Pointing Fingers

Your Privacy. Your Problem. Idiot.

Everyone knows about Facebook's latest privacy violations at this point, which this time, has more than your average privacy zealots up in arms. Matt McKeon's visualization The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook drives the point home more effectively than a million pontificating editorials.

In a nutshell, they modified their Terms of Service - again - so that pretty much everything you once thought was private isn't anymore, and launched their "Instant Personalization" strategy, chockablock with clever, social-sounding features and concepts such as “open graph,” "social plug-ins" and "connections" all designed to make you feel part of something bigger and more and edgy and important.

And to save you having to so much as think about it, they signed you up (or opted you in). You can still opt out of some things if you have the time and wherewithal. You can also learn calculus, a foreign language and climb Kilimanjaro if you want to. It's just as easy.

One of the things you ought to be really grateful for, is that Facebook's new caching policy now allows developers to store their users' Facebook data permanently. So your personal data is now in the hands of any Facebook developer, presumably scrupulous, of course, even if you didn't sign up for the application. All it takes is a bored, self-obsessed friend taking yet another stupid, annoying quiz and broadcasting the results. Developers get data on friends too. You agreed to that somewhere in the fine print once. You did. You use Facebook, right?

This all ties in neatly to Facebook's new "like" strategy, which coupled with the change in privacy settings, is just about a month or an algorithm short of calculating (based on where you Foursquared you had dinner last night), exactly when you're taking a shit so Charmin can text you on your mobile to try out their new UltraSoft 2ply toilet paper, which thrillingly, happens to be the same as what your sister, your ex-boyfriend and your dentist's mother-in-law "like".

Not everyone is against it though. In fact, a lot of people "like" it so much, they think you're a petrified luddite and whiny, annoying asshole to even voice concern over this erosion of privacy that is to yours what Katrina was to New Orleans.

In a blog post titled "I Wish Facebook Was MORE Open!!!," Robert Scoble marvels how " only about 50 of my more than 1,300 friends have disappeared from my Facebook friend network." Of course when you have real friends, you tend to care more about losing 50 of them, and might have to give two seconds thought as to how to remain in touch while respecting their desire to keep their opinions to a select few.

Jeff Jarvis, who has given this a good deal of thought, seems to say a hell of a lot without appearing to grasp the most basic premise. See for yourself in a post titled "Privacy, publicness and penises," which seems to take Danah Boyd's thinking and twist it into a confusing landscape where public is private and private is less public or something to that effect but in which privacy is a casualty. I think. Boyd's research "examines social media, youth practices, tensions between public and private, social network sites, and other intersections between technology and society." If you don't know her work, it's worth your time.

Not everyone who appreciates the benefits of efficient communications technology is driven by the extreme narcissism that it enables. There are some of us who are confident and capable people who really don't think that every mundane thought is worthy of mass distribution. While a good, well-deserved shit reveals much about one's well-being, one's fiber intake and whatever else can be garnered from analyzing it, there's a reason we flush it instead of TwitPic it.

It's shit, though, that smart people seem incapable of discerning. Just like so much of what our brains fart shouldn't be reposted, retweeted, repackaged, revomited, reingested and re-regurgitated. Not everything is worthy, or in the public interest. We don't need any more digital clutter any more than we need real shit piling up.

Caring about your privacy, according to Paul Carr, on TechCrunch, generally makes you the asshole in a piece titled "NSFW: Facebook Breached My Privacy, And Other Things That Whiny, Entitled Dipshits Say." In the only intelligent sentence in a diatribe of self-aggrandizing crap, Carr claims to be "a firm believer that Facebook et al have an obligation to act to defend a person’s reasonable assumption of privacy."

Given that Carr would brand you a whiny, entitled idiot to have any reasonable privacy assumptions to begin with, the most I could garner from his privacy be damned utopia was don't do anything you don't want the whole world knowing about, or else destroy anyone or anything that might serve as evidence. And if that fails, cry and beg Facebook to help you.

Robert Scoble asks: "Just what are you doing that needs to be so damned private? Are you having sex inside Facebook? Doing illegal drugs? Cheating on your wife? Damn, your Facebook life must be SO interesting!" To which I respond: "That's the whole point. It's none of your fucking business."

More than that, it's such a specious argument - the notions that everything should be public, and if you don't want your every utterance instantly available worldwide, then don't utter anything on the Internet at all.

Sure, if there's something that is so private, the revelation of which would destroy you or a relationship or a career, then avoid sending it electronically, whether that be voice, video, photo or text or any other means on any communications device or application. In fact, avoid saying it anywhere you may be overheard, or telling anyone you don't implicitly trust.

But otherwise, just because these jackasses are willing to roll over and wallow in it all, don't give up on the idea that you can generally communicate with friends or affiliations of your choosing simply because that's what you choose. Don't give up on retracting permission when companies like Facebook change terms on you. Because Facebook may not like what you decide to do with their brand if they fuck you over enough, agreements and promises be damned. Don't give up on enjoying the promise of and distinctions among information that is publicly available versus its aggregation and the publicizing of it elsewhere, without your permission, knowledge, request or desire.

