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).

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

One of the questions that fascinates me is the relationship between Internet technologies and social norms - particularly those around privacy. Some suggest that as “Digital Natives” get older, their exposure to various tools for online self-disclosure may change their view of privacy norms. In today’s New York Times*, however, we see that this process is not always just an unintended consequence of technological change - it seems that the founder of Facebook wants his software to change people’s privacy norms:

When I spoke to him, Zuckerberg argued that News Feed is central to Facebook’s success. “Facebook has always tried to push the envelope,” he said. “And at times that means stretching people and getting them to be comfortable with things they aren’t yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”

Of course this makes sense commercially - the more happy we are to share information about ourselves with others, the more data about ourselves we provide for potential advertisers and the more we provide the content that brings people back to Facebook. But there are some un-addressed problems here.

Even if we get comfortable with this new attitude to self-disclosure is this a good thing for society? And what about the transitional difficulties when self-disclosing young people run into authorities who don’t understand or sympathise with this new attitude?

(Also see my earlier post “The Death of Privacy” or indeed any of the posts here categorised Privacy)

* I’ve highlighted just a small part of this article by Clive Thompson - it’s well worth reading the rest too if you want a quick and interesting overview of the issues around microblogging…

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…

LJ provides one of the most flexible and powerful toolsets for protecting weblog users’ privacy available today. Unfortunately, I just discovered that only paid LJ accounts have the ability to change the privacy levels of several posts at once. Surely a tool mainly useful to help users protect their privacy when they miscalculate their exposure shouldn’t be made into an added-cost ‘extra’?

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.

According to this NY Times article about Twitter, “90 percent of users agree to have all their posts available to the public”. This is all the more baffling considering that twitter now allows any user to be alerted in real time about anyone who mentions any string publicly. Public blogging I can understand but isn’t microblogging about the kind of hour by hour minutiae that only your friends will be interested in?

David Brake

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 ;-).

Just wanted to take the opportunity to highlight two very useful resources danah boyd has recently brought to my attention via her blog.

First is a presentation (available in audio and video though not alas transcribed) by her and three other US leaders in the study of online risks for young people - David Finkelhor, Michele Ybara and Amanda Lenhart. I was surprised as she was about how much their conclusions (particularly those of Finkelhor and Ybara) seem to have been misrepresented by the media. They do an excellent job of separating the hype about online dangers from the realities and the remedies they suggest for educators and for parents (and their criticisms of current thinking) seem to me very well thought through and argued.

danah mentioned an idea which I hadn’t seen promoted before - “digital street outreach” - the idea that peers online would intervene when they see behaviour or profiles that suggest the author is having trouble. I had thought the Cyber Angels might be doing this kind of work but it seems their focus is now on schools and parents not on the troubled kids themselves.

On a similar theme, but with more qualitative detail, I recommend a paper of danah’s she recently published online both as text and as audio - “Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?”. It was very broad-ranging and gives an excellent introduction to some of the issues around young people’s use of social networking software.

I have just been listening to NPR’s Technology podcasts and their coverage of the furore about strangers molesting children they first met through MySpace. I have some sympathy with the view that not enough had been done by the company to ensure the safety of children but some of the comments by those who are concerned make me worried as well.

Take for example the comments of Carl Berry, the attorney for a girl suing MySpace for letting an adult contact her “If they want to chat with each other that’s fine but I don’t see the social benefit of allowing children to talk to complete adult strangers online”, or those of Representative Diana DeGette (D) who told NPR, “we used to say to our children if a man comes up to you in the park or in the shopping mall don’t talk to them, run away. Now we have to translate that to the digital era.”

Are Americans really so terrified of each other? Fairly recent (2000) US research indicates only 7.5% of sexual assaults on children and adolescents were perpetrated by strangers (and quite a high proportion of assaults on teenagers are perpetrated by other teens, not predatory adults). The tens of thousands of ’stranger on pre-teen’ assaults in the US each year are terrible crimes but by far the majority of children will never face this danger. Is it worth creating a climate of pervasive fear and limiting childrens’ freedom to explore (and yes, even to make mistakes) in an attempt to tackle this? Just as adults’ civil liberties can be endangered in the ‘War on Terror’, those of children can be imperilled in the ‘War on Perverts’. And children arguably have even less of a chance to put their point of view than accused terrorists.
(Also see earlier posts Big Mother is Watching and The Death of Privacy).

David Brake