Social Networking

Twitter and Statutory Notions of Privacy

/ Christopher Parsons

protectionpersonaldataright[Note: this is an early draft of the second section of a paper I’m working on titled ‘Who Gives a Tweet about Privacy’ and builds from an earlier posted section titled ‘Privacy, Dignity, Copyright and Twitter‘ Other sections will follow as I draft them.]

Towards a Statutory Notion of Privacy

Whereas Warren and Brandeis explicitly built a tort claim to privacy (and can be read as implicitly laying the groundwork for a right to privacy), theorists such as Alan Westin attempt to justify a claim to privacy that would operate as the bedrock for a right to privacy. Spiros Simitis recognizes this claim, but argues that privacy should be read as both an individual and a social issue. The question that arises is whether or not these writers’ respective understandings of privacy capture the normative expectations of speaking in a public space, such as Twitter; do their understandings of intrusion/data capture recognize the complexities of speaking in public spaces and provide a reasonable expectation of privacy that reflects people’s interests to keep private some, but not all, of the discussions they have in public?

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Privacy, Dignity, Copyright and Twitter

/ Christopher Parsons

privacyfield[Note: this is an early draft of a section of a paper I’m working on titled ‘Who Gives a Tweet about Privacy’. Other sections will follow as I draft them.]

Unauthorized Capture and Transmission of Data

Almost every cellular phone that is now sold has a camera of some sort embedded into it. The potential for individuals to capture and transmit our image without permission has become a common fact of contemporary Western life, but this has not always been the case. When Polaroid cameras were new and first used to capture images of indiscretions for gossip columns, Warren and Brandeis wrote an article asserting that the unauthorized capture and transmission of photos and gossip constituted a privacy violation. Such transmissions threatened to destroy “at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under [gossip’s] blighting influence” (Warren and Brandeis 1984: 77). Individuals must be able to expect that certain matters will be kept private, even when acting in public spaces – they have a right to be let alone – or else society will reverse its progress towards civilization.

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Facebook Fights Search Engines Over Copyright

/ Christopher Parsons

DarkKnightPirateBayThe problem with walled gardens such as Facebook, is that you can be searched whenever you pass through their blue gates. In the course of being searched, undesired data can be refused – data like links to ‘abusive’ sites that facilitate copyright infringement. As of today, Facebook has declared war on the Pirates Bay, maintaining that because links to the site often infringe on someone’s copyright then linking to it violates the terms of service that Facebook users agree to. Given that the Pirates Bay is just a particularly specialized search engine, it would seem that Facebook is now going to start applying (American?) ethical and moral judgements on what people use to search for data. Sharing data is great, but only so long as it’s the ‘right kind’ of data.

What constitutes ‘infringing’ use when talking about a search engine? Google, as an example, lets individuals quickly and easily find torrent files that can subsequently be used to download/upload infringing material. The specific case being made against the Pirate Bay is that:

“Facebook respects copyrights and our Terms of Service prohibits placement of ‘Share on Facebook’ links on sites that contain “any content that is infringing. Given the controversy surrounding The Pirate Bay and the pending lawsuit against them, we’ve reached out to The Pirate Bay and asked them to remove the ‘Share on Facebook’ links from their site. The Pirate Bay has not responded and so we have blocked their torrents from being shared on Facebook.” (Source)

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Comment: Google Latitude

/ Christopher Parsons

200902121734.jpgIn the past week or so, Google has receive an enormous amount of attention because of their Latitude program. Latitude, once installed and enabled, will alert specified friends to your geographic location very specifically (i.e. street address) or more broadly (i.e. city). Google has developed this system so that users can turn off the system, can alter how precise it locates users, and has (really) just caught up to the technologies that their competitors have already been playing with (I wrote a little about Yahoo!’s Fire Eagle software, which is similar to Latitude, a few months ago).

While many people have already written and spoken about Latitude, I’ve found myself on a fence. On the one hand, I think that some of the criticisms towards the ‘privacy’ features of the program have been innane – at least one privacy advocate’s core ‘contribution’ to has been a worry that individuals might be given a phone with Latitude installed and active, without knowing about its presence or activation. As a result, they would be tracked without having consented to the program, or the geo-surveillance.

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Privacy: Available on Facebook for a cost (kinda)

/ Christopher Parsons

This comment isn’t likely to win me any privacy-friends, but…Facebook’s privacy settings are really pretty good. Yeah, I went there – no other social networking service (that is widely used) has such a granular group of privacy settings. Now, whether you want to say that the setting of these settings is a complicated process, or an onerous, one, or whatever is another issue entirely, and it’s not the issue I want to address right now.

Facebook has what are called ‘applications’, and these delightful little pieces of code let users play mini-games, bother their friends, put up listings of the books, movies, and models that they love at the moment, etc. In essence, they greatly increase “the social” in Facebook’s social networking garden (surely I can refer to “the social” and Facebook given the b0rg’s massive investment in Facebook). What people, such as myself, take issue with concerning these applications is that when my friend adds an application, the developer of the application tends to grab a bunch of my information along with my friend’s. I didn’t agree to have the application installed, and I have no say over whether or not it gets to take some of my information. The cost for my friend to install the application is one that I have to pay.

