As Twitter continues to thrive as the communications tool of choice amongst activists, dissenters and occupiers worldwide it should be no surprise that the San Francisco-based company is drawing heightened attention from US law enforcement agencies. Most recently, and likely to the surprise of even the most conspiratorial privacy advocates has been the Boston Police Department’s subpoena for data on a hashtag, #bostonPD. Yes, a supeona on a hashtag.

- Zachary Wolff, Twitter: To log or not to log: Is that the question? via the dialog

Wolff goes on to discuss the #NOLOGS policy being promoted by WikiLeaks and other groups concerned with publicy. I can’t say this is a concern for privacy since twitter messages are in general public.

MY bet is that #NOLOGS wont’ work, simply because there are so many organizations that are logging tweets through different means. It’s not just a matter of convincing the folks at Twitter to not log your tweets. If I can read them, for example, can’t I log them on my hard drive?

(via underpaidgenius)

F.T.C. Said to Be Near Facebook Privacy Deal - NYTimes.com

The rumor is that Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission are near to an agreement that will block Facebook from making explicitly private information public. So, in case you wondered, the Feds don’t think it’s in the public interest to claim that black is white, and to disclose people’s secrets while saying you aren’t.

Claire Cain Miller via NY Times

Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission are nearing a settlement over deceptive practices related to several Facebook features, including its privacy settings, according to two people briefed on the settlement.

Under the agreement, Facebook would agree to privacy audits for 20 years, one of the people said. It would also prohibit Facebook from making public a piece of information that a user had originally shared privately on the site without express permission, the person said. The individuals spoke on condition of anonymity because the F.T.C. commissioners have not yet approved the settlement.

But Facebook would not be required to ask users if they would like to participate in all sharing features on the site, including tools that it builds in the future.

Again, the Feds stop short of a more comprehensive collar on Facebook, but at least we know that doublespeak privacy policies are forbidden.

The advice is to log out of Facebook. But logging out of Facebook only de-authorizes your browser from the web application, a number of cookies (including your account number) are still sent along to all requests to facebook.com. Even if you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page you visit. The only solution is to delete every Facebook cookie in your browser, or to use a separate browser for Facebook interactions.
Logging out of Facebook is not enough, via Mike Rose. (via nikf)

(via nikf)

Secrecy - A Sanctuary in a Transparent World - NYTimes.com

Buried in an editorial about playwright Wendy Wasserman’s secrecy-laden life:

Implicit in Mr. Rich’s lament and my own pursuit of Wasserstein’s essential truths is the notion that secrets are inevitably harmful and the desire for privacy somehow suspect, and neurotic, if not downright nefarious.

[…]

BUT maybe secrecy and privacy have become too easily conflated when they are, in fact, quite different. Before endless sharing and complete transparency became the norm, it was understood that privacy was a kind of sanctuary, a refuge from the selves we presented to the world. Embarrassing family snapshots weren’t unexpectedly tagged on the Internet; you could hide your age if you were so inclined. Wendy Wasserstein’s life certainly suggests the possibility that she treated her private life as a kind of protected space.

Today we baby boomers worry that nothing is hidden, except maybe the Internet identities our children might assume. We thought we wanted openness, full transparency, in all realms. Our parents were so leery of outside scrutiny that mundane matters were given the status of high-level security; my husband’s mother forbade her children to reveal any illness more serious than a cold.

For my parents’ generation, secrecy was a way to survive; dwelling on the past could only drag you down. That belief served my mother well: now in her 80s, she survived Auschwitz (but lost her parents there) and went on to travel the world, become a shrewd businesswoman, have a family and carry on after the deaths of two remarkable husbands. She’s had an epic life containing monumental dislocation and loss as well as much satisfaction.

I am always amazed at how few social tools have provisions for secrecy, and only the weakest supports for privacy, grafted on as an afterthought.

“Real Names” Policies Are an Abuse of Power - danah boyd

Starting from her research into youth, people of color, abuse victims, LGBT folks, and other marginalized groups, danah makes a short and sweet refutation of the premises of normalcy and naturalness of the Google ‘Real Names’ policy. She ends up here:

There is no universal context, no matter how many times geeks want to tell you that you can be one person to everyone at every point. But just because people are doing what it takes to be appropriate in different contexts, to protect their safety, and to make certain that they are not judged out of context, doesn’t mean that everyone is a huckster. Rather, people are responsibly and reasonably responding to the structural conditions of these new media. And there’s nothing acceptable about those who are most privileged and powerful telling those who aren’t that it’s OK for their safety to be undermined. And you don’t guarantee safety by stopping people from using pseudonyms, but you do undermine people’s safety by doing so.

Thus, from my perspective, enforcing “real names” policies in online spaces is an abuse of power.

The Zuckerberg Fallacy is a travesty of dogmatic ideology, based on a asbergerish premise of a single public identity to be mandated and used in all contexts.

Zuckerberg said “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” in an interview with David Kirkpatrick, which directly attacks the motives of anyone advancing an opposite argument.

Facebook and now Google have adopted this model because they think of us as consumers, not people. They want to track our doings, for their own ends.

