Japan’s online social scene isn’t so social
MSNBC has an interesting story on the differences in how social networks are used in Japan as compared to the US.
Welcome to Japan's online social scene, where you're unlikely to meet anyone you don't know already. The early promises of a new, open social frontier, akin to the identity-centric world of Facebook and MySpace in the U.S., have been replaced by a realm where people stay safely within their circles of friends and few reveal themselves to strangers.
[from MSNBC]
It reveals some interesting facts about people’s expectation of privacy.
People rarely give their first names to those they don't know well. Spontaneous exchanges are uncommon even on the tightly packed trains and streets of Tokyo. TV news shows often blur the faces of those caught in background footage and photos to protect their privacy.
This is quite in line with the open letter to Google last month by a Japanese blogger pointing out the cultural inappropriateness of Google Street View
According to the morals of urban area residents in Japan, the assumption that “it is scenery [viewable] from public roads and therefore it must be public” is in fact incorrect. Quite the contrary, [these morals state that] “people walking along public roads must avert their glance from the living spaces right before their eyes”.
Japan’s cultural difference was again brought out in the response it gave to Apple’s iPhone 3G launch in July, 2008.
"The iPhone was welcomed here with long lines of gadget fans. But it's also being seen as shockingly alien to this nation's quirky and closed mobile world... For example, young people in Japan take for granted the ability to share phone numbers, e-mail addresses and other contact information by beaming it from one phone to another over infrared connections. Being without those instantaneous exchanges would be the death knell on the Japanese dating circuit," Kageyama reports. "While the iPhone has Bluetooth wireless links, it has no infrared connection."
"Also missing from Steve Jobs' much-praised design: a hole in the handset for hanging trinkets. Westerners may scoff at them as childish, but having them is a common social practice in Japan," Kageyama reports.
This is a good example of the tension between centralization and specialization of service and control. Making one device or service for all is a very cheap process; however, making it fit the long tail requires intense resources for customization and is harder to achieve.
What’s that under my skin – an RFID?
I have always been very excited about this but have been putting it off. However, the IEEE doesn't want to let us on-the-edge engineers rest in peace – they went ahead and dedicated an entire issue of Spectrum magazine on embedding RFIDs inside human bodies. Reading about the experiences of the few people who have done it helps reduce the anxiety around it and very strongly tempts me to go ahead and get it done. I have already looked up online about where I can order the RFID chips and readers from. I am at the last step – I need to order it and schedule an appointment with a doctor to perform the 3 minute insertion procedure.
I suggested this idea to fellow students at SI and have got many concerned responses – why do you want to make it easy for the Big Brother? Is it safe? What's the point?
Big Brother (Privacy): It's a passive device for identification and authentication, just like finger-prints, so it is not as scary as the potential scenario of a GPS enabled chip that radios in to Big Brother at intervals. Safety: well, the IEEE seems to endorse it, they haven't made active and scary disclaimers about the risks involved, if any. And animals have been RFIDed since a long time now. The point: Well, to be honest, there is no point. It's only a cool thing to do, like getting a tattoo; just a more geeky tattoo. There is absolutely no compelling reason about why the RFID should be under my skin – can I really not be ok with it being in my pocket?
Well, we will have to see what I end up doing!
Google’s Privacy Policy for Orkut
I wanted to find out what Google expresses to do with the extremely large amount of information it gathers from its social networking website Orkut. When going through the terms, I was felt happy for a second while I was mid-sentence, but it immediately turned to frown. I will explain why. This was the sentence I was reading.
You can terminate your account at any time. To learn how, click here. If you terminate your account, your profile, including any messages in your inbox, will be removed from the site and deleted from orkut servers. Because of the way we maintain this service such deletion may not be immediate, and residual copies of your profile information may remain on backup media.
It starts out by assuring that when you delete an account from Orkut, the profile gets deleted completely, and all messages in the inbox will be removed from the site and deleted from Orkut servers.
It sounds good on first read, but if you are familiar with Orkut you would realize that there is so much more information in your friends network, your scrap-book, your usage and communication statistics etc which will stay forever. They never make any explicit mention of this data.
Secondly, even if they mean to encompass all data using the meta-term "message", the latter part of the sentence flushes down the effectiveness of the first sentence.
"... residual copies may remain on backup media...". For how long? No mention.
Why can't Google be more open and frank about how they intend to use and process the data and let people make a conscious choice rather than trying to mislead them?
Google Shut Up!
It's quite sad that even before Microsoft can release it's Windows Vista, a respectable company like Google cries foul over it's integrated search feature.
How can a company innovate and provide a good experience to it's end users if the "new companies" keep trying to break it's legs.
This particular case is: Microsoft has decided to include a search box in Internet Explorer 7, just like we have in Firefox & Opera. If it defaults to MSN Search, there's nothing wrong? Should Microsoft be defaulting it to Google Search? Definitely not. Google pays a lot of money to Firefox & Opera so that their search boxes default to Google Search. But obviously, Microsoft won't be interested in any kind of money to default it to Google. This worries Google, and they go to court!
Well, the court ruled that there's nothing wrong in what Microsoft is doing, since they have made it very easy to change the target of the search box and have also provided OEMs the capability to brand it before first boot. What more can they do?
