Social media is not just the place where young people in Egypt and Tunisia coordinated efforts that in 2011 ended decades of unpopular presidents. They are also a fabulous source of information for repressive governments spying on their citizens. At least that's how Andrew McLaughlin (41), Barack Obama's former adviser on technology and former head of Google's institutional affairs department, sees it.
McLaughlin spoke with iEco last week, after speaking at the Endeavor Experience conferences about the goals of his new venture, Civic Commons, an organization that fosters collaboration between cities within open source software projects.
- While social networks played a fundamental role in the revolts in North Africa, two arguments have also emerged against it: they serve to spy and to keep the population entertained.
- From the second argument, I wouldn't even worry.
- According to the author of the book The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov, it is a more than substantiated hypothesis...
- Maybe, but it doesn't catch my attention. The first thing I do think is important. Governments can do three things on social media: censor, pay fake commentators to redirect the conversation to where they care, and spy.
If you look at China, government investments are in the first category, censorship, and that's completely wrong. Censorship is always late and they no longer control the news. As demonstrated by the recent train wreck they suffered, people tweeted it for hours before they could block the tweets. In addition, there is always a way to write in code to avoid locking.
China is slowly investing more in the second category: creating fake commentators or SockPuppets as we call them in English. They hire a lot of people to say nice things about the Communist Party. I'm not sure how effective this will be in the long run, I would say not much now that social media allows you to evaluate the quality of comments. Sites like Yelp, which serves to evaluate restaurants, have a scoring system that gives more value to the opinions expressed by people with many connections and comments in different restaurants. That way, the fake profiles that restaurants create to praise their own business carry much less weight. That is a system that is going to spread throughout the Network.
The third category, espionage, is in my view the most effective form of control for states and dangerous for activists. China and other repressive countries have made it their main weapon. Every now and then they arbitrarily arrest someone, just to send the signal that activism on social media can cause you trouble. One of the things we still have to learn is how to protect ourselves from this espionage work. So far, very little has been done in that regard.
At what point will the Obama Administration begin to fear Google's growing power?
Governments that believe in competition have to look closely at big business and that's what's happening now. Google is a company that wants to make a profit, like any other, and that's why I don't think we should expect it to always act for the public good.
Either way, I don't see any problems in the way Google is being handled. I know the algorithms of the search engine and I know that they are clearly oriented to get the most accurate result. They have no deviations against competitors because it would be going against Google's own interests.
What the government is looking closely at is the Android operating system, to determine whether or not Google favors its own services, against those of competitors, when they are accessed through this platform.
- Before we talked about risks of social networks that we are not very aware of, in what things will the Internet still surprise us for good?
- We have not yet dared to dream of everything that can mean the storage and exchange of information in large quantities, which in English is called Big Data. I give an example: when we all have our medical record digitized and with a good mechanism to protect our privacy, medical diagnoses will improve dramatically. The magic question that we can answer is what is the best treatment for each patient taking into account their conditions, age, sex, blood pressure, symptoms, etc ... because we will be able to look at what worked best for thousands of people with similar conditions. This will mean a huge advance in disciplines such as urban planning, public transport and education.
Sensors that broadcast wirelessly will also be very important. Not only the GPS that tells you where the bus is, but those that measure the air, pollution, traffic, places where there are more people ... If used responsibly, protecting privacy, they can help us better understand the world and predict it.
- The debate on net neutrality gained strength in the US with the rise of audiovisual content transmitters such as Netflix, are operators going to make the transmission of some type of content more expensive?
- Net neutrality is important for economic growth and entrepreneurship. Countries need to make an effort to protect it. They say that companies like Netflix take advantage of resources that do not pay but it is a lie. Netflix pays for its bandwidth and I, as a customer, pay for my bandwidth, so there shouldn't be any problems. If operators are concerned, it is because they are vertically integrated and own cable channels. What they're trying to do is make Netflix's service worse so that customers choose their cable channels.
- Why is it so important to prevent operators from discriminating against prices based on the data being transmitted?
- Because they can turn it into a way to take advantage of their competitors, and that will make there are fewer competitors, fewer startups and less innovation.
Do you expect a technological leap that will end the broadband shortage and, therefore, the controversy over net neutrality?
- Operators want to make money justifying themselves with scarcity. That is, if the government does not protect net neutrality, what it ends up doing is allowing the following reasoning of the operators: 'Broadband scarcity is more profitable for me than abundance'. But of course, the goal of government policy should be to give incentives for abundance, not scarcity. That is, operators that offer more broadband, better speeds and greater coverage are more profitable. And not the operators who pretend to charge extra to internet companies that are just doing what they are supposed to do.
Author: Francisco De Zárate
Source: iEco - Clarin.com
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