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A sense that it wasn’t design
Robert Sullivan has such a good interview with Jony Ive over at Vogue:
In other words, the secret weapon of the most sought-after personal-electronics company in the world is a very nice guy from Northeast London who has a soft spot for woodworking and the sense that designers ought to keep their design talents backstage where they can do the most good. “There’s an odd irony here,” he observes. “I think our goal is that you would have a sense that it wasn’t design.”
I’m not sure the Apple Watch is for me because I haven’t had the chance to hold one yet. But the passion and sincerity Ive exudes for his work compels me to at least check it out.
Philly will consider adding LGBTQ protections to hate crimes ordinance
Philly will consider adding LGBTQ protections to hate crimes ordinance
Randy Lobasso, writing at Philly Weekly‘s PhillyNow blog:
Last week, Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown introduced a proposal along with Councilman Jim Kenney to add disability, sexual orientation and gender identity to the city’s ordinance. The proposal would add up to 90 days of jail time and a $2,000 fine if someone is convicted of hate crimes in addition to whatever other specific crime they’ve committed. It’s not much — but it’s something.
Lobasso’s piece is a great primer on the politics of bill passage, and he explains eloquently and with just the right amount of indignation why Pennsylvania has so far failed to address hate crimes, housing and other venues of discrimination with respect to the Commonwealth’s LGBTQ citizens. Go read it.
Subprime auto lenders use technology to compel payment
Subprime auto lenders use technology to compel payment
Michael Corkery And Jessica Silver-Greenberg, reporting at the New York Times DealBook blog:
Ms. Bolender was three days behind on her monthly car payment. Her lender, C.A.G. Acceptance of Mesa, Ariz., remotely activated a device in her car’s dashboard that prevented her car from starting. Before she could get back on the road, she had to pay more than $389, money she did not have that morning in March.
This is as stark an illustration of the intersection of law and technology as I’ve linked to in a while. While the tech can be a blunt instrument in a world of nuance (some borrowers are doing their best, others are surely not), I don’t oppose it. Assuming everyone was aware of the terms of the loan, it’s a valid contract, etc.
But this sentence gave me pause:
Using the GPS technology on the devices, the lenders can also track the cars’ location and movements.
Again, there probably isn’t anything illegal about it, assuming a valid contract. But in a world of automated license plate scanning and associated geo-behavioral profiling, is a GPS device overkill?
I suppose the business model itself is unnerving. After all, if you need to use a GPS device to manage risk, maybe you shouldn’t be making the loan in the first place. Borrowers using subprime auto loans probably just can’t afford to get a car.
Some drivers volunteer for activity-tracking devices as a way of qualifying for reduced car insurance premiums. Such people can already afford insurance though, and allow their provider to track their behavior as an added savings.
Maybe it’s less the tech involved and more the word “subprime,” which to me invariably suggests a corporation taking advantage of someone who can’t actually afford what they’re getting, and will inevitably default.
FBI Director dislikes encryption on Apple and Google devices
FBI Director dislikes encryption on Apple and Google devices
Encryption of data on mobile devices is a big selling point in our post-Snowden world. But FBI Director James Comes isn’t happy about it:
What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law.
David Kravets of Ars Technica reports Comey has “reached out” to the companies about the issue. Absent new or amended legislation, though, there is little he can do about it, precisely because there is such a sales incentive to marketing encryption these days.
Anonymous Instagram users role-play with stolen baby photos
Anonymous Instagram users role-play with stolen baby photos
Blake Miller of Fast Company has this chilling article:
Jenny had become a victim of a growing—and to many, alarming—new community that exists primarily on Instagram: baby role-players. Instagram users like Nikki steal images of babies and children off the Internet, give them a new name, and claim them as their own. Sometimes they create entire fake families.
The sad thing is there is relatively little protection to be had from the law in situations like this. You may be able to sue someone using your likeness in a commercial venture without your permission, but non-commercial use of the nature described above is rarely protected in the same way.
Instagram users should review their privacy settings by reading the company’s help pages about controlling your visibility and setting photos and video as viewable only to approved followers.
Keep this in mind, though: even if you set your content as private, sharing a link to a photo or video on a social network like Twitter or Facebook will allow anyone with that link to view it.
People who do steal your photos and pretend they’re your child or your child’s parent are violating Instagram’s Terms of Service, which prohibits impersonation, among other things (emphasis mine):
You must not defame, stalk, bully, abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate people or entities […]
The Fast Company article to which I link above includes a statement from Instagram that the company does remove the stolen images when users report such activity.
