Nathan Lustig

Crowdsourcing Policing: A Double Edged Sword

Category : Personal Thoughts, Technology
Posted on April 18, 2013 by Nathan Lustig

We’re going through the biggest period of change in human behavior since the invention of the printing press. One of the biggest changes is crowdsourcing: the ability to have many people do tasks that individuals and small groups used to in the past.

You can find examples of crowdsourcing changing nearly every industry including encyclopedias (wikipedia), news (twitter), sports reporting (bleacher report), investing (kiva, kickstarter), menial tasks (mechanical turk), tshirts (threadless), space exploration (mars rover) logo design (99designs), editing (ueditme), traffic (waze), travel reviews (lonleyplanet), restaurant reviews (yelp), even concert tours (eventful). Pretty much any industry you can think of has been disrupted by crowdsourcing. Most for the better.

Crowdsourcers use the ubiquity of data and an internet connection to provide better service to consumers than they previously had from full time employees or big, slow institutions. Many of these services have replaced the old guard completely. Nobody would think of looking at encyclopedia britannica anymore. Wikipedia is way better, easier and cheaper.

Crowdsourcing has started to spill over into even more traditional industries like government and policing. Police have always had tiplines and there have always been amateur sleuths, but the internet, a proliferation of data, and online communities have supercharged these efforts. Regular people, or those with a cause, can help police identify witnesses, send in tips and even add to the investigation.

In Boston, reddit and 4chan immedietly sprang to life to try to identify the bombers. In another case, a gearhead was able to identify the car used in a hit and run just by looking at a photo of it’s headlight. In the Stubenville rape case, Anonymous hacked into youtube, email and other online services to gain access to incriminating texts, videos and pictures that directly led to the rapists’ conviction. In another case the police released a video of an assault and the perpetrator was identified by his social media a few hours later. These are all cases where the crowd’s participation has led to justice.

In the Boston bombing, it’s led to singling out many people, most of whom are not guilty, but so far nobody’s been falsely accused by these amateurs. But what happens when the wisdom of the crowd turns into a mob? What happens when online sluethes are convinced they have a suspect?

The mob has started to publish people’s personal details, family, net worth, address etc. During the Trayvon Martin case, Spike Lee tweeted the personal details of the wrong Zimmerman. The family was harassed and intimidated and feared for their lives as the mob circled them. When Anonymous or other internet hackers have disagreed with individuals or believed that they’ve committed a crime, their response has been to publish personal details, invade their privacy and try to turn the mob on them.

Some people believe that the crowd can replace traditional police work. And that the crowd can act as a deterrent to bad behavior. I believe that the crowd can help, but we must weigh the potential to shame innocents and devolve into mob behavior and public lynchings of people who should be innocent until proven guilty. I don’t want to live in a world of distributed 1984, where everyone is watching, everyone can be an informer. That doesn’t sound like fun to me.

We must come up with new social norms that allow the crowd to help out, like in the Stubenville rape case, but that deter people from devolving into mob behavior, publishing people’s personal details and shaming people before they’re are proven guilty, or at least until there’s significant evidence to support the conclusion. This will be a big trend to watch over the next 3-5 years as these social norms develop.

Google Follows Entrustet with Inactive Account Manager

Category : Entrustet
Posted on April 15, 2013 by Nathan Lustig

Last week Google announced Inactive Account Manager, a way to decide what happens to your Google accounts when you die. Google is the first major company to create a viable, real service to actually help their users plan for their death. Four and a half years after Jesse and I started Entrustet in a library at the University of Wisconsin, we’re finally seeing the first real, concrete step from a major company to address this massive problem.

Google’s system allows you to choose whether your accounts are deleted or transferred to a trusted third party when your accounts become inactive. You set the inactivity period, between 3-12 months, and then Google will send you a text message to make sure you’re actually inactive (read:dead) before taking any action. I’d prefer a third verification step, like contacting a nominated third party (our digital executor concept) to verify you’re actually dead, as I believe google will end up deleting or transferring accounts of people who are still living. These “deathswitches” are not fool proof and I think one extra layer of protection is a good compromise.

All in all, it’s great to see. It’s an incredible first step. We started Entrustet in November 2008 after reading about US Marine Justin Ellsworth’s family’s efforts to gain access to his Yahoo account after he was killed in Iraq. We created Entrustet to make sure that nobody would ever have to go to court to get access to their loved one’s digital information and to make sure that people could control what happened.

When we first talked to Google, Facebook and other major companies in 2009 and 2010, they were interested but made it very clear they weren’t interested in doing anything about the problem yet. Over the past four and a half years, we, along with our competitors, we featured in just about every single newspaper and major internet publication in the world, bringing massive attention to the problem. Our acquisition brought even more PR. More and more people had personal experiences with people who passed away, leaving their digital lives a mess for their survivors. Some states even have started to change their laws.

