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But someone else was regularly checking in, too: her employer, which paid to gain access to the intimate details of its workers’ personal lives, from their trying-to-conceive months to early motherhood. Diller’s bosses could look up aggregate data on how many workers using Ovia’s fertility, pregnancy and parenting apps had faced high-risk pregnancies or gave birth prematurely; the top medical questions they had researched; and how soon the new moms planned to return to work.

“Maybe I’m naive, but I thought of it as positive reinforcement: They’re trying to help me take care of myself,” said Diller, 39, an event planner in Los Angeles for the video game company Activision Blizzard. The decision to track her pregnancy had been made easier by the $1 a day in gift cards the company paid her to use the app: That’s “diaper and formula money,” she said.

But Ovia also has become a powerful monitoring tool for employers and health insurers, which under the banner of corporate wellness have aggressively pushed to gather more data about their workers’ lives than ever before.

There are, however, age differences in the share of Facebook users who have recently taken some of these actions. Most notably, 44% of younger users (those ages 18 to 29) say they have deleted the Facebook app from their phone in the past year, nearly four times the share of users ages 65 and older (12%) who have done so. Similarly, older users are much less likely to say they have adjusted their Facebook privacy settings in the past 12 months: Only a third of Facebook users 65 and older have done this, compared with 64% of younger users. In earlier research, Pew Research Center has found that a larger share of younger than older adults use Facebook. Still, similar shares of older and younger users have taken a break from Facebook for a period of several weeks or more.

Roughly half of the users who have downloaded their personal data from Facebook (47%) have deleted the app from their cellphone, while 79% have elected to adjust their privacy settings.

There have always been outsiders who criticized the tech industry — even if their concerns have been drowned out by the oohs and aahs of consumers, investors, and journalists. But today, the most dire warnings are coming from the heart of Silicon Valley itself. The man who oversaw the creation of the original iPhone believes the device he helped build is too addictive. The inventor of the World Wide Web fears his creation is being “weaponized.” Even Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, has blasted social media as a dangerous form of psychological manipulation. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he lamented recently.

To keep the internet free — while becoming richer, faster, than anyone in history — the technological elite needed something to attract billions of users to the ads they were selling. And that something, it turns out, was outrage. As Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in virtual reality, points out, anger is the emotion most effective at driving “engagement” — which also makes it, in a market for attention, the most profitable one. By creating a self-perpetuating loop of shock and recrimination, social media further polarized what had already seemed, during the Obama years, an impossibly and irredeemably polarized country.

The Architects (In order of appearance.) Jaron Lanier, virtual-reality pioneer. Founded first company to sell VR goggles; worked at Atari and Microsoft. Antonio García Martínez, ad-tech entrepreneur. Helped create Facebook’s ad machine. Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit. Filed major gender-discrimination lawsuit against VC firm Kleiner Perkins. Can Duruk, programmer and tech writer. Served as project lead at Uber. Kate Losse, Facebook employee No. 51. Served as Mark Zuckerberg’s speechwriter. Tristan Harris, product designer. Wrote internal Google presentation about addictive and unethical design. Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka, entrepreneur who founded influential message board Something Awful. Ethan Zuckerman, MIT media scholar. Invented the pop-up ad. Dan McComas, former product chief at Reddit. Founded community-based platform Imzy. Sandy Parakilas, product manager at Uber. Ran privacy compliance for Facebook apps. Guillaume Chaslot, AI researcher. Helped develop YouTube’s algorithmic recommendation system. Roger McNamee, VC investor. Introduced Mark Zuckerberg to Sheryl Sandberg. Richard Stallman, MIT programmer. Created legendary software GNU and Emacs.

De son côté, Facebook explique que s'il collecte bien certaines données via des "apps" externes, il interdit à ces dernières de lui faire parvenir des informations sensibles des usagers.

Parmi ces données collectées figurent des infos très sensibles, poursuit le WSJ, citant l'exemple d'une application qui sert à surveiller ses périodes d'ovulation et dans laquelle l'utilisatrice rentre les dates de ses cycles menstruels.Selon les tests du WSJ, ces données, mais aussi le poids ou des habitudes en matière de shopping sont envoyées à Facebook à l'insu des usagers.

The received wisdom was once that a unified, unbounded web promoted democracy through the free flow of information. Things don’t seem quite so simple anymore. China’s tight control of the internet within its borders continues to tamp down talk of democracy, and an increasingly sophisticated system of digital surveillance plays a major role in human rights abuses, such as the persecution of the Uighurs. We’ve also seen the dark side to connecting people to one another — as illustrated by how misinformation on social media played a significant role in the violence in Myanmar.

