Question Technology

Privacy is Important, Unless it's Funny

I haven't blogged about the AOL search record disclosure fiasco, nor do I often blog about privacy issues in general, because the topic is so well covered elsewhere. (See Michael Zimmer, Lauren Weinstein, EFF, etc.)  But one aspect of the AOL episode that I find strange is how the internet chatter (I refuse to use the word 'meme') shifted so quickly from concern for privacy to delight over the content of the records.  Lists started popping up all over of the crazy things people search for (see BoingBoing for examples).  And of course these were AOL users, one of the lowest Internet classes and a favorite target for ridicule.

I know it's all just harmless fun, more or less, but beyond the joking, I think this is an instance of two core geek values colliding: privacy and "free culture."  Free culture appears to trump privacy, at least in the sense that privacy is seen as something for corporations to honor.  Free copying is something that citizens will do, regardless of the privacy consequences.  Once something is out there, there's no getting it back.  Or at least it seems to me that that's the underlying model here.  It's evident also in this casual statement in a recent Wired story:

AOL has apologized and taken down the data, but it is now widely available on the internet and some have set up search engines that query the records.

Link: Wired News: FAQ: AOL's Search Gaffe and You.

The phrasing -- "it is now widely available" -- suggests that individuals aren't responsible for continuing to make the data available.  It's just the way things work.

Watching Web Visitors' Every Move (ClickTale)

Tiara.org writes about new web tracking software call ClickTale, whose creators seem oblivious to privacy concerns:

TechCrunch blogs about a new tool that lets website proprietors watch what their users do. And I do mean watch. They provide “movies of users’ individual browsing sessions” including all mouse movement, clicks, and keystrokes. They also aggregate data to provide overall statistics.

These types of tools are often used in usability studies to make websites more accessible or information easier to find. However, in usability studies, there is full disclosure and the participants are usually paid. [...]

But there is no consent and no means to inform the user that they are tracked. While a few people voice privacy concerns on the comments to this entry, the responses are:

1. Privacy’s dead, get over it –and
2. That is a niche user preference.

Arik from ClickTale says in the comments:

    "LOL. You might be surprised but most of the users are not concerned by this like you do. This is a personal preference and we respect that. There is an option to install a cookie that will disable the service for you (more on this in our soon to be released privacy policy), or you can use whatever tools that you are familiar with if you don’t like cookies."

Link: tiara.org: ClickTale: Where’s the Consent?,

via MichaelZimmer.org: Tracking Web Users with ClickTale

Parents Using Technology to Spy on Kids

The San Francisco Chronicle has an article today about parents using technology to spy on their kids.  Excerpt:

Paige White was surprised when her parents figured out soon after she started driving last year that she'd gone 9 miles to a party, not 4 miles to the friend's house she'd told them she was visiting. It seemed to her almost as if her car was bugged.

It was.

Paige's parents had installed a device in their daughter's SUV that can tell them not only how far she's driven, but how fast and whether she's made any sudden stops or hard turns.

"I was kind of mad because I felt it was an invasion of my privacy," said the Los Gatos resident, now 17.

Parents, some of whom feel outmatched by their offspring in this tech-savvy world, are using a growing number of gadgets, software and specially equipped cell phones to track kids' driving, read their instant messages and pinpoint where they're hanging out. [...]

"The bottom line is, surveillance will cut down somewhat on potential risk behavior kids will engage in, but it is at a cost," [psychologist Anthony] Wolf said. "To the extent that you do surveillance, you are potentially interfering with your kids developing responsibility for their own lives."

Link: Parents' gizmos high on tech, low on trust.

It goes on to mention products for child monitoring that include GPS-enabled cell phones, RFID-equipped clothing, and software to track internet use.

DNA Testing: Do You Really Want to Know?

Some good thoughts on DNA testing by Clive Thompson in Wired.  Excerpt:

Here's the thing: You pay anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars for a genetic test, but what you're really buying is a sense of control. You want to know your dread future and prepare for it - or even prevent it. But with most big genetic scares, like a predisposition for colon cancer, heart problems, or diabetes, what will the doctors tell you? Eat better, stop smoking, get more exercise. You don't need the Delphic Oracle to figure that out. Yes, in very rare circumstances, radical measures can be taken, such as a double mastectomy to forestall the likelihood of breast cancer. But genetic results are probabilities, not certainties. Run a broad enough test and nearly everyone could have a red flag for something.

