Kink on tap had an interesting podcast about the privacy wars. It showed the point of view from a group of people, that have to take care of their privacy. However, i feel that it was lacking some crucial aspects that came up since the development of social networking.
Real names
Using a real name on the internet is an interesting topic and highly depends on your background, and the initial goal for a certain platform.
Before the massive use of the word wide web, most of the public communication was happening over the usenet. Many newsgroups asked the subscribers to provide a real name as a matter of good manners.
With the information stored in the usenet and public mailing-list archives, you can create social networks of the participants. It often exposed key members of the network, core people who play a crucial role of keeping a community running.
Also developers for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution are asked to provide their real name, in progress of the integration into the community. The whole process comes from the need to manifest responsibilities for crucial elements of the operating system.
On of the first programs, that answered the need for a “web-of-trust”, is “pretty good privacy” aka PGP. However it was providing encrypted eMail communication, the key-signing feature also exposed the social network to the public. A long time before sites like Facebook. This problem was addressed by providing a local-only storage of that information. Later, GnuPG became a GPL equivalent of PGP.
The public pgp key of any Debian developer, would directly show how well established a person is in the community. The whole GnuPG based web-of-trust became the essential base of the Debian developer and maintainer network.
Anonymity
In the more radical and political movements, you would hardly find anyone without a nickname of sorts, unless they have to represent a NGO or other official organizations. Massive repression from the state and police or threads from right wing groups make it almost impossible to be known under the real name. Many people even used a separate nickname for this community only.
Facing stalkers and employers is an aspect of the users privacy on the internet. Facing the repression of the state and police brings up a couple more crucial questions that still matter for everyone, whether you fight against the state or not.
Who has access to the data? Where is the data stored? Who owns the data? And how willing is a company or group to share the information with third parties, state and police? The very recent anonymous release of the “compliance guide for law enforcement” of some social network providers, stress the importance of these questions.
The outer edge of this discussion are projects like Wikileaks, Indymedia, Tor and other networks and services that intentionally stand up for freedom of speech and anonymous publishing of any material. Networks that work on the technical and social infrastructure to guarantee as much anonymity as possible. The refusal of indymedia.us to give out the users IP-Address logs show that web services could protect their users privacy.
Your data
There is no question that sharing and the “social net” are the key applications on the internet today. There will most likely be a point when the western world will no longer be able to live without it. Just avoiding social networks will not solve the problem.
The simple answer to many of these problems are that the user needs direct control over their data, at best, stored on their own computers.
With that we come back to the very basic horizontal ideas of the internet, that every node, every computer can provide services and share data. Opera Unite for example, is trying to make this fundamental feature of the internet accessible to the average user.
Also projects like open-id, foaf-ssl and the semantic web in general, work on technical solutions, for a more diverse and decentralized social network, that allows the user to have more direct control over their data.
What is needed are services and desktop applications that combine the features of decentralized social networks, the web-of-trust and encrypted communications.
But it’s not only the technical aspects, it’s about the consequences of horizontal and direct communication in times when people move away from one-way mediums like the television.
Back in 2001, Wau Holland said, that we more and more “need to learn to filter”.
We are no longer just consumers, where other people make the choices for us. The social networks we are exposed to is one of our filters and it is what we want to see in this world.
In 2007 Andreas Pfitzmann held a little speech at the German Federal Constitutional Court, that stresses the need for direct control over our data.
He points us to the possibility that computers are no longer just going to be desktops or laptops separated from us, they will become part of our body. They become a extension of ourselves, provide us with additional memory and give us unique and extended access to these memories, to our data.
The very interesting documentary The Cyborg Revolution from 2007 shows what the current developments are. From artificial vision for blind people to the digital replication of the neurological brain structure of the rat.
It’s only a question of how fast the interface between humans and computer will develop. Augmented reality today, is a little application on your mobile phone. In 10 years it might sit on your nose as part of your glasses, in 20 years it is part of your eye.
Independence
Many social networks like Facebook work with the commercial strategy of binding the customer to their service, to create a dependency, up to the point where they make the choices for you.
This is contrary to the idea of a horizontal communication, to the old idea of “power to the people”, contrary to diversity and independence. Make sure the choice is yours.
occam, 2009-12-27
