Facebook, Google: Welcome to the new feudalism [10Sep11] - 0 views
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In the modern web, Google and Facebook are the feudal lords and people are the peasants — at least when it comes to control of the photos, comments, 'likes' and other data that each person posts online.
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"The users contribute their own content to you for free. You sell it back to them with banner ads put on there. And on top of that, you spy on them to gather profiling data," says Michiel de Jong, of the Unhosted project to decentralise user data.
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As your friends talk to each other, they feed Facebook data about how information flows between its users. It's likely that your friends will have their own friends and will talk to them as well. Every time these first- and second-level contacts interact, it gives Facebook more pointers to where you fit within your network. To you, it's a bunch of your mates; to Facebook, it's an expanding cloud of data to be harvested.
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According to Metcalfe's Law, the value of a communications network is proportional to the number of users connected to the system.
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Mistrust People mistrust this handing over of their data, in much the same way IT managers have concerns about uploading their enterprise's data into the cloud, or web users have misgivings about Gmail and Yahoo automatically scanning their emails.
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Privacy concerns Meanwhile, Facebook has responded to people's concerns about their privacy on its network by providing more tools for adjusting privacy settings. This does not go far enough, according to de Jong. Read this Why Google+ may change the web for good Read more "If a building company put up a tollway and made drivers cede ownership of their cars whenever on that tollway, the traditional justice system would prohibit that," he argued. "Yet this is exactly what is happening on the 'information highway', and the situation is largely overlooked by justice departments, who still live largely in a brick-and-mortar world."
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Methods of controlWhat makes this modern feudalism powerful is that the key parties are keeping their methods of control from the users.
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Neither company openly gives details to users about how their data is being used. We never see inside Google's algorithms, or gain a view of how our connections interweave with every other person on Facebook, but their services see all.