A few days ago, a friend of mine (David Nguyen) asked me if i wanted to help with a proposal for a workshop for CSCW 2002, alongside Carlos Jensen and Scott Lederer. The topic: privacy in digital environments, intended to empower users through awareness and control. Of course, i jumped at the opportunity and in a matter of days, we produced this workshop proposal.
Every day, i’m reminded that privacy is becoming less and less a part of my reality. What’s sad to me is not that i lack ultimate privacy, but that i’m quickly losing the privacy that i’ve gained through modern life, back to a state that is so invasive that we might as well have zero freedom. Below are random articles on privacy that i want to keep track of, because they are a reminder.
inQtel – the CIA’s VC firm.. They are paying off different startups to turn around and make spyware of sorts…
Rosen’s article on privacy (which is quite similar to the talk that i went to this week on the same topic). It’s quite nice to hear that someone is coherent about these issues, even if they make me paranoid.
[cypherpunk login for nytimes: c1ph3rpunk/c1ph3rpunk]
Nothing to Yahoo Over New E-Rules – lack of privacy on Yahoo, again.
Online Companies Draw Fire For Removing ‘Offensive’ Postings – Yahoo deleting “terrorist” messages. Too bad that all of my V-Day posts got removed too. But, i guess we are a terrorist organization, because we fund folks like RAWA and talk about pornographic words.
FDA doesn’t regulate implantable chips. Yes, they regulate everything else that goes in my body based on their moral high ground, but not chips.
what a gorgeous day – although it seems as though the bugs have emerged as well.. i sat in the courtyard today discussing lab politics with one of my oldest friends here and it’s sooo depressing to learn how much the lab consistently screws people over. yuck yuck and yuck. this was particularly painful because i spent the earlier part of the day mentally remembering why there is no way in hell that i want to be here in the future. i watched as my advisor told others how their project would look and that just made me feel gross gross and gross. this is really just not the way that research is supposed to work. ::sigh:: so i just felt disgusting coming out of that conversation in every way possible.
i keep having those mental conversations about the value of education, the power plays that happen here, etc. interesting mental games…
regardless, i also got to think about the institution of marriage, how to reform it and the politics of drugs… she gave me the most fantabulous link about how colombia’s super bowl handled anti-drug advertisements – sooo hysterical!
this is so entertaining in light of The Onion‘s latest drug-related article.
::sigh:: i have to admit that i’m quite cranky with the gov’t & drug issues these days… just like i’m always thrilled when the government is hypocritical. Drugs & the Internet is one of their latest publications, intended to crack down on online available drug information. my favorite is how they are upset that reformers are gathering online to “promote” drugs (what about when we are engaging in freedom of speech to question the government’s legitimation of alcohol/tobacco but not marijuana, a far less harmful drug [1][2][3]). and, even on the front page, they are concerned about the availability of information on harmful effects of MDMA, GHB and LSD. since when is it a bad thing to release the causes for concern? oh, right, because the people saying the problems are generally against government dictation of how to treat one’s body… plus, the gov’t is generally after raving folks, because of the promotion of mind-expansion with drugs. i think it’s a bit terrifying to realize that even my digital discontent (this page) with this approach could put me at risk. freedom of speech has failed; we are living in China, just no one knows it.
Nelson was right-on with his thoughts of using images as passwords – it seems as though Microsoft thoughts of that. People have much better visual memories that verbal ones…
It scares me to realize the approach that our government is going in copyright protection. I think that we’ve lost a sense of the purpose of copyright. The idea is to get more information to the common good in a way that protects the creators of the ideas. Alas, we are now seeing bills like the SSSCA/CBDTA. Of course the tech-industry is up in arms – this is against everything that we stand for, and it’s just not reasonable for the common technologies.. talk about a way to make all but the monopolies have no chance…
And remember all of my worries about consumer agents being automated, meaning that you could prioritize your customers in scary ways. It seems as though more and more companies are using bots to replace customer service folks. And i thought Sprint’s Claire was annoying… Shit… How can you make a bot realize that what you need is important or doesn’t fit into the previous protocol? How will i be treated as a young person without enough credit?
And isn’t it funny that the government can order websites to delete data, but consumers and general people can’t? I really hope that archive.org works here…
Oh.. and it’s really funny to think about artificial societies– how do you grow them and what can they tell us about the future? I think that my problem is that i want to have my own society, my own rules, my own system.. i keep thinking that i should start my own country.. i wonder if i would be a bad dictator…. i still believe that the best countries are run by benevolent dictators..
They just announced that CNN Student News will remain commercial free – thank goodness!! To me, this situation is a *big* sign that capitalism has reached a point of being absolutely ridiculous. I mean, isn’t it a bad sign that everyone needs corporate sponsorship in order to be functional in this society? Corporate sponsorship means corporate control which means limited control. If a site is supposed to be educational, supposed to teach students (which means is supposed to give multiple perspectives, not just the ones desired by that corporation), isn’t it dangerous to imagine corporate sponsorship? It reminds me of the battles that Ms. went through when they were battling whether or not to have advertisements. They couldn’t get food-related ads because they wouldn’t put recipes in their magazine; they were denied makeup-related ads because some of the images on their cover had women without makeup on!! If educational material was all corporate-sponsorship, would students not be able to hear conflicting perspectives? Would they not hear about oil spills because Exxon was a sponsor? Eek!
What a dumb policy. I tried to order an American Airline / Citigroup credit card today to start earning miles on American Airlines instead of USAirways (mostly because i’ve grown cranky with USAir’s service lately). Of course, i was already feeling guilty about getting a credit card with miles, because of Zittrain, but still.. i know the reality and i know that i travel and fuck, i hate it when i’m willing to give up my privacy for rewards. So, i was feeling guilty, but i called anyhow. And i went through the process and they sent me this letter in the mail stating that they are sorry that they’re unable to process my request because they couldn’t confirm my home telephone number. So, i politely call them up and explain that i am a frequent traveling and don’t have a home telephone number. And they tell me that they can’t offer me a credit card. And i got very confused, saying that i couldn’t imagine that i am the only one without a home telephone number, that i was a frequent traveler and maintained only a cell phone number. And they told me that they couldn’t confirm my identity and that it was their policy to deny credit to anyone that they couldn’t confirm by way of a home telephone number.
It was like talking to a machine – i couldn’t get anywhere with them because they had orders that they were told to follow and no matter who i talked to, they only relayed the script that they were given. Human computers. Fabulous. Let me tell you how much i love this new society. So, alas, i got frustrated and hung up, proceeded to immediately call American Airlines who was outraged and said they’d work on it.
When nothing had happened in quite a few days, i decided to call American back. This time, i got someone on the phone who told me that there was nothing that American could do because they were a separate company and that they couldn’t dictate the rules. Another human-computer reciting lines and not really being a customer service person. Great.
Once again, annoyed, i decided to call up my current Citibank credit card number, explained who i was, went through a few changes on my account and then said, oh, by the way, can i change this account to a Frequent Flyer account and !bam! sure enough, i received the change. ::sigh:: I hate dealing with stuff like this – jumping through hoops just to jump through hoops. It’s just downright irritating.
And besides, it just can’t be a good thing that society is turning away from human services to human computers. If there was any question about how aggressive powerful individuals would maintain power…
i rushed to NY to visit with my family on Wednesday.. well, rush, sorta.. 8.5 hours to get there (cruel & unusual punishment, i tell you) apparently AAA said that like 85% of its members were on the road!! (i think that if AA was looking at its stats, it would find that 85% of those who should be their members were also on the road..) i was in a lot of pain by the time i got there… i hadn’t sat up straight for two weeks so sitting in a car for hours was like agony. it was made worse by the fact that i couldn’t take my pain medication and my lovely mother, in all her preciousness, was kinda anxious and i must admit that tension and anxiety continues to make thing worse… stupid body parts.. so anyhow, i got to NY for the family thing, spent time with my oh-so-large family of 8, peacefully endured the conversations about Afghanistan (all pro-war, of course), and did a good job of keeping my opinions to myself…
after about 24 hours of familyness, i took a look at the traveling situation and decided to head to Wilkes-Barre to meet up with my friend A… i had decided to go to his reunion, barring any more pain from my ever-grumbly ovaries… although i wasn’t feeling perfect, i felt good enough to go so i got to his silly mountain by the middle of the nite. funny thing is that his family is born-again-Christian so i knew that i would have to be on best behavior (hell, i even had to put away my current reading material – Satanic Versus)… but they were sweet and nice to me (his mom even made me a cake on my birthday!!)…. A & i spent the first nite up chitter chatting about a variety of things, mostly because i was so bouncy from driving…
the reunion was utterly ridiculous… completely in fact. i got to meet lots of crazy strange folks… all of the punk-rock-trouble-makers now have kids and are going through divorces… girls who looked like madonna in their 1980s year book pictures are now wearing plaid dresses that do not become them. there were really only three of us girls who looked like we were still partying and living life. one was a guest of a new divorcee from Chicago.. another was A’s cousin who’s still partying at the same level that she was in high school (which she never graduated from).. she was a bloody riot, coming up to A immediately telling him he’s lost weight and obviously got the good-looks genes of the family (then proceeding to tell him all the problems that the family has – diabetes, heart problems, cancer this, cancer that)… she was a trip. another good friend of A’s was this overly sarcastic boy who’s given up on people so he doesn’t go out of his house in Pittsburgh… another boy was this cop who had been in love with the same girl since he was 15.. she finally paid him attention just after he graduated high school, he got her pregnant, now has a 9 year old, cheats on her, does a lot of drugs and is a cop ::sigh:: another kid works border control in Mexico… needless to say, everyone was trashed, drunk for free and smoking weed out back.. good to know that middle america never changes.
didn’t do anything on my birthday, ‘cept recover from the hangover, change my car’s oil and drive back to Boston… back now, trying to recover… ::sigh::
is it that foolish to expect that i should be able to get an academic education at an academic institution? i definitely set my expectations way too high for what i thought i would get out of the Lab, and it’s just disappointed me over and over again. that, plus the lack of support or kindness by faculty members. i feel as though i have bosses instead of teachers or advisors. i am treated like a 5 year old or an employee in a nasty hierarchical system, not valued for my opinon, punished for being too sick to attend class, treated as though i don’t choose to go here. i want to be a student; i want to learn; i want to do good work, but when i am treated with such disdain, i shut down… i just thought that an elite educational institution would be so different…
so at least i have a diagnosis now.. i can handle that. knowing that it’s cysts and that all i have to do is lay back, take my birth control pills and hope that it goes away in the next few weeks. it’s not much of a luxury, but at least i know what’s going on. the only prob is that this means not going out, not doing much of anything. i feel like a lump. and i can’t take concentration medication so i can’t really work much (sad, very sad).. so i am stuck at home, doing nothing, trying & failing to focus… but at least i know what’s going on…
some days, i genuinely wish i could just buy into that blind faith thing.. have blind faith in something, anything. and not just a substance, not something temporary. i want long term blind faith. i want a purpose in life. a religion maybe. i wanna wake up blissfully ignorant and go about my life in pursuit of the higher purpose. maybe blind faith in the idea that capitalism is good for all humans. or that God is the purpose to life. why can’t i just have some blind faith please? and it doesn’t come in a tab or a pill, nor in weekly therapy visits or avoidance. i think too much. i am my own disease.
i despise modern medicine; oh let me count the ways.
i decided to listen to others’ advice and seek out medical help for the blasting pain that i was feeling in my abdomin. for the umpteenth time in my medical career, i walked out of the hospital 14 hours later with thousands of dollars in debt and a kind diagnosis of “unknown cause”. i am ok with systematically being able to stump computer programmers as i crash their software, but i am not ok with constantly being able to stump the medical system. how about the time that i threw up continually for two days? or when i used to pass out randomly? unexplainable causes, immense tests, no success. irritating.
i thought that i had this one down pat. hell, i had every classic symptom of ovarian cysts – locational pain, bloating, nausea, hot/cold rushes, pain during penetration (including by me with my fingers). the pain had evolved over the last 6 weeks; i had my period twice; numbness had evolved in my legs and my bladder felt so much pressure that it always wanted to pee. school put me on UTI medication but that did nothing (not like i had the secondary characteristics for that anyhow). at the ER, had tons of different doctors, surgeons, nurses feel around my belly, put pressure on things, notice the bloating. in the internal examine, the doc said things felt peculiar and that there was definitely swelling. anal probes suggested that it was not a problem there. appendicitis specialists said it didn’t seem like that. ultrasound showed slight cysts on the other side, but non-related and _nothing_ on the right side. wtf? it would be one thing if i was imagining my symptoms all by myself but the doc noticed some of them. where do you go with this? what’s the next step?
i’m in pain, can’t walk comfortably, am unable to laugh without pain or otherwise cramp my muscles. but, the hospital couldn’t see anything wrong. so they discharged me with “unknown cause.” can’t wait to get the bill for this one, reminding me once again that there’s no point in seeking medical help.