A contact of mine kindly sent me an invitation to a Chinese business networking site, called Ushi. All seemed well till I looked at the terms and conditions, which have, inter alia:
You agree to abide by any and all the related Chinese laws and regulations of the Contract Law of the People’s Republic of China, Copyright Law of the People’s Republic of China and its implementing regulations, Decision of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on Preserving Computer Network Security (âSecurity Decision of the National People’s Congressâ), Law of the People’s Republic of China on Guarding State Secrets, the Telecommunication Statute of the People’s Republic of China (âthe Telecommunication Statuteâ), the Computer Information Security Protection System Regulations of PRC, INTERIM PROVISIONS GOVERNING THE MANAGEMENT OF THE COMPUTER INFORMATION NETWORKS IN THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA CONNECTING TO THE INTERNATIONAL NETWORK and measures for implementation, Administration of the Maintenance of Secrets in the International Networking of Computer Information Systems, Administration of Internet Information Services Procedures, MEASURES FOR SECURITY PROTECTION ADMINISTRATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL NETWORKING OF COMPUTER INFORMATION NETWORKS, Administration of Internet Electronic Messaging Services Provisions (âElectronic Messaging Provisionsâ). You also agree to be fully responsible for any behaviors and the any possible result due to the misuse of your account and password in this or that way. Any violation of Security Decision of the National People’s Congress may constitute a crime and you might be prosecuted for the crime. According to the Telecommunication Statute, telecommunication users assume liability for message contents and result transmitted via a communication network. In any case, should Ushi.cn have reasons to conclude that any of your behaviors, including but not limited to any of your words and other behaviors, have violated or may violate any of the above mentioned laws and regulations, the service offered by Ushi.cn will be immediately terminated at any time without prior notice.
Mainland China has an awful lot of laws relating to the internetânot very Confucian.
This scares me off, big time. Iâm cool with contract law and copyright law, and I have the basics there when it comes to the PRC. The rest: I really donât have time to look up the legislation and procedures.
It is so tempting to accept the invitation, given the way the business world is heading, but until the Peopleâs Republic can do something about cleaning up its legislative framework, itâs a no to Ushi.
Iâm sure that when browsing other Chinese sites, I have not been confronted with quite this much. Or maybe I just havenât browsed enough in the dot-cn space?
Iâve a bit more reason to moan about Google of late, after a few more dodgy happenings on the site.
But before I do, some good news: I found a very good search engine. And itâs not Bing.
Ironically, one of the alternatives to Google search that I liked was Yahoo!, but even that company now has switched to Bing. However, it still has some search tools that others can tap in to.
From what I know, Duck Duck Go (or, to use the siteâs own convention, DuckDuckGo) takes some of those data and supplements its own. Itâs surprisingly comprehensive and accurateâsomething I could not call Cuil, which once saw itself as a Google-killer.
I got a similar feeling in 1998 when I ďŹrst saw Google. âWow, this is much better than AltaVista!â Now with Google doing more evil, DuckDuckGo is a breath of fresh air. None of that âsupplemental indexâ BS, either. It also promises that it wonât store your private information. That, too, feels revolutionary in 2010.
I liked Google better, too, when it just delivered good services, and didnât bother with who I am or tried to pretend it was a social network.
Hereâs the real kicker: the founder of DuckDuckGo, Gabriel Weinberg, emailed me after I sent in a compliment. I remember when either Jerry or David did that back in 1994 or thereabouts on Yahoo!. Youâll be lucky to get that now.
Now, as promised, Google-dissing time.
Youâd think Iâd have got most of it out of my system earlier this year with the privacy flaws I discovered around the time of the Google Buzz dĂŠbâcle.
But youâd also think that Google would have learned from that mistake. Apparently not.
First up, hereâs a screen shot of my old Google profile. I had deleted it once post-Buzz, but reinstated it because, ironically, it was the only way to remove Buzz. (Deleting my profile did not, as Google would have you believe, remove Buzz when the service was forced on me back in February.)
I found an option in my profile (which had not been there prior to February) that claimed to prevent my name being found, if I unchecked it. It also said that by unchecking that option, one could not use Buzz and Latitude.
I should also point out that I do not have a Gmail account.
I donât know what that says to you, but I would have thought that that meant I would never get Buzz.
Wrong.
What part of ensuring that my name could not be found did Google not understand? What other US laws has it violated this time?
Itâs pretty rich for a company that did not have, the last time I looked, a privacy policy for Buzz.
So, I went and deleted my profile again. This time, it did kill Buzz, though I still have 777 connections in my Social Search. How does it know, if I am no longer supplying data for that?
I also really donât want to know the 285 friends-of-friendsâ searching habits and Tweets. (It still insists I have four blogs with themâthe actual number is zero. I wouldnât trust Google to be able to do arithmetic correctly.)
But hereâs one big down side to not having a Google profile. Google suggests you can be contacted through the company by not signing up to a profile with them! In your Google account, there is now this:
You are now a member of something that hasnât even been invented yet! This is probably how, after all, it got all those Buzz users earlier this year. Google has âpre-consentâ!
Clicking on âNew Serviceâ results in a 404. I donât know what game Google is playing, but something is rotten in Mountain View.
I can moan all I want, but I have acted and have drafted a letter asking Google to remove the unwanted services from my account. I would delete the whole account, but for a couple of services where colleagues have asked me to set things up (notably Analytics for the Medinge Group websiteâcontrary to Googleâs own claims, I cannot remove myself as an administrator).
So why whinge? Hopefully itâll have you checking your own Google accounts to make sure there arenât unwanted things there.
As news emerges that teenagers have spent less time on Facebook, and there are more profiles getting closed on the social network, Sony has released its newest trailer for The Social Network.
After 9-11, itâs time to tell the âotherâ story of the ânoughties. And if Facebook is the topic of a Hollywood ďŹlm, then this could mean it has jumped the shark.
Whatâs next? A new social network where privacy is respected? Or, something more radical?
Modern kids in the first and second world might want that newfangled âreal lifeâ next, because to them, the internet is ubiquitous, not special. So why not balance what was once a novelty to us with what we once found to be normal? As we once said: try it now, do it more, things youâve never done before. The mainstreaming of extreme sports, if you will, simplified to basic exercise and enjoying the outdoors. It almost seems new.
Simplicity seems to be âinâ in so many facets of life, whether itâs a netbook without bells and whistles, or the old-shape Audi A4 with SEAT Exeo badging. Somewhere along the line, practicality finally found its place ahead of wank. It can happen in some economic recessions.
Real life: more valuable to the teenagers of the 2010s than we thought. Itâs back in vogue.
PS.: Thanks to Stefan Engeseth for inspiring part of this post.âJY
I seem to be on a lot of social networks (Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Vkontakte), so I thought Iâd look in to Sonico. I can see why itâs not as big as the others.
For a start, there seems to be insufficient globalization of its features. Try entering a Chinese film in to the favourite movies, and itâs a no-go:
And while you select New Zealand as your country, itâs too bad if youâre from Wellington:
Maybe these jokers hate the Wellywood sign as much as we do?
Iâm getting fussier about whom I follow back these days on Twitter, and have noticed myself removing some people I followed.
Initially, my rule on Twitter was to follow back only people I knew in the real world. Eventually, I opened that up and even went back among the following to include people I met online. Then, I chose people to follow based on whether they were real or fake and have to admit that a few clever Tweeters suckered me in to following some bots (which I remove whenever they are in my Tweetstream).
Today, Iâm afraid that even being human doesnât necessarily have me following back. I now consider the subject and whether itâs among my interests. Or I consider the location. In other words, I might have entered into a fourth phase of my time on Twitter, where I donât expect contact with all and sundry, just those whose interests align, or live in places I am in or am likely to be in.
Being more geographically specific with social media is exactly what Stanley Moss predicted would be a major 2010 trend at his Medinge and, later, SorbonneâCELSA presentations. I never gave it much thought till I realized I had been doing that myself for several months.
So as we begin the New Year, there are some rules to those I do not follow.
1. If your Tweetstream has any quotations from famous people in itâeven oneâforget it. A year ago, I might have followed you if you had some engagement with people and there was the odd quotation from Mark Twain or some other luminary interspersed with your conversations. Today, if youâre still using automated quotation programs, then Iâm no longer interested. It seems either lazy or passĂŠ, sorry.
2. While Shelly Ryan, the spammer, has gone, anyone having as their first Tweet an invitation to their profile and hinting it could be adult will get a block from me.
3. If the whole Tweetstream looks like a Twitter edition of my spam filter trash folder, youâre outta here. The teeth-whitening Tweet remains a dead giveaway. Also: anyone who repeats promotional Tweets can forget about getting me to follow back. And yes, I do scroll down the entire first page.
4. Thereâs a grey area with any type of automated Tweet outnumbering manually written ones. I have followed some car magazine ones when they are automated, but I am not following back a Tweetstream about, say, Facebook, or a whole bunch of advice, no matter how well meaning it is. If I wanted to read self-help stuff, that is better coming from a book than in Tweet form.
5. A huge disparity between those followed and the number following back. If you have followed 1,200 people and you have about three follow-backs, then that screams, âSpammer,â to me. In borderline cases, I will see who you are following. If your list is filled with people who all seem to have the same name, then I will know you are a bot, and I will send a block request to Twitter. (Some of these bots will find humans to follow by using spidering techniquesâsometimes it is obvious, and they will get a block, too.)
6. Anyone who has more API-delivered Tweets than real ones will be far more likely to be ignored than they were in the past.
7. Anyone whose Tweetstreams are made of re-Tweets nearly exclusively.
8. Anyone who has plugged into a single site and is feeding their headlines out, using that method to make up their entire Twitter account. I have seen two that just take headlines from ReadWriteWeb and link to their articles. Duh, why donât I just follow ReadWriteWeb directly? (Similarly, those who have taken a Google News feed are unlikely to get my attention.)
9. Companies who I know have misbehaved, and this is usually personal. (I can think of one that has had a preemptive block from yours truly.)
10. People whom I know are dicks in real life. (Fortunately, none have come knocking on my Twitter account, probably because they think Iâm a dick.)
Some of my choices sound harsh, and I donât profess to following the above 100 per cent of the time. Very occasionally, I might see a friend who has started Tweeting, who has, in the few hours after setting up his account, filled it up with people he knew. Obviously, the followingâfollower disparity would not apply.
Nor do I claim that I am more right than anyone else. Given thereâs no right and wrong with how you follow back in Twitter, letâs just say, âIt just is,â rather than put a judgement on to it. It is each personâs decision on how they use the service and whom theyâd like to follow.
I was getting annoyed at Google for the services it counts as part of my âproductsâ, but that was minor compared with what Harriet Jacobs has gone through with Googleâs new Buzz serviceâwhich appeared to have put her personal safety in jeopardy (hat tip to Simon Green).
From what I can tell, Buzz shares, by default, your information with your Gmailâs most frequent contacts. In Harrietâs case, this included her abusive ex-husband, who emails her a lot. All of a sudden, she feared that everything that was in her Reader account was being shared with her ex.
She never made a Google profile, never signed up to Buzz, and never had her Reader settings on public. In fact, in the comments was this response from Harriet (sic):
I opted out of Buzz when it arrived, but it still auto-followed.
My âContactâ list only lists my boyfriend and mother as people who are approved for anything. Everybody else is on a separate list. This has always been the case. They were still auto-followed.
I never approved connecting ANY of my sites to Buzz. Reader and Picasa were connected automatically, without my permission or knowledge. My Reader and Picasa were private, by the way, but followers still showed up on my Reader (according to Google now, they couldnât read anything, but they were still there).
I never created a Google profile. I checked that again this morning to make sure I wasnât crazy, and Iâm not. I never created a Google profile, specifically because I am so concerned with my privacy.
So! All future comments about, âTurn Buzz off,â âMake your stuff private,â âDonât approve contacts,â âMake your profile private,â âYou shouldnât have approved Buzz in the first placeâ are to be deleted, because I DID ALL THOSE THINGS.
First, just to be clear: if your Reader shared items are âProtected,â no one except the people youâve explicitly allowed to see your shared items have been able to see them. If your Reader shared items are public on the web, then they are discoverable by anyone. To make sure your Reader shared items are protected, visit this page in Reader.
You can block any unwanted followers in Google Buzz, regardless of whether or not you (or they) have a profile. This is one of the changes we made last night in response to feedback weâd received from others. Click the Buzz link in Gmail, click on âXX followers,â and then block them.
But, while Harriet is grateful that Todd responded to her concerns, she rightly points out (with my emphasis):
So! There are still a lot of issues with Buzz, and beyond all the bugs, thereâs still the fact that they opted me into it without my permissionâin fact, explicitly against my permission. Thatâs not something Iâm going to forgive or forget, and thereâs still a broken trust that makes me hairy eyeball even the nicest thing Todd can say to me.
Makes my issue with Google really, really minor. About this time last night, before I knew of Harrietâs case, I was prepared to complain about what was in my Google account settings:
As you have figured out, these are, according to Google, the stuff I use from the company. You can find this page by going to the Google home page and, provided you are logged in, via the âSettingsâ link in the top right-hand corner. The down arrow has a link for âGoogle Account settingsâ.
The products are divided into two sections: those I am supposedly currently using, and those that I am not but might like to try.
This is where it gets annoying.
The big one that jumped out at me a month ago (this screen shot is from today) was Web History. When Google announced there would be a Web History service, I specifically opted out of it. I was very surprised last month to find it was turned on. I had to opt out again. As a result, this dropped down to the âTry something newâ category.
I opted out of iGoogle some years ago, and itâs also in âTry something newâ. That was back when opting out of stuff on Google worked.
But that leaves some oddities up above. In alphabetical order:
⢠AdSense. I cancelled this last month after getting very fed up with Googleâs behaviour elsewhereâand the six monthsâ damage to its brand from Bloggerâs poor and, later, obstructive, support. Oh, and it was crap. No monies are outstanding. As far as I can tell, I am not on AdSense, yet it remains in the products I am âcurrently usingâ;
⢠Notebook. Never signed up for it; have no idea what itâs doing there. I cannot opt out of it;
⢠Picasa Web Albums. I was shocked to find half a dozen images in there that I never uploaded into it. They were mine, and they had come from my Blogger profile. As far as I knew, when I uploaded those photographs in the early 2000s, they were not being put on to Picasa. In fact, these photographs predate the opening of my Picasa account by many years. Nevertheless, I have deleted everything from it now. Picasa only exists in this category as friends have shared their albums with me;
⢠Reader. Never signed up for it, and was surprised to find a dozen blogs in there that I supposedly follow (which, again, came via BloggerâI was never told that following blogs would open a Reader account and have everything stuck into it), and even a follower. I have deleted everything from it now. There is no way to opt out of it. One friend has told me that I have Reader as a default for a Google user. But I donât want it and am unlikely to ever want it, so why canât I opt out of it?;
⢠SketchUp. I did sign up for it via Google Earth, but it was called something else. Whatever the case, I canât leave;
⢠Subscribed Links. Never signed up for it, and cannot leave;
⢠Talk. Never signed up for it, and cannot leave it. The same friend informed me that I would have got this via Gmail. But, as you can see above, I donât have a Gmail account. Given the way Google treats people and our privacy, I am unlikely to ever want a Gmail account;
⢠Wave. I was sent an invitation to it, and added one friend. However, as I am deleting unwanted services on Google, I am trying to rid myself of Wave, too. No such luck: despite deleting my two friends, you canât leave this, either.
There are a few other things I donât use personally, but signed up to them to help clients and colleagues (e.g. Google Docsâgiven the way Google has behaved, I am never going to create any Docs myself. Why bother, when WordPerfect is perfectly adequate?).
Iâve been taking things out of the Google Dashboard, too. Sooner or later, I expect my Blogger profile to disappear as I shut down everything relating to that service. It was in the Dashboard that I found I had a Reader follower, whom I never approved (heâs not a bad person, itâs just that I see no point of having a follower for a service I never signed up for, and never added anything to with my knowledge).
If you care about your privacy, I recommend you go in to your Google account settings and check what you might have been signed up to without your knowledge. As for asking for support on this stuff, forget it. Iâm pretty sick of the Google support forums after months on them on a single issueâand itâs going to be quicker for us to sort these things out ourselves.