In the real world, when someone treats you like a cheap, unworthy piece of shit, you reestablish the definitions and boundaries of the relationship. An invitation to opt in to a new service or product demonstrates a respect for you as a person, and a confidence by the inviter in their product and service and the value it will add to your life.

There's a flip side to the same issue to what people like Zuckerberg and Scobie seem to be tone deaf. Interesting as Scobie may think it is, I couldn't give a flying fuck what music he listens to on Pandora or what movies he likes. Or if his father's fucking the postman, or if he has the clap.

I have enough of my own shit to sort through without having to wade through his as well wherever I go or wherever I click. If you're all that fabulous, I'll opt in.

In a Zuckerman and Scobie privacy-dead, opt-out world, they fuck you up the ass involuntarily without a condom. Because that's what you want, whether you know it or not. And if you don't like it, you better make damn sure you learn what steps you need to take to ensure it doesn't happen again, no matter how inconvenient it may be for you, how difficult it may be to do, or how long it may take. And don't even think about complaining either, you whiny, entitled dipshit.

It's not rape. It's Opt-out.

Pandemics and Polemics

Remember that awful headline back in January of 2008?

“S.F. gay community an epicenter for new strain of virulent staph.”

It began with a San Francisco Chronicle article by Sabin Russell, which in essence “reported” on a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) study published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine related to a MRSA study, which resulted in widespread misinformation and fear of a “pandemic,” which could magically spread from gay men in the Castro to the “general population” (of which gay men were supposedly not included).

Binh An Diep, a researcher at San Francisco General Hospital and lead author of the report contributed to a UCSF press release that mischaracterized the results of the study, resulting in a global blizzard of sensational headlines, immediately seized upon by the likes of right wing groups, demonizing gay men, and endangering everyone else by its absurd implications that the virus was contained within the gay community, or could only be contracted through gay sex.

Whether an MRSA pandemic resulted seems unlikely, given how little attention has been given to the matter since. You would think.

But MRSA infections are not only on the rise, they’re even being linked to H1N1 (Swine Flu), and a new study by the Henry Ford Hospital's division of infectious diseases, released Sunday, relating to USA600 is alarming. As expected, being gay has nothing to do with neither the transmission nor incidences.

It seems the only real benefit of that initial press release, is that right wing and anti-gay organizations continue to use it as bona fide “evidence” of the “Health Effects of Homosexual Lifestyle,” as it relates to methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

At the time, together with activists Michael Petrelis and the late Hank Wilson, we demanded that UCSF meet with us to help understand how they could have released such an ill-informed press release, and figure out what concrete and immediate steps they could take to ensure such a debacle never happened again.

The result of three independent activists demanding answers from UCSF in a face-to-face meeting, and who until then had only participated in the dialog by sending a representative to community meetings, resulted in some concrete action, and promises from UCSF.

Among those were the development of a database that would allow for easier access to accommodate interest in studies and results, even those not published, or terminated prior to conclusion, and the extent to which community relations and communications with the gay community could serve as an across-the-board template in managing other communities, particularly vulnerable populations, such as children, women or prisoners. Soon after our meeting, in which UCSF also agreed to release a retraction, they did.

Chronicle reporter Sabin Russell told SF Weekly, “…as for not responding to the UCSF 'retraction' — that was a clarification of a press release, not a retraction of the article. If UCSF retracts the [research] paper, that would be news.”

I was later invited to testify before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to relay the results of our meeting with UCSF.

Owing to the extent to which the original misinformation continues to be disseminated, I am bringing attention to it again, including video of my testimony before the Board of Supervisors, (in which I refer to Sabin Russell, apparently present at the hearing, as a “transcriber” and the Chronicle’s atrocious coverage of this story).

Today I sent a letter to UCSF to see what, if any, steps have been taken since our meeting. Specifically, I requested follow up with the status of the following:

1. The internal task force that was set up, its findings in the wake of the MRSA fiasco, and the solutions implemented as a result of those findings.

2. The extent to which easier access to the database containing studies/results that would enable communities that may be impacted negatively to proactively protect themselves, and the extent to which, if at all, UCSF could/would help in identifying such studies.

The apparent dangerous rise of MRSA makes it worth reiterating the extent to which such idiotic reporting of a study did not only inspire a slew of homophobic headlines, but put at risk everyone who thought that the spread of the infection was unlikely to impact them. Like people who play sports, or go to the gym.

Imagine the difference in terms of audience awareness, sensationalism notwithstanding, had the headline read: "A new drug-resistant staph infection. Just how safe are your workouts at the local gym?"

In the meanwhile, I will keep you posted on what I learn from UCSF.

Stay tuned.