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.

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.

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

Mark Headd, Philly’s first Chief Data Officer, who quit in spring of 2013, talking to Juliana Reyes of Technically Philly about why he resigned the post:

“A self-certifying website is a 20th century answer to the problem of tax deadbeats,” he wrote in an email. “An open data API is a 21st century answer to the problem. And that was my single biggest frustration during my time at the city — we were constantly using 20th century answers to problems that required a 21st century solution.”

I know from personal experience and talking with friends that this is a common complaint of tech-savvy government employees, especially leaders ostensibly authorized to do something about it but never truly empowered.

Budgets and egos slow technological (and many other forms of) progress to a glacial pace in many government settings.

I once spent valuable time collecting requirements for a piece of vital software, researching and recommending a reasonably priced and effective off-the-shelf solution.

Instead, someone decided to shoehorn the new use case into an aging enterprise software suite that had never seemed anything more than an ugly utilitarian GUI on top of a fancy backend of connected spreadsheets.

There was no line-item cost to the shoehorn solution, so it naturally looked like a winner when it came to budgeting. But the person-hours wasted reinventing the wheel easily outweighed the out-of-pocket cost of the solution I had proposed.

And aside from cost, persons in positions of power are often averse to being educated by twenty-somethings. That is especially true when it comes to technology, which most leaders know is important but few truly understand.

Budgets and egos.

Anyway, go read the rest of the article. It looks like Mr. Headd replies to comments, so it’s worth asking him any questions you might have.

Violet Blue, reporting at ZDNet:

Facebook also announced Thursday it will begin tracking its users’ browsing and activities on websites and apps outside Facebook, starting within a few weeks

Her article is full of great advice for people who want to minimize Facebook’s tracking ability across desktop and mobile browsers. Be sure to have a look if the recent changes freak you out.

Nathan Mattise, reporting at Ars Technica:

The two companies will demonstrate “continued commitment for three years after closing to the FCC’s Open Internet protections established in 2010, irrespective of whether the FCC re-establishes such protections for other industry participants following the DC Circuit Court of Appeals vacating those rules.”

My first draft of this post was cynical and incredulous, as I am wont to be. But on second thought, it would behoove AT&T to stick to it’s “vow,” if for no other reason than to grease the skids for regulatory approval of the deal. Like I said about Moves and Facebook, it’s hard to blame a company for seeking growth.

While the FCC’s Open Internet rules have been struck down since they were first imposed in 2010, Comcast still abides by those rules pursuant to requirements imposed by the FCC on its purchase of NBCUniversal.

Now that those rules have been struck down, and we’re in limbo while a new rules proposal goes through its comment period, AT&T committing to the Comcast restrictions presumes the FCC will have similar concerns about their purchase of DirecTV. So the worst case scenario for AT&T is that the FCC achieves similar restrictions via the new rules, in which case AT&T is already prepared. And the best case scenario is that the new rules are more lenient than the 2010 rules, and AT&T is even happier.

In fact, the only losers here are consumers. While there is some question about whether this consolidation in the connectivity/content space will cause immediate market overlap and thus a significant reduction in local competition, it’s hard to see how things will get better for consumers as a result of this vertical integration over time.

I actually think a lot of the reason why great stuff gets built is because it’s kind of irrational at the time, so it kind of selects for the people that care most about doing it.

A great point. That young man is going places.

Janet Vertesi tried to hide her pregnancy from the internet:

The myth that users will “vote with their feet” is simply wrong if opting out comes at such a high price. With social, financial and even potentially legal repercussions involved, the barriers for exit are high. This leaves users and consumers with no real choice nor a voice to express our concerns.

It’s a fascinating article.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting virtual reality will follow mobile as the next major communication paradigm. While I’m not sure that’s true with VR tech alone, the massive user base and data stores of Facebook, used wisely despite a minefield of privacy concerns, may be just what VR needs to go mainstream.

That of course assumes Oculus can get the tech to a mass-marketable state. With a $350 developer hardware kit, consumer-level pricing looks within reach. So perhaps Zuckerberg is onto something. But it’s easy to be social when you’re clicking around in a browser. The real question is whether people will have any interest in a totally immersive digital social experience.

When Cook turned the spotlight on someone, he hammered them with questions until he was satisfied. “Why is that?” “What do you mean?” “I don’t understand. Why are you not making it clear?” He was known to ask the same exact question 10 times in a row.

Once upon a time I had a boss who was verbally abusive of everyone he met, loose with the law and prone to what can only be called temper tantrums.

He was also a genius.

And one of his staples in a meeting was the same thing that quote above explains about Tim Cook. Eventually I was ready for it every time, and it’s a valuable lesson.

ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen, on the license plate tracking system recently proposed by the Department of Homeland Security:

It is important to note that this database would be run by a commercial enterprise, and the data would be collected and stored by the commercial enterprise, not the government.

Because the government never compels commercial enterprises to give it data.

Ever.

Following up on my recent tirade, this made me happy. Facebook has massive amounts of influence, and is influenced by massive amounts of people, and changes like this are a positive step forward in how technology reconciles with shifting norms and modes of self-identificaiton. Good on ‘em.

Now, if Mr. Zuckerberg needs a good charity write-off for tax season, I would be happy to put him in touch with my student loan creditors.

Steve Jobs, in 1985:

We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people — as remarkable as the telephone.

The remarkable thing is that, at least for people my age, ~30, as old as the Mac itself, the computer is far more remarkable than the telephone ever was. We were raised with the telephone as a commonplace thing, the way our children and nephews and nieces are growing up with iPhones and iPads.

Our computers used the telephone as merely a means to an end, a mode of connectivity. Think about that for a moment: the previous household’s most advanced piece of technology (except perhaps for the television, which is an interesting argument) ended as just a feature in the next generation’s most advanced pieces of technology.

I don’t know whether that’s good or bad for society taken in the aggregate, but the ability of technology to truly and ineffably amaze is gloriously unrelenting. I see no difference, no separating line, between technology and art. Each is made to convey meaning, to delight, to terrify, to teach, to challenge perceptions, and to inspire those who come after us.

Technology and art, or technology as art, or art as technology, are always examples of the same thing:

Humans dreaming, and then building the dream.

What a neat idea.

A TechCrunch reporter had this to say about his employer’s sister product:

Put another way: The CrunchBase team ended up looking like it didn’t really understand how Creative Commons worked, or at least that’s what the vast majority of online commentary suggested.

Mutually agreeable settlement is always the best outcome. Although judging by the comment from CrunchBase President Matt Kaufman near the bottom of the TechCrunch post I linked to, Aol still doesn’t understand Creative Commons at all.

Stephen Wolfram, putting modesty aside as he often and justifiably does, to discuss his most ambitious project to date:

The level of automation is incredibly higher than people could ever have before – it’s incredibly powerful. Anything that WolframAlpha knows your app knows.

This can be the beginning of a vastly more accessible world of bespoke, personal programming, or it could be very, very bad.

No.

Very sad news. I’ve used Winamp for its entire life, all 15 years.

David Kravets writes at Wired about AOL’s demand that an app called People+ stop using a complete replica of AOL’s tech company database.

AOL’s CrunchBase is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution:

We provide CrunchBase’s content under the Creative Commons Attribution License [CC-BY].

However, the terms of service for the same product say, with my emphasis:

CrunchBase reserves the right in its sole discretion (for any reason or for no reason) and at anytime without notice to You to change, suspend or discontinue the CrunchBase API and/or suspend or terminate your rights under these General Terms of Service to access, use and/or display the CrunchBase API, Brand Features andany CrunchBase content.

Actually, as AOL attorneys should know (but apparently don’t), the company cannot reserve any such right at all, at least as to any data accessed, used or displayed while the Creative Commons license is still in effect, which it is as of November 6, 2013.

AOL can legally prohibit future access, use and display, but once content is under a Creative Commons attribution license one reserves no rights whatsoever, except the right to attribution.

It’s baffling that AOL lawyers would assert otherwise.

Bobby Ghoshal, co-founder of the now-defunct social news app Flud:

A year after pivoting to the enterprise we were out of business […] because we ran out of money and investors didn’t have enough data to make a decision to jump on board.

I buy this reasoning. I read a lot about venture capital investors and how they conduct their due diligence.

Investors want to (as they should) gorge themselves on data before even discussing the possibility of backing your startup.

But if the first iteration of your idea falters and you’re too late to accept it or notice it or implement a pivot, getting to the next phase of development won’t save you because, as Ghoshal notes, the data won’t be there to convince investors to sign on the line which is dotted.

Of course, passion and user engagement is important when you’re building an app with a backend service. But all passion and users usually get you is a meeting.

It’s data that closes deals.

Mystery one day, party barge the next.

Special interest groups oppose federal privacy reform to prevent onerous new regulations.

But this effort must, at some point, become counterproductive.

A multitude of state-specific privacy frameworks that, by (federal) law, can’t operate between states, must, at some point, become at least as onerous as new federal regulations. 

I thought this was interesting but not really worth mentioning here, until the Coast Guard visited, apparently, as USA Today reports, under a presumably Google-imposed gag order.

I’m an avid Google user, incredibly open on the internet, and something of an apologist for the utility of systems that know a ton about me. But I still think it’s rich that, as Michael Winters writes in the article, Google “is zealously guarding its privacy” around the barge.

So rich. 

UPDATE: It’s a party barge. No, seriously.