Anecdotal evidence suggests that there’s no such thing as bad publicity (at least for Facebook). In the wake of the recent flap about Facebook’s change in its terms of service, I seem to be experiencing a spike in new friend requests on Facebook. Of course, there may be no causal relationship whatsoever but I don’t think I’ve become any nicer or more popular. 
I have a feeling people just have Facebook on the brain.
Steve Lohr has a nice piece in the New York Times (’Technology Gets a Piece of Stimulus,’ 26 Jan 2009, p. C1) this morning about the role that technology and innovation will play in the economic recovery (aka stimulus) bill supported by the Obama Administration.
In the past, health IT deployment has been approached as an engineering problem: what computers have to be part of which networks exchanging which types of data? This loses sight of the purpose of electronic medical records: helping doctors to provide better care to their patients and transforming the system at a macro scale so that it enables data-driven, evidence-based research on how to provide effective, cost-efficient care. Today, because most doctors are paid based on how many procedures they perform, as opposed to how good they are at keeping patients healthy, will actually lose money if new information systems help them to deliver care more efficiently and keep people healthier. So, the key challenge for electronic medical record deployment is to marry up overall changes in healthcare policy with the the right innovation environment to produce the health information infrastructure we need to support safer, more efficient health care.
A quick infusion of stimulus spending, combined with a long term commitment to spend much of this money in a way that rewards doctors for delivering better care and data needed to measure effectiveness and efficiency (as opposed to just subsidizing them to put expensive hardware and software on their desks), can help lay the groundwork for the systems needed for health care reform. As Lohr explains:
The time-tested way for governments to create jobs in a hurry is to pour money into old-fashioned public works projects like roads and bridges. President Obama’s economic recovery plan will do that, but it also has some ambitious 21st century twists.
The $825 billion stimulus plan presented this month by House Democrats called for $37 billion in spending in three high-tech areas: $20 billion to computerize medical records, $11 billion to create smarter electrical grids and $6 billion to expand high-speed Internet access in rural and underserved communities.
[..]
The technology industry is not typically viewed as a prolific job producer. Much of its manufacturing is highly automated. But bringing technology to services fields like health care, telecommunications and energy can be labor intensive and thus generate jobs.The issues surrounding electronic health records illustrate the policy challenges of targeted programs. Mr. Obama has advocated spending $50 billion over five years to accelerate the use of such records and the sharing of health information across a national network.
[..]
The computerized records, when used properly, are an indispensable tool for measuring, tracking and improving patient care — yet only about 17 percent of the nation’s doctors are using them. They are commonplace at large medical groups, but 75 percent of doctors practice in small offices of 10 physicians or fewer.Doctors often benefit from inefficiency, because the dominant fee-for-service payment system means they are paid for doing more — more doctor visits, tests, surgical procedures, pills.
“Paying to put computer hardware and software in physicians’ offices isn’t going to do anything unless you change the incentives in the system,” said Dr. David J. Brailer, former national health information technology coordinator in the Bush administration.
[..]
“You want to pay for achievement — better health quality and efficiency,” said Dr. David Blumenthal, director of the Institute for Health Policy at the Harvard Medical School, who advised the Obama campaign. “But in the transition period, before financial incentives are reformed, you need to provide incentives or grants to use electronic health records because this technology is sort of the opening wedge to reform.”
And summarizes the current contents of HealthIT stimulus proposals developed by the transition team and current being considered by Congress:
Those eligible for grants to buy technology, a member of the Obama transition team said, will include inner-city and rural hospitals and small doctor practices. But most money, he said, will go to incentive payments to improve quality and safety of care.
The big leverage that that the Federal Government has is the over $700 Billion dollars that it spends on Medicare and Medicaid each year. All together the Federal government pays for over 40% of all healthcare in the US so directing that spending in a way that encourages a more data-driven health care system is the key to success. The stimulus spending will be the first step toward creating a system in which that money can be used to encourage smart, data-driven health care.
I’ve spent the last eleven weeks working on the Obama-Biden Transition Project with the Technology Innovation and Government Reform (a.k.a TIGR) policy group and have now finished. It’s been an great experience and tremendous honor to be able to work on a wide range of technology policy issues with such a talented, disciplined and dedicated group of people. Knowing that President Obama is now in the White House and getting to participate in the inaugural festivities was a great way to cap this all off.
What was extraordinary about the Technology and Innovation policy group was that it existed at all. This presidential transition, as others in the past, had to do a thorough review of issues and challenges in all of the Federal agencies, select senior personnel to fill Cabinet and White House positions, and prepare strategies for meeting key policy challenges and campaign commitments: health care reform, economic recovery, national security, foreign policy, etc. While Internet technology and innovation issues have been on the radar screen for nearly 20 years, this was that first Presidential campaign and the first Presidential Transition Team to give tech policy issues high profile attention.
Now I’m going to take a few days off, try to catch up on old email, and look forward to returning to my research and teaching at MIT at the beginning of February.
From Remarks of President-Elect Barack Obama
As Prepared for Delivery
American Recovery and Reinvestment
Thursday, January 8, 2009
[..]
“To improve the quality of our health care while lowering its cost, we will make the immediate investments necessary to ensure that within five years, all of America’s medical records are computerized. This will cut waste, eliminate red tape, and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests. But it just won’t save billions of dollars and thousands of jobs – it will save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health care system.”
[..]
A wonderfully perceptive and funny characterization from outgoing US Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean (Health care contenders – Chris Frates – Politico.com):
Dean said: “I’m not going to say anything about anything to do with transition. Generally, those who talk don’t know, and those who know don’t talk. And I don’t know what he’s [President-elect] going to do, but I ain’t talking.”
Last week Thomson Reuters (the owner of EndNote Software, a widely used proprietary tool for collecting and managing scholarly bibliographic information) filed a lawsuit against Zotero, the most popular open source, Semantic Web-enabled bibliographic tool. Zotero, packaged as a Firefox extension, is a handy tool for collecting bibliographic metadata to assist scholars in managing information necessary for their research (news story, complaint). Zotero can import and export a variety of different bibliographic formats and does so in a web-friendly, RDF-enabled way. Exchanging and linking bibliographic information (ie., the title, author, publication venue) of scholarly communication is an important means to discover new links amongst individual pieces of research that are published around the world. This has been a high priority, for example, in the life sciences where new knowledge can be uncovered by linking individual pieces of research together.
The latest beta release of Zotero will read and write EndNote’s proprietary metadata format and import and export the citation formats that EndNote provides for a wide variety of academic journals. In response to this, Thomson sued the Zotero developers (an open source community hosted at George Mason University), charging that Zotero (and GMU) reverse engineered the EndNote citation file format in violation of EndNote’s end user license agreement (EULA).
The key effect of Thomson’s suit, if it succeeds, would be to create a legal doctrine that enables software developers to restrict the Semantic Web’s potential to promote data interoperability and data integration. The legal issue at bar has to do with reverse engineering and the enforceability of EULAs, both of which are important questions. And, there’s a lot of say about whether or not the compliant will stand up to legal scrutiny. That said, the Web community, as well as the scholarly community, ought to pay careful attention to this case because its outcome could have real bearing on how free we will all be in the future to exchange information and realize the knowledge-enhancing benefits of the Web through collaborative research.
Update: Nature Magazine editorializes about the threats to interoperability of the lawsuit.
For a couple of years, colleagues of mine and I have been writing about the need to protect privacy through rules and laws restricting how information is used, not just who can access the personal information. So, I was very happy to discover that a famous early exposition of privacy rights in United States law (Olmstead v. United States (1928)), by the most famous judicial advocate of privacy rights, Justice Louis Brandeis, expressed a clear sentiment in favor of protecting privacy based on how information is used, not just whether one is entitled to have access to it or not. In the course of explaining why earlier Supreme Court legal precedents should be understood to make wiretapping illegal, Brandeis wrote
Unjustified search and seizure violates the Fourth Amendment, whatever the character of the paper; [n4] whether the paper when taken by the federal officers was in the home, [n5] in an office, [n6] or elsewhere; [n7] whether the taking was effected by force, [n8] by [p478] fraud, [n9] or in the orderly process of a court’s procedure. [n10] From these decisions, it follows necessarily that the Amendment is violated by the officer’s reading the paper without a physical seizure, without his even touching it, and that use, in any criminal proceeding, of the contents of the paper so examined — as where they are testified to by a federal officer who thus saw the document, or where, through knowledge so obtained, a copy has been procured elsewhere [n11] — any such use constitutes a violation of the Fifth Amendment.
That is to say, even if the officer was in rightful possession of the private information, it still should be understood as a violation of privacy it the police use the information against the individual. This is privacy as a set of usage rules.
Brandeis was trying to argue that wiretapping should be considered illegal under the Courts existing precedents but the majority of the Court opposed him and asserted that wiretapping was constitutional because it did not involve any physical trespass into the private property of the telephone user. So, Brandeis lost the argument in this early case and wiretapping remained constitutional (though not always legal) in the US for another 40 years. Eventually, though, the Court came around to Brandeis’ view that how the government got access to the telephone call matters less than the fact that people have, and are entitled to have, an expectation that their calls are private; that government would become too powerful it allowed to use the contents of our private communications without a warrant.
Today a senior McCain advisor, Doug Holtz-Eakin, proudly held up Blackberry and declared:
“You’re looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create.”
AP, 16 September 2008
Bloggers on all sides of the partisan divide are having a field day with this, suggest that the McCain campaign is out of touch, desperate, or trying to top the trouble VP Al Gore got into when he was falsely accused of claiming to have invented the Internet. At best, it suggests that Eakin-Holtz was just careless. At worst, it suggests that the campaign and the candidate has deeply irrational ideas about how to promote innovation. It’s also been pointed out that there’s some irony in McCain claiming credit for the success of a Canadian company.
The real question is: what would a McCain presidency do to help enable the NEXT innovative device, service or revolutionary use of the Web? (**Full disclosure here: I’m an active supporter of Senator Obama, though this post is entirely my own and not in any way made on behalf of the Obama campaign.**)
McCain’s record in promoting innovation on the Internet and in the large information and communications marketplace is terrible. Mostly, he can claim credit for supporting incumbents over innovators and for failing, in his time as Chair of the Senate Commerce Committee to do anything at all to support the innovative and socially beneficial aspects of the Internet. While he was in the leadership of the Senate Commerce Committee (1997 – 2001, and 2003 – 2005) his contributions included:
What did McCain do has chair of the most powerful congressional body in the communication and information market? He mostly stood up for the interests of incumbents. He wrote letters to the FCC supporting higher cable television rates, encouraged consolidation in the telecommunications market reducing the number of local phone companies from 7 down to an eventual 3.
And today, even though he’s no longer in a leadership role on Internet and telecommunications policy, he’s still speaking up against innovation and for incumbents through opposition to even modest Net Neutrality provisions.
In the end, the campaign season slide of some advisor is nothing compared to the anti-innovation record of Senator McCain himself. We’re lucky (well, maybe ) to have Blackberry’s an other innovations today. They won’t likely go away. But the question is which presidential candidate is more likely to support policies that enable the NEXT Blackberry. History shows is certainly isn’t John McCain.
I’m sitting at the Microsoft Faculty Summit, listening to Tony Hey (VP for External Research) talk about how critical it is for scientific researchers to have open access to data and open source tools (Tony actually said ‘free software tools’) in order to solve the most critical problems of the world. Among other things, Tony highlighted the importance of attaching metadata to documents and data, mentioning some of the MSFT tools such as a MS-Office plug-in that attaches Creative Commons labels to Office docs.
Anyone who thinks that institutional views of monolithic or easy to predict….
Today, the Senate passed a much-debated revision to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act with Lots of different views out there, even amongst the mainstream liberal establishment on the upcoming FISA legislation (’Senate Passes Surveillance Bill With Immunity for Telecom Firms‘, Washington Post, William Branigin, 9 July 2008).
In advance of this vote, there has been much debate, recently because Sen. Obama announced that he would support this compromise bill and not vote in support of filibuster. (Full disclosure, I’m an Obama supporter and have helped the campaign on Internet policy issues.) In thinking about this, I thought I’d survey the range of opinion just on the liberal center. Here’s some of what I found:
Mort Halperin, highly regarded civil libertarian, former head of the ACLU Washington office, and himself a target of unwarranted government wiretapping when he was working for Henry Kissenger in the Nixon White House, writes in a New York Times Op-Ed (’Listening to Compromise‘, New York Times, 8 July 2008):
The compromise legislation that will come to the Senate floor this week is not the legislation that I would have liked to see, but I disagree with those who suggest that senators are giving in by backing this bill.
The fact is that the alternative to Congress passing this bill is Congress enacting far worse legislation that the Senate had already passed by a filibuster-proof margin, and which a majority of House members were on record as supporting.
What’s more, this bill provides important safeguards for civil liberties. It includes effective mechanisms for oversight of the new surveillance authorities by the FISA court, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and now the Judiciary Committees. It mandates reports by inspectors general of the Justice Department, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies that will provide the committees with the information they need to conduct this oversight. (The reports by the inspectors general will also provide accountability for the potential unlawful misconduct that occurred during the Bush administration.) Finally, the bill for the first time requires FISA court warrants for surveillance of Americans overseas.
As someone whose civil liberties were violated by the government, I understand this legislation isn’t perfect. But I also believe — and here I am speaking only for myself — that it represents our best chance to protect both our national security and our civil liberties. For that reason, it has my personal support.
On the same day, the New York Times Editorial Board wrote against the bill (’Compromising the Constitution‘, 8 July 2008):
The Senate should reject a bill this week that would needlessly expand the government’s ability to spy on Americans and ensure that the country never learns the full extent of President Bush’s unlawful wiretapping.
[..]
Supporters will argue that the new bill still requires a warrant for eavesdropping that “targets” an American. That’s a smokescreen. There is no requirement that the government name any target. The purpose of warrantless eavesdropping could be as vague as listening to all calls to a particular area code in any other country.
The real reason this bill exists is because Mr. Bush decided after 9/11 that he was above the law. When The Times disclosed his warrantless eavesdropping, Mr. Bush demanded that Congress legalize it after the fact. The White House scared Congress into doing that last year, with a one-year bill that shredded FISA’s protections. Democratic lawmakers promised to fix it this year.
[..]
The bill dangerously weakens the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. Adopted after the abuses of the Watergate and Vietnam eras, the law requires the government to get a warrant to intercept communications between anyone in this country and anyone outside it — and show that it is investigating a foreign power, or the agent of a foreign power, that plans to harm America.
Proponents of the FISA deal say companies should not be “punished” for cooperating with the government. That’s Washington-speak for a cover-up. The purpose of withholding immunity is not to punish but to preserve the only chance of unearthing the details of Mr. Bush’s outlaw eavesdropping. Only a few senators, by the way, know just what those companies did.
And today, the Washington Post, often somewhat more centrist on civil liberties matters than the Times editorialized (’FISAs Fetters‘, 9 July 2008):
These are serious concerns, worth taking seriously. We are under no illusion that the measure is perfect; future fine-tuning may well be called for. The classified nature of the surveillance program makes it impossible to assess the implications with anything near certainty. But the legislation reflects, as far as we can tell, a reasonable compromise, worked out over long months of negotiations, between the legitimate needs of intelligence agencies and the legitimate privacy interests of Americans.
