Thoughts: Google and ‘Interest Based’ Advertising

/ Christopher Parsons

200903121245.jpgPrivacy. Privacy, Privacy, Privacy.

Google is persistently in the limelight for it’s ‘invasions’ of personal privacy. I’ve made references to Google and privacy in a variety of blog posts, but whenever I think about Google my mind returns to a comment from Peter Fleischer, the chief privacy officer for Google. In a post in 2007, he wrote (in his personal blog) that:

. . . privacy is about more than legal compliance, it’s fundamentally about user trust. Be transparent with your users about your privacy practices. If your users don’t trust you, you’re out of business (Source)

Perhaps naively, I think that this statement is accurate – look at the nightmares that Facebook, NebuAd, and Phorm (to name a few) all have when they ‘invade’ customers’ privacy without being fully transparent about what, and why, they are engaging in their practices. What’s more, as soon as you establish an ‘it’s our way, or no way’ approach, you immediate establish a hostile environment between you and your users. In business, your users are your lifeblood; alienate them only if you really like polishing your resume.

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Conference Presentation: The Ontological Crisis of Melacholia

/ Christopher Parsons / 2 Comments

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I’ll be presenting my paper “The Ontological Crisis of Melancholia: Searching for foundations in the ether of cyberspace” tomorrow at the (inter)disciplinarities: theory & crisis conference tomorrow. If you have any thoughts or comments on the paper, feel free to drop me a line – I’m hoping to polish it over the next few months and then start shopping it around to a few journals. The abstract is below:

Abstract

In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler argues that the power structures ordering individuals and states alike are predicated on a mourning that cannot be mourned; melancholia permeates the primary ordering structures of the individual and the state. Butler takes up this absence, and alerts us to the state’s reliance on citizens’ melancholia to support its continued being. The state, constituted by the melancholic, reasserts and normalizes the melancholia responsible for plunging the modern subject into its ontological crisis of Being; it perpetuates the subjects’ inability to authentically ground their selfhood.

In this paper, I ask whether digital environments are spaces that can facilitate the resolution of modern subjects’ ontological crisis, and thus might provoke the reconstitution of modern politics. In responding to this inquiry, I take up Butler’s analysis of mourning and melancholia and situate her politics of identity in the context of Cyberspace. Specifically, I investigate whether the modern subject can work through their crisis within the plasticity of digital spaces, or if these spaces only superficially present possibilities for working through crisis. In interrogating these possibilities, I consider how psychosocial norms of embodied life are (being) embedded throughout digital spaces, and reflect on the implications of state-held norms being reaffirmed in these new media environments. I conclude by adopting the stance that Cyberspace may enable some individuals to acknowledge their experience of melancholia, but stop short of claiming that the possibilities afforded by this space’s plasticity can or will provoke a widespread reconstitution of modern politics.

Announcement: Working Paper on DPI Now Available

/ Christopher Parsons / 2 Comments

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Last year I spent some time and put together a working paper entitled, “Deep Packet Inspection in Perspective: Tracing its lineage and surveillance potentials,” for the New Transparency Project (of which I’m a student member). The document has gone live as of today – if you have any comments/thoughts concerning it feel free to send them my way! The abstract is below:

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are responsible for transmitting and delivering their customers’ data requests, ranging from requests for data from websites, to that from file-sharing applications, to that from participants in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) chat sessions. Using contemporary packet inspection and capture technologies, ISPs can investigate and record the content of unencrypted digital communications data packets. This paper explains the structure of these packets, and then proceeds to describe the packet inspection technologies that monitor their movement and extract information from the packets as they flow across ISP networks. After discussing the potency of contemporary packet inspection devices, in relation to their earlier packet inspection predecessors, and their potential uses in improving network operators’ network management systems, I argue that they should be identified as surveillance technologies that can potentially be incredibly invasive. Drawing on Canadian examples, I argue that Canadian ISPs are using DPI technologies to implicitly ‘teach’ their customers norms about what are ‘inappropriate’ data transfer programs, and the appropriate levels of ISP manipulation of consumer data traffic.

Thoughts: Irish Newest Victims in the Copyright Wars

/ Christopher Parsons

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Copyright is becoming an ever-increasingly important part of contemporary lexicon; in Canada, it’s so important that we now have a ‘citizen’s guide‘ to help ‘regular folk’ with their copyright-related concerns. While most eyes are presently focused on the Pirate Bay trial (Ernesto has been blogging about it regularly since the trial started, Jesse Brown’s recent podcast addresses it, etc.), a major ‘success’ in the war on copyright has actually been ‘won’ by Big Media. Ireland’s Eircom has announced that they will be blocking access to peer-to-peer websites in an effort to limit their users’ access to spaces holding copywritten content. This effort to block access is in addition to Eircom’s agreement that they will cut off users who are found infringing on copyright multiple times (a three-strikes rule).

This development substantially ratchets up the question, “What is role(s) do telecommunications companies play in today’s virtualized world, and global digital economy?” Self-imposed private corporations’ policies now threaten to substantially normalize ‘permissible’ modes of both accessing data and determining what accesses are ‘legitimate’ and which are not.

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DPI Deployed for Mobile Advertising

/ Christopher Parsons

200902181453.jpgDeep Packet Inspection is being deploying by an increasing number of operators for a host of purposes, including content analysis, flow analysis, network management (broadly stated), network management as integrated with policy management, and behavioural advertising (to name a few). While BT, in the UK, has openly admitted to working with Phorm to bring behavioral advertising to its consumers, it now appears as though network owners are going to be analyzing Internet traffic from mobiles, as well as desktop and notebook computers.

The Guardian is reporting that in a recent GSMA trial to collect information of where mobile users’ are browsing, that “the UK’s five networks – 3, O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone – used deep packet inspection technology to collect data covering about half the UK’s entire mobile web traffic” (Source). There is no indication that this is presently being associated with customers’ geolocation, but this does suggest that DPI is gaining increasing acceptance in the UK as a means of tracking what people are doing. Apparently the weak regulatory responses in the UK are spurring companies to deploy DPI before they are left behind the rest of the pack.

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Update: Repatriation of EDL Database

/ Christopher Parsons

200902171545.jpgThe Canadian Press is reporting that the EDL database that was part of the Phase 1 Trial of the BC EDL program is coming home. Specifically, they write,

The database with details about several hundred British Columbians was turned over to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency last year as part of a controversial project to issue “enhanced driver’s licences” instead of passports for land border crossings. (Source)

What strikes me as interesting/weird about this is that under Phase 1 of the BC EDL program no Canadian data was turned over to the American authorities! This was revealed in the BC EDL Phase 1 Post Implementation Review (Redacted), for which I’ve provided a ‘best hits’ document. Only in Phase 2 was any data sharing to actually start happening, and it was last November (’08) that Ottawa totally dropped plans to locate the Canadian EDL database in the US. This seems to suggest one of two things about the Canadian Press’ article: Continue reading →