I had a discussion with my class today about issues that are raised by keeping our data in the Cloud. It was an interesting conversation, and a number of students raised some really interesting points.<\/p>\n
At some point I mentioned something a colleague had said to me recently. “What happens,” he asked, “after you take a picture with SnapChat?”<\/p>\n
The students all knew part of the answer. After a little while, your image disappears.<\/p>\n
But then I asked them what my colleague had asked me: What happens to the data? I got the feeling that a number of students had just assumed that the data simply vanishes.<\/p>\n
But of course it doesn’t. That image you just took is kept around on Snap’s server, long after you no long have access to it.<\/p>\n
The information in all of those images is very valuable to advertisers, since it adds to a growing profile of users’ likes and dislikes. Which explains Snap’s high (if somewhat volatile) market valuation.<\/p>\n
Some students seemed non-plussed by this point. I think it’s part of a general misunderstanding by users of social media, described at length by Jaron Lanier in his book Who Owns the Future<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Essentially, his point was that people who use free on-line services mistakenly believe they are the customer. When in fact they are the product.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had a discussion with my class today about issues that are raised by keeping our data in the Cloud. It was an interesting conversation, and a number of students raised some really interesting points. At some point I mentioned something a colleague had said to me recently. “What happens,” he asked, “after you take … Continue reading “Snap judgment”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18487"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18487"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18489,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18487\/revisions\/18489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}