Maybe you just want the peace of mind that comes with knowing, if only partially, what cards you may be dealt. Fair enough. But if you get bad news, you'll still have to cope with untidy ethical and political issues. Should you tell your blood relatives? After all, it's their DNA, too. The next time you apply for health insurance, you'll have to decide whether to disclose your genetic mark of Cain and risk getting turned down.

Link: Wired 14.04: START.

AttentionTrust

AttentionTrust.org is "A non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the basic rights of attention owners."  They believe in the following rights:

• Property: You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish. You have CONTROL.
• Mobility: You can securely move your attention wherever you want whenever you want to. You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention.
• Economy: You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Your attention has WORTH.
• Transparency: You can see exactly how your attention is being used. You can DECIDE who you trust.

And their stated mission is:

• Empower people to exert greater control over their “attention data,” i.e. any records reflecting what they have paid attention to and what they have ignored. We accomplish this by promoting the principles of user control, by distributing our Attention Recorder, and by supporting the development of other appropriate tools, standards and practices.
• Educate people about the value of their attention and the importance of attention data.
• Build a community of individuals and organizations that will guarantee users’ rights to own, move, and exchange their attention data, in a transparent environment that gives users the freedom to decide how their data will be used.

Their board of directors is

Hank Barry, Secretary
Ed Batista, Executive Director
Nick Bradbury
Dick Costolo
Seth Goldstein, Chairperson
Mary Hodder, Chairperson, Advisory Council
Clay Shirky

It sounds like a worthy idea, and one that I'm sure sounds eminently agreeable to most people, perhaps in part because it's so vague.

This hijacking of the psychological term "attention" bugs me, but that's probably a lost cause.  "The Attention Economy" was apparently the theme of last week's whole "Etech" conference -- who knew?  I'm so out of touch on my IT/business/marketing buzzwords.  This usage seems to presume the whole data-processor theory of human behavior -- everything is data (thus money), etc.

I also wonder if this effort can ever be genuine if it's corporate-funded.  (They haven't yet raised money, but the site says "Contributions will be accepted from both corporations and individuals.")

Spotted at michaelzimmer.org : AttentionTrust: Owning your Data.  More at Mary Hodder's Napterization.

"I See Toilets Crashing"

An article in the SF Chronicle describes a recent talk by Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing:

Greenfield, author of the new book "Everyware" from Berkeley's Peachpit Press, told a room packed with more than 200 people that an age of "ubiquitous computing" is upon us, with technology able to monitor nearly every facet of daily life and feed it all into databases. [...]

Smart toilets developed in Japan can monitor waste products to gauge a person's health, Greenfield said.

"This is not blue sky, speculative science fiction," he said. These applications are being built today. "We're talking about everyday life."

Aside from the civil liberties implications -- which Greenfield said are significant -- he also said the technology won't always be pretty.

In fact, he said, "I see a lot of misery. I see people's toilets crashing. How much in our homes are wired and subject to the blue screen of death?"

Greenfield said he hopes his book can spur more than just nerds and geeks into paying attention to these issues. "It kills me that there hasn't been more discussion," he said. "I have no illusion that government or business are going to do it. It's going to take a lot of pressure from the bottom."

Link: NOTEBOOK / Technology is not always your friend / Author warns of intrusive gear, 'toilets crashing'.

Greenfield's site: V-2.org.

George Monbiot on "Children of the Machine"

The story about the two Ohio workers who got RFID chips implanted is ancient news by blog standards, but it's still worth thinking/writing about.  George Monbiot had a good article about it last week.  An excerpt:

There are, in other words, plenty of legitimate uses for implanted chips. This is why they bother me. A technology whose widespread deployment, if attempted now, would be greeted with horror, will gradually become unremarkable. As this happens, its purpose will begin to creep.

At first the tags will be more widely used for workers with special security clearance. No one will be forced to wear one; no one will object. Then hospitals – and a few in the US are already doing this(7)- will start scanning their unconscious or incoherent patients to see whether or not they have a tag. Insurance companies might start to demand that vulnerable people are chipped.

