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"I think somebody should start selling T-Shirts that say, in big block letters, I LIE TO FACEBOOK. That may or may not be true for me -- but how would Facebook (or Google Plus, or Friendster, or whatever) know for sure?
So here's the big problem: we've become accustomed to the assumption that the status quo of deteriorating privacy is the only possible world. That's unlikely -- but the alternatives are going to be problematic in their own ways. Is a world of people lying about themselves preferable to a world of asymmetric transparency, where those with money and power can hide themselves but know whatever they want about you?
We're not likely to have a perfect future of (as David Brin says) privacy for me and accountability for everybody else. It's going to be a choice between various imperfect options. Wish us luck."
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Information isn't the new oil; opacity is the new oil. The ability to be opaque -- the opposite of transparent -- is increasingly rare, valuable, and in many cases worth fighting for. It's also potentially quite dangerous, often dirty, and can be a catalyst for trouble. In short, it's just like oil. (Which makes me wonder when we'll have a new OPEC -- Organization of Privacy Enabling Companies.)
Opacity isn't inherently good or bad -- it's both. To people who need privacy and secrecy to survive, opacity is immensely, critically valuable; for people who want privacy and secrecy to hide misbehavior, opacity is also rather important. But for individuals and organizations alike, opacity is becoming harder to maintain.
Some people have argued that privacy is dead. Typically, those making this argument are wealthy white guys, able to buy as much privacy as they want (and likely to get extremely annoyed when their privacy is violated). And for folks like these, opacity will always be easier to come by than for the rest of us.
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It's the last approach that really interests me: Pollution. Poisoning the data stream. Putting out enough false information that the real information becomes unreliable. At that point, anyone wishing to know the truth about me has to come to me directly, allowing me to control access. It's hardly a perfect option -- the untrue things can be permanently connected to you, and it does kind of make you hard to trust online -- but it's the one approach to opacity that's purely social and extremely difficult to stop.
Quick question: for those of you on Facebook, did you provide your real birthday? If so, why?
Part of the reason why commercial entities are able to run roughshod over our personal privacies is that we've become programmed to give them our information. They'll say in BIG SCARY LETTERS that you must provide truthful personal info, but seriously -- if you give Facebook a fake date of birth, how are they going to know? If you check in from fake locations, how can they prove you're not where you say you are? Your actual friends and family will know the truth.
And here's the fun part: if lots of people start lying about themselves on social media, even the truth becomes unreliable.
"The necessary feature of the open systems and networks that Doctorow advocates is that they must preserve the possibility of evil. The systematic exclusion of evil breaks the open (unit operational) nature of the system. From a political perspective, you won’t score too many points campaigning for the preservation of the possibility of evil. The most successful argument of this kind is the theological argument around why God has given humans free will. Being good without choosing good means that goodness isn’t a virtue. The possibility of choosing evil makes the choice of good meaningful. Pre-deleting evil processes from the operating environment pre-empts the possibility of choosing to run good processes and the act of terminating the evil ones."
How the Roberts Supreme Court is using the First Amendment to craft a radical, free-market jurisprudence.
Review of Consent of the Networked by Rebecca MacKinnon.
"So, it turns out, Americans feel about the regulation the same way they feel about government as a whole: they don’t like the idea in the abstract, but they like it in concrete form. This shouldn’t be too surprising. Of course people want stronger food safety regulations when they read stories about people dying from tainted food; of course they want stronger environmental protections when they hear about toxic groundwater. At the same time, exactly half of the political establishment has been on a crusade to demonize regulation in general for the past forty years."
The defining question of the information age is no longer who’s online, but how they got there. In a Colorlines.com investigation, Jamilah King explains how big telecom created two Internets—one in which consumers and their content enjoys some, limited protection and another in which they are left prey to mobile wireless companies’ decisions. People of color, who have closed the traditional digital divide with their smartphones, are streaming into the latter space—and as a result, racial inequity is being wired into the 21st century economy.
"Decisions about when and how to regulate activities online will have a profound societal impact. Debates underlying such decisions touch upon fundamental problems related to economics, free expression, and privacy. Their outcomes will influence the structure of the Internet, how data can flow across it, and who will pay to build and maintain it. Most striking about these debates are the paucity of data available to guide policy and the extent to which policy-makers ignore the good data we do have."
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he best approach is neither to make ill-informed decisions based on too little data nor to avoid state regulation simply because of the absence of decent data. Instead, we should begin a concerted push for highly reliable and publicly available forms of measurement of the Internet and the Web and how we use them, including the flows of information we generate and consume. Better data would do more than just help the state meet its regulatory obligations; better data would also improve self-regulation by private sector players and empower individuals to make better decisions. In the meantime, we as researchers need to work harder to translate the good data that we do have into terms that can directly inform policy-making.
"In the meantime, we need to reinvent our rulemaking processes. Currently we make laws and regulations like oysters make pearls, except instead of starting with a tiny grain of sand and covering it with precious nacre, we start with a tiny pearl of sensible principles and cover it with layer upon layer of sand, grit, and detritus. This makes for ugly pearls, and lousy legislation."
"When I hear folks like Richard Florida praise wealthy artistic types as fuel for urban development, I feel like they leave out this part of the equation. People think about operas or high price jazz clubs. But they should also think about the grungy substrata of mico-scenes and think about how cities should be encouraged to lay off and let them grow."
"Computer scientists have recently undermined our faith in the privacy-protecting power of anonymization, the name for techniques for protecting the privacy of individuals in large databases by deleting information like names and social security numbers. These scientists have demonstrated they can often 'reidentify' or 'deanonymize' individuals hidden in anonymized data with astonishing ease. By understanding this research, we will realize we have made a mistake, labored beneath a fundamental misunderstanding, which has assured us much less privacy than we have assumed. This mistake pervades nearly every information privacy law, regulation, and debate, yet regulators and legal scholars have paid it scant attention. We must respond to the surprising failure of anonymization, and this Article provides the tools to do so. "
"But it goes, I think, even deeper than that. Control of drugs is deeply embedded in the DNA of modern government. The criminalisation of drug use, in the west at least, is almost entirely a 20th-century development. Laudanum, a tincture of opium, was in common use in Victorian England and Coca-Cola, invented in 1886, contained cocaine until 1903. No US state banned cannabis until 1915 and it remained legal in England until the 1920s, as did heroin and cocaine. The rise of conscript armies and Fordist mass production prompted the change, briefly affecting alcohol – the US took the first steps towards prohibition during the first world war – along with other drugs. Nobody wanted a drowsy numbness to overcome men marching into battle or clocking onto the production line."
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