This story is another lesson to be mindful of not only what you share online, but how you share it. After all, a private company like Instagram could simply choose to ignore concerns like these, and users would have no recourse. Social networks can be a rich and vibrant way to stay in touch, but we are all responsible for what and how we share.
Apple can't bypass your iOS passcode
Apple can’t bypass your iOS passcode
Apple says in the latest revision of its page on government information requests:
On devices running iOS 8, your personal data such as photos, messages (including attachments), email, contacts, call history, iTunes content, notes, and reminders is placed under the protection of your passcode. Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data. So it’s not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8.
Sure enough, the company also updated its Legal Process Guidelines (PDF) to reflect the increase in user privacy:
For all devices running iOS 8.0 and later versions, Apple will no longer be performing iOS data extractions as the data sought will be encrypted and Apple will not possess the encryption key.
This is obviously good news for people concerned about the amount of our data swishing around in the binary ocean, ripe for government fishing expeditions.
However, it’s also worth noting the overwhelming majority, 93 percent, of law enforcement requests to Apple are made at the behest of the customer themselves, usually in the case of a lost or stolen device.
You can find more information about what Apple discloses to law enforcement at its transparency reports page.
Millenials won't use subpar enterprise software
Millenials won’t use subpar enterprise software
Paul Boag writes at Smashing Magazine:
Frustration will only increase as millennials enter the workforce. These people are digital natives, and they expect a certain standard of software. They expect software to adapt to them, not the other way around.
My generation were loud about the outdated software our employers used. We begged, insisted and shouted from the rooftops that efficient workload management demanded a higher level of polish, functionality and user experience.
Even massive software makers like Oracle do little if anything post-sale to ensure their products get the design and functionality upgrades they so desperately need. You can pay an army of contractor-consultants to customize the database architecture and processing flow, sure, but the interface is still all ’90s.
That was then, though. Today, the up-and-comers are just as unlikely to accept awful software and user experience. The difference is they won’t ask or shout at all, they just start using third-party tools. Sometimes this is fine, but other times there are serious security concerns with using third-party software for company work.
Read Boag’s article, especially if you manage any young folks, because this stuff is happening and you should take the opportunity to learn from them. They’re going to gravitate toward good user experience and efficiency, and that’s good for business.
The systemic failure of modern hiring practices
The systemic failure of modern hiring practices
Laurie Voss, in a piece about technical hiring that is easily applied to the legal field and hiring more generally, on asking applicants questions to which they almost certainly don’t know the answer:
The weakest candidates will try to waffle or make wild guesses. This is a terrible sign, firstly because it never works, and secondly because they thought that it would. [ … ] Strong candidates say “I don’t know” as soon as they hit their limit, and may start asking questions. The very strongest candidates say “but if I had to guess” and then attempt to extrapolate.
Yup. And what’s more, most interviewers or hiring managers who ask such counterproductive questions are actually looking for the waffles and the wild guesses. They invariably want to see someone who can obfuscate without sacrificing an air of omniscience.
It’s an astounding feat of self-sabotage, and it makes it difficult for the truly intelligent among us (like myself, all arrogance aside…) to make an impression among the din of bloviating thought-sheep.
Privacy advocates, tech companies nudge Congress to protect ‘abandoned’ e-mails
Privacy advocates, tech companies nudge Congress to protect ‘abandoned’ e-mails
The Email Privacy Act would prevent the government from using mere administrative subpoenas to access email older than 180 days. The distinction, included in the Stored Communications Act , was based on the need for users to access and download email from a service provider’s servers. The logic was that if someone hadn’t downloaded their email in six months or more, they had effectively abandoned it.
Of course, things are no longer that simple in the age of constant synchronization and push notifications on mobile devices.
Previously:
7th Circuit strikes down gay marriage bans in Wisconsin and Indiana
7th Circuit strikes down gay marriage bans in Wisconsin and Indiana
The legal momentum favors universal application of the fundamental right of two consenting adults to marry, but that doesn’t make each ruling any less exciting.
Listen: The Lawfare Podcast discusses zombies in the context of international law and national security
If you’ve ever wondered how international law, laws of war and national security policy might be applied to a zombie apocalypse scenario, listen to episode 89 of The Lawfare Podcast.
The law and policy discussed are real and interesting but the tongue-in-cheek analysis is wonderfully entertaining.
