Legends of the Sun Pig

After a long, full, and happy life, my grandmother Florence McLean died peacefully this morning.

We miss her a lot.

I don’t make a secret of the fact that I don’t like Facebook. Where others find it playful, I find it intrusive and annoyingly attention-seeking. I don’t like its attitudes towards content ownership and privacy. I particularly don’t like its sense of self-importance, and the greedy way it tries to assume control of my social graph. It’s not that I don’t want to connect with my friends over social networks, but I want it to be on my terms, not theirs.

Additionally, whenever you’re dealing with a company that handles anything of value to you (with banks it’s money, with Facebook and Google it’s personal data), you have to weigh up the trust you have to place in them against the benefit you expect to receive. Google passes that test for me (for now), but I don’t trust Facebook not to try and screw me over.

What happens when you try to leave Facebook is emblematic of this. Here’s the page you get when you try to disable your account:

Asking me to confirm that I want to deactivate my account is appropriate. Using my social connections in a clear attempt to trigger an emotional response that will keep me on the service is absolutely not.

“Your 32 friends will no longer be able to keep in touch with you” is nonsense. I assume that since they know how to use a web browser, they’re reasonably familiar with a computer, and probably have an email account they can use to reach me.

Below that, they display a random selection of my Facebook contacts with above each one the text “XXX will miss you”. Not only are these statements factually incorrect — they won’t miss me because I never used Facebook to communicate with them in the first place — but Facebook is almost literally putting words in the mouths of these people. Facebook has not asked them if they will miss me; it is using them as sock puppets to push its own message, which is “don’t go.” By using the emotional “miss you” phrase, Facebook is using its knowledge of my social connections to make me feel bad about leaving.

They are abusing my social graph for their own ends. It’s manipulative, unethical, and downright slimy.

Furthermore, if they are using my contacts to try to make me stay, it follows that if my friends have tried to leave Facebook, then Facebook may have used me, or at least my photo, to try to make them stay — something that I myself would absolutely not do.

Goodbye, Facebook. Martin will not miss you.

When it comes to security, I’m firmly in Bruce Schneier’s “refuse to be terrorized” camp. I’m sick of the “we must do something” panic reaction that follows even minimal terrorist threats, and the security theatre it leads to. It’s not about the inconvenience it causes me and other passengers; it’s not even about the ridiculous costs that have to be borne by companies and taxpayers in order to implement measures that will do nothing to prevent a determined terrorist carrying out a attack — all they have to do, after all, is change their target.

Bruce Schneier:

It’s magical thinking: If we defend against what the terrorists did last time, we’ll somehow defend against what they do next time. Of course this doesn’t work. We take away guns and bombs, so the terrorists use box cutters. We take away box cutters and corkscrews, and the terrorists hide explosives in their shoes. We screen shoes, they use liquids. We limit liquids, they sew PETN into their underwear. We implement full-body scanners, and they’re going to do something else. This is a stupid game; we should stop playing it.

Edward Hasbrouck:

What’s most striking about the government’s response to this unsuccessful bombing attempt is the complete lack of any rational relationship between the actions that have been taken and are being proposed, any analysis of which of these and similar tactics did or did not contribute to the success or failure of the Christmas Day attack on Northwest Airlines flight 253, and any likelihood that they would make future attempts at terrorism less likely to succeed.

No, what bothers me is the fact that distorting public policy, removing individual liberties, and instituting a culture of irrationality and fear is exactly what the terrorists wanted in the first place.

Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show’s viewership.

So what can I personally do to refuse to be terrorized? Unfortunately, airlines and airports have a monopoly on air travel, and national governments have a monopoly on border control, so I can’t refuse to play the security game whenever I go abroad. I would if I could, because personally I feel more at risk from the security measures than I do from terrorist action. The risk of being subject of an attempted terrorist attack (much less a sucessful one) is, after all, less than being struck by lightning.

For one thing, I can help point out when people take the right approach. For example, The Register:

First: It is completely impossible to prevent terrorists from attacking airliners.

Second: This does not matter. There is no need for greater efforts on security.

Third: A terrorist set fire to his own trousers, suffering eyewateringly painful burns to what Australian cricket commentators sometimes refer to as the “groinal area”, and nobody seems to be laughing. What’s wrong with us?

I can also call bullshit on articles like this one on Travolution in which a tiny, poorly worded sidebar poll on a travel industry blog gets blown up to represent that a majority of all travellers are in favour of body scanners that would not have flagged the completely pants bomber in the first place.

But ranting about this stuff on my blog reminds me of the depressing inevitability of the war in Iraq in late 2002 and early 2003. No matter how much we, the people, protested — and the lead-up to the war we saw the biggest anti-war protests in history — our governments still went blithely ahead. I may have high hopes for the decade ahead, but an end to the ridiculous security theatre that plagues us is beyond even my wildest dreams.