On our privacy

My mother forwarded me an email recently with a link to a local news story. It warned, in grave terms, that your geotagged photos from your iPhone were revealing where you live and where your kids go to school. Anywhere you take pictures, you could be exposing your child to a predator! Whoa! Turn off geotagging!

But wait a second, isn't there another way to find out where you live? Oh, that's right - the phone book. And what about the school where your child goes? Well, if you live in a small town, there's probably only one school that they go to. Otherwise, is it really sensitive information where your child attends? If a predator is after your particular child, you'll have bigger worries than their discovering where he or she goes to school. We can't hide where the schools and playgrounds are because we have no idea who to hide them from and because parents can be predators, too. You won't keep that information private, so there's no reason to pretend you have control.

The reality is that much of this kind of privacy has not existed in our lifetimes and probably even less so before that. It's a recent development for us to even think so critically about privacy, because it used to be simple - you might have had a single private space in your home, and if you lived in a city you had some moderate anonymity in public. Even that wasn't necessarily true; ask my grandmother what kind of privacy her family had in the tenement apartment her family shared on the Lower East Side in the 1920s. As our worlds have grown larger in scope but smaller in accessibility, we've had the luxury of worrying about who knows what about us.

So rewind 30 years, before the emergence of personal computing and before Twitter and Skype. When you walked into a department store and signed up for a charge card, they took down all of your information. And they kept track of the things you bought. Did they keep this all private? No way! They turned around and sold it to a marketer for a couple of bucks. The marketer sent you brochures and circulars, and they called you at home during dinner to sell you mail-order frozen steaks or Hawaiian vacations. And they sold your information to every other marketer that would pay them a buck for it.

So what's your grocery store's privacy policy? What about your plumber's privacy policy, or your realtor's? And what about the woman who works the pastry counter at your favorite cafe - will she out you for your lemon bar addiction when you come in with a date? Tons of data is out in the world about you, both structured and unstructured. You are a walking, talking privacy disaster, and there isn't a damn thing to be done about it without retreating into some kind of self-sufficient wilderness life. And we haven't even talked about the Internet yet!

The accessibility of search and social media have made us all aware of how much data are being gathered about us and being used, both for products and to serve us targeted ads. But the great thing is that we've set expectations that each one of them needs to publish and stick to a privacy policy. And we have the right to read it, pick it apart and yell at them about it, or choose not to use a business whose policy we don't like. This is a huge leap in the transparency of how our data is being used! The Internet titans are way more transparent than their brick and mortar cousins. I know much better what Amazon is doing with my data when I search "paper towels" than I do when when I buy them in person at Joe's Paper Towel Emporium.

In addition to easily accessible privacy policies, the other advantage of Internet data use is that the big companies we care most about are not going and selling our data to advertisers and marketing agencies. Facebook is very happy to allow an advertiser to show their ad only to 25-year olds who are engaged and living within 20 miles of Philadelphia. But Facebook does not hand the advertiser a list of those people. That's the deal we get on the Internet. And it's way better than the one we get from the tangible world around us.

On driving your car with a manual transmission

Call for volunteers: we need someone in New York willing to teach Marco Arment to drive stick.

Marco talked on this week's Build and Analyze After Dark about his preference for stick shift and how he was impressed by an automatic transmission with a manual mode and paddle shifters. He also told us that he's "generally OK but not amazing" at driving stick and that he only stalls once in a while. He asserted that his wife would be happier with an automatic because his driving would be less jerky. Marco, I'm sorry to say that you might be a bit worse at all of this than you think. Here's why:

• A car properly driven with a manual transmission should be no more jerky than one with an automatic transmission. Unless you're equating fast acceleration to jerkiness, in which case the experiences would be the same, jerky manual transmission driving sounds like a symptom of giving too much gas while letting out the clutch, not easing off the gas before pushing it in, or both.
• I live in San Francisco, land of many hills, and I can count on one hand the number of times I have stalled in the past 5 years. If you're stalling in any way other than in weird cases where you were in gear and didn't realize it, you need some more help with starts.
• The value of a manual transmission is partially being able to shift when you'd like, and paddle-shift automatics do provide that service, but the real value of a manual transmission is being able to control exactly how much power goes down to the wheels. It's the clutch. You have very fine control of the connection between the engine and the wheels when you drive stick, and that's especially useful at times when you have poor traction (like, perhaps, driving on snowy hills in Westchester).

I'm also no expert on driving stick, but I know as much as I've learned driving stick since I first learned to drive.  Please, someone help Marco fix what he's doing wrong. We can't afford to lose too many more enthusiasts in the US before they start forcing us all to drive those giant Go Karts that everyone else drives.

On RIM's acceleration toward insignificance

RIM has a new series of ads on buses and subways - they picture very serious people who look like they do very serious things for a living. These people glare out of their posters with their arms crossed or hands busy with something more important than anything you do. They're captioned, "I'm not interested in down time," like the rest of us who enjoy other stuff on our phones are just idiots who do nothing.

Somehow, RIM has completely missed the reason that they have been unsuccessful in the past five years. The very serious people in their ads are exactly the people that used to use Blackberry devices and made them the market leader in smartphones for years. Those people switched devices. They started bringing iPhones and Android phones into work and asking IT if they could use them. Blackberry is trying to convince the people that used to love Blackberry that they really want the same experience they had five years ago, but the reality is that the rest of the world moved on. People want personal email, games, Twitter, and Instagram on their phone, regardless of whether they use the same device for sending work emails and calendar invites.

If this is RIM's idea of focusing on the enterprise, they may as well pack it in and cash out the shareholders. When customers demand a better experience, the answer is not to double down and convince them that they misunderstand the experience that they really want. That's a losing game plan.