The armed forces will discover that they are more useful than dog tags for identifying injured soldiers or for tracking troops who are lost or have been captured by the enemy. Prisons will soon come to the same conclusion. Then sweatshops in developing countries will begin to catch on. Already the overseers seek to control their workers to the second; determining when they clock on, when they visit the toilet, even the number of hand movements they perform. A chip makes all this easier. The workers will not be forced to have them, any more than they are forced to have sex with their bosses; but if they don’t accept the conditions, they don’t get the job. After that, it surely won’t be long before asylum seekers are confronted with a similar choice: you don’t have to accept an implant, but if you refuse, you can’t stay in the country.

Link: George Monbiot - Children of the Machine.

Blogosphere catch-up

• Josh at Fire and Knowledge has been posting some quotes from one of my, um, favorite books that I've never read:
  

    We live in a world where it is as unthinkable to walk five miles to visit a friend as it was once unthinkable to speak across the distance through a wire.

—Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies (1994)

Coincidentally, I did finally get a copy of this recently.  Part of my delay was caused by Fawcett's cruel, destined-to-go-out-of-print price of $19 for a slim paperback.  (I bought it used, and yes I'm too lazy to go to the library.)

• Science Blogs is a new "blog portal" hosted by the people who bring you the relatively new Seed Magazine.  (Thanks to prosthesis for the pointer.)

• Michael Zimmer has been on top of Google's controversies over the past several months with lots of great posts.  From a recent Q&A post:
  

  In light of the China situation, do you think the shift in “principles” is merely a tipping point for a public that has been waiting for a clear-cut reason to be anti-Google?
  
  I don’t think the general public has been looking for a reason to become “anti-Google.” From my perspective (and supported by Pew’s research), the typical web user (erroneously) feels Google is a neutral tool that inherently delivers the “best” and most useful search results. Few considered the fact that search engines could have biases or be political. I do think, however, that the China incident was an event that finally did bring these issues to light. The potential biases in how search engines operate has now come to the forefront of people’s minds. For those who already were concerned about the “politics of search engines,” the China incident was merely the latest manifestation.

No Place To Hide

I was pleased to see Robert O'Harrow on The Daily Show recently with his book No Place To Hide, which is now out in paperback.  It seemed like that book didn't get the publicity it deserved when it first came out in hardcover.  The accompanying website is also quite substantial compared to most book tie-in websites, with many interviews and extra material: http://www.noplacetohide.net/.

Protecting Your Search Privacy

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch recently published a comprehensive guide to web search and privacy: Protecting Your Search Privacy: A Flowchart To Tracks You Leave Behind (via Michael Zimmer).

Are The Edge's Dangerous Ideas Really Dangerous?

Dave Pollard has an excellent post on his blog about The Edge's question "What's your dangerous idea?"  Here's an excerpt:

I was stunned by the blandness of the responses and the utter disconnectedness of respondents from the critical issues of our world today. From the social scientists, who are overwhelmingly from the so-called 'cognitive sciences', we get navel-gazing speculations on consciousness that are neither dangerous nor useful. From the technologists we get technophilia, muddle-headed blather about technology as religion and as the saver of the universe, dangerous only its naivety. From the real scientists we get shopworn retreads about the compatibility or incompatibility of science and religion. From philosophers we get starry-eyed dreaming about a new political order, a world where people suddenly stop behaving the way they do and start behaving responsibly. What planet do these people live on? [...]

Perhaps if Edge proprietor John Brockman could get past the idea that his beloved "Third Culture", the blending of elite intellectuals from both the scientific and literary world, doesn't need the collective intelligence of the great unwashed rest of the world to inform, provoke, qualify, amplify and act on its ideas, and, as Einstein expounded and exemplified, to keep us all self-critical and humble, Edge might stand a chance of once again becoming relevant to the real world. In the meantime, the most dangerous idea that emerges from this self-referential group is the propensity of elites to groupthink and to exaggerate their own awareness, knowledge, importance, power, authority, and relevance.

Link: How to Save the World: Blinded by science: What's your dangerous idea? (via Scott Rosenberg's blog)

He goes on to offer some truly dangerous ideas from various thinkers.  It's worth reading in full.

 

Wikipedia Weaselling

Andrew Orlowski has a good article at The Register summing up the whole Wikipedia/Seigenthaler libel fiasco.  Excerpt:

Two great cries have rung around the internet since the Seigenthaler scandal broke.

