I found myself surprisingly content when the clouds came back on Wednesday this week. I’m not a big fan of the typical California winter weather: cloudy, rainy, chilly. But there’s something reassuringly normal and expected about it. The nice weather lately had been amazing and I did my best to enjoy it, but always with a little frisson of guilt, knowing that it was making an already-parched state drier and hotter. Now I’m even a little pleased things are back to normal.
I happened to read today that Stacey’s Bookstore in San Francisco is closing.
Any bookstore closure is kind of sad, but this one has a particular sadness for me because that’s where I bought The Mindbody Prescription, which I used to get rid of my RSI totally. I bought the book in November 2005, on one of my first trips into San Francisco after moving to the Bay Area, and have been totally pain-free since June 2006 (more than two and a half years now). So the bookstore has some personal significance to me, and it’s weird to think of passing by there and not seeing it and being reminded of that lucky moment.
But the great thing he brought us is the reminder that he doesn’t have to do everything. We the people have reserves of extraordinary that we can and should spend freely. –Sars
Clotilde’s Grated Carrots and Beets is a terrific way to try beets (raw or otherwise) if you are a little skeptical about them. But I don’t think it has a very good name; I always look for it under “Beet and Carrot Salad” before I remember that the name in English is a translation from French. Maybe it sounds more fun in French, but if someone told me “We’re having grated carrots and beets for lunch”, I wouldn’t be excited.
I have sunsets on the brain today, so I thought of a new and (imo) better name for it: Sunset Salad. It’s such a pretty meld of oranges, pinks, and reds that the name really works.
I just discovered that the reason that my camera phone has been taking much crappier photos recently than previously is that at some point it was set to take photos at 640×480, instead of at its top resolution of 2048×1536. The setting is actually pretty visible if you know where to look, so I can’t really blame the camera for this, but it’s not super-obvious.
I can’t decide if I like the fact that the camera settings on my phone are remembered from session to session, or not. On the one hand, it’s probably correct to remember the resolution. But I often take photos in different places and forget to correct the white-balance setting; my cameras don’t remember this setting from session to session, so I’m not sure why my phone does.
Overall, I think LG needs to do a bit of thinking about this kind of interface issue; how to best show the settings, and which ones to remember between sessions.
I got some offline feedback on my last entry, with the effect that I rethought a few things. Here are some of the new thoughts:
Anonymity. The way I defined this previously was “being out in public without being notable”. This isn’t a very good definition, because, as Gavin pointed out, anonymity actually has a more technical definition that’s important to preserve, namely: being in public without being known. So works of art can be anonymous, in that they are well-known but no one knows who made them (they are completely unsigned). Or a person can be anonymous by being in disguise or otherwise completely unrecognized. Or information can be made anonymous, “unconnected to an identity”, by purging it of identifying information, like aggregated web search data unconnected to IP address or other similar identifiers.
Gavin suggested that the concept I defined previously could be described as being “unnotable” or “unnoticed”. Perhaps a better word is needed, but having both concepts is certainly more useful.
Another concept that I didn’t define explicitly, but left under the umbrella of privacy, is pseudonymity. This is a very important concept in modern web communications since so much information these days is attached to usernames. When is a pseudonym truly unconnected to a person’s “real identity”? This can be a challenge to determine, and a lot of pseudonymous information is poorly protected because of subtle identifiers in the information or interconnection between pseudonymous information and information filed under a “real name”; it can also become an issue when pseudonym or username is used for multiple sites, services, or types of works. It’s often easier to find a person’s data on the web once you know one of their common usernames than it is when you know their name. Usernames are, by their nature as keys to a specific record, more unique than names.
I also am not that fond of my definition of notability. It doesn’t seem to me to require numbers, but only a certain level of significant interest. However, that’s pretty hard to describe and define.
Finally, Dave wrote me an extensive discussion of yet another concept relating to accessibility: risk.
Risk is what you have when information is accessible to some people, but not others, because there’s a risk of failure of the safeguards that prevent it from being accessible to everyone (loss or deliberate breakage), as well as a risk of legal decision that the safeguards must be removed (search warrants, subpoenas).
Dave sums his discussion up thus: “Heightened accessibility, even if it is well-understood under normal conditions, still creates the prospect of lowered privacy.”
This is, I think, one of the big deals about accessibility that makes people pitch a fit about sudden increases in it.
As a result of some long-ago and more recent conversations with smart friends of mine, I came up with some interesting thoughts about privacy.
I don’t fully understand the legal umbrella of privacy, but it seems to me that there are a few distinct concepts that it would be useful to introduce into quasi-legal/common-sense discussions of privacy, and potentially to the legal arena too, in the long run.
First, a brief rundown of the concepts, before we get into their interactions and complications.
Privacy. Things that are private are things that you do on private property not visible from a public space, or public spaces where you have “a reasonable expectation of privacy”, and that you don’t speak or publish about in publicly-accessible forums — or if you do, those forums are specifically unconnected to your “real identity”. Also, things are private which are defined by law to be private, but that’s less important here than the nontechnical definition.
Accessibility (or Ease of Access). Things that are accessible are things that are easy for the average person or user to find. This is not a great term because “accessible” also has a technical binary definition related to privacy: if information is not at all accessible, it is private. But bear with me for a while, and suggest a better word if you have one.
Notability. Things that are notable are things that a substantial percentage of people (in the whole population or some subgroup) is interested in knowing about.
Anonymity. Being out in public without being notable.
The complexities of online “privacy” often come up when something besides privacy is involved, namely accessibility or notability. In my old journal, I wrote an entry about Google Street View (and Facebook News Feed, to some extent) in which I used the terms “theoretical privacy” and “actual privacy” rather than using the word “accessibility”, although I did notice, on re-reading the comments, that I start to talk about information being “(easily) accessible”.
GSV and FNF are iconic examples of things that “raised privacy concerns” without actually doing anything to change whether information was private or not. All the information on GSV and FNF was always available (to anyone who set foot in a place, in the case of GSV, and to anyone who previously had access to the info, in the case of FNF). What they did do was make it incredibly easy to find things out that previously had required a lot of effort to find out: what a place looks like at ground level, and what your friends are doing on Facebook. So the information became accessible (in the sense defined above) where before it had been inaccessible.
Notability is implicated in most problems where accessibility becomes an issue. If information is not notable (no one is really interested in knowing it), it doesn’t matter if it is easily accessible or not: no one cares, either way. Dave sent me a link today (which spawned this whole thought process on my part) about a guy whose information suddenly became notable. The guy didn’t mind, but it gave him pause for thought, as I’m sure it would most of us.
In the FNF and GSV cases, nothing became differently notable, just differently (more easily) accessible. This is closer to a form of privacy loss, because it makes something notable easier to find, and if something notable is found, you have much easier access to it. BoingBoing readers had many things to say about it, some of them wondering if we need new laws, or a new area of law, to deal with accessibility of information, since it isn’t covered by traditional privacy law.
Personal conduct in public, combined with YouTube and other video-upload services, illustrates a different set of circumstances. Most of us who live in largish urban areas, most of the time we’re in public, are anonymous: out in public without anyone particularly caring who we are. We feel restricted in our activities by our visibility, but don’t need to worry very much about anyone caring what we’re up to, even if we’re eating cookies when we’re supposed to be on a diet, or smoking when we said we quit. The situation isn’t the same in smaller communities, of course. In small communities, it’s hard to be out in public without being known.
Even in larger communities, recording and uploading a person’s behavior to a video site like YouTube makes it more accessible, but doesn’t necessarily make it more notable (consider all the incredibly boring YouTube videos that no one watches). Likewise, a person’s behavior becoming an object of attention/controversy would make it more notable but not more accessible: you’d still have to actually find the person to see what they were doing. When you get the simultaneous combination of accessibility and notability, you get something like the recent BART shooting video + controversy or the Caltrain cyclist arrest. But another worrying situation is when something goes up earlier, and then later becomes notable (like the guy’s photos as linked above, or like Facebook photos of undergrads drinking which get them in trouble).
How do we live our lives in a world that is increasingly a participatory panopticon? How do we act in public? What do we publicize and what do we keep private when things could become far more accessible or notable in the future than we ever imagined?
I was looking up the name of the holiday that’s today because a contractor of ours said that she would be off until Jan. 6, which is the end of her holidays. Apparently it’s called Epiphany, and:
Prior to the reform of 1955, when Pope Pius XII abolished all but three octaves, the Roman Catholic Church (and prior to 1976, the Anglican churches) celebrated Epiphany as an eight-day feast beginning on January 6 and ending on January 13, the Octave of Epiphany.
The Octave of Epiphany is just about the coolest name for anything ever. I love the idea that you can have Octaves of things, and Epiphany is a great word (though hard for me to type correctly, apparently).
I mentioned Straus Family Creamery back in my Mt. Tam post as providing the milk that goes into Cowgirl Creamery cheese. Besides that, of course, they also make milk and other dairy products, like yogurt. Ryan very kindly brought some SFC whole-milk Eurostyle yogurt to dinner the other day as an unexpectedly awesome component of a shopping list for chickpea curry. The curry is supposed to be served with yogurt, and I didn’t have any, so I asked if he would bring some.
I usually get TJs French Village rBST-free fat-free yogurt when I do buy yogurt (which is rare these days), but let me tell you, although I like the TJs yogurt, the SFC yogurt is AMAZING. It is fresh-tasting, tangy without being sour, and rich without being overwhelming.
I <3 Straus Family Creamery. I think I’m going to have to start making the extra effort and expense of getting their dairy products when I do eat dairy. I really, really want to support them.
Powered by WordPress