The measure requires an individualized, court-approved warrant to conduct surveillance targeted at Americans’ communications with those overseas and — in an expansion of existing FISA protections — at Americans abroad. Purely domestic-to-domestic communications, even among foreigners here, would require a warrant as well. Intelligence agencies would be able to target and collect the communications of non-Americans “reasonably believed to be located outside the United States,” even if their phone calls or e-mails passed through or were stored in the United States. But the agencies are required to adopt procedures to “prevent the intentional acquisition” of purely domestic communications and to minimize the retention and dissemination of such information.
more to come…
In all the recent uproar (New York Times, “Google Told to Turn Over User Data of YouTube,” Michael Helft, 4 July 2008) about the fact that Google has been forced to turn over a large pile of personally-identifiable information to Viacom as part of a copyright dispute (Opinion), there is a really interesting angle pointed out by Dan Brickley (co-creator of FOAF and general Semantic Web troublemaker). Dan points out in a blog entry today that while the parties before the court are arguing about whether the YouTube ID is, by itself, personally identifiable information, the fact is that the publicly visible part of this ID in the context of other information on the Web is sufficient to identify a lot about a person, not the least of which is their name. Dan explains:
YouTube users who have linked their YouTube account URLs from other social Web sites (something sites like FriendFeed and MyBlogLog actively encourage), are no longer anonymous on YouTube. This is their choice. It can give them a mechanism for sharing ‘favourited’ videos with a wide circle of friends, without those friends needing logins on YouTube or other Google services. This clearly has business value for YouTube and similar ’social video’ services, as well as for users and Social Web aggregators.
Given such a trend towards increased cross-site profile linkage, it is unfortunate to read that YouTube identifiers are being presented as essentially anonymous IDs: this is clearly not the case. If you know my YouTube ID ‘modanbri’ you can quite easily find out a lot more about me, and certainly enough to find out with strong probability my real world identity. As I say, this is my conscious choice as a YouTube user; had I wanted to be (more) anonymous, I would have behaved differently. To understand YouTube IDs as being anonymous accounts is to radically misunderstand the nature of the modern Web.
Dan makes a really important point here. One the on hand, the fact that we are all more identifiable as a result of social networks in which we exist suggests that the judge was just plain wrong (even wronger than others have already said) in saying that the YouTube IDs are not personally-identifiable. But on the other hand, to the extent that Dan is correct about the revealing nature of the social web (true for some of us now, more and more in the future), we have to face the fact that merely limiting disclosure of personal information from one source is less and less unlikely to protect privacy effectively across the Web.
Applying this view to the Viacom v. YouTube case suggests that privacy protection has to focus more limiting how people and institutions can *use* personal information even as we recognize that it is harder and harder to protect privacy by access control alone.
Some of my colleagues and I have written about this view of privacy as Information Accountability in last month’s Communications of the ACM.
A little transparency would go a long way toward helping keep online political discourse open, especially in the particular corner of the blogosphere run by Google (ie. blogger.com). The Herald Tribune (Bloggers take aim at Google – International Herald Tribune) reports on a controversy involving pro-Clinton blogs that might have been blocked as spam due to what we might call a PDOS (Political Denial of Service Attack) in a skirmish between Obama and Clinton partisans. The IHT asks:
Was Google’s network of online services manipulated to silence critics of Barack Obama? That was the question buzzing on a corner of the blogosphere over the past few days, after several anti-Obama bloggers were unable to update their sites, which are hosted on Googles Blogger service.
It is alleged that some pro-Clinton blogs were blocked after a number of pro-Obama users marked them as ’spam’ on blogger.com. A Google spokesperson explained:
“It appears that our anti-spam filters caused some Blogger accounts to be blocked from creating new posts,” a Google spokesman, Adam Kovacevich, said in a statement. “While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the ‘Just Say No Deal’ network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam.”
Kovacevich said that Google had restored posting rights to the affected blogs and that it was “very important” to Google “that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.” He gave no further details about Google’s spam-monitoring techniques or how they relate to the Blogger service.
It certainly would be useful if Google could provide some transparency into what they block and why. That way, either Google or the possibly malicious spam-flaggers could be help accountable for their behavior. (In a recent CACM piece on Information Accountability we explain why accountability is so important on the Web and how we might have more of it through additions to the architecture of the Web.)
Google does a very good job of giving transparent explanations when their search results contain information that has been blocked for legal reasons such as copyright takedown notices. I hope they can find a way to bring similar transparency to their part of blogosphere.
This week a wonderful high school teacher of mine retired. I was asked to write a remembrance of his teaching and thought I’d post it on this blog.
Junior year at Mamaroneck High School for me was about nothing if not being able to eat lunch in Mike DiGennaro’s classroom. By senior year, those of us who went on to take American Fiction with Mike felt we had earned the right to be there with him at lunch, but as a nerdy, socially uncomfortable 11th grader, to be invited to eat with this teacher for whom I had so much respect and fascination was the ultimate vindication of my nerdy existence.
In 1981, our class elected him to be the faculty speaker at MHS graduation. In the tradition of American literature that he loved so much, he spoke of rites of passage: our passage from high school into adulthood and his passage into the ripe old age of 40. I think this must have been a difficult transition for him, raising all sorts of questions about the meaning of his life and his sense of mortality. What has stuck with me ever since was the tremendous generosity of spirit he showed in being willing to link the passages in his life with the changes in ours. He made us feel that we were all in these transitions together and that the struggles we felt as teenagers heading off to the next stage in our lives were every bit as significant and worthy of serious regard as were the milestones in his adult life.
His graduation speech, and all of the rest of the wisdom he offered to us, imbued his relationship with us with narrative drama in a way that connected our lives to his. With this, I feel that he taught us how to take ourselves seriously at the same time as he taught us to read seriously. He taught us that these are really the same thing.
Just as Mike marked his 40 year milestone in that speech, Mike’s hero (and subject of his dissertation) Saul Bellow, began his Nobel Prize speech with a reflection on his own life 40 years prior to the award, when he was a restless undergraduate. At 40, Mike still had a lot of intellectual restlessness in him and passed that along to us. This is the restlessness of writers and readers that Bellow described in his speech:
[There is] an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for. (Nobel lecture, 1976)
The gift that Mike gave me was to look at literature and my own life with that longing but also to find some humor and perspective along the way. I think that’s why he offered us a calm place to eat lunch with him every day.
Freada Kapor Klein, a long-time leader in the field of workplace diversity and discrimination issues, has written a really thoughtful piece on Hillary Clinton’s approach to gender and race in the current (nearly over?!?!) campaign. In the course of explaining (Another 55-year-old White Woman for Obama. HuffPost 28 May 2008) why she, Freada, supports Obama and not Clinton, Klein begins by explaining:
After each loss, Hillary Clinton or her supporters raise the specter of sexism in a divisive way; this stands in sharp contrast to Barack Obama’s unifying discussion of race. Declaring gender as the “highest glass ceiling” has neither facts nor a hunger for uniting the country on her side.
She goes on to say that all quantitative research conducted by her Level Playing Field Institute on discrimination in the workplace finds that “People of color are more than three times as likely to leave solely due to unfairness (9.5%) than Caucasian heterosexual men (3.0%). In comparison, Caucasian women are only one-and-a-half times more likely to leave (4.6%).
