Month: May 2013

…I would love to see a mass uprising of “Christians” outraged about poverty. Or hunger. Or the corrosive effect of great wealth. Or anything that actually appears in the four canonical Gospels, or anything at all, really – just something that puts them on monkey tilt to one-quarter the degree that the existence of homosexuality appears to.  Seriously, in a world of hunger, poverty, abuse, neglect, the Hobbesian “poor nasty brutish and short” of life, why do “The Christians” only get bent out of shape about The Gay?

Part of the problem with Christianity is that for the better part of two thousand years, huge swaths of it have been administered from the top.  And the Gospel is about those on the bottom. Sell all you have and follow Him.  Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The backlash against the authority of the Pharisees, the Saducees, the priests and the scribes of the Temple.  This is why at heart I still sympathize with the thrust of what was originally the Baptist mission: priesthood of the believer, independence of individual church congregations, power and authority and doctrine flowing up rather than down.  By this logic, of course, the Southern Baptist Convention ceased to actually be Baptist by 1990, but I digress.

Here’s the thing: a religion that exists for those on the bottom cannot be administered by those whose interest lies primarily in keeping them there.  The letters of Paul said there is no more slave and free, we are all brothers together in Christ.  And yet the Confederacy came up with all manner of Biblical justification for why that didn’t actually count for, you know, slaves.

But no, it’s all about TEH GHEYS.  If I see one more Tweet, Facebook status, Instagram post, whatever – if one more person wails about how Jason Collins comes out as gay and gets praised while Tim Tebow gets persecuted for his faith, I will fucking lose my shit. Top tip, holy rollers: Tim Tebow isn’t being persecuted for his Christianity. He’s being mocked because no amount of piety makes up for being the worst quarterback in the NFL not called Rex Grossman. (Seriously, what is it with former Gator QBs who suck out loud at the next level?)  If your job is “quarterback,” you can try to change the job description to “Christian quarterback,” but being great at the first won’t cut any ice with your employer if you’re no good at the latter.

Take a hint, Timmy: the Hebrews wandered in the wilderness for forty years. You can at least condescend to one season in Montreal and see what happens.  You could even stuff the whole paycheck in your Lottie Moon envelope and think of it as one big act of foreign missionary work.  And for the rest of you: go back and make a list of all the times Jesus mentions the gays, then make a list of all the times he mentions the poor – and see if you can learn to prioritize like Him.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation has released its 2013 “Who Has Your Back?” report.  They evaluate tech companies on “which companies help protect your data from the government” – whether the company fights for users’ privacy rights in legislation and in court, whether users are told about government data requests, whether they require a warrant for content, etc etc. Not surprisingly, AT&T and Verizon do horribly (one star between them out of a possible 6 each) while Dropbox and Google pull five each and Twitter gets all six.  Nicely done…

…but it kind of misses the point.

There is a sort of neo-libertarian ethos in Silicon Valley that says that the government is ultimately your enemy, that only private innovation can save us all.  You need to be safe from the prying eyes of Uncle Sam.  As for the prying eyes of Mark Zuckerberg, or Scott McNealy (who famously said “you have no privacy. Get over it”) or the Beast of Mountain View…well, that’s something else entirely, isn’t it?

Not really. As a test, I’ve been using the new Google Now function for iOS with my dummy Google account.  It doesn’t have any calendar data, I don’t get email there, and I rarely if ever log in for search (anywhere), but it does have location data turned on.  So far, all I get is an occasional weather update (of varying accuracy), location-specific transit timetables (which are actually right handy at a glance) and a constant slew of Zagat cards for local dining establishments – which would probably be more useful if I was anywhere but work and home this week.  Maybe this weekend I can see how it looks.

But that’s the thing: the new Silicon Valley Web 3.0 lifestyle requires that you entrust private companies with your data.  None more than Google and Facebook, whose entire current business models fall apart without your constant contribution of personalized information.  I don’t know offhand of any EFF report on which companies protect your data from the depredations of the private sector, but right now, I suspect a lot of companies would have a lot of explaining to do.  For instance, after their latest bout of WTFery, I dumped Path.  Not because they did something awful – it seems like this latest stink about spamming was a result of poorly-chosen defaults, user cluelessness, slow networks and the oddity of texting landlines in the UK.  But coupled with their automatic harvesting of the address book last year or so, it suggests a company that is at best careless about their use of your data.

This valley needs a good solid industry-wide policy about what companies can do with your data.  Whether they can share it internally between products (is it OK for Google to go through your email and find flight data to remind you about?) or sell it along to other companies (looking at you, Facebook) or keep it seemingly in perpetuity (back at you, Google).  Look at that EFF list again: Amazon got two stars and Apple only one, but they’re also the only companies on the list whose business is based primarily on selling you actual things.  The others are either selling you an OS (Microsoft), selling you access to the network (AT&T, Verizon, Sonic.net), or – this is the important bit – providing you with some sort of service that’s free at the point of use.  If they’re not making money by selling something to you, they need to sell something to somebody to make their money.

This is another place where William Gibson had it right: in the long run, corporate dystopia is far more likely than government dystopia. Right now, the feds have a lot more limits on what they can do with your data than Google does.  Uncle Sam needs a warrant; Google can just point to your login and say “you consent to a worldwide irrevocable license to harvest your organs and sell the contents of your brain.”  The Bill of Rights lacks ambiguity.  The EULA lives by it.  It’s past time for a tech sector that scorns lawyerly jargon and obtuse legislation to live by its own ranting.