Larry Lessig fighting for campaign finance reform with Mayday PAC
Larry Lessig fighting for campaign finance reform with Mayday PAC
Lawrence Lessig’s Mayday PAC is using the very system it decries to attempt to bring that system down. In other words, Lessig et al are hijacking the virus (the influence of big donors on American politics via election contributions) to deliver the vaccine (funding for politicians committed to proposals which would limit big political contributions).
If you support the cause, be heartened: Lessig likes to fight, and is good at it.
If you don’t support the cause, it’s probably time to start taking Mayday seriously. Your candidate’s job may depend on it.
Facebook is not free
If you use Facebook, this article is a must-read. It’s now common knowledge Facebook is always watching and analyzing how you use the service. But the breadth and depth of the company’s participation in the data brokering economy is staggering. The worst part? You literally signed up for it.
Facebook obviously doesn’t charge its users money, but the mere act of creating a profile affirmatively grants the company total access and usage rights over everything you do on the site. It even shares its data about you with data brokerage firms whose business model is monetizing you.
This is all stuff I have personally known and accepted for a long time, but as the ability to easily aggregate dossiers on anyone and everyone increases, it’s more important than ever to educate yourself and those you care about. Facebook is not free, and in fact it’s worth asking whether the price most people pay by clicking a harmless-looking “I agree” button is really worth it.
Why we don't speak up at work
This piece by Claire Lew at Signal v. Noise doesn’t exactly fit into my general topics of law, technology and design, but it’s so important I that feel obligated to share it. I mention in my article about the role of metrics in editorial strategy that I’ve been present for some poor decisions and didn’t speak my mind.
Claire’s post explains exactly why I failed to speak up, and it’s an important read whether you’re a manager or not. Unlike more navel-gazing, hand-wavy articles in the management advice realm, she actually offers some practical advice.
Facebook COO Sandberg apologizes for emotional contagion experiment
Facebook COO Sandberg apologizes for emotional contagion experiment
R. Jai Krishna, reporting on the reaction of Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg to the outcry over the company’s experiment on the emotions of nearly 700,000 unwitting users:
We take privacy and security at Facebook really seriously because that is something that allows people to share” opinions and emotions, Sandberg said.
The telling part about Sandberg’s reaction is that those who take privacy and security seriously don’t have to say it very often, if at all.
Listen: This Week in Law
When it comes to my own website, editorial calendars always give way to real life. I’m back with the latest in a series that would be more accurately called the “Podcast of the Month.” I really need to step it up with these, as I still have about 70 of them to which I listen with some regularity.
I’m featuring This Week In Law, a podcast covering technology, privacy, intellectual property and other areas of the law relevant to the internet and its users, for a couple of reasons. The first is that the most recent episode (embedded below), entitled Monkeys, Ducks and Unicorns, discusses the Aereo case as well as a recent Fourth Amendment case about cell phones, both decided by the Supreme Court in June.
The second reason I’m featuring This Week in Law is because I have probably listened to more hours of this podcast than any other. It got me through law school by educating, entertaining and inspiring me, even while I was studying far less interesting areas of the law. The voices of Denise Howell and Evan Brown, in a way that only happens on the internet, more familiar to me than some of my longest friends’ voices.
Subscribe to This Week In Law in iTunes, Pocket Casts or RSS.
Houston, We Have A Public Domain Problem
Houston, We Have A Public Domain Problem
Parker Higgins of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, lamenting the recent removal of a public domain NASA clip he posted on the audio sharing site SoundCloud:
The real goofy bit is that before I started at EFF, I worked at SoundCloud. I actually uploaded this Apollo 13 clip, along with sounds from Apollo 11 and others, as part of a project to attract more historic and archival audio and really celebrate the public domain as a rich source of sounds.
Copyright law has been trending in favor of rights holders for a long time. That’s precisely why unlawful claims of copyright over public domain works are so despicable.
Facebook experimented on its users' emotions
Facebook experimented on its users' emotions
Aviva Rutkin, reporting in New Scientist:
A team of researchers, led by Adam Kramer at Facebook in Menlo Park, California, was curious to see if this phenomenon [of contagious emotion] would occur online. To find out, they manipulated which posts showed up on the news feeds of more than 600,000 Facebook users. For one week, some users saw fewer posts with negative emotional words than usual, while others saw fewer posts with positive ones.
Forget about the filter bubble, Facebook is (and has been since at least 2009) a Petri dish.
Click through to find out the results.
Related: Even the Editor of Facebook’s Mood Study Thought It Was Creepy