Tag Archives: Google

If Your Privacy Isn’t Yours, Whose Is It?

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3Are you as amazed as I am at the indifference so many people have to their own personal privacy? Practically every day there’s another revelation of prying, “data-mining”, bogus security “filters” and the astonishing trade going — with your personal information. Where you are. Where you go. What you buy. Who you call and text. All of it literally making billions for the tech giants — Google, Facebook, cell phone carriers — while they heavily promote themselves as benevolent giants “bringing us together”.

As someone native to a small town — bucolic, Mayberry-like Montevideo — I grew up accustomed to listening to Mom and Dad grumble about so and so at church, at the Sunday morning-for-pancakes restaurant, at the clothing store that once prospered on Main Street. Nosey busy-bodies constantly working the gossip mill for news, the badder the better, about everyone else in town. “Why didn’t they mind their own business?” Naturally, Mom and Dad were as unconditionally interested in chatter about everyone else … as everyone else. Who doesn’t love gossip? “I heard Donny was so plastered Saturday night they had to carry him out of the club” . Nevertheless, they were as annoyed as hell when they were the primary subjects. Human nature. It’s a beautiful thing.

As a kid I probably took an unhealthy attitude toward “my business”. Being also Catholic, with the sword of eternal fiery damnation hanging over every “impure thought”, mortification came far too easily when word got out of my clueless, hopelessly-bridled carnal fascination with cute little Peggy or Patty or Mary or … well, the list went on.

Anyway … last week I wrote a column for MinnPost on Al Franken’s most recent inquiries into the privacy raiding and trading practices of big tech companies. Namely, Clear Channel billboards and Oculus Rift. Here’s the post. (Please read it, or at least click and pretend you read it. MinnPost likes the traffic.) I won’t reiterate everything, except to say that the ability of these companies to grab, sort and sell damn near every bit of information about you is way … way … ahead of laws to prevent or control it. (And unlike Big Gubmint, feared by every paranoid Tea Party rancher feeding cattle for free on public land, these companies have a powerful profit incentive to play with your business.)

After a couple Franken staffers backgrounded me on what the Senator was up to and why, some effort was made to get Al on the phone for a few minutes. That never happened. So after a couple weeks, I said, “[Bleep] it. Here’s a handful of questions. Pretend it’s him talking and kick something back to me.”

Most of the Q&A is in the published MinnPost piece. But for some reason, what for me was the central question was edited out, probably because it was the one question to which Franken didn’t offer a response. (His answers to the other questions qualify as predictable boilerplate.)

The deleted section was this:

 

Finally, in terms of a kind of ‘grand umbrella’ piece of legislation, has anyone proposed a law establishing an individual’s full proprietary rights to their personal information? By that I mean establishing that every person must be given, A: Notification that his/her information has been collected. B: Must agree to allow it to be sold/transferred/traded. C: Is notified as to who it has been transferred, and D. Is offered even a micro-payment remuneration for each transfer?

On that one his office sad they were not aware of any such legislation.

The reason I asked it is that it seems to me, watching this astonishing proliferation of technologies Hoovering up personal information … and then trading and selling it … the time really has come for a kind of Constitutional amendment-like declaration of individual privacy rights. I mean, the situation – if controlling the outflow and exploitation of your personal information is important to you (and it isn’t to many, I accept that) — will only get worse, rapidly and exponentially.

Did you catch this on “60 Minutes” last night?

Had I got Franken on the phone, the follow up question to that last one, would have been asking him to speculate on political blowback from the tech industry, in the case of Silicon Valley giants, an enormous and reliable source of cash for Democrats.

It would be a demonstration of Lincoln-like political courage and suicide for Al Franken to purpose legislation requiring, say Google or Facebook, to directly notify everyone whose information they collect, get their explicit approval (i.e. “opt in”) and then remunerate each and every one of us every time their GPS logged us parked in front The Smitten Kitten and sold that information to Latex Fantasies of Hong Kong Limited.

The bottom line questions are really pretty simple: Do you own you? If not, why not? And if not, why should anyone else?

Haunted by Nickelback

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Lambert_to_the_Slaughteri don’t really know anything about Nickelback, but Google is convinced I do.

If you are as uninformed (not to mention as culturally deprived) as I am, Nickelback, “… a bunch of fatuous frat boys” to quote one reviewer, has earned a reputation as “the worst band in the world”. Says Steven Hyden at Grantland, “After forcibly ingesting The Best of Nickelback Volume 1 for professional (or perhaps sadomasochistic) purposes, I can affirm from personal experience that this band’s music sucks. (Or, more accurately, suuucks.)4 Nickelback distills every cliché about bad white-guy durr music in a convenient one-stop package — the vocals bellow like an excavator tongue-kissing a gravel pit and the riffs sputter like amplified lit farts.”

