When Issues of Privacy Go "Viral"

Yes, it's true. The days of hiding behind the internet screen name "2Kewl4Skewl" seem to be behind us. We're stuck with the sepia-toned memories of ruining our eyesight for just one more ill-lit hour of updating the tiled image of Megan Fox on our desktops, of editing the blog post (a scathing critique of unhygienic bath houses in ancient Rome, perhaps?) that will reach our faithful readership of seven, and of distorting family photos so Uncle Stevie's bloodshot eyes are less noticeable when posted to Facebook.

Goodbye, "Have you ever surfed the Interwebs?" Hello, "What, you haven't uploaded the seventeen newest social networking aps to your iPhone today?" A new age is dawning, folks, one where older conceptions of privacy collide and intermingle with the digital connections afforded via internet usage.

Below I've included several recent online NY Times articles dealing with issues of e-privacy. When one of the oldest and most "respected" print newspapers closely follows and renders public what was once considered a fringe issue for code-hungry nerds, we have a good indication that the digital age is upon us.

Never fear, internet naysayers. There is a place where you can escape, but beware of pesky outsiders infringing upon your privacy. They're likely to bring their Garmin and iPhone Google Maps to root you out.

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In "Technology Coalition Seeks Stronger Privacy Laws," Miguel Helft writes

A broad coalition of technology companies, including AT&T, Google and Microsoft, and advocacy groups from across the political spectrum said Tuesday that it would push Congress to strengthen online privacy laws to protect private digital information from government access.

While this proposed legislation would tighten privacy rights for online users to prevent the government from accessing our information, these protections don't acknowledge the ways in which our data is mined on a daily basis for potential marketing targets. Do we accept consumer data mining because we're cool with free market capitalism? Why is it more acceptable for a marketer to manipulate me while I assume Big Brother is coming to take away my rights when a governing body accesses my personal information? How are they different? One is an illusion of free choice while the second doesn't even try to disguise its ability to mine my data.

In "Mastercard Set to Open an Online Shopping Mall," Andrew Martin focuses on how Mastercard is creating an online shopping site, Mastercard Marketplace, that will use a new technology to monitor customer behavior all over the internet to better target the customer. As part of his report, he interviews Anita L. Allen, a law professor who studies privacy issues at the University of Pennsylvania. Allen says that as consumers give up more private information for short-term gains,

“'In the end, we turn into citizens who live in a world where we have no control over our own data.'”

Martin's article works well with the Helft piece because both suggest free market capitalism as a naturalized entity that does not seem to concern people as much as governmental invasions of privacy.

This recent editorial in the NY Times discusses online privacy in connection to government officials having no real legal prohibitions to prevent them from invading a user's privacy. However, there is a move toward developing legislation that will take issues of internet privacy into account. I do think this is important, but again, I find it ironic how willingly people accept being marketed to because of data mining.

In "Bringing a Smarter Search to Twitter, With Fees," Todd Woody highlights the strong connection between marketing and internet use. Here, people are willing to pay for a Twitter service that will (like Google) decide which feeds are most useful to the user. That service will use a data collecting technology to customize info for users, but this information can easily be used for marketing purposes, too.

Woody talks with the folks at the forefront of this entrepreneurial venture:

“TweetUp is to Twitter what Google is to the Web,” Mr. Case said.

Here is how the service will work, according to Mr. Gross: people can bid on key words or phrases, like “iPad” or “solar energy,” to push their Twitter profile or posts to the top of TweetUp’s rankings. Bids begin at 1 cent and people will pay each time their profile or a post shows up in a search.

Mr. Gross stressed that bids were not required to appear in search results. The service will also calculate rankings based on an algorithm that uses data from a company called Klout that measures a Twitter user’s influence. Bit.ly, a service that shortens Web addresses for display on Twitter, will provide data on how often people click on a link in a post.

So who does Mr. Gross expect to pay to put something as ephemeral as a Twitter post on top of the charts? “I think everyone who is looking to build a following will pay,” he said. That means companies that want to build their brands as well as individuals who hope to drive readers to their Web sites.

Beyond explicit economic reasons for data mining (what folks are often up in arms about in relation to e-privacy), many online newspaper services are asking whether the veil of 'privacy' for their viewers should be pulled back a bit. Richard Pérez-Peña reports in "News Sites Rethink Anonymous Online Comments" that the days of unmediated nasty comments or the prevalent 'LOL' and 'So Random' internet shout-outs may be numbered:

When news sites, after years of hanging back, embraced the idea of allowing readers to post comments, the near-universal assumption was that anyone could weigh in and remain anonymous. But now, that idea is under attack from several directions, and journalists, more than ever, are questioning whether anonymity should be a given on news sites.

The Washington Post plans to revise its comments policy over the next several months, and one of the ideas under consideration is to give greater prominence to commenters using real names.

The New York Times, The Post and many other papers have moved in stages toward requiring that people register before posting comments, providing some information about themselves that is not shown onscreen.

...“Anonymity is just the way things are done. It’s an accepted part of the Internet, but there’s no question that people hide behind anonymity to make vile or controversial comments,” said Arianna Huffington, a founder of The Huffington Post. “I feel that this is almost like an education process. As the rules of the road are changing and the Internet is growing up, the trend is away from anonymity.”

Global Free Trade Zone Labor via Internet

Today's NY Times "Technology" section ran an article that highlights how an internet security measure like captchas (a mechanism that forces the user to input a string of words to prevent the proliferation of spam) matters little when spammers outsource labor to willing workers in developing countries. Vikas Bajaj writes

Sitting in front of a computer screen for hours on end deciphering convoluted characters and typing them into a box is monotonous work. And the pay is not great when compared to more traditional data-entry jobs.

Still, it appears to be attractive enough to lure young people in developing countries where even 50 cents an hour is considered a decent wage. Unskilled male farm workers earn about $2 a day in many parts of India.

Ariful Islam Shaon, a 20-year-old college student in Bangladesh, said he has a team of 30 other students who work for him filling in captchas. (The term is a loose acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart.”)

Learning to Profile the Internet User Profile

In his NY Times March 16th article, "How Privacy Disappears Online," reporter Steve Lohr investigates recent academic e-experiments that show the ease with which one's identity (even with careful attention to safeguarding private info) can be determined.

Lohr found that

"You may not disclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender, location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing.

'Personal privacy is no longer an individual thing,' said Harold Abelson, the computer science professor at M.I.T. 'In today’s online world, what your mother told you is true, only more so: people really can judge you by your friends.'

Collected together, the pool of information about each individual can form a distinctive 'social signature,' researchers say."

Lohr learned that "the F.T.C. and Congress are weighing steps like tighter industry requirements and the creation of a 'do not track' list, similar to the federal 'do not call' list, to stop online monitoring," which does show one of the ways in which legislative bodies are working with the transition to digital culture.

Lohr closes his article by quoting Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell University who studies social networks, Kleinberg is "skeptical that rules will have much impact," and suggests to internet users that "'when you’re doing stuff online, you should behave as if you’re doing it in public — because increasingly, it is.'"

All the World's A Stage (Even Your Seedy Moments during Cosmetic Surgery)

In an article in today's NY Times, Brad Stone reports about the escalation of the public persona (I just want to be loved!):

" A wave of Web start-ups aims to help people indulge their urge to divulge — from sites like Blippy, which Mr. Brooks used to broadcast news of what he bought, to Foursquare, a mobile social network that allows people to announce their precise location to the world, to Skimble, an iPhone application that people use to reveal, say, how many push-ups they are doing and how long they spend in yoga class.

Not that long ago, many were leery of using their real names on the Web, let alone sharing potentially embarrassing personal details about their shopping and lifestyle habits. But these start-ups are exploiting a mood of online openness, despite possible hidden dangers.... To Silicon Valley’s deep thinkers, this is all part of one big trend: People are becoming more relaxed about privacy, having come to recognize that publicizing little pieces of information about themselves can result in serendipitous conversations — and little jolts of ego gratification."

Is Internet Democracy Just Code for American-Style Democracy?

This recent NY Times article about the proliferation of social networking sites in Indonesia suggests potential complications of assuming a universal ideology for internet users.

I'm the last person to suggest that someone's free speech should be limited, but after having lived in conservative communities in China and Malaysia, I'm aware that my view of free speech is politically, culturally, and geographically specific and naturalized, so it's easy for me to argue that anyone out to regulate content or use of the internet is wrong. Still, even if I can't escape my sense of democracy as a human right, it's important for me as a thinker and writer to consider the ways in which other countries are handling issues of internet democratization without hasty conclusions about people and places that are quite different from my comfort zone.

Below are the two major conversations occurring in Indonesia about Internet regulation:

1. “We want to limit the distribution of negative content like pornography, gambling, violence, blasphemy,” Mr. Tifatul (the minister of communication and information technology) said, adding that online content should be regulated in such a way as to preserve “our values, also our culture and also our norms.”

2. Similar to the discussions I've shared recently with colleagues in a graduate courses about computers and writing, Indonesian Ramadhan Pohan, a member of Parliament and a former newspaper reporter, aruges that "those online movements had deeply unsettled politicians, bureaucrats and even hospital administrators unused to such direct — and successful — challenges to their authority."

“The problem is that many officials in government are paranoid about this new online content,” Mr. Pohan said. “They are old-style politicians and bureaucrats who, if you ask them, don’t have a Facebook or Twitter account. They don’t realize that in terms of democracy and freedom of expression, we’ve reached a kind of point of no return.”