Okay let’s pause it right there.
Let’s talk about Nimses recently promoted by Pewdiepie without falling into the pit
of conspiracy theories and without personally attacking Felix.
What is Nimses?
Nimses would have you believe it’s an American company.
But make no mistake about it.
It’s a Ukrainian social media platform that is trying to penetrate Western markets.
Nimses is incorporated in Delaware, which is ranked among the best and most convenient
states to incorporate your company in the US if you are a foreign entity.
Nimses’ strategy to win against the dominance of the Facebook/Instagram empire is trying
to lure users in by offering them a virtual currency for their time spent on the platform.
This sounds like a novel idea, even to Felix.
But it is not.
Minds.com, which is a pro-free speech open source social network, also rewards its users
with points for every activity on the platform.
Minds is also privacy focused, which means they are not deploying trackers to mine your
personal and location data to monetize the hell out of your existence.
Nimses, on the other hand, presents itself as a geolocation app and it is impossible
to use it without broadcasting your live location feed to the company’s servers at all times.
Their privacy policy is quite honest about it:
IF YOU DO NOT WANT NIMSES TO COLLECT AND TO PROCESS YOUR DATA AT ALL, PLEASE DO NOT USE
THE SERVICES.
Unlike Minds, Nimses relies on 49 cookies to deliver its service, most of them purposed
for analytics and targeted advertising.
So how does Nimses plan to succeed in the world of privacy invasive and speech controlling
social media?
By respecting your digital rights and speech?
No.
By paying you for using it.
At least virtually.
The concept of offering virtual monetary incentives to grow one’s user base in exchange for
their private information is a logical evolution from the advertiser-centered Web 2.0.
The market for human attention is oversaturated.
People are increasingly becoming aware that they are paying for a free service with their
data.
But if you give some of that ad-generated money back to the users without whom you’d
have no data to monetize, you might create an illusion that people are getting a better
deal on your network than on Facebook.
So how is Nimses going to do this?
Nimses generates one nim every minute of your life on the platform.
This virtual currency is centrally controlled by the company and its value doesn’t seem
to be backed by anything other than what the company currently says.
With traditional cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Litecoin, you are in control of your coins,
the network stands on the consensus of all its stakeholders, and the value is backed
by the market.
There is no central authority in control of the Bitcoin network nor the value of bitcoin
itself.
It’s easy to create your own virtual coin.
The harder part is to persuade people of its value.
That is what caused the cryptocurrency bubble burst last year that Bitcoin is still recovering
from.
Too many people created their own coins to fund their app development projects or shady
schemes but ultimately failed to back the value of their own creations.
Nimses promises to create an ecosystem of goods and services that you could spend your
nims on.
The more people sign up for Nimses, the more people could potentially use nims and hence,
the demand would raise the value of nimcoin.
But there’s a catch.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are valuable because they are scarce.
There is a maximum of 21M possible bitcoins in circulation and there will never be a single
satoshi more.
Bitcoins are not generated but rather mined by solving complex algorithmic functions.
With nims however, there doesn’t seem to be a cap.
As more nimcoins are generated with time and as the number of users increases, the amount
of nims in circulation will also increase.
And thus Nims will never be scarce.
If Pewdiepie’s wish came true, then your only opportunity cost of spending your nims
is time.
The more time passes, the less value your nims have because in the process of endless
money generation time is on the side of inflation.
If you are not familiar with the concept of virtual currencies, imagine if the US Federal
Reserve began printing $1 for each American every minute of their life.
Not just giving them $1, but actually printing a new note each minute for each American citizen.
For a while, it would seem everyone has more money.
So they would go spend it on their favorite goods and services.
Which would increase a demand for those products so much their suppliers would run out of stock
and would have to increase prices.
Which means your same $1 banknote would now buy less stuff.
But the Fed would still print you more notes, so that would make up for the difference.
Until another price increase happens.
And then you’d need even more dollars to buy even less stuff.
Until you realize the green papers you are holding in your hand have no value because
they are not limited by scarcity.
They are abundant.
And there is nothing you can do because the Fed just keeps printing more.
A sustainable concept for Nimses instead of automatically rewarding each user with a time-generated
coin would be to use a computational power of their users’ devices to mine nims, of
which there would be a capped amount.
Only then would demand for Nims legitimately grow their value and users could safely use
this currency for real purchases.
But there is no game in that.Mining cryptocurrency wouldn’t necessarily incentivize spending
more time on the platform.
But Nimses needs your activity.
Because they need your data.
