Black Mirror choices can be snooped on?

Magic box

I have so much to say about Bandersnatch, most has been written here. But its clear that Netflix haven’t given up on the medium and even doubling down on it.

Something popped into my feed about some researchers paper saying you can snoop on the choices of people using Netflix’s interactive system. I’m hardly surprised as its typical network analysis and GDPR requests. But it reminds me how important the work we have done with perceptive media is.

I best explain it as delivering (broadcasting) the experience as a contained bundle which unfolds within the safe space (maybe living room) of the audience. Nothing is sent back to the cloud/base. This is closer to the concept of broadcast and means the audience/user(s) and their data isn’t surveil by the provider. This is exactly how podcasts use to work before podcast providers started focusing on metrics and providing apps which spy on their listeners. I would suggest the recent buy out of gimlet media by spotify might point this way too?

Of course the broadcast/delivery model this doesn’t work too well for surveillance capitalism but that frankly not my problem; and all audience interaction should be (especially under HDI) explicitly agreed before data is shared or exported.

I might be idealistic about this all but frankly I know I’m on the right side of history and maybe the coming backlash.

Standards in bundles

The concept is very simple.

One URL/URI points to a series of resources which have preselected by someone else. There usually arranged in someway, to either tell a story or illustrate a point

Bit.ly for example implemented bundles back in November.

We are thrilled to announce the launch of bit.ly bundles, a new way of sharing multiple links with a single bit.ly short URL.

You can start bundling links right away! Just head over to bit.ly, shorten some links and then hit the β€œBundle” button.

Its a good idea but I’d like to see some standard applied to bundles. For example it would be great if Xpointer could parse bundled links. It would be possible for browsers to support a small subset of Xinclude to give a standards approach to bundled links or heck take the XLink support in Firefox and shift it towards the purpose of bundled links.