kant

On a Social Networking Bill of Rights

/ Christopher Parsons

I attended this year’s Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference and spent time in sessions on privacy in large data sets, deep packet inspection and network neutrality, the role of privacy in venture capital pitches, and what businesses are doing to secure privacy. In addition, a collection of us worked for some time to produce a rough draft of the Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights that was subsequently discussed and ratified by the conference participants. In this post, I want to speak to the motivations of the Bill of Rights, characteristics of social networking and Bill proper, a few hopeful outcomes resulting from the Bill’s instantiation and conclude by denoting a concerns around the Bill’s creation and consequent challenges for moving it forward.

First, let me speak to the motivation behind the Bill. Social networking environments are increasingly becoming the places where individuals store key information – contact information, photos, thoughts and reflections, video – and genuinely becoming integrated into the political. This integration was particularly poignantly demonstrated last year when the American State Department asked Twitter to delay upgrades that would disrupt service and stem the information flowing out of Iran following the illegitimate election of President Ahmadinejad. Social networks have already been tied into the economic and social landscapes in profound ways: we see infrastructure costs for maintaining core business functionality approaching zero and the labor that was historically required for initiating conversations and meetings, to say nothing of shared authorship, have been integrated into social networking platforms themselves. Social networking, under this rubric, extends beyond sites such as Facebook and MySpace, and encapsulate companies like Google and Yahoo!, WordPress, and Digg, and their associated product offerings. Social networking extends well beyond social media; we can turn to Mashable’s collection of twenty characteristics included in the term ‘social networking’ for guidance as to what the term captures:

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Journal Publication: Moving Across the Internet

/ Christopher Parsons

I recently had an article published through CTheory, one of the world’s leading journals of theory, technology, and culture. The article is titled “Moving Across the Internet: Code-Bodies, Code-Corpses, and Network Architecture.” The article emerged from a presentation I gave at last year’s Critical Digital Studies Workshop that was titled “Moving Online: Your Packets, Your ISP, Your Identity.”

Abstract:

Across the Internet, an arms race between agents supporting and opposing network-based surveillance techniques has quietly unfolded over the past two decades. Whereas the 1990s might be characterized as hosting the first round of the encryption wars, this paper focuses on the contemporary battlescape. Specifically, I consider how ISPs “secure” and “manage” their digital networks using contemporary DPI appliances and the ramifications that these appliances may have on the development, and our understanding, of the code-body. DPI networking appliances operate as surveillance devices that render the digital subject constituted by data packets bare to heuristic analyses, but, despite the ingenuity of these devices, some encryption techniques successfully harden otherwise soft digital flesh and render it opaque. Drawing on Kant and Derrida, I suggest that ISPs’ understanding of the Internet as one of packets arguably corresponds with a Kantian notion of reality-as-such and offers a limited and problematic conception of the code-body. Turning to Derrida, we move beyond protocol alone to consider the specters that are always before, and always after, the code-body; Derrida provides a way of thinking beyond Kantian conceptions of space and time and the reality-as-such code-body and lets us consider the holistic identity of the code-being. Further, Derrida lets us interrogate the nature of DPI networking appliances and see that they resemble thrashing zombie-like code-corpses that always try, but perpetually fail, to become fully self-animated. While Derridean insights suggest that ISPs are unlikely to be successful in wholly understanding or shaping code-bodies, these corporate juggernauts do incite identity transformations that are inculcated in cauldrons of risk and fear. Not even Derridean specters can prevent the rending of digital flesh or act as a total antidote to ISPs’ shaping of consumers’ packet-based bodily identity.

Link to article.

Public Databases and Massive Aggregation of Data

/ Christopher Parsons

This is just a really quick thought that I wanted to toss out.

I perceive a problem associated with the digitization of public records: such digitization allows business interests to gather aggregate data on large collections of people while retaining identifiable characteristics. This allows for a phenomenal sorting potential. At the same time, we might ask, “is there anything we can, or really want to, do about this?”

Paradigm Shift

I hear this a lot – ‘Chris, you have to understand that things are different now. The paradigm is shifting towards transparency, and there’s nothing wrong with that, and you’re being a pain in the ass suggesting that there is anything wrong with transparency. Do you have something to hide, or something like that?’ This particular line bothers the hell out of me, because I shouldn’t have to expose myself without giving my consent, especially when I previously enjoyed a greater degree of privacy as a consequence of obscurity and/or the costs involved with copying, sorting, and analyzing analogue records. I fail to see why I have to give up past nascent rights and expectations just because we can mine data more effectively (hell, that would have been a meaningless statement around the time that I was born…). Efficiency is not the same as superior, better, or (necessarily) wanted.

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