Here’s what I think really happened.

Facebook used to have a wall-to-wall feature, which showed the wall posts between you and your friend in a back-and-forth conversation format. It looked sort of like this. Or this. Because this layout looks very similar to how messages work in Facebook, people treated wall-to-wall the same way they treat private messaging. But as the name suggests, wall-to-wall posts actually go on your (very public) wall. The wall-to-wall feature was removed in late 2010. Coincidentally, people are only reporting private messages on their timeline for 2010 and earlier.

That’s not to say there hasn’t be a privacy snafu. There absolutely is. Regardless of whether they’re wall posts or PMs, old embarrassing messages on your Timeline are still embarrassing. And if that bothers you, you should hide them.

But the cause of this privacy breach isn’t some Facebook engineer inadvertently flipping the privacy bit in the FB database. It’s really a UI / design problem, or more specifically, a divergence between Facebook’s model of users behave and the user’s mental model of how Facebook behaves. Two divergences really.

The first is the aforementioned wall-to-wall issue. From Facebook’s perspective, two users were posting on each other’s public walls. But from the user’s standpoint, based on the visual cues presented to them, they were engaging in a private conversation.

The second is Timeine itself. Timeline exposes old, possibly-private and sensitive information. Again, this is because of a divergence between mental models. For Facebook, the question of whether something is public is a binary decision. When the server receives a request for some particular information, it either provides it or it doesn’t.

But for many Facebook users, public really means accessible. And accessibility isn’t quite so binary. Prior to Timeline, sifting through old messages was time-consuming and difficult (it still is in a way). So by the time an old wall post was buried several months in the past, it may still have been public (as Facebook understood it), but it was relatively inaccessible. Timeline changed the accessibility of old information, and combined with the earlier wall-to-wall issue, we ended up with a huge chunk of Facebook users thinking their private messages were exposed (and in a way, they were).

Some final takeaways / questions:

Don’t trust your memory. When it comes to technology, what matters is what the technology thinks is true, not what you remember as true. As the Wall-to-Wall issue shows, poor UI design can affect how people perceive things are happening on the backend. In this case, if you still think there’s a PM on your timeline, the easiest way to verify this is to cross-reference it against your email archives (if you have your email archived that far back and you had e-mail notifications turned on). Until recently, Facebook would send a separate e-mail for wall posts and private messages. If it’s a private message, the e-mail will say so. And you should notify Facebook, because that’s a huge $#@&-up.

Privacy is often a design problem. Same with security. Or really anything else whether the error exists between keyboard and chair.

How do you resolve old UI mistakes? Facebook was almost certainly aware that many wall posts were intended to be private, despite being marked public. But because of the mis-marking, there’s no easy way to identify what user intent actually was for many of these messages. So what’s the proper response? This actually reminds me of the 2000 election in which many Gore voters likely inadvertently voted for Buchanan. But at least some of those Buchanan voters actually intended to vote for Buchanan, and there’s no easy way to tell who intended what, short of a re-vote. So what’s the fair thing to do here?

How do you roll out new paradigms with old data? Start-ups are all about rapid growth and change. Lots of iterations. The occasional pivot. The problem is this can look a lot like a bait-and-switch. Users may provide a company private information based on implicit assumptions on how that data is being used. And indeed, the company may share those assumptions, at least initially. But start-ups often to change course. Sometimes those changes may seem slight from the start-up’s perspective but strongly conflict with the user’s assumptions about how the data is handled. In such case, what’s the best way for a start-up to handle that?

Route and places visited on Google Maps.

Big Law

Large firms catering to large corporations, or more accurately, well-known partners catering to large corporations. Presumably, number of large corporations isn’t increasing relative to number of lawyers. Also, number of big law firms and well-known partners increase slowly because of the big law feedback loop — i.e. the only way you get to be a big firm is if you win big cases, and the only way you get big cases is by already being a big firm.

So for big law, your underlying demand (corporations) remains untouched. And your underlying supply (firms) is the same. But that doesn’t mean no change. More law students = more competitive to get a big law job. Effect of new technology — productivity per lawyer increases, and since caseload is fixed, lawyers per firm drops. You could argue that firms might hire more lawyers and ask them to do less work for less salary. But that’s unlikely — there are fixed costs per lawyer — HR, office space, etc. So firms are likely to hire fewer lawyers, but require higher productivity (ugh). And you’ll see the price tag for big law drop, although this will be the result of fewer hours billed rather than a lower hourly billing rate (assuming we don’t nix the hourly system altogether).

Solo Practitioner

Difference story for people hanging out a shingle. Supply is more closely linked to number of lawyers rather than number of firms, so legal costs should go down more dramatically. But this also depends on the nature of the legal services offered.

If you’re offering services with minimal court or client interaction — e.g. helping a small business owner incorporate, filing basic wills, drafting run-of-the-mill employment contract, etc. — technology works to your advantage. These things scale well. You have to charge a lower price per client, but you can also cater to more clients, so it’s a net wash. And if you’re sufficiently entrepreneurial, you can also seek out “underserved” clients, thereby expanding the market. For example, I normally wouldn’t pay a lawyer to review the purchase agreement for a new car. But suppose I could use my smartphone to snap a photo of the agreement and e-mail it to a lawyer. Normally, it’d take the lawyer an hour to review the entire contract, but by using pattern-recognition software to highlight unusual terms, she can send back her analysis of the contract in 15 minutes at a total cost of $100. I don’t know about you, but if it’s a $10K+ car, that seems reasonable.

On the other hand, if you’re dealing with legal services that require more interaction with people — e.g. child custody fights, criminal defense, landlord/tenant, etc. — then life is rough. New tech may help you do legal research or fill out forms faster, but it doesn’t do much to speed up interviewing a client or appearing in court. And you still have more competition, so you can’t charge as much as you used to.

Ethics

Some of this stuff poses an ethics problem as well. In order to compensate for the lower income-per-client, a lot of lawyers are going to take on more cases. To some extent, it’s great that more clients are able to get legal services at lower cost. But a lot of these lawyers are also going to take on more cases than they handle. And when it comes to stuff like child custody or criminal defense, that’ll get ugly. If it’s one thing that law school should teach, it’s time and case management.

My fifth year reunion is wrapping up now, and one thing I realize is that I used to be ambitious. Ridiculously so. Like take-over-the-world ambitious. Maybe I’m mellowing out and settling for a quiet life. A career. Maybe I’ll meet someone and settle down and have two-and-a-half-children and live in suburbia and drive a minivan. I’ll be a respectable lawyer working for big companies at a white shoe firm, and if I’m lucky, maybe I’ll be a cartoonist too — that sort of life. Choice C instead of “all of the above”. A world where I don’t call and hope others call me. Maybe.

We’ll see what happens to me. I hope there are explosions involved. But if not, I still hope my children end up ambitious. And I especially hope for that if my child ends up being a girl.

One of my favorite professors in law school has a daughter, and I remember him telling my class that he was worried that social stereotypes would pressure her to reject math and science. So he went out of his way to make find and make mathematical puzzles for her to solve, in the hopes that she might love math and science as much as he did.

Hopefully, that won’t backfire. My parents tried to make me a math-science wiz. And largely because of that, I dropped out of Computer Science and majored in “Government”. Oops. But I understand and respect the motive.

If I ever have a daughter, I probably won’t insist she be a math / science wiz. But I will insist that she be ambitious. Like take-over-the-world ambitious. Like Sheryl Sandberg meets Hillary Clinton ambitious. And she’ll probably hate me for it. But if I had a choice, that’s the daughter I’d choose. I hope she chooses that too.

P.S. If you actually are my daughter and you end up reading this through the magic of the Internet, no pressure. Also, listen to your mom. I don’t know she is, but she’s right.

Instagram’s user value is instant gratification:

• The time I most to want to share a photograph with friends is right after I take it. If I have to interact with other apps on my phone, or (heaven forbid) upload the pictures to my computer, photo sharing becomes less fun and more chore. Or I’m just going to forget to upload / send the photo to my friends. Instagram makes it easy to share the picture immediately, all within one app.
• It’s hard to take a good photo on a phone — even if the phone has high quality camera, the phone may be shaped awkwardly, hands are unsteady, etc. Instagram’s filters quickly makes photos “acceptable” for sharing. Of course, I could edit the photo in a photo-editing app on my laptop, but that means I can’t share my photo right away.
• Likewise, let’s say you take a photo of your friends and it’s sort of “meh”. Should you take another photo or is this fixable with some Photoshop filters? You can’t ask your friends to hang around while you fool around with Photoshop. On the other hand, Instagram lets you know right away.
• Instant gratification generates positive feedback loops. If you take a photo and Instagram makes it look awesome, you’ll want to take another photo. You’ll also want to share it. Sharing makes the Instagram community seem more active, which attracts new users. It also makes existing users want to come back and check for new content.

So why would Facebook buy Instagram?

In a nutshell, it’s because Instagram is good at encouraging sharing. It’s not entirely frictionless, but it’s gotten a lot closer to that experience than Facebook’s own app.

Specifically, Instagram’s app captures three types of data that Facebook badly wants:

1. Location data – Photos are often geo-tagged
2. Data with “real time” relevance – Instagram photos are shared soon after the event, so Facebook gets a better sense of when an important event is happening.
3. Whom your “real friends” are – you might post on the walls of a “Facebook friend”, but you only take photos of people you hang out with in real life

Facebook already has one way of getting this data — e.g. if you directly post photos to Facebook. But Instagram just executes better here — if only because it was built for that purpose.

Interestingly, Facebook is letting Instagram maintain some level of autonomy and brand identity (sort of like YouTube and Google), as well as letting Instagram users share on social networks that compete with Facebook’s. Odd, but I understand the logic — I’d bet Instagram’s brand has better favorable-unfavorable ratios than Facebook’s. And either way, Facebook still access to Instagram’s data. Moreover, to the extent that Instagram encourages sharing on existing social networks, Facebook is the primary beneficiary of this.

By contrast, imagine if Google bought Instagram and auto-shared all Instagram photos on Google+. Facebook would be pissed.

Finally, at least some of the purchase price value is for the team. Good user-experience designers are incredibly valuable. You want people who “get” what makes people happy and how to establish an emotional connection with a user. FB doesn’t always get that — e.g. just look at how often FB users seem to be pissed about something or another. I don’t know how closely Instagram’s designers will be working with other FB designers, but if they can teach Facebook about what makes a good user experience, that’s worth a lot to FB.

Sec. 1 – The Comptroller General of the United States shall have the power to declare that any piece of proposed legislation is silly.
Sec. 2 – For the purposes of sec. 1, legislation is silly if a substantial factor in how it was named was creating a contrived acronym.
Sec. 3 – The Comptroller General shall provide adequate notice that a piece proposed legislation has been declared silly, preferably by posting a yellow sticky note on his office door.
Sec. 4 – Once legislation has been declared silly, the sponsors of said legislation shall deposit $100 into a jar outside the Comptroller General’s office. The proceeds of this jar shall go towards reducing the national debt.
Sec. 5 – If the sponsor of silly legislation fails to comply with Sec. 4 in a timely manner, any member of the public shall have the legal right to deposit one (1) dead fish on the sponsor’s office desk.

My concern is that the bills are overbroad. They take down too much non-infringing speech in order to get at the stuff that does infringe upon copyright. I’m not sure whether the Supreme Court would hold that the bills abridge free speech rights under the First Amendment, but they would have a serious chilling effect upon free speech.

For example, suppose that the Russian equivalent of Google’s Blogger service hosts infringing content — say, at blogger.ru/piratedmovies. Suppose also that this is the only piece of infringing content and that the vast majority of content on blogger.ru is stuff like critiques of Dostoyevsky and recipes for borscht. Under Sec. 102 of SOPA, the Attorney General can obtain a court order to block off all U.S. access to blogger.ru. While the Russian operators of blogger.ru could, in theory, appear in a U.S. court to dispute the Attorney General’s actions, it’s unlikely that the operators of a Russian language website are going to go to that effort for the handful of American users interested in its Borscht recipes. Collectively though, this would block off Americans from a lot of “foreign” Internet account. It would, in effect, create a “Great Firewall of America”.

Or take the anti-circumvention provisions. Sec. 102(e)(4)(A)(ii) of SOPA makes it illegal to distribute “a product or service designed or marketed for the circumvention or bypassing of measures” used to block access to infringing foreign websites. The problem is that there’s no technical difference between a product Americans would use to get around a ban on our hypothetical blogger.ru/piratedmovies and one the Chinese would use to get around a ban on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989. The only real difference would be in how the technology was marketed. But that wouldn’t be much consolation to IP holders. It’s like how BitTorrent advertises itself as a way to distribute legal content but “everyone knows” that the main use of BitTorrent is to download copyrighted content for free.

This places the AG in a tough spot. Either he lets people get around these technical measures, or he cuts off access to technology used by human rights dissidents!

