I should have posted this last week but things happened. Anyway Danah Boyd’s Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant) is an excellent contribution to the Facebook integrity discussion. In particular I like…
What pisses me off the most are the numbers of people who feel trapped. Not because they don’t have another choice. (Technically, they do.) But because they feel like they don’t. They have invested time, energy, resources, into building Facebook what it is. They don’t trust the service, are concerned about it, and are just hoping the problems will go away. It pains me how many people are living like ostriches. If we don’t look, it doesn’t exist, right?? This isn’t good for society. Forcing people into being exposed isn’t good for society. Outting people isn’t good for society, turning people into mini-celebrities isn’t good for society. It isn’t good for individuals either. The psychological harm can be great. Just think of how many “heros” have killed themselves following the high levels of publicity they received.
Mark Zuckerberg the the 25 year old founder and chief executive of Facebook says that privacy is no longer a social norm (eweekeurope):
…that people no longer have an expectation of privacy thanks to increasing uptake of social networking. Speaking at the Crunchie Awards in San Francisco this weekend, the 25 year-old web entrepreneur said: “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people.”
“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built,” he said. “Doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do.
“But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”
I would be a lot more impressed if someone who was a tad older than 25 and didnt have such a large stake in the commodification and commercialization of information decided what was a social norm. But the whole thing is also very familiar of the old quote (1999!!!) from Scott McNealy the CEO of Sun Microsystems (Wired)
The three strikes approach to internet-regulation is a misguided approach to the problem. Read David Canton‘s arguments on the topic:
The three-strikes law is misguided, even if you believe such activity should be controlled.
Whether someone has violated copyright is often not a black-or-white issue. Copyright law is complex, and knowing in any given instance whether an infringement happened isn’t easy.
To implement these policies on a mass basis, in a similar manner to handing out parking tickets, ignores this complexity. And the penalty is more than paying a few dollars in parking fines.
In 1984 one of the basic premises of state control was to be found in the dictum “He who controls the past, controls the future”. This can be seen as a version of the popular quote from the Spanish philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it“.
One of the themes in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the way in which the repressive society encourages friends, neighbors and family to spy on one another. The informer was seen as a hero by the state. In particular Orwell writes that parents lived in fear of their children.
The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.
This is based on the story of Pavlik Morozov, a child who denounced his father to the soviet state and became part of soviet mythology and naturally part of the the fear of the soviet state.
Now we could dismiss the whole thing as a fiction set in a far away place, in a far away time but this is not what Orwell wants. The same year Nineteen Eighty-Four was published he wrote in a letter*
My recent novel [Nineteen Eighty-Four] is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter), but as a show-up of the perversions . . . which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. . . . The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else, and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.
Today we are again and again being actively encouraged to destroy not family but society. We are supposed to discover and report “suspicious behavior” for the good of us all – in the name of terrorism. The most reason slick version of the state asking us to denounce anything different comes (via BoingBoing: What to do if you smell a terrorist). It’s about a video released by the LA police department in a campaign called IwatchLA.
The video is slick, sleek and personal. It encourages people to denounce anything unusual – even an unusual smell – and let the authorities decide if its terrorism. This is what Orwell feared. The goal of terrorism prevention is a praiseworthy goal but the destruction of social trust by creating universal suspicion is not the way to go.
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* The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 4 – In Front of Your Nose 1945–1950 p.546 (Penguin)
I am looking to attempt an experiment during the course I am teaching right now. The idea is to give the course participants the opportunity to examine how much personal information is available online.
To do this, participants are divided into groups. Each group is then given the name of a person and then digs up any and all information they can about that person.
The teams will have to account for:
The information they find
How & where they found the information
Make assessment of the details of credibility.
One of the major “problems” in conducting this experiment is the selection of the person to be examined. Choosing a public figure could be an option but it is difficult to assess the credibility of information acquired. Therefore what remains is to put oneself on the line and the students study their lecturer. Which leads to a question I must ask myself – Do I have something I do not want to find out about myself…
In 1968 Andy Warhol launched the idea that: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Later in 1979 Warhol restated his idea with the words: “…my prediction from the sixties finally came true: In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.”
Yesterday my colleague Dr Dick posted this amazing quote on Facebook:
In the future, everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes.
With a little googling I found the origins of the quote come from the great street artist Banksy – here is a picture from one of his exhibitions.
This was a brilliant twist on the classic Warhol idea. Today everyone is striving for fame in a way that has never been done before. If we then add the death of privacy both the voluntary and the semi-voluntary. We voluntarily give away our privacy through blogs, twitter and facebook (and tons of other web2.0 applications). Then we semi-voluntarily give away too much information through our dependence upon technology.
Through all this loss of privacy the question is no longer one of fame or recognition. The question is if we in the future can have any privacy at all. So in the same way as Warhol in the sixties surprised (or even shocked?) people by claiming people would have fame the question today is more relevant whether we will have privacy.