There’s a world of difference between the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, known commonly as G.D.P.R., and China’s technologically enforced censorship regime, often dubbed “the Great Firewall.” But all three spheres — Europe, America and China — are generating sets of rules, regulations and norms that are beginning to rub up against one another.

The information superhighway cracks apart more easily when so much of it depends on privately owned infrastructure. An error at Amazon Web Services created losses of service across the web in 2017; a storm disrupting a data center in Northern Virginia created similar failures in 2012. These were unintentional blackouts; the corporate custodians of the internet have it within their power to do far more. Of course, nobody wants to turn off the internet completely — that wouldn’t make anyone money. But when a single company with huge market share chooses to comply with a law — or more worryingly, a mere suggestion from the authorities — a large chunk of the internet ends up falling in line.

But in terms of vocational shifts or better business practices, it’s unclear what #platformcoop has produced. The original excitement is giving way to unmet expectations.

In Baltimore, a group of returning citizens — men and women who were formerly incarcerated — faced ridiculously unfair barriers to employment. And so, over the past two years, they formed Core Staffing, a staffing agency with 12 members.

When I asked about where Core Staffing is investing its energy lately, Joseph said, “we’re trying to figure out how to foster close relationships and community while managing a distributed workforce. What will keep people engaged outside of profit?” Core Staffing currently has 15 members, fewer than virtually any other platform co-operative, but these tensions are already very present.

Motivations for decentralizing the internet vary. These three keep coming up: Resilient - whether there’s a hurricane, a severed trans-atlantic cable or just a train line with a poor connection, we’d like to be able to carry on making phone calls and sharing documents. Private - as a company keeping our commercial secrets, or as an individual concerned about criminals and overreaching governments, we'd like our most personal messages not to be held in distant data centres. Competitive - we're often forced to use one dominant provider who restricts competition, we'd like to build communtities around new protocols, driving innovation of new services on top.

Fed up with this heartless model, some tech activists are developing online workplaces that operate as worker-driven communities. Daemo, a pilot program incubated at Stanford University’s Crowd Research Collective, is one such worker-driven crowd-labor platform. Since 2015, Daemo’s developers have been building on MTurk’s interface with a communications system aimed at allowing for more equitable “matching” between work requesters and digital taskers. As a non-hierarchical, nonprofit framework where workers control the operations, Daemo is designed for fairer working conditions, with a minimum wage of $10 an hour, which is a major improvement on MTurk’s precarious labor-outsourcing system.

Some former participants in Daemo’s project recently aired sharp criticism of the platform in response to a largely favorable article in Wired. In a collectively authored article on Medium, they argued that, in their practical experience with the platform, decision-making power rests with a “platform team” of researchers and leading developers. Though Daemo has established a Constitution that theoretically is open to amendments and revision based on workers’ input, critics say the day-to-day management remains tightly controlled by researchers.

“Whenever they talk about the decentralization, they talk about technical decentralization, like block-chain or decentralized platforms, but most of the time they overlook the governance level, which is more important,” Hashim says. “So it’s about who takes the positions, it’s about who has the right to access information. If you don’t have a well-informed society, you don’t have democracy.”

We treat open source like it’s a poison pill for a commercial product. And yes, with an open source license it’s harder to force someone to pay for a product, though many successful businesses exist without forcing anyone.

I see an implicit assumption that makes it harder to think about this: the idea that if something is useful, it should be profitable. It’s an unspoken and morally-infused expectation, a kind of Just World hypothesis: if something has utility, if it helps people, if it’s something the world needs, if it empowers other people, then there should be a revenue opportunity. It should be possible for the thing to be your day job, to make money, to see some remuneration for your successful effort in creating or doing this thing.

That’s what we think the world should be like, but we all know it isn’t. You can’t make a living making music. Or art. You can’t even make a living taking care of children. I think this underlies many of this moment’s critiques of capitalism: there’s too many things that are important, even needed, or that fulfill us more than any profitable item, and yet are economically unsustainable.

Black activists say hate speech policies and content moderation systems formulated by a company built by and dominated by white men fail the very people Facebook claims it's trying to protect. Not only are the voices of marginalized groups disproportionately stifled, Facebook rarely takes action on repeated reports of racial slurs, violent threats and harassment campaigns targeting black users, they say.

