Public policy and privacy
Public policy issues such as privacy, technology industry economic development, education to support technology workers, and so on. Privacy in particular, whether or not strictly tied to public policy.
Google in China — Tough question, wrong question
Henry Blodgett poses the question — if you don’t think Google should have cooperated with the Chinese authorities in fostering censorship, what do you think it should have done instead? I think that’s the wrong question (although I’ll answer it below anyway). Rather, I think the right question is:
What can the rest of us do to help overcome Chinese censorship?
In the 1980s, Western information flow was huge in bringing down the Iron Curtain. The main influence was free TV, undermining communist-regime propaganda by showing how people in the West lived (much more affluently than in the East, for starters). George Soros also famously donated copiers, fax machines, etc., which seem to have been a nontrivial aid to internal information flow.
China of course is more open today than communist countries were then. TV, movies, travel, the uncensored part of the internet — they all help ensure a reasonably high level of understanding of Western thought and Western information. Even so, the Chinese government tightly controls discussion of — and access to infomation about — certain sensitive political issues, such as democracy, Taiwan, Tibet, etc., just as several Arab governments do on their favorite hotbutton issues.
But we in the West, if we choose, should be able to overcome that censorship! We can’t even keep ourselves from getting unwanted information — email spam, search engine results spam, etc. Getting information to Chinese people who want it should, by comparison, be straightforward. (I’ll write up a post with a specific plan shortly; the URL should appear in the trackback section to this post.) That’s where effort and attention need to go.
Back to Blodgett’s question. As a number of insightful links and comments in Blodgett’s thread illustrate, Google’s decision about whether or not to cooperate was not an easy one. I really only have two observations to add to those there. First, this isn’t just about short-term revenue and market presence. It’s also about developing technology cost-effectively that will be useful in any future Chinese endeavors under any future Chinese regime.
Second, that technology development point cuts both ways. Google will be training a lot of smart Chinese engineers in exactly the skills they’d need to make automated censorship more effective. And for that reason, I think Google should have stayed away.
Since I also favor proactive steps to fight censorship, I guess that puts me in Blodgett’s “Option III” group.
| Categories: Google, Public policy and privacy | 1 Comment |
NSA at AT&T: Universal monitoring apparently confirmed
An AT&T engineer has stepped forward, accusing the NSA of monitoring all AT&T internet traffic. EFF is suing the Feds accordingly.
Maybe this should be going on and maybe it shouldn’t, but one thing seems obvious to me — if it is going on, there should at least be a heckuva lot more transparency and disclosure.
The tech industry notices that the Republicans are bad for it
Michael Kanellos reports that Silicon Valley is down on the Bush Administration, largely because of its lack of support for private or public technology research.
Well, duh. I endorsed John Kerry in a Computerworld column before the 2004 election. And anybody who’s seen the antiscientific attitudes of the Bush Administration in biological and environmental sciences shouldn’t be surprised that IT is getting short shrift too.
| Categories: Public policy and privacy | 1 Comment |
Goodmail, Esther Dyson, Andrew Orlowski, etc.
Esther Dyson weighed in in the New York Times on Goodmail-like services. Andrew Orlowski of The Register responded with his usual clueless misogyny.
Orlowski doesn’t just gratuitously bash Esther; whenever possible, he goes after Ann Winblad too. One hilariously stupid instance is this one, in which he fabricated a marriage between Ann and her business partner John Hummer. Hmm, Mitchell Kertzman is there now too. My mind is reeling at the possible menage’-a-trois possibilities …
Esther’s opinion, which I first heard her express almost 20 years ago, is this: Senders should pay readers for the time they spend in looking at email. And you know what? She’s right. Advertisers in broadcast, web, and print media pay us for our attention, by subsidizing the content we consume. So do event sponsors. Almost everything you read or hear about the technology industry is subsidized in one way or another by somebody who would like to sell something. (E.g., if you’re reading this free blog, I may be interested in selling you consulting services.)
Now to Orlowski’s response. Most of it was the kind of ad hominem trash he loves to dish out, especially but not exclusively about smart women such as Esther Dyson and Ann Winblad. Besides that, the main substance I found was “Think of the poor people who can’t afford to pay to send email?!” Well, Andrew — who are they writing to? Whoever it is, those recipients do NOT have to charge them for sending mail, whether that recipient is their mother, their electric company, or you. If you want to open your mailbox to, say, everything that comes in from the poor country of Nigeria, there’s nothing stopping you. (And you can still apply spam filters if you like.) Personally, I find that I get email from the occasional Third-World businessman or professor, but no starving Guatemalan peasant has ever found the time or motivation to send me a personal letter.
