The Product?

If you're not paying for it then you're the product.

I keep hearing people talking about social media and the online world in these terms. Usually not very far into the conversation issues of privacy and access are also being mentioned and the argument can start to sound part civil rights issue and part conspiracy theory; that somehow the online illuminati are staging mass identity theft/profiling of us all.

I'm still not sure what to make of it all and so I dutifully ensure my privacy settings are set high and perhaps more importantly I self censor rigorously (which for some people might just mean not going near a computer whilst drunk!). Still though, I find it quite strange after searching on a whim for a flight somewhere that I soon find advertisements for holidays on my FB and other pages.

Am I savvy because I know this or a retard for not yet adequately getting around it and protecting my online life? I have no idea what the answer to that question is or even if it's the sort of question that can be answered at the moment. Whenever we use an app, whether to shop, search, poke, check in or any of the functions they offer, there is potential for data to be mined from us and sent back to the developer. What it might be used for is likely still being explored but I pause when I think someone could know what I'm thinking (from status updates and tweets), what I'm reading (from purchases) and where I go and when (check ins and the like). Thank goodness I don't live in a repressive state where that sort of information can get you in trouble.

In my last post I was wondering out loud about the potential for mobile applications and social media to change our thinking about parts and peoples we don't know or understand that well. Consider the African continent where smartphone penetration is closing in on 20% or one in five people. It's higher in Northern and Southern Africa and pretty low in Central Africa. This compares with almost 40% in Australia.

(here's a nice site for some stats http://www.mikekujawski.ca/2012/05/30/finally-some-2012-statistics-for-the-african-mobile-phone-market/)

This can have amazing impacts as was shown throughout the Arab Spring uprisings but it also brings up questions about the rights of people acquiring smartphones and the information they share. An external company may have incentives to develop and offer free software and applications for people in this developing market, which they can then transition into a data mining, money spinning operation (Facebook I'm looking at you). On the other hand there are great initiatives like Apps4Africa (http://apps4africa.org/) that encourage local developers to target problems and needs at a local level.

I did a quick Google search using the terms 'ethics of app development' and I got very little. All the top hits were for people wanting to write an ethics application for a research project or associated endeavor.  Curious, I did another search, this time with the search terms 'ethics of software development'. This time I got a lot more success which was comforting, at least people are thinking in the general area. The thing was that of the top hits I saw the most recent was from 2009, a little early for the current app revolution. Now this was an admittedly tiny search, using only narrow terms but I was really hoping for a little more thinking out there about the potential benefits and harms of our mobile, online life and how to address them.

The way I see it is the information economy is growing at a huge rate and this is largely driven by mobile internet usage. This usage is in turn driven by the development and use of apps on people's mobile phones. As this development occurs our thinking in turn must keep pace with the changing nature of content development and sharing. This is predominately going to require innovative thinking about the way to deal with all the incidental content development that happens when we're not thinking about it (location services and the like). Information shared by people online is intimately connected to their identity, their livelihood and sometimes their safety. The key to addressing the issue is probably as always education, but of what nature and how? 

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I proofread this before I posted and got a little worried that I sounded a bit doom and gloom about spreading technology, which I'm really not. My thoughts tend towards wondering about future scenarios and I often play the devil's advocate. Anyway, here's another article I read while researching this that discusses the amazing potential and achievements mobile access can have in a development information economy... http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/13/world/africa/mobile-phones-change-africa/index.html