Marc Goodman > Quotes

“Google gets $59 billion, and you get free search and e-mail. A study published by the Wall Street Journal in advance of Facebook’s initial public offering estimated the value of each long-term Facebook user to be $80.95 to the company. Your friendships were worth sixty-two cents each and your profile page $1,800. A business Web page and its associated ad revenue were worth approximately $3.1 million to the social network. Viewed another way, Facebook’s billion-plus users, each dutifully typing in status updates, detailing his biography, and uploading photograph after photograph, have become the largest unpaid workforce in history. As a result of their free labor, Facebook has a market cap of $182 billion, and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has a personal net worth of $33 billion. What did you get out of the deal? As the computer scientist Jaron Lanier reminds us, a company such as Instagram—which Facebook bought in 2012—was not valued at $1 billion because its thirteen employees were so “extraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it.” Its inventory is personal data—yours and mine—which it sells over and over again to parties unknown around the world. In short, you’re a cheap date.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“If you control the code, you control the world. This is the future that awaits us.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“If J. K. Rowling had written Harry Potter in Google Docs instead of Microsoft Word, she would have granted Google the worldwide rights to her work, the right to adapt or dramatize all the Muggles as Google saw fit, to say nothing of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Google would have retained the rights to sell her stories to Hollywood studios and to have them performed on stages around the world, as well as own all the translation rights. Had Rowling written her epic novel in Google Docs, she would have granted Google the rights to her $15 billion Harry Potter empire—all because the ToS say so.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“Shockingly, the Deep Web is a massive five hundred times larger than the surface Web you use and search every day. While the Deep Web contains seventy-five hundred terabytes of information, the Googleable universe contains a paltry nineteen terabytes. According to a study published in Nature, Google captures no more than 16 percent of the surface Web and misses all of the Deep Web. As a result, when you search Google, you are only seeing 0.03 percent (one in three thousand pages) of the information that actually exists and would be available online”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“did you realize every time you speak a query into Apple’s Siri artificial intelligence agent, your voice recording is analyzed and stored by the company for at least two years?”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“The noted Yale computer science professor Edward Tufte once observed that there are only two industries that refer to their customers as users: computer designers and drug dealers. Importantly, you are equally as likely to recover damages from either of them for the harms their products cause.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“In China, organ brokers are particularly targeting young people in Internet forums with slogans such as “Donate a kidney, buy the new iPad.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“Mathematically, IPv4 can only support about 232 or 4.3 billion connections. IPv6, on the other hand, can handle 2128 or 340,​282,​366,​920,​938,​463,​463,​374,​607,​431,​768,​211,​456 connections. The implications of a number this large are mind-boggling. There are only 1019 grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. That means IPv6 would allow each grain of sand to have a trillion IP addresses. In fact, there are so many possible addresses with IPv6 that every single atom on our planet could receive a unique address and we would “still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths.” It is in the wake of these changes that the Internet of Things will be born.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“The challenge, however, is that Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon do not publish their algorithms. In fact, the methods they use to filter the information you see are deeply proprietary and the “secret sauce” that drives each company’s profitability. The problem with this invisible “black box” algorithmic approach to information is that we do not know what has been edited out for us and what we are not seeing. As a result, our digital lives, mediated through a sea of screens, are being actively manipulated and filtered on a daily basis in ways that are both opaque and indecipherable.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don’t understand the problems and you don’t understand the technology. BRUCE SCHNEIER Cyber”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“Accordingly, the word “Facebook” appeared in a full one-third of divorce filings in 2011. All of this provides excellent fodder for the 81 percent of divorce attorneys who admit searching social media sites for evidence that can be used against their clients’ spouses. For instance, all the data shared on Facebook and Twitter and all the cell-phone call records and GPS locational data that neatly recorded whose cell phone was next to whose and when become fair game in the battle royal that can be divorce proceedings. The pictures innocently taken of you at all those parties over the years, blurry-eyed with drink in hand, now become evidence of unfit parenting, a nugget of gold for opposing counsel during cross-examination.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“We saw a blatant example of this abuse in mid-2014 when a study published by researchers at Facebook and Cornell University revealed that social networks can manipulate the emotions of their users simply by algorithmically altering what they see in the news feed. In a study published by the National Academy of Sciences, Facebook changed the update feeds of 700,000 of its users to show them either more sad or more happy news. The result? Users seeing more negative news felt worse and posted more negative things, the converse being true for those seeing the more happy news. The study’s conclusion: “Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“We are at the dawn of a technological arms race, an arms race between people who are using technology for good and those who are using it for ill.”
― Marc Goodman