But in a fragmented world online our identity is becoming a network of context-dependent identities, or multiphrenic identity as Kenneth Gergen styled it, and as I explored:

Stowe Boyd, Multiphrenic Identity

We invest ourselves into relationships that are shaped by the affordances of the tools and the particular social contracts of the contexts. Through these relationships new and perhaps unexpected insights into others and ourselves arise. And we participate in dozens of these social environments, possibly with non-overlapping constituencies, each focused on different aspects of the greater world: entertainment, food, news, social causes, health, religion, sex, you name it. We become adept at shifting registers, just like polyglots shift from Italian to Corsican to Catalan without even thinking about it. We are multiphrenic.

It’s an interesting paradox — and one that might spell the limits of Google+ success — that Google has built the Circles capability so that people can break up their monolithic social world into separate scenes. But Google won’t let you be Carlos in one, and Carlotta in another, even if that is how you are known those possibly non-overlapping groups.

I am known as an advocate for publicy: living out loud online. But nearly every time I discuss living openly I make the case for privacy and secrecy, which are essential elements of life for all of us.

A social tool that prohibits fundamental and non-harmful human behaviors is oppressive, and such oppression means that we are justified in breaking their ‘laws’ to the extent that we can.

10 years ago the biggest internet anxiety was privacy, now it’s reputation online.

- Genevieve Bell, cited by Stuart Miles, 10 visions of the future

The shift from privacy to publicy, from fear of networks to fear of being left out, of missing out.

Hiding In Plain Sight: Publicy and Social Steganography

I have written a great deal about our transition online from an ethos of secrecy and privacy (a la email, and groupware) in the pre-social web, to a social web in which publicy (or publicness) is displacing and remaking the premises of social interaction.

Danah Boyd has introduced a great metaphor into theis discussion: social steganography. Here’s a discussion about teens, making the case for concealment by social camouflage:

Alice Marwick and Danah Boyd, Tweeting teens can handle public life

But even when teens aren’t hiding behind monikers, what they post may not make sense to an outsider. Access to content is not the same as access to interpretation. Teens regularly post in-jokes and use song lyrics or cryptic references to speak to a narrower audience than might be accessing their tweets. Some tweets are clearly difficult to decode, making the reader aware that a message is being hidden; others can be understood as “social steganography” where the message is hidden in “plain sight”. While their classmates, parents or potential employers may be able to see these tweets, they don’t necessarily understand them. Although there’s nothing fundamentally new about these practices, their application to Twitter makes it clear that teens are aware of speaking in public and using strategies to manage it.

What all this means is that “public or private” is more complicated than it seems. Twitter and its ilk aren’t going away, and the answer to responsible use isn’t to shut teens out of public life. Many teens are indeed more visible today than ever before, but, through experience, they’re also developing skills to manage privacy in public. What matters is not whether or not teens are speaking in public, but how we support them as they try to learn how to responsibly navigate the networked public spaces that are central to contemporary life.

Steganography is ‘is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity.’ - Wikipedia. The classic examples include invisible ink between the visible lines of a letter, and today, information can be embedded in digital images, sent via email, and extracted by the recipient based on a shared key.

It’s based on a kind of camouflage: where the familiar and superficial draws attention away from the occluded and hidden.

Danah defines social steganography this way:

When Carmen broke up with her boyfriend, she “wasn’t in the happiest state.” The breakup happened while she was on a school trip and her mother was already nervous. Initially, Carmen was going to mark the breakup with lyrics from a song that she had been listening to, but then she realized that the lyrics were quite depressing and worried that if her mom read them, she’d “have a heart attack and think that something is wrong.” She decided not to post the lyrics. Instead, she posted lyrics from Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” This strategy was effective. Her mother wrote her a note saying that she seemed happy which made her laugh. But her closest friends knew that this song appears in the movie when the characters are about to be killed. They reached out to her immediately to see how she was really feeling.

Privacy in a public age

Carmen is engaging in social steganography. She’s hiding information in plain sight, creating a message that can be read in one way by those who aren’t in the know and read differently by those who are. She’s communicating to different audiences simultaneously, relying on specific cultural awareness to provide the right interpretive lens. While she’s focused primarily on separating her mother from her friends, her message is also meaningless to broader audiences who have no idea that she had just broken up with her boyfriend. As far as they’re concerned, Carmen just posted an interesting lyric.

In a world based on publicy and multiphrenic identity it will not be uncommon to have the meaning of one’s words or actions interpreted differently, contextualized differently, by the members of different networks. Do they see the leopard’s spots, or the leopard?

(ht @fstutzman)

Despite some good actors, self-regulation of privacy has not worked adequately and is not working adequately for American consumers.
Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, cited by Edward Wyatt and Tanzina Vega in F.T.C. Online Privacy Plan Seeks ‘Do Not Track’ Option - NYTimes.com
If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

- Eric Schmidt

This is Schmidt verbalizing conventional moralistic nonsense, which would be fine if he were just another private citizen, although it is conservative mumbo jumbo.

The problem is that he is the head of Google, who potentially could amass damaging evidence about people’s unconventional interests, unpopular political views, or who knows what. If the moral philosophy of Google turns out to be ‘don’t do anything that you wouldn’t want your grandmother, your boss, or the IRS to know about’ then we have the possibility of bad privacy/publicy decisions from Google.

We are not owed the right of privacy and publicy conditionally, only if we don’t do, or think, or say something that would offend the general population. We have these rights unconditionally, and Google’s chief executive officer should studiously avoid and comments that suggest these rights are granted to us by governments, society, or corporate behemoths. These are inalienable rights, not open to tinkering, and especially not open to being rolled by political force.

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Secrecy is essential to empire.
Daniel Ellsberg