Tag: deepinder goyal

The Buzz Around Zomato

My congratulations to you if you are unaware of what I’m going to talk about in this blogpost. And not just my congratulations, I will be envious of you as well. I aspire to reach your level of moksha one of these days, and please, tell me how you did it.

But here’s the background:

The pure veg fleet not only delivers only pure vegetarian food from pure vegetarian restaurants, but was also going to get different uniforms, as you can see in the tweet above.

Which, of course, means we have to talk about Google Buzz.

When Google introduced Buzz, its answer to Facebook and Twitter, it hoped to get the service off to a fast start. New users of Buzz, which was added to Gmail on Tuesday, found themselves with a ready-made network of friends automatically selected by the company based on the people that each user communicated with most frequently through Google’s e-mail and chat services.

But what Google viewed as an obvious shortcut stirred up a beehive of angry critics. Many users bristled at what they considered an invasion of privacy, and they faulted the company for failing to ask permission before sharing a person’s Buzz contacts with a broad audience. For the last three days, Google has faced a firestorm of criticism on blogs and Web sites, and it has already been forced to alter some features of the service.

E-mail, it turns out, can hold many secrets, from the names of personal physicians and illicit lovers to the identities of whistle-blowers and antigovernment activists. And Google, so recently a hero to many people for threatening to leave China after hacking attempts against the Gmail accounts of human rights activists, now finds itself being pilloried as a clumsy violator of privacy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13google.html

Did Google mean to violate the privacy of its users by launching Buzz? Of course not. Did it end up violating the privacy of its users? Of course it did.

Should a business aim to optimize for the privacy of its customers? Each one of us is entitled to our opinion in this case, but I have a very clear answer, personally, for this question. Yes, a business should optimize for the privacy of its customers

What if a tenant has told his or her landlord that they are vegetarian, when in fact they are non-vegetarian?

What if someone’s son or daughter has taken to eating non-veg, but hasn’t told their parents yet?

What if a housing society decides to ban entry of non-vegetarian food into the society?

You may have ethical, cultural, religious or political views about each of these scenarios. And because I’m writing this for an online audience, I’m sure you do have some or all of these views. I do too, of course.

But those views have nothing to do with the fact that people are free to have their preferences when it comes to dietary habits, and keep them private from whomsoever they like. You and I may disapprove or regret this state of affairs, but we do not get to unilaterally change said status. That’s my personal take, at any rate, and if you happen to disagree, I would love to know why.

What Zomato, or indeed any other business, does is its own business. I and everybody else in this country, we are all free to increase our patronage of Zomato for having started its pure veg fleet, or boycott them altogether for it. That is each individual customer’s own business.

But each person in this country ought to have the right to keep their dietary preferences private to themselves, or share it only with folks of their choosing.

The truth always lies somewhere in the middle. Maybe you’ve heard me say this before, but here’s where Zomato has ended up re: this situation

So the pure veg fleet will continue to exist, but will be indistinguishable from the rest of Zomato’s fleet in terms of appearances. This will be counted as a victory and as a defeat by different representatives on both “sides”, and much outrage will manifest itself, to everybody’s all round satisfaction.

Speaking of which…

It is our fate to live in the age of social media, so you will see a million takes about religious intolerance from both “sides” of this “debate”. Ditto for caste related aspects. And a million other things besides, I am sure. Here’s a useful tip:

Seven days is overkill, if you ask me. Twitter will find something else to lose its excreta over by tomorrow, don’t you worry.

Deepinder Goyal’s Tweet About Food Delivery in Mumbai

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock and aren’t sure who Deepinder Goyal is.

He sent this tweet out the other day:

… and I have questions. Lots of ’em.

  1. This wouldn’t have been possible twenty years ago: a businessman raising a question about a government decision on a public, online forum, and getting a response from the authorities on that forum. You might say newspapers and television channels, but they weren’t public forums – you could read and view, but you couldn’t do much else besides. Does that make the world today a better place – that it is very easy and cheap to raise questions and expect answers? More importantly, is the opportunity cost worth it?
    That is, anybody can raise questions and comment online.((You only need to see the responses to this tweet to figure that out, for example.)) Still worth it?
    I say yes, but your mileage may vary.
  2. This would have been possible ten years ago. Deepinder Goyal could have tweeted out this question, but it is unlikely that the Mumbai Police would have responded. For one thing, they only joined Twitter in December 2015. For another, the pressure on them to respond wouldn’t have been quite as much ten years ago. Twitter (and other social networks) have become village squares. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
  3. Deepinder Goyal is likelier to get a response than I am because he is way more popular. This isn’t a criticism of the Mumbai Police, to be clear. I’m just stating a thumb rule that I think makes sense: the more followers you have, the likelier it is that you will get a response. What are the incentives for the average Twitter user? What are the optimal strategies? What are the optimal strategies given everybody else’s optimal strategies? With what consequences?
  4. Likes, retweets and replies are effectively a currency we get to spend on Twitter (and other social networks likewise have their own currency).
    1. These are certainly a unit of account, because the value of a tweet at least partially lies in how viral it has become. (“Holy shit, this blew up over night! Check out my soundcloud!”)
    2. They are also a medium of exchange (you retweet my tweet, I’ll retweet yours – although the terms of trade are in some ways a function of the point above)
    3. They are a store of value too. Try complaining about stuff on Twitter (fridge not working, internet down, flight ticket reimbursement etc. etc.) if you want to understand how this works out in practice.
    4. How should we spend this currency that we have? How much of it do we have? How should we spend it, and what are we optimizing for? What should we be optimizing for? Why?
  5. If public authorities can be held to account on online forums, does that make them less accountable in offline forums? Does the substitution effect dominate the income effect? With what consequences?