The Great Debate

How to resist Big Brother 2.0

Don Tapscott

May 17, 2012 12:45 EDT

The ubiquity of digital gadgets and sensors, the pervasiveness of networks and the benefits of sharing very personal information through social media have led some to argue that privacy as a social norm is changing and becoming an outmoded concept. In this three-part series Don Tapscott questions this view, arguing that we each need a personal privacy strategy. Part one can be read here, and part two here.

As the Net becomes the basis for commerce, work, entertainment, healthcare, learning and much human discourse, each of us is leaving a trail of digital crumbs as we spend a growing portion of our day touching networks. The books, music and stocks you buy online, your pharmacy purchases, groceries scanned at the supermarket or bought online, your child’s research for a school project, the card reader at the parking lot, your car’s conversations with a database via satellite, the online publications you read, the shirt you purchase in a department store with your store card, the prescription drugs you buy – and the hundreds of other network transactions in a typical day – point to the problem.

Computers can inexpensively link and cross-reference such databases to slice, dice and recompile information about individuals in hundreds of different ways. This makes these databases enormously attractive for government and corporations that are keen to know our whereabouts and activities.

George Orwell’s iconic text Nineteen Eighty-Four described the dystopian society where a totalitarian state rules in its own interests and everyone is under constant surveillance by authorities. This situation was often correctly alleged about the totalitarian East Bloc countries during the Cold War. It is unfortunately increasingly true of Western democracies today. In the name of national security, governments are collecting real-time information from us, sampling phone calls, emails and social networks, and taking our biometrics at airports and a growing list of other places.

We have little idea what governments are doing with this flood of personal information. And the aftermath of 9/11 should remind us just how quickly our civil liberties can be undermined in the name of national security.

Recently the New York Times reported that: “Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight.”

The Times reports that this practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, as carriers market a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts, or provide other services.

Can we retain privacy in the era of Big Data?

Don Tapscott

May 16, 2012 13:32 EDT

The ubiquity of digital gadgets and sensors, the pervasiveness of networks and the benefits of sharing very personal information through social media have led some to argue that privacy as a social norm is changing and becoming an outmoded concept. In this three-part series Don Tapscott questions this view, arguing that we each need a personal privacy strategy. Part one can be read here.

Privacy is nothing if not the freedom to be let alone, to experiment and to make mistakes, to forget and to start anew, to act according to conscience, and to be free from the oppressive scrutiny and opinions of others.

It may seem an odd notion today, but in its infancy the Internet was a favorite refuge for many seeking privacy. A famous New Yorker cartoon published almost 20 years ago featured two dogs sitting in front of a computer, with one saying to the other: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

Today such anonymity is essentially non-existent. Practical obscurity – the basis for privacy norms throughout history – is fast disappearing. Our society is collectively creating, storing and communicating information at nearly exponential rates of growth. Most of this data is personally identifiable, and third parties control much of it. This personal data will be archived online forever and be instantly searchable, and few appreciate how many ways this data might be used to harm us.

Should we ditch the idea of privacy?

Don Tapscott

May 11, 2012 12:35 EDT

The ubiquity of digital gadgets and sensors, the pervasiveness of networks and the benefits of sharing very personal information through social media have led some to argue that privacy as a social norm is changing and becoming an outmoded concept.  In this three-part series Don Tapscott questions this view, arguing that we each need a personal privacy strategy.

Since I co-authored a book on privacy and the Internet 15 years ago I’ve been writing about how to manage the various threats to the security and control of our personal information. But today I find myself in a completely unexpected discussion. A growing number of people argue that the notion of having a private life in which we carefully restrict what information we share with others may not be a good idea. Instead, sharing our intimate, personal information with others would benefit us individually and as a society.

This is not a fringe movement. The proponents of this view are some of the smartest and most influential thinkers and practitioners of the digital revolution.

Jeff Jarvis, in his thoughtful book Public Parts, makes the case for sharing, and he practices what he preaches. We learn about everything from details of his personal income to his prostate surgery and malfunctioning penis. He argues that because privacy has its advocates, so should “publicness.” “I’m a public man” says Jarvis. “My life is an open book.” And he provides elaborate evidence on why this has benefited him, and says that if everyone followed his lead, the world would be a better place. He concludes that while releasing information should be a personal choice, privacy regulation should be avoided.

Facebook is the leading social-media site that promotes information sharing, and part of the company’s mission is to “make the world more open.” In his book The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick explains that Facebook founders believe that “more visibility makes us better people. Some claim, for example, that because of Facebook, young people today have a harder time cheating on their boyfriends or girlfriends. They also say that more transparency should make for a more tolerant society in which people eventually accept that everybody sometimes does bad or embarrassing things.” Some at Facebook refer to this as “radical transparency” – a term initially used to talk about institutions that is now being adapted to individuals. In other words, everyone should have just one identity, whether at their workplace or in their personal life.

Stanford University professor Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist at Amazon.com, says that “the notion of privacy began with the creation of cities, and it’s pretty much ended with Facebook.” He says “our social norms are changing.”

Other thought leaders like Tim O’Reilly (he coined the term “Web 2.0″) or Steward Brand (author of the Whole Earth Catalog) defend an individual’s right to privacy. But they argue that the benefits of sharing personal information are becoming so beneficial to each of us and so widespread that we need to shift the discussion from what to share, to how to ensure the information we share is used appropriately. Says Brand: “I’d be totally happy if my personal DNA mapping was published.”

from Paul Smalera:

The piracy of online privacy

Paul Smalera

Feb 10, 2012 13:28 EST

Online privacy doesn’t exist. It was lost years ago. And not only was it taken, we’ve all already gotten used to it. Loss of privacy is a fundamental tradeoff at the very core of social networking. Our privacy has been taken in service of the social tools we so crave and suddenly cannot live without. If not for the piracy of privacy, Facebook wouldn’t exist. Nor would Twitter. Nor even would Gmail, Foursquare, Groupon, Zynga, etc.

And yet people keep fretting about losing what’s already gone. This week, like most others of the past decade, has brought fresh new outrages for privacy advocates. Google, which a few weeks ago changed its privacy policy to allow the company to share your personal data across as many as 60 of its products, was again castigated this week for the changes. Except this time, the shouts came in the form of a lawsuit. The Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the FTC to compel it to block Google’s changes, saying they violated a privacy agreement Google signed less than a year ago.

Elsewhere, social photography app Path was caught storing users’ entire iPhone address books on their servers and have issued a red-faced apology. (The lesser-known app Hipster committed the same sin and also offered a mea culpa.) And Facebook’s IPO has brought fresh concerns that Mark Zuckerberg will find creative new ways to leverage user data into ever more desirable revenue-generating products.

This is the way we’re private now. It’s ludicrous for anyone who loves the Internet to expect otherwise. How else are these services supposed to exist -- let alone make any money? Theft or misuse of private user data is a crime, certainly. But no social web app -- not one -- can work without intense analytics performed on the huge data sets that users provide to them voluntarily (you did read the terms of service agreement...right?).

And the issue compounds when people connect one site to another. By linking their Twitter to their Facebook to their Google+ to their Foursquare to their Zynga to their Instagram to their iOS, users are consolidating their lives, and in the process making them more attractive to marketers. While Facebook, Twitter and other services have made attempts to warn users about hitting the “connect” button, many of us hit that button with reckless abandon, without a thought of who’s slavering on the other side.

The reason social media and digital information companies want that data is because of what we refuse to give them: money. No one wants to pay for the privilege of chatting with their friends or using a coupon, and to this day, no one has to: Go ahead, ring their doorbell or pick up the free coupon book from your front stoop. But if you want to chat using Facebook or Gmail, or you want to buy a groupon for an 80 percent-off Botox service, you will have to tell those companies who you are. And those companies will use that information to tailor their offerings to you, increasing your value as a user and a customer. They will slice their data sets into a million different pieces and show those pieces to people -- advertisers -- who will pay them money for the privilege of using their service. They’ll use it to get to you.

This is an update on an old media model. Magazines and newspapers for decades could only guess at the readership of their product and the demographic of their customers. But now social and new media demand to -- and can -- know exactly who you are before they agree to let you use their free services. Even email newsletter services like the increasingly hot Thrillist -- which might innocuously start you on their service by asking only for your simple email address -- deploy click trackers, pixel trackers and other online data-gathering techniques to start to put together a picture of you as a user, both individually and in aggregate. A deceased magazine like Spy could only dream of that kind of intel.

from MediaFile:

Should you trust Facebook with your email?

Michael Fertik

Nov 19, 2010 14:05 EST

- Michael Fertik is the CEO and Founder of ReputationDefender, the online privacy and reputation company. The views expressed are his own. -

Facebook already knows a massive amount about you.  They know your age, what you look like, what you like, what you do for fun, where you go, what you eat, whom you know, whom you know well, whom you sleep with, who your best friends and family are, and, again, how old they are, what they like, and so on.

On top of that, Facebook has a well-known history of privacy breaches or at least snafus.  Publicly they seem committed to the notion that privacy is dead.  Their CEO and Founder has said as much.

Never mind that this view is not shared by the public, which is hungry for privacy in the digital age.  And never mind that the “death of privacy” would serve exactly the interests of a digital media company.  It seems that it may be an honestly held belief among top leadership of Facebook that privacy is and should be dead.

Now, Facebook is expanding its reach even further.  It will be rolling out a unified, cross-platform messaging system that will combine features of email, SMS, and chat.  The company will offer users @facebook.com email addresses.  At first blush, there’s nothing altogether new about the development from a technical standpoint.  Unified messaging has been a goal since the advent of disunified messaging—more or less since SMS, IM, and chat became comparably popular and used in parallel.

But a Facebook-based unified messaging system may offer different appeal and new risks, and not just because it can instantaneously distribute its feature set to its 500 million-plus user base.

It is impossible for a digital media company to care deeply about privacy.  You are the only asset they have to sell.  The promise of advertising in the Internet age is that the platform can connect a brand with the individual person most likely to buy.  The only way that happens is through the collection and use of huge amounts of data about each of us, followed by the sale of access to the data or the person they describe.

Google street view: shades of Nazi spy era?

The following article by Krista Kapralos first appeared in GlobalPost.

FRANKFURT, Germany — It wasn’t too long ago that apartment dwellers in Germany assumed that someone, somewhere in the building, was taking notes on everything they did. Even people who owned their own homes could never be certain whether a government mole was listening in on their conversations.

“Making sure the law was kept,” said Jobst Krause, a 67-year-old Frankfurter, of the surveillance during the Nazi era.

Krause is too young to have experienced the worst of Nazi surveillance, and he lived in West Germany when the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police force, kept tabs on citizens. But he understands the pang of worry that shot through the hearts of many Germans last week when Google, the American search engine giant, announced that it would launch its Street View application in Germany before year’s end.

Google began sending camera-equipped cars throughout Germany’s 20 largest cities in 2008. Once launched, the Street View program will offer panoramic, ground-level photographs of most streets in those cities, allowing Web surfers to virtually tour those cities as if they were walking or driving.

The program was launched in the U.S. in 2007, and has since spread through 23 countries. But Google found fierce resistance in Germany, where strict privacy laws and suspicion about the company’s reasons for widespread data collection have led to a handful of investigations.

from Ask...:

Bailout bonuses: Does the public have a right to know?

Mario Di Simine

Aug 24, 2009 12:53 EDT

Is it anybody's business how much money you make?

When it comes to Wall Street and the meltdown that whacked financial markets and emptied investors' pockets, the normal rules of etiquette don't seem to apply.

Wall Street salaries seem to be everybody's business lately. Nevertheless, the Obama administration's pay czar may try to keep a large portion of the compensation plans he is reviewing under wraps.

It's Kenneth Feinberg's job to review salaries at the biggest corporate recipients of government bailout funds.

How much of his report will become public is the multimillion dollar question.

Privacy laws and fears that highly compensated executives will become targets for an angry public argue for limiting disclosure.