Re: [Air-L] Privacy Buzz
Thanks for these observations: the Buzz story is one more example of what we might expect to happen (as Christian points out), when, in the name of convenience, access, lack of better alternatives, etc., we develop and conduct significant portions of our communicative and transactional lives (whether social, professional, or educational -- think of the Google/Microsoft battle over who will take over university email accounts) on commercially supported platforms whose business model is based on data collection and processing. I wonder if Google's "clumsiness" in rolling out something like this lies in the way it thinks about information, which has much to do with finding applications for making sense out of (and putting to use) large amounts of data. Our contact lists, viewed in this light, are just one more data set that can be multi-purposed, for them and for us. From such a perspective, it might seem like such a waste not to put that information to "good use." It's a perspective that is perhaps implicit in the media charges of "clumsiness" (that Google just didn't handle this right, that they're too willing to release applications in beta form, not fully tested, etc.), which seems to assume, that yes, all of this info is useful for multi-purposing, if it's just done right. I suspect that this is just the beginning of an ongoing series of revelations regarding what it means to rely on privatized, data-driven, commercially supported platforms for an increasing range of our communication and information-related activities. It's really an unprecedented level of commercialization and privatization. Against the background of Google taking over university email (and perhaps, eventually secondary school email accounts, document storage, and so on) previous concerns about commercial organizations in the schools (Channel One, in the US for example) seem almost quaint. The "value proposition" is clear: commercial companies will provide us with a range of communication and information services in exchange for detailed data collection about these various aspects of our lives -- data that can be used in non-transparent ways to sort, manipulate and manage users. It's not the kind of choice we might make in theory, when laid out in stark terms, but it does seem to be the kind of choice we're willing to make in practice, perhaps out of a lack of better alternatives to address the social and economic pressure to network, respond, stay in contact, etc. I think Christian makes a very interesting point about the focus on potential ~abuses~ of Buzz data by "other" authoritarian regimes, a focus that implicitly sanctions the "proper" commercial use of personal information and backgrounds the state's use of private sector data by, say, the United States. At the same time, the line between government use and corporate use continues to be reconfigured and blurred. The "investment arm" of the CIA puts money into data-mining companies, which in turn purchase data from an increasingly entrepreneurial state for commercial use, and so on. ________________________________________ From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Richard Forno [rforno@infowarrior.org] Sent: Saturday, February 13, 2010 7:38 PM To: Christian Fuchs Cc: List Aoir Subject: [Air-L] offlist - Re: Privacy Buzz I agree .... again, while I don't use Gmail or Facebook, etc......I am more concerned with the personal privacy "violation" to/for friends than I am anything having to to with a state government. Why? Because i presume that anything I do/say in cyberspace, or has the possibility to transit through or exist on a server/service that I don't have positive control over, potentially can be intercepted or compromised for any number of legitimate or nefarious purposes. That reality is not something one should fear only in totalitarian societiies, by the way. That said, to me, the more sinister "motive" is what Christian talks about: economic exploitation -- but I certainly acknowledge and appreciate those with political concerns here as well. It's also one of the reasons I've been slow to embrace things like Facebook (I don't) and only recently began dabbling with Twitter and LinkedIn. Put bluntly, I just don't like the idea of a for-profit entity knowing my social network, which can be used for marketing or other purposes that I may not appreciate or agree with. Am I paranoid? Perhaps. But I am under no obligation to use these services, so if I chose 'not to play' it's no big deal for me .... even though many of my friends would love it if I joined them on Facebook. ;) -rf On Feb 13, 2010, at 7:59 PM, Christian Fuchs wrote:
I think Buzz is an interesting new phenomenon.
I find interesting about the NY Times article and the reactions of some users to Buzz that they primarily stress the danger that China, Iran, etc could use Buzz for engaging in the (political) surveillance of political oppositionists and that they label such endeavaours totalitarian, while at the same time they do not provide a critique of the economic surveillance machine constituted by Google's expanding services, its collection, storage, analysis, and commodification of personal data, and its market dominance.
Surveillance and Big brother are not only somewhere out there in China or Iran, they are also present in the heart of capitalism itself - in the form of economic surveillance, and Google is one of its primary executors.
Buzz privacy policy for example says: "When you use Google Buzz, we may record information about your use of the product, such as the posts that you like or comment on and the other users who you communicate with. This is to provide you with a better experience on Buzz and other Google services and to improve the quality of Google services" "If you use Google Buzz on a mobile device and choose to view "nearby" posts, your location will be collected by Google."
The task is to collect as many data about users and to then to sell this data as commodity to advertising clients. Google fears the competition by Facebook and Twitter in the social networking market, and so has set up its own service (although I doubt that I will be so successful because until now it only supports rather trivial functions).
To only focus on the political surveillance capabilities that Buzz provides for some non-Western societies and to ignore the immanence of economic surveillance, is a form od Digital Orientalism that is ideologically blind for the forms of stratification that are at the heart of Western economies.
Cheers, Christian
On Feb 13, 2010, at 11:33 AM, Aziz Douai wrote:
Hi everyone,
I guess I am one of the lurkers on the listserv, but here goes my first contribution: Buzz. If you have used the new google social network service, how do you feel about the seeming violation of privacy? A few days ago, I decline my Gmail's insistence on adding trying the new feature/service. Now, the New York Times has a great article (Critics Say Google Invades Privacy with New Service: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13google.html) on how users' rights to privacy appear to have been violated. The article raises the interesting question of how totalitarian regimes may use the service to suppress political dissent. Google's rhetoric and carefully constructed image following its row with China is put to test.
Anyway, I am curious as to how AIR members have found the feature with regard to both privacy and security.
Cheers,
Aziz
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Aziz Douai, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Communication Program Faculty of Criminology, Justice and Policy Studies University of Ontario Institute of Technology 2000 Simcoe Street North Oshawa, ON L1H 7K4 E-mail: aziz.douai@uoit.ca/ azizdouai@gmail.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both." James Madison, 1822
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
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-- - - - Priv.-Doz. Dr. Christian Fuchs Associate Professor Unified Theory of Information Research Group ICT&S Center University of Salzburg Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18 5020 Salzburg Austria christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at Phone +43 662 8044 4823 Personal Website: http://fuchs.uti.at Research Group: http;//www.uti.at Editor of tripleC - Cognition, Communication, Co-Operation | Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society http://www.triple-c.at Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge. http://fuchs.uti.at/?page_id=40 _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
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This remind me the work of Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, who suggest that our digital data should have an "expiration date". Alejandro Tortolini Science and techonology journalist. Teacher.
Hi Mark, I think we agree that economic surveillance is a huge phenomenon on the Internet today and that Google is one of the main players in this respect. We both focus on these topics in our research. Much important work has been done on these issues, including your own works, but more research of many related issues is still needed. Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently remarked about Internet privacy: "If you have something that you do not want anyone to know, maybe you should not be doing it in the first place”, which points towards a lack of understanding of the online surveillance threat and privacy issues. I have commented here in more detail on privacy and surveillance issues of Google Buzz in a blog entry: http://fuchs.uti.at/313/ Best, Christian Andrejevic, Mark schrieb:
Thanks for these observations: the Buzz story is one more example of what we might expect to happen (as Christian points out), when, in the name of convenience, access, lack of better alternatives, etc., we develop and conduct significant portions of our communicative and transactional lives (whether social, professional, or educational -- think of the Google/Microsoft battle over who will take over university email accounts) on commercially supported platforms whose business model is based on data collection and processing.
I wonder if Google's "clumsiness" in rolling out something like this lies in the way it thinks about information, which has much to do with finding applications for making sense out of (and putting to use) large amounts of data. Our contact lists, viewed in this light, are just one more data set that can be multi-purposed, for them and for us. From such a perspective, it might seem like such a waste not to put that information to "good use." It's a perspective that is perhaps implicit in the media charges of "clumsiness" (that Google just didn't handle this right, that they're too willing to release applications in beta form, not fully tested, etc.), which seems to assume, that yes, all of this info is useful for multi-purposing, if it's just done right.
I suspect that this is just the beginning of an ongoing series of revelations regarding what it means to rely on privatized, data-driven, commercially supported platforms for an increasing range of our communication and information-related activities. It's really an unprecedented level of commercialization and privatization. Against the background of Google taking over university email (and perhaps, eventually secondary school email accounts, document storage, and so on) previous concerns about commercial organizations in the schools (Channel One, in the US for example) seem almost quaint. The "value proposition" is clear: commercial companies will provide us with a range of communication and information services in exchange for detailed data collection about these various aspects of our lives -- data that can be used in non-transparent ways to sort, manipulate and manage users. It's not the kind of choice we might make in theory, when laid out in stark terms, but it does s ee m to be the kind of choice we're willing to make in practice, perhaps out of a lack of better alternatives to address the social and economic pressure to network, respond, stay in contact, etc.
I think Christian makes a very interesting point about the focus on potential ~abuses~ of Buzz data by "other" authoritarian regimes, a focus that implicitly sanctions the "proper" commercial use of personal information and backgrounds the state's use of private sector data by, say, the United States. At the same time, the line between government use and corporate use continues to be reconfigured and blurred. The "investment arm" of the CIA puts money into data-mining companies, which in turn purchase data from an increasingly entrepreneurial state for commercial use, and so on.
________________________________________ From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Richard Forno [rforno@infowarrior.org] Sent: Saturday, February 13, 2010 7:38 PM To: Christian Fuchs Cc: List Aoir Subject: [Air-L] offlist - Re: Privacy Buzz
I agree .... again, while I don't use Gmail or Facebook, etc......I am more concerned with the personal privacy "violation" to/for friends than I am anything having to to with a state government. Why? Because i presume that anything I do/say in cyberspace, or has the possibility to transit through or exist on a server/service that I don't have positive control over, potentially can be intercepted or compromised for any number of legitimate or nefarious purposes. That reality is not something one should fear only in totalitarian societiies, by the way.
That said, to me, the more sinister "motive" is what Christian talks about: economic exploitation -- but I certainly acknowledge and appreciate those with political concerns here as well. It's also one of the reasons I've been slow to embrace things like Facebook (I don't) and only recently began dabbling with Twitter and LinkedIn. Put bluntly, I just don't like the idea of a for-profit entity knowing my social network, which can be used for marketing or other purposes that I may not appreciate or agree with. Am I paranoid? Perhaps. But I am under no obligation to use these services, so if I chose 'not to play' it's no big deal for me .... even though many of my friends would love it if I joined them on Facebook. ;)
-rf
On Feb 13, 2010, at 7:59 PM, Christian Fuchs wrote:
I think Buzz is an interesting new phenomenon.
I find interesting about the NY Times article and the reactions of some users to Buzz that they primarily stress the danger that China, Iran, etc could use Buzz for engaging in the (political) surveillance of political oppositionists and that they label such endeavaours totalitarian, while at the same time they do not provide a critique of the economic surveillance machine constituted by Google's expanding services, its collection, storage, analysis, and commodification of personal data, and its market dominance.
Surveillance and Big brother are not only somewhere out there in China or Iran, they are also present in the heart of capitalism itself - in the form of economic surveillance, and Google is one of its primary executors.
Buzz privacy policy for example says: "When you use Google Buzz, we may record information about your use of the product, such as the posts that you like or comment on and the other users who you communicate with. This is to provide you with a better experience on Buzz and other Google services and to improve the quality of Google services" "If you use Google Buzz on a mobile device and choose to view "nearby" posts, your location will be collected by Google."
The task is to collect as many data about users and to then to sell this data as commodity to advertising clients. Google fears the competition by Facebook and Twitter in the social networking market, and so has set up its own service (although I doubt that I will be so successful because until now it only supports rather trivial functions).
To only focus on the political surveillance capabilities that Buzz provides for some non-Western societies and to ignore the immanence of economic surveillance, is a form od Digital Orientalism that is ideologically blind for the forms of stratification that are at the heart of Western economies.
Cheers, Christian
On Feb 13, 2010, at 11:33 AM, Aziz Douai wrote:
Hi everyone,
I guess I am one of the lurkers on the listserv, but here goes my first contribution: Buzz. If you have used the new google social network service, how do you feel about the seeming violation of privacy? A few days ago, I decline my Gmail's insistence on adding trying the new feature/service. Now, the New York Times has a great article (Critics Say Google Invades Privacy with New Service: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13google.html) on how users' rights to privacy appear to have been violated. The article raises the interesting question of how totalitarian regimes may use the service to suppress political dissent. Google's rhetoric and carefully constructed image following its row with China is put to test.
Anyway, I am curious as to how AIR members have found the feature with regard to both privacy and security.
Cheers,
Aziz
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Aziz Douai, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Communication Program Faculty of Criminology, Justice and Policy Studies University of Ontario Institute of Technology 2000 Simcoe Street North Oshawa, ON L1H 7K4 E-mail: aziz.douai@uoit.ca/ azizdouai@gmail.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both." James Madison, 1822
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- - - - Priv.-Doz. Dr. Christian Fuchs Associate Professor Unified Theory of Information Research Group ICT&S Center University of Salzburg Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18 5020 Salzburg Austria christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at Phone +43 662 8044 4823 Personal Website: http://fuchs.uti.at Research Group: http;//www.uti.at Editor of tripleC - Cognition, Communication, Co-Operation | Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society http://www.triple-c.at Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge. http://fuchs.uti.at/?page_id=40 _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- - - - Priv.-Doz. Dr. Christian Fuchs Associate Professor Unified Theory of Information Research Group ICT&S Center University of Salzburg Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18 5020 Salzburg Austria christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at Phone +43 662 8044 4823 Personal Website: http://fuchs.uti.at Research Group: http;//www.uti.at Editor of tripleC - Cognition, Communication, Co-Operation | Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society http://www.triple-c.at Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge. http://fuchs.uti.at/?page_id=40
Thanks for this - In my writing and lectures I try to counter this sort of blithe dismissal of privacy concerns (going back at least to Scott McNealy's famous "You have no privacy, get over it" (1999)) by highlighting the connection in Western liberal political philosophy between individual freedoms - including the freedom to choose the goals and ends defining one's own good life - and the right to privacy as it becomes articulated especially over the last hundred years or so. I'm doing this right now as part of a masters class here in Aarhus - I'll be eager to see what the students make of the arguments and claims involved. At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly: I worry that we largely seem happy to trade off individual privacy for the multiple conveniences we gain in doing so - a trade that is all that much easier as we forget and/or simply no longer care about why such privacy is central to liberal democracies. We fall in love with the technologies of our enslavement. I would be very happy for someone to prove me wrong... again, thanks! - charles On 2/16/10 3:06 AM, "Christian Fuchs" <christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at> wrote:
Hi Mark,
I think we agree that economic surveillance is a huge phenomenon on the Internet today and that Google is one of the main players in this respect. We both focus on these topics in our research. Much important work has been done on these issues, including your own works, but more research of many related issues is still needed.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently remarked about Internet privacy: "If you have something that you do not want anyone to know, maybe you should not be doing it in the first place², which points towards a lack of understanding of the online surveillance threat and privacy issues.
I have commented here in more detail on privacy and surveillance issues of Google Buzz in a blog entry: http://fuchs.uti.at/313/
Best, Christian
Andrejevic, Mark schrieb:
Thanks for these observations: the Buzz story is one more example of what we might expect to happen (as Christian points out), when, in the name of convenience, access, lack of better alternatives, etc., we develop and conduct significant portions of our communicative and transactional lives (whether social, professional, or educational -- think of the Google/Microsoft battle over who will take over university email accounts) on commercially supported platforms whose business model is based on data collection and processing.
I wonder if Google's "clumsiness" in rolling out something like this lies in the way it thinks about information, which has much to do with finding applications for making sense out of (and putting to use) large amounts of data. Our contact lists, viewed in this light, are just one more data set that can be multi-purposed, for them and for us. From such a perspective, it might seem like such a waste not to put that information to "good use." It's a perspective that is perhaps implicit in the media charges of "clumsiness" (that Google just didn't handle this right, that they're too willing to release applications in beta form, not fully tested, etc.), which seems to assume, that yes, all of this info is useful for multi-purposing, if it's just done right.
I suspect that this is just the beginning of an ongoing series of revelations regarding what it means to rely on privatized, data-driven, commercially supported platforms for an increasing range of our communication and information-related activities. It's really an unprecedented level of commercialization and privatization. Against the background of Google taking over university email (and perhaps, eventually secondary school email accounts, document storage, and so on) previous concerns about commercial organizations in the schools (Channel One, in the US for example) seem almost quaint. The "value proposition" is clear: commercial companies will provide us with a range of communication and information services in exchange for detailed data collection about these various aspects of our lives -- data that can be used in non-transparent ways to sort, manipulate and manage users. It's not the kind of choice we might make in theory, when laid out in stark terms, but it does s ee m to be the kind of choice we're willing to make in practice, perhaps out of a lack of better alternatives to address the social and economic pressure to network, respond, stay in contact, etc.
I think Christian makes a very interesting point about the focus on potential ~abuses~ of Buzz data by "other" authoritarian regimes, a focus that implicitly sanctions the "proper" commercial use of personal information and backgrounds the state's use of private sector data by, say, the United States. At the same time, the line between government use and corporate use continues to be reconfigured and blurred. The "investment arm" of the CIA puts money into data-mining companies, which in turn purchase data from an increasingly entrepreneurial state for commercial use, and so on.
________________________________________ From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Richard Forno [rforno@infowarrior.org] Sent: Saturday, February 13, 2010 7:38 PM To: Christian Fuchs Cc: List Aoir Subject: [Air-L] offlist - Re: Privacy Buzz
I agree .... again, while I don't use Gmail or Facebook, etc......I am more concerned with the personal privacy "violation" to/for friends than I am anything having to to with a state government. Why? Because i presume that anything I do/say in cyberspace, or has the possibility to transit through or exist on a server/service that I don't have positive control over, potentially can be intercepted or compromised for any number of legitimate or nefarious purposes. That reality is not something one should fear only in totalitarian societiies, by the way.
That said, to me, the more sinister "motive" is what Christian talks about: economic exploitation -- but I certainly acknowledge and appreciate those with political concerns here as well. It's also one of the reasons I've been slow to embrace things like Facebook (I don't) and only recently began dabbling with Twitter and LinkedIn. Put bluntly, I just don't like the idea of a for-profit entity knowing my social network, which can be used for marketing or other purposes that I may not appreciate or agree with. Am I paranoid? Perhaps. But I am under no obligation to use these services, so if I chose 'not to play' it's no big deal for me .... even though many of my friends would love it if I joined them on Facebook. ;)
-rf
On Feb 13, 2010, at 7:59 PM, Christian Fuchs wrote:
I think Buzz is an interesting new phenomenon.
I find interesting about the NY Times article and the reactions of some users to Buzz that they primarily stress the danger that China, Iran, etc could use Buzz for engaging in the (political) surveillance of political oppositionists and that they label such endeavaours totalitarian, while at the same time they do not provide a critique of the economic surveillance machine constituted by Google's expanding services, its collection, storage, analysis, and commodification of personal data, and its market dominance.
Surveillance and Big brother are not only somewhere out there in China or Iran, they are also present in the heart of capitalism itself - in the form of economic surveillance, and Google is one of its primary executors.
Buzz privacy policy for example says: "When you use Google Buzz, we may record information about your use of the product, such as the posts that you like or comment on and the other users who you communicate with. This is to provide you with a better experience on Buzz and other Google services and to improve the quality of Google services" "If you use Google Buzz on a mobile device and choose to view "nearby" posts, your location will be collected by Google."
The task is to collect as many data about users and to then to sell this data as commodity to advertising clients. Google fears the competition by Facebook and Twitter in the social networking market, and so has set up its own service (although I doubt that I will be so successful because until now it only supports rather trivial functions).
To only focus on the political surveillance capabilities that Buzz provides for some non-Western societies and to ignore the immanence of economic surveillance, is a form od Digital Orientalism that is ideologically blind for the forms of stratification that are at the heart of Western economies.
Cheers, Christian
On Feb 13, 2010, at 11:33 AM, Aziz Douai wrote:
Hi everyone,
I guess I am one of the lurkers on the listserv, but here goes my first contribution: Buzz. If you have used the new google social network service, how do you feel about the seeming violation of privacy? A few days ago, I decline my Gmail's insistence on adding trying the new feature/service. Now, the New York Times has a great article (Critics Say Google Invades Privacy with New Service: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13google.html) on how users' rights to privacy appear to have been violated. The article raises the interesting question of how totalitarian regimes may use the service to suppress political dissent. Google's rhetoric and carefully constructed image following its row with China is put to test.
Anyway, I am curious as to how AIR members have found the feature with regard to both privacy and security.
Cheers,
Aziz
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ Aziz Douai, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Communication Program Faculty of Criminology, Justice and Policy Studies University of Ontario Institute of Technology 2000 Simcoe Street North Oshawa, ON L1H 7K4 E-mail: aziz.douai@uoit.ca/ azizdouai@gmail.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------------------
"A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both." James Madison, 1822
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- - - - Priv.-Doz. Dr. Christian Fuchs Associate Professor Unified Theory of Information Research Group ICT&S Center University of Salzburg Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18 5020 Salzburg Austria christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at Phone +43 662 8044 4823 Personal Website: http://fuchs.uti.at Research Group: http;//www.uti.at Editor of tripleC - Cognition, Communication, Co-Operation | Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society http://www.triple-c.at Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge. http://fuchs.uti.at/?page_id=40 _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
Here in Israel a class action was submitted yesterday to Jerusalem's district court. The motion claims that Buzz privacy policy violates privacy and more specifically - this policy violates two state laws - privacy protection law and consumer protection law. It would be very interesting to follow this case. Have a great day. Best Wishes, Sharon Haleva Amir, HCLT Fellow (PhD Candidate) Faculty of Law, University of Haifa, ISRAEL. -------------------------------------------------- http://weblaw.haifa.ac.il/en/research/resstudents/pages/sharonha.aspx -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Charles Ess Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 7:58 AM To: Christian Fuchs; Andrejevic, Mark Cc: Air list Subject: Re: [Air-L] Privacy Buzz Thanks for this - In my writing and lectures I try to counter this sort of blithe dismissal of privacy concerns (going back at least to Scott McNealy's famous "You have no privacy, get over it" (1999)) by highlighting the connection in Western liberal political philosophy between individual freedoms - including the freedom to choose the goals and ends defining one's own good life - and the right to privacy as it becomes articulated especially over the last hundred years or so. I'm doing this right now as part of a masters class here in Aarhus - I'll be eager to see what the students make of the arguments and claims involved. At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly: I worry that we largely seem happy to trade off individual privacy for the multiple conveniences we gain in doing so - a trade that is all that much easier as we forget and/or simply no longer care about why such privacy is central to liberal democracies. We fall in love with the technologies of our enslavement. I would be very happy for someone to prove me wrong... again, thanks! - charles On 2/16/10 3:06 AM, "Christian Fuchs" <christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at> wrote:
Hi Mark,
I think we agree that economic surveillance is a huge phenomenon on the Internet today and that Google is one of the main players in this respect. We both focus on these topics in our research. Much important work has been done on these issues, including your own works, but more research of many related issues is still needed.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently remarked about Internet privacy: "If you have something that you do not want anyone to know, maybe you should not be doing it in the first place², which points towards a lack of understanding of the online surveillance threat and privacy issues.
I have commented here in more detail on privacy and surveillance issues of Google Buzz in a blog entry: http://fuchs.uti.at/313/
Best, Christian
Andrejevic, Mark schrieb:
Thanks for these observations: the Buzz story is one more example of what we might expect to happen (as Christian points out), when, in the name of convenience, access, lack of better alternatives, etc., we develop and conduct significant portions of our communicative and transactional lives (whether social, professional, or educational -- think of the Google/Microsoft battle over who will take over university email accounts) on commercially supported platforms whose business model is based on data collection and processing.
I wonder if Google's "clumsiness" in rolling out something like this lies in the way it thinks about information, which has much to do with finding applications for making sense out of (and putting to use) large amounts of data. Our contact lists, viewed in this light, are just one more data set that can be multi-purposed, for them and for us. From such a perspective, it might seem like such a waste not to put that information to "good use." It's a perspective that is perhaps implicit in the media charges of "clumsiness" (that Google just didn't handle this right, that they're too willing to release applications in beta form, not fully tested, etc.), which seems to assume, that yes, all of this info is useful for multi-purposing, if it's just done right.
I suspect that this is just the beginning of an ongoing series of revelations regarding what it means to rely on privatized, data-driven, commercially supported platforms for an increasing range of our communication and information-related activities. It's really an unprecedented level of commercialization and privatization. Against the background of Google taking over university email (and perhaps, eventually secondary school email accounts, document storage, and so on) previous concerns about commercial organizations in the schools (Channel One, in the US for example) seem almost quaint. The "value proposition" is clear: commercial companies will provide us with a range of communication and information services in exchange for detailed data collection about these various aspects of our lives -- data that can be used in non-transparent ways to sort, manipulate and manage users. It's not the kind of choice we might make in theory, when laid out in stark terms, but it does s ee m to be the kind of choice we're willing to make in practice, perhaps out of a lack of better alternatives to address the social and economic pressure to network, respond, stay in contact, etc.
I think Christian makes a very interesting point about the focus on potential ~abuses~ of Buzz data by "other" authoritarian regimes, a focus that implicitly sanctions the "proper" commercial use of personal information and backgrounds the state's use of private sector data by, say, the United States. At the same time, the line between government use and corporate use continues to be reconfigured and blurred. The "investment arm" of the CIA puts money into data-mining companies, which in turn purchase data from an increasingly entrepreneurial state for commercial use, and so on.
________________________________________ From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Richard Forno [rforno@infowarrior.org] Sent: Saturday, February 13, 2010 7:38 PM To: Christian Fuchs Cc: List Aoir Subject: [Air-L] offlist - Re: Privacy Buzz
I agree .... again, while I don't use Gmail or Facebook, etc......I am more concerned with the personal privacy "violation" to/for friends than I am anything having to to with a state government. Why? Because i presume that anything I do/say in cyberspace, or has the possibility to transit through or exist on a server/service that I don't have positive control over, potentially can be intercepted or compromised for any number of legitimate or nefarious purposes. That reality is not something one should fear only in totalitarian societiies, by the way.
That said, to me, the more sinister "motive" is what Christian talks about: economic exploitation -- but I certainly acknowledge and appreciate those with political concerns here as well. It's also one of the reasons I've been slow to embrace things like Facebook (I don't) and only recently began dabbling with Twitter and LinkedIn. Put bluntly, I just don't like the idea of a for-profit entity knowing my social network, which can be used for marketing or other purposes that I may not appreciate or agree with. Am I paranoid? Perhaps. But I am under no obligation to use these services, so if I chose 'not to play' it's no big deal for me .... even though many of my friends would love it if I joined them on Facebook. ;)
-rf
On Feb 13, 2010, at 7:59 PM, Christian Fuchs wrote:
I think Buzz is an interesting new phenomenon.
I find interesting about the NY Times article and the reactions of some users to Buzz that they primarily stress the danger that China, Iran, etc could use Buzz for engaging in the (political) surveillance of political oppositionists and that they label such endeavaours totalitarian, while at the same time they do not provide a critique of the economic surveillance machine constituted by Google's expanding services, its collection, storage, analysis, and commodification of personal data, and its market dominance.
Surveillance and Big brother are not only somewhere out there in China or Iran, they are also present in the heart of capitalism itself - in the form of economic surveillance, and Google is one of its primary executors.
Buzz privacy policy for example says: "When you use Google Buzz, we may record information about your use of the product, such as the posts that you like or comment on and the other users who you communicate with. This is to provide you with a better experience on Buzz and other Google services and to improve the quality of Google services" "If you use Google Buzz on a mobile device and choose to view "nearby" posts, your location will be collected by Google."
The task is to collect as many data about users and to then to sell this data as commodity to advertising clients. Google fears the competition by Facebook and Twitter in the social networking market, and so has set up its own service (although I doubt that I will be so successful because until now it only supports rather trivial functions).
To only focus on the political surveillance capabilities that Buzz provides for some non-Western societies and to ignore the immanence of economic surveillance, is a form od Digital Orientalism that is ideologically blind for the forms of stratification that are at the heart of Western economies.
Cheers, Christian
On Feb 13, 2010, at 11:33 AM, Aziz Douai wrote:
Hi everyone,
I guess I am one of the lurkers on the listserv, but here goes my first contribution: Buzz. If you have used the new google social network service, how do you feel about the seeming violation of privacy? A few days ago, I decline my Gmail's insistence on adding trying the new feature/service. Now, the New York Times has a great article (Critics Say Google Invades Privacy with New Service: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13google.html) on how users' rights to privacy appear to have been violated. The article raises the interesting question of how totalitarian regimes may use the service to suppress political dissent. Google's rhetoric and carefully constructed image following its row with China is put to test.
Anyway, I am curious as to how AIR members have found the feature with regard to both privacy and security.
Cheers,
Aziz
------------------------------ Aziz Douai, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Communication Program Faculty of Criminology, Justice and Policy Studies University of Ontario Institute of Technology 2000 Simcoe Street North Oshawa, ON L1H 7K4 E-mail: aziz.douai@uoit.ca/ azizdouai@gmail.com
-----------------------------------
"A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both." James Madison, 1822
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-- - - - Priv.-Doz. Dr. Christian Fuchs Associate Professor Unified Theory of Information Research Group ICT&S Center University of Salzburg Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18 5020 Salzburg Austria christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at Phone +43 662 8044 4823 Personal Website: http://fuchs.uti.at Research Group: http;//www.uti.at Editor of tripleC - Cognition, Communication, Co-Operation | Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society http://www.triple-c.at Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge. http://fuchs.uti.at/?page_id=40 _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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just some thoughts below. Feel free to request my unpublished paper on facebook and privacy where I look at networks and privacy settings in facebook. It is probably dated now. I know common notions in law of privacy were based on the invention of the camera and a famous case of photo journalism. It is a more than 100 year old case in the Harvard law journal. So technology seems to move this law. The university of Ottawa law and technology students moved facebook. At work I am under a law to keep respondent information confidential. I could be fined 10,000 dollars and go to jail for 10 years. Um research ethics of the state that. I wonder about red lining which is where insurance companies do demographic research and charge the poor too much? Poverty is something to hide. Poverty is not caused by doing something wrong in many political views. The gain is often internet access broadly defined ( the goods of using the net included ) that we trade for privacy. Disabilities are something to hide when like mine are psychiatric. I want fellow activists in the disability movement to know about this but not my fellow workers who are security guards ( a great job for students btw is the night shift as you can read 1000 of pages of case law in empty buildings). On 16-Feb-10, at 12:58 AM, Charles Ess wrote:
by highlighting the connection in Western liberal political philosophy between individual freedoms - including the freedom to choose the goals and ends defining one's own good life - and the right to privacy as it becomes articulated especially over the last hundred years or so.
Peter Timusk, B.Math statistics (2002), B.A. legal studies (2006) Carleton University Systems Science Graduate student, University of Ottawa. just trying to stay linear. Read by hundreds of lurkers every week. kiitos paljon, merci, thank you and muchas gracias for reading.
Mark, Christian and list members, Christian said:
Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently remarked about Internet privacy: "If you have something that you do not want anyone to know, maybe you should not be doing it in the first place², which points towards a lack of understanding of the online surveillance threat and privacy issues.
Absolutely, and there is something more to this jaw-droppingly blasé statement as well. I don't think it's *only* a result of Google's desire to facilitate and track and cross-aggregate everything everyone does on the internet ever (which is clearly the manifest destiny of Google, and several others). We also had this today in the WSJ: 'After taking steps to stem the public backlash against its social-networking service Buzz, Google Inc. is planning further updates and considering changing how it tests new Buzz features. Google product manager Todd Jackson said in an interview Monday that the number of people initially uncomfortable with the service underscored that the company's approach of testing Buzz among its employees hasn't been sufficient." "Getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn't quite the same as letting Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild," Mr. Jackson said. "We needed to launch to the public and get feedback from users." ' (Thanks to Michael Zimmer for tweeting the link) As various commenters have pointed out elsewhere, Google's apparent "lack of understanding" of the threats to privacy has an identity politics as well. At least in my head (and tell me if I'm crazy), the ideal, undifferentiated internet user says: "I mean, I live my life online and it's fine. I don't care who knows which Starbucks I'm using my Blackberry at or which of my business contacts I compare Geek 2.0 conferences with or what Business 2.0 book I'm buying." All very obvious - assumed, unrecognised privilege that goes with a certain class position, geographically myopic worldview despite the desire for global colonisation, etc. But this assumption of a universal 'we'; the complete carelessness about the idea that public exposure can do harm; the shrugging off of the social complexity of social media, and so on, also have a gender politics. In some of the *critique* of Googlebookspacetube, so does a similar shrugