Posts about privacy

Davos08: What happens in Davos stays in Davos?

January 28, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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I continue to wonder whether off-the-record can work anymore.

At a closed Davos session, I witnessed a bizarre anti-American meltdown by a government official. It went on for sometime before I finally had it and called this person on it, saying that the rant was anti-American and that I was offended. I’m not telling you anything more — including what else I said — so as not to identify the official because the session was off the record, as I was firmly reminded by a WEF person and as the moderator reminded the room five seconds after the event (which is to say that they knew this was newsworthy). The rule is clear and I’m respecting it.

But the next day, the official’s outburst was the topic du jour among all the dozens of people at the meeting and they talked about it with more people. And all those people are powerful: journalists, media executives, business titans, government officials. So the off-the-record rule is no shield for a brain fart. The people who witnessed it could and very well may affect that official’s career.

The argument for making things off-the-record is that participants will feel freer to talk and to be candid. And that seems to make sense. But at a place like Davos, you’re still talking among people who can affect policy, business, brand, media, and careers. And they talk. Just because it’s not in the press or on blogs doesn’t mean such a lapse won’t have an impact.

Now add to this the live nature of media today. Someone could have broadcast that moment live or Twittered it as it happened. No one in that room did or likely would because we all want to be invited back to Davos. Yes, that motivates me to follow the rule. But at any other event that is supposed to be off the record, there is surely someone in the room who won’t care. And once it’s out online, it’s out.

All this is further confused because my own policy is that I am generally on the record — my life is an open blog — unless I label something, which I try to do to be clear and which usually involves someone else’s information or privacy I want to respect. This had an impact on a session I moderated, which fell under the off-the-record cloak. But I said I was on the record and at least one other person piped in and said she is always on as well. Then someone who didn’t pipe up got quoted on a blog (no big deal, by the way). So it’s hard to know who and what are off-the-record nowadays without a scorecard.

Life is simply becoming more public. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Friends forever: The advantages of publicness

November 28, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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I say it’s a good thing that our lives are becoming more public and permanent on the internet. It will keep us closer as people. It might make us more civil and more forgiving as a result.

While we tend to focus on the dangers of losing privacy, for a Guardian column I’m working on, I’d like to examine the benefits of living in public, of publicness.

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Start with the idea that young people today need never lose track of their friends, as I have with most of mine. That’s not only because they will leave bits of themselves online that will be be searchable and findable via Google, but also because they will remain linked in ever-expanding social networks, like Facebook, that connect them to their friends’ friends back through their own histories online.

Like everyone today — come on, admit it — I have Googled old friends and girlfriends. But at my age, that’s frustrating, since so few of my contemporaries have left visible Google shadows. I’ve found nothing for my high-school and college friends. So in January, 2003, I blogged a post listing a few names, just in case they Googled themselves with ego searches and found my “Google call” to them. Then, some months ago, I got email out of nowhere from my high-school girlfriend, Marki, extolling the wonders of Google. So now, via email, we’ve been catching up by tiny increments for more years than we’ll admit. I asked Marki whether she’d found my Google call or my Google shadow. It was the latter; she hadn’t heard of ego searches and my shadow is, well, bigger than me by now: My life is an open blog. Regardless, I’m delighted to reconnect with her. With each of us on opposite coasts, far away from our Midwestern alma mater and both disinclined to return for reunions, we never would have been able to reconnect without Google. Even so, the odds of making the link were small; it took one of us having a Google life and the other seeking it. I know we’re better off for it.

But for today’s young people, this won’t be so hard. They are all Googleable. They will all have threads connecting them on Facebook and whatever follows. (Alloy says that 96 percent of teens and tweens use social networks; they are now universal.)

So what does that mean to them? First, I think it means that they will maintain friendships and other relationships longer in life. I didn’t. I moved to four schools in three states in both elementary and high school (no, my father got out of the military so we wouldn’t move but then went into sales and we moved). I think that nomadism may have actually helped me. Friends will think this is a punchline but in truth, I was shy and being the new kid eight times forced me to be able to talk to people. But as we moved, I lost touch with almost every friend I had and that is a loss. If I had what young people have today, I could have stayed in touch with many of them or at least been able to track them through life.

I think this will lead to not just longer but better, richer friendships and I hope that is good for the character and good for the society. You’ll know that you can’t just escape people when you move on; you are tied to your past. And you’ll be able to stay in touch and won’t have those awkward moments of trying to catch up on 30 years over a single cocktail or email.

But what about living our lives in public? Yes, it’s possible that they could do one stupid thing in life and it goes onto Google — Google is everybody’s permanent record — and they are humiliated forever. Yes, it’s possible. Google CEO Eric Schmidt jokingly suggests we should be able to change our names and start fresh at age 21.

But I think this will be a matter of mutually assured humiliation: We will all have our moments of youthful indiscretion and we will have to forgive others’ if we want them to ignore ours. I say that could even make us more tolerant. OK, so you inhaled. So did I. Had awful taste in music once? Me, too. Wrote blog posts we’ve regretted? Haven’t we all? Yes, even our politicians’ youthful foibles will be open to the world to see and isn’t it better that we see their fallibility and humanity before they get into office? Isn’t it healthier if they and we don’t pretend they’re anything more than just people and politicians? And isn’t it better for democracy if they are forced to be more transparent?

There are other benefits to living life in public. It pushes us into social acts, into connecting with other people, even in subtle ways. When Flickr began, cofounder Caterina Fake has said, they made the fateful and fortunate decision to “default to public,” to go against the presumption and precedent of all the earlier photo services that we would want our pictures to be private. By making them public and by tagging them, we could find others’ photos and other people with shared interests; we could even find friends. Del.icio.us made the same decision about defaulting to public and so our collective bookmarks and tags there yielded greater value together than they did apart; it enabled us to find more content like this and for content to be discovered by more people; it enabled us to — as David Weinberger has explained in his brilliant book, Everything is Miscellaneous — organize information. Publicness allows us to join up to do more together than we could alone.

You see, putting a photo on Flickr or a bookmark on Del.icio.us or a tag on this post so it (and I) can be found in Technorati — and certainly blogging — all become social acts. And encouraging social acts would seem to be a social good.

As I’ve pointed out here before, young people have a different view of privacy and publicness because they realize you can’t make connections with people unless you reveal something of ourself: You won’t find fellow skiers unless you tell the world that you, too ski. I couldn’t find advice and support from people about my heart condition without revealing that I had one. Privacy advocates, as they are so often called, would be appalled that I revealed the most private of my personal information: my health data. But public people will tell you that living in public brings its benefits.

As I’ve also written recently, I think that Facebook has made important refinements on the idea of publicness on the internet by requiring real identity — not the anonymity and pseudonymity that dominate so much of the internet; by enabling us to control that identity and how public it is; and by enabling us to control our communities. We don’t live entirely in public; we decide how public want to be; we control our friendships. As I was researching this post — yes, I do research them, occasionally — I looked up my college girlfriend, who is an academic (a real one, unlike me) and found a review of one of her articles that eloquently summarized this idea of identity and the “crucial liberties” to “represent one’s identity publicly” and to “have a protected private sphere.” That is just what I wanted to explore here. Google kismet. She also posited the liberty to “equal opportunity to influence future generations.” That is about the purpose of living in public: the public as the political. You can’t change the world unless you’re willing to reveal how you think that should be done.

The issue isn’t so much privacy but, as Doc Searls has been writing, it is control of our identities and our data. Publicness is good so long as we decide how public we want to be.

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So look at the benefits of publicness: We can maintain richer friendships longer. We may be more careful to act civilly in public. We may become more forgiving of others’ lapses of civility and sense in the hopes that they will forgive ours: the golden rule of the social life online, I hope. We can make connections with people with shared interests and needs. We act more socially. We find we can do more together than apart. We invest in and protect our identities and communities. We organize and act collaboratively to improve this world. Yes, there are risks to publicness and to losing privacy. But the benefits of life in the public are great. That is what my private peers do not realize but what the young public understands in their souls.

How personal should a blog be?

November 17, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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I apologize, blog friends, for having been silent since Wednesday night, when our family lost my brother-in-law, Steven Westmark, to a sudden and tragic heart attack.

I almost turned off the comments on this post, which may seem rather odd. But I know that you all would offer my family condolences, and if you do so in the comments and emails, I’ll feel guilty not responding to each of you with thanks. Your sympathies are assumed and accepted as are my thanks in return. But that’s not why I’m writing this post.

What has puzzled me these last few days is what I should or should not write about this and how personal this blog or any blog really is.

I often tell people that the best blog posts come when you see, read, hear, experience, or decide something and think, ‘I should tell my friends about that.’ Your friends, of course, are your readers.

There were many such moments in the last week. If this were fully personal, I’d be chronicling our debate about whether to be angry at God or kill him; the impressive maturity I’ve seen emerge from young people in the midst of trauma; the social and manipulative business of funerals; and even the media story of charging the bereaved $400 to share their news and grief (where is the craigslist of obituaries? perhaps it should be craigslist).

But I’m not doing any of that because it would, I believe, be an intrusion on my family’s privacy. I’m not doing it for their sake.

But for my sake? My life is an open blog. Sharing these moments and the context they give to other thoughts is what I do now. It is reflex. Or that’s what I’ve discovered in this time.

This isn’t unlike my days as a columnist in San Francisco in the late ’70s. I constantly had the column on my mind and when I saw or thought something column-worthy, I’d store it away like a nut in a tree until I could publish it. But that was more opportunistic. That was about filling a space six days a week. That made experiences a commodity to be exploited.

A blog is different. Pardon me for restating the overstated, but it’s a conversation, a conversation among friends. It’s different from publishing. And, of course, it’s personal: one person talking among others. And so privacy has a different impact. That’s a lesson young people teach us often these days in their attitudes toward privacy online: In this conversation, you can’t get something in return if you don’t give something of yourself. And in this case, I don’t mean the return of condolences. I mean the return of experiences and ideas and viewpoints. I can’t get those from you, which I value, if I don’t give something myself first: my experiences, my thoughts, and the context for them. It’s personal, a blog.

Sometime later, I may well have that conversation about killing God. And I think I will contemplate the impact of someone disrupting the obit market. But not now.

Now I’ll just say that personally, I miss Steve greatly. He was a magnificent uncle to my children. No one in our family understood kids like he did; there’s a special smile only he could bring to their faces. He was a wonderful brother to my wife and a generous brother-in-law to me. He was a great husband, father, brother, and son. Steve was a devoted Deadhead, a talented builder, great fun, one of a kind.

The public life

June 27, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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The irony is so thick you could spread it on a bagel: In Today’s Times, Tom Friedman writes about living our lives in public thanks to the bloggers, vloggers, and podcasters who can watch our any, if not every, move and tell the world about it. Of course, the column itself is not in the public. It’s behind the wall. Anyway, Friedman tells a story he told at the Personal Democracy Forum (columnists, like bloggers, are good recyclers):

Three years ago, I was catching a plane at Boston’s Logan airport and went to buy some magazines for the flight. As I approached the cash register, a woman coming from another direction got there just behind me — I thought. But when I put my money down to pay, the woman said in a very loud voice: “Excuse me! I was here first!” And then she fixed me with a piercing stare that said: “I know who you are.” I said I was very sorry, even though I was clearly there first.

If that happened today, I would have had a very different reaction. I would have said: “Miss, I’m so sorry. I am entirely in the wrong. Please, go ahead. And can I buy your magazines for you? May I buy your lunch? Can I shine your shoes?”

Why? Because I’d be thinking there is some chance this woman has a blog or a camera in her cellphone and could, if she so chose, tell the whole world about our encounter — entirely from her perspective — and my utterly rude, boorish, arrogant, thinks-he-can-butt-in-line behavior. Yikes! . . .

For young people, writes [Dov] Seidman, this means understanding that your reputation in life is going to get set in stone so much earlier. More and more of what you say or do or write will end up as a digital fingerprint that never gets erased. Our generation got to screw up and none of those screw-ups appeared on our first job résumés, which we got to write. For this generation, much of what they say, do or write will be preserved online forever. Before employers even read their résumés, they’ll Google them.

“The persistence of memory in electronic form makes second chances harder to come by,” writes Seidman. “In the information age, life has no chapters or closets; you can leave nothing behind, and you have nowhere to hide your skeletons. Your past is your present.” So the only way to get ahead in life will be by getting your “hows” right.

I’m going at this from a different perspective in a post I’ll be putting up soon about the positive aspects of living life in public.

Losing control of media

April 19, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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NBC News says they will not make the videos from the Virginia mass murderer fully public and this morning on Today, Matt Lauer promised that they would not constantly loop them on the air. NBC News President Steve Capus just said on the air that “it’s so twisted” and “there’s no way to watch it without being extremely disturbed.” There’s a debate going on in blogs about whether the tapes should be released online. Dave Winer and Doc Searls say that the video should be released: “It’s 2007,” says Dave, “and it’s a decentralized world. We should all get a chance to see what’s on those videos.” But Micah Sifry says the father in him doesn’t want his kids discovering this on the internet.

As a father, I understand Micah’s wish. But that horse is out of that barn. This is related to yesterday’s discussion about news coming from witnesses, live, to the internet without the opportunity to filter it.

The essential infrastructure of news and media has changed forever: There is no control point anymore. When anyone and everyone — witnesses, criminals, victims, commenters, officials, and journalists — can publish and broadcast as events happen, there is no longer any guarantee that news and society itself can be filtered, packaged, edited, sanitized, polished, secured.

Like it or not, that’s the way it is. But before we start wringing our hands over the unique, one-in-a-billion exception to all rules — the mass murderer with a camera — let’s make sure we remember that this openness is a great and good change. It enables us all have a voice and to hear new voices.

And let’s not presume that we all need NBC or anyone to protect us from life as it is. But we do need to make sure to educate our children to be media-wise in a new media world. They will need to judge who the bad people are in life just as they will online. They need to understand that media is no longer a pasteurized and packaged version of life but life itself, witih all its benefits and dangers.

And though I don’t want to watch the murderer’s videos myself, I do think there may be a benefit to these tapes being out there: The guy was clearly insane and dangerous and what’s most shocking about this story is that people around him knew it and tried to both get him help and stop him from doing something dangerous and yet our laws even prevented his parents from being notified because of overzealous laws governing privacy. Perhaps this will motivate us to change those laws and our attitude about insanity and its dangers. That may be an advantage of the public life.

This is not an easy transition. It challenges so many assumptions we have about a controlled media. Some of us celebrate the loss of control but others fear that loss.

Cookie monsters

August 15, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis
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I feared this: When AOL fucked up — is there any other word for it? — and released what turned out to be personally identifiable information with its data base of search results, I was afraid that the next thing we’d see would be a story once again raising the spectre of privacy with ad cookies. Here’s one. I’m a strong defender of ad cookies because without them and the targeting and efficiency they enable, advertisers would advertise less or pay less or both on the internet, pulling the rug and big out money out from under our beloved new world. And we’d all be getting crappier ads with dancing monkeys. Cookies are good. Search is good. But sometimes, an idiot does something stupid that ruins a good thing. AOL is just such an idiot.

: Fred Wilson’s take here.

Yes companies need to have privacy policies. And yes they need to adhere to them. And yes, they shouldn’t be making public people’s search queries. And yes, consumers should be able to easily opt out of these targeting approaches.
But cookies and stored search queries are good things. They make it possible for web services to deliver relevancy in advertising, something no other media has been able to deliver efficiently and reliably.

The reality is that these targeting approaches, whether they be searched based, behavioral, contextual, or whatever is next, are giving us more relevant ads.

The data fight

May 13, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis
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The issues in the fight over telephone companies releasing data to the NSA aren’t so simple as they are being reported and spun under the dark cloud of privacy violation.

From what we know, data was released to the NSA so it could be analyzed to find patterns and thus to find anomalies that might lead to suspect communication and suspects, in turn. In other words, you can’t tell what’s abnormal until you define normal and we define normal.

If, in fact, it is aggregate data they are using to discover those exceptions, then we need to ask a new question that isn’t really being addressed in the networked world: Who owns the wisdom of the crowd? If the people own it, then one could argue that the government, acting as the people, may seek and use that data unless we, the people, forbid it through law. There is, of course, a proper debate about whether the law does allow it. There is also a proper debate over whether this is a necessary and prudent weapon in finding terrorists (and whether that is being done effectively). Indeed, a Washington Post poll says that 63 percent of Americans consider this an “acceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism.” And didn’t we protest that our government did not do a good enough job analyzing data and intelligence to prevent 9/11? If someone had been analyzing patterns of enrollment in flight schools — hmm, why are an abnormally high number of Saudis suddenly learning how to fly passenger jets? — then could we have stopped them? A further question is whether we have a right to know that all this is going on or whether that public knowledge cripples this investigation and our safety. Finally, it is not clear that releasing aggregate data necessarily violates individuals’ privacy. My point is that this isn’t as simple as raising the tattered-from-overuse privacy flag. Neither is this as simple as raising the also tattered war-on-terrorism flag.

This is about a new asset that is created in the networked world — the aggregate knowledge generated by our aggregate behavior — and who has a right to that.

This is certainly not new, only more efficient. Insurance companies have long used our health and mortality data in aggregate to set rates. Marketers use our aggregate data to adjust products and ad campaigns. Google uses our aggregate data to improve its search engine. So Google owns, analyzes, and exploits the data we create through our actions. In the case of the kiddie porn investigation, Google tried to refuse to hand over random aggregate data about our searches to the government; other search engines complied. The same thing occurred in the NSA case; some phone companies complied and Qwest did not.

The bottom line is that there isn’t yet a bottom line: The law and ethics around aggregate data are not clear.

See also this New York Daily News editorial:

Well, here we go again with the horrified screams from the crowd that’s inclined to believe the big bad government is peeping through every keyhole and recording every streetcorner chat about whether or not it looks like rain.

Revelations that the National Security Agency has been collecting a database of every telephone call in America – numbers dialed, that is, not conversations parsed – happen to come as British probers report that July’s London transit bombings might have been prevented if only security forces had been aware that one of the bombers regularly called Pakistan in the days before the blasts.

No, it’s no crime to call Pakistan. But when the call is part of a pattern that suggests a security risk, this is worth red-flagging and perhaps eavesdropping on – with a warrant and court supervision, as all right up to the commander in chief agree would be necessary.

Anyway, the idea that phone companies have been turning over raw logs to the NSA somehow doesn’t strike us as all that revelatory. Of course they have been, and they have been doing it legally. If the purpose is synthesizing data, then certainly the NSA would be keeping a database from which to synthesize. And where did you think the NSA was going to go to collect log data? …

: See also this Washington Post story on the privacy buggabuzzword:

“I wish I could say I was bothered by it but I’m not,” said Jacques Domenge, a 28-year-old Potomac man who visited a Cingular Wireless store in Rockville yesterday to replace a stolen phone.

“If it’s only done to protect people and find patterns that help the government find terrorists — I don’t think it will work, by the way, but let’s say it will — then I am all for it,” he said, adding that he had no problems with Cingular — or any other phone company — turning over records.

According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released yesterday, 63 percent of Americans said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, including 44 percent who strongly endorsed the effort. Another 35 percent said the program was unacceptable, including 24 percent who strongly objected to it.

“The value of fighting terrorism, in a lot of our research, seems to be more important to the public than what they perceive as violations of their privacy — so far,” said Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll and vice president of the Gallup Organization in Princeton, N.J.

Newport said views of the NSA program — which was disclosed on Thursday by USA Today — should be viewed in the broader context of Americans grappling with more and more of their personal data being collected and analyzed by businesses. “When we ask what’s the most important problem facing the country, we don’t see any signs that privacy is beginning to percolate up,” he said.