I’d always seen the steam vacs at Safeway. Thus, when we decided to do a massive house cleaning yesterday, i decided to make certain that all of the carpets and rugs got a thorough cleaning. We have a no-shoe policy in our house so i figured it would just help get rid of Marble fur and random dust. I was so not prepared for the color of the water in a matter of moments. The amount of dirt that came out of those rugs was mindblowing. Where on earth did it come from? Is it from before my time? If you think that your house is clean and tidy, go do a steam vac on your rugs. Me oh my.

This evening, my roommate wrote a mock USPS launch announcement to highlight why Gmail might seem foreign to those who view their email as a metaphor for the real thing:

The United States Postal Service has announced the launch of an automated service that ensures its customers receive advertising material directly related to their interests. No more junk mail!

Now the advertisements you receive free each day — courtesy of the trusted USPS — will be automatically selected to match keywords found in your correspondences. And it’s all privacy-friendly!

Newly installed robots will open every letter handled by the USPS, read its contents, reseal the envelope, and send the recipient — free of charge — third-party material describing goods and services directly related to the scanned content of the letter.

…(cont’d)

Many people have heard me tell an anecdote that i learned while living in Holland: At the turn of the century, the Dutch government collected mass amounts of data about its citizens with good intentions. In order to give people proper burials, they included religion. In 1939, the Nazis invaded and captured that data in less than 3 days. A larger percentage of Dutch Jews died than any other Jews because of this system.

Well, i’d been searching for a citation for a while. Tonight, i remembered to ask Google Answers and in less than an hour, had a perfect citation:

The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data Systems in Human Rights Abuses. Social Research, Summer, 2001, by William Seltzer, Margo Anderson

The essay is even better than my anecdote and i truly believe that anyone in the business of doing data capture should be required to read this.

why privacy issues matter… to me

Bloody Gmail (and the scarier A9) has me back to thinking about my love/hate relationship with privacy issues and my deep need to unpack the term and insert the issues of vulnerability into the discussion. Privacy is a loaded term. I’ve heard way too many people talk past one another thinking that they’re both talking about privacy issues. It’s a slippery discussion and i leave it to Dourish to fully flesh out why. But i do think that there are important issues that must be teased out in order to have a conversation about privacy, vulnerability or any of our data woes.

Key privacy-related questions

Given XYZ situation, i ask myself two key privacy-related questions:
1) Does XYZ make any person or group of persons feel icky? Who? Why?
2) Are there any rational scenarios of how XZY can be abused by the creators, potential hackers, or ill-advised governments/coups?

[Note: these are my questions for myself and thus i define rational, a notably arbitrary definition that falls under the “i know it when i see it” category. The key anecdote that i keep in my head is that at the turn of the century, Holland (and other countries) collected religion as part of their census data. In 1939, that data was horribly horribly abused. This may not have appeared to be a rational situation in the 1920s, but it is in my scope of the possible now.]

Reasons for the ickiness factor

First, i address the ickiness factor. I immediately disregard any groups that involve the paranoid from my list of ickiness contenders that must be addressed. I do not exclude the marginalized. Often, the ‘why’ answer for this group has to do with heightened walls around what is normative and what is not. Given that i’m politically all-in-favor of challenging normative values, i recognize their plight and pay special attention to it, albeit reflexively so.

Of the groups who fall into the ickiness reaction zone, i’ve identified a few reasons why there’s usually a reaction to XYZ:

• XYZ makes a someone feel at risk to situations of theft, notably identity theft. This is usually from people who have experienced identity theft, a growing group.
• XYZ asserts values or normative boundaries that feel uncomfortable. Example: you tend to be hyper-aware of demographic requests when your race/religion/sexuality/gender are not listed; thus, you feel invaded in ways that you wouldn’t feel if you fit the mold perfectly.
• XYZ opens the possibility of having material available to an undesired audience. This is a control issue. Most frequently, the undesired audience consists of known individuals with whom the individual has a relationship but that relationship does not include the sharing of material required by XYZ.
• XYZ makes information available to authorities with power over the individual. This is not simply a fear of the paranoids. This is a rational concern of many people who reside in countries whose governments have abused their power and individuals who work in companies whose bosses have regulated employee’s behavior.

Vulnerability embedded in ickiness

This ickiness feeling in relation to ‘privacy’ is what i called vulnerability. Something that XYZ has done has made people feel vulnerable to potentially abusive strangers, cultures and cultural norms, known others, and institutions with power. I am particularly interested in rational constructions of vulnerability, particularly amongst those who have felt the fire. We already live in a culture of fear – i’m not interested in magnifying it.

Outside of those who live in a fear for fear’s sake mentality, there’s a pretty consistent set of patterns regarding vulnerability:
– New situation raises people’s vulnerability concerns; walls go up
– Situation appears to cause no harm; walls start lowering
– Incentives are used to encourage participation; walls lower faster
– Vulnerability comes to forefront with resultant situation; walls spike

Point two is where the concerns slumber and why civil rights activists are essential. People’s innate vulnerability concerns definitely subside over time. Incentives definitely work, particularly when the consequences are not high.

While you may not give any demographic information just because, you will probably give it for the chance of winning a Porsche. For most people, this isn’t an issue of high vulnerability and there are low consequences so they don’t need a strong incentive. Take it to the next level. What will it cost to have a bot track your web surfing? Many people will do it… but the necessary incentive is usually more than dreadful odds at winning a Porsche. Take it to the next level. What will it take for you to be willing to turn your personal web surfing data over to your boss, lover or parents? Surfed any porn lately? The incentive (or, more likely, extreme guilt/requirement) must be high because the consequences of having to face your actions are much higher, particularly if you weren’t prepared to turn over your data to those with power over you. Note that for many people, fear of turning over this information to known undesired audience is far more threatening than having to turn this over to institutions; this is not the case in certain countries where vulnerability to dreadful governments runs much deeper than vulnerability to known individuals. A lot has to do with power and ability to execute enforcement over undesired behavior.

Why we need civil rights activists, legal changes and architects

Let me dig out of this hole and return to the civil rights activists. As people’s concerns lower, they’re willing to tolerate much more invasive access to data because they only see the incentives and they don’t see the consequences. This is rational. We tend to operate on local, not meta levels in everyday life. The role of the civil rights activist is to go meta and deal with first point #2 – can any rational abuse of data be expected? Their role is to look at the larger picture and protect people from engaging in localized decisions that might harm the larger picture.

There are usually two approaches that said activists take:
1) Try to educate the masses.
2) Try to change XYZ from happening through any means possible.

Education is nice and it works locally through social networks, but i genuinely do not believe that privacy education (which usually works by inserting fears) will overcome the incentives. Furthermore, the incentives will be increased and living in a culture of fear sucks; even Americans have started to ignore the bloody terrorist warning color markers. Of course, a moment of super-fear and then its slow decline to disregard always puts people on greater guard than originally. But i wouldn’t want the education camp to educate by creating situations that instigated super-fear. Leave that to governments.

I should clarify… i’m not entirely opposed to education; i just don’t believe that it’s the solution. Let’s keep it in mind as the social norms part of Lessig’s 4 point regulation scheme – valuable as a contributor, but not effective as the sole approach.

Then there’s the systemic changes. Going with Lessig, there are three types of systemic changes that can be made – the market, the law and the architecture. Personally, i think that the market is the reason that things are being moved in this direction and thus, i think that they’re a bit impossible to swing, so i believe that more effective approaches can be made on the law and the architecture side. Architecture is a bit more obvious, except that it is inherently tied into the market (or government). That kinda leaves law. And law continued to become more fubared. One excuse is that it is in bed with the market. Another excuse is that it’s fending off the paranoids.

The reality, i believe, ties into how law negotiates social norms. I wish i remember the details, but i remember learning once that social practices are often enough to affirm laws. In other words, if a law and the social practices are primarily in cahoots, it is unlikely that the law will change. It is only when there are significant differences that change is likely to occur. In other words, if people are tolerant of invasive practices, why regulate against them?

This is where i start to believe in the education branch of the civil rights movement. The key shouldn’t be to make people see the world differently, but stall them enough that they don’t assimilate to problematic breaches of privacy so that laws can be changed. Of course, i don’t know how to do this and thus, i suspect that it will take extreme conditions of masses feeling vulnerable to upset the law structure. (It is for this reason that Europe is much slower about opening up privacy… they remember WWII.)

The opportunity for designers and why i’m involved

Bring this back to me. From my perspective, a lot of the architectural decisions that induce vulnerability emerge from naivety, not poor intention. I genuinely believe that many creators really meant to do the right thing. The problem is that their construction of how to do the right thing is about privacy, not vulnerability. They only imagine how to address the data, not how to address people’s relationship with the data. The approaches are fundamentally about creating control or transparency. I’ve never found anyone who really thought through the implications of having all of the data in the first place. And most designers don’t realize the cultural norms that they insert into a system. Also, control is really really hard when people are trying to manage an external representation of their information. These systems insert new architectures: persistence, searchability, lurkers, etc. Control doesn’t work when people don’t know how to operate the controls. As for transparency, i am horrified by most people’s reading of Brin. Universal transparency will only heighten vulnerability, particularly that on a local level. It is not a solution for most of the situations that i’m concerned with.

So, as i see it, i have two roles as an activist on this issue:
– Educate people to conceptualize vulnerability and go through the exercise of thinking about who a design might affect, how, and why. Encourage them to minimize vulnerability in their design, not simply protect privacy.
– Work directly in domains that are all about vulnerability management and dive deep into the design issues with a conscientious perspective trying to maximize the protections afforded to users.

Dear me that was a rant…

A friend of mine just launched Driving Votes, a site dedicated to getting people out to swing states in order to get non-voters registered to vote for 2004. Of course the goal is obvious: get Bush out in 2004.

[And if you want to laugh (since absurdity is another valid route to the current state of affairs), listen to Dick is a Killer]

I’ve always been a bit obsessed about the differences between New York and San Francisco. As such, i really enjoyed reading Auren’s reflections on the difference (even if he’s a Republican – ::wink::).

ROFL. Last night, a gang of us went karaoke singing. We didn’t stop singing after we left the room and by the time we hit Shibuya we had moved on to “Oh Brother Where Art Thou” songs. I’m just now going through a few blogs in my RSS and i almost died when i saw that Cory posted an electronic version of Constant Sorrow. (Caterina and John did a fantastic (drunken) rendition of this song in front of Hachiko.)

According to David, Eric Schmidt from Google said: “Social networks will get better as we figure out what problem they’re intended to solve.” In an attempt to learn from last week, i will try really hard to not take that literally and imagine that he meant to say that “social networking TOOLS will get better…”

But even still, there’s a bit of backwards logic here. Why are we asking: what can social networking tools solve? Why aren’t we asking: what problem do we have that social networks give us insight to? I remember when i first got involved in technology creation, there was always a technology-first, problem-second approach. A technology was created and then everyone was rushing around trying to put it to use. I find it very entertaining that social networks (which weren’t invented, but modeled) are being put to the same process.

The thing is that social network representations require nuance. We can either try to solve the nuances universally (not going to happen) or try to figure out what problems we’re trying to employ social networks in and figure out how to negotiate them there IN A CONTEXT. The latter is going to be far more successful. Haven’t we already learned that each YASNS models a different social network anyhow (and no, FOAF is not the answer here because the different models are often because people are segmenting their networks differently in order to represent different facets).

I don’t believe that social network tools will get better as we find our problems. I think that social networks will get embedded into tools simply because they help us solve specific problems. The focus won’t be on the network, but on the problem solving.

(::cringe:: I’m almost approaching activity theory here. Must stop.)

Clarification based on good question:

Q: What’s the diff? Either way you’re holding a hammer and looking for a nail, no?

A: The difference is key. When you are focused on building social networks just to build them, you make very different design decisions than when you are trying to design a tool the utilizes social networks as a concept employed to solve a task problem.

The difference has a lot to do with the amorphous discussion of what social network TOOLs are and what social networks are. They aren’t the same thing. RIght now, there’s no hammer. Just the shadow of a hammer, which doesn’t solve the same problems.

Furthermore, when you have a hammer, you try to find nails. You turn things that shouldn’t be nails into nails. This is a really really really bad thing when you’re dealing with people and their relationships. Instead of accidentally breaking the wooden post cause you thought it was a nail, you break people, their relationships, their trust and their willingness to participate.

I’m really glad that David noted how his name gets morphed by the Internet. I have a similar situation. My name does not have capital letters in it, but when people see me lower-casing things on the web, they assume i’m just being lazy or artistic or something. Folks think that they should be more proper when they address me. Yet, when i publish papers, people realize that i went through effort to get my name lower-cased and they recognize this is how my name is spelled. (That’s why there’s an h – it’s all balance.) So, yes, my lower-casing is not an accident.

[Of course, one friend loves to send me emails full of capital letters, to make certain that i have enough for when the apocolypse comes. He sends me D’s and B’s just in case i needed a few extra.]