Our data, ourselves - The Boston Globe

Leon Neyfakh via

Taken together, the information that millions of us are generating about ourselves amounts to a data set of unimaginable size and growing complexity: a vast, swirling cloud of information about all of us and none of us at once, covering everything from the kind of car we drive to the movies we’ve rented on Netflix to the prescription drugs we take.

Who owns the data in that cloud has been the subject of ferocious debate. It’s not all stored in one place, of course — our lives are tracked and documented by a diffuse assortment of entities that includes private companies like Google and Visa, as well as governmental agencies like the IRS, the Department of Education, and the Census Bureau. Up to now, the public conversation on this kind of data has taken the form of an argument about privacy rights, with legal scholars, computer scientists, and others arguing for tighter restrictions on how our data is used by companies and the government, and consumer advocates instructing us on how to prevent our information from being collected and misused.

But a small group of thinkers is suggesting an entirely new way of understanding our relationship with the data we generate. Instead of arguing about ownership and the right to privacy, they say, we should be imagining data as a public resource: a bountiful trove of information about our society which, if properly managed and cared for, can help us set better policy, more effectively run our institutions, promote public health, and generally give us a more accurate understanding of who we are. This growing pool of data should be public and anonymous, they say — and each of us should feel a civic responsibility to contribute to it.

In a paper forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Brooklyn Law School professor Jane Yakowitz introduces the concept of a “data commons” — a sort of public garden where everyone brings their data to be anonymized and made available to researchers working in the public interest. In the paper, she argues that the societal benefits of a thriving data commons outweigh the potential risks from the crooks and hackers who might use it for harm.

Yakowitz’s paper has found support among a wider movement of thinkers who believe that, while protecting people’s privacy is certainly important, it should not be our only priority when it comes to managing information. This position might be a hard sell at a time when consumers are increasingly worried about mass data leaks and identity theft, but Yakowitz and others argue that we shouldn’t let fear of such inevitable accidents cloud our ability to see just how necessary data collection is to our progress as a society.

“There are patterns and trends that none of us can discern by looking at our own individual experiences,” Yakowitz said. “But if we pooled our information, then these patterns can emerge very quickly and irrefutably. So, we should want that sort of knowledge to be made publicly available.”

The power of publicy.

Publicy - Schott's Vocab

Publicy

When the public, not the private, is the default.
(Publi[c] + [Priva]cy)

Writing for TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld described how the advent of social networking and Web 2.0 tools have brought about a shift in social norms:

It used to be that we lived in private and chose to make parts of our lives public. Now that is being turned on its head. We live in public, like the movie says (except via micro-signals not 24-7 video self-surveillance), and choose what parts of our lives to keep private. Public is the new default.

Stowe Boyd, along with others before him, calls this new state of exposure “publicy” (as opposed to privacy or secrecy).

Explaining the concept on his blog, Boyd wrote:

There is a countervailing trend away from privacy and secrecy and toward openness and transparency, both in the corporate and government sectors. And on the web, we have had several major steps forward in social tools that suggest at least the outlines of a complement, or opposite, to privacy and secrecy: publicy.

The idea of publicy is no more than this: rather than concealing things, and limiting access to those explicitly invited, tools based on publicy default to things being open and with open access.

Tumblr is a tool based on publicy. So is Twitter. Tumblr blogs and Twitter accounts default to open unless the user takes great efforts, and as a result the resulting communities are based on sharing of posts rather than membership in closed groups.

As I have said in the past the open sharing model of Twitter and Tumblr will be the dominant motif of all successful social tools of the next decade. This will be the publicy decade, where network effects are induced by growing awareness of the benefits of publicy and the negatives of privacy and secrecy-based social tools, customs, and institutions.

Co-vocabularists are invited to share incidents where they have made public facets of their lives that, pre-Internet, would have remained private.

I guess I missed this February when it was published because of my mother’s illness. Still, nice to see it at all.

However, more academically-minded folks — like danah boyd and Jeff Jarvis — continue to use publicity for this, in a way that I think is confusing, considering how that term is generally used.

Evan Williams | evhead: Five Easy Pieces of Online Identity

Ev Williams tries to boil down identity to five parts:

  1. Authentication - Do you have permission?
  2. Representation - Who are you?
  3. Communication - How do I reach you?
  4. Personalization - What do you prefer?
  5. Reputation - How do others regard you?

This is a very tool-centric, or marketing-centric approach, and leaves out — or dismisses — all the messy and interesting philosophical aspects of identity.

Consider issues like publicy: How much of these various aspects of identity do you want to be revealed? Or context-based identity: you are a different you with the bowling league, at work, or on Suicide Girls.

Ev’s list is based on information flows — how people and systems might communicate or interact with people through identity markers of various kinds — but it doesn’t get at our personal motivations, needs, or requirements around identity as an aspect of human psychology.

Facebook, Discourse, And Identity

The question of Facebook comments disguises a number of deeper issues, but is also in and of itself interesting. Many have reported that the number of blog comments has gone down with the introduction of Facebook comments on various well-trafficked blogs. This may be a good thing, reintroducing social scale to forums that had grown too large, and as a consequence had seen a decrease in civility.

Mathew Ingram notes that involvement trumps numbers in comments:

Mathew Ingram, Why Facebook Is Not the Cure For Bad Comments

[…] the reality is that when it comes to improving blog comments, anonymity really isn’t the issue — the biggest single factor that determines the quality of comments is whether the authors of a blog take part in them.

Working at a pioneering blog network in 2004, I coined the term ‘the Conversational Index’ which we discovered as a means of predicting the future success of blogs. It was defined as

Conversational Index = (comments + trackbacks) / posts

I guess nowadays we’d have to include references from Twitter and Facebook, but you get the idea. Successful blogs generated a lot of commentary, and they did so from almost the very start.

And it wasn’t a function of publicy: there was no effort involved to have people use their legal names. It was a function of involvement on the part of the authors.

Regarding the deeper issues underlying comments, Robert Scoble went apeshit yesterday, after reading Steve Cheny’s piece, How Facebook is Killing Your Authenticity, that I also commented on (see The Facebooking Of Identity). Here’s some of what Robert wrote:

Robert Scoble, The Real Authenticity Killer

These “authenticity is dead” people are cowards.

See, where I ONLY post opinions I’m willing to sign my name to, lots of people are actually cowards and just not willing to sign their names to their mealy-mouthed attacks.

Don’t give me that horseshit that you won’t be able to whistle blow at work.

It is hard to summarize Scoble’s rant, but in essence he is making the case that the web’s natural structure channels each of us toward using a single identity — for example in comments, or blog posts — and we should embrace that, and not attempt to subvert it.

I think this is a bit simplistic, at the least; principally because it leads to overtly conservative strictures on discourse, and not just for whistle blowers.

How many people have been fired in recent years for blogging, for example? And how many untold thousands have held their tongue or suppressed their own potentially unpopular opinions for fear of various sorts of retribution, or just being left out of the discussion?

Lastly, we are moving into a new era, principally opened by the rise of web culture, where a post-modern identity is a possibility. We can potentially involve ourselves with very different social scenes, with different ground rules, different purposes, and starkly different values, all at the same time.

Through involvement with such diverse groups we grow and learn very different perspectives. In a sense, we can  shift from a unitary identity to a network of identities, where the various nodes connect with each other in asymmetric and uneven ways: we may even have elements in a multiphrenic personality that are in conflict with each other.

This infuriates a lot of people, and whenever I present this concept there are fireworks. Some argue that such an identity is immature, illegitimate, and possibly immoral. I have been accused of inciting others to have false identities, when in fact I am really just observing a shift in societal mores.

Just as our society, politics, and business benefit from increased diversity — different views that possibly conflict — I think the same is true for post-modern identity.

Who among us is certain about everything? Who has no doubts? Who never wonders about choices made, or paths not taken? Who never sees multiple sides to an argument?

Scoble obviously has no doubts about identity: you are the you that the most open social context says you are, and that’s that. You should accept it, and if you don’t you are a coward, or so Scoble says.

But I have a different perspective, one that is more accepting of our search for self and the relativity of identity, and less demanding of certainty in an uncertain and rapidly evolving world.

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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)

The Many Faces of You - Claire Cain Miller

Facebook has received its share of criticism as it prods people to make more information on the site public. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, has said Facebook reflects social norms, which are rapidly changing as people become more comfortable sharing more information with more people.

But attitudes toward sharing have not necessarily changed. Instead, people are developing new norms to manage their online lives, said Coye Cheshire, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies online social intelligence.

For instance, after a party or vacation, people will often e-mail others in the group to find out if it is O.K. to post the photos on Facebook. “People begin to realize the implications of their actions, and that’s where norms get generated,” Professor Cheshire said.

The etiquette may be evolving, but the technology is moving faster than our social practices can adapt.

The position that we have — or should have — a single unitary social identity is wrong, and I have taken to calling it Zuckerberg’s Fallacy. One of the implications of the Fallacy is everything should be public. This notion of ubiquitous publicy (or publicness, as others call it) is an insidious moralistic stance, and is based on the same sweeping generalizations that dominate discussions about privacy in the political sphere.

The reality is that post industrial identity is a network of distinct identities, some of which may not gibe with each other. There is a possible conflict inherent in this multiphrenic identity (as Kenneth Gergen called it), and possible opprobrium when contacts in one context learn of the nature of another context, like the bridge club finding out about your foot fetish.

This is why we have an increased need for privacy and secrecy in a world that is becoming more public.

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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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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