The SPAM Rule: There is no SPAM in your email

The number of people and companies who abuse the word SPAM continues to amaze me (that's me speaking as someone who started ringing alarm bells about unsolicited bulk email about ten years ago).

I see everyone from well-meaning hi-tech startups to established email companies talking about avoiding email SPAM. The fact is, email SPAM does not exist. It is email spam. The word SPAM is a trademark of Hormel Foods, used for a meat product that comes in a can (and the SPAM on the can in the special font is a registered trademark).

If you want to be taken seriously talking about spam in email you need to follow the rules: There can be spam in my email inbox but never SPAM and seldom Spam. You can say "Remove Spam From Email" but not "Remove SPAM From Email." The only time the stuff in email is SPAM is when it's hanging with a bunch of other capital letters like SPAM IN MY INBOX.

Are we clear now? I hope so.

The "Oilmen Lie" Rule


As a rule, the men who lead the petroleum industry cannot be trusted to tell the truth about their industry. In other words, you should never accept at face value what oilmen tell you about the oil business. And by oilmen I mean the men who run the petroleum business, not the many honest, hard-working folk who risk their lives to bring us the oil and gas products to which our country is sadly addicted. 

(For the record, I am saying "men" quite intentionally, because historically the oil business was started, and is led and run, almost entirely by men, not women. I am not saying that women are incapable of discovering novel uses for naturally occurring substances. Many have. However, while managing a large petroleum-based enterprise with ruthless efficiency and blatant disregard for the environment is not something a woman cannot do, not many have.)

I realize that publicly questioning the moral integrity of the leaders of a large and powerful industry in a blog post is a bit risky. Who knows when someone might be checking out my background—maybe as part of a hiring or employment process—and come across this post. But hey, if you can't get to say what you believe when you're pushing 60, then when?

I'm not just talking about all the lying BP executives have been doing in the last 40 days (and before that when they said they could do deep water drilling without screwing up life as we know it for millions of people). I worked with oilmen for three years back in the 1980s. I was Chief Oil and Gas Tax Auditor for a state that became the tenth largest oil-producer in the Union.

I approached that job as I do most things, with a passion for the past and as a path to the future. I read the history of the oil business. And I went on Petroleum Accounting courses. I did a week-long petroleum auditing boot camp out in Texas Hill Country, courtesy of the Texas Comptroller's office. 

I also did a lot of research for politicians and taxpayers who wanted to see an increase in the state's oil production tax—the one I was tasked with enforcing—from 5% of gross value to 10%. In hearings for those proposed tax increases, the oil industry spokesman told state lawmakers that the oil industry would leave the state if the tax was increased. Eventually the tax was doubled and the state eventually rose from 17th to 10th in the production rankings. That oilman lied. 

He also lied when he said, in about 1983, that there was no need to double the production tax because the price of oil would soon double, from the then current price of $30 per barrel, to $60 a barrel, so the state would soon see a doubling of oil tax revenues without changing the tax rate. Oil did not reach $60 a barrel until about 2006.

A great way to gauge the honesty of oilmen over the years is to read these four books:
  1. The Seven Sisters by Anthony Sampson.
  2. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power by Daniel Yergin.
  3. Texas Rich: The Hunt Dynasty from the Early Oil Days through the Silver Crash by Harry Hurt III.
  4. Oil! by Upton Sinclair (not the 2007 film “There Will Be Blood”).
Among the interesting things you will learn from these books is the way oilmen lied to Arabs in order to cheat them out of a fair price for their oil. And the fact that controls on the price of oil in America were originally put in place at the request of the oil industry, not imposed by the federal government. This may come as a shock if you grew up with the huge propaganda campaign oilmen mounted in the 1970s to get domestic oil prices deregulated. Yep, a whole lot of lying went on.

BTW, the last of those four books, Oil! may have the shortest title but it is one of the richest reads in twentieth century American literature. Forget the movie for which this book was butchered (There Will Be Blood). This long-neglected novel reveals a lot about American history that they just don't teach in (American) schools. Like the rule I'm citing here: Oilmen lie!

Facebook Tool Might Help With Privacy Settings and Awareness

Using Facebook means sharing personal information with at least some people, but Facebook sometimes makes changes to the way sharing works. Knowing exactly what you share and with whom can be hard to figure out. And at least some of your information is visible to everyone, even people who don't use Facebook, thanks to something called the Graph API. Confused? Fortunately, someone created a web tool that shows you what the Graph API reveals. Here's a sample of my Facebook information, as revealed by this tool:

How revealing is this? In one sense it is no revelation at all. It's no secret that I like Stagecoach Coffee. I've blogged about their great French Toast more than once. But in this screen shot I cropped the full report which shows I like a lot more than just these three things. Frankly, I was not aware that people who are not "on" Facebook could see this information and I am probably not the only person sharing this false assumption.