One is that Seigenthaler should have corrected the entry himself, and the other is that no source of authority can be trusted "definitively". That's a deliciously weaselly phrase we'll examine in a moment.

But both excuses seek, in the classic tradition of bad engineers blaming users for their own shoddy handiwork, to pass the responsibility onto Wikipedia's users.

[and even non-users!]

The blame goes here, the blame goes there - the blame goes anywhere, except Wikipedia itself. If there's a problem - well, the user must be stupid!

[...]

The first, and the most immediately absurd of these two defenses, is that since nothing at all can be trusted, er, "definitively", then Wikipedia can't be trusted either. This is curious, to say the least, as it points everyone's expectations firmly downwards.

If you recall the utopian rhetoric that accompanied the advent of the public "internet" ten years ago, we were promised that unlimited access to the world's greatest "knowledge" was just around the corner. This hasn't happened, for reasons cited above, but now the public is now being exhorted to assume the posture of a citizen in an air raid, where every moving object might be a dangerous missile.

   

Everything you read is suspect! You'd better duck!

Only a paranoiac, or a mad person, can sustain this level of defensiveness for any length of time however, and to hear a putative "encyclopedia" making such a statement is odd, to say the least.

Link: There's no Wikipedia entry for 'moral responsibility' | The Register.

Update: For more fun, you can read about this on the ever-earnest Wikinews!  "Author of Wikipedia character assassination takes responsibility".  The poor guy who did it is now marked forever as the "Wikipedia Hoaxer" (or at least until he deletes it, which I would do if I were him).  I find the Wikipedia "biographies" of everyday people a little creepy.

Previously: The First Wikitorial, Wikipedia: Just the facts!, Pretend News, WikiIrony.

Why John Gilmore won't show his ID at airports

Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Gilmore refuses to show ID to get on an airplane (or a train, and he doesn't drive either -- he doesn't travel far, apparently), and is taking this issue to the courts. Cory Doctorow (himself an EFF employee) at BoingBoing gushes:

Pittsburgh's Post-Gazette has an amazing, balanced, in-depth profile on John Gilmore, the guy who Sun hired to write their first code, the guy who co-founded EFF, the guy who won't show ID to get on an airplane:

From the Post-Gazette article:

John Gilmore's splendid isolation began July 4, 2002, when, with defiance aforethought, he strolled to the Southwest Airlines counter at Oakland Airport and presented his ticket.

The gate agent asked for his ID.

Gilmore asked her why.

It is the law, she said.

Gilmore asked to see the law.

Nobody could produce a copy. To date, nobody has. The regulation that mandates ID at airports is "Sensitive Security Information." The law, as it turns out, is unavailable for inspection.

What started out as a weekend trip to Washington became a crawl through the courts in search of an answer to Gilmore's question: Why?

In post 9/11 America, asking "Why?" when someone from an airline asks for identification can start some interesting arguments.

I think he has a strong point about secrecy and the law.  Homeland Security should have to produce the text of the law or at least a more specific explanation.  This legal "rabbit hole" needs to be fixed, but Gilmore's true mission is clearly broader.  He says:

"I will show a passport to travel internationally. I'm not willing to show a passport to travel in my own country," Gilmore said. "I used to laugh at countries that had internal passports. And it's happened here and people don't even seem to know about it."

He apparently forgets that this is a daily reality for the millions of immigrants in this country (having to produce their passport on request).  So it's not exactly unheard of.  Airlines presumably also use identification simply to verify that the person boarding the plane is the one who bought the ticket.

Link: Grounded: Millionaire John Gilmore stays close to home while making a point about privacy via Boing Boing: Why John Gilmore won't show his ID at airports.

Healthcare executive gets RFID chip implanted

From an article in Health Data Management:

"John Halamka, M.D., does not have a chip on his shoulder. He has a chip in his shoulder.

Halamka, CIO at Boston's CareGroup Healthcare System, has become the first volunteer to test an implantable radio frequency identification chip for medical use. The VeriChip, from Delray Beach, Fla.-based Applied Digital, was approved in October by the Food and Drug Administration for medical use in humans. In December, it was classified as a Class II medical device with special controls. ..."

Via Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends -- The World's First RFID-Enabled CIO.