“As should be obvious by now, surveillance is the business model of the Internet. You create “free” accounts on Web sites such as Snapchat, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and PatientsLikeMe and download free apps like Angry Birds, Candy Crush Saga, Words with Friends, and Fruit Ninja, and in return you, wittingly or not, agree to allow these companies to track all your moves, aggregate them, correlate them, and sell them to as many people as possible at the highest price, unencumbered by regulation, decency, or ethical limitation. Yet so few stop and ask who else has access to all these data detritus and how it might be used against us. Dataveillance is the “new black,” and its uses, capabilities, and powers are about to mushroom in ways few consumers, governments, or technologists might have imagined.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“Screens tell you not what is really out there but what the government or Facebook thinks you should see. If you searched for something and it wasn’t there, how would you know it really was? To paraphrase an old philosophical question, if a tree falls on the Internet and no search engine indexes it, does it make any noise? As we live our lives increasingly mediated through screens, when it doesn’t exist online, it doesn’t exist.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“Analysis of your social network and its members can also be highly revealing of your life, politics, and even sexual orientation, as demonstrated in a study carried out at MIT. In an analysis known as Gaydar, researchers studied the Facebook profiles of fifteen hundred students at the university, including those whose profile sexual orientation was either blank or listed as heterosexual. Based on prior research that showed gay men have more friends who are also gay (not surprising), the MIT investigators had a valuable data point to review the friend associations of their fifteen hundred students. As a result, researchers were able to predict with 78 percent accuracy whether or not a student was gay. At least ten individuals who had not previously identified as gay were flagged by the researchers’ algorithm and confirmed via in-person interviews with the students. While these findings might not be troubling in liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts, they could prove problematic in the seventy-six countries where homosexuality remains illegal, such as Sudan, Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia, where such an “offense” is punished by death.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“When you post your vacation plans on social media and burglars pay a visit, it was your decision to share that helped facilitate their criminal activity.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“But many of these Silicon Valley entrepreneurs hard at work creating our technological future pay precious little attention to the public policy, legal, ethical, and security risks that their creations pose to the rest of society.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it. ALAN KAY, XEROX PARC”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“No matter how many firewalls, encryption technologies, and antivirus scanners a company uses, if the human being behind the keyboard falls for a con, the company is toast. According to a 2014 in-depth study by IBM Security Services, up to 95 percent of security incidents involved human error.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“Fifty-five percent of people use the same password across most Web sites, and 40 percent don’t even bother to use one at all on their smart phones.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“Today, using the distributed computing power of the cloud and tools such as CloudCracker, you can try 300 million variations of your potential password in about twenty minutes at a cost of about $17. This means that anyone could rent Amazon’s cloud-computing services to crack the average encryption key protecting most Wi-Fi networks in just under six minutes, all for the paltry sum of $1.68 in rental time (sure to drop in the future thanks to Moore’s law).”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“Facebook’s own security department has shockingly acknowledged that over 600,000 accounts are compromised every day.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“The problem is that we are leading lives fully intermediated by screens and other technologies that, although they give the appearance of transparency, are in fact programmed, controlled, and operated by others. Worse, none of us have a freaking clue as to how any of it works. Increasingly, we are living in a “black box” society, one in which magical boxes provide directions, report the news, execute stock trades, make phone calls, recommend restaurants, and put the world’s knowledge at our fingertips.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“Today 89 percent of employees are accessing work-related information on their mobile phones, and 41 percent are doing so without permission of their companies.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“Who was this criminal mastermind behind Silk Road? Not at all whom you would expect. Ross Ulbricht was the kind of kid any parent would be proud of, an Eagle Scout from Austin, Texas, who had earned a master's degree in science and engineering.”
― Marc Goodman

“An investigation by the House Energy and Commerce Committee revealed that “more than a dozen American utility companies reported ‘daily,’ ‘constant,’ or ‘frequent’ attempted cyber-attacks ranging from phishing to malware infection to unfriendly probes. One utility reported that it had been the target of more than 10,000 attempted cyber attacks each month.” The report concluded that foreign governments, criminals, and random hackers were all hard at work either planning or attempting to take down the grid.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“China has secretly developed an army of 180,000 cyber spies and warriors, mounting an incredible ninety thousand computer attacks a year against the U.S. Defense Department networks alone. The totality of the thefts and their impact on American national security are breathtaking.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“Those very same metadata are contained in millions of photographs posted to sale and auction sites such as Craigslist and eBay. For example, a photograph of a diamond ring or an iPad posted on Craigslist might have embedded with it the precise location of your home where the photograph was taken.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes