I’m at the DLD conference in Munich. Haven’t live-blogged in ages. But the European Commission vice-president Viviane Reding is speaking and I disagreed with her rather a lot in Public Parts, arguing that her four pillars for internet governance — privacy by default, demanding European standards for storage of data, the right to be forgotten, and transparency — bring unintended consequences.
Reding says that in “Europe, we have too many rules, too many conflicting rules.” So she wants to take over the rules for all Europe. Look at SOPA, too: There is a competition among governments to regulate the internet, to consolidate power.
“Persosnal data is the currency of today’s digital market. And like any currency, it needs stability and trust,” Reding says. Yes, but is government — which can most abuse our data — its best protector?
“Can we be sure that the rules we make today will fit tomorrow?” she asks. She says one cannot build rules that are too rigid; they need to be “futureproof.” But then, they also become very broad and that, too, has consequences.
She argues that following 27 separate sets of regulations costs 2.3 billion euros a year. Again, she justifies taking over local authority. But that is the EU.
She also calls for a smoother exchange of data among police authorities in the EU members to fight terrorism. Well, that sounds like the greatest threat to privacy I can imagine: all governments pooling what they know about you.
Reding says companies will be required to appoint data protection (privacy) officers. Thus the regulatory-industrial complex of the new privacy industry grows.
She says data-protection authorities need to be “independent” of politics. Does that mean they are above government by the people and representation?
Now to her “right to be forgotten.” It is a right, she says, to “withdraw permission” for data held by companies. I fear the implications for free speech. And on a practical level, how can one as a principle to tell people to no longer know what they know?
She says it is not an absolute right. “There are no absolute rights,” she says. She says it’s not a right to erase history or impact media. So this shows the problem with this notion, when one starts making exceptions for a principles.
Now she speaks about the debate about the freedom of the internet. She says the freedom of information and expression is a basic right and “this is directly linked to the freedom of internet, which has thus to be preserved. But those are not the only freedoms…. Sometimes one must balance freedom.” She claims the right of the creator (read: copyright) is “equally important.” Really? Higher than speech? But she says that Europe will never pass blocking legislation (read: SOPA).
No opportunity to question Reding. Shame.
Now a Microsoft guy is giving a talk and I cannot figure out what he’s trying to say. Otherwise, I’d blog it.
Next up, Andrew Keen. Polemic time. He reads a quote from Sheryl Sandberg about deeper portraits online. “I’m here as someone who is raising my voice in defense of lost privacy,” he says. But he doubts that Reding and government are the protectors.
He calls me a spokesman for “the cult of the social.” AKA society, I’d say.
He says we need to learn to live alone. Funny, but the internet was last accused of making us antisocial and now it’s accused of making us too social. It makes us neither. We make it.
Now Nick Bilton leads a panel asking the premise of his book: is privacy dead. Garg.
Odd how the topic of privacy has turned an internet conference into an anti-internet conference.
Nick asks 4Chan’s Chris Poole whether we “should allow anonymity on the net.” That’s how the net is built, Nick. It already is allowed. It is part and parcel of free speech.
WASHINGTON–Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz today announced a record fine against Santa Claus for violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
“Mr. Claus has flagrantly violated children’s privacy, collecting their consumer preferences for toys and also tracking their behavior so as to judge and maintain a data base of naughtiness and niceness,” Leibowitz said. “Worse, he has tied this data to personally identifiable information, including any child’s name, address, and age. He has solicited this information online, in some cases passing data to third parties so they may fulfill children’s wishes. According to unconfirmed reports, he has gone so far as to invade children’s homes in the dead of night. He has done this on a broad scale, unchallenged by government authorities for too long.”
Claus was fined $2 million and ordered to end any contact with children. Prior COPPA fines include $1 million against now-virtually-unknown social site Xanga, $400,000 againstUMG Recordings, and $35,000 against notorious toymaker Etch-a-Sketch.
The FTC action follows similar complaints against Claus brought by European privacy authorities. European Commission Vice-President Viviane Reding has complained about Claus holding data on children outside of EU data-protection standards in North Pole server farms. German head of consumer protection Ilse Aigner has called for an investigation of Claus’ use of Google Street View in navigating his Christmas Eve visits. German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information Peter Schaar has demanded that Claus give children, naughty or nice, the right to be forgotten in his data base. And Thilo Weichert, head of the privacy protection office in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, demanded that German web sites take down any Facebook “Like” button referring to Claus.
Meanwhile, Canadian Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart has attempted to bring together an international coalition of privacy officers opposed to Claus’ practices. In California, Claus has been threatened with severe penalties for nonpayment of the state sales tax. And the UK has vowed that Claus will be detained and could face extradition should he set foot in any English chimneys on Christmas Eve.
Reaction to the FTC decision was mixed in Washington. Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry vowed to kill the Federal Trade Commission, relieved that he had finally recalled the final agency he had marked for death. Rival Newt Gingrich suggested that Claus apply for U.S. citizenship, “having contributed much to U.S. industry by stimulating greed at all ages; we need more Clauses and more spending to fix this Democrat-ruined economy.” Ron Paul suggested that Claus set up a Liberatarian nation at the North Pole and offered to run for office there. Herman Cain, whose candidacy remains on hold after allegations of sexual improprieties, said that he “always wondered why the old coot didn’t get in hot water for plopping kiddies on his lap; seemed a lot creepier than anything I ever did.” President Barack Obama refused comment.
From his North Pole headquarters, Claus said through a spokesman that he endeavored only to fulfill children’s dreams. “I regret that the world has come to this: treating any adult who wants to make a child happy as a dangerous stranger,” he said. “The problem with our modern world is not technology but fear, suspicion, and cynicism.” He vowed to continue his Christmas mission of joy. “What’s the worst they can do to me?” he asked, “cookie me?”
Sunday’s New York Times editorializes in favor of Do Not Track and other privacy legislation going through Congress and the Federal Trade Commission. Yet The New York Times itself makes much use of personal, private, and tracking information itself. Indeed, it requires tracking.
The editorial (my emphasis): “Congress should act on the F.T.C.’s recommendation to establish a system that would allow consumers to effectively opt out of all tracking of their online activities. There are other worthy proposals, including the administration’s call for limits on the collection of data about consumers online. Lawmakers have proposed about a dozen privacy bills this year alone. But with Congress stuck in a partisan rut, it is reassuring to see the F.T.C. at work.”
* If you subscribe to the print New York Times, the company will sell your name *and address* and other unspecified data to others. “If you are a print subscriber to The New York Times newspaper and subscribed either by mail, phone or online, we may exchange or rent your name and mailing address and certain other information, such as when you first subscribed to The New York Times (but not your e-mail address) with other reputable companies that offer marketing information or products through direct mail.” That’s not opt-in; it’s opt-out.
In Public Parts, I argue that privacy policies in old media have long been far worse than online. Magazines, newspapers, and other recipients of your media money have for years sold information about what you read and consume and who you are and where you live to large data-base companies and marketers. If a library or an online site did that, it would be shot. But The New York Times does that. Want to pass a law about that, Times?
* The New York Times requires that you use cookies. It decrees: “You will not be able to access certain areas of our Web sites, including NYTimes.com, if your computer does not accept cookies from us.” So what happens when Congress passes Do Not Track, Times?
In its explanation of cookies, The Times says: “Our registration system requires that you accept cookies from NYTimes.com in order to log in to our Web site. Cookies are not spyware, viruses or any other kind of malicious program. For best results, set your browser options to accept all cookies from NYTimes.com. You can use your browser options to clear the cookies later, if necessary.”
Precisely. You have many means now to get rid of cookies: You can turn them off, kill them at the end of every session or whenever you want, or open a private session (an “incognito” window in Chrome) that relays no data about you. Do Not Track is redundant. It’s political cynicism.
Oh, and The Times — which gathers more personally identifiable data about you than most any other newspaper — could not operate its paywall without cookies.
* Just like other online marketers, The Times uses cookies to target advertising. “The New York Times Home Delivery Web site also transmits non-personally identifiable Web site usage information about visitors to the servers of a reputable third party for the purpose of targeting our Internet banner advertisements on other sites. To do this, we use Web Beacons in conjunction with cookies provided by our third-party ad server on this site.” Would The Times outlaw this essential business behavior? This is how The Times earns its premium rates with branding advertisers.
* The Times hires a number of analytics companies to track your behavior, from the creepily named Audience Science to WebTrends for the web and from Localytics to the fluffily named Flurry for mobile.
* The Times logs what pages you see and uses that to recommend content.
* It logs your location if you use mobile applications.
* It allows third-party ad servers to place cookies on your computer and track your behavior.
Mind you, I do not object to any of these tracking behaviors. They are, in my opinion, necessary to pay for the content we get from The Times and The Journal and much of the rest of media. They are used to reduce noise, repetition, and irrelevant advertising and content. They are all-in-all harmless and have been demonized by privacy’s regulatory-industrial complex and now even by The Times. If The Times gets its wish and Do Not Track passes, enabling too many consumers “to effectively opt out of all tracking of their online activities,” then I fear we will get less content or more paywalls or both.
I also argue that media and marketing companies have done a godawful job of letting their customers know what information they were gathering and what they were doing with it and how consumers benefited. They long ago should have learned from Amazon, which reveals what it collects and what results and enables customers to see and control and correct that information (which also only gives Amazon yet more valuable data). So it’s their own damned fault they’ve been demonized, opening the door to the cynical pols and bureaucrats who proposed Do Not Track — and to their allies, such as The Times editorialists, who argue on the basis of nonspecific emotions rather than tangible facts about harm and consequences.
The Wall Street Journal today publishes excerpts from a debate among me, danah boyd, Stewart Baker, and Christopher Soghoian about privacy (and publicness). They had us write to specific lengths, so I was surprised that they didn’t publish the entire conversation, even online. So if you can bear more, here are my complete bits; I’ll let me fellow debaters post their own.
Privacy is important. It deserves protection. And it is receiving protection from no end of self-appointed watchdogs, legislators, regulators, consultants, companies, and chief privacy officers: an entire regulatory/industrial complex. Privacy is in good hands.
It’s publicness I worry about: our corresponding right and newfound ability to use this Gutenberg press we all now own—the internet—to speak, assemble, act, connect, and collaborate in a more open society. I fear that that if we over-regulate privacy, managing only to the worst-case, we could lose sight of the benefits of publicness, the value of sharing.
Our new sharing industry—led by Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Foursquare, blogs, and new services launched every day—is premised on an innate human desire to connect. Eight hundred million people can’t be wrong. That’s how many people use Facebook alone to post more than a billion artifacts of their lives every day. These aren’t privacy services. They are social services.
But the private/public discussion to date has focused almost exclusively on privacy and worry. New technologies that cause disruption have often led to collective concern about privacy. After the invention of the press, the earliest published authors fretted about having their thoughts associated with their names, set down permanently and distributed widely. The first serious discussion of a legal right to privacy in the United States did not come until 1890, spurred by the invention of the portable Kodak camera and the rise of the penny press. For a time, President Teddy Roosevelt banned “kodakers” from Washington parks.
Now we are at the dawn of the greatest technological disruption since the press and it brings corresponding concern. It is well to worry about what could go wrong so we may guard against it, to assure that companies and especially government do not surveil us to our detriment.
But I ask us to also recognize and guard the publicness our new tools empower. I hope we engage in another discussion about the principles of an open society: the right to connect, speak, assemble and act; privacy as an ethic; the call for our institutions to become transparent by default and secret by necessity (now it is reversed); the value of maintaining the public square; and the need to safeguard the people’s net from tyrants, censors, private control, and the unintended consequences of well-meaning but premature regulation.
Privacy has its protectors. What of publicness?
Part II:
Privacy legislation and regulation are awash with unintended consequences.
Germany’s head of consumer protection, Ilse Aigner, surely believes she is guarding citizens’ privacy when she urges them to exercise their Verpixelungsrecht, their so-called right to have photos of buildings taken from public streets pixilated in Google Street View. But she sets a precedent that could affect the free-speech rights of journalists and citizens. She diminishes the public square at the public’s cost.
The U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act says sites may not use information specific to a child under 13 without written (that is, faxed, scanned, or videoconferenced) parental consent. The result: Children learn to lie about their age. And young people are likely the worst-served sector of society online. That is a tragedy of lost opportunity.
The Do Not Track legislation making its way through Congress threatens ad tracking and cookies. This newspaper demonizes them as “intrusive” and “intensive surveillance.” FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz denounces media that use them as “cyberazzi.” Though most of this data is anonymous. Taken too far, Do Not Track could devalue online media, resulting in less content, more pay walls, and a less-informed populace. The road to ignorance may be paved with good intentions.
Part III:
Stipulated: Anonymity, pseudonymity, and even nicknames need to be protected for the vulnerable, dissidents in danger, whistleblowers, and even game players, for the sake of their speech.
That said, real people and real relationships have proven to add value, accountability, and civility to online discourse.
Stipulated: The advertising, media, and sharing industries have done a dreadful job being open about what they track, why, and what benefits accrue to their users. The mess they’re in is much of their own making.
Even so, online tracking is being demonized in shrill fear-mongering (Chris’ is but one example), which doesn’t acknowledge that most of this data—unlike the consumer data bases of preinternet marketing—do not contain names and addresses. There is little discussion of harm or benefit, only vague fear.
Stipulated: We need to come together as one society to perform certain functions, such as voting and taxation.
But we are not a mass. The myth of the grand shared experience of media—all of us hanging on Uncle Walter’s every pause—was an unfortunate, half-century-long aberration. Democracy should be a cacophony of ideas and perspectives. Thanks to our new tools of publicness, we are regaining the power to create and find our own publics.
Identity can aid connections. Tracking can produce relevance. Personalization can reduce noise. These are benefits of the net.
Here, friends, is the introduction to my new book, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way we Work and Live, complete and free. It’s a summary of the thinking in the book.
The excerpt is in Scribd because that maintains the formatting and pretty typography. (Click on the full-screen button at the bottom of the player to blow it up, or click on the link atop to go to the Scribd page.)
Also, below, is the audio version of the intro — with me at the mic, oft-edited.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you that you can go here for links to preorder the book, which is released on Sept. 27. And here is the schedule for the book tour, as it stands.
Here’s the audio excerpt. (If it’s not showing up, try this link; the embed has been a bit wonky for me.) By the way, audiobook fans, you can’t preorder the audio version — oddly — but it will be on sale promptly on Sept. 27.
Fortune’s Jessi Hempel writes a wonderful review of Public Parts, I’m proud to say.
“Privacy has its advocates. Jeff Jarvis has made himself an advocate for publicness. In Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way we Work and Live, the original Internet optimist argues that if we become too obsessed with guarding all personal information on the ‘Net, we’ll miss important opportunities that come with making information available.
“It’s a refreshing take on a topic often covered by people who feel that the Internet — and in particular, social networks like Facebook and the vast amount of personal data that flow within them — threatens to imperil our children and undermine our society. . . . .
“His book is not so much a rallying cry for tweeting your breakfast choices and blogging your company financials as it is a field guide for how to navigate this new technology with optimism rather than fear.”
There’s a hubbub brewing over privacy and Facebook in Germany — and, not for the first time, there’s misinformation involved. So I got on the phone to Facebook to get technical facts.
First, the news: Thilo Weichert, head of the office for data protection in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, issued a press release (conveniently translated into English) attacking and essentially outlawing the Facebook “Like” button on sites, telling them to take down the button — and, oddly, their fan pages — and threatening them with 50,000€ fines. He declared that “Like” violates German and European law because it sends data about users back to Facebook in the U.S. He went so far as to advise German users not to click on “Like” and even not to set up Facebook accounts.
I contacted Facebook and just spoke with the head of the platform, Carl Sjogreen, and the chief European spokesman, Stefano Hesse, to understand what really happens. This is what Sjogreen said:
Obviously, when you click on a “Like” button, you are telling the world you like something and so, of course, your identity and your affection are recorded and published at Facebook. If you are signed into Facebook when you visit a site with the “Like” button, obviously, Facebook’s servers will act on knowing who you are because it will tell you which of your friends also publicly liked this site.
In the case Weichert seems to be aiming at, If you are not signed into Facebook, your IP address will be sent back to Facebook but then your IP address is sent back to the servers of Google+ buttons, comment systems, and ads of all types. “That’s how browsers work,” Sjogreen said. “We don’t use that information in any way to create a profile for the user, as has been alleged here.”
Facebook send sites data in aggregate so they can see, for example, click-through rates for the “Like” button in various pages. Facebook erases IP data after 90 days. It does something else to further anonymize I hope to tell you about later.
“The only time ‘Like’ button information is associated with a particular person is when you are signed into Facebook and click,” Sjogreen said.
I see no violation of privacy, no sneaky stealing of user information worthy of this action and press release – which, by the way, Weichert issued without taking to Facebook. Indeed, Hesse told me that Facebook has been working with Weichert’s counterpart in Hamburg and that that office, he says, is pleased with what Facebook is doing.
But Weichert is a grandstander. I saw that first-hand when I debated him in a panel set up by the Green party in Berlin, where he attacked not only Google but his constituents — the people he is supposedly trying to protect — who use it: “As long as Germans are stupid enough to use this search engine,” he spat, “they don’t deserve any better.” He went farther, comparing Google with China and Iran. “Google’s only interest is to earn money,” he said, as if shocked. That theme continues in his Facebook attack, where he complains that the company is worth more than $50 billion. No, he’s not from the Communist part.
Earlier today, I went to search GoogleNews for “Facebook” and “Schleswig-Holstein” to find news on the event but found something else interesting, which I discussed — to considerable controversy — in a Google+ post: A politician from Schleswig-Holstein just resigned in shame after confessing to an affair via Facebook with a 16-year-old girl. To me, there’s an obvious paradox there: Aren’t government officials trying first to protect the privacy and thus safety of our young people? Yet here is a government official exploiting a young girl via Facebook. Facebook is not the threat here; the government official is. In my earlier post, I said that in some states in the U.S., this would be statutory rape. Much upset ensued. But I still don’t get it. Who’s protecting whom from whom?
This is why I focused so much on Germany in my book, Public Parts, because it is grappling with privacy and technology in ways that are similar to other cultures, only amplified and skewed.
In any case, I wanted to get to the facts here and that’s why I’m posting this.
Among the most deliberate and abhorrent mass violations of privacy committed in recent memory did not come as a result of technology, social services, databases, hackers, thieves, leakers, or governments. It was an act of a news organization, News Corp., which hacked into the phones of a reported 4,000 people, including not just celebrities but dead children and the families of the victims of terrorism and war.
Power corrupts.
The oh-so-rich irony is that this comes from the same company that, through its Wall Street Journal, fancies itself the protector of our privacy. The Journal would have us believe that web sites, technology companies, advertisers, and retailers are the enemies of privacy. No, it was their own corporate colleagues, their fellow journalists.
The solution to this threat to privacy is not to change technology or even the law. It is to enforce the laws, norms, and mores that already exist and hold to account the criminals and those responsible for their actions. That is, the managers of News Corp. That is, the Murdoch family.
This is not a matter of technology but of corruption.
Killing the offending News of the World is — I agree with the Guardian — a deeply cynical act. Some relatively small number of the paper’s employees was responsible for these acts — they’re presumed to be gone already. Now all of them are out of a job. Now a 168-year-old newspaper is dead — and it’s not as if we have any to spare. But the bosses responsible for the coverup remain.
The Murdochs apparently believe that they have amputated the offending limb and that’s that. But the toxin still flows in the bloodstream.
Mind you, I’m not your stock Murdoch basher. I worked for News Corp. in the ’90s, when I was TV critic at TV Guide, when the company owned it. I launched a magazine there and then went to work briefly at Delphi Internet when the company bought it (escaping in the nick of time before the first of many News Corp. internet disasters ensued). When News Corp. bought Dow Jones, I told reporters that I had not seen interference from Murdoch the way I had at revered Time Inc. That is to say, I defended Murdoch.
A further disclosure: My next book, Public Parts, was to be published, like my last one, by News Corp.’s HarperCollins. But I pulled the book because in it, I am very critical of the parent company for being so closed. It’s now being published by Simon and Schuster.
One more disclosure: I write for and have consulted for the Guardian, which has dogged this story brilliantly and triumphally.
Now having said all that, I’ll say this: News Corp. and its culture are simply corrupt. I’ll ask you this: Could you imagine such crimes occurring at Google? Wouldn’t these crimes mortally damage its brand? Could you imagine News Corp. taking Google’s pledge to do no evil? Those are rhetorical questions. The answers are obvious.
I’m most appalled that News Corp.’s crimes occur under the banner of journalism. Ah, professional journalism, which holds itself up above the supposedly nonexistent standards of bloggers and mere citizens and witnesses. Journalism, here to protect, educate, inform, and represent us.
I doubt we’ll end up with a Nixonian moment: What did Rupert know and when did he know it? But we can’t say the same for his son, James. See the Guardian’s annotation of James’ statement today (a new form of journalism, by the way), which only raises more questions. He is in charge of News International, the offending division. He is set to take over the company. The company is almost set to take over Sky.
I’m generally a critic of regulating speech and thus media. But the UK regulates media and I can’t imagine a better time to do so. What will the government do? If it allows the Sky acquisition to go through, then it makes a lie and laugh of its authority. Meanwhile, what can the profession do to amputate this diseased arm, News Corp.?
I know I sound strident here. I know some will properly accuse me of being late to the bonfire, having just confessed that I’d defended Murdoch. But the two go together. I was willing to give the Murdochs their rope. Now they’ve hung themselves with it.
The story’s a long way away from America. But News Corp. isn’t. Now all of us who live under its influence deserve to ask what they will do to fix the company’s corrupt culture that allowed these crimes. We can ask. But I don’t expect answers.
I fear we are on the verge of fetishizing privacy. Well, we’re not — but our media and government are.
Media’s assumptions
Yesterday I got a call from a journalist about Google+ and its Circles. He was not at all hostile to Google, Facebook, or social, but even so, implicit in his questions was a presumption that privacy is our highest priority in social services.
Think about that for half a minute and the absurdity of it becomes apparent. We don’t come to social services to hide secrets; that would be idiotic. We come to share.
The journalist said that people must be afraid of being public. Think about that for the rest of a minute: Media and government have held a monopoly on publicness as they have owned the megaphone and soapbox. Now the internet gives the rest of us the ability to be public and these long-public people think we are scared of what the have? How patronizing of them.
The meme about Google+ Circles is that it beats Facebook on privacy because it gives us upfront control over whom we share with. That’s true: Every time I share something I make a decision about whether to share it with the public or some of my circles. That is better, clearer, and easier than digging into Facebook’s settings once and for all to silo my world. It is better than not bothering to change those settings and depending on Facebook’s defaults, only to find them change and become more public. Google+ got to learn from Facebook and start with Circles to enable this difference.
Except I have watched my own behavior with Google+ lo, these 36 hours and I find at when I share with less than everyone it is not out of privacy or security needs. It’s out of relevance. I may have something to tell my TWiT colleagues or my fellow journowonks that would bore everyone else who follows me. So I restrict my audience not to keep a secret but to reduce noise for them, which I can’t do on Twitter or can’t easily do on Facebook. I am still sharing; it’s better sharing.
The journalist talked about Zuckerberg and Google wanting us to share — and they do because, as I’ve said, they depend on getting us to generate more signals about our interests, needs, and desires so they can gi e us more relevant, thus valuable content, services, and advertising. But in the journalist’s phrasing I heard him implying that Zuckerberg and Page were squeezing stuff out of like toothpaste tubes, against our wills.
Nonsense. As I say in Public Parts, 600 million people can’t be wrong. We are sharing a billion things a day on Facebook alone because we want to, because we find value in it. That’s where the discussion should begin, with the power of publicness, not with the presumption of privacy.
Government’s presumptions
I was delighted yesterday to see a senator — Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania — warn his colleagues against “breaking the internet.”
Some are in such a rush to regulate the net and protect what they and media think is our highest priority — privacy — that they threaten to both hamper how sites and services and operate and how they can sustain themselves.
Jay Rockefeller is pushing do-not-track. John Kerry and John McCain have a privacy bill. Al Franken has a bill to limit sharing of location data with third parties (those “third parties” are becoming the boogeymen of the digital age, though they are often just companies that serve ads, provide web services such as analytics, and sell us stuff).
I’m not suggesting that all this legislation is bad. We do need privacy protections. Sites must give us greater and clearer control over what we share to whom and why (as Google seems to have done with its Circles). Phones should not be storing information about what we do without our knowledge and without giving us control over it. Stipulated.
But I fear unintended consequences. Rockefeller’s do-not-track could pull the advertising rug out from under web sites, forcing some of them to go behind a pay wall — if they can — and killing other sites, reducing the content on the web. Franken’s location bill, I learned this week, does not have a carve out for sending data to ad-servers (they are dreaded “third parties”), which could kneecap the local-mobile content industry before it even starts.
Politicians and media companies are coming at these questions at the wrong starting line: as if we go to the internet to take a piece of private information and squirrel it away there. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re sharing.
: MORE: On Twitter, @hasanahmad complains that when sharing a photo with a circle members of that circle could share it in turn and then it becomes more public.
Yes, absolutely. That’s how life works. You tell a friend something. Then, as I say in Public Parts, the responsibility for what to do with that lies with that friend; what you’ve said is public to that extent and whether it becomes more public is a decision your friend will now make. It may be fine to share in turn; it may not be. You’d need to set those conditions with that friend before sharing. And if you don’t want the friend to share, maybe you shouldn’t share. The issue here isn’t technology. It’s people. No change there.
So I asked my Twitter interrogator what he proposes we do about this: Put license conditions on the photo we share? Sue the friend?
This is where Eric Schmidt is right. I’ll paraphrase him: If you want to hide something, the worst place to do that is on a social network. That’s where you share. Your brain is where you hide secrets.
: SEE ALSO: Jonathan Allen on sharing for purpose v privacy.
At two privacy conferences—one in New York, the other right now in Victoria, B.C.—I’ve watched the growth of privacy’s regulatory/industrial complex and seen its strategy in action: scare, then sell.
Yesterday, before I spoke at the Reboot conference, the privacy commissioner for the province, Elizabeth Denham, got up to demonize the social net and its leaders. She said that Google’s Eric Schmidt believes privacy is not relevant anymore, citing his jokes about changing our names at age 21. She belittled Mark Zuckerberg, too. She bragged about helping to bring Facebook to accounts when she was in the federal privacy office. And she gloated about the fizzle of Google Buzz. Then she boasted about adding more regulators to her office and getting more resources. Scare and spend.
At a later panel, I saw a vendor go through his PowerPoint showing the growth of so many outlets of social media. He said 500 million people were using Facebook. Then he paused … dramatically. Then he said, “scary.” Why is that scary? He didn’t say. He talked about watching YouTube videos as if that could be harmful in and of itself. How? He didn’t say. That’s how the discussion of the social web has advanced in this industry: all you have to do is say people are using these mysterious tools and the fear is assumed. But then he sold his service. Scare, then sell.
I spoke with the head of an association of chief privacy officers. Boy, I said, I’ll bet your membership is growing. In increments of a thousand, he said. He also noted how the growth in the U.S. is in privacy officers while in Europe it’s in privacy regulators.
I saw the two come together at the other conference, MediaBistro’s in New York, when the head of a privacy advocacy organization issued his fearsome spectres for the crowd of companies and regulators. It becomes a self-powering machine: The privacy advocate feeds the regulators arguments to be scared and regulate more, then companies think they need more privacy services, and more companies are born to provide them—companies that set up booths here in Victoria. One handed out a slick magazine with the big cover billing: “Social Media RISKS: Four Areas You Must Examine At Your Company.”
In the draft of my book Public Parts—which I’m furiously editing now—I had not gone after privacy’s regulatory/industrial complex. I’m trying hard not to pit privacy and publicness against each other as they are not binary; one depends upon the other in a continuum of choices we all make.
But the emergence of Privacy, Inc., as a industry built on scaring people is beginning to scare me.
In my talk yesterday, I warned of unintended consequences of too much regulation enacted too quickly. I cited Germany’s Verpixelungsrecht, its blurring of images in Google Street View and the precedent that sets for others taking pictures in public of public views.
I also worry that efforts to bring in a Do Not Track list and other demonization of ad targeting could cripple the revenue of the media and news industries even as they struggle to find sustainability; it could kill news outlets and reduce journalism.
At the final panel I attended, moderated by Denham, I saw execs from trade groups and Yahoo as well as a reasonable friend from Ottawa’s privacy office talk about meaningful efforts that are being made to be more transparent about advertising, which—lord knows—is needed.
The ad and media industries have been damned fools, not being open enough about what they do and how they do it and the value that comes to them—in higher ad rates—and much more importantly to the public—in relevance (and less noise). But Yahoo showed off a good tool to see and change how you are being targeted. The Canadian Interactive Advertising Bureau put forward a good framework for self-regulation. FutureOfPrivacy.org gave good advice about seeing past tools and disclosures and making advertising actually worthwhile for consumers.
Denham, to her credit, asked the panel to define bad regulation. They said it’s taking a narrow issue and using broad strokes to regulate it, doing collateral damage. She came to the view of regulation I’ve learned from danah boyd: that we need to concentrate on controlling use of data more than the gathering of it. (It’s illogical, indeed impossible, to tell people what they may not know; it’s logical and feasible to tell them what they may not do with what they know.)
So at the end of the day, I felt a bit better. But I fear that the reasonable and necessary moves to protect privacy—and it does need protection—won’t be able to outrun the fear strategy. For fear is building a new industry, a very fast-growing industry.
: Here’s Mathew Ingram’s GigaOm report on my talk with a brief chat. I hope to be able to post the talk itself soon.
Yesterday, I held a session on privacy and publicness as part of a news literacy event held at Baruch’s journalism school, intending to exploit these young people by interviewing them — rather than lecturing them — for my book on publicness and privacy. I came away greatly heartened about the wisdom and savvy of the NYC teens I heard from there.
I started the day, though, depressed as GMA weekend anchor Ron Claiborne delivered a propagandistic defense of all things professional, closed, and corporate in journalism and an attack on this internet thing. “When was the last time you saw a correction on a blog?” he demanded. I muttered, “fuck me,” and then had to remind myself of the company I was in. So I muttered on Twitter that I’ve seen countless corrections on blogs since I last saw one on network news. Claiborne was telling the internet to get off these kids’ lawns. I got grumpy. My mood didn’t improve when nobody showed up for my first of two sessions. “Well,” I joked with fellow faculty, “they say kids today don’t care about privacy today. I guess this is the proof.”
But in my second session, the room filled with three or four dozen young people (and a few teachers) and I began interviewing them. Boy, was I impressed. Random notes….
No one in the room uses MySpace. They scrunch their collective noses at the name. Not so very long ago, MySpace was said to be the service for young people, particularly urban young people. Well, no more. Rupert’s Folly has fallen off a cliff. It’s clear this is why he’s giving it two quarters to climb back up or he’s setting it adrift.
Almost none of them uses Twitter. They say it lacks context; it is too fast and fleeting; and they don’t care about much of what they read there (which makes sense when your friends aren’t there). When I tweeted that, the NYTimes’ @zimbalist asked why. I think it’s because they’re not publishers (yet). They’re connecting. Whether this is a matter of the the age or their age, I have no way to know; we’ll have to wait to see the impact on Twitter when they grow older.
But I’ve seen this elsewhere. This summer, as my son and I drove up to Facebook’s headquarters to interview Mark Zuckerberg for the book, Jake said he thought Facebook had invented something entirely new in the Wall. Its inventor disagreed; Mark said people always have, in his word, signalled. But I side with Jake. On his Wall (when I’m permitted in) I see him and his friends holding conversations there, in the open, as if in the hall at school. They use the Wall as a place to communicate. I see the Wall — as I think others my age do — as a place to publish or broadcast; we instinctively see it as media. So Twitter fits our reflex; Facebook theirs. But I think the young people are making use of the internet that is truer to its nature: It is not a medium but is a connector.
All the students post photos to Facebook; many post videos there; a few had posted videos to YouTube — interesting that so few do, because some of them come from a school for the performing arts. One young woman says she was going to take down her account because her videos are dumb and pointless, in her view: just her talking. One young man had just put up some impressions and he enjoys the idea of having a public there. Will we see more of that; is it their ambition to make media and audiences? Again, time will tell. I’ll bet we will as they find their public voices.
Every student in the room uses Facebook. They confess to being on it for hours at a time — three or more a day. My son’s was in the first class able to use Facebook in high school four-plus years ago. I thought it might seep down to middle school. So far, not so much. These students say they started using it in high school. I’ll confess relief. I found it fascinating that a few of the students with younger siblings were quite protective of them and did not approve of a 9-year-old using Twitter.
To a young man and woman, the people in this room confirm what I’ve learned from danah boyd: that young people do care about their privacy; that they do protect it; but also that they have to learn this. As danah says — countering Murdoch, btw — young people are not “digital natives” who are born with TOS in their DNA.
These students are very aware that what they tell a few friends on Facebook could end up anywhere, seen also by people they do not know. They post with that fully in mind. Backing up what danah says, many of them seemed to have been burned once and taught the lesson. The biggest challenge to privacy, then, is not so much Facebook or the internet but blabby, gossipy friends. Ever thus.
They are also aware that their parents and other adults are watching. Even if your parents aren’t your “friends” someone else’s may see what you write on their Wall. So they’re careful. Nonetheless they decry classmates doing stupid things (though they also know that folks often exaggerate on Facebook). Like what? Like showing themselves drinking. What could come of this? They could get caught.
Or there’s the college admissions problem. For these kids — bright, active, and mostly college-bound — that’s an issue. I ask whether they think that college admissions officers — and later, employers — should not be allowed to look at their Facebook presences. Surprisingly, none of them seem to object as a matter of principle and right. To them, it seems to make sense to check someone out online.
Almost all these students have changed their privacy settings, restricting their Walls, photos, birthdays, or contact information — even though, again, they know that anything could be repeated. They seem very much in control and like that control. They have other means of control as well: I ask whether they speak in code that they understand and parents don’t; they all laughed and nodded.
Is there, as media would lead us to believe, a sudden explosion of bullying? No, they tell me, there’ve always been bullies; it’s probably just easier to see them now. A teacher complained that fights get bigger crowds because students tweet the location and a mob gathers. “It doesn’t go down like that,” one of her students tells her. “There’s no texting.” Crowds gather the way they always have.
These students are not slavish fans of Facebook. One student argues that Facebook dilutes friendship; he says he doesn’t use it to communicate with his close (real) friends. Another says she unfriends people with some regularity because in reality friendships do change. A few others say they did discover new friends through Facebook. They all expect to use Facebook to stay in touch after they graduate. The point, says one: “Different people have different reasons to be on Facebook.” Some use it to connect with others; some use it just for fun. Which are you? I ask him. A bit of both, he says.
At the end, I ask what I’d missed and one student wants to be sure that I knew about the benefits of using Facebook and the publicness it brings. Oh, yes, I do, I assure her.
Last night, I went to CBS to record an interview with Katie Couric about the Rutgers tragedy, privacy, and technology.
Couric asked me the same question a half-dozen ways — old reporter’s trick; I’ve used it; I teach it — trying to get me to give her the answer she wanted: that the internet makes this different, that this is a teaching moment, and that we should give our children instruction about the dangers of the internet. I wouldn’t agree that technology makes the essence of this story and its sin different. The lesson is the same as it has always been: the Golden Rule. The sin could have been committed with a Kodak camera or a telephone or a letter, for that matter.
I do agree that the internet adds speed and reach and permanence to a mistake — that, as someone has said, it is a tattoo. But what this story really brings out is a timeless ethic of privacy (which is how I am framing the topic in Public Parts): Privacy is the responsibility of the person who receives information about someone. Once you know something about me, the weight lies with you as you decide how to use that information, whether to spread it, in what light. That came as close as I would to what Couric was aiming for and so this is the clip that made it onto the show.
I also said society bears responsibility in this story. That today anyone would still feel shame about being revealed as gay — full stop — and then would make such a tragic decision is our failing. I told Couric that the gays and lesbians who have summoned the courage to leave their closet and privacy behind to stand before the homophobes — saying, “Yes, I’m gay, you have a problem with that?” — are the heroes who used their publicness as a weapon against bigotry. I made clear to her that I am not suggesting people should be forced out of their closets. But I do believe that the people who have chosen to leave have operated under an ethic of publicness. If the weight of the ethic of privacy lies with the recipient of information — you know information about me — then the weight of the ethic of publicness lies with the originator of information — I know something and must decide whether it would be of benefit to others to share it.
As I left, I tried to tell Couric that media too often look at technology and change and see only danger. This is how the invention of the Kodak camera was treated in the 1890s. More than 500 million people choose to share on Facebook because they see benefit in it and more do so on Twitter and in blogs and YouTube…. Media constantly looks at the edge, the dark edge, jumping on a story such as this to seek out the perils technology brings. Couric protested that they do lots of stories about good things in technology. Every time Steve Jobs does anything, we cover it, she said. But that’s not understanding its value, I argued. I urged her to do a story in which young people who use and understand Facebook explain it to their elders.
We can’t pretend to give young people lessons in the internet if we don’t understand how they see it. For example, I’ve learned lately that young people use Facebook’s Wall to hold conversations in public while people my age use it — with media reflex — as a place to publish or broadcast. Same platform, different uses, different worldviews, different impact. When I was in Berlin talking about publicness and privacy, Renate Künast, head of the Greens in Parliament, said she talked to a young person who took a cooking course instead of an a computer course because in the latter “what the teachers wanted to teach me was something I learned five years ago.” We have things to learn from children about the future, for the future is theirs and they’re building it right in front of us.
But in enduring morals and ethics — the Golden Rules — we parents remain the teachers and I don’t think we give ourselves enough credit for teaching and our children enough credit for learning well. Those rules pertain no matter the medium or the technology in which human interaction occurs. The Rutgers story is not a tale of technology creating tragedy. It is a story of human tragedy.
