Tom Steinberg, leader of the group of policy wonks and e-government/e-democracy hackers-for-good best known for their sterling work under the MySociety label has come together with a group of individuals from government, Cisco, Ofcom, Google and others (working in their personal capacities) to form a Power of Information Taskforce which has just released a draft of its Power of Information Taskforce Report. The remit of the taskforce is here, but briefly it is intended to help the government help the public using web 2.0 and better use of citizen- and state-generated information.

Consistent with the overall approach of the taskforce, the report will be available in a comment-able form for two weeks, after which it will be handed officially to the Cabinet Office.

From what I’ve seen from a brief view of the report it makes a useful contribution to encouraging the UK government to open up its data and practices to public deliberation and scrutiny. It does however appear to be missing a strategy to formally integrate participation in relevant social media sites as part of the normal activity of (selected) civil servants. On the one hand, many might see such outreach activity as an optional extra they can easily forego given their already busy workloads dealing with phone calls, emails and the post. On the other hand, it may be necessary to provide rules outlining how to judge how much engagement with social media is “sufficient” and which social media is strategic, since it would be possible for an enthusiastic civil servant to spend all of his or her time intervening in this way at the expense of other work.

Hal Roberts at The Berkman Center for Internet & Society has made a startling discovery:

Three of the circumvention tools — DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix — used most widely to get around China’s Great Firewall are tracking and selling the individual web browsing histories of their users.

(further details here)

Sonia Livingstone and I have just finished our draft of:

Livingstone, S., & Brake, D. (in prep). On the rapid rise of social networking sites: New findings and policy implications. Children and Society.

If you’re a policy-maker or educator and would like to see it before publication, please email me (dbrake {at} gmail.com).

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