From Dan Gillmore in today's Guardian
If you buy a refrigerator for your home, it's yours. And once installed, it's going to work the same way for the rest of its working life, letting you organise perishable food inside a cold space.
But in the world of technology, once you buy something – or, even more, become a user of a web-based service – there is a very good chance that it will change. And increasingly, the changes come with a take-it-or-leave it choice – which is to say, little to no choice at all.
This comes to mind this week as Facebook announces the latest array of changes and improvements to the social media platform that has become by far the biggest global network apart from the internet itself. Many of its users consider Facebook to be integral to their lives, but they will live with the new features – some of which sound quite useful – or they will leave. At least some of its users have already told journalists, based on some news leaks, that they are outraged.
The Facebook changes come only a couple of days after Google added many new features to its much-less-developed Google+ social networking product. Google's users welcomed the additions, but who's to say that a year from now Google won't turn the product in radical new directions.
But it's not just web-based products and services that change radically. The more a company has market power – that is, the more captive or happy its customers are with what they've been using – the more ability it has to shift directions in ways that make clear who is boss.
Consider what Apple did this summer with its new Mac OS operating system for desktop and laptop computers. Apple has been steering its business toward the iOS ecosystem it has created around mobile devices (iPhone and iPad) – a world it utterly controls. Mac OS X "Lion", as the new operating system is called, took on more iOS-like features and gave credence to some observers' belief (including mine) that Apple's long-range plan is to converge the two ecosystems.
Because I like the Mac, which gives me freedom to install what softwareI choose to install, and don't like the iOS restrictions on what software may run, that trend worries me. Moreover, I strongly dislike many of the new cosmetic and more structural features Apple has put into Lion. On the computer (not the one I use every day) where I've been testing Lion, I've had to do a series of tweaks to recover most – but not all – of the functionality I had with the previous OS. But if I buy a new Mac, I will have no alternative but to use Lion or its successor; Apple rigs its new hardware in ways that prohibit the operation of previous operating systems.
But it's Apple's ecosystem, not mine. And if I want to keep being a Mac user, I'm going to have to do it Apple's way, not mine. (I am making alternate plans, about which I'll say more here soon.)
The control-freak behavior by companies is worst when they change existing products that you've purchased and can't return. The latest egregious example comes from OnStar, a communications system sold with many General Motors vehicles. The GPS-based service has been marketed primarily as a way of letting others know if you've been in an accident or otherwise need help in your car.
But OnStar can do a lot more than that. It records, among other things, just about everywhere a driver has gone, and at what speed. And last week, OnStar changed the terms of service to allow it to use customers' data in just about any way it chooses – including selling it to other companies. The uproar was deafening, especially when people realised that even if they stopped subscribing to the service, OnStar could (and would) continue to capture the data and do what it pleased with the information unless customers explicitly disabled the devices. Thecompany's assurances that it would not actually misuse the information fell on understandably sceptical ears.
We're only at the beginning of this trend, I fear. Someday soon – count on it – governments will order car makers to install software and communications "services" that give government not just the power to know where you are, but also to govern your top speed or, should it decide it needs to do this, stop your car, dead, on the highway.
The point is this: the more our products contain software – and increasingly, code is integral to the things we buy – the more likely it will be that these products are not really ours anymore. The companies that sell them (or, in the case of web services, allow us to use them) will increasingly make decisions that they can change at a whim, or a court order. Probably the most infamous example to date took place whenAmazon reached into its customers' Kindle book readers in 2009 to delete copies of – irony alert – George Orwell's 1984, which, it turned out, were being sold illegally by one of its online vendors.
I don't expect bad faith to rule. Most of the changes will be upgrades, no doubt. But we will have no choice but to accept them. That's the problem.
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