Tag: privacy

Owning One’s Data with Jennifer Lyn Morone (Podcast)

Jennifer Lyn Morone Part I
Jennifer Lyn Morone Part II

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are presently grappling with existential questions posed by big data and at the same time, considering the social implications of rulings by the supreme court in both Citizens United and Hobby Lobby.   In fact, I believe we have an unprecedented mandate at this point in history to more rigorously consider the distinction between human beings their inventions. The nature of existence itself is changing as we atomize experience into data that is bought and sold as a new commodity.  At the same time, many of us in the United States are concerned about the precedents set when corporate entities appear to be endowed with the same rights as living beings.  A corporation is a tool.  Technology is a tool.  But whether us makers are using these tools or they are using us is a question yet to be answered. And examination includes choices about personal privacy and the economic value of ourselves as expressed in a body of data.

Jennifer Lyn Morone, Inc from jennifer morone on Vimeo.

In this podcast, I talk with Jennifer Lyn Morone, who is in the start-up phase of bringing to market Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Incorporated.  An American artist who has lived in Europe for more than a decade, Morone has chosen to address these social, economic, and existential questions with a venture that is part experiment, part cultural statement, and part business.  By incorporating herself, Jennifer Lyn Morone will now be the CEO of Jennifer Lyn Morone, Inc., and that means literally treating her life, her experiences, her knowledge, even her biological data, as a set of assets to be fully managed and monetized at the discretion of the corporation.  This Fall, Morone will begin using a combination of cameras and data recording technology to track her activities and store information on servers controlled by the corporation.  I think this is not going to be just another example of web-enabled voyeurism.  Morone is serious about the business venture, and she’s eager to share what she learns as she explores the dual nature of being both a person and a corporation.

Visit Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc. website.

Privacy-ish Concerns

This week, I paid a small fortune to have the instrument cluster replaced on my car, and the mechanic, sympathizing as I wincingly wrote out the check, said, “The days of mechanical failures are over.” By this he was of course referring to the reality that everything we depend on is supported by integrated electronics and computers, the downside of which is that failures are often systemic and expensive rather than isolated and cheap.  In fact, I can’t think of any repair to any machine in the last decade or more that hasn’t required replacement of a control panel, and it’s these delicate electronics that make even products we still call “durable goods” not so durable as they used to be.  Given all that and other considerations like privacy and security, is the proverbial “smart home” desirable?   Frankly, if my coffee maker, smoke alarm, fridge, television, and thermostat all start talking to one another (and a company like Google is listening), I’m never going to sleep soundly again.

With its 3.2 billion dollar acquisition of smart device maker Nest, Google is clearly poised to enter the home through portals other than the computer and mobile device.  As this article by Steven Rosenfeld on AlterNet.org describes, Google is fairly unapologetic about invading privacy as a for-profit venture, which makes the company’s public denouncements of the NSA more than a little hypocritical.  The article lists several ways in which Google has already violated user privacy, including its achieving the dubious honor of paying the highest civil fine ever ($22.5 million) to the FTC for bypassing user security settings in Apple’s Safari browser.  While the fine may be a record-breaker, it is likely dwarfed by the market value of the illicitly gained data Google was able to sell to advertisers. So, not an effective deterrent, then.

I’ve been called a privacy skeptic by commenters on this blog and in other places because I’ve stated that I’m not extraordinarily fussed about the Snowden revelations.  Let me try to clarify. I’m not extraordinarily fussed about the Snowden revelations in context to the larger picture.  I think the 4th Amendment should be defended, even if that defense is on principle alone; but in the case of domestic spying, I do believe we may be substantially more focused on principle and hypotheticals than on practical, day-to-day reality.  In reality, it is unclear yet whether or not the intelligence-gathering agencies have broken any laws or violated anyone’s rights. In reality, Americans polled on the issue are split right down the middle, which suggests there may be little change in policy no matter what.  In reality, most people who work at these agencies really are more interested in finding terrorists, human traffickers, and other criminals than in reading the content of our boring-ass emails during their lunch breaks.  In reality, the only entity that has been caught reading the content of our boring-ass emails is Google, and this includes not only Gmail users, but people who have corresponded with Gmail users.  In reality, if the intelligence gathering agencies really want the dope on any one of us, they need look no further than most of the stuff we voluntarily put out there through social media.  And finally, if intelligence gathering agencies want robust information, they’re going to get it from Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, DropBox, and Skype, all of which are named in the aforementioned article as supplying information to government agencies.

And this brings me to the latest email blast from the Electronic Frontier Foundation inviting users to an online protest on February 11th called The Day We Fight Back – Against Mass Surveillance.  Invoking the martyrdom of Aaron Swartz, the defeat of SOPA (again), and the disgruntlement with the NSA, the EFF wants us to raise the fists of solidarity against domestic spying.  And that’s fine, but where is there any mention of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, DropBox, or Skype as targets of this day of protest?  There isn’t.  Instead, these corporate entities are being portrayed as first-tier victims of intelligence overreach, several issuing transparency reports as though to say, “Look at all the data we have on you the government made us give them!”  So, assuming we successfully reign in the intelligence community (or convince ourselves we can), are we still cool with all the for-profit data collection these companies are doing because it’s supposedly voluntary?  Are we okay with prospective employers or insurance underwriters judging us based on our search data or Facebook profiles?  Because that’s a lot more likely than the average citizen attracting the attention of an analyst at the NSA?

I’m all for holding government agencies accountable, but not if we’re simultaneously letting private industry off scott free.  After all, private industry is actually better at this domestic spying thing, and they have a profit motive, which I happen to think is a more realistic concern than the hypothetical analyst who just wants to pry because he’s a creep.  To debate and protest domestic surveillance without focusing on these private companies seems incomplete to say the least. So why isn’t the EFF more critical?

Here’s the thing that worries me more than anything an Edward Snowden could possibly reveal:  when corporate interests seek to drive a wedge between the public and their elected representatives, it’s often because those representatives are (as they are meant to be) a barrier between the public and whatever the corporate interests would like to do to the public.  And that’s what I believe is happening here.  I don’t think the EFF gives a damn about actual privacy, otherwise the aforementioned companies would be in their crosshairs for this protest on the 11th.  I think the EFF wants to capitalize on distrust in “the government” in the service of protecting the Internet industry’s interest in maintaining our trust in the almighty cloud.  After all, what could be worse for Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, DropBox, and Skype than if we all seriously began to care about privacy?

Want to Protect Speech? Strengthen Copyright

Following up on yesterday’s brief reference to Jaron Lanier’s editorial in the New York Times, we find the same theme echoed in this coverage by Emma Green at The Atlantic.  Green writes about an event at which authors E.L. Doctorow and David Simon also raised concerns regarding the disconnect between overreacting to stories about government surveillance while remaining unconcerned with Google’s collection and exploitation of data we volunteer as users of the Internet.  The title of the article, predicated on a quote from Simon, invokes Orwell, as topics of this nature invariably do; and I while I think it takes much more than technological means to produce the “Orwellian nightmare,” the exaggeration is still instructive.

Although she doesn’t really preface quite what she means by “principles,” Green concludes with an editorial statement that “principles may serve as better starting points than solutions” when it comes to addressing the matter of privacy in our digitally connected lives.  Certainly a lack of privacy is one feature of an Orwell-like dystopia, but privacy alone, as is often interpreted through a technological bias, translates into anonymity as a solution; and I would argue that voluntarily turning ourselves into faceless avatars would be a very effective way to hasten a post-human society orbiting some centralized, fascistic body.  On the subject of principles, however, if the Orwellian nightmare is what we fear, then there is one thing we can do in the coming year to hedge against it:  let’s strengthen copyright law against threats from internet companies like Google.

Artists, journalists, and cultural leaders whose faces and voices are known to us, who speak in the sunlight, and who author works and sign their names to those works have been, and continue to be, a counterforce against all mechanisms of tyranny. And in a free society with a market economy, we cannot separate the social value of those voices from their civil right to derive economic value by their labors.   While it is necessary that speech for all is an absolute right, the boundaries and power of speech are not always extended by mass reaction through social media (i.e. what’s trending).  The overreaction to the Snowden leaks attended by simultaneous blindness to Google’s use of data makes a good example. Speech is not inherently made more powerful every time a troll acts like a jackass, or even necessarily every time millions of us write rational critiques of the world on Facebook and Twitter.  Speech is made more powerful by those who use it powerfully, and what the Internet surely proves is that this can be anyone from a poet laureate to a six-year-old child you would never have known without a thing called YouTube.  Still, if we want to avoid sliding over the cliff into the Orwellian abyss, then an empowered population of authors is essential, and like it or not, that means protecting the economic power of authors.

Yes, the industries built on copyright often serve up a lot of drivel that can hardly be said to live up to the platitudes stated above.  I would not suggest, for instance, that Miley’s twerking or the subsequent circus of response to it do much of anything in particular for speech; but then, this is a chicken and egg issue, isn’t it?  Who buys tickets to the circus and makes a non-story a story?  YouTube doesn’t force twenty-plus-million people to click on the video to see what all the fuss is about.  We get caught up in the frenzy, and certain entities, including what used to be television news, must monetize the frenzy or go out of business. On this matter, Christopher Hedges’s editorial from June 2010, describes the Coliseum-like atmosphere in which Americans are too distracted by shiny objects to deal with the reality that our economy my be rotting from within.  Meanwhile, the most powerful oligarchs of this era, to paraphrase Andrew Orlowski, have built themselves luxury life rafts in order to transcend the bleak future their distracting technologies might help make manifest for the rest of us.

If we want to strengthen free speech; if we want a hedge against invasions of civil liberty; if we want to speak truth to power, then we must continue to empower those who speak the truth and do so openly and professionally. To put it whimsically, a great bulwark against tyranny would be a class of unusually wealthy poets.  As Congress resumes the process of copyright review in 2014, we should seek not to weaken these laws on an assumption of their irrelevance in the digital age, but to strengthen them on the grounds that they are more important than ever.