So in other words … really bad.

Personally, I’m not aware of ever hearing one note of any of Nickelback’s (allegedly) turgid, derivative anthems. Although something loud and horrible was playing at a trucker bar in Ajo, Arizona last winter. All I know is that Nickelback’s name comes up every time a conversation turns to “really shitty music”.

So a couple months ago I’m over at MPR interviewing The Current’s program director, Jim McGuinn, and as a way of wrapping up I ask him if there’s any band who’ll probably never get airtime on his eclectic pop music station? As he mulls his choices I tossed out Nickelback’s name, to which he laughed and said, “only in some highly ironic context.”

With that, I go home, open Google Docs and transcribe my interview with McGuinn, including the line about Nickelback, which is then published at MinnPost.

That’s the beginning. middle and end of my interest in Nickelback. But it’s only the beginning of what Google believes is a ravenous hunger on my part for all things Nickel and Backy, because within days, and ever since, whenever I open Google on my Google Nexus 5 phone I’m greeted by breaking news, gossip and marketing touts about … Nickelback. Nickelback tour dates. Nickelback set lists. Nickelback-licensed emesis bags.

Clearly, Google’s algorithms are convinced I’m a Nickelback fetishist. The kind of sad, pathetic bastard who’ll buy one ticket to a Nickelback show, (because what Nickelback fan could ever get a date?), park himself in the front row and yell himself hoarse demanding a 20-minute guitar solo off their greatest hit … assuming I knew the title of even one of their (alleged) songs … much less their greatest “hit”.

And that’s Google’s interpretation of my cultural interests it is sending to me. I can only wonder what impression of me the uber Cloud is peddling to the multitude of social and commercial interests tapping Google’s servers for access to the highly-sought-after 63 year-old white male suburbanite power washing his driveway while listening to Nickelback demographic. The way this is going, I truly expect Christmas-season discount offers for Nickelback hoodies, framed/concert-used Nickelback guitar picks and Nickelback-sanctioned douche bags, (since “douche bag” and “Nickelback” seem to be synonymous among the pop music cognoscenti.)

As much as I tell myself to laugh it off — and ignore the taunts of buddies to whom I’ve told this story — the experience only aggravates my aggravation at the cyber monitoring, analyzing and “repurposing” of my private information. Looked at through another lens, I cannot imagine hooking myself up to an iWatch or cloud-based health-monitoring system, or, were I not married, disgorging every quirk, kink and appetite of my personality into some on-line dating site, which as “60 Minutes” recently showed, is then harvested by literally hundreds of parasitic re-sellers.

It’s bad enough that I know about my issues with powdered wigs and mink whips. i don’t need offers from Amazon and The Smitten Kitten.

But hey, rock on, Nickelback.

Why Minnesota Might Be Planning TOO MUCH Road Expansion

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MnSHIP_cover-2The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) released a new 20-year plan in December 2013 – the Minnesota State Highway Investment Plan (MnSHIP).  Spoiler alert:  MnSHIP says we need more money to build more road capacity.

MnSHIP says much more than that, but adding road capacity is a central theme, as has been the case for many years with such long-range plans.  At first blush,  the call for increased road capacity seems like the most unassailable part of the plan.  After all, Minnesota’s population is expected to increase over the next 20 years.

But the call for additional road capacity could ultimately turn out to be the most flawed part of the plan.   Here’s why:  One term you won’t see in MnSHIP is “driverless car.”

Are Driverless Cars Feasible?

When I was a lad, the science fiction cartoon The Jetsons offered  the dream of flying personal vehicles, which, alas, have not materialized.  That has made many of us skeptical about subsequent predictions about revolutionary transportation technology, such as Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) and driverless vehicles.

Google_driverless_care_on_street-2But driverless cars are far less speculative that flying cars.  Google, one of the wealthiest corporations on the planet, has been investing heavily in a driverless car.  Their test vehicle has logged over half a million miles, and it has never had an accident while the computer was driving.

Based on their tests to date, Google founder Sergey Brin predicts that Google will have autonomous cars available for the general public by 2017.   Again, this isn’t some penniless, garage-based tinkerer expressing his utopian pipe dream.  This is the founder of a company bringing in almost $15 billion in revenue per year.  This is someone who has already produced a prototype that is successfully operating on the streets and has been legalized for use in California, Florida and Nevada.

Beyond Google, just about every major auto manufacturer is engaged in developing this technology.  If Google doesn’t nail the driverless car assignment, one of their well-resourced and experienced competitors might.

