Magic Spot Flowing

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 haven’t generally been extremely hopeful about Obama as president as far as “Change” goes — my feelings tend more to the “intelligent, self-reflective, moderately liberal guy? okay, that sounds pretty good” sort — but I am fairly disappointed that he’s appointing a Secretary of Energy who thinks the problems are on the supply side and can be solved by technology, and a Secretary of Agriculture who thinks that…surprise…the problems can be solved by technology (bio, in this case). Technology is terrific, but we’re facing some pretty major problems, and I would like to see the new administration thinking about new, not old, ways to solve them.

It’s good that Chu is a scientist! Really! But…it’s not that good that he thinks that if only we can make more energy, it’s not important that we’re using so much.

And it’s really not good that Vilsack loves ethanol and Monsanto.

Edit: And.

Sigh.

Your Vision

I had a hard time finding this and ultimately got the link from a friend, so I figured I would share in case anyone else is as lazy as I am but still wants to take the time to tell Obama their thoughts.

This is my personal blog, not a topical blog, but I find myself unable to say anything terribly original or interesting about the election per se. Like many Californians, I am thrilled by Obama’s election, and terribly disappointed that it looks like Prop 8 may pass. However! They have not counted my ballot yet (vote-by-mail ballots submitted on Election Day have not been counted; more than 3 million ballots remain to be counted) so I will hold out a small hope yet. Other smaller happinesses (Prop 1A, Prop 2) abound. So, I resort to interesting linguistics:

“It felt very, like, moving.”

I heard this on the Caltrain shuttle tonight, and it constitutes one amusing linguistic tidbit regarding the election. No doubt I’ve said things that sounded equally empty-headed because I put ‘like’ in at an inopportune moment, but this one struck me as funny.

The other interesting linguistic bit was McCain’s use of “an historic” in his speech, and what happened to it afterwards. We were watching Fox News at the time (why? I don’t know) and they were putting pull quotes in the little “Alert” box. When they did this, they changed it to “a historic moment”. MSNBC, though, has the correct version in their story.

“An historic” is an interesting pattern. I don’t use it; it’s almost exclusively used by older people, who I think learned, or were explicitly taught, to use “an” before words starting with H (that are not stressed on the first syllable, a restriction I was not aware of explicitly until looking it up for this entry). It’s described well on this page. The origin is from British h-dropping, which later receded, leaving this little island of confusion. I was surprised to see Fox News ‘correcting’ McCain’s correct, if less common, usage. Did they do it for familiarity? Or because they really thought he misspoke?

Say what you like about the original bailout bill, it did not get better with the addition of tax cuts (yes, tax cuts at a time the government is proposing to give away $700B it doesn’t have anyway) and unrelated items. Write or call and urge your rep to vote against it. Strangely, those of you with Republican reps might have better luck for once. The Democrats so far have been annoyingly eager to save Wall Street from itself in the guise of saving us from them.

It’s sort of unfortunate when people who may have a point undermine themselves with hyperbole, hand-wringing, and inaccuracy.

I got pointed via BoingBoing to what should have been an interesting article about the people behind the sources of Facebook’s funding. I’m no particular fan of Facebook, especially because it just seems to get more and more annoying over time, and certainly there are and have been privacy issues with it.

But I can’t take seriously an article that

1) originally connected something created in 1999 with “after 9/11″ (there’s a correction on it now, but this isn’t just a misprint kind of error — it’s a fundamental conceptual error of the type that tends to be brought on by a desire to connect 9/11 to everything and/or a desire to see nefarious influence everywhere).

2) spends a lot of time hand-wringing about Facebook being “fundamentally uncreative” and disconnecting us from nature. This is just typical The Children Are Too Connected To Their Computers and What Is The Point stuff. Why use Facebook when there are books to read? he wonders. That’s not the issue. Facebook is completely different from books. If I want to read I read; Facebook is a vehicle for something entirely different — social connection.

3) uses the phrase “anyone can glance at your intimate confessions”. If you’re putting intimate confessions on Facebook (which people do) I must say I don’t have much sympathy for you. Facebook is essentially the public internet — and is basically about sharing and other people seeing what you do — even though there are some ways to limit information distribution. The phrase is used in the context of the ToU’s “if our privacy controls are circumvented we can’t necessarily protect your information” which is certainly unfortunate, but the head bit should be “weak privacy controls” not “anyone can glance at your intimate confessions”.

In general, the article raises the issue of Facebook’s connection to people I would characterize broadly as crazy libertarians, but it also conflates them with neocons (without taking any effort to convince you that it’s a valid connection). It uses rhetoric rather than actual argument to try to convince you that because Facebook was funded by these people and can be interpreted, in a certain light, as an experiment in realizing their world vision, it must be that we are helping them out in reaching their allegedly sinister goals. I wasn’t convinced of either the total sinistry of their goals (they range from the off-the-wall bizarritude of the Singularity to very unpleasant extremist capitalism) or of the fact that Facebook actually serves as either an an experiment or actual realization of them, largely because the points are implied and almost assumed. I suppose maybe for the usual audience of the Guardian that’s enough?

There’s also plenty of hand-wringing about the ad-supported nature of Facebook. I do think that this is a general trend that’s concerning — there are very few online social sites that are not ad-supported, and that basically means that all online community is also an opportunity for people to sell you stuff. But the same is true (as the article’s author indeed alludes to) of newspapers and magazines. Ad-supported media is not new and the amount of “OMG your social relationships are being used as marketing devices” seems excessive to me. I find guerrilla marketing and paid shills who act like sincere product users far more disturbing uses of the social network for advertising.

Maybe I’m too complacent about this, but ad-supported websites of all kinds are de rigeur, and I’m sure most of the ones that have any information about you via login use that information to target the ads (Google does, for example). Facebook does have a lot of people’s personal information, but I’m more concerned about the general availability of the information than about them sharing it with advertisers, honestly. At least I know what advertisers want — my money. The government? Random people? Not so sure about that.

It’s inarguable that you’re giving these people ROI (return on investment) through your use of Facebook, and you may quite legitimately want to avoid doing that. It does squick me a bit for sure, especially since the pointer from BoingBoing was about Facebook hiring Alberto Gonzales’s former Chief of Staff as their general counsel. Yuck. I can’t see that going anywhere good.

But it’s less clear to me that these people’s strange worldview and aims are necessarily furthered by Facebook, or that even if they are, that Facebook doesn’t have other uses that are completely legitimate and irrelevant to that. The guy may have founded PayPal as a way to escape monetary controls (see article for this contention), but most people just use it to send money to friends or people they bought something from, or set up an easy payment system for their website. Likewise he may have invested in Facebook because it instantiates a virtual, borderless world, but most people just use it to talk to their friends and share photos. The article, instead of being a consideration of the implications of the financial relationship (most interestingly through providing potential funding to the guy’s weirder organizations — not that he really needs more money to be effective given how rich he is), is a piece of poorly argued hysteria.

I’m currently having a similar problem with Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which I expected to like. It may be in part that unlike most of the first generation who had the book available, I was initially exposed to history that was being rethought to give more weight to what happened to the groups that weren’t writing all the books. So although some of what he writes about is new to me, much of it isn’t — it doesn’t feel revolutionary.

But even more so, I feel that he retreats from evidence into rhetoric; that he has a definitive agenda into which he’s trying to fit evidence, rather than letting the facts speak for themselves and guide his points. To his credit, he makes that explicit at the beginning of the book — and indeed I almost stopped reading at that point, because I’d been led to believe that it was a history book from a unique perspective, not an extended essay with a particular thesis (“the guys in power actually suck a lot” to put it shortly).

One example is his discussion of Native American social arrangements. While he seems to stick to the facts, there’s a definite gloss of romance over them. They were egalitarian! They cared about the environment! Europeans suck compared to them! He doesn’t, however, address the issue that the progress of farming tends to give rise to greater hierarchy (this is a Jared Diamond idea so it may not have been around when he wrote the book, but it does affect his point), meaning that given their own time, it’s entirely possible that the Native American cultures could have ended up much less egalitarian. And he doesn’t discuss the less savory aspects of various Native American cultures, of which there certainly are some. His evidence about their behavior is valid and I grew up with the new-standard narrative that yes the Europeans were absolutely horrible to Native Americans and that’s putting it lightly, but he tilts it just that little bit too far, undermining his legitimate points.

I need to read more of the book before I make any firm conclusions, but all the chapters have felt like that so far to me. Some very interesting evidence, interesting framework, just pushed a little too far for credibility.

Some time back, I wrote about the TSA’s policies on knitting needles. Not surprisingly, it isn’t just the TSA which seems to have trouble defining what or why the issue is with knitting needles.

On my way back from London yesterday, the guy at the Continental counter — not an airport screener — asked me if I had anything in my carryon which could be used as a weapon. I thought about it and said no with the possible exception of knitting needles, but the ones I was carrying were bamboo, dull-tipped, and had made it through US security on the way here (all true).

He said that nevertheless I should check them because they aren’t permitted. What really got to me about this is that he said that the airline permits them (also obviously true since I was previously allowed on board with them and they weren’t at any point interrogating me or any old ladies about the contents of our bags) but that security doesn’t, and the reason that security doesn’t is that they are trying to follow what the Americans tell them to do.

The first part of what he said turns out to be true, though I had no way of verifying that at the time except by either leaving the line and walking over to ask them or completing checkin and trying my luck. The Gatwick airport website specifically indicates knitting needles of all kinds as not to be packed in “hand luggage” (the British term for carryon luggage). But the second part is clearly untrue, and I really wish that people would not give bogus excuses like that for their stupid policies. I said rather crossly, but still politely, to him that this obviously had nothing to do with US airport security policy since the US has no such policy, and moved the knitting bag into my checked suitcase.

In Newark I moved it back to my carryon before customs and got absolutely no comment when I went through security again. Whatever excuse Gatwick airport (and it is just Gatwick and a few other airports — neither the government nor BAA which runs many British airports forbids knitting needles!) have for forbidding my knitting needles, it isn’t US security. But I must say, they don’t have an arbitrary policy — just a stupid one.

Useless nominalization – defeated!

I have to admit that I’m pleased about this on both pedantic and political grounds (the current phrasing is correct, and the current phrasing is more likely to assist in the measure’s defeat), but mostly what caught my eye is the judge referring to the desired change as “useless nominalization”. Nice phrase.

This week is the Towards Carfree Cities conference in Portland, and Kent & Christine and Beth both have lovely things to say about life without a car. So many lovely things to say that they’ve said everything I could imagine saying!

My favorite line:

As Peter once told Kent, “I don’t ride my bike because I’m a damn hippie like you, Dad. I ride my bike because I am a FISCAL CONSERVATIVE.”

On my birthday, I drove to the VA in Palo Alto (for the Sequoia ride), to the Farmer’s Market, home, and then to Berkeley, in a friend’s car. While I was on 880-N, driving 65-70mph (and being passed regularly, since this is California), I kept thinking “This is just insane. Why am I going so fast? Where is everyone going?”

Practically speaking, that day was very unusual for me. I had too much to do and too much to carry (a full trunk and back seat) to take my bike or transit. I needed to be able to get to Berkeley in an hour with a whole load of crap, more (I think) than would even fit on an Xtracycle. (You also can’t take Xtracycles on Caltrain.)

What it ended up doing was reinforcing for me how utterly weird it is in my life for me to want or need to be somewhere 50+ miles away in an hour, and how much I no longer enjoy doing that. Slowly, through habit, my life has been reshaped for a more human scale, where ten miles in an hour seems like plenty and trying to locate appropriate places to put a 2000-lb vehicle for 30 minutes to several hours seems bizarre. It also reminded me that I could have made other choices, that it was my own choices that put me in that situation to begin with. Had I made a greater head start on the prep, I could have sent a lot of the stuff back with the other party host, and I would have needed less time for last-minute prep and thus had more time for travel. I’m not unhappy with the choices I made, but I might make different ones next time.

Life without a car is just like any other life: full of evolving choices about how I most want to spend my time.