October 7th marked the darkest day in Israel’s history. Civilians were massacred by an organisation hell bent on killing as many Israelis as possible. To be clear, the Palestinian people are not Israel’s enemy. Our enemy is Hamas, who not only preaches the destruction and death of Israel and Israelis, but given the opportunity to do so, acted on it in the most barbaric fashion imaginable. Hamas slaughtered women and children, burned people alive, kidnapped 84 year old demented grandmothers into Gaza in the name of what? Resistance to occupation? Are these victims at fault for their plight?

Can one truly say though in good conscience that anything justifies the murder of over 500 civilians? Young people executed at point blank range at a party celebrating peace and love? Dragging mutilated bodies of young women through the streets of Gaza to the cheers of the crowd? They don’t even hide it, to the contrary, they celebrate it online.

There are those that excuse it, that say that resistance to occupation will never be pretty. They ask what did we expect would happen? They show us the statistics of casualties in this bloody and horrible conflict, and to them I say yes, the Palestinian people are suffering. Yes, many more of them have been killed than Israelis. Yet anyone willing to scratch the surface, clearly see that there is no genocidal attempt by Israel to kill as many Palestinians as possible. Ask yourself what would happen if Hamas had Israel’s military might, October 7th certainly gave us a clue.

The Palestinian people in Gaza are suffering greatly and unfortunately are going to suffer much more over these next days. My heart breaks for them. Everything that can be done to reduce civilian casualties should be done, but there is no going back to status quo that was before October 7th, Israel cannot allow itself to share a border with an organisation that willfully inflicts such unspeakable horror and parades its atrocities proudly for all to see.

Israel’s war against Hamas must reverberate around the world. Our war is the war against barbarians, no different to ISIS and the Taliban. Hamas’s actions were mediaeval, they were on par with the pogroms in eastern europe, the Nazis’ during the holocaust, these were the events that we vowed “never again”.

Israel is an imperfect country to say the least, I disagree with Netanyahu and with nearly each and every one of his ministers and their policies. This government and its actions do not represent me. Yet this war is much more primal than that, it is a war against those that do not accept our very right to exist and as a people persecuted for so very long, we cannot afford to lose the battle over the only place we can truly call home.

So to you my friends from all over the world, I ask of you one thing, pick a side and speak up. There is no moral equivalence, there are no two sides, speak up for us today as the evil we saw in Israel on October 7th will not end here.

As my country goes to war, as my family goes to war, I pray for a better time for our entire region, but make absolutely no mistake, we will not go quietly into the night, we have nowhere else to go.

“It’s free and always will be”

These are the promising words that greet anyone landing on Facebook’s homepage. But is it really free? Actually this promised covenant comes at a price that many users don’t expect. When Facebook was first founded, no one could have anticipated the massive amount of data that the company would soon possess.

Who knows who and how, who likes what and why, who searches for what and when. While it is difficult to really quantify which internet company has the most information about us as users, I believe that Facebook possess the most intimate knowledge of it’s users more than any other company on the planet. Facebook has become a global village square, a place where all our significant milestones are recorded and shared with the world, a place where we can connect with knowledge from anywhere and maybe most importantly a place where we interact with those around us, near or far. So, if Facebook doesn’t charge us money, and is providing us with a service that has become so ingrained in our day to day routines that we are actually spending anywhere between 20 minutes to 20% of our time interacting with Facebook and Facebook owned products[1], how are they making their money? And most importantly, what are we as users paying?

The answer of course is advertising. 95% of Facebook’s $16 Billion in trailing annual revenue comes from advertising.[2] Facebook is using the data provided by it’s users to build the most personalized advertising platform in history. While time will tell whether Facebook will indeed be able to sustain and grow it’s advertising business, the quid pro quo is clearer than ever. Facebook provides us with the services we just can’t live without in return for our personal details and tastes, and with them our privacy. All of these are essentially provided to the highest bidder.

The ethical dilemma is, should we expect otherwise? Is privacy, or our expectation of it, dead? Maybe more interestingly, should we really care?

In our day and age, it seems that we as users, want to have our cake and eat it too, we want the best possible social networks, newspapers, music services and video platforms, yet don’t really want to pay for most or any of them.

To me this expectation seems unrealistic, no one is forcing anyone to be on Facebook or any other medium and therefore those that are actively using these networks should be well aware of the trade-off, we are the product and we should get used to it.

The truth is that with all the changes that have occurred in the world, I believe that there is one paradigm that hasn’t changed and that most probably won’t, and that is that you get what you pay for.

