Google Glass and privacy

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Antony Mayfield

Jan Chipchase blows away the froth around the Google Glass/privacy conversation:

As a product that is both on-your-face and in-your-face, Glass is set to become a lightning rod for a wider discussion around what constitutes acceptable behavior in public and private spaces. The Glass debate has already started, but these are early days; each new iteration of hardware and functionality will trigger fresh convulsions. In the short term, Glass will trigger anger, name-calling, ridicule and the occasional bucket of thrown water (whether it’s ice water, I don’t know). In the medium term, as societal interaction with the product broadens, signs will appear in public spaces guiding mis/use1 and lawsuits will fly, while over the longer term, legislation will create boundaries that reflect some form of im/balance between individual, corporate and societal wants, needs and concerns.

In Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants thesis, Google Glass is an inevitability – we could see it coming a mile off. Ban it if you like, ignore it if you like, but you can’t un-invent it or the technologies it bundles together.

We are surrounded by thousands of cameras and microphones everyday in the hands of our fellow citizens. Some even play with surveillance drones at the weekend.

All of this technology will only get more common, cheaper, smaller.

What are we going to do about it?

Privacy sells?

Posted on May 12, 2011 by Antony Mayfield

This advertising billboard in Clerkenwell stopped me in my tracks (and by tracks I mean the sedate progress of my Boris Bike) on Monday.

BlackBerry’s encryption of emails is good enough that it upsets those of an authoritarian, prying-into-your-citizens’-communications-persuasion and now they are making a selling point of it.

Privacy gets in the way of advertising business models as well as the secret police, which is why managing your privacy settings on services from your browser to Facebook is often unnecessarily complicated. It may not be a conspiracy to stop you from guarding your data, but there isn’t a perceived incentive to make this stuff really useful for the networks.

Or for anyone else. Apart from Ad Blocker web browser extensions and a clutch of very geeky tools used by activists and cautious geeks, there aren’t mass market tools and services to help people control how their data is used, how their personal becomes public…

Google’s recognised this, sort of… At least Paul Adams did in his masterpiece of a research paper on social networks - The Real Life Social Network – at Google (I note he is now at Facebook). Then we thought we’d see Google Circles, an social network designed to help with this managing of your content and conversations. But then we didn’t.

Thing is, privacy – what we want from it, what we actually mean by it, etc. – is complicated. As I discussed at Local Social Summit last year, privacy can mean all sorts of things. Privacy is proxy issue for fears and doubts about life with the web and with technology more broadly.

Anyway, back to the BlackBerry ad. I wonder if this sells phones. I wonder if privacy will sell other stuff too. I wonder if – as Alan Patrick – privacy itself is something that will be sold (as a service, a premium package, whatever…).

Mining the where: CIA-funded start-up says 80% of online content contains location information

Posted on November 25, 2010 by Antony Mayfield

Last week at Local Social Summit I talked about some of the issues around location and privacy. Especially problematic is people’s inadvertent tagging of their photos with location information – something potentially of interest to crooks, stalkers and others you might not want to know everything about you.

Open-source spying is a term which has been around for a while, reflecting the fact that when it comes to gathering information, the web is often as good a place as going into the field. In-Q-Tel’s investments reflect a justified fascination with the social web by intelligence agencies.

Well it turns out the CIA is also interested in this kind of information. In a post about the CIA’s Silicon Valley VC firm, In-Q-Tel, the Not So Private Parts blog on Forbes found the firm…

…likes companies coming up with better ways to mine social networking sites and geospatial location data. One of its investments, Geosemble, a private spin-off from USC, estimates that “80% of online content has location information.”

80%? Wow.

“Our mission is to shine a torchlight on geographic unknowns and help organizations neutralize threats and capitalize on opportunities in their areas of geographic interest,” says its website. Another of IQT’s geospatial investments, FortiusOne, promises instant maps based on Tweets and photo uploads, for mapping election-day threats in Afghanistan, for example.

The idealist in me is attracted to the data mining stories of humanitarian efforts of platforms like Ushahidi, but we should remember that governments and their agencies are interested in our geo-location information as well.

Bonus link : : Really interesting presentation from FortiusOne on analysing geo-data for business.

Publish first, police second… is that how it works?

Posted on November 22, 2010 by Antony Mayfield

The other evening I watched some of the Channel 4 documentary Coppers, in which UK police officers were sharing their disquiet about how people they deal with seem to phone the police rather than deal with their problems themselves.

Could it be that there is another contradictory trend, for people to take evidence of crimes to their social networks first, when the police might be more appropriate?

Two cases spring to mind. One, which was a tabloid cause celebré this morning, is the ten-year-old boy who took a picture of a mugger leaving the scene of a crime.

According to Th Sun, he…

He snapped Royal as he fled on a bike then posted the pic online. Cops identified and nicked Royal who was fined in Darlington, Co Durham.

Why not call the police? And the police “praised Alex’s ‘quick thinking’”. Really?

The other was the cat-in-the-wheelie-bin lady, who was caught on someone’s private CCTV committing an act of animal cruelty. The footage was posted to YouTube and then a web community took up the cause of identifying the woman (something they did very quickly).

It may be that the socially acceptable behaviours that emerges, that becomes a norm, is that we post everything to the web and then direct the police to it. At some point this is likely to incite real-world vigilantism, at some point this is likely to compromise evidence in a case, or the ability of a court to hold an impartial jury trial.

: : Lastly, a ten-year-old on Twitter – really? I hear parents wondering whether to let their kids use Facebook when they are 13 (the legal limit), but Twitter? Never… There’s a few things about this story which see odd.

Thoughts on privacy and location: nosey neighbours and norming

Posted on November 19, 2010 by Antony Mayfield

Nosey neighbours and norming getting ready for the local privacy debate local social summit 2010

View more presentations from Antony Mayfield.

This post is the extended version of the notes and research I made to prepare for a talk I gave at Local Social Summit 2010. Hence the length and odd format – if you’re thinking about or researching privacy, location and social media hopefully there’s some useful things here. Have a look at my Delicious bookmarks tagged privacy and location if you want to see the raw links…

Privacy is a complicated issue, to say the least. Giants like Facebook and Google regularly trip over it and look uncertain if not clumsy in their approach to it. Individuals are often either surprised to learn that this is an issue for them, or overly cautious about how they use the web.

Even as I started the talk and begin to write this post, I’m thinking of another post I need to write on the subject, along the lines of “designing for privacy”. It’s an issue everyone from developers to media and brand owners need to consider when thinking about the social web.

This is where I got to…

Privacy is a complex issue: Complex, but we keep trying to over-simplify it. Some talk about it as invioable right, without going into detail about what it entails. Web companies try to wish it away as an issue – I find it amazing that people as smart as Google CEO Eric Schmidt can use the“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” argument or Mark Zuckerberg can try to insist that the argument has finished and publicness-as-the-default has won.

Privacy is a proxy issue for people’s hope and fears about the web

In discussions I hear or read “Privacy!” thrown in like a rheotorical grenade. Bang! Stop everything! Privacy is under threat, and like motherhood and apple pie it is too precious to put at risk.

I sense that “privacy” is sometimes a catch-all term to encompass things that make people uncomfortable, their unease with social and cultural change that growing numbers of them realise is happening as a result of the web.

Privacy makes good headlines

Since I started researching for Me and My Web Shadow a couple of years ago, the number of stories about Facebook, Google and privacy in the mainstream media has grown. Last summer saw useful initiatives like Pleaserobme.com make the headlines and then be hi-jacked by insurance aggregators as a PR story, while the Daily Mail criticised BT “spies” who “trawl internet” conversations to find people having problems with the firm.

These stories are worrying because they raise fears about privacy without looking closely at the issues or giving practical advice.

People are often unaware of what they are revealing about themselves

Geo-tagging your photos can give away a lot of information about you, but many people don’t realise they are doing it. A project by a interesting bunch of security experts called I Can Stalk U is trying to raise awareness about this by using a crawler to gather information about where people are when they post photos to Twitter and then Tweeting an @ message to let them know (see the post about Educational stalking for a related initiative by a secondary school English teacher).

Even the very digitally literate get the odd scare, as Shea Sylvia’s story The Night I Was Cyberstalked on Foursquare shows.

The privacy debate in society may take place at a local level

It could well be that it is at a local levels that people face the implications and consequences of online publicness and start to work out where they draw the line between public and private, how the new social norms will work.

If local authorities are happy to abuse laws designed to combat terrorism to investigate and surveil their citizens for petty offences, it is likely that sooner or later we’ll hear of some bright spark trying to use geo-tagged photos and Tweets to prove parents are lying about the school catchment area they live in or not recycling their plastics in the appropriate way.

Privacy is not a personal matter

Writing Me and My Web Shadow coincided with my less geeky friends (“Hotmail friends” as Danah Boyd, once put it) really committing to Facebook, going past the addiction and over-enthusiastic social games phases and starting to use it as part of their everyday lives.

It became clear to me that what I did with my Facebook privacy settings and vice versa affected us all. If I post photos of people online, I make some decisions about their web shadow for them.

Discussion and social norming are required for us to work out how privacy works within our actual social networks. This is something we can and will all take part in…

Privacy is a fluid concept

Bill Thompson puts it really well in a talk he gave to the Lift Conference. Privacy as we understand, or understood it, is a new concept and one which may disappear or change radically.

The notion of people being happy to trade away their privacy is wishful thinking

Many people want to be in control of what appears about them in the public domain. Witness the “whitewalling” trend among young people spotted by (again) Danah Boyd. They want and need access to Facebook, but in order to remain in control of what is on their wall, who tags them where, they close down their accounts completely (temporarily) while they are not online.

Innovation can solve privacy issues

Sharing my location is useful, but sharing it permanently with anyone in the world who knows how to look for it is an unattractive proposition. Services like Glympse set a precedent for handling privacy differently from presuming openness is what people want – you can use it to send your location to people or broadcast it but after a period of time you choose – say a couple of hours – that information is deleted. In a similar vein Whapee is a photo-sharing service that lets you geo-tag photos anonymously.

Maybe “personal data management” is a better description than “privacy”

Obviously it is not – it is not very pithy for a start – but you catch my drift. What we talking about with privacy in the context of the social web is not “the state or condition of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people” (as my computer’s dictionary puts it), but being in control to some degree or other of what others observe or how they are able to disturb you.

We need to stay close to users’ perceptions of privacy

Point is, privacy, what privacy is, how people understand it and what they want from it is changing all the time. Different users will have different points of view, different personal policies. If you commissioning or building services and spaces in the social web you need to understand where they are at right now.

Privacy is a design issue

Perhaps I mean an innovation issue, and we’ve covered that above, but I suspect that applying design thinking to how users data, their privacy/publicness will be affected by a service would be useful. It is certainly something to be borne in mind from the outset in the development process.

Whitewalling: Teens create their own Facebook super log-off

Posted on November 17, 2010 by Antony Mayfield

Here’s an interesting approach that Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd found a young person using to manage their Facebook privacy and presence:

Mikalah uses Facebook but when she goes to log out, she deactivates her Facebook account. She knows that this doesn’t delete the account – that’s the point. She knows that when she logs back in, she’ll be able to reactivate the account and have all of her friend connections back. But when she’s not logged in, no one can post messages on her wall or send her messages privately or browse her content. But when she’s logged in, they can do all of that. And she can delete anything that she doesn’t like. Michael Ducker calls this practice “super-logoff” when he noticed a group of gay male adults doing the exact same thing.

Mikalah is not trying to get rid of her data or piss of her friends. And she’s not. What she’s trying to do is minimize risk when she’s not present to actually address it.

It goes to show that despite a platform’s desire to push people into disclosure by default, users will find ways to make their own choices about how publicness works. Because for many young people not being on Facebook just isn’t an option.

I asked Shamika why she bothered with Facebook in the first place, given that she sent over 1200 text messages a day. Once again, she looked at me incredulously, pointing out that there’s no way that she’d give just anyone her cell phone number. Texting was for close friends that respected her while Facebook was necessary to be a part of her school social life. And besides, she liked being able to touch base with people from her former schools or reach out to someone from school that she didn’t know well. Facebook is a lighter touch communication structure and that’s really important to her. But it doesn’t need to be persistent to be useful.

In the comments and related Tweets to this post, we can see that this hacking of the way Facebook works to suit personal reputation / presence management is common. One Tweet from @Tremblebot says their students call it “Whitewalling” or “Whitewashing”, and that the practice requires an investment up front and then makes it easy to stay on top of what people are posting about in the way of comments, tags and photos.

Perhaps this is something I should add the second edition of Me and My Web Shadow in the workflow for managing reputation. Certainly, if Facebook were to take a leaf out of Twitter’s playbook it would think about adding this as an easier to use or more prevalent feature.

“Whitewalling” also looks like evidence for the notion that people, yes even digital natives, want to retain some control over their privacy and what the world sees and hears about them.

Educational stalking

Posted on November 13, 2010 by Antony Mayfield

Interesting to read of the English teacher who encourages their pupils to cyber-stalk strangers. It’s an excellent, practical lesson for them about just how much information people reveal about themselves online, often without considering the consequences.

Clarence Fisher explains his lesson:

Wanting to teach the kids in my class about concepts of digital footprint and online safety, I used three people well known from the edusphere as examples: Will Richardson, Jabiz Raisdana and Jeff Utecht. I introduced these three friends to the students in my class by giving them only a photo and a name. I simply told the kids in my class: find out all you can about these three guys.

The students made a list of places to search. They started with simply Google and then soon expanded to other places such as flickr, youtube, twitter, wordpress, linkedin, delicious and facebook. They expanded into a Yahoo domain search and searching other sites such as whois.net. Soon their lists of information began to grow.

Take a look at his blog post to see the detail they uncovered and noted on their classroom flip-charts. Granted the stalking targets are people who have chosen to live in plain sight online for some time, but the exercise is still a very useful one. This is an example of just one:

Stalk. Stalking. Stalkerish. These are words which have found their way from the news pages into everyday vocabulary.

At the irritating, but mostly harmless end of things, I’ve heard young people describing someone who won’t take being ignored lightly (posting to their Facebook wall when texts, emails and DMs have been ignored is described as “stalkerish”).

Slightly more blood-chillingly there are the encounters with strangers that remind us that living in public online is not something to take too lightly. Shea Sylvia’s account of an unsettling phonecallin a restaurant from an unknown other while eating at a restaurant, is a reminder for us all that geotagging out location openly may not always be a good idea.

What a fantastic way, then, this teacher has found to show young people how managing their web shadow (or digital footprint as he terms it) is something to take very seriously indeed.

Via Ewan McIntosh

Transgressions: Noobs, boobs and Facebook privacy

Posted on June 10, 2010 by Antony Mayfield

A tangled web of transgressions...

Privacy is one of the most complex social, political and commercial issues on the web. It’s not a single issue at all really, it’s a seething mass of issues, struggles, norms being negotiated, lines being re-drawn…

For privacy, read: change. Read: brave new world. Read: cry for help. Read: incitement to revolt.

A few years ago, Matt Locke wrote an incredibly useful essay called Six spaces of social media (secret, group, publishing, performing, partcipation and watching), in an attempt to pry definitions of social spaces away from technical and platform ones and focus minds on what was actually happening in these spaces. You know, the interesting, human stuff. All of these spaces might exist in Facebook, for instance, or in a forum, or across several platforms (Twitter/blog/Facebook/email is a common combination).

Now he’s come back to the topic with a post about transgressions, that is to say when other users or the platform owners do things with your stuff (data, identity, images etc.) that you didn’t want them to. Continue reading →

Always look on the brightside of the downside…

Posted on May 27, 2009 by Antony Mayfield

Image: Grin-and-bear-it optimism...

Being utterly besotted with the web, and especially the social web, as I am, I tend dislike nay-saying about its significance, and the manifold benefits this thing will bring to society, the world etc. You know the sort of Daily Fail nonsense: Facebook gives you cancer, Twitter rots your brain, bloggers never meet real people.

But there’s a difference between reactionary nonsense and thoughtful critiques. Over at the O’Reilly Radar blog, Joshua-Michéle Ross has been poking at some of the more troublesome prospects that social technologies bring. Like how much of our identity and personal data are we surrendering for analysis by corporations and governments (since analysis of that data is a big part of my business, but I also value personal freedom that’s a particularly interesting issue for me).

He takes through a series of four posts that I highly recommend reading:

The Evangelist Fallacy, Social Media and The New Age of Enlightenment: In which we are reminded that the Enlightenment with which we draw so many parallels to today brought not just progressive new ideas about equality and rights, but new (very effective) thinking about how to control the massses.
The Captivity of the Commons: With the whole world connected and people living their lives in public we need to re-think privacy and how corporations work (so that they are less amoral).
The Digital Panopticon: How the nightmare of the Panopticon is effectively at hand if corporations are able to see every detail of our livs in plain sight.
Social Science Moves from Academia to the Corporation: Funding for social sciences will increasingly come from corporations as they try to understand how to manipulate mass social media.

As Alan Patrick says on Broadstuff:

hat makes this post extremely fascinating is that it comes from the O’Reilly Radar, which – in my experience anyway – have tended to be on the “cup overfloweth” side of the New New Social Thing, never mind a Glass Half Full – so this Glass Half Empty article – the first, it seems, of a series, is a rather fascinating shift of tenor, methinks.

He senses the beginning of a backlash, good and proper, perhaps coming from businesses (that aren’t managing to figure out how to get value out of networks as fast as Joshua-Michéle fears) as well as individuals wanting to rein in how much web shadow they are comfortable casting.

Meanwhile, Ian Delaney has a melancholy reflection on this subject that makes for good further reading and thinking matter, about how his early hopes that social media would bring socialist values to the fore are fading. He picks up the Panopticon analogy and extends it to society.

philosopher Michel Foucault back in the 70s picked up and ran with the idea of the Panopticon, especially in his best-known work Discipline and Punish. His idea was that Bentham’s model wasn’t just an idea for a prison; but for a society.

He argued that prisons are a really new idea. Back in the past, we simply thrashed/burned/drowned/stabbed transgressors. That all changed in the C18th with the Enlightenment . The idea of law-enforcement was ‘enlightened’ with the understanding that resources [people] didn’t need to be wasted and that better social control is exercised through freely-given compliance, rather than co-option.

People could be turned into machines, a consequence of political thinking in the emergence of industrial society and the rush to efficiency and cost-allocation. Once properly mechanised, they could be ‘trusted’ – the scare quotes, because the trusted prisoner is no longer human. A big part of that process is surveillance: once people know that they are always (potentially) watched, they’re a bit more compliant to the rules, and a bit more like machines.

Actually, Ian turns from melancholy to fighting talk. Where is the transgression, he asks? What passes for subversion online is often just prnaksterism, often funded to, in small feats of legerdemain to slip in a flash of brand in front of the viewer.

The echo chamber is another danger in all of this, Ian says. Where are the racists in his network?:

Racists are poised to take Stoke in the next by-election. They don’t appear on my spectrum because I have deliberately blinded myself to their existence on a day-to-day basis. Diversity of opinion is purely opt-in (with strong incentives to opt-out) in socialmediaworld.

Add some racists to your feed list? I don’t know about racists, but I enjoy having different views on hand in my inbox. I detest a great deal of what some political bloggers say, but I like to try and understand. Sometimes I have had my mind changed too. I understand people on the right (OK, mainly the centre right) much better than I did when I was a pre-web student. Then I used to sneer at people for reading the Telegraph for goodness sake. Now I’ll read it’s leaders and blog posts alongside Comment is Free and the Guardian.

I’ll unsubscribe because people are boring, not because I disagree. Maybe that’s just me. And maybe I need to listen more to some Green voices, some far right voices, some Socialist Workers Party voices.

All is not lost, I say. Fight on…This world is still ours to shape, perhaps as never before. We’re right to identify these pitfalls and blind alleys, but nothing is inevitable in all of this. There’s still a revolution to be had.

After we’ve read these warnings, go and read some Umair Haque manifesto. Then think about what you will do this year to change the world. Seriously.

Point is: there’s a lot at stake.

Open (minds, finds, conversations)…

By Antony Mayfield

Tag Archives: privacy