, not each other

"...That meshed with a lot of what I’ve observed at big organizations. Enterprise 2.0 is sometimes a too-well-kept secret, despite the best efforts of the executives, trainers, curators, and others who want it to succeed. Most of today’s knowledge workers are somewhere between busy and harried, and they certainly feel that they have better things to do than poke around the Intranet looking for cool new social tools. So in addition to evangelizing, training, leading by example, moving E2.0 technologies into the flow of work, and engaging all the other classic strategies and tactics, I believe that interested organizations need to make their emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) blatantly obvious to their people and encourage usage and experimentation."
From Andrew McAfee's blog post What’s the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work?

"Four days into the state of emergency imposed on the Jamaican capital, the situation is becoming clearer - not simply in terms of statistics - but in understanding the chain of events that led to the current impasse. Diaspora blogger Geoffrey Philp was taken right back to 1979 when he left Jamaica because “because [his] mother was worried about the rising level of violence in Jamaica and the close ties between gun-men and politicians”..."
From Janine Mendes-Franco's blog post for Global Voices, Jamaica: Situation Improving?

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The Berkman Buzz is curated weekly from the blogs of current Berkman Center directors, fellows, projects: http://cyber.harvard.edu/planet/current/