Privacy

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.”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6695685.stm

I’m very sorry to see, via “the Virtual Stoa”:http://virtualstoa.net/2007/03/05/in-memoriam/ , that “Chris Lightfoot”:http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/wwwitter/ , blogger, coder and social entrepreneur “has died suddenly”:http://www.mysociety.org/2007/03/05/rip-chris-lightfoot-1978-to-2007/ . 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”:http://www.pledgebank.com/ ). 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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The BBC are running a story about “SWAT raids”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4803570.stm. The hook is the case of Dr Salvatore Culosoi, a Virginia doctor who was under investigation for illegal gambling. Culosi was unarmed, had no history of violent behavior, and threatened no-one during the raid. He was shot dead by a police officer. A striking statistic from the article is that the number of SWAT raids per year has increased from 3,000 in the 1980s to “at least 40,000 per year” now. Seems like a straightforward “garbage-can”:http://faculty.washington.edu/krumme/gloss/g.html process at the organizational level, or a “neoinstitutionalist”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_institutionalism story at the field level: SWAT teams are effective in certain situations. Initially, it’s cutting-edge departments who have them. They also get a lot of press. The gear makes a nice recruiting tool, too. Pretty soon, you need one if you want to be seen as a respectable police department. Once you have one, it’s a solution sitting around waiting for problems to apply itself to. Seeing as your podunk town is unlikely to have a hostage crisis, the bar for its application gets lowered way, way down. Voila, the police force is now militarized.

The story led me back to “Radley Balko’s”:http://www.theagitator.com/ outstanding coverage of the “Cory Maye case”:http://www.theagitator.com/archives/cat_cory_maye.php, which I wrote about “late last year”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/12/12/knock-knock-bang-bang/. It’s to Balko’s great credit that he’s been following up on this miscarriage of justice. He’s working on a magazine article about the case, which I sincerely hope appears where people will see it. Right now the Maye case shows that a lot of blogger agitation (about a nonpartisan issue, no less) can just sink without a trace unless it gets picked up by the media.

I see via Larry Solum (an indirect route if ever there was one) that Alan Rubel has posted his paper “Privacy and the USA Patriot Act: Rights, the Value of Rights, and Autonomy” (forthcoming in Law and Philosophy) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

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Law professor Glenn Reynolds quotes law professor Ann Althouse:

I wonder if those who screamed loudest about the Plame leak and national security are equally outraged about this new leak?

Pointing out this vile hypocrisy must be the zingiest zinger that ever zinged a zingee. They’re right, in way. Few of us who are upset about the outing of Valerie Plame are viscerally upset about the NSA leak, which we tend to see as a classic whistleblower scenario. As a dedicated Plame screamer, let me try to reply. (NOTE: Update below the fold.)

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You may have read about Sony/BMG putting rootkits on some of their music cds. (The original discovery was revealed by Mark Russinovich on his blog. Today, he posted a follow-up. Mainstream coverage is here, here, and here. There’s a good discussion on the Security Now podcast, number 12.)

Basically, rootkits are pieces of software that change the operating system in order to hide themselves and what they are doing. For example, they can intercept directory calls, thus hiding files from the operating system and from any software using the operating system. This makes it virtually impossible to see them from within. And once the operating system is compromised in a way that is invisible to users, all bets are off.

It’s bad enough that Sony would do this without giving users adequate notification. But the system they used – licensed from a company called First 4 Internet – did this in a particularly clunky way. Any file starting with the prefix $sys$ would also be hidden from the operating system, leaving the computer open to other hacks that would themselves be hidden.

Last week, on an NPR interview, a Sony executive downplayed the controversy, saying: “Most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?” Words to live by, I guess, because nothing can hurt you unless you know about it.

Update: EFF has a page with useful information including a list of cds known to contain the software. (hat tip: boingboing)

If you support a legal right to abortion, you should read Russell Arben Fox’s careful and nuanced argument against his fellow abortion-opponents who support the right to abortion. If you think there is no right to abortion, you also might want to read his argument. Here is the interesting post by Hugo Schwyzer to which he is responding; and here is a response to Russell from the excellent djw.

Ok, this was all discussed 3 weeks ago, but I am the slowest blog-watcher on the web. Comment there, not here.

Just by the by, commenters on last week’s Exit, voice, loyalty thread who wanted to be deleted from the baptismal register of their churches may be interested in a 2003 ruling by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner. A man contacted the parish priest asking to have his name removed from the baptismal register, saying he had been enrolled in the church against his will and did not want the church to keep any of his personal data.

The priest found no record of the baptism – the man was living in Holland and seems to have had bad information – but suggested that a reasonable solution would in any case be to add a note to the record saying the man no longer wished to be associated with the Catholic church. The Data Protection Commissioner agreed, finding the priest’s suggestion both appropriate and considerate, and noting that the register was a factual statement of an event. Which seems fair enough from the data protection point of view, but probably no consolation to people baptised as Catholics who do not wish to be counted as such.

As to myself, I figure I’m better off inside the tent, pissing in. I did perform an act of protest, though. The day after Benedict XVI’s election as pope, I took out my shortest skirt, pulled on my highest heeled FMBs, and flounced the mile and half to work. It was one just as (in)effective as anything else I could think of and made road-crossing surprisingly easy.

Bloggers with more patience than me have been dealing with the tragic story of Terri Schiavo. “Lindsay Beyerstein”:http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2005/03/the_left_and_te.html has been “especially good”:http://www.alternet.org/story/21572. It’s clear that the Republican position on Schiavo is sheer grandstanding and hypocritical to boot. There’s plenty of evidence for this, what with President Bush’s signature on the “Texas Futile Care Law”:http://www.markarkleiman.com/archives/schiavo_/2005/03/schiavo_futile_care_and_money.php and Bill Frist’s “statements about Christopher Reeve”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_03_20_atrios_archive.html#111169758487216228 and his support for “harvesting organs from anencephalic children”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_03_20_atrios_archive.html#111160342761631336. And never mind the broader policy context where the fiscal means whereby people might support patients in persistent vegetative states — via Medicare and bankruptcy protection — are being hacked away. Now, via “DC Media Girl”:http://dcmediagirl.com/index.php?entry=entry20050324-204119, we have the icing on the cake. Some “Fox News Pundit”:http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,151442,00.html is thinking that Jeb Bush should just authorize a SWAT team to storm the hospice and get Terri Schiavo out:

bq. Just to burnish my reputation as a bomb thrower, I think Jeb Bush should give serious thought to storming the Bastille. By that I mean he should think about telling his cops to go over to Terri Schiavo’s (search) hospice, go inside, put her on a gurney and load her into an ambulance. They could take her to a hospital, revive her, and reattach her feeding tube. … So Jeb, call out the troops, storm the Bastille and tell ’em I sent you.

It’s our old friend, “poetic justice as fairness”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/07/17/poetic-justice-as-fairness/. Two words, buddy: “Elian Gonzalez”:http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/elian/.

Jeffrey Rosen has a piece in yesterday’s NYTimes Magazine about the practice of blogging intricate details about one’s dating and sex life on one’s blog. (I was going to say “one’s private life”, but how private is it once it’s been blogged and read by hundreds?) As usual with journalistic pieces such as this one, it is hard to tell how widespread the phenomenon is, but it is out there to some extent and may be worth some thought. I certainly know that people in my social circles – friends, family members, colleagues – do wonder what I will and will not blog about from our interactions and sometimes even preface comments by saying “this is not for blogging”. I always reassure these people that I never blog information about other people without permission and in general rarely mention any names or other identifying information (except to give credit, but I check in such cases as well). However, from reading the article one would think my practices are more the exception than the rule.

Since I do not blog anonymously there is more social control over what I decide to make public. After all, everything I say reflects on me in return. Outing information about others that many may find inappropriate will have negative repercussions on me. So even if I had no concerns, whatsoever, about the privacy of people around me – but I do – a solely self-interested approach would still dictate that I keep information about others’ lives private in order not to upset people and in turn lose credibility and trust in the future. However, such social control operates much less effectively among those who can hide behind the veil of a pseudonym.

As I prepare for my upcoming undergraduate class in which students will be required to maintain blogs, I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about how to comply with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). According to FERPA, I have to make sure that certain details about student enrollment in my classes are kept private. In the process, I have realized that this is a one-way street. There is nothing preventing my students from blogging whatever information they decide about me. Of course, social sanctions may still exist. Students may decide it is not worth upsetting their instructor through such practices. Nonetheless, there will be plenty of opportunities for blogging things after class is over. Moreover, they may have individual blogs not associated with the class that are written anonymously and can serve as an outlet for commentary about others.

Of course, we all have different selves depending on the social situations in which we find ourselves and there is no reason one should let down certain guards in front of a classroom or when with a group of colleagues. Perhaps the most disturbing part about the phenomenon described in the article is that people are blogging intricate details about their private lives, which in turn includes the private lives of others. Of course, as long as this is a known fact one can accept it and behave accordingly (or not accept it and stop spending time with the person assuming that’s an option). But it sounds like this practice often only becomes clear after the fact, which seems to put unfortunate added pressure on private interactions.

I just wanted to be part of the Allelujah chorus on this:

Atrios reports gleefully that a Republican Congressman, asked point-blank about his sexual orientation, refused to answer.

Good for him! (The congressman, I mean.) The right answer to that question, from anyone except a potential sexual partner, is “None of your f—ing business.”

I really, really disapprove of gay-baiting, even if the gays being baited hold disgusting political positions. And I thought that attitude was part of the definition of liberalism.

When did that change? Did I miss the memo?