The genius of Google, Facebook, and others is that they’ve created services that are so useful or entertaining that people will give up some privacy in order to use them. Now the trick is to get people to give up more—in effect, to keep raising the price of the service.
These companies will never stop trying to chip away at our information. Their entire business model is based on the notion of ‘monetizing’ our privacy. To succeed they must slowly change the notion of privacy itself—the “social norm,” as Facebook puts it—so that what we’re giving up doesn’t seem so valuable. Then they must gain our trust. Thus each new erosion of privacy comes delivered, paradoxically, with rhetoric about how Company X really cares about privacy. I’m not sure whether Orwell would be appalled or impressed. And who knew Big Brother would be not a big government agency, but a bunch of kids in Silicon Valley?
Podcast 6738: A Love Affair
It all started December 1st 2009. I sent an email to Podcast 6738 (hey look, free advertising!), telling them I was interested in taking an ad out on their show.
I never heard back from them, and I didn’t know why. Last night I was playing catch up and listening to some older episodes of the podcast I had missed. Specifically one episode called Party Crashers that was released on 12/3/09. Starting at 17:53, they start talking about in detail what I now call “The Incident”. Here’s the segment edited down to 2:16 - To listen to it click HERE.
That should give you a pretty good idea of the story from their side. Now is the chance to hear mine.
This part of the story might seem irrelevant, but it’ll make sense later. Without getting into too much detail, my blood brother (I’m adopted) found me on MySpace a couple years ago. He then found me and started following me on Twitter. Back in August his girlfriend said something really nasty about me and I decided to block all communication with them for a while. I changed my Twitter name from @JoshSieg to @Joshonthenet, and blocked both him and his girlfriend.
Now, I’ve never met Josh or Matt, but we do have about 10 or so mutual friends and I sincerely enjoy their podcast. As you can see above in the screen capture from the e-mail I sent Podcast 6738, I never updated my signature to reflect my new Twitter handle. Oops! My mistake.
One day I got an email saying that @JoshSieg was now following me on Twitter. Immediately I thought of my brother. I thought that maybe he reactivated my old account as a means to get a hold of me. I also thought that if it wasn’t him, someone found out my password. I have one password for practically everything I use. So after I changed my password on every website I could think of, I got on my computer and blocked @JoshSieg from following me right away. One of the first things I noticed was, whoever copied my Twitter page didn’t save the background, they took a screenshot of it and saved it as “SiegBG.jpg” if I remember correctly.
I then went to Twitter’s help section and filed a claim for impersonation. I had to fax Twitter a photocopy of my driver’s license to prove that I am who I am. They removed the profile from circulation on December 19th.
Josh and Matt, you really did it. My website is all about comedy skits, bits, stunts gags and pranks (sometimes spelled PRANX for thriving purposes) and you deserve to be on it. You really did a number on me. I’d like to officially meet you both and shake your hands. After that we can legitimately negotiate advertisement. I officially forgive you for what you’ve done.
Slowly, but surely, I am becoming famous. Well, on Twitter at least.
Every Monday and Wednesday morning from 10:00-10:30 AM you can find me sitting in the lobby of the M East building at PVCC, waiting for my class to start, being bored and people watching. I might Tweet about your behavior.
