Politics in the Zeros

Google Takeout provides a way to get some of your data out. You can archive your Contacts, G+ stream, Docs, and more. However, Gmail isn’t there and there’s no apparent way to import the data into another platform. Still, this is a useful service.

FYI: Backupify will backup Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

Identity theft continues to grow as a huge industry, nailing an estimated one in 10 Americans and generating more than $100 billion in losses worldwide.

Credit card companies and banks could take simple measures to curb the problem. They could start by taking a simple lesson from, of all places, Facebook. Sure, Facebook has had its share of security lapses. But, one of its new features provides a simple model that could be emulated at minimal cost.

The new Facebook security feature verifies that the computer you are using is allowed to log in as you. A consumer who uses this new security feature gets a text message via cell phone with a code that must be used to log in.

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Equitable Mortgage Company, New York c1888. (Library of Congress)

In 2003, Nye Lavelle, a rich Florida businessman who had spent years investigating the mortgage industry following his own experience with foreclosure on a family-owned property, made a list of what he found wrong and shared it with the nation’s largest mortgage buyer, the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae). After two years of corresponding with Mr Lavelle, Fannie Mae hired a Washington law firm to look into his claims. That firm’s 2006 confidential report to Fannie Mae corroborated many of the warnings about illegal activity on the part of loan-servicing companies it was doing business with but opined that some of Mr Lavelle’s claims were overstated. There is little reason to believe that anyone at Fannie Mae ever did anything further about the subject.

One of the companies Mr Lavelle warned about was Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Inc. (MERS).

Perhaps no development has done more to obscure the forces behind the foreclosure epidemic than the rise of the MERS, the private registry that has all but replaced public land ownership records. Created by Fannie, Freddie and big banks, MERS claims to hold title to roughly half the nation’s home mortgages. Judges and lawmakers have questioned MERS’s legal authority to initiate foreclosures, and some judges have thrown out foreclosures brought in its name. On Friday, New York’s attorney general sued MERS, contending that its system led to fraudulent foreclosure filings.

MERS no longer participates directly in foreclosures, but as Mr Lavelle says,

“Hundreds of thousands of foreclosures in Florida and across America were knowingly conducted unlawfully, for which there are still severe liabilities and implications to come for many years.”

Scoble says the dream of a common web is gone. We now have pretty web gardens with big high walls around them, often with no way to get your data out much less make it interchangeable. You want one central repository for all your contacts across all platforms? There’s no way to do that now. Scoble says that window of opportunity passed in 2008 and the web is the worse for it. And there’s no way to go back.

The lesson today, four years later, is that the common web is in grave threat, not just from Facebook’s data roach motel but from Apple’s and Amazon’s and, now, Google.

It’s too late. Now, excuse me, while I crawl back into the trunk that Google, Facebook, Amazon have locked me in.