Tech Roundup: Facebook Psychology Experiment, Songza & More
[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]
Facebook's emotion altering psychology experiment sparks outcry:
Is Facebook a research lab or somesuch? If the recent experiment carried out by the social network is any indication, it would seem so. The problem here is that once you consent to a service's terms and conditions (including its data usage policy) without even bothering to read them in the first place, because you don't want to and don't have the patience to read all that dense wording and legal mumbo-jumbo, it can effectively do whatever it can with your data. And if it's Facebook, it can trigger an emotional contagion just by altering your news feeds. And that's what it did. In a study curiously funded by US's Department of Defense to examine the emotional impact of Facebook and with a pure motive of improving its product, a team of data scientists manipulated the news feeds of 689,003 users for a period of one week in January 2012, algorithmically omitting content that contained words associated with either positive or negative emotions.
Want to know the results? "When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks. This work also suggests that, in contrast to prevailing assumptions, in-person interaction and nonverbal cues are not strictly necessary for emotional contagion, and that the observation of others' positive experiences constitutes a positive experience for people," reads the abstract on PNAS. Since then, there has been a predictable outrage over the social network's flagrant violation of ethical guidelines in conducting the study without asking for users' informed consent.
I get that companies keep testing their services on users all the time and you might be thinking all this is no big deal. Furthermore if the company's data use policy specifically states that your personal data will be used "for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement" (the 'research' clause was actually added four months after the experiment was done), what exactly can you do? But does it then mean it can pull any sort of mind games on its unsuspectingtest subjects users? Is Facebook treating its users as some sort of digital livestock? As furore over the project spread on the interwebs, lead author of the study Adam Kramer posted a lengthy apology on his err.. Facebook page:
"The goal of all of our research at Facebook is to learn how to provide a better service. Having written and designed this experiment myself, I can tell you that our goal was never to upset anyone. I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety." But this is hardly the first time the social network has apologised for its behaviour. The controversy in fact only goes on to highlight how social media landscape is changing and how big corporations like Facebook, Google and others can cross the ever blurring lines of online user privacy to control vast swathes of data for advertising dollars. In the midst of all this, privacy watchdog Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a complaint with US's Federal Trade Commission stating "the company purposefully messed with people's minds".
China sounds the warning bell on Apple iPhones:
The blowback of Edward Snowden revelations has been such that in addition to rightly igniting a debate on user privacy, it has also forever changed the political landscape around us. Amid simmering tensions between USA and Germany over the recent CIA double agent scandal, China hasn't been sitting quiet either. It banned installations of Windows 8 operating system on government computers, asked banks to remove IBM servers and replace them with a local hardware brand, and now it has brought to attention the iPhone's "frequent locations" feature in iOS 7, calling it a national security concern. The feature enables you to access a list of every location you frequent, including the date, time and address.
Apple, quickly realising the gravity of the situation, for China is one of its biggest market base, has defended itself, stating "Apple has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will. It's something we feel very strongly about." With Chinese state media calling for severe punishments against US tech firms for spying on the nation and its internet users, it's also worth pointing out that IBM and Cisco Systems have already seen their revenues slump in the Asia-Pacific region after details about NSA's PRISM program emerged last year. If you wish to disable this feature on your iPhone, you can follow the steps listed here (courtesy Buzzfeed).
Google buys context-aware music curation service Songza:
Close on the heels of Apple's recent Beats Electronics purchase comes Google, which as part of its accelerated acquisition spree, has now gone ahead and snapped up free music-streaming startup Songza as part of its efforts to beef up Google Play Music All Access and the yet-to-be-launched paid YouTube music streaming service. Songza, for its part, functions similar to Beats Music in creating music playlists based on users' moods and local weather conditions by pulling data from The Weather Channel. "No immediate changes to Songza are planned, other than making it faster, smarter, and even more fun to use," goes the statement announcing the move.
Google faces tough balancing act in EU over Right to be Forgotten ruling:
Search giant Google recently started complying with a European court ruling that allowed individuals the right to remove information about themselves from search engine results, and in the last two months since the law came into effect it has received over 70,000 take down requests covering 250,000 web pages, according to David Drummond, Google Senior VP and Chief Legal Officer. In an essay published on the official Google blog, Drummond calls for a robust debate on the right to be forgotten, while outlining the factors its team of people take into consideration before removing a search result. A painstaking task no doubt, but if Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt has repeatedly resorted to the same tactic in 2005, 2010, 2011, and last year "to preserve his own reputation", then mind you, anyone can. Hop to Valleywag for more details.
"The issues here at stake are important and difficult, but we're committed to complying with the court's decision. Indeed it's hard not to empathize with some of the requests we've seen—from the man who asked that we not show a news article saying he had been questioned in connection with a crime (he's able to demonstrate that he was never charged) to the mother who requested that we remove news articles for her daughter's name as she had been the victim of abuse. It's a complex issue, with no easy answers. So a robust debate is both welcome and necessary, as, on this issue at least, no search engine has an instant or perfect answer." Recently The Guardian and BBC became an unwitting party when Google removed links to their news articles from its search results in "what effectively amounts to censorship" and a grave threat to internet (and press) freedom, although it has since then reinstated some of the links back. In the meanwhile, Microsoft too is readying to open its floodgates to accept right to be forgotten requests.
