Results tagged “privacy”

This one's been kicking around in my head for a while, and maybe you can all help me understand it. With any contemporary social networking site, I can control who has access to the things I share, and I can update or change or revoke the relationships that enable that access at any time.

For example, I can share a photo on Flickr with just my friends, or a post on Vox with just my family, or display my profile on Facebook to just my contacts. And then, if somebody ceases to be my friend, I can change their status and they no longer have access to that information. It's a unliateral, technologically enforced restriction, and circumventing the restriction would be tantamount to hacking and likely to get you banned from any of these services.

So, with all of that being said, how are privacy settings on social networks different than DRM restrictions placed on media content files from companies? Is it because I'm not a corporation? Is it because the DRM technology is provided by Flickr or Facebook instead of by Apple's iTunes or Microsoft's WIndows Media? Is it because I only (theoretically) grant permissions to dozens or hundreds of people, instead of millions?

This is a genuine question, because it's something I'm not sure I know how to articulate. I can certainly identify the difference in intent, but I am not sure I can explain the difference in definition. Feel free to comment here, or post a link or reply to @anildash on Twitter and I'll collect the best explanations I get.

I found some really interesting responses to the launch of Google Web History that are all well worth visiting.

• CNET's Margaret Kane has a roundup of news on their news blog.
• Mark Blair's SMOblog (which stands for "Social Media Optimization", a term I kinda like) says Google is organizing the world's conversation. It's a fairly generous variation on Google's original mission of "organizing the world’s information", which I think Google abandoned long-ago, but it's well worth the read.
• The Globe and Mail's Mathew Ingram asks How much do you love Google? I believe Tina said it best: What's love got to do with it?
• Adobe's John Dowdell, whom I'm a huge fan of, always has a great perspective. This time on proprietary data:

Microsoft's hyperintegration of code and functionality led to their well-known security problems over the past ten years... Google seems similarly vulnerable these days, with their hyperintegration of user data. It looks like they're trying to handle it correctly, but it's a heavy weight to accept. I suspect that eventually we'll see a counter-pressure, towards decentralized data services rather than private, opaque, and centralized data silos.

• Aliza Sherman has some nice words that get at exactly why I like blogging about these things -- hopefully a good blog post can provide perspective that's useful for those too busy to do the research themselves.
• Rex Hammock offers a more personal look at Web History, focusing on the attention implications of the new service.
• Geek and Poke already has a comic strip up about Web History.
• And, winning the "Best Headline" award, is Good Morning Silicon Valley, with Those who do not purge history are condemned to reread it. Aaaand I think think nobody's topping that one today, folks.

Many years ago, when the web was a simpler place, one of the scariest monsters conjured up to describe the privacy threats that lurked on the Internet was the DoubleClick cookie, used for tying your ad-viewing behavior on the web to your real-world identity. USA Today said it was Orwellian, and set off a half-decade of worries for web surfers, many of whom didn't even have the foggiest notion what they were worried about.

Today, Google's released Google Web History. It's a brilliant, powerful, even insightful tool that will undoubtedly worry those who were concerned about privacy in the early days of the web's popularity. It doesn't help that Google now owns DoubleClick, and all those worries about cookies are amplified that Google actually stores all of this data on its computers, not yours, tied to an identity that might well also be linked to your email, office documents, your instant messages, and of course your browser history itself, courtesy of the browser toolbar.

Services For Your Web History

From a technical standpoint, Google Web History is one of those tools that's so well-executed it seems simple, or even obvious, the first time you see it. There's a basic timeline of your search history, with the ability to drill into specific search result histories for Google properties like web search, image search, news, Froogle (now renamed Google Product Search, though the UI for Web History shows the old name), Video, and Maps. There's even, astoundingly, a history of which AdSense Ads you've clicked on.

