The privacy paradox and Google
At the New York Times BITS blog, Brad Stone reports on a study about to be released by George Loewenstein and several other Carnegie Mellon researchers about people’s parodoxical attitudes towards privacy and personal information. In one experiment, some people were given express assurances of privacy whereas others were given none. Strangely, the people given no assurances of privacy were twice as likely to admit to copying someone else’s homework.
In one sense, that’s paradoxical because assurances of privacy are intended to foster open communications, as with the attorney-client privilege. But in another sense, the behavior is not paradoxical at all. Express assurances of privacy may serve the socially useful prophylactic purpose — albeit sometimes unintended — of reminding people of the risks of volunteering personal information. Even if people don’t really read privacy policies, seeing a conspicuous “privacy policy” link may serve as a cold glass of water to the face, reminding people that they are volunteering personal information, and that they should look before they leap.
That brings to mind the scrutiny Google has recently garnered for its refusal to put a conspicuous link to its privacy policy on its homepage. Is Google concerned that a link will remind people of the implications of continually using the myriad Google services? C’mon. How many times did you use Google today? And when, if ever, did you think about how much information Google may have about you? As noted by The Register,
The company still indexes your email. It still stores your IP address alongside your search history for at least 18 to 24 months. And if it does “anonymize” your IP address after 24 months - and that’s a big if - it still refuses to anonymize the whole thing.
So if conspicuous reminders of privacy concerns are important, why won’t Google put a simple link on its homepage? According to another post at BITS, a Google competitor stated that Google co-founder Larry Page “didn’t want a privacy link ‘on that beautiful clean home page.’”
I rather doubt that Page’s concerns are fueled by aesthetics. One more link won’t change the site’s minimalistic look. But the starkness of the Google homepage may largely explain why Google doesn’t want that link. On most e-commerce sites, the visual clutter — think Yahoo — makes it unlikely that a privacy policy link will stand out. But on Google’s “beautiful clean home page,” such a link would be significantly more conspicuous.
And paradoxically, perhaps more likely to serve its purpose.
New report coming on “How Much Information”
A new “How Much Information” study is being undertaken, to update previous reports done in 2000 and 2003. The HMI study’s site states:
An updated and expanded study of information growth, conducted by a multi-disciplinary, multi-university team supported by corporate and foundation sponsorship, will complete an update of the 2003 Berkeley report by the end of the year. The 2008 report will be the first in a three-year research program, sponsored by seven companies, AT&T, Cisco, IBM, LSI, Oracle, Seagate and the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and spanning three research universities, UC San Diego, MIT and UC Berkeley.
Hat tip to Lockergnome’s Tech News Watch.
Tiger Woods, distractions, and laptops in the classroom
I was awe-struck during the recent U.S. Open Championship, where Tiger Woods won a nerve-wracking 19-hole playoff on the fifth day. The whole time, Woods suffered from a torn ACL and a double-stress fracture in his leg. Not only was he often in visible pain when taking a shot: he also had to walk a 7000+ yard course five times. Yet he remained focused, tuning out everything, including his own considerable pain.
Around the same time, I read Maggie Jackson’s post at Nanci Alboher’s blog about Jackson’s new book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Citing an expert in the field of “interruption science,” Jackson states that knowledge workers switch tasks on average every three minutes. Once distracted, they take a half-hour to return to their original task. Jackson notes that “[in] meetings where everyone is checking e-mail, opportunities for collective creative energy and critical thinking are lost.”
Substitute “meetings” with “law school” and one sees a pretty accurate image of what can happen in classrooms with laptops. I would imagine that Jackson would agree that banning laptops would enhance the classroom experience. As she states in her posting (albeit not on the topic of laptops):
We are born interrupt-driven -– that’s how humans stay tuned to their environment. But if we jump on every e-mail or ping, we’ll have trouble pursuing our long-term goals. To make inroads on the deep, messy work of life, we need to stay focused, bringing the spotlight of our attention back again and again to the work at hand.
Chinese censorship and the infoglut
Yesterday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote about his experiments in testing Chinese censorship of the internet. (See In China It’s ******* vs. Netizens, June 20, 2006, subscription required.) Kristof started two Chinese-language blogs and filled them with politically charged postings. He was surprised that the posts were quickly available online, with only an occasional — and apparently automated, I would think — substitution of asterisks for certain Chinese characters.
Commenting on the quick availability of his blogs, Kristof observes that it’s impossible for China’s 30,000 censors to keep up with 120 million Chinese netizens. This might be correct: the sheer quantity of internet information makes absolute control pretty much impossible. But Kristof further concludes that “the Web is beginning to assume the watchdog role filled by the news media in freer countries.” As Ethan Leib notes at PrawfsBlawg, he’s not as optimistic as Kristof, and I agree. The fact that Kristof’s postings went online mostly unscathed likely says more about the ineffectiveness of filtering programs than about governmental permissiveness. Getting things on the web and keeping them there are not the same.
To his credit, Kristof recognized that his postings might not last long, predicting that “[w]hen State Security reads this, it may finally order my blogs closed.” His prediction was proven correct, and quickly. Though the blogs were online last night, when I checked this afternoon they were gone. One, http://jisidao.blog.sohu.com/, now apparently says that the user does not exist. (Caveat: I don’t read Chinese and used Babelfish to translate.) The other, http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/1238333873, now redirects the user to the main page at http://blog.sina.com.cn/main/. Almost certainly it was humans — and not programs — that removed the sites. Automated and human censorship in China apparently work hand in hand.
Kristof’s observations do contain some seeds of optimism that Chinese censorship can be circumvented by technological and human countermeasures. He writes that young people use proxy software to reach forbidden sites and Skype to make phone calls. He also writes about Chinese blogger Li Xinde, “who travels around China with his laptop, reporting on corruption and human-rights abuses.” Xinde’s sites are closed down constantly, but “the moment a site is censored he replaces it with a new one.” Xinde uses an overseas site, http://www.lixinde.com, to inform readers of the best current internet address.
Nonetheless, I have to wonder how many Chinese citizens engage in these activities or risk imprisonment to blog about politically charged subjects. Even though automated and human censorship might be circumvented by technological and human countermeasures, the will to take such risks must exist as well. As Ethan Leib notes, “it is hard to blog from a Chinese prison.” How does one counteract fear?
Facebook: job-hunting, non-invisibility, and the creepiness factor
Note to job applicants: your potential employers aren’t just looking at Google and Yahoo.
Sunday’s New York Times includes a really interesting article by Alan Finder on how some companies now investigate job applicants on social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, and Friendster. See “For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Résumé.”
The article underscores a simple but important fact: users of social network sites shouldn’t assume that their postings are private. Although names like “MySpace” paint an image of personal spaces, personal doesn’t mean private. It’s not difficult to get into these sites – as the article notes, for some sites such as MySpace, you generally only need to register. For Facebook, to view entries for a particular college, you only need an e-mail address from that college.
That means an awful lot of people can view Facebook entries: alumni with email addresses (which could include potential employers), professors, even campus police. Despite this, at an emotional level, many people assume that their personal websites, blogs, and social network postings are relatively personal spaces that won’t be noticed or invaded by others. These assumptions are wrong in at least two ways.
Shakespeare & serendipity
Why use a chunk from Shakespeare’s first sonnet as my first posting?
Quick answer #1: Because he wrote so much more beautifully than I ever will.
Quick answer #2: Because I wanted a placeholder.
Not-so-quick answer #3: When working on the blog’s design, I wanted something — anything — to serve as a placeholder. Shakespeare seemed like a good idea: because I’m interested in the technical, policy, and legal problems of preserving information, Shakespeare’s works seemed a textbook example of what should be preserved.
So I found a Shakespeare website and gleefully exercised my right to copy, clip, and paste from the public domain. Sidebar: it would have been even more interesting if I had clipped from a DRM’d CD-ROM of Shakespeare’s works, but that’s another post and another day . . . .
And an admission: Although I was an english & philosophy major in my undergraduate days, it’s been a very, very long time since I thought about Shakespeare. (Notwithstanding Shakespeare in Love, which was great). Having absolutely no idea what might be relevant or useful, I simply looked at the the first thing I found, Shakespeare’s first sonnet.
But serendipity is a funny thing. Considering that I’m currently writing about digital preservation, and further considering that so much of what we electronically preserve is forgettable noise and infoglut — or digital garbage! – I thought Shakespeare’s language was a keeper. Which, of course, it is.
To keep or not to keep, that is the question
FROM fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’st flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies . . . .
Shakespeare, excerpt from Sonnet #1.
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A blog on IP, information, and technology by Professor Ira Nathenson, St. Thomas Univ. School of Law. Nothing on this site is intended as legal advice.
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