There are some potentially serious implications. What if you "like" something that is not liked by your boss or perhaps a prospective employer? Maybe you like the idea of legalizing marijuana. Some people could read that the wrong way. "Like" is the new Facebook term for "Fan" and maybe, perhaps a few years ago, you "fanned" some crazy stuff. Do you even remember all the things you fanned? (I had totally forgotten some of my likes).

So, my hat is off to Ka-Ping Yee, the Google.org software engineer and UC Berkeley graduate who created this little application that could have some big implications. (In that sense, he's a good example of a "white hat hacker," a gifted technologist who has shown us some of the pitfalls of a particular technology.) For example, thanks to Graph API you can check out people on Facebook without being logged into Facebook. You can just plug in their Facebook ID and look around. You can even enter random names and ID numbers. Some information is protected by privacy settings, some is not. And the reports that Ka-Ping Yee's web page displays contain live links (e.g. the report above shows a live link to the Stagecoach Coffee page) so you can just click your way from one piece of data to the next.

All of which is a little worrying when you factor in something I have blogged elsewhere, namely Facebook's founder Marc Zuckergerg's alleged indifference towards privacy. The various privacy missteps that Facebook has taken since its inception, and the difficulty many users have trying to keep up with changes to the way Facebook handles privacy settings, tend to add credence to the claim that Mr. Zuckerberg does not care about privacy. Consider what happens when you want to change your privacy settings.

Facebook makes you go through a two-step process if you want the most private of settings. When you want something to be visible to Everyone or Friends of Friends all you need is to select from a pull down list. But making something visible only to yourself is not visible as an option. You have to go through an extra step and choose Customize to see that choice.

That suggests the interface designers are not keen for you to get restrictive with your privacy. Of course, it could be a simple design flaw, but Facebook users are likely to be sensitive to such things these days, particularly when they learn that none of the settings can hide your "likes" from the Graph API and the outside world.

(If I have this wrong, please leave me a comment and let me know. I changed the privacy setting for "Things I Like" to "Only me" but they are still visible to the Graph API, as seen here: http://zesty.ca/facebook/#/stcobb/likes.)

Mark Zuckerberg Faces the Privacy Meter: Facebook trends open book

Face it folks, it's time to dust off the Privacy Meter for a quick check of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. According to an internal source, Mr. Zuckerberg has placed himself in the camp made (in)famous in 1999 by Scott McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, who was reported to have said: “You already have zero privacy anyway, so get over it.”

Mr. Zuckerberg's position was recently described by a Facebook insider in response to this question: "How does Zuck feel about privacy?" Response: “He doesn’t believe in it.”

The details of this revelation can be read here and I'd have to say it hardly amounts to a public statement by "Zuck" himself (for the record, Scott McNealy's declaration was not a public statement either, and should be placed in context, something I tried to do in my 2002 book on privacy).

I doubt that either Mr. Zuckerberg or Mr. McNealy would say, on the record, that they don't believe in privacy. What both men seem to share is a frustration with privacy concerns as they relate to digital systems. Human beings can be annoyingly inconsistent and hard to predict when it comes to matters of personal information. That makes it inherently difficult to design online communications and online communities that satisfy every shade of sentiment with respect to the sharing of personal information. And that's why I created the Privacy Meter:

Not exactly a high tech device, it nevertheless serves its purpose: to help people assess their own attitude to their personal information. I developed the privacy meter as a teaching tool, specifically to teach Chief Privacy Officers and other C-level execs that:

a. Everyone has a different place on the privacy scale, there is no "correct" score;

b. Entities like companies and agencies cannot handle privacy issues according to one person's views about privacy.

In other words, the fact that you're an open book kind of person does not make it okay to impose an open book approach on people who are more closed book. If you are closed book you can't impose that view either because it could limit your organization's ability to serve its customers. Most importantly, the way you handle other people's private data has to be in accordance with their view, not yours. That principle was established, in the context of computer data, back in 1974, and remains one of the pillars of privacy best practices in the realm of data protection (see Chapter 3 of Privacy for Business, available as a free .pdf file here).

Several years ago I put together a short set of slides on the privacy meter and the potential benefits and problems arising from getting privacy positioning right or wrong. You can click here to download the slides as a .pdf file which I recently updated to include Facebook's current privacy perception problem. That slide is pretty easy to understand:

Just a few hours after Wired puts out the story that your CEO doesn't believe in privacy, PC World publishes a story about the latest privacy invading scam that your system is enabling. Not good. Just the sort thing that can hurt your share price and tarnish your brand. Which is why your personal feelings about privacy should probably remain private when you are running a company.

[BTW, you can now download the full 240 page text of Privacy for Business (2002) as an Adobe Acrobat document from this web site; there's no charge and no registration required.]