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Privacy worry over location data – Solution is from Facebook?

/ Christopher Parsons

Yahoo! has recently released a new product called Fire Eagle. Fire Eagle is an application that developers can integrate into their software suites, enabling users to identify and broadcast their geospatial location to others on the application’s network. There are many very positive features of Fire Eagle (at least relative to other applications of this nature):

* It’s opt-in
* It allows for granular, application level, sharing of information
* It keeps limited historical data – it “keeps only the most recent piece of location information it has received for each of the major levels it understands: Exact Location, Neighborhood, City, State, Country etc. If a new piece of “Exact Location” information comes in, then we throw away the old one.” (Source)
* Yahoo!’s developers anonymize user data, and assert that they will exclusively use it for system statistics as it pertains to updates and improving service (no notes on how data is anonymized, however)
* The privacy statement makes note that users need to read the privacy agreements of the applications that utilize/integrate Fire Eagle
* Yahoo! notes that their partners must consent to terms and services, and a code of conduct, and Yahoo! provides a space for users to complain if they think that a Yahoo! partner is violating their agreements with Yahoo!.

But, but, what about those third parties!?!

A BBC article that talks about this new service (Privacy worry over location data) really identifies the core privacy concern that most advocates seem to have with this service:

The problem for privacy watchers is that privacy policies across the web are all very different and using a service through a third party could raise some real issues

This is a very, very real concern, but one that I think is misidentified by the popular media. While it’s true that people (such as myself) are concerned about the actual legibility of privacy policies (most are in complicated legalese, and as such effectively meaningless – someone can’t reasonably be expected to consent to a contract that they have no way of understanding), another (perhaps more significant issue) is that when most contracts state that they won’t share information with ‘third parties’ they really don’t clearly identify what a third party is.

Let me unpack that last bit, just a little. Let’s say that you enter into a contract/agree to an EULA with Company Alpha (Company A). Unbeknownst to you, Company A is a subsidiary of Company Big (Company B for short), who is a subsidiary of Core Company (Company C, for short). When you enter into an agreement with Company A, your information can often be passed around the rest of the corporate family without violating the contract that you consented to. Of course, the average consumer has no clue who is a member of a ‘corporate family’, and is still vulnerable to the commonplace divergent understandings of corporate privacy policies in the various subsidiary corporations. Most people are also unaware that this means that their granular data, which is on its own not terrible useful or informative about themselves as users, is drawn together to compose substantial data doubles, and that these doubles are (a) valuable; (b) used to discriminate against consumers without their being aware of the discrimination taking place.

Alleviating third-party worries

I hesitate to say that I necessarily LIKE this way of doing things, just because I’m hesitant about how facebook actually operates. That said, Facebook is releasing a new service (Facebook Connect) where the privacy settings that you establish in the Facebook environment will carry along with you to the other websites that you access. Of course, this means that Facebook will be gathering information on where you go, what you do, and so on. It also means that to enjoy a unified privacy policy that you’ll need to be a member of Facebook – you’ll need to be willing to give a corporation access to your personal data to enjoy something that you really should be able to expect a government to set up for you.

Nevertheless, Facebook’s Connect Platform may offer a way for Facebook users to enjoy a common attitude towards privacy. This is one of the solutions that Lessig notes in Code 2.0, but I remain concerned about the solution for the reasons that I addressed in my MA thesis. Namely:

  1. Without federal/state/provincial regulations, violations of a corporate policy lack a clear punitive strategy. Without a monetized penalty, corporations may be less willing to entirely abide by the codes of conduct.
  2. It makes it challenging to enjoy a granular privacy policy – I may not want to let Nike know much about me, whereas I’m comfortable telling the local government a great deal.
  3. What happens if a particular group chooses not to ‘buy-in’ to the Facebook program for their own, valid, reasonings? Are citizens to become citizen-consumers, where to enjoy their constitutional rights they are limited to the corporate brands that they see as ‘healthy’ to them?
  4. Why *shouldn’t* government be the body responsible for setting these kinds of rules and regulations, and developing the IT frameworks to allow all citizens to have consistent privacy frameworks across their browsing experience. I’m not suggesting that citizens would subsequently be required to use the government systems, or that there aren’t inherent challenges with any large body establishing a common privacy level that travels with me across the ‘net, but I’m far more comfortable with a democratically legitimated body doing this than a for-profit corporations who just wants to harvest my personal information.

Ultimately, however, I want to quickly return to Yahoo!’s own stance toward privacy and Fire Eagle. Yahoo! is being reasonably up-front, honest, and genuine with the consumer – they’re doing their job in providing the information that consumers really need to be aware of, in language that is easily accessible. Whether or not people read the privacy policy, the policy isn’t one that is so filled with legalese that it’s non-sensical to the average person. This, in and of itself, is a massive change in how the industry constructs their privacy notices, and is something that reflects well on their division of Yahoo! services.