Yule Heibel's Bookmarks

Back in 1890 two Boston lawyers, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, wrote an article in the Harvard Law Review warning that the invasive technologies of their day threatened to take "what is whispered in the closet" and have it "proclaimed from the house-tops." In the face of those threats, they posited a direct "right to privacy" and argued that individuals whose privacy is violated should be able to sue for damages.

Warren and Brandeis called privacy "the right to be let alone" and gave numerous examples of ways it could be invaded. After more than a century of legal scholarship, we've come to understand that these examples suggest four distinct kinds of invasion: intrusion into a person's seclusion or private affairs; disclosure of embarrassing private facts; publicity that places a person in a "false light"; and appropriation of a person's name or likeness.

9/11: The First National Scare of the Computer Age
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, changed the terms of the debate. Suddenly, the issue was no longer whether Congress should protect consumer privacy or let business run wild. Instead, the question became: Should Congress authorize the Bush administration to use the formidable power of state surveillance to find terrorists operating inside the United States and stop them before they could carry out their next attack?

The administration itself had no doubts. Where laws protecting privacy got in the way of its plans to prevent attacks, it set out to change those laws. The pinnacle of this effort was the USA Patriot Act, signed on October 26, 2001, which dramatically expanded government power to investigate suspected terrorism. In the months that followed, representatives for the administration repeatedly denounced those who complained about threats to privacy and liberty; they were, said Attorney General John Ashcroft, "giv[ing] ammunition to America's enemies."

The roughly one in five Internet users who spend an average of 25 minutes each day on Facebook implicitly face a question every time they type into a Facebook page: Do they trust the site's security and privacy controls? The answer is inevitably yes.

That's the reason privacy activists are on Facebook: it's where the action is. It's easy to imagine a future where most personal messaging is done on such platforms. Activists and organizations that refuse to take part might find themselves irrelevant.

"Modern humans have been around for at least 160,000 to 200,000 years but there is no archaeological evidence of any technology beyond basic stone tools until around 90,000 years ago. In Europe and western Asia this advanced technology and behaviour explodes around 45,000 years ago when humans arrive there, but doesn't appear in eastern and southern Asia and Australia until much later, despite a human presence. In sub-Saharan Africa the situation is more complex. Many of the features of modern human behaviour – including the first abstract art – are found some 90,000 years ago but then seem to disappear around 65,000 years ago, before re-emerging some 40,000 years ago.

"Scientists have offered many suggestions as to why these cultural explosions occurred where and when they did, including new mutations leading to better brains, advances in language, and expansions into new environments that required new technologies to survive. The problem is that none of these explanations can fully account for the appearance of modern human behaviour at different times in different places, or its temporary disappearance in sub-Saharan Africa."

To comprehend journalistic value creation, we need to focus on the benefits it provides. Journalism creates functional, emotional,
and self-expressive benefits for consumers. Functional benefits include providing useful information and ideas. Emotional
benefits include a sense of belonging and community, reassurance and security, and escape. Self-expressive benefits are provided
when individuals identify with the publication's perspectives or opinions, or when they're empowered to express their own
ideas.

These benefits used to produce significant economic value. Not today. That's because producers and providers have less control
over the communication space than ever before. In the past, the difficulty and cost of operation, publication, and distribution
severely limited the number of content suppliers. This scarcity raised the economic value of content. That additional value
is gone today because a far wider range of sources of news and information exist.

The primary value that is created today comes from the basic underlying value of the labor of journalists. Unfortunately,
that value is now near zero.

The move to liberate government records was welcomed by the provincial organization that monitors the state of information more closely than any other, the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association.

"There is more and more information available in computer files, but the trend, unfortunately, so far has been that increasingly that information is restricted," said Richard Rosenberg, a computer-science professor who is the association's president. He started working with computers in the 1960s, and there was hope the technology would be a great tool for democracy.

Instead, governments have become more wary about releasing information, especially in B.C.

"There's this underlying feeling from bureaucrats and politicians that releasing information would come back to haunt them."

In the past few years, Vauban has become a well-known niche community, even if it has spawned few imitators in Germany. But whether the concept will work in California is an open question.

More than 100 would-be owners have signed up to buy in the Bay Area’s “car-reduced” Quarry Village, and Mr. Lewis is still looking for about $2 million in seed financing to get the project off the ground.

The Presence of Absence: Where are the people in public space?

• What is the role of new technology?

• Are we being isolated by the iPod culture?

• Is it possible to plan in spontaneity?

• If an art object is chosen for a place, who does it represent?

Diarmaid Lawlor, associate director of Urban Initiatives, says that places should be ‘centres of collective meaning'.

Some of the key issues raised included:





• The profession has overdone planning for all – we have lost the ability to say no, do little, allow people to make places work. Should urban designers say no to briefs they don’t think will work?


• Artists get selected too often for the way their work looks rather than the way they think – this can lead to clashes of ideology and aspirations. Too often the creative input of artists is not taken seriously by others – there is a ‘throw away mentality’ - how do we rectify this?


• The debate surrounding objects being placed in our cities and towns is obscuring the need for thoughtful places, which encourage real interaction. How can the two professions unite to encourage more creative clients?

JT: In a future world where this is more pervasive and available rather than being a one-shot, how would you see urban planners and governments using this data?

AV: Well, for the urban planners, there is a big, big revolution going on. What happens today is that policies and plans are thought by assumptions. And their effects and imports can be evaluated only after a long time that they are implemented because, again as it was seen before, gathering this information is expensive. It's costly. It's cumbersome. So it's really impossible to get this information in real-time. What is going to happen is that instead of planning the city, the urban planners would actually have to program the city, to configure [it] in real-time because information will flow in real-time. So if you change the direction of the one-way road, you will see almost immediately what the effect on traffic is. If you close an area to cars, you can see immediately what will happen into the mobility in general. And if you create public spaces in a place rather than another, you will see immediately how people will react to that.

Well, basically, our major datasets are on one side cell phone activity and on the other side, Flickr pictures. They are not the only ones of course. But they are the two best examples of what we call digital shadows and digital footprints. Digital shadows are all of those data that are gathered by the interaction and conscious interactions of the user with pervasive systems. Digital footprints, on the other side, are explicitly released information about the behavior of citizens in the city. Flickr pictures are publically available online.

And a good deal of those is available and geotagged. So you can download them and see where they were taken. Since you know also the user that took them and you know, for example, his or her nationality, you can really see how people flow within a specific area from the level of the nation to the level of a city, back down to the level of a specific area within the city. And you can see where most of the pictures are taken: what are the hotspots, what kind of temporal signature is in specific place so whether tourists go more in the morning or in the afternoon.

And more interestingly, you can see flows. You can see where people go to take a picture first and where they go next. And all of these places are interconnected with each other.

Content Aggregated from Other Sources

Alternatively, some media companies, such as the Washington Post Co. (WPO) and NBC, are posting ads to their own sites, but are using others' aggregated content. They work with a startup called Outside.in that aggregates blogs and discussions around specific locations—by state, city, ZIP code—and serves the links up onto a map located on sites such as NBCChicago.com. There, users click on their neighborhood and find blogs and video related to happenings in the next block. Partly thanks to this feature, the overall audience for NBC's Web sites has doubled between December and February. "Our old strategy [of using only our stations' content] just had a limited growth opportunity," says Brian Buchwald, a senior vice-president at NBC. "Now, it's really about focusing on the growth of the market and being trusted by a particular user base."

Here’s what is going on out there:





• The cost to create and distribute information has dropped to almost zero.






• Consumers don’t go find news, a recent study (I’ll find attribution) quoted someone saying “if the news is important enough, it will find me!”






• Audience and therefore ad impressions are diffused to thousands of sites, including, yes, blogs.






• Ad networks have more inventory in any given market than the big newspaper in town.

¶No more free content. The Web has become the primary delivery mechanism for quality newsrooms across the country, and consumers will have to participate in financing the newsgathering process if it is to continue. Setting the price point at free — the newspaper analyst Alan D. Mutter called it the “original sin” — has brought the industry millions of eyeballs and a return that doesn’t cover the coffee budget of some newsrooms.

The big threat would be that newspapers could lose the readers they have, lots of them. The mitigating factor is that a lot of those readers aren’t paying anyway.

¶No more free ride to aggregators. Google announced that it would begin selling ads against Google News, with almost no financial accommodation to the organizations that generate that news. The book industry — of all Luddites — has extracted cash from Google, as did the wire services. Google, The Huffington Post and Newser have built their audiences and brands on other people’s labors.

Most aggregators are not promoting newspaper content; they are repurposing it to their own ends. Newspapers’ audiences are harvested and sold divorced from the content that attracted them in the first place.