What really struck me in her discussion of the political behavior of some groups of white women, she writes:
[I] learned that white women voters in California and Michigan voted in favor of Propositions 209 and Proposal 2, both of which effectively ended affirmative action. Why would women, who had been assured equal opportunity under affirmative action, vote for such a measure? According to those who conducted interviews with them, because they believed that a vote for themselves and people of color was a vote against their white husbands and their white children…. To me, Hillary Clinton represents the status quo: privilege protecting privilege at the expense of less affluent or “connected” populations of our society — especially with regard to creating a level playing field in American workplaces. I am supporting Barack Obama because he challenges us to build empathy, to care about others as much as ourselves, and to ask hard questions–such as who really has the unfair advantage
I suggest reading her whole post.
The New Jersey Supreme Court (State of New Jersey v. Shirley Reid (A-105-06)) has issued an important decision on Internet users’ right to privacy. The case involves a dispute about whether an ISP violated a user’s privacy rights by turning over subscriber information (name, address, billing details) associated with a particular IP address. It ends up the that subpoena served on the ISP was invalid for a variety of reasons. As the user had a ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ in her Internet activities and identifying information, and because the subpoena served on the ISP was invalid, the New Jersey court determined that the ISP should not have turned over the personal data.
The important aspect of this case in the evolving understanding of privacy on the Internet is the court’s recognition that we must look at privacy from the broad perspective of what can actually be discovered about people online. In this way, the ruling has significant strengths and weaknesses from a privacy perspective. On the one hand, the court finds that there is, today, an expectation of privacy in IP addresses because they are currently hard to link to personal identity. There have been lots of disputes in the US and the EU about whether IP addresses are ‘personally identifying information.’ (”PII” in the jargon of privacy.) This court takes a pragmatic view of this question and finds that IP addresses should be considered private for now, but that this may change. The court finds:
the reasonableness of the privacy interest may change as technology evolves. A reasonable expectation of privacy is required to establish a protected privacy interest…. Internet users today enjoy relatively complete IP address anonymity when surfing the Web. Given the current state of technology, the dynamic, temporarily assigned, numerical IP address cannot be matched to an individual user without the help of an ISP. Therefore, we accept as reasonable the expectation that one’s identity will not be discovered through a string of numbers left behind on a website.
The availability of IP Address Locator Websites has not altered that expectation because they reveal the name and address of service providers but not individual users. Should that reality change over time, the reasonableness of the expectation of privacy in Internet subscriber information might change as well. For example, if one day new software allowed individuals to type IP addresses into a “reverse directory” and identify the name of a user — as is possible with reverse telephone directories — today’s ruling might need to be reexamined.
Others have written about the legal details of this case and have suggested that it is a big win for privacy. Given the reliance on the shifting state of identity technology, I’m a little less sanguine.
This case is yet another reason why I believe (as I’ve explained elsewhere) that meaningful privacy on the Web requires rules the govern how personal information is used, not just what can be collected. Under the court’s reasoning, as our lives become more and more transparent, that would justify increasing harmful use of personal data. While it’s pretty hard to control how exposed we are all become, we still can limit how powerful institutions (governments, etc.) use personal data about us.
Ethernet inventor, journalist and now venture capitalist Bob Metcalfe speaks on the lessons from the Internet community for the global warming arena. In looking at how to accelerate technical innovation to address climate change, Metcalfe asserts that:
“… the place to do research is in university labs. “The best vehicle for technology innovation is not patents, it’s students.”
Of course, Bob also manages to express is distain for monopoly, Bell Labs, and even Al Gore. (See report by Martin LaMonica.) I’m not sure about those but think he’s right on with respect to patents.
Ever the astute observer of the various features and bugs of our collective behavior, a longtime mentor of mine, Mitch Kapor, has coined a new defintion:
Meetingboarding: (n) the sensation of being unable to breathe arising from continuous immersion in meeting after meeting
I’d add to this a characterization of email that I learned from Mitch many years ago:
The problem with email is that it has low emotional bandwidth.
-Mitch Kapor, circa 1991
National Public Radio’s Science Friday program will feature a discussion of online privacy with Alessandro Acquisti of CMU and yours truly a little later today. It’s live from 3:00 – 4:00 pm Eastern/US, rebroadcast at various times depending on where you live, and streamed on the Web.
Listen it. Call and challenge other listeners to think about the privacy questions raised by the Semantic Web!
Update: the broadcast is streamed at this link.
Behavioral targeting is pervasive on the Web. As documented by a very nicely-researched New York Time story today (’To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You,’ NYT, by Louise Story, 10 March 2008.) it’s now clear that each of us who use popular search engines and portals are the subject of thousands of individual data collection events per month of Web usage.
I’m glad to see some clear analysis of the practice out there but would like to see an additional level of transparency. If it is the case that profiling is benign, then why not tell uses what aspect of their profile triggered the placement of a particular ad. The ad delivery systems all make decisions about which ads to place for a given user from some properties of that user that are either known or inferred. Why not just tell us what those properties are along with the add placement. This would go a long way toward eliminating the feeling that we’re being ’spied on’ because it would eliminate any sense of secrecy about what is learned in the course of the behavioral monitoring. My guess is that many people would ignore the profile data, but some would check it, and we’d all have piece of mind from knowing that whatever is being done is happening out in the open.
According to the Times, data is collected on which web pages we look at and is then combined with other data (demographics, browsing history, purchases on partner sites, etc.). Right on cue traditional privacy advocates declare that profiles developed in this way (based on our behavior) do (or should) make us feel uneasy:
“When you start to get into the details, it’s scarier than you might suspect,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group. “We’re recording preferences, hopes, worries and fears.”
No doubt people (as least some people) feel alarmed about this and probably others are either implicitly or explicitly happy to have the right ads targeted to them. As an online ad agency exec said in the article:
“Everyone feels that if we can get more data, we could put ads in front of people who are interested in them,” he said. “That’s the whole idea here: put dog food ads in front of people who have dogs.”
Unless were going to require an outright ban on this sort of behavioral targeting, the question what to do about it. Is the goal to allay people’s fears? To limit the use of the profiles? Or to help people avoid incorrect targeting?
The statistics developed by comScore for the New York Times article do a nice job of illustrating the magnitude of data collection that happens. Jules Polonetsky, AOL’s Chief Privacy Officer, is launching a new consumer education campaign to explain the mechanics of data collection and tracking to users. The light that both the Times stories and the AOL campaign shed on marketing practices is valuable.
Many people are going to far more interested in how this profiling actually effects them, than on the overall magnitude of the practice. Is there any reason not to be upfront with people about the basis for delivering an ad? If there is, then there is reason to feel that we’re being deceived or maniplated, not assisted, by the behavior tracking techniques.
It’s pretty amazing what a little bit of structured computer power can do when deployed on the Web. Slate’s Delegate Calculator puts in the hands of Web-enabled citizens some simple computing power that helps us to understand how the delegate counts in the upcoming Democratic primaries may effect the final outcome for Obama and Clinton over the next hours, weeks and months. The knowledge about which states have how many delegates, how they might be apportioned, etc., is information that used to be a closely guarded secret of the political intelligencia and the press. How, it’s out there for all of us to see. It’s such a useful tool that many reporters from other publications are actually writing about it:
Jonathan Alter, Hillary’s Math Problem, Newsweek (4 March 2008)
Peter Baker, Clinton Down, but not Out, for the Count, Washington Post.
Jason Tuohey, Delegate Counter, Boston Globe
Carol Lockhead, Obama Wins Vermont, But Look at the Math, San Francisco Chronicle.
Granted, Slate has a relationship with some of those new outlets, but it’s still striking to see computing make the political news.
Danny Weitzner is W3C Technology and Society Policy Director and co-directs the MIT CSAIL Decentralized Information Group.
The views expressed here are purely his own.