So what would my fees be? Without thinking it over at great length, they might be something like this:
Free — friends, acquaintances, family, return mail from tech support, etc.
Free — some news mailing lists
$.01 — other commercial mailing lists, if I opted in
$.25 — unsoliticited email from commercial vendors I have relationships with
$.50 — everybody else
I imagine the cost to senders would be roughly double the prices quoted above, which is OK.
One beauty of this system is that it would immediately turn spam into a matter of pure financial theft. I.e., you wouldn’t be able to spam unless you got somebody else to pay the email delivery charges, presumably by hijacking their computer and/or identity. Most users would have safeguards in place that made them go through security hoops if they wanted to send true spammishly large volumes of mail. And just as online theft isn’t really that big a problem today, this new form of online theft would probably also be a much smaller problem than spam now is.
Implementation of course isn’t easy. The trickiest part would probably be assigning prices to different senders, then adjusting the prices for different senders, and having the senders be automatically notified of the price adjustments. There’s also an antifraud problem, of a sort; if people are paid to get junk mail, they might make efforts to get lots and lots and lots of it to pad their bank accounts. (Wouldn’t that be just a wonderful recreation for smart teenage boys?)
But the technical issues, while non-trivial, are all solvable (or at least controllable — this scheme would indeed add more complexity that could then annoyingly malfunction). So what about adoption? Here’s one scheme that might work — email service providers might compete on the basis of not only being free, but of actually rebating cash to their users. This gets around what could otherwise be a bottleneck, namely the reluctance of consumer service providers such as AOL to share revenue with their customers.
What about nefarious uses? E.g., the government of China is all too eager to control information coming into the country, and this could be another tool. Hmm. I don’t have a fast answer. But I have even less of an answer as to what good would be done is this regard by refraining from using the technology in the rest of the world. After all, they can adopt it themselves if they want.
OK. I’m on board. How do we make this happen?
| Categories: Online and mobile services, Privacy, censorship, and freedom, Public policy and privacy, Security and anti-spam | 14 Comments |
Cheap PCs for developing countries
The possibilities for getting cheap PCs into developing countries keeps growing. The Register has a series of articles on the alternatives.
The machines are getting cheap enough that it’s not a question of whether they should be all over even the poorest countries, but rather exactly how this should be accomplished. Electricity is a non-issue in some cases, more of a challenge in others. And actual internet access of course also needs to be provided.
But in essence — a few years from now, every schoolchild in the world should have access to most of the world’s educational information.
Except to the extent, of course, that her country’s leaders censor it out …
| Categories: Economic development, Hardware, Public policy and privacy | Leave a Comment |
I promised a bunch of links on privacy issues
As promised in my column in today’s Computerworld, I’m throwing up a bunch of links on privacy issues. Let me confess that I’m finding these in the last moment by searching, and these are not necessarily articles I’ve carefully read through or analyzed myself. (It turns out I didn’t bookmark anything when I first read about these various subjects.)
1. Your Google searches can be used against you as evidence in court. Prosecutors won a murder conviction against Robert Petrick for killing is wife in part by showing that, using his computer(s), somebody had Googled on a lot of murder-related terms, and visited a series of websites that gave information potentially useful in a murder of the kind actually committed. This information was gathered from his hard drive; it was not turned over by Google. Here’s another article on the Petrick case.
2. Search Engine Watch has extensive discussion on actual search engine privacy. It was inspired by the Federal government’s requests to the major search engines for general data (nothing personally identifiable) about child porn in search results. Google refused; MSN and Yahoo complied. EDIT: Google and the Feds are going to court, as per a 3/13 USA Today article. FURTHER EDIT: They cut a deal, as per the Reg’s cynically funny (as usual) article.
3. David Brin’s 1998 book The Transparent Society — focused on video surveillance, actually — has been highly influential in my own thinking. It appears he has an extensive web site that grew out of that discussion, but the link EDIT: IS NOW WORKING AGAIN.
4. The Register writes extensively about the British government’s attempts to institute national ID cards, biometric drivers licenses, and such like. It also writes about a number of other privacy-related issues.
5. Perhaps the most extensive single site covering Internet privacy issues is the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s.
More later, but that should be enough to get you started.
EDIT: I’ll keep adding some here.
