These three Google employees may be the world’s most powerful censors

The New York Times Magazine today featured Google’s Gatekeepers - a look at the small unaccountable team within Google who decide whether and to what extent they will comply with the wishes of governments around the world who wish to regulate its operations. Encouragingly, Andrew McLaughlin, global public-policy director, is a Berkman Fellow, which is about as good a place as I can imagine to start from if you want to appreciate Internet regulation issues.

More disturbingly, Nicole Wong describes her role as finding an approach which “will allow our products to move forward in a country” (which should come as no surprise - as a publicly-held company it is legally obliged to maximise its profits).

Google has long insisted that it wasn’t interested in or involved with news gathering that involved human intervention - “we just serve stuff up using algorithms”, they say. (Of course the algorithms at Google News are continually tweaked to ensure that people using them get the kind of results that Google believes that they want, and the selection of news sources themselves is done by humans…) But I just noticed a new programme off in a corner of Google - Power Readers in Politics - essentially a group blog run by a small and Google-selected set of politicians and journalists, attached to Google Reader. Also see their Canadian version.

How Wikipedia Works, a free-to-access book (also available in print) about all aspects of Wikipedia by some Wikipedia ‘insiders’ and
Is something fundamentally wrong with Wikipedia’s governance processes, a roundup of concerns from someone who has been both participating in it and studying it (inspired by this list of concerns by another critic, but adding links to specific cases).

I have not researched the subject sufficiently to have a view on the accuracy of the claims of problems but I was dismayed at the sheer number of allegations…

You can find an assortment of papers delivered at Media, Communication and Humanity linked here (ordered by subject).

The BBC’s iPM programme/podcast recently featured a short piece about the right of the police and other bodies to access communications data - that is any data about our communications short of the communications themselves - which websites we access, who we phone, when and from where. Stuart Ward, whose blog posting inspired the piece, was concerned that new government proposals would give authorities direct access to this data without their having to request it from telecoms operators and ISPs. Well it’s true that these companies have the right to question any such request but I can’t help thinking that’s not much of a safeguard. What proportion of requests are refused? And would businesses really be willing to resist government pressure to hand over data given that they are not privy to the reasons it is wanted? What startles me is that as it was explained communications data requests can be authorised on the say-so of a senior police officer alone - no judicial or other oversight is involved (except, as I said, if a telco or ISP objects). The argument I imagine is that communications data is not as sensitive information as communications themselves, but it can still reveal your physical movements and (through web traffic and search terms) quite a bit about what you are thinking…

Respected researchers at the Crimes against Children Research Center have released an excellent new paper debunking myths about the use of the Internet to get underage sex. Much of the information contained in the press release and the paper has been published before but it bears repeating.

Most Internet-initiated sex crimes involve adult men who are open about their interest in sex. The offenders use instant messages, e-mail and chat rooms to meet and develop intimate relationships with their victims. In most of the cases, the victims are aware that they are talking online with adults.

A majority of the offenders are charged with crimes such as statutory rape, that involve non-forcible sexual activity with adolescent victims who are too young to consent to sexual intercourse with adults.

What is new (at least to me) is their assertion that:

adolescents’ use of popular social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook do not appear to increase their risk of being victimized by online predators. Rather, it is risky online interactions such as talking online about sex to unknown people that increases vulnerability

The paper is freely downloadable:
Online “Predators” and Their Victims: Myths, Realities, and Implications for Prevention and Treatment, by Janis Wolak, PhD, David Finkelhor, PhD and Kimberley J. Mitchell, PhD Crimes Against Children Center at the University of New Hampshire and Michelle L. Ybarra, PhD, Internet Solutions for Kids, Inc., in American Psychologist, Vol. 63, No.2 .

A friend of mine, Robin Hamman who looks after the BBC’s blog trials recently brought to my attention this study of the expressed political views of BBC Facebook users which was put out by conservativehome - an independent right wing UK website - back in October and was picked up by the Daily Mail.

The study (whose figures I have updated here using the same Facebook ad tool that conservativehome used) showed that of the 11,040 BBC staff registered on the site, 1420 staff put themselves in the “liberal” or “very liberal” category, compared with just 120 who labelled themselves “conservative” or “very conservative”. 420 regard themselves as “moderate” (the rest did not specify their political views). This compares to roughly 160k liberals and 56k conservative Facebookers in London and 847k liberals vs 233k conservatives in Facebook across the UK. (For the curious - there are < 20 self-confessed liberals working for Fox News in the US on Facebook compared with 40 conservatives and an equal number of moderates).

Of course this is somewhat embarrassing for the BBC as it provides further ammunition for those who would accuse it of liberal bias. The sample is a self-selecting sample from a self-selecting sample however, therefore no more than suggestive - and of course it includes large numbers of staff not involved in politically-sensitive work.

I find it interesting to note that the information provided probably included a large number of people who specified that their profiles (including their political allegiances) should be private. The privacy does not, however, protect users from being aggregated in order to be sold to - it is Facebook's ad sales tool that enables anyone to 'mine' Facebook to find out the expressed interests, ages and - yes - political affiliations of its users, grouped by organization. As this example shows, even aggregate data can be harmful to an organization when made widely available.

I also note that it is possible to attempt to advertise to Facebook users as young as 13 - and the ad sales tool says nothing about relevant regulations.

It seems YouTube viewers watch more anti-immunisation videos than ones promoting immunisation, and public service videos on the subject were among the most low-rated. It seems Gresham’s Law can be applied to information on the Internet as well - bad (but interesting) information can drive out good.

Ironically, the JAMA study referenced is itself subscription only!

If I were to be really cool I would say that I was among the first to join Friendster but moved to Myspace fairly early on when most of my friends-in-bands were totally ‘in’ to it (and ‘I’m here to help’). I would also say that I was invited to Joost beta (because I like to download stuff). I would also say that I’ve been ripping & burning lots of music and films from p2p’s early hay days (you have to get real about what you can take with you on the road). And although I brushed elbows with some big name record companies on this topic it didn’t refrain me from, all lovey dovey, r&b-ing. I would also say that I flirted with AIM, MSN and Yahoo Messenger but when a deceased friend kept reappearing on AIM it was time to go. I forgot my password for MSN (and gosh, I get fairly upset about Microsoft’s passport thing, so MSN got abandoned very fast) and Yahoo meant a blast from the past who kept on sending offline messages (’next!’ as they say in sheaux biz). I would also say that from the mid-1990s I taught myself some basic programming mambo jumbo and toyed with the idea of becoming a digital architect. It turned out that I had a short attention span. Never got into the hang of BBS. Yes, I do remember BBS. As a matter of fact, I stem from that period, from before when terms like ‘being networked’ and ‘digital’ seemed to become the norm for a lot of us; I know that there was no internet and no email for instance (well, for the common peeps like me). I guess these statements date me so to speak.

John Palfrey’s blog post on the Berkman Center’s project on Digital Natives raises the question who are actually these so-called Digital Natives? In his and Urs Gasser’s upcoming book ‘Born Digital’ (Basic Books, 2008) they explore and address an emerging global culture of connectivity, communication and content. Where the world is the network and the people the content… Where multi presence no longer differentiates between analogue players and the digital world. Are we then all Digital Natives? No. Are we all Born Digital? Heck, I’m not and even if I were, there would be no guarantee that I would be a Digital Native.

So, this is a discussion we’re having at the Berkman. What are the attributes? Age, culture, economics, etc. All of them? Who do they represent? What is its place in our day-to-day activities? I guess the main claim explored is the idea that connectivity and communal activities seems to be defining how people will live and work in times to come (a claim I’m critically assessing but will write about in due course). What are the implications for privacy? Safety? IP? Information quality? etc. And looking at sites like Google and Facebook where platforms are provided for us to connect (and create) we should ask ourselves how commonality here is really governed… And what that actually means from both user- and firm-centric perspectives.

So to tell you the truth: I have pimped my ‘all-features’ cell phone (truth be told that we usually lead separate lives). I would also say that I love taking pictures so possess more cameras than one might consider healthy, so transgressed into the bits & bytes of it (oftentimes end up with tears in my eyes and my good ol’ camera with real film in my hands). Aw my gawd. I’m an old fart (thank you, David Weinberger ;-).

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