Privacy

Speaking of public intellectuals, Siva Vaidhyanathan gave a talk here a couple days ago on privacy and surveillance, developing the ideas here. (For one thing, he now prefers “Cryptopticon” to “Nonopticon.”)

Siva thinks we should stop our Foucauldian worrying about Bentham’s Panopticon. He says he’s lived in the Panopticon, in New York, where there are lots of visible cameras everywhere (when I lived in one of the home counties, where it is said you can go all day without being out of CCTV range, I knew the feeling). Siva points out a lot of the cameras aren’t maintained, monitored, or even attached to anything; that’s not the point of them. They’re not there to watch you, they’re there to make you think that you’re being watched. Such reminders (your call may be monitored) are supposed to get you to become your own social superego.

On balance, Siva seems to think, this is pretty harmless. The point of the Panopticon is to get you to behave, to hide your real self, to conform. About which we can note two things: one, if you’ve been to London or New York, you see that in the real Panopticon people get their freak on just fine, thank you very much. And two, to the extent that it does work, the Panopticon actually reinforces privacy—getting you to hide your real self draws the boundaries around that real self. What we really need to worry about is unannounced, concealed surveillance: the NonCryptopticon.
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Henry points us to a new Google initiative and was wondering what I might think about it. I started writing a comment, but thinking that a comment shouldn’t be three times as long as the original post (and because I can), I decided to post my response as a separate entry.

First, I think Kieran is right, knol is way too close to troll, I would’ve picked a different name. (That said, most people out there probably have no idea what a troll is so in that sense it’s just as well although I still don’t like the name.)

I address three issues concerning this new service of trying to create something Wikipedialike within Google’s domain: First, will it gain popularity? Second, what might we expect in terms of quality? Third, what’s in it for Google beyond the potential to showcase more ads? [click to continue…]

Google is staking a claim on the moral high ground of Internet privacy. The company has called for new international rules, ostensibly to protect privacy online. Little of Google’s search information is strictly ‘personal data’, i.e. data directly concerning named individuals. But search data, potentially tied to individuals’ IP numbers, is dynamite, something it’s taken Google a long time to face up to publicly. Google got its fingers badly burnt by the incredulous reaction to its ‘trust us, we’re the good guys’ privacy policy a couple of years back. They hired Peter Fleischer, a well-respected Microsoft lawyer and data protection expert, to put their case more seriously. And now Fleischer is showing Google’s global citizenship willing by suggesting to UNESCO that an international body create a new set of rules on Internet privacy. But would this improve individuals’ privacy?

Part of the argument for a new instrument – at least as summarized in reports on the speech – is that the existing ones are too old and were crafted before the Internet really took off. The OECD Guidelines date from 1980 and the EU data protection directive from 1995, so they’re said to be out of date. Fleischer is said to argue for new rules based on the APEC privacy framework, and says Google is in favour of individuals’ privacy. The trouble is the ‘past their sell by date’ argument doesn’t hold up, and the APEC principles are a weak model to anyone who cares about privacy.
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This ZDNet article on datascraping firm Rapleaf is both interesting and disturbing.

In the cozy Facebook social network, it’s easy to have a sense of privacy among friends and business acquaintances. But sites like Rapleaf will quickly jar you awake: Everything you say or do on a social network could be fair game to sell to marketers. … By collecting these e-mail addresses, Rapleaf has already amassed a database of 50 million profiles, which might include a person’s age, birth date, physical address, alma mater, friends, favorite books and music, political affiliations, as well as how long that person has been online, which social networks he frequents, and what applications he’s downloaded. … All of this information could come in handy for Rapleaf’s third business, TrustFuse, which sells data (but not e-mail addresses) to marketers so they can better target customers, according to TrustFuse’s Web site. As of Friday afternoon, the sites of Rapleaf and Upscoop had no visible link to TrustFuse, but TrustFuse’s privacy policy mentions that the two companies are wholly owned subsidiaries of TrustFuse.

… In other words, Rapleaf sweeps up all the publicly available but sometimes hard-to-get information it can find about you on the Web, via social networks, other sites and, soon to be added, blogs. … Apart from the unusual TrustFuse business, Rapleaf is among a new generation of people search engines that take advantage of the troves of public data on the Net—much of which consumers happily post for public perusal on social-networking sites and personal blogs. The search engines trace a person’s digital tracks across these social networks, blogs, photo collections, news and e-commerce sites, to create a composite profile. … There doesn’t appear to be anything illegal about what these companies are doing. No one’s sifting through garbage cans or peeking through windows. They’ve merely found a clever way to aggregate the heaps of personal information that can be found on the Internet. … Just ask Dana Todd … “It’s my growing horror that everyone can see my Amazon Wish List. At least I didn’t have a book like ‘How to get rid of herpes’ on there, but now I have to go through and seriously clean my wish list,” she said.

This raises all sorts of interesting issues for privacy, going way beyond the dumb-teenager-spliff-smoking-photo-on-MySpace kind of story that get most public attention. If I’m understanding the article correctly, Rapleaf have figured out ways to get at some information from social networking sites that the users of these sites mightn’t have wanted to share with the outside world. This isn’t illegal, but it is fishy. Also, by aggregating together information about people’s networks and tastes across a variety of different websites and networking sites, it’s likely that the firm can draw non-obvious connections that people would prefer not to be drawn. US privacy law is notoriously patchy (your video rental records are heavily protected, thanks to efforts to embarrass conservative Supreme Court nominees, your sensitive financial information … not so much), but I’m not sure what kinds of policies would effectively protect those people who wanted to protected from this kind of widescale data trawling, even in more privacy friendly jurisdictions like the EU. That said, I’m personally quite creeped out by this kind of thing (albeit not creeped out enough to stop blogging or to withdraw my profile from social networking sites, for whatever good that would do me at this stage).

For some time, Josh Marshall has been saying that President Bush won’t fire Alberto Gonzales because he wouldn’t be able to get a new Attorney General confirmed by the Senate who would be willing to keep all of the cover-ups in place. Evidence for this theory is mounting. But Bush won’t be able to keep him in office for ever.

Assume a new Democratic President is inaugurated on January 20, 2009. Focusing on the illegal wire-tap program(s) (as opposed to the other cover-ups), which of the following is most likely:

a. the illegal wire-tap program(s) will be dismantled and all evidence of them destroyed by the time the new administration takes office;
b. they will still be up and running, and the new administration will quietly continue them;
c. the new administration will quietly stop them;
d. the new administration will say that they are stopping them, but actually continue them;
e. the new administration will make a big show about stopping them (and actually do so);
f. the new administration will make a big show about stopping them and move to prosecute members of the previous administration for violating the law.

I can’t believe a. is a viable option, so how would a Democratic administration handle such an illegal inheritance? Is there a significant difference among the candidates? (Maybe I should have made a you-tube video asking this.)

Ever since Google’s street view service was debuted there have been many discussions over its privacy implications. I’ve found most of these fairly overblown, but this morning I started to get a better sense of what some of the concerns might be about. Writing on the SMH’s news blog, Matthew Moore writes approvingly,

Mr McKinnon reckons you can hardly have a reasonable expectation of privacy on a public street when every second person has a video camera or mobile phone and when Google is now using street-level maps with images of real people who have no idea they have been photographed.

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Soon there will be a Web site just for this – if there isn’t one already -, but until then, let’s see what we can collect here.

Yesterday, Google announced a new feature of its Maps service: Street View for select urban areas in the U.S. plus Google’s backyard. We’ve seen this before on services like A9 (which discontinued the feature), and Microsoft’s Live Maps, but this seems more user-friendly.

Boing Boing has a thread with links to some interesting finds. Oh, the temptation to go hunting for more! Spot any embarrassing situations or funny captures? There is potential here for hours of amusement!

I’m off to Trader Joe’s.

Not the sort of phrase you associate with Britain, but this may change.

I’m very sorry to see, via the Virtual Stoa , that Chris Lightfoot , blogger, coder and social entrepreneur has died suddenly . My own knowledge of Chris was limited to reading his blog, exchanging the odd email, and sometimes visiting the various projects he helped create (such as Pledgebank ). But I read enough to notice that he was one of the few really individual voices on the interwebs: quirky, stubborn, idiosyncratic and pretty determined about the things he cared about – such as government and commercial threats to privacy.

Not surprisingly this is the kind of topic that spreads like wildfire across blogland.

AOL Research released (link to Google cache page) the search queries of hundreds of thousands of its users over a three month period. While user IDs are not included in the data set, all the search terms have been left untouched. Needless to say, lots of searches could include all sorts of private information that could identify a user.

The problems in the realm of privacy are obvious and have been discussed by many others so I won’t bother with that part. (See the blog posts linked above.) By not focusing on that aspect I do not mean to diminish its importance. I think it’s very grave. But many others are talking about it so I’ll focus on another aspect of this fiasco.

As someone who has research interests in this area and has been trying to get search companies to release some data for purely academic purposes, needless to say an incident like this is extremely unfortunate. Not that search companies have been particularly cooperative so far – based on this case not surprisingly -, but chances for future cooperation in this realm have just taken a nosedive.

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This is something that came up as an aside in a dissertation defence the other day (congratulations, A!). The dissertation was about privacy, and a brief comment was made that secret ballots might protect a voter’s right to privacy. I was surprised that I already had a half-thought-out but very strong dissent from this idea, so I thought I’d articulate it here and see what you think. There are some practical arguments in favour of having secret ballots in representative democratic elections for governmental positions; most obviously the argument that secret ballots obscure the information needed to perfect a market in votes; so that the vote remains effectively inalienable. But is there a right to vote secretly?; that is, if other measures could effectively prevent the emergence of a market in votes, or government retaliation against individual voters, would voters have a complaint if ballots were public? The privacy thought it that the interest in privacy, or something like that, protects this information; it protects us from others having the information about how we voted, just as it protects us from others having information about various other details of our thoughts and personal life.

I don’t think so.

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