Fifteen minutes of privacy is an important question to be thought about considering the way in which or society is moving.
The EFF have released a new report on the dangers between locational information and privacy: On Locational Privacy, and How to Avoid Losing it Forever (PDF). The short report by Andrew J. Blumberg and Peter Eckersley takes up issues that need to be taken much more seriously than they have been.
This post is in support of the Norwegian’s struggle for preserving internet freedom. The question concerns the choice to implement the Data Protection Directive (2006/24) into Norwegian law. Since Norway is not an EU member state they have the right to reserve themselves and not implement directives. The protest for digital privacy is an attempt by the Norwegians not to follow the same integrity-violating policies being adopted throughout Europe. The protest action is an attempt to get the Norwegian government to state that they will not be adopting the directive.
Personvern er en grunnleggende verdi i et demokrati. Personvernet innebærer en rett til å være i fred fra andre, men også en rett til å ha kontroll over opplysninger om seg selv, særlig opplysninger som oppleves som personlige. Etter EMK artikkel 8 er personvern ansett som en menneskerettighet.
Med en mulig norsk implementering av Datalagringsdirektivet (direktiv 2006/24/EF), som pålegger tele- og nettselskap å lagre trafikkdata om borgernes elektroniske kommunikasjon (e-post, sms, telefon, internett) i inntil to år, vil nordmenns personvern bli krenket på det groveste.
Datalagringsdirektivet ble vedtatt av EU 15.mars 2006, men fremdeles har den norske regjeringen ikke offisielt tatt stilling til om direktivet skal gjøre til norsk lov eller ikke. Gjennom EØS-avtalen har Norge en reservasjonsrett. Denne har aldri før blitt brukt, men så har man heller aldri stått overfor et direktiv som representerer en så stor trussel mot demokratiets grunnleggende verdier som det datalagringsdirektivet gjør.
Vi krever at regjeringen sier ifra nå før valget om de vil gjøre datalagringsdirektivet til norsk lov eller ikke. Å ikke ta stilling, slik regjeringen har gjort i over tre år, er det samme som stilltiende aksept.
Regjeringen må ta stilling nå – si nei til datalagringsdirektivet!
Følgende støtter saken og har samme eller et lignende innlegg på sin blogg (denne listen oppdateres fortløpende):
A post on Slashdot this morning dealt with a juror who posted twitter comments about a trial (while it was in progress) and the effects of this may be to declare the trial a mistrial.
“Russell Wright and his construction company, Stoam Holdings, recently lost a $12 million dollar lawsuit brought by investors. But lawyers for the firm have complained that juror Johnathan Powell’s Twitter comments broke rules when discussing the civil case with the public. The arguments in this dispute center on two points. Powell insists (and the evidence appears to back him up) that he did not make any pertinent updates until after the verdict was given; if that’s the case, the objection would presumably be thrown out. If Powell did post updates during the trial, the judge must decide whether he was actively discussing the case. Powell says he only posted messages and did not read any replies. Intriguingly, the lawyers for Stoam Holding are not arguing so much that other people directly influenced Powell’s judgment, rather that he might have felt a need to agree to a spectacular verdict to impress the people reading his posts.”
This is an interesting example of the way in which new technology practice is clashing with established rules and ideas. During the recent Pirate Bay trial in Stockholm there was a vertible information orgy with live audio feed, spectators twittering from within (and outside) the courtroom and live bloggers en masse – in addition to traditional media channels. Yet the interesting thing was that the audio tape picked up the judge telling individuals in the courtroom that no pictures could be taken. On a least two occaissions the judge asked whether a laptop and a phone was being used to film the proceedings.
Everybody was filmed, photographed and interviewed entering and leaving the courtroom. All the participants were activly seen courting and presenting their cases to the media on the courtroom steps – but no photographs in the courtroom.
When a witness who was to be heard at a later date was discovered in the audience he was asked to leave. Before leaving he asked whether he was allowed to listen to the radio. The judge understood the futility of the rules when he replied – well you cannot stay in here.
The “no images” rule in Sweden or the no communicating in the US are rules which need to be explained logically to the participants. Naturally the principles of justice and equality must be upheld and should not need to be questioned at every turn…
What people do and what people say is a notoriously difficult paradox to integrate. Technology Liberation Front writes about the rhetoric and reality of online privacy.
In a nutshell, ask anyone if they care about their privacy and almost 100% of them will say, yes, absolutely. But then ask them about what they do both online and offline on a daily basis and most of them will reveal a very different set of preferences or values when it comes to what “protecting privacy” would mean in practice.
My experience reflects this. Some users are unaware of the privacy implications of their actions (they don’t read the EULA). Other users are disinterested in their privacy even if they say that they are concerned. Still others are concerned about their privacy but are unwilling to pay the price of protecting it.
What this shows is not that privacy is unimportant. It shows that people need help to do the right thing. Compare privacy concerns to dental hygiene: almost everyone claims to be interested and concerned about dental hygiene but do you all floss daily?