Part of the Making Publics Podcast

Download from / Listen on drop.io of full Episode 14 from CBC.

Michael Warner at the Making Publics Podcast, about the relation between “the public” and cellphones. “Broadcast” is the interesting aspect for me.

(also as MP3 download on drop.io or the full episode 13 from CBC)

I just posted a little feature request on the Flickr Ideas Forum. You could also understand it as a open letter to Flickr.

Dear Flickr Goddess,

i would like to ask for a very simple feature: I want access to ALL my photos ALL the time, unless i canceled / deleted my account.

There is a very simple solution:

I would like to a see a separation between the public view of my photo stream and how i with my account see the photo stream.

My view always includes all my pictures. It is my data, and i should always have access to it.

The public view for everyone else can be limited to the 200 pictures.

I don’t mind all the other limitations on the upload and set’s etc. But i would like to have full access to MY data. I am totally willing to pay for sharing. To give everybody the possibility to access my pictures. But i am NOT willing to pay to get access to MY data.

Why?

Well, i put “Privacy Wars” into the topic for a reason: With the recent privacy issues on Facebook, more and more people started to realize to what extend a company has control over their data. The asynchronous access to my photos and the resulting dependency is a major problem of the current privacy issues. With a similar dependency Facebook is able to adjust the privacy terms and therefor control the users data.

In my opinion Flickr always had a very good understanding of sharing and privacy. 90% of the decisions Flickr made in the last years related to that topic where transparent and comprehensible. They in general went into the direction to empower the user.

I know that some people at Flickr understand the current issues of the “Privacy Wars” very well. It would be wonderful if Flickr could send out the right signal to the Flickr Users.

“We understand: You need the free access to your data, we give it to you.”

Even if that means to adjust the Terms of Services.

Thanks
   occam, 2010-06-11

The idea

As I mentioned before, one good solution of the current fundamental privacy problems might be the use of a decentralized social web. The idea isn’t new but the talk on Freedom in the Cloud by Eben Moglen on February 2nd 2010, outlined the broader context that was needed to understand the puzzle of problems.

As a direct reaction to the talk, the Diaspora projects now starts taking off and already collected >10 times the amount of money they asked for.

However, both Diaspora and Eben Moglen don’t mention one of the major crucial problems: The accessibility of the huge amount of data we collect from our friends and us.

The semantic web and the so called “triple-store” provide the technology to store all the information in one place with the huge possibility to combine data in ways we never thought of before. However, what is still missing is the easy access to all information in such a triple-store.

But before we come to possible solutions, let us imagine the “Mensch-Maschine”, the cyborg, us IT-humans, in ten years.

The device

In ten years, we might have a device we can carry around, that constantly accumulates information’s about what we are doing. It stores the streets and ways we walk, it continuously takes pictures of our environment, records audio, recognizes text, speech, music, voices and faces. We then can review the menu from the Asia restaurant, just because we looked at it. We can always roll-back in time and access a moment we missed, or forgot. And that is the main point, our forgetfulness. Who would not like to have device that remembers for you? Because we are obviously not able to handle it all?! Imagine you could always access the “memories” of your childhood.

You can build such a device already, it might be a bit clumsy and and less fancy, but all the components and technologies are available.

In the ideal world, such a device is only accessible to us and we can always decide what we want to share and what not. Also, if Catherine shares some information with Jules, only Jules should be able to read it, and not Jim.

With sharing and the semantic web the device starts to unfold the full potential. The device will not just store the information about us, but also provide us with the data we got from our friends. The combined data might unfold a view of the world, we never saw before. More or less directly with the eyes from our friends.

The possibility of such a device should make clear how fundamentally important the discussion about privacy in the social network is.

The first step

But what is possible now? What could be the outcome of the Diaspora project?

The Diaspora project might provide two essential features:

• a combined storage of all our “social data” under our direct control
• a encrypted decentralized network to share social data

The combined data store, at best a triple-store, holds the potential to a new way to access information’s about our friends and us. We no longer have to visit multiple websites, go through our RSS reader, check e-mails, IM and micro-blogging - instead everything gets accumulated into one storage. To access the information’s we want, we apply filters. We select a group of people, set a time-frame and get all updates from the different sources.

The current web technologies make it possible to provide easy access to data, but they hardly scale as soon as the amount of data gets bigger. Long lists of micro blogging messages are very hard to go through without the proper context.

The proper context, or ways of accessing information’s are very easy to outline.

• a person
• a group of people
• a location
• a topic / tag / keyword
• the link between these elements

Future applications should provide the functionality to focus on a certain context. The view should be different if we select a person, a group or a location. If we select a location, we want to see what persons and topics are related to it. However, we want to see a map, not a long lists of elements.

The second step

The fact that a decentralized social web will store the information’s on the users hard disk, holds the possibility for dynamic desktop applications. Such a application could go beyond the current web techniques and try new ways of visualizing the semantic web.

I have specific ideas about such a desktop application and hope that i can bring them into some sort of a visual demo. Hopefully in another post.

Three steps ahead

What else? The open source aspect of the Diaspora project will not prevent the commercial copycats. With the resources of bigger companies, it might even be possible to outrun the project, provide a “even nicer” user interface, or certain specific functionality. However, the open source world has learned a lot in the last 10 years. People “demanded” a proper web browser and Mozilla was born. If people keep demanding a direct control over their data and actually have the alternatives, sites like Facebook might never surface again.

Or let my rephrase that: Your data should have the same cultural and legal protection as your body. You better demand that.

CV Dazzle Makeup

Good blog about privacy and face detection.

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