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Thursday, July 25, 2002 |
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Owning your words
Yesterday the charmingly middle-named Jennifer 8. Lee wrote a fascinating story for the NY Times, Net Users Try to Elude Google's Grasp. Here are some excerpts:
These days, people are seeing their privacy punctured in intimate ways as their personal, professional and online identities become transparent to one another. Twenty-somethings are going to search engines to check out people they meet at parties. Neighbors are profiling neighbors. Amateur genealogists are researching distant family members. Workers are screening co-workers.
In other words, it is becoming more difficult to keep one's past hidden, or even to reinvent oneself in the American tradition. "The net result is going to be a return to the village, where everyone knew everyone else," said David Brin, author of a book called "The Transparent Society" (Perseus, 1998). "The anonymity of urban life will be seen as a temporary and rather weird thing."
As always, Brin's visionary book remains the touchstone for this issue. What I find most interesting about this article is a subtle shift in emphasis. A few years ago, there might have been a suggestion that control was possible -- that with the right kind of architecture, individuals could control their cyber-footprints. Now, the sense seems to be -- Palladium notwithstanding -- that such control will not be possible. And the implications of that are starting to sink in:
Jeanne Achille, the chief executive of a public relations firm called the Devon Group, was horrified that someone had used her name and e-mail address to post racist slurs in a French online discussion group. She has repeatedly had to explain the situation to potential clients who have asked her about the posting.
"Whoever did this had to put some thought into it," Ms. Achille said. "Is it perhaps one of our competitors? Is it someone who felt we did something to them and wanted to get back at us? Is it a personal thing? Is it a disgruntled former employee?" The posting has been impossible to remove. "There is no cyberpatrol that you can go to and make all of this go away," Ms. Achille said. "You just have to live with it."
What hasn't yet sunk in, though, is what can be controlled: identity. You can't be an anonymous yet fully connected cyber-citizen. You can, however, certify your identity. What Ms. Achille and others will eventually discover is that you can't hide from Google, but you can own your words.
Not co-incidentally, ownership is central to the weblog experience. I own my space, nobody else speaks in it. You own yours, nobody else speaks there. We interact, as Dave Winer likes to say, at a respectful distance. As we do so, we tell our own stories in ways that Google finds authoritative.
9:59:32 AM 
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Sunday, July 14, 2002 |
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John Patrick on digital IDs for spam control
Yes, yes, yes! Pardon my euphoria, but I'm really pleased to see such a thoughtful and seasoned observer as John Patrick linking use of voluntary digital IDs to spam control:
Recently I have received a lot of email from friends and family asking why I had been sending out spam. The email said it came "From: John Patrick" but in reality was spam that came from someone else "spoofing" my name in hopes that it would result in higher odds of the email being opened.
People are going to demand that their political leaders do something about spam. This will lead to regulation of the Internet. I think most of us feel that Internet regulation can be costly, limit innovation and hurt productivity. I believe that an ingredient of the long-term answer to the problem is authentication. If an email arrives from a person with no digital ID, I want it deleted. If the sender is not "real" I don't want to see their email. If the sender has a digital ID but I have never received mail from them before, then I want to know who issued the digital ID to them and what the subject of the email is. If it is not an offensive topic or something I know I am not interested in and the issuer of the ID is an organization I have heard of then I'll let it into my in-box. This isn't the perfect solution but it could help a great deal. [John Patrick: The Spam Has Got to Go]
I've been making this argument for years now (e.g., 1, 2, 3), most recently in my latest O'Reilly Network column, and it's been lonely. Maybe now we'll start to get some triangulation around the issue. The key (pardon the pun) is voluntary use of IDs -- a culture of identity, rather than anonymity.
3:35:32 PM
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Tuesday, March 05, 2002 |
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The sanctity of sources
A story about the privacy of reading lists:
The Village Voice: Nation: by Nat Hentoff: Big John Wants Your Reading List ....the FBI , armed with a warrant or subpoena from the FISA court, can demand from bookstores and libraries the names of books bought or borrowed by anyone suspected of involvement in "international terrorism" or "clandestine activities." I found the Village Voice link on The Shifted Librarian. [Privacy Digest Weblog]
Privacy Digest picked up on this story by way of Jenny, the Shifted Librarian, who upholds (as she should) the sanctity of library patrons' reading lists.
Earlier today, I was helping the self-same Shifted Librarian figure out how to reveal her own reading list on her weblog. (Did you get it working, Jenny?)
This might seem contradictory, but I don't see it that way. It would be wrong to force us to reveal our sources. But we may still choose to do so.
11:12:24 PM
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Thursday, February 14, 2002 |
© Copyright 2002 Jon Udell.
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