I expect other companies to follow Google’s lead and create a digital inheritance manager. There’s an opportunity for a startup to create a 3rd party SaaS app that any company can plug into, but it will be hard sledding. It’s a massive market, but a hard one to crack. There are at least 3m people who die on Facebook each year and Google’s numbers are likely the same. Every online service has a similar problem. So do offline services.

Alternatively, Google (or Facebook), could become the central hub of death verification online and sell access to their API for anyone, including governments, insurance companies and any online service to use, under the assumption that if someone’s dead on google, you can trace their online profiles based on Google connections, email accounts and personal data. Google could do it if they wanted and become the arbiters of life and death online. I believe this is at least a $100m per year business, maybe more.

It’s been fun seeing how this has evolved since we came up with the idea in 2008. It will be interesting to see what happens. Stay tuned, there is going to be massive innovation in this morbid, yet necessary industry.

Chronicle of Two World Cup Qualifiers

Category : Sports
Posted on March 31, 2013 by Nathan Lustig

World Cup qualifiers are special matches. In South America, there are only 16 meaningful matches over four years to decide which 5 soccer mad countries make it to the World Cup. In North America, there are only 10.

Each game is a grinder. The pressure is high. Any screw up can mean dropped points and the potential to miss the World Cup. In most countries outside of the US, the entire country stops for each match. On match day, Chileans gather round their tvs to watch the game, accompanied by friends and family, piscola, beer and sometimes day long asados. The national mood rides on the result: a win national ecstasy, a loss, national depression, followed by assigning blame and national soul searching.

Last week, Chile sat in 6th place, on the outside looking in after 9 matches. On Tuesday they lost a hard fought away game to bottom feeder Peru 1-0 where they should have drawn and the entire country went into depression.

Next up was Uruguay, probably the best per capita soccer team in the world and a team Chile hadn’t beaten in something like 25 years. At 3.8m people, Uruguay are the reigning South American champs and took 4th place in the last World Cup. Chile needed a home win or else they would be in deep trouble and were at risk to miss the first South American World Cup since Argentina ’78.

My friends Mike (visiting from the US), David, Pepe and I got tickets to go to the match. It was my first South American World Cup Qualifier, though I’ve been to US qualifiers and World Cup games in Germany and South Africa. We met up in my apartment to have a few beers, then took a taxi to Chile’s Estadio Nacional. We got there just in time to hear the national anthems.

Our tickets were for a general admission section in the corner and it was really full, but we ended up with seats low down, but still with a good view. The crowd was electric, willing Chile to score. Chile obliged in the 11th minute, scoring right in front of us. The crowd went nuts. Chileans really believe they could win. The crowd was on Uruguay’s striker Luis Suarez the entire game, especially after he punched a Chilean defender in the face and got away with it.

Uruguay pushed back from the start of the second half and Chilean fans were suffering badly. Fans cursed players and screamed abuse at Uruguayan players and refs, while singing songs to support the team. Our section had a significant number of families attending together. Fathers attending with their young daughters all screamed as if they were alone with their best friends. Chile scored again in the 77th minute and the party was on. Uruguay brought on Diego Forlan who had a few close chances, but it wasn’t enough. Chile had won. Everyone left the stadium happy. Everyone was together, something that doesn’t happen very often in Chile. Chile was back on track, moving up to a tie for 4th.

We walked a bit, then caught a cab to watch the US take on Mexico in Mexico City, a place the US has only won once in 75 years. We watched surrounded by dejected Mexican fans as the US got its second away point in Mexico in World Cup qualifying and solidifying their road to the world cup. Although the US still doesn’t have the passion for soccer that much of the world does, the vocal US crowd in Denver in a driving snow storm for the victory over Costa Rica and the over 7m tv viewers for USA/Mexico shows that soccer is growing and gaining popularity. At 60% of a typical monday night football game, that’s huge progress. If you get a chance to see a world cup qualifier even if you’re not a big fan, take it.

Travelogue: Driving from Santiago, Chile to Mendoza, Argentina

Category : Travel
Posted on March 13, 2013 by Nathan Lustig

My parents came to visit last week and we decided to rent a car and drive over the Andes to visit Mendoza for Vendimia, the grape harvest festival. I’ve already been to Mendoza , but I’d never driven over the Andes, which is always rated one of the best drives in South America.

For someone used to flying into countries or driving between the US and Canada, there are a surprising amount of hoops you have to jump through before you’re even able to go from Chile to Argentina, especially if you’re renting a car. First, you must have a notarized letter of permission from the car owner that says you’re legally able to take the car out of Chile. Next you have to have a special type of insurance for the entire time you’re in Argentina or else Chile won’t let you out and Argentina won’t let you in. You also have to carry proof of insurance with you at all times, especially at the border. If your insurance is expired when you try to come back to Chile, Argentina reserve the right to keep the car until you personally come back with valid insurance. Lastly, you have to have the customs form that lists when the car has gone out/in of Chile in the past.

Paperwork to go from Chile/Argentina. At the end, lots of stamps!

If you don’t have ALL of them, you won’t be able to leave and will have to turn around at the border. Make sure you call to reserve your rental car a few days ahead of time, as the agencies need time to get the paperwork in order. Most companies ask for a week in advance, but I was able to do it with two days notice. My insurance and all of the paperwork cost CLP$70.000 (US$140) for five days in Argentina and I probably could have gotten it a little cheaper if I had shopped around.

Once I took care of all of that, we got on the road. We left Santiago and headed northwest into the foothills toward the city of Los Andes. The first hour or so is on nice four lane highway, but as you make your way toward Portillo, the sky center, it turns into a winding two lain highway with some significant dropoffs. It can be frustrating because trucks have to travel incredibly slowly and there aren’t many passing zones.

There’s currently construction on the Chilean side of the border to make the road safer and the countries have agreed alternate traffic. You can go into Argentina from 20:00 to 07:00 and back into Chile from 08:00 to 19:00. This construction is likely to go on for at least another two months.

We arrived at the construction zone at about 18:30 and had to wait until about 20:30 to get moving. There were probably 60 cars ahead of us, plus another 100 behind us by the time we got moving. It ended up being a mess because everyone arrived at the border crossing at the same time. When there’s no construction, you can arrive at any time cross. Total driving time should be around 5 hours. In our case, it took us 7 hours of driving time because we had to wait in a huge line at the border.

Because of the construction we had to cross at night, so we didn’t get a feeling of just how big the mountains were on the way into Argentina. But I felt myself steadily driving up on nice wide two lane highways. All of the sudden we reached a sign that said “zona de curvas peligrosas” dangerous curves, and we started to go up, straight up. It was mesmerizing watching the cars zigzagging up the hairpin turns, seeing the white and red lights like tiny ants on the mountain above us. There were 28 curves in all and it took us almost 45 minutes to cover the 7km to the top.

The border crossing is located at the top, just before the Cristo Redentador tunnel that connects Chile and Argentina. The countries have partnered together to have a shared border control all in one place. There’s four steps: first, show your auto papers, insurance, permission to leave Chile, etc, that we talked about before. If you don’t have it, Chile won’t let you out of the country and will send you back down the mountain. Second, you have to have the correct papers to leave Chile, your passport or identity card. After those papers are stamped, you move onto Argentinian border control. The Argentinians stamp your passports and check to make sure you have your insurance paid up and that the Chileans have let you take your car out of the country. Another stamp.

If you’re from the US, Canada or Australia, you must pay the reciprocity fee ahead of time and bring the printout. The rules just changed in February and they don’t have anyone at the border to take your money. They were nice enough to let us use their personal computer to pay the fee and print out the paper, or they would have sent us back down the mountain and into Chile. Previously, Argentina only collected this fee if you flew into Ezeiza airport in Buenos Aires.

Next, you pass to Argentinian customs where they make sure you’re not bringing in contraband or huge amounts of dollars. Since we were clearly tourists, they just asked two questions and let us go. All told, we were at the border for about two and a half hours. On the return trip, it only took us 30 minutes.

The road down from the border slowly slopes down, following the path of a large river. After about an hour, you arrive at Upsallata, a small resort town in a beautiful valley. From there’s it’s another hour and a half, at least to Mendoza. Make sure to watch out for trucks. We saw three different trucks completely flipped over and could smell burning breaks on countless others. They drive about 20km per hour going down the mountain, making for interesting passing in no passing zone opportunities.

After three days in Mendoza, we drove back to Chile during daylight. The mountains are huge and colors change quickly as you drive farther in. We stopped at Upsallata for a bbq lunch at a truck stop, which was one of the better lunches I’ve had. The owners were preparing their own Sunday family lunch and served us some of what they were going to eat: five cuts of beef, two types of sausage, potatoes, a tomato, onion and lettuce salad and homemade bread. It was just what I needed to make the drive up over the mountains and back into Chile.

The drive itself lived up to its billing. It’s a beautiful, fun drive, but make sure you have all of your paperwork in order or you might get turned around at the border. I wouldn’t want to try it in winter though!

Looking for more high quality information about Chile? Check out my book Chile: The Expat’s Guide: