19 March 2013
Google Glass: Orwellian surveillance with fluffier branding
19 Mar 2013
In the online world – for now, at least – it’s the advertisers that make the world go round. If you’re Google, they represent more than 90% of your revenue and without them you would cease to exist.
So how do you reconcile the fact that there is a finite amount of data to be
gathered online with the need to expand your data collection to keep ahead
of your competitors?
There are two main routes. Firstly, try as hard as is legally possible to
monopolise the data streams you already have, and hope regulators fine you
less than the profit it generated. Secondly, you need to get up from behind
the computer and hit the streets.
Google
Glass is the first major salvo in an arms race that is going to see
increasingly intrusive efforts made to join up our real lives with the
digital businesses we have become accustomed to handing over huge amounts of
personal data to.
The principles that underpin everyday consumer interactions – choice, informed
consent, control – are at risk in a way that cannot be healthy. Our ability
to walk away from a service depends on having a choice in the first place
and knowing what data is collected and how it is used before we sign up.
Imagine if Google or Facebook decided to install their own CCTV cameras everywhere, gathering data about our movements, recording our lives and joining up every camera in the land in one giant control room. It’s Orwellian surveillance with fluffier branding. And this isn’t just video surveillance – Glass uses audio recording too. For added impact, if you’re not content with Google analysing the data, the person can share it to social media as they see fit too.
Yet that is the reality of Google Glass. Everything you see, Google sees. You don’t own the data, you don’t control the data and you definitely don’t know what happens to the data. Put another way – what would you say if instead of it being Google Glass, it was Government Glass? A revolutionary way of improving public services, some may say. Call me a cynic, but I don’t think it’d have much success.
More importantly, who gave you permission to collect data on the person sitting opposite you on the Tube? How about collecting information on your children’s friends? There is a gaping hole in the middle of the Google Glass world and it is one where privacy is not only seen as an annoying restriction on Google’s profit, but as something that simply does not even come into the equation. Google has empowered you to ignore the privacy of other people. Bravo.
It’s already led to reactions in the US. ‘Stop the Cyborgs’ might sound like the rallying cry of the next Terminator film, but this is the start of a campaign to ensure places of work, cafes, bars and public spaces are no-go areas for Google Glass. They’ve already produced stickers to put up informing people that they should take off their Glass.
They argue, rightly, that this is more than just a question of privacy. There’s a real issue about how much decision making is devolved to the display we see, in exactly the same way as the difference between appearing on page one or page two of Google’s search can spell the difference between commercial success and failure for small businesses. We trust what we see, it’s convenient and we don’t question the motives of a search engine in providing us with information.
The reality is very different. In abandoning critical thought and decision making, allowing ourselves to be guided by a melee of search results, social media and advertisements we do risk losing a part of what it is to be human. You can see the marketing already - Glass is all-knowing. The issue is that to be all-knowing, it needs you to help it be all-seeing.
Google's Sergey Brin wearing Gogle Glass on the New York Subway
If choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without, then Google Glass goes to the heart of what it is to live in a digital world and what it is to exercise choice about your privacy. The danger is that we lose our privacy and Google gains the power. The reality is that as profit-making strategies go, there’s nothing better.
Europe’s leaders run out of credit in Cyprus
By Gideon Rachman
March 18, 2013
European leaders must surely know that they are taking a big risk with Cyprus. The danger is obvious. Now that everybody with money in Cypriot banks is being forced to take a hit, nervous depositors elsewhere in Europe might notice that a dangerous precedent has been set. Rather than run even a small risk of an unwanted financial “haircut” in the future, the customers of Greek, Spanish, Portuguese or Italian banks might choose to get their money out now. If that starts to happen, the euro crisis will be back on again – with a vengeance.
The people behind the Cyprus plan hope that the risks of contagion are small. They reckon that the Spanish banks are on the mend, and that Greece too has pulled back from the brink. There is no reason for depositors to draw lessons from the peculiar case of Cyprus, whose banks are stuffed with Russian money.
Maybe so. And yet EU leaders have got these kinds of calculations badly wrong before. At a summit in Deauville in September 2010, they announced that the holders of sovereign bonds in bailed-out countries would lose some of their money. The result was a severe worsening of the euro crisis, as investors began to demand much higher rates to lend to risky-seeming countries, such as Italy or Spain.
So why – after all the painstaking efforts to put euro-humpty back together again – have European leaders taken such a gamble in Cyprus? The answer is that they too are out of credit – political credit.
This credit shortfall takes different forms in northern and southern Europe. For leaders of nations such as Germany, the Netherlands and Finland, there was a sense that their voters and parliaments just would not approve another bailout – unless heavy penalties were attached.
Cyprus is a small place, and so the amounts of money needed to shore the country up are relatively small – “just” €17bn. The problem is that Cyprus is also a particularly clear-cut example of the fundamental deficit in trust between northern and southern Europeans. Ever since the crisis began, the German media has been full of stories of southern corruption. German voters have been encouraged to believe that their hard-earned money is going to shore up fundamentally rotten countries.
Cyprus is a particularly big problem because its banks have a well-earned reputation for being a haven for dirty money from Russia. The amount being “round-tripped” through Cyprus – as it goes in and out of Russia – does suggest that the Cypriot banking laundry has been spinning wildly. Hitting depositors with more than €100,000 looks like an effective way to target illicit Russian money. The baffling and dangerous decision also to tax small depositors shows the extent to which sympathy has run out – even for the “little guy” in southern Europe.
In theory, Angela Merkel, German chancellor, and other European leaders could have told their voters that they had to bite the bullet – and bail out Cyprus, without demanding a price – because the alternative is risking a European bank-run that eventually leads to bank failures back home. But the likely reaction would have been even more voter anger and incomprehension.
Cyprus’s rulers also had very little political credit left in the rest of Europe. Many EU leaders had been deeply reluctant to admit Cyprus into the union in 2004, without a peace settlement that reunified the island. But Greece had threatened to veto the entire enlargement of the EU – blocking Poland, the Czech Republic and the rest – unless Cyprus was admitted. Reluctantly, EU leaders succumbed to this act of blackmail. But the whole episode left a bitter taste, particularly when Greek Cypriot voters rejected the Annan peace plan. As a result, when Cyprus ran into trouble the well of sympathy was fairly shallow.
The bigger problem remains, however, the gap in trust and political cultures between northern and southern Europe. Back before the crisis, when things were going well, it was considered politically incorrect, even xenophobic, to suggest that standards of probity in public life vary widely across Europe and that this is a problem for an organisation dedicated to “ever closer union”.
Now, however, it is apparent that this lack of convergence in trust and political culture is at least as important as a lack of economic convergence. It is also true that the Germans, the Dutch and the Scandinavians have their own problems with corruption in public life, and that the caricature of the whole of southern Europe as corrupt and lazy is grossly unfair.
And yet it is a fact that tax-evasion is rife in countries such as Greece and Italy. That has always made it hard to persuade northern voters to bail out the south.
Even casual observation confirms that attitudes to public money vary widely. A couple of years ago, I was invited to a meeting of all Dutch ambassadors from around the world. Lunch was a not terribly appetising array of sandwiches and crisps, eaten standing up. I suspected that, even though the public finances of Italy or Greece were in worse shape, their ambassadors were eating better.
It is a trivial anecdote. But it is the kind of cultural difference that explains why the northern Europeans have now said “basta”, when it comes to the Cypriot banks.
Unless Europe can create a real convergence in standards in public life, then the resulting gap in trust could ultimately break up first the euro – and the EU itself.
March 18, 2013
European leaders must surely know that they are taking a big risk with Cyprus. The danger is obvious. Now that everybody with money in Cypriot banks is being forced to take a hit, nervous depositors elsewhere in Europe might notice that a dangerous precedent has been set. Rather than run even a small risk of an unwanted financial “haircut” in the future, the customers of Greek, Spanish, Portuguese or Italian banks might choose to get their money out now. If that starts to happen, the euro crisis will be back on again – with a vengeance.
The people behind the Cyprus plan hope that the risks of contagion are small. They reckon that the Spanish banks are on the mend, and that Greece too has pulled back from the brink. There is no reason for depositors to draw lessons from the peculiar case of Cyprus, whose banks are stuffed with Russian money.
Maybe so. And yet EU leaders have got these kinds of calculations badly wrong before. At a summit in Deauville in September 2010, they announced that the holders of sovereign bonds in bailed-out countries would lose some of their money. The result was a severe worsening of the euro crisis, as investors began to demand much higher rates to lend to risky-seeming countries, such as Italy or Spain.
So why – after all the painstaking efforts to put euro-humpty back together again – have European leaders taken such a gamble in Cyprus? The answer is that they too are out of credit – political credit.
This credit shortfall takes different forms in northern and southern Europe. For leaders of nations such as Germany, the Netherlands and Finland, there was a sense that their voters and parliaments just would not approve another bailout – unless heavy penalties were attached.
Cyprus is a small place, and so the amounts of money needed to shore the country up are relatively small – “just” €17bn. The problem is that Cyprus is also a particularly clear-cut example of the fundamental deficit in trust between northern and southern Europeans. Ever since the crisis began, the German media has been full of stories of southern corruption. German voters have been encouraged to believe that their hard-earned money is going to shore up fundamentally rotten countries.
Cyprus is a particularly big problem because its banks have a well-earned reputation for being a haven for dirty money from Russia. The amount being “round-tripped” through Cyprus – as it goes in and out of Russia – does suggest that the Cypriot banking laundry has been spinning wildly. Hitting depositors with more than €100,000 looks like an effective way to target illicit Russian money. The baffling and dangerous decision also to tax small depositors shows the extent to which sympathy has run out – even for the “little guy” in southern Europe.
In theory, Angela Merkel, German chancellor, and other European leaders could have told their voters that they had to bite the bullet – and bail out Cyprus, without demanding a price – because the alternative is risking a European bank-run that eventually leads to bank failures back home. But the likely reaction would have been even more voter anger and incomprehension.
