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.

(Source: underpaidgenius)

“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.

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)

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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Facebook Is Deeply Broken

The seemingly never-ending cascade of privacy breaches at Facebook continues. The newest demonstrates a design flaw at the heart of Facebook: getting access to a user’s Facebook ID gives access to all information stored in Facebook created by that person. Apparently various companies that build Facebook apps (Zygna, and others) have been using this backdoor to transmit personal information to other companies,

Emily Steel and Geoffrey Fowler, Facebook in Online Privacy Breach; Applications Transmitting Identifying Information

The information being transmitted is one of Facebook’s basic building blocks: the unique “Facebook ID” number assigned to every user on the site. Since a Facebook user ID is a public part of any Facebook profile, anyone can use an ID number to look up a person’s name, using a standard Web browser, even if that person has set all of his or her Facebook information to be private. For other users, the Facebook ID reveals information they have set to share with “everyone,” including age, residence, occupation and photos.

The apps reviewed by the Journal were sending Facebook ID numbers to at least 25 advertising and data firms, several of which build profiles of Internet users by tracking their online activities.

Defenders of online tracking argue that this kind of surveillance is benign because it is conducted anonymously. In this case, however, the Journal found that one data-gathering firm, RapLeaf Inc., had linked Facebook user ID information obtained from apps to its own database of Internet users, which it sells. RapLeaf also transmitted the Facebook IDs it obtained to a dozen other firms, the Journal found.

RapLeaf said that transmission was unintentional. “We didn’t do it on purpose,” said Joel Jewitt, vice president of business development for RapLeaf.

Facebook said it previously has “taken steps … to significantly limit Rapleaf’s ability to use any Facebook-related data.”

Facebook prohibits app makers from transferring data about users to outside advertising and data companies, even if a user agrees. The Journal’s findings shed light on the challenge of policing those rules for the 550,000 apps on its site.

The Journal’s findings are the latest challenge for Facebook, which has been criticized in recent years for modifying its privacy rules to expose more of a user’s information. This past spring, the Journal found that Facebook was transmitting the ID numbers to advertising companies, under some circumstances, when a user clicked on an ad. Facebook subsequently discontinued the practice.

Wow, this stinks to high heaven.

But it shouldn’t be possible. Facebook should be based on a design where user information is partitioned in such a way that having access to a pointer, like user ID, should not open all doors in the user account. In a capabilities based architecture, the user should be able to grant specific access rights to a specific recipient, and those rights would involve both sides at the time of any access: the recipient would provide the key that was granted, it would be checked against the user’s key, and only if they cross-matched would the transfer take place. This would mean that there would be no master ID that could open all of a user’s information.

Until Facebook is redesigned, and especially while they are so eager to stripmine our social networks, no one should put or maintain any information on their Facebook account that you wouldn’t publish on your blog or give out to a total stranger in a bar. There is no Facebook privacy.

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Another Facebooking: June Siple Is The Most Recent To Be Dooced

Yet another person is fired for expressing unpopular or impolitic opinions: a high school teacher who was not looking forward to coming back to work in the fall, and said so on hre facebook page.

H.S. Teacher Loses Job Over Facebook Posting

On her Facebook page, (June) Siple called the residents of Cohasset “arrogant and snobby,” and said that she is “so not looking forward to another year at Cohasset schools.”

As the high school supervisor for math and science, Siple was making more than $92,000 a year.”

I think that’s pretty ungrateful, taking that much of the town budget going into the schools, filling up the position, teaching kids when her heart wasn’t in to it,” said resident Sam Green.

In a telephone interview, Siple said she is not apologizing for her comments, but that she is sorry that they went public. She said she was referring to the political situation in the school, which she called “very stressful,” and she said she thought she was only blowing off steam with friends in private.

But back in February, when Siple got sick, she wrote on her page, “Now I remember why I stopped teaching kids. They are all germ bags.”

Siple said her Facebook friends knew it was a joke.

People are so two-faced. Does everyone who is damning Siple believe that they themselves have never made a disparaging remark about work, their customers, or boss? No, obviously not. So the only issue is whether it is made in a private or public forum: not the actual feeling involved.

Once again, people are mistaking morality with etiquette, putting appearances before realities.

Where is it written that you can’t publicly complain about your job? Do we have to pretend that everything is sunshine and flowers?

Radical transparency does not mean that people are invited to share the good things going on in some business or wing of government: it means that we should be free to see into organizations and understand what is truly going on in them.

Tax payers have a right to know what is really going on the schools they pay to support, but that shouldn’t mean that everyone should be mumbling bland platitudes. If a senior teacher like Siple is not looking forward to work the reaction should not be to kill her, but instead to open up what is going on in the school and the relations between kids, teachers, administrators, and parents.

However in our hothouse, accusatory, and reactionary realm of social discourse, anyone like Siple — who expresses discontent with the current system — is burned at the stake, and all the folks with the torches and nooses pat each other on the back and consider themselves good citizens.

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An Assault On Privacy

It seems likely that new sorts of surveillance that police and prosecutors want to use are running close to the edge of privacy guarantees in the constitution:

Charlie Savage,  Judges Divided Over Growing GPS Surveillance - NYTimes.com

“Often what we have to do with the march of technology is realize that the difference in quantity and speed can actually amount to significantly more invasive practices, “ said Paul Ohm, a University of Colorado law professor and former federal computer-crimes prosecutor. “It’s like you keep turning the volume knob and it becomes something different, not the same thing just a little louder.”

Last week, such calls seemed to be answered by an ideologically diverse panel on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. It overturned a drug trafficking conviction because the evidence against the defendant included tracking data from a GPS receiver that the police hid under his sport utility vehicle without a warrant. The device essentially recorded his whereabouts 24 hours a day for four weeks.

Traditionally, courts have held that the Fourth Amendment does not cover the trailing of a suspect because people have no expectation of privacy for actions exposed to public view.

But the appeals court argued that people expect their overall movements to be private because different strangers see only isolated moments and a police department’s surveillance resources are limited. GPS technology, by allowing police departments to inexpensively track someone’s comings and goings, changes that equation, it said.

“Prolonged surveillance reveals types of information not revealed by short-term surveillance, such as what a person does repeatedly, what he does not do, and what he does ensemble,” wrote Judge Douglas Ginsburg.

“A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individual or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”

Supreme Court review of the decision seems likely. It contradicted decisions in three similar GPS-related cases by appellate panels in Chicago, St. Louis and San Francisco.

In 2007, for example, Judge Richard Posner argued that “following a car on a public street” is “unequivocally not a search within the meaning” of the Fourth Amendment. While acknowledging that “technological progress poses a threat to privacy by enabling an extent of surveillance that in earlier times would have been prohibitively expensive,” he concluded that using a GPS device to investigate a suspect crossed no constitutional line.

The Fourth Amendment “cannot sensibly be read to mean that police shall be no more efficient in the 21st century than they were in the 18th,” he wrote. “There is a tradeoff between security and privacy, and often it favors security.”

But the tradeoffs that could favor security — like being able to barge into people’s homes unannounced — are specifically blocked by the constitution. Therefore we will have to reestablish limits to hold back an increasing lack of privacy and sovereignty over personal information, like geolocation.