Now consider this:
I have a Sony DVD player. This DVD player comes with a swell remote control. Now, this remote control has some buttons, which are actually meant for a Sony TV. It has buttons for changing the input source & controlling the volume of the TV. So if I have a Sony TV, I can use just one remote control, the DVD control, and enjoy watching the DVD on the Sony TV.
Now, if I don't have a Sony TV, then those buttons are of no use to me. And there's no way I can re-configure the buttons to work with the different brand TV. Is this a case for an Antitrust issue? Google guys, do you have a Sony DVD player and a Hitachi TV? If yes, then you should move court!!
A very pithy post about this can be found here.
Graphologist sues Google, local company for exploitation
Haaretz - Israel News - Graphologist sues Google, local company for exploitation
These are indications of more things to come.
reflectop0rn
People do crazy things.
There are enough p0rn sites on the internet. So shouldn't one restrict such content there?
No, people want to play around. They want to "use online public places(Snopes report on this phenomenon)":http://www.snopes.com/photos/risque/kettle.asp to press forward their nude selves, just for the kick of it.
And now they are recognised. The action is well acknowledged and is called "Reflectop0rn":http://www.reflectoporn.com/
bq. _What is Reflectoporn?_
??Reflectoporn is the exhibitionist act of photographing yourself reflected naked in a household item and then submitting the photographed object to an auction website.??
Things people do!! Seriously!
A Good GPS device
A GPS Device
I really want a GPS device. I have a smartphone, so I want a bluetooth GPS receiver so I can use them together. Read a lot about them, SIRF chipset or XtracSIRT chipset. Finally liked the Fortuna Clip-On, but its not available easily in the market Am attaching a Doc file which shows a real-size comparision of all the Small GPS devices available in the market. Take a look at it to see how big (or small) these devices really are.
Privacy, Google & Other search engines
As search engines get better and better at finding things, it becomes more and more difficult to hide.
Every individual has a right to hide and conceal.
Search engines and all the other new-age technologies like smartphones, GPS tc are taking that right away. And we are not yet realizing it.
Read what ZDNet has to say about Google and Privacy here
Technology is getting more and more refined to get accurate and help us in searching the facts. But we also need to find ways to obfuscate truth. We need technological innovations to help us in lying.
Electronic Presence Awareness – Dodgeball & Google
I don't know where we are going. Sometimes things happen so fast, they overtake my thoughts and I find myself unprepared to sample what the facts convey. It takes time to sink in. It takes time to then incorporate that fact into my understanding of things and use it to make more accurate and deeper extrapolations.
Dodgeball ties up with 
.
You are sitting in a library, reading a book. You wonder which people in the library like the book you are reading. You fire up google and search on it.
Viola, you get a list of people, sorted by Gender, Preferences, Age, Money and everything else that people choose to disclose. And you also get a snap (or even better GPS co-ordinates) and you can just walk up to the person and chat him/her up.
Convenient, revolutionary, amazing & disturbing.
Will take time to handle this.
Canadian Laws on Multimedia sharing / copying
Read this for the Canadian
laws on File Sharing. They are very pro-consumer and extremely sensible.
Take a look. Copying music is not illegal as long as it is for Personal use. That's the spirit.
Privacy’s random answer
Big Blue is experimenting with an idea for customer databases called data randomization. The technique will, conceivably, preserve consumer privacy by masking data such as income, age, past purchases or medical information through mathematical calculations that can't be unwound.
For instance, if a customer submits their age as 38 when registering at an online shopping site, a randomizing plug-in in their browser software will add a number between minus 25 and 112 to their age and send that number over to the server.
Randomization represents an opportunity to defuse the ugly conflict over privacy The wrinkle is that, at the back end, computers then apply a barrage of calculations onto the scrambled data to discern patterns among all customers. The 38-year-old individual's true age can never be recovered, but an online business can somewhat accurately figure out how popular it is with 38 year olds. Unscrambled data collected by the company--such as how much a person paid for a car and on what date--could subsequently be randomized too, for additional privacy.
"The basic notion, in some sense, is kind of heresy in computer science. The normal notion is, in order to do a good job, you need to have accurate information," said Rakesh Agrawal, a senior fellow at IBM who is leading the research. "And here we are saying, 'You have good information, and we are going to perturb it or put errors into it to protect people's privacy.'"
I love this. Seriously. It's a very good thing.
Recent Posts
- Comparing lack of insurance deaths with traffic accident deaths
- Thoughts after reading the 1,990 page health care reform bill H.R.3962
- Do you monitor your energy consumption?
- Can you think your way to sharper TV picture quality?
- Returning to the Ordinary World
- Interesting urban geocache in Vancouver
Recent Comments
- Deepak Pande on My IIT JEE Notes and Books
- Kokil on Adobe: The next hijacker
- sanjana on Facebook friends visualization tool for Many Eyes
Tweets
- @maureenhanratty looks like a bunch of SI folks are going to be there. Let's meetup. I am getting in on Fri afternoon
- I just unlocked the "Photogenic" badge on @foursquare! http://4sq.com/d9UeLo
- @robdolin Sounds good. I am getting in on Friday morning.
- Will be at #sxsw this week