Cyprus’s rulers also had very little political credit left in the rest of Europe. Many EU leaders had been deeply reluctant to admit Cyprus into the union in 2004, without a peace settlement that reunified the island. But Greece had threatened to veto the entire enlargement of the EU – blocking Poland, the Czech Republic and the rest – unless Cyprus was admitted. Reluctantly, EU leaders succumbed to this act of blackmail. But the whole episode left a bitter taste, particularly when Greek Cypriot voters rejected the Annan peace plan. As a result, when Cyprus ran into trouble the well of sympathy was fairly shallow.
The bigger problem remains, however, the gap in trust and political cultures between northern and southern Europe. Back before the crisis, when things were going well, it was considered politically incorrect, even xenophobic, to suggest that standards of probity in public life vary widely across Europe and that this is a problem for an organisation dedicated to “ever closer union”.
Now, however, it is apparent that this lack of convergence in trust and political culture is at least as important as a lack of economic convergence. It is also true that the Germans, the Dutch and the Scandinavians have their own problems with corruption in public life, and that the caricature of the whole of southern Europe as corrupt and lazy is grossly unfair.
And yet it is a fact that tax-evasion is rife in countries such as Greece and Italy. That has always made it hard to persuade northern voters to bail out the south.
Even casual observation confirms that attitudes to public money vary widely. A couple of years ago, I was invited to a meeting of all Dutch ambassadors from around the world. Lunch was a not terribly appetising array of sandwiches and crisps, eaten standing up. I suspected that, even though the public finances of Italy or Greece were in worse shape, their ambassadors were eating better.
It is a trivial anecdote. But it is the kind of cultural difference that explains why the northern Europeans have now said “basta”, when it comes to the Cypriot banks.
Unless Europe can create a real convergence in standards in public life, then the resulting gap in trust could ultimately break up first the euro – and the EU itself.
17 March 2013
EU Socialists Want To Ban Opponents
|
British Nationalist Party
March 17th, 2013
Socialist
bigots in Brussels move to
deny voters
the nationalist choice.
We need YOU to help fight for freedom “To save democracy, we have to destroy it!” This is now openly the position of the Left in the EU, who are set to launch a devastating attack on political freedom and the rights of voters this coming Tuesday. Socialist MEPs are trying to ban their political opponents from even being allowed to stand candidates in future European Parliamentary elections. This is on top of their greedy totalitarian efforts to deny funding to pan-European Alliances set up to nationalists – a move which, if successful, would mean that the Socialist block would get even more money. The Socialist Group (which includes all Britain’s Labour MEPs) made its move to deny voters the right to choose at a special meeting of the parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee (AFCO) last Thursday. They presented a series of totally undemocratic amendments to the Giannakou Report on the future of European-level political parties and foundations. The leftists’ proposals would lead to parties that THEY believe don’t conform to THEIR values being banned from standing and from receiving a share of the EU funding pot for European level parties. The proposed demolition of democracy was put forward at the last minute, in order to minimise the possibility of supporters of freedom and fairness organizing an effective lobbying campaign to push other members of AFCO to stand up to the leftist bullies and reject their Stalinist plot. If these amendments are passed at the AFCO meeting this coming Tuesday, then they will go on to be put before the whole Parliament for approval later this spring. We are therefore just two voting sessions away from leftist bureaucrats in Brussels having the power to ban political parties they don’t like from contesting future elections. One German Liberal MEP suggested during the debate that groups who wish to trim EU's powers should be allowed, whilst those representing the wishes of many millions of voters that the EU should be abolished should be banned! They would even be able to prevent politically incorrect parties even being registered in future. Such ‘laws’ would give neo-Marxist bureaucrats sitting on a newly created Advisory Committee (“Four Wise Men”) literally the power of life and death over not just our Alliance of European National Movements, but over EVERY political grouping in Europe – not just present ones, but any that emerge in future as popular anger against the EU’s disastrous policies continues to grow. So we have only until Tuesday morning to stop these monstrous proposals. That’s why we need you – right now – to take a few minutes to send a short, polite (remember that some of the MEPs on the Committee are as worried about the Socialists’ Stalinist proposals as we are) email to every single one of the AFCO Committee members. It only needs to be a couple of lines. Or you can simply cut and paste the following: Dear AFCO Member I am writing to you to urge you to oppose any amendments that seek to discriminate against, or persecute on the grounds of political belief or organisation, during the Giannakou Report vote this coming Tuesday. I further urge you to vote against the entire report, which is a self-serving piece of blatant political corruption. If it is passed, it would enrich its author’s own party while banning political opponents. The proposals to deny voters across Europe the right to choose ‘politically incorrect’ and anti-federalist parties is a brutal attack on the very principles of democracy and equality before the law for which the EU claims to stand. I call on you to defend democracy, protect the rights of electoral minorities and uphold the principle of equality before the law. I look forward to checking the voting records and video footage of the manual votes in due course and to seeing that these totalitarian amendments have been rejected by a large majority of which you are a part. Thank you in advance for protecting democracy from Stalinist extremism. Remember! Tuesday afternoon will be too late. We need you to send these emails right now. It would be even better if you could also send this entire Call to Arms on to all your own email and social network contacts and urge them to do the same. Thanks for joining the fight against Stalinist extremism and political corruption! |
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