For Wysinger, an activist whose podcast The C-Dubb Show frequently explores anti-black racism, the troubling episode recalled the nation's dark history of lynching, when charges of sexual violence against a white woman were used to justify mob murders of black men. "White men are so fragile," she fired off, sharing William's post with her friends, "and the mere presence of a black person challenges every single thing in them." It took just 15 minutes for Facebook to delete her post for violating its community standards for hate speech. And she was warned if she posted it again, she'd be banned for 72 hours.

So to avoid being flagged, they use digital slang such as "wypipo," emojis or hashtags to elude Facebook's computer algorithms and content moderators. They operate under aliases and maintain back-up accounts to avoid losing content and access to their community. And they've developed a buddy system to alert friends and followers when a fellow black activist has been sent to Facebook jail, sharing the news of the suspension and the posts that put them there.

All of a sudden, several crypto-focused handsets are hitting the market, or will soon. The biggest player in the new game is Samsung, which confirmed this month that the Galaxy S10 will include a secure storage system for cryptocurrency private keys. It joins HTC, which for months has been touting the Exodus 1; Sirin Labs, which used proceeds from a huge ICO to build the Finney; and Electroneum, which this week began selling an $80 Android phone that can mine cryptocurrency.

In the wildest dreams of enthusiasts, these devices will be a gateway to something called the decentralized web, or “Web 3.0.” In this future version of the internet, blockchains and similar technologies would support decentralized applications—“dapps”—that look and feel like the mobile apps we use today but run on public, peer-to-peer networks instead of the private servers of big tech companies.

It’s widely thought that a major impediment to mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency and dapps is that these technologies are too difficult to use for people who are not especially tech savvy. Better user experiences, starting with cryptographic key management, could change that. But getting there is not straightforward, given that key security is paramount: you lose your keys, you lose your assets.

Cette culture industrielle a été rendue possible par « les vertus de la centralisation » (Mailland et Driscoll). En effet, elle a permis la création du Kiosque, la « killer app » du Minitel : un système très simple, mis en place par l’Administration pour simplifier les transactions économiques autour des services Minitel. Kiosque reversait directement 2/3 des profits de connexion aux fournisseurs d’accès, leur évitant des démarches. Les utilisateurs, eux, ne payaient qu’à la fin du mois, en bloc, en même temps que leur facture téléphonique. Cette simplicité d’utilisation a été essentielle, en encourageant les entrepreneurs à se lancer sur le Minitel, et les utilisateurs à se connecter aux services. Cette centralisation a été largement critiquée, car elle fait dépendre le modèle économique et les connexions d’un acteur unique et ici étatique. Mais les chercheurs notent que son efficacité ne fait pas de doute, au plan économique. On retrouve une organisation similaire chez les géants du Web : l’Apple Store, par exemple, fonctionne un peu comme une version privée du Kiosque. Mais ce n’est pas tout : pour Mailland et Driscoll, Minitel offre une version publique des marchés multifaces, mettant en relation des usagers/consommateurs et des fournisseurs de services, en prélevant une rente — modèle devenu le filon des économies de plateforme comme Uber ou Air BnB.

Le Minitel a été un « succès domestique », qui a permis à la France de devenir un pays extrêmement connecté, et à toute une population de découvrir des activités en ligne. Il a surtout favorisé l’« émergence d’une pratique collective de la communication numérique qui a généré des systèmes de représentations variés, des formes de discours et de comportements qui apparaissent aujourd’hui comme matriciels ». Ainsi, les forums de discussion, la communication anonyme par écran interposé, l’usage de pseudonymes, l’explosion de la pornographie, les débats sur la liberté d’expression ou la censure qu’on associe souvent aux cultures numériques... ont leur origine dans le Minitel.

Les messageries roses en sont l’exemple le plus célèbre (et le plus lucratif) mais les usages du Minitel ne se limitaient pas à l’annuaire et aux messageries coquines. D’autres usages, éclipsés par ce folklore, se sont aussi développés dans ces années-là, préfigurant les usages numériques : achat et vente par correspondance, services bancaires, consultation d’informations (horaires de train, de spectacle — ou autres : sur le service Minitel de Libération, on peut accéder dès 12h aux infos qui seront publiées le lendemain), usages administratifs, enseignement (informations, corrigés, inscriptions...), jeux (black jack, bridges, quizz et même un 3615 PENDU)...