Model_T_bad_roads-2Ignoring driverless cars in a 20-year transportation plan beginning in 2013 plan may turn out to be akin to ignoring horseless carriages in a 20-year transportation plan written in 1903.  Ford Motor Company was founded in 1903, and by 1923 Ford was flooding 2,000,000 Model T cars per year onto an overwhelmed infrastructure.

Consumer Buy-In?

But will consumers really surrender control of their vehicles to a computer?  In 2017, the first year Google predicts that driverless cars will be available to consumers, we won’t see mass consumer buy-in.  It will take time for the skeptical masses to observe the early adaptors.  But within the 20-year sweep of the MnSHIP era, broader consumer buy-in is certainly a distinct possibility.

Google_driverless_car-2Safety Advantages.   Driverless vehicles could offer consumers significant advantages.  Any life insurance underwriter can tell you that driving is one of the most dangerous tasks any of us regularly undertake, and driverless vehicles offer the hope of vastly improved safety.    Though human egos makes us skeptical of this truth, computer drivers have the capacity to be much more attentive, reliable and quick to react to danger than even the most skilled human drivers.  In this way, the computers have the potential to keep us safer than human drivers can.

Time-Saving Advantages.  Driverless cars also can offer us more of life’s most precious and limited commodity — time.  Distance sensors and computers allow computer-driven vehicles to safely follow each other at much closer distances and higher speeds than human-driven cars, making for shorter, less congested and less stressful trips.

If driverless cars can supply Americans with more time, less stress, lower insurance rates, and less death and suffering, consumers will demand it.  If policymakers further stimulate such consumer demand with incentives, such as tax breaks or dedicated lanes that offer faster and safer service, the revolution could happen even more quickly.

“Game Changer”

At first blush, the dawn of the driverless car era doesn’t seem to have implications for a transportation plan like MnSHIP.  After all, we would still need roads for those driverless vehicles, right?

While we would still need roads in the era of driverless cars, we might need much less road capacity, and different kinds of road capacity.

Both because of fewer crashes and  vehicles that can follow each other more closely at higher speeds, we might need much less road capacity to serve travel demand.   How much less?  Patcharinee Tientrakool of Columbia University estimates that autonomous vehicles could improve capacity by 43%.  Driverless vehicles that can coordinate with other driverless vehicles would increase capacity by 273%.

Adeel Lari, a transportation expert and former MnDOT leader who is now at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, points out that in the 1960s traffic engineers were taught that highway capacity maxed out at around 2,000 vehicles per lane per hour.  With improved traffic management methods and technology, Lari and his MnDOT colleagues later found they could briefly push capacity as high as 2,600 vehicles per lane per hour.

Temporarily moving from 2,000 to 2,600 vehicles per lane per hour was a huge improvement.  But driverless cars could push capacity to a jaw-dropping 6,000 vehicles per lane per hour or higher, which Lari calls a “game changer.”

Transportation Planning Implications

For MnDOT, here’s how “the game” could rapidly change:

  • Less Road Capacity?  Minnesotans might need much less road capacity at a much lower taxpayer cost.
  • Narrower Lanes?  We also might be able to use narrower lanes, since driverless cars could reliably navigate tight spaces, and squeeze more vehicles through choke points in the process.
  • Dedicated Lanes?   In the interim period when both human drivers and computer drivers are sharing the roads, it might make sense to have dedicated lanes for driverless vehicles, to keep them safe from more erratic and less skilled human drivers.
  • More sprawl?  If driverless cars allow for shorter and less stressful trips,  people may  feel free to move further away from their jobs and other destinations.  If they do, the increased sprawl would impact infrastructure needs.
  • Gas Tax Alternative?  Safer driverless vehicles might be able to be much lighter, and therefore be more fuel efficient.  Additionally, less stop-and-go traffic would also save fuel.  While these changes would be good for the environment and energy security, they also would mean less gas tax revenue available for maintaining and retrofitting the transportation infrastructure.

These are just a few of the kinds of issues transportation leaders should be analyzing. Land use planners have their own set of issues to analyze.

MnDOT, and its MnSHIP collaborators at the Met Council, are wise not to construct MnSHIP on an assumption that mass use of driverless vehicles is imminent.  I’m not naive about all the variables that could delay or stop the successful development and deployment of this technology, or the public acceptance of it.

But in a 20-year plan, it is an oversight to ignore the potential implications of an issue as distinctly possible as driverless vehicles.  MnSHIP should call on MnDOT and Met Council leaders to closely monitor and analyze the pace of driverless vehicle development, and consumer buy-in, so they could, if necessary, swiftly adjust their plans to fit a newly emerging reality.   After all, the transition to driverless cars will be no time for vision-less planning.

– Loveland

Note:  This post was also republished in MinnPost and streets.mn.