A British Journalist: 'I Don't Want to Think This, Help Me Not Think This'
A British journalist said this on Twitter the other day (amid news facebook has been eagerly handing our personal data, including private messages, to app developers): "I don't want to think this. But maybe blogs were better than social media. Please help me not think this."
Slow up there. Blogs were better than myspace. Blogs were better than friendster. And most are better than facebook.
How funny when we're ashamed to think our own thoughts. Get your thoughts back with a *paper interrupt*.
Really popular technologies were designed to be extensions of ourselves. Jotting an idea for a post even in illegible shorthand, onto a paper journal, severs the limb that is facebook. Don't jot the whole idea - making contact with the paper to scratch a hashmark revives awareness.
Blogs are more individualized than facebook. Do people fear saying something bad about blogs on their own blog? Nope. Do people fear saying something bad about facebook on facebook? Very much so.
If a product is really well designed, it becomes frictionless. One who fears posting something bad about facebook eventually fears *thinking* something bad about facebook.
Maybe our British friend feared that thought would mean he was "old fashioned":
Jobs: No, Silicon Valley is not monolithic. We've always had a very different view of privacy than some of our colleagues in the Valley. We take privacy extremely seriously. As an example we worry a lot about location in phones. We worry that some 14-year-old is going to get stalked and something terrible's going to happen because of our phone. As an example, before any app can get location data, we don't make it a rule they have to put up a panel and ask, because they [the app developer] might not follow that rule. They call our location services and we put up the panel, saying 'this app wants to use your location data, is that OK with you' every time they want to use it. And we do a lot of things like that. To ensure that people understand what these apps are doing. That's one of the reasons we have a curated app store. We have rejected a lot of apps that want to take a lot of your personal data and suck it up into the cloud. A lot. So...a lot of people in the Valley think we're really old-fashioned about this. And maybe we are. But we worry about stuff like this.
WM: But aren't you also going to move into cloud-based things? ... Doesn't that inevitably mean -
SJ: No! Privacy means people know what they're signing up for. In plain English. And repeatedly. That's what it means. I'm an optimist. I believe people are smart. And some people want to share more data than other people do. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of you asking them. Let them know precisely what you're going to do with their data. That's what we do.
-- Steve Jobs speaking to Walt Mossberg at D8 Conference, 2010.
Slow up there. Blogs were better than myspace. Blogs were better than friendster. And most are better than facebook.
How funny when we're ashamed to think our own thoughts. Get your thoughts back with a *paper interrupt*.
Really popular technologies were designed to be extensions of ourselves. Jotting an idea for a post even in illegible shorthand, onto a paper journal, severs the limb that is facebook. Don't jot the whole idea - making contact with the paper to scratch a hashmark revives awareness.
Blogs are more individualized than facebook. Do people fear saying something bad about blogs on their own blog? Nope. Do people fear saying something bad about facebook on facebook? Very much so.
If a product is really well designed, it becomes frictionless. One who fears posting something bad about facebook eventually fears *thinking* something bad about facebook.
Maybe our British friend feared that thought would mean he was "old fashioned":
Jobs: No, Silicon Valley is not monolithic. We've always had a very different view of privacy than some of our colleagues in the Valley. We take privacy extremely seriously. As an example we worry a lot about location in phones. We worry that some 14-year-old is going to get stalked and something terrible's going to happen because of our phone. As an example, before any app can get location data, we don't make it a rule they have to put up a panel and ask, because they [the app developer] might not follow that rule. They call our location services and we put up the panel, saying 'this app wants to use your location data, is that OK with you' every time they want to use it. And we do a lot of things like that. To ensure that people understand what these apps are doing. That's one of the reasons we have a curated app store. We have rejected a lot of apps that want to take a lot of your personal data and suck it up into the cloud. A lot. So...a lot of people in the Valley think we're really old-fashioned about this. And maybe we are. But we worry about stuff like this.
WM: But aren't you also going to move into cloud-based things? ... Doesn't that inevitably mean -
SJ: No! Privacy means people know what they're signing up for. In plain English. And repeatedly. That's what it means. I'm an optimist. I believe people are smart. And some people want to share more data than other people do. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of you asking them. Let them know precisely what you're going to do with their data. That's what we do.
-- Steve Jobs speaking to Walt Mossberg at D8 Conference, 2010.