That’s how they make money.
Rewarding users with a virtual currency that may or may not have any value whatsoever is
the main selling point of Nimses.
It doesn’t seem the company would change anything substantial about this.
And other than that, Nimses has nothing special to offer, because it’s your average run-of-the-mill
privacy invasive, speech policing, centrally controlled social media app.
Felix got very defensive when his 9yo army criticized his sponsorship choice on his subreddit.
I would actually agree with this
advice if it was delivered in a less condescending way.
It’s like we are not allowed to criticize privacy invasive design decisions.
In the age of digital surveillance, do we really need more privacy invasive social media
platforms?
Or should we be more concerned with finally securing the inherently insecure Internet
that the modern world so fundamentally relies on?
There is a reason advertisers are so hungry for your data.
It works.
Data-driven targeted advertising is extremely efficient at squeezing more money from you.
Whether it’s a targeted manipulation from political campaigns, or algorithmically raising
prices for products that you need and lowering them for those that you don’t, marketers
are hungry to know you personal data.
And in this arena, Nimses is a privacy nightmare.
It was very unfortunate when Felix dismissed all criticism of the Nimses app as spreading
misinformation.
Especially when somebody on Pewdiepiesubmissions posted a decompiled APK of the app revealing
some its intrusive permissions.
We’ll get to that in a minute.
Can Nimses track you even after you uninstall it?
Yes, it can.
Not as an app.
But as a company.
They can use your personally identifiable information and your device information to
continue tracking you through their outside trackers and third parties.
This practice is known as shadow-profiling and Facebook has been doing the same for ages.
It’s a practice deserving all the backlash and criticism.
Here is a list of permissions posted on the subreddit thread.
Felix’s justification is that everyone does it so it must be okay.
It’s your ordinary social media app and that’s how it goes so you deal with it.
But that’s exactly the whole point.
Nimses is like Facebook on steroids.
Among many permissions that Felix so condescendingly dismissed as totally harmless, are access
to your camera, microphone, your location through all possible means – GPS, WiFi and
cellular network, and your contacts.
Now I agree that most law abiding citizens should not worry too much about the app’s
access to your camera or microphone, unless you are politically active or a journalist.
However, real time access to your precise location in all three dimensions alongside
access to your phonebook should give everyone a pause.
Nimses is not shy about using this information to study your behavior and build profiles
from the collected data.
Its privacy policy even lays out this example: if a user frequently attends a dental clinic,
Nimses can make some conclusions about the health of the user and the user can see some
promotional offers of dental clinics.
This information is not going be kept secret.
Nimses reserves the right to share your data with third parties, including advertisers.
Although they claim this data is only aggregated and cannot be used to identify a particular
person.
Obviously, Nimses is never going to disclose how exactly they are protecting individual
data before transferring it.
Even if it is anonymized, which in itself is a vaguely understood and inefficient practice,
any advertiser can use the data and match it with their database to easily re-identify
particular individuals.
How is your health record going to impact the price of your private health insurance?
Or the interest on your savings account?
Nimses also has a right to sell your private data to whomever acquires their company, or
whoever Nimses merges with.
The highest bidder can come from anywhere in the world.
Are you comfortable with giving a precise history of all the locations you ever visited
with Nimses installed on your phone to anyone who is willing to buy it?
Selling access to all your contacts and friends is the root problem behind the Cambridge Analytica
scandal with Facebook.
87 million users were affected by having their data used for a political campaign without
their knowledge or consent when only a few hundred thousand people actually downloaded
the app because the same policy used to be a practice at Facebook.
The fact that Felix presents protecting your own privacy as something ancient or completely
unreasonable, is deeply troubling.
Of course privacy matters.
Not for its own sake.
But for the damage absence of privacy could cause you if your personal information fell
into the hands of people with an interest against you.
How damaging would it be if somebody uploaded a livestream of Pewdiepie’s day in life
without his knowledge or consent?
How would the media react to how Felix lives his life, what he said, places he’s been
to and people he met?
At a time when we start realizing social media are probably doing more harm than good to
our society, is it really so innocent to promote yet another social media platform that is
reinforcing the same broken practices?
None of this is to criticize Pewdiepie’s personality, nor is it to say Felix is a worse
person because he promoted a privacy invasive social media app.
But I feel like the position of protecting your own privacy and holding platforms accountable
for bad data practices needs be defended.
I am not too worried about privacy.
I am more worried about the fact that knowledge is power.
I don’t like the idea of someone having that power over me.
And that’s why I protect my privacy.