How to resist Big Brother 2.0
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?
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.
The advancement of privacy norms and legal rights have historically been consequences of widespread privacy harms. Think of transparency, accountability, access, and correction rights following abuses of secret dossiers maintained by governments and early credit reporting agencies, for example.
Far be it for me to hope for a “privacy chernobyl” or “data valdez” to mobilize a sufficient percentage of the public to act and to demand change, but such are the kind of scenarios that do seem to be effective.
The next frontier, in my opinion, will be individual access. If there is a simple and effective way for people to find out what information is being collected about them, and how that information is being used, then they will be empowered and motivated to hold those organziations more accountable for their actions.
Wouldn’t you like to know when and why government or law enforcement authorities have surveilled you, or what online advertisers have collected about you? Who has accessed your medical files and why? Empower citizens with real access and redress rights and watch society be transormed by new privacy norms and more accountable behaviour on the part of the data collectors and aggregators that are watching us more and more.
Should we ditch the idea of privacy?
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.”
What happened to ‘Yes we can’?
At this pivotal moment in the presidential race, President Barack Obama and his re-election team need to focus on a key question that could influence the outcome of this year’s election:
How do they get the “we” back?
Good question. We all remember how Obama broke new ground in the 2008 campaign by using social media as a powerful political tool. Obama’s campaign created an expansive Internet platform, MyBarackObama.com, that gave supporters tools to organize themselves, create communities, raise money and induce people not only to vote but to actively support the Obama campaign. What emerged was an unprecedented force, 13 million supporters connected to one another over the Internet, all driving toward one goal, the election of Obama.
When they chanted “Yes we can,” it wasn’t just a message of hope for the future – it was a confirmation statement of collective power. They weren’t waiting to be told what to do; they were actively engaged, calling friends to come to events, learn what was at stake, contribute ideas, and help out in some way. The power of “we” was awesome to behold. The “we” not only raised hope for people but also unprecedented sums of money for the old-fashioned campaign on the ground.
But this time, “Yes we can” has been replaced by a new modus operandi for the Obama campaign. It’s “We know you.”
The Democrats are investing heavily in what’s called Big Data to give them significant new insights into the everyday behavior of each one of their supporters. Big Data allows companies, or political campaigns, to probe and analyze information about you – your friends, your shopping habits, what type of events you go to and when, and what issues you care about. With this information, they can presumably be more accurate in sending messages out over email or in identifying the trigger points that send you to events and get you to donate money.
But whatever happened to the power of the people? Whatever happened to the “we”? We haven’t heard about it since the 2008 victory. “They built the largest online community in the history of the presidency,” says Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Media, which tracks the intersection of technology and politics. “But then they stopped talking to them and engaging them” – that is, until they called in recently with a pitch for money.
You did! Kash for Klunkers to buy Toyotas, failed loans to Solyndra, and the money pit Obamacare. Now every citizen has $50,094 of debt of the now $15 Trillion (seems being illegal has its advantages). How long until we riot and have a run on the banks when we have to start our own austerity measures?
from Don Tapscott:
20 big ideas for 2012, continued
The views expressed are his own.
What will happen in 2012? In the spirit of the aphorism “The future is not something to be predicted, it’s something to be achieved,” let me suggest 20 transformations (which Reuters will publish in four groups of five; the first can be found here). We need to make progress on these issues now to prevent next year from being a complete disaster.
These ideas are based on the research I did with Anthony D. Williams to write our recent book which comes out in January 2012 as a new edition entitled Macrowikinomics: New Solutions for a Connected Planet.
All 20 are based on the idea that the industrial age has finally run out of gas and we need to rebuild most of our institutions for a new age of networked intelligence and a new set of principles – collaboration, openness, sharing, interdependence and integrity. These big ideas will be the focus of much of my writing next year.
6. The Arab seasons: Getting beyond wiki revolutions to democratic, secular governments
In Egypt and Tunisia we saw a revolution in how to foment revolutions. Now we need to reinvent how to build democracies. Enabled by social media, anti-government leadership in these two countries came from the people themselves rather than a traditional vanguard. Tools such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter radically lowered the cost and effort of collaboration and undermined state censorship. Now leaders are beginning to use the same tools to help build functional democracies. "Social networks, Twitter and texting were critical to the revolution," said Yassine Brahim, Tunisia's new minister of infrastructure and transport, last year at Davos. "We are going to leverage social media to build a horizontal democracy rather than a vertical democracy." We must ensure that the wiki revolutions result in just societies, and not be taken over by the old regime or other regressive forces.
7. As the Old Media collapse, improve how We inform ourselves as societies
Is social media losing its lure … and return on investment?
How do you know that social media is folded into the narrative of American life? Perhaps when people are being encouraged to give it up for a religious holiday.
Offlining Inc., a group of Silicon Valley types, is promoting the occasional break from social media and tech devices in general by blasting an ad showing Lindsay Lohan. The message: “You don’t have to be Jewish to make amends for your tweets on Yom Kippur.”
It’s a good idea — we could all use time off from our iPhones, not to mention Twitter, Facebook, et al. But Americans don’t actually spend that much time on social media. Which is good because the reason many people have embraced social media (which would be marketing) is turning out to have a lousy return on investment, if you consider the opportunity cost of time.
Certainly, the numbers of folks using social media is on the rise. Over 100 million people are on Twitter, and more than 500 million on Facebook. People keep guessing which will be the next big one: Foursquare? It’s got over 3 million users. Missed in these numbers is that most of us aren’t heavy users.
Nielsen recently released figures reporting that Americans spend 906 million hours per month on social media. That sounds like a lot, until you consider that there are 240 million of us online. That means Americans are logging less than 4 hours per month on social media, or less than 1 out of the 168 hours we have each week.
Of course, there are heavy users. Someone is sending the 50 million tweets per day that Twitter reports, and judging by the number of posts in my News Feed, plenty of people (like me) spend a lot of time on Facebook as well. Many are doing it solely for the social outlet. Or something.
With all due respect, Laura, your perspective seems to reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of how social networking platforms should be leveraged. Though they may have some (limited) value in generating sales, that should not be viewed as their primary purpose, especially for small and independently-owned businesses. As you noted (unwittingly perhaps) in your piece, their value is far greater with respect to general brand development and marketing. For example, though I don’t follow Dan Schwabel on Twitter or FB, and I’ve probably never read his blog (which reminds me: blogs are social media too … and so are book reviews), I certainly know who he his because of his strong digital presence.
Social media encompasses far more than the public social networking platforms (e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook) that garner most of the media attention. Folks who want a richer understanding of Digital Era technologies are invited to read Part 1 of the Social Media Primer I’m developing, which can be accessed at http://www.sminorgs.net/social-media-pri mer.html.
It’s also important for folks to take a longer-term view of their social media investments and realize that trying to apply a linear metric to capture ROI may not be an appropriate way to measure success in the non-linear world of the Digital Era.
Courtney Hunt
Founder, Social Media in Organizations (SMinOrgs) Community
Are social media platforms the Jurassic Park of computing?
– Kevin Prince is chief technology officer of Perimeter E-Security. The views expressed are his own. –
Social Networks have grown out of control. Literally. Today, neither users nor social networking companies can control the monsters they have created. Think Jurassic Park: where John Hammond wanted to build something no one else had ever done, a fun theme park combined with a zoo of cloned dinosaurs. He built what he thought would be adequate security, but in reality, didn’t understand nearly enough about the environment he was trying to control. People naturally trusted that proper security was in place and that they would of course be safe. Quickly things spiral out of control, and nearly everyone gets eaten by the end of the movie.
The creators of social networking sites — yes all of them — are just like John Hammond. Their unique ideas caught on in such a viral way that just keeping up with the bandwidth, processing power, storage, development, and everything else required to keep the system online is an amazingly complex, never-ending task. For most of these sites, security is – and has always been – an afterthought. Some of them try, but it’s a bit like closing the amusement park gates after the Tyrannosaurus has bolted.
The users of social networking sites also contribute to the problem. Most are absolutely reckless when it comes to behavior on the sites. A while ago, I ran a social networking experiment on Facebook. I created a new user profile based on a free Google mail account. I chose the name Rebecca Johnson, made her 26, and used a profile picture of a three-year-old girl in a dress that I snagged from a department store website. No other information was in the profile. I wanted to see what would happen when I invited random strangers to be friends with this fictitious person.
Lucky for me, Facebook presents you with people it thinks you might know. Due to a lack of information in my profile, Facebook presented me with people of all ages that live in my county (obviously they were looking at my IP address and correlating that with my city). I of course knew none of these people but went ahead and invited them and others. In all, I invited 250 totally random people to be my friends. The only criteria I used: they had to have profile pictures. My logic: if you don’t have a profile picture, you’re probably not a serious or frequent user. Here’s a timetable of what happened next.
8:00am – Invite Friends 8:02am – My first friend accepts the invitation 9:00am – 6 Friends 10:00am – 12 Friends 3:00pm – 28 Friends
Caravanning is a very popular vacation choice for many. Allowing holidaymakers the freedom of the road, whilst also providing a cost-effective holiday solution.
Camping and Caravan Club
http://campingandcaravanclub.com/
from The Great Debate UK:
Are publication bans outdated in the Internet era?
The debate over freedom of expression and the impact of social networking on democratic rights in the courts is in focus in Canada after a Facebook group became the centre of controversy when it may have violated a publication ban.
The group, which has more than 7,000 members, was set up to commemorate the murder of a 2-year-old boy in Oshawa, Ontario.
The breach of a publication ban could lead to a mistrial, a fine and even jail time. Violating a ban could taint the opinions of witnesses or jurors, and the news media must wait to report information protected under a publication ban until after the trial is over.
The ban on the case of the Oshawa toddler was lifted by the court, but it raised questions over whether court-ordered publication bans are feasible in the Internet era.
With the popularity of such global social networking groups as Facebook and Twitter, can the courts control the pre-trial spread of information? What are the implications for fair trials?
"The Internet really has posed quite a problem in the sense of trying to keep things in check," argues Toronto-based criminal lawyer Enzo Rondinelli.
It’s going to be difficult to eliminate pre-trial publicity as a whole, but there are other powers that the courts can use to stem the dangers associated with pre-trial publicity, he told Reuters at his office.
from For the Record:
Citizen journalism, mainstream media and Iran
Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.
The recent election in Iran was one of the more dramatic stories this year, with powerful images of protests and street-fighting dominating television and online coverage.
Because traditional news organizations were essentially shut down by the authorities, it fell to citizen journalists -- many of whom were among the protesters -- to provide the images that the world would see, using such social media as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
This has raised a number of ethics, standards and legal questions for mainstream journalists. My colleague John Clarke, Reuters Global Television Editor, found himself in the middle of the issue as images became available and clients demanded coverage of the election's aftermath. John discusses the issues raised, the lessons learned and the opportunities for the future below. As always, his opinions are his own.
-----
Protests following the controversial Iranian election have put citizen journalism even more firmly in the spotlight. With traditional news gathering organizations effectively shut down by authorities, text, video and stills being produced and posted on social websites by the protesters themselves became the main way that much information was getting out of the country. This dramatic coverage -- regardless of (and perhaps even enhanced by) its shaky nature -- was accessed by Reuters (and other news organizations) and distributed to clients and viewers around the world.
Citizen journalism isn't new. We have long accessed amateur footage of stories around the world, from plane crashes to wars to natural disasters. However, the internet and mobile devices have resulted in a dramatic increase in the amount of content available and the speed of delivery, the ability to deliver outside of normal controls, more uncertainty over origin, ownership and verification, and the viral nature in which it can all spread around the globe.
from For the Record:
Counting quality — not characters — in social media
Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.
Are we too connected?
In recent days and weeks I’ve been wondering if our mobile phones, Blackberries, text messaging and constant access to email and social media have brought us too close together for our own good.
Or maybe the quality of our connected life is only as good as the information we share.
At this point, social media and microblogging phenomena like Facebook and Twitter focus on short answers to such generic questions as, “What are you doing?”
We hear from network and cable television anchors who tell us what they’re having for lunch (often a quick sandwich in the company cafeteria because they are, well, really busy). Or from usually cynical White House journalists who can’t resist Tweeting which B-list celebrity they saw at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Here are a few actual Tweets from the so-called nerd prom:
- "Just spend quality time with ricky schroeder #nerdprom".
- "post #nerdprom sightings. demi/ashton, james franco, owen wilson, eric holder, mayor fente, d axelrod, christopher hitchens, dana delaney". (This one's fitting since Ashton Kutcher is the world's most followed Twitterer).
- "Just got picture with Dule Hill."
Hello Dean,
Good thoughts, thank you for sharing. It’s good to know you are developing guidelines for journalists using social media.
However, I have to take issue with your characterization of Twitter, in particular its ” ““me, me, me” quality” and “focus on short answers to such generic questions as, “What are you doing?””
This misses the mark on Twitter’s value and importance. For some of us that have been active users for two or more years (yes, we do exist) Twitter is primarily an INFORMATION MANAGEMENT tool. That’s not to say all who use it find value that way, but it is a way of finding and sharing information that is more efficient than email, yet as the same time a bit quixotic and serendipitous. It is like Digg and StumbleUpon with people who share your interests. Thus, I have characterized Twitter as part of a personal information management system. Not the only part, but an important one.
On a broader level, the manifestation of so many thoughts can be seen as a peek into the collective conscious, or panconsciousness. I’ve articulated this concept on my blog.
I having trouble with login today.
Login form says it does not recognize my ID in some areas and provides no response either positive or negative.
This is a test.