6. One issue that probably has gotten more hype than it urgently needs is the theoretical risk of tracking consumer good usage via their embedded RFID chips. Retailers and consumer packaged goods manufacturers are being held back somewhat — or at least are being sensitive to — political and activist pressure.
7. Even the CIA is easy to trace. Never mind government and large-enterprise databanks; even web searches and other techniques open to the general, law-abiding public produce a lot of information — including the identities of many covert CIA agents and facilities. While not exactly a repressive-goverment fear point (quite the contrary, if anything), this still serves to illustrate one of my core points — information will inevitably be gathered. Hence tighter controls on the USE of information are needed now than were necessary before.
8. Lauren Gelman seems to be teaching a course on law/technology/privacy, and raises a number of specific issues in one of her blog posts.
The inevitable breaches of privacy, and what to do about them
Let’s continue the discussion of infomation privacy. Basically, governments and other large enterprises will be able to track almost everything about you — purchases, movements, medical details, communcations, even the things you think about (if you think about them long enough to search the Web for a bit of information). This trend can realistically be slowed, but it probably can’t be stopped.
Other than surrendering to 1984ish oversight, what is to be done? I see only one practical choice — the laws regulating use of information must be greatly strengthened. For example:
1. In the United States today, it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of an employee’s, job applicant’s, loan applicant’s, etc. race or sex or religion or national origin. This information is often available to companies (e.g., just by looking at the person). But even though companies have the information, they’re not allowed to use it.
2. Many safeguards against overzealous police and prosecutors take the form of limiting what information is admissible as evidence in court. If the police didn’t follow proper search procedure (in the US), tough on them; they can’t use what they found.
Indeed, it’s an almost universal myth that the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution precludes a person being forced to give testimony. Actually, the government can very easily compel testimony. But if it does, it has to give a grant of immunity so that that testimony can not be used against the person in court — and if that means the person can’t be tried at all for a specific crime, so be it. Once again, the law allows the government to gather information which it is then precluded from using.
I think the ultimate solutions to the dangers of privacy invasion will have to in large part follow this model. For example, I’d like to see a prohibition on the legal use of “state of mind” information such as web searches, library research, and so on. If there must be exceptions to such a prohibition, they should be explicitly and narrowly carved out.
Issues in privacy
My March Computerworld column is an exhortation to IT workers to get involved in IT-related public policy issues. Probably the most complex and serious ones are in the area of privacy. Options I posed include:
• Do nothing.
• Maintain sharp limits on government acquisition and retention of information.
• Mandate that the government keep its information in separate silos.
• Create strong rules about how governments can use information once acquired.
• Hamstring corporate acquisition, retention, or use of information. (Much of the government’s potential data comes through private channels.)
• Various mixes and matches of the above.
My own view, which I plan to lay out and defend in a series of posts, is a complex one. Historically, protections such as the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution have focused on limiting the government’s access to information. And this has been wise. As was shown for example by the misuse of FBI information under J. Edgar Hoover and the misuse of IRS information in the Nixon Administration (which Nixon claimed he didn’t innovate), once information gets into government hands its use is hard to control.
I see no good alternative to preserving these safeguards as long as possible. Maybe the Bush Adminstration should have gotten legislative permission for its data mining adventures and maybe the permission should have been denied, but the fact that they pursued them while circumventing the legal safeguards is utterly deplorable. That few people have suffered from the violationof these safeguards, or the worrisome provisions of the Patriot Act, merely proves that our multiple layers of safeguards are strong. It does not justify chipping away at them illegally, and I’m not real thrilled about legally undermining them either.
On the other hand — many of those safeguards are eroding fast. The amount of information the government can or potentially could obtain legally from credit card records, electronic auto toll tracking, etc. is staggering. National ID cards and passports are going electronic. The US Constitution apparently doesn’t prevent sensitive devices snooping into your house from the outside. Web surfing behavior is being submitted as criminal evidence. The government WILL have access to a very complete dossier on your activities, rather soon. Legislation to mandate this data be maintained in independent silos, while worthy, is just a stopgap.
And so in the US (and other developed countries, I would think), it is not just enough to fight government information acquisition. That’s a losing battle, especially since the most absolute safeguards can not be maintained in the face of the terrorist threat. Thus, I think we also need some reaffirmation — in principle, at least, if not in actual law — that “thou shalt not be hassled.”
I’m not yet sure what form(s) I think that needs to take.