Finally, the immunization provisions create some perverse incentives. Sec. 103 of SOPA creates a notice-take-down scheme for payment processors and the like. In a nutshell, it works like this. Suppose some jerk decides to (falsely) notify PayPal that Tort Bunnies infringes upon his copyright. Under SOPA, PayPal must freeze my account and hold my money in limbo. I can file a counter-notice with PayPal saying that there’s no copyright issue since I own the copyright on Tort Bunnies, not this random bozo. But nothing in SOPA obligates PayPal to actually acknowledge my counter-notice and unfreeze my account. And Sec. 104 of SOPA immunizes PayPal from any lawsuit so long as it “reasonably” believes that Tort Bunnies is infringing.

In practice, this creates an incentive for PayPal to over-regulate free speech and block transactions for sites that are perfectly legal. Nor is there any liability for the jerk who falsely told PayPal to freeze my account so long as he didn’t “knowingly” make any misrepresentations. This creates an incentive for rights holders to abuse the takedown process, since there’s no penalty for negligence or recklessness, only knowing misrepresentations.

In theory, maybe these abuses and restrictions of free speech would be worth it if copyright infringement was a serious enough problem right now. And Hollywood would argue it is. But somehow the movie industry is still seeing record profits despite piracy. Even the music industry seems to be recovering. Sure, maybe profits could have been even higher with stronger enforcement of IP rights. But chilling perfectly legal free speech isn’t worth the price.

If you’re interested in why these bills are a bad idea from a technical perspective,  here’s why (PDF). I don’t think it necessarily “breaks” the Internet, but it would make things less secure.

UPDATE (11/16/2011): Actually, the more I think about it, the more I believe PROTECT IP would “break” the Internet. Read Michael Geist’s article about how the bills would assert American control over Canadian websites. Much of the Internet’s infrastructure is U.S.-centric. Every dot-com, for instance, is registered in the U.S. Other countries have tolerated this because we’re generally pretty even-handed about things. But unilaterally subjecting the basic building blocks of the Internet to U.S. law (and the quirks of U.S. politics and the U.S. legal system) would undermine that trust. As more and more try to assert their online independence from America, collateral damage is very likely.

Also, check out Techdirt’s concerns about SOPA’s language penalizing “deliberate actions to avoid confirming a high probability of the use of the U.S.-directed site to carry out acts that constitute” infringement.

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There’s a White House petition against SOPA/E-PARASITE here. You should sign it.

I probably won’t agree with all of UI choices being made with Windows 8, and I’m sure I’ll have plenty to gripe about when it finally comes out. But the one thing you get from Windows 8 blog is that Microsoft spends a lot of time thinking about their UI choices and trying to make their users happy. For example, the team uses a good chunk of this blog post to explain concepts like Fitts’ Law and minimizing the amount of time to launch an app. Arguably, some of the “big picture” stuff gets lost with this attention to very specific metrics. But you get the sense that a lot of care is going into Microsoft’s Windows 8 UI.

Contrast this to Google’s new UI changes.

One of the most atrocious implementations of the Google’s new gray, black, and red theme is the new Google Reader. I’ll defer to criticism from folks more familiar with the product. But suffice to say, the new Google Reader redesign raises the question of whether anyone on the team actually put the product in front of real people.

I remember stories about how how Google conducted massive amounts of AB testing on even tiny changes to the interface. Engineers would analyze each extra link on google.com or use of a different shade of blue. Guess that’s not being applied across the board.

I get the impression that Google’s UI team really wants to be like Apple. Like there’s some creative overlord that just imposes “freshness” and “good taste” across each of Google’s products in a consistent manner. Well, I don’t know how Apple works. But whatever it does, Google’s doing a piss poor job at imitating it.

I wish had larger versions of the photo, but I couldn’t find one.

If you’re using one of the newer versions of PowerPoint on a PC, this is straight-forward enough. You just pull up the Document Inspector and tell it to remove notes, along with other possibly sensitive metadata. Here’s how to do it in PowerPoint 2007 and PowerPoint 2010.

But let’s say you’re using a Mac. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to remove notes in PowerPoint for Mac 2011 (if there’s a way to do it, please let me know in the comments). You may be able to use some VBScript macros, but explaining scripting to someone with little technical experience can be difficult.

So I took the liberty of packaging this as an Automator app for OS X, and as an .exe for Windows. If you’re interested, you can download my Python source code as well. It takes advantage of the fact that PPTX files are really nothing more than zip archives of XML files.

• OS X app
• Windows .exe
• Python source