Android's factory-reset doesn't wipe personal data after all:
We all have traded our old Android smartphones at one point or the other and one of the last things we do before handing them over is a factory-reset, a preinstalled wipe tool that erases all your data and restores your electronic device to its original manufacturer settings. At least that's what is the intended function. But Czech Republic-based security software maker Avast discovered something more troubling where in they were able to glean over thousands of photos, including naked selfies, 750 emails and text messages, 250 contacts, 1000 Google searches and shockingly the identities of four previous owners from 20 second hand Android phones purchased on eBay.
And worryingly they were able to extract all this just by using "simple and easily available recovery software", writes Jude Mccolgan in a blogpost, adding "deleting files from your Android phone before selling it or giving it away is not enough. You need to overwrite your files, making them irretrievable." Google has responded by saying that Avast used outdated phones for their research and that it doesn't believe that the study reflects the "security protections in Android versions that are used by the vast majority of users". The search giant issues periodic security updates (every six weeks) via Google Play Services and as per the latest stat issued by Sundar Pichai at Google I/O, 93% of all Android users are on on the latest version. Nevertheless, you can ensure your personal data gets deleted by just encrypting your device first before attempting a factory reset, then loading some dummy data and repeating the factory reset again.
In other news:
Facebook's emotion altering psychology experiment sparks outcry:
Is Facebook a research lab or somesuch? If the recent experiment carried out by the social network is any indication, it would seem so. The problem here is that once you consent to a service's terms and conditions (including its data usage policy) without even bothering to read them in the first place, because you don't want to and don't have the patience to read all that dense wording and legal mumbo-jumbo, it can effectively do whatever it can with your data. And if it's Facebook, it can trigger an emotional contagion just by altering your news feeds. And that's what it did. In a study curiously funded by US's Department of Defense to examine the emotional impact of Facebook and with a pure motive of improving its product, a team of data scientists manipulated the news feeds of 689,003 users for a period of one week in January 2012, algorithmically omitting content that contained words associated with either positive or negative emotions.
Want to know the results? "When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks. This work also suggests that, in contrast to prevailing assumptions, in-person interaction and nonverbal cues are not strictly necessary for emotional contagion, and that the observation of others' positive experiences constitutes a positive experience for people," reads the abstract on PNAS. Since then, there has been a predictable outrage over the social network's flagrant violation of ethical guidelines in conducting the study without asking for users' informed consent.
I get that companies keep testing their services on users all the time and you might be thinking all this is no big deal. Furthermore if the company's data use policy specifically states that your personal data will be used "for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement" (the 'research' clause was actually added four months after the experiment was done), what exactly can you do? But does it then mean it can pull any sort of mind games on its unsuspecting
"The goal of all of our research at Facebook is to learn how to provide a better service. Having written and designed this experiment myself, I can tell you that our goal was never to upset anyone. I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety." But this is hardly the first time the social network has apologised for its behaviour. The controversy in fact only goes on to highlight how social media landscape is changing and how big corporations like Facebook, Google and others can cross the ever blurring lines of online user privacy to control vast swathes of data for advertising dollars. In the midst of all this, privacy watchdog Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a complaint with US's Federal Trade Commission stating "the company purposefully messed with people's minds".
China sounds the warning bell on Apple iPhones:
The blowback of Edward Snowden revelations has been such that in addition to rightly igniting a debate on user privacy, it has also forever changed the political landscape around us. Amid simmering tensions between USA and Germany over the recent CIA double agent scandal, China hasn't been sitting quiet either. It banned installations of Windows 8 operating system on government computers, asked banks to remove IBM servers and replace them with a local hardware brand, and now it has brought to attention the iPhone's "frequent locations" feature in iOS 7, calling it a national security concern. The feature enables you to access a list of every location you frequent, including the date, time and address.
Apple, quickly realising the gravity of the situation, for China is one of its biggest market base, has defended itself, stating "Apple has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will. It's something we feel very strongly about." With Chinese state media calling for severe punishments against US tech firms for spying on the nation and its internet users, it's also worth pointing out that IBM and Cisco Systems have already seen their revenues slump in the Asia-Pacific region after details about NSA's PRISM program emerged last year. If you wish to disable this feature on your iPhone, you can follow the steps listed here (courtesy Buzzfeed).
Google buys context-aware music curation service Songza:
Close on the heels of Apple's recent Beats Electronics purchase comes Google, which as part of its accelerated acquisition spree, has now gone ahead and snapped up free music-streaming startup Songza as part of its efforts to beef up Google Play Music All Access and the yet-to-be-launched paid YouTube music streaming service. Songza, for its part, functions similar to Beats Music in creating music playlists based on users' moods and local weather conditions by pulling data from The Weather Channel. "No immediate changes to Songza are planned, other than making it faster, smarter, and even more fun to use," goes the statement announcing the move.
Google faces tough balancing act in EU over Right to be Forgotten ruling:
Search giant Google recently started complying with a European court ruling that allowed individuals the right to remove information about themselves from search engine results, and in the last two months since the law came into effect it has received over 70,000 take down requests covering 250,000 web pages, according to David Drummond, Google Senior VP and Chief Legal Officer. In an essay published on the official Google blog, Drummond calls for a robust debate on the right to be forgotten, while outlining the factors its team of people take into consideration before removing a search result. A painstaking task no doubt, but if Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt has repeatedly resorted to the same tactic in 2005, 2010, 2011, and last year "to preserve his own reputation", then mind you, anyone can. Hop to Valleywag for more details.
"The issues here at stake are important and difficult, but we're committed to complying with the court's decision. Indeed it's hard not to empathize with some of the requests we've seen—from the man who asked that we not show a news article saying he had been questioned in connection with a crime (he's able to demonstrate that he was never charged) to the mother who requested that we remove news articles for her daughter's name as she had been the victim of abuse. It's a complex issue, with no easy answers. So a robust debate is both welcome and necessary, as, on this issue at least, no search engine has an instant or perfect answer." Recently The Guardian and BBC became an unwitting party when Google removed links to their news articles from its search results in "what effectively amounts to censorship" and a grave threat to internet (and press) freedom, although it has since then reinstated some of the links back. In the meanwhile, Microsoft too is readying to open its floodgates to accept right to be forgotten requests.
Android's factory-reset doesn't wipe personal data after all:
We all have traded our old Android smartphones at one point or the other and one of the last things we do before handing them over is a factory-reset, a preinstalled wipe tool that erases all your data and restores your electronic device to its original manufacturer settings. At least that's what is the intended function. But Czech Republic-based security software maker Avast discovered something more troubling where in they were able to glean over thousands of photos, including naked selfies, 750 emails and text messages, 250 contacts, 1000 Google searches and shockingly the identities of four previous owners from 20 second hand Android phones purchased on eBay.
And worryingly they were able to extract all this just by using "simple and easily available recovery software", writes Jude Mccolgan in a blogpost, adding "deleting files from your Android phone before selling it or giving it away is not enough. You need to overwrite your files, making them irretrievable." Google has responded by saying that Avast used outdated phones for their research and that it doesn't believe that the study reflects the "security protections in Android versions that are used by the vast majority of users". The search giant issues periodic security updates (every six weeks) via Google Play Services and as per the latest stat issued by Sundar Pichai at Google I/O, 93% of all Android users are on on the latest version. Nevertheless, you can ensure your personal data gets deleted by just encrypting your device first before attempting a factory reset, then loading some dummy data and repeating the factory reset again.
In other news:
- NASA confirms Voyager 1 spacecraft is in interstellar space.
- USA's National Security Agency intercepted communications of ordinary internet users, American and non-American alike, far more than "legally targeted foreigners", according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.
- World Health Organisation labels the latest Ebola virus pandemic in West Africa the largest and deadliest as total death toll climbs to 539 since the onset of outbreak in February this year.
- Psychedelic drugs induce dream-like state by increasing brain activity in hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex, the regions that are known to be activated during dreaming, new study reveals.
- Latest research shows that the need to forage for hidden insects may have led to bigger human brains, rewarding them in turn with a diet rich in fat and protein.
- Russia passes new internet data protection law requiring all internet companies to move Russian citizens' data onto servers located within the country starting 2016.
- Google to shut down its Orkut social network come September 30 as Google+ celebrates third birthday; data can be downloaded via Google Takeout.
- Tinder dating app exec Whitney Wolfe alleges sexual harassment by the company's co-founders; Yahoo! follows suit.
- Microsoft to end mainstream support for Windows 7 on Jan 13, 2015; extended support ends in 2020.
- Chinese electronics giant Xiaomi debuts in India with Mi 3 tablet (priced at Rs. 14,999); teases Redmi Note and Redmi 1S smartphones for July 15 release.
- HTC finally swings back to profit buoyed by strong HTC One M8 phone sales; Samsung's everything but the kitchen sink approach begins to falter as it forecasts waning demand for its smartphones amidst increased competition from Apple, LG and Xiaomi.
- Microsoft reportedly working on a cross-platform fitness band that will work with Android and iOS.
- Redesigned Google News for mobile lands in India more than six months after it was rolled out in the US.
- Apple's App Store celebrates its sixth anniversary.
- Samsung delays Tizen based Galaxy Z smartphone launch in Russia; to appear on the Russian market later, "when we can offer our users a fullest portfolio of applications," reports Wall Street Journal.
- Apple recruits luxury watch maker Tag Heuer's Vice President of Global Sales & Retail, Patrick Pruniaux, and two engineers from Nike's recently downsized FuelBand team as the tech giant's smartwatch rumours reach a fever-pitch.
- Google's Android Wear gets its first custom app launcher.
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