Whilst the currency in the past might have been paying with cold hard cash for a subscription to a country club or the New York Times to get your social and news fix, today our payment is in data. No one is forcing users to be a part of any of these social networks or services, and as such, all of these privacy concerns seem to be no more than first world problems of spoiled consumers which have fostered unrealistic expectations. As long as our data is being given voluntarily (and this is an if) or at least with an air of transparency, we are all willing players in the privacy for services trade off.

As long as we are able to opt out of the services that we don’t want, and delete our data and very existence on these networks the complaints must be set aside. As a case in point, Facebook allows it’s users to erase all traces of their existence on the network, in a move that pre-dates the European High Court’s ruling on the right to be forgotten.[3]

Nonetheless, in order for any agreement to be binding we must have at least two knowing parties. Parties that are aware of the fact that they are entering into an agreement and that clearly understand the conditions being set forth. And here is where we reach a stumbling block. Both in the case of Google, Facebook, Twitter and most other web services we interact with, the balance of power is strongly tilted towards our service provider. With one small check of a box, and sometimes not even that, a user agrees to terms way beyond anything they ever imagined. How many of us have actually read these terms and conditions? How many of us can really be expected to? Courts around the world have opined on standardized contracts and how binding they are. Just to give some sort of scale, it would take a user 76 full working days in order to read all of the terms and conditions for the websites that they regularly use.[4] It seems unreasonable to expect that any person know in detail what parts of their privacy they are indeed giving up in order to get the services that have become so essential to our lives.

“If You Have Something You Don’t Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn’t Be Doing It” — Eric Schmidt

Our information and data is out there today and we as users must be empowered to make better choices. Internet companies need to be required to state in clear, plain and short language what you give up when you join any website, what is the information that is going to be collected and who is it going to be given to and why.

In this day and age, it seems that we as users are indeed the product, yet this doesn’t mean that therefore we must loose control over every single part of our lives. As Facebook, Google and others continue to grow and become ubiquitous in our lives we as consumers, together with our governments, must fight for knowledge and transparenct and punish those companies that do not act in an open and honest fashion. That is all we can and should expect from so many of the companies that have provided us with services that we today, cannot imagine our lives without.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-time-people-spend-on-facebook-per-day-2015-7 and Sandberg’s estimate on latest FB earnings call

[2] http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-NJ5DZ/992219873x0x859098/DC6C9112-AFF6-4E76-9168-7DBA0D5FFDAB/FB_Q3_15_Earnings_Slides_FINAL.pdf

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/06/technology/personaltech/right-to-be-forgotten-online-is-poised-to-spread.html?_r=0

[4] http://techland.time.com/2012/03/06/youd-need-76-work-days-to-read-all-your-privacy-policies-each-year/

Nobody has the answers, which is most probably because they don’t exist. There is no guidebook that tells you what choices to make or which paths to follow (and if there is, please make sure to send it over by the end of today). It’s a mixture of risk and luck that bring us to where we are. Nobody can tell you what to study, who to date or where to work. Nobody knows what’s right for you. We tend to think that we are faced with decisions of good vs. bad but the truth is that this is only apparent in hindsight. You make choices and hope for the best. It sounds oh so cliche, but as I read somewhere, there is a reason that cliches become cliches.

There is something so crazy about growing up. You don’t really notice it on a day to day basis but one day all of a sudden, you look back and realize how much time has passed. As a teacher once told me in high school, you close your eyes and open them and all of a sudden you are 50 years old. Somehow it all happens oh so slowly yet all at once.

As a kid I always used to check at what age superstars got discovered and would tell myself that I have time, that I will soon find the thing that I am exceptional at. And like the Seinfeld joke I was even willing for it to be someone discovering that I have the greatest eye sight ever, prompting a call to the President.

Slowly but surely I passed the milestones, and found out that I’m probably not going to be the next Alan Shearer, Macaulay Culkin or Mark Zuckerberg. I was waiting, but can now safely say that I definitely will not make the top 30 under 30. But I’ve also find out that that is kind of alright, there is still time to be great.

We covet youth in our society, but the truth is, that I wouldn’t go back a single day, each period has it’s own time and I just want to continue and look forward. I am extraordinary privileged to be surrounded by a wife, friends and family that are supportive in ways beyond imagination and who allow me to journey on and discover. I don’t want 30 to be the new 20, or any other age for that matter. I like where I am and I’m incredibly curious about what the future holds. These first 30 have been incredible, here’s to discovering the next 90.