Some Google properties are missing -- Google Apps documents don't show up in your history, and the more loosely-connected services like Blogger, Reader, and Picasa are nowhere to be found. Plus, there's a peculiar disconnect with the Google Desktop Search tool's services -- the Timeline feature shared between both applications appears completely different, and your desktop history isn't integrated into the new service.

As you'd expect, there's a prominent and simple way to remove those scurrilous bits from your web history. And the improved presentation of an item as mundane as one's browser history reveals a recent strength of Google's: revealing data you already have access to. The Google Desktop Search tool on Windows made smart use of a disk indexing system that Microsoft had already built into Windows. In a similar way, the Web History service makes use of the Google Toolbar history to take old data and turn it into useful information through smart presentation.

There's a promising, but (for me, at least) still blank area titled "Interesting Items", and the reappearance of a feature that first showed up in the excellent Google Reader: Trends.

Now, Google's data for my own history is slightly skewed; I tend to use Blingo for a lot of basic searches on my computers, and Google's toolbar doesn't track that. But the fundamental underpinnings for a remarkably deep look into behavior on the web are already present.

The Real World

Outside of the world of users who gawk at every shiny new thing on the web, though, this is going to give people the heebie-jeebies in a way that we're probably only used to getting from Microsoft. In fact, it's probably safe to say that no other major web company could release this product today; The backlash from the user community of players like Microsoft, Yahoo, or AOL would simply be too strong.

Google is still in a period where most users on the web feel they are a relatively benevolent company. And it helps that the new product is excellent, useful, and unique. But with the release of Web History, especially in the context of its recent acquisitions and announcements, Google may have crossed the line where regular users start to react with skepticism and caution instead of unabashed enthusiasm.

This product is all about web history. We've already learned some lessons from the history of the web about what happens to companies once users start to question their trust in the intentions or implications of new products. It may serve Google well to revisit those lessons.

Some Links

Here are a few useful links to add to your own web history:

• Eight years ago, concerns about privacy in a billion-dollar DoubleClick deal. A related story from the period in USA Today, as well as a contemporary warning from a privacy advocacy group.
• A comprehensive overview of Google Web History from Search Engine Land.
• Google's first mistake, which was a fairly naive post I wrote four years ago, back before it was as clear to outsiders how important AdWords and AdSense would be to Google. I think it was most useful in the context of refuting some understandably hyperbolic observations such as Google are building the Memex. Jason Kottke also chimed in with Google is not a search company a few weeks later.
• Fred Wilson's skepticism over Google's recent direction, in the context of their acquisition of DoubleClick and YouTube, as well as the departure of Dodgeball's founders.
• And finally, Blingo, to whom I trade my search history in exchange for intermittent prizes which mostly consist of free movie tickets. Seems fair to me.

Sure, Microsoft Word is fine for kids who want to write papers for school, but serious professionals should be very worried about using this dangerous tool! Just a few weeks ago, I found out about this poor Des Moines woman fired for Wording at work!

Three hundred single-spaced pages of irresponsibility. Her name is Emmalee Bauer, so perhaps we should give her a verb -- be careful with your word processor, or you could get Emmaleed™.

In completely, totally unrelated news, there was a nice story about Vox in the New York Times.

Every time there's a resurgence in general-audience (non-techie) interest in Google, as after Newsweek's recent Google fawning, the issue of privacy in a presence of a pervasive and permanent record rears its ugly head. People who aren't technologically savvy don't realize that statements don't fade away or remain in confidence on the web; The things we say only get louder and more widely known, unless they're completely trivial.

We're all celebrities now, in a sense. Everything that we say or do is on the record. And everything that's on the record is recorded for posterity, and indexed far better than any file photo or PR bio ever was. It used to be that only those who chose career paths that resulted in notoriety or celebrity would face having to censor themselves or be forced to consciously control the image that they project. But this faded as celebrity culture grew and as individuals are increasingly marketed as brands, even products.

Naturally, this affects larger groups of people. First it was actors, then musicians, then entertainers of all stripes. We count politicians as celebrities now, too. I realized this when I ran into Rudy Giuliani this weekend. I took a moment to thank him for the work he did for this city, but I realized from the reaction of his body language that he was much more used to being approached as a celebrity than as a politician. I've met a few prominent examples of both over the years, both more and less well-known than Giuliani, and one of the constants that I've seen is that they're the only people who pay as much attention to the phrase "on the record" as do journalists.

Trent Lott comes to mind, when we consider the permanence of a celebrity/politician's statements, of course. Few of us who were alive in 1980 have to be concerned that any of our statements from that year will come back to haunt us, let alone some of our more obscure comments, aimed at audiences that we feel might be sympathetic. But that won't be the expectation of the generation of kids growing up today. Even their most casual instant messages will be "on the record". And it's not the sort of record that suffers the vagaries of our files today, where the audio to that reel might be lost, or the words on the original obscured by an errant coffee cup's ring.

So what to do? Well, first, of course, social expectations will change. The fear everyone has is that we'll all have to be nice all the time. And niceness sucks. It's the valid part of the backlash against "political correctness". Except that most of the people who object to political correctness do so because they resent that they've lost the chance to be coarse and offensive in public. They're resenting the loss of social control that they used to have, when calling a person or a group by an offensive name was acceptable because there wasn't any social or political cost to doing so.

But if we're not going to become nice while all our words are for the record, what will we do? Well, we'll adapt and become more reasonable in our expectations of people in the public. Instead of expecting that Britney Spears never acknowledge the loss of her virginity, that she might preserve a marketing message, we'll either accept that she tells the truth, or not require her to discuss it at all. One or two generations from now, the impossibility of scrubbing every private utterance for the demands of permanent public presentation will lead to a society much more accepting of occasional flubs, faults, and flaws. Behold, the triumph of context. Metadata about a person, and hyperlinks to their lifelong record, will inform the decisions made by a public used to an informal, non-governmental version of Total Information Awareness.

So do we have to, as Scott McNealy said, "get over" our desire for privacy. Do we have to permanently filter our thoughts and expressions, lest they be thrown back at us at some inopportune moment in the future? What do we do until people are used to seeking out context, until meta is intrinsic? Well, you have to own your name.

Go look me up. Googlism's use of Google searches to define a topic was so addictive that Google's WebQuotes was created as a virtual clone. And the phrases that pop out of those services aren't entirely inaccurate. But if you do a simple Google search on my name, what do you get? This site.

I own my name. I am the first, and definitive, source of information on me.

One of the biggest benefits of that reality is that I now have control. The information I choose to reveal on my site sets the biggest boundaries for my privacy on the web. Granted, I'll never have total control. But look at most people, especially novice Internet users, who are concerned with privacy. They're fighting a losing battle, trying to prevent their personal information from being available on the web at all. If you recognize that it's going to happen, your best bet is to choose how, when, and where it shows up.

That's the future. Own your name. Buy the domain name, get yourself linked to, and put up a page. Make it a blank page, if you want. Fill it with disinformation or gibberish. Plug in other random people's names into Googlism and paste their realities into your own. Or, just reveal the parts of your life that you feel represent you most effectively on the web. Publish things that advance your career or your love life or that document your travels around the world. But if you care about your privacy, and you care about your identity, take the steps to control it now.

In a few years, it won't be as critical. There will be a reasonably trustworthy system of identity and authorship verification. Finding a person's words and thoughts across different media and time periods will be relatively easy. Getting a "true" picture of that person might be possible, even simple. But that's years away. For now, recognize that you're a celebrity, treat your likeness and personal information with that gravity, and choose which statements and facts are going to represent your presence in the global media universe. Any adult in an industrialized society who hasn't taken these steps is forfeiting opportunity and security, out of either laziness or ignorance. Maintaining privacy in the face of corporations and governments that wish to violate it requires a bit of identity judo, neutralizing their desire for everything by freely giving away just a little bit.

So, who owns your identity right now?