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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I know it raises familiar awkward questions about Google’s market power but in this instance I have to agree. Google’s ban on advertising for essay writing services joins its existing bans on ads for “weapons, prostitution, drugs, tobacco, fake documents and miracle cures.”

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.

If you’ve been wondering what the man who popularised the term virtual community has been thinking about these days you should check out this post he wrote on the Annenberg Centre’s DIY Media blog. It outlines the potential importance of digital literacy for enabling political engagement. Well worth a look as is the weblog as a whole.

The British Academy has produced a report on Copyright and research in the humanities and social sciences which concludes inter alia while the law itself gives academics sufficient ability to use copyright work, “risk averse publishers, who are often themselves rights holders, demand that unnecessary permissions be obtained, and such permissions are often refused or granted on unreasonable terms” and “there are well-founded concerns that new database rights and the development of digital rights management systems (DRMs) may enable rights holders to circumvent the effects of the copyright exemptions designed to facilitate research and scholarship”.

David Brake

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

Rep. Joseph Pitts of Pennsylvania said last week at a hearing on the subject of video game ratings:

I think it’s safe to say that a wealthy kid from the suburbs can play Grand Theft Auto or similar games without turning to a life of crime, but a poor kid who lives in a neighborhood where people really do steal cars or deal drugs or shoot cops might not be so fortunate.

Actually it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that any effects from exposure to video game violence exposure would be likely mediated by social class and environmental factors. But in a way a trifle more complex than he said!

You can see him giving that soundbite around 4 minutes 23 seconds in to this somewhat amusing Daily Show take on the congressional hearings.

David Brake

I thought I had written my own robust defence of Google Book Search and book digitisation in general but it seems I haven’t - at least I haven’t found any on this blog or my personal one (though I posted enthusastically about meeting Brewster Kahle who runs the Internet Archive and briefly mentioned my own experience of using Google Books).

Kevin Kelly has had a go at providing a popular account of the potential importance and utility of the widespread availability of books online in Scan This Book! in the New York Times. He rehearses many of the good arguments against the ever-lengthening text copyright regime and for the social utility of book scanning programmes but unfortunately his argument is somewhat spoiled by his need to “epater les bourgeois”.

First by hyperbolic statements: “The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years.” Inventions? Talmudic scholars (for one) would be surprised to learn we had just invented annotation.

Secondly, and more importantly, by un-necessarily sweeping and apocalyptic predictions about the way technology will (must?) change existing businesses (like publishing).

Copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won’t mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media and sewn together into the universal library.

Much of what he says is arguably valid for non-fiction and particularly scientific research but less so for fiction where (as Updike says) we actually seem to like reading (or viewing) self-contained narratives (though we may then go on to comment on them or construct other self-contained narratives based on them).
He usefully points out that academic science is heading faster than other fields towards the universal library but doesn’t think through the implications. Academics need to publish freely to advance and do so happily but only because there is a state system in place that pays them to be experts because society benefits from their creation and dissemination of knowledge. It is hard to imagine the same model being applied to the writers of cookbooks, say, but in the UK we pay authors a (very) modest sum when their books are checked out of the public library.

Could some form of super-UNESCO (or a number of national government initiatives) help to fund freely-available fiction (or other creative works) to be added to the universal Internet library of the future? Perhaps paid for through a levy on broadband subscriptions as suggested by some in France - the Global License? This is approximately the way the BBC works, for example (though it is not as free as it should be in sharing the content that our license fees have paid for). Surely this is a more attractive proposition for artists than having to individually flog “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information, ads, sponsorship or periodic subscriptions” which KK suggests are the options that will be available to artists in the brave new world when their individual works themselves are no longer saleable.

KK anticipates some of the hostile reaction that followed from John Updike (speaking predominantly on behalf of fiction authors) and by Nicholas Carr (among others) more generally:

Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what’s taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)

I for one am in the young enthusiast camp but I don’t think it means that the way things work in the creative industries has to be swept away in order to bring the (near)-universal Internet library about.

If we could reduce the term of copyright to 14 years, renewable for another 14 (as Creative Commons suggests) and if copyright could be easily asserted at a central database but the default for works where the ownership was unclear was that such work would be in the public domain, authors would still be able to get paid for their works during their most valuable commercial life but we would have a huge public domain of useful information instead of the stunted one we have now.

The above suggestions still radical (more radical than many authors and publishers would like, I am sure) but are consistent with the new potentials technology offers without requiring the total restructuring of publishing…

I’ve not provided as fully thought-through or well-ordered set of arguments here as I’d like (and not perhaps a particularly original point of view either - it draws heavily on Lawrence Lessig’s thinking, for example) but there’s as much polishing here as I can spare considering the £0 I am getting paid to write this! What do you think?

Update: As if in answer to my wishes, I have just heard about a very promising bill in the US House of Representatives - the Orphan Works Act which would release into the public domain works where the owner is no longer known. Someone should set up a campaign to support Lamar Smith (the bill’s sponsor).

David Brake

Since it is illegal to advertise smoking on TV and Hollywood and TV directors are being increasingly discouraged from glamourising the practice, nicotine peddlers are following ‘citizen journalists’ into DIY media. One savvy entrepreneur has decided to produce the Up in Smoke Video Podcast - guest starring technology pundits John C. Dvorak and Steve Gibson to give it some online word of mouth - and is trying to promote it via bloggers (the creator contacted me via my weblog).

I note that while the website of the company selling the cigars and producing and promoting the podcast asks that you be over 18 to view it, there is no such barrier to access the website or directly download the podcast and the only barrier to downloading the programme via iTunes is that it is rated ‘explicit’ (a tag normally used to describe language or nudity). iTunes does let you restrict access to ‘explicit’ content but that parental control option is not switched on by default.
Alas, the hype around weblogs being a ‘free’ media where the plucky independent citizen can challenge corrupt corporate and governmental interests is obscuring the manner in which business interests are sheltering behind its current lack of regulation for their own ends (as I have blogged before).

P.S. Smoking cigars is a fatal addiction - just say no!

P.P.S. To save you a lengthy download, the quality of the acting in this ‘mini sitcom’ is, perhaps unsurprisingly, truly awful. Not even laughably awful…

BoingBoing recently published an extraordinary allegation - a reader claims Yahoo’s new web ad publishing network tries to insist that non-US web surfers must not see their ads. Of course this is very difficult if not impossible for a potential content publisher to guarantee - but imagine if it was? If successful, Yahoo would be responsible for ghettoising the Internet just in order to make their ad network more efficient. I’m a little disappointed the media hasn’t picked this up yet - I can imagine the furore if some French ad network did the same thing to American content…
This is not a new problem, by the way. There have been repeated attempts to produce artificial national restrictions to Internet-distributed content. The BBC’s Creative Archive License for example appears only to allow UK residents to re-use their material.

According to a recent study in the December issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which is summarised here:

people overestimate both their ability to convey their intended tone?be it sarcastic, serious or funny?when they send an e-mail, as well as their ability to correctly interpret the tone of messages others send to them.

So be careful out there!

Today marks the launch of Harm and Offence in Media Content by Andrea Millwood Hargrave and Sonia Livingstone (I was one of the book’s contributors). You can find the press release and a link to an executive summary of the book here and if you are in the UK you can order it online via Amazon for ?18.95 (?1 saving).

Briefly, the book breaks new ground we believe because it looks at recent research across the whole gamut of available medias - television, radio, music, press, film, games, internet, telephony and advertising - as well as the regulation associated with each medium. Something there for everyone we hope! Do let us know what you think of the book if you’ve had a look and I will endeavour to answer any questions that may arise.

25 American bloggers have been selected to go on a Dutch junket. They are required by the PRs to disclose the gift but will be interviewed by tourism officials who can use their comments for promotional material both on and offline. Such junkets are commonplace in trade publications at least here in the UK (who otherwise would not be able to pay to test cars, computers etc) but normally journalists here excuse themselves because they take presents equally from all sides… A furious debate has already begun in the blogosphere…

I can’t describe it better than Robin Hamman does:

The panel, chaired by Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the NUJ, includes:

Carol Hall, Rights Manager, BBC News
John Thompson, MD, Mousetrap Media
Kyle McRae, Scoopt.com
Fiona Brownsell, CEO, Youview
Eddie Gibb, Head of External Relations, DEMOS
Bill Hagerty, Editor, British Journalism Review
Vicky Taylor, Editor, Interactivity, BBC
Jemima Kiss, News Editor, journalism.co.uk
Simon Waldman, Guardian Unlimited

You can read and participate here

The US Department of Justice asked Google recently for a selection of the searches people made over a two month period, with the identities of the searchers removed. Google, to its credit, has resisted this while the other major US search engines have not. John Battelle and Danny Sullivan have further analysis of this issue.

There are four issues that arise from this which have not been prominently dealt with in discussions I’ve read:

1) If Google hadn’t resisted this request, would we have heard about the fact that AOL, Yahoo and MSN immediately complied?
2) How many people realise that Google (and others) frequently do keep track not just of what people search for but who searches for what?
3) Mightn’t there be some searches that tend to reveal the identity of the searcher even if the searcher’s IP address is concealed? Particularly if you examine them in time order? Update: Search Engine Watch just produced a lengthy analysis of this issue which suggests that this is probably not a big issue.
4) The DOJ doesn’t seem to have asked only for searches by Americans. Does it have any business looking at searches from international users who might (for whatever reason) have chosen to use yahoo.com instead of (for example) yahoo.co.uk?

Update: Tim Wu of Columbia Law School writes an excellent analysis of the whole issue on Slate, arguing that it’s simply excessive for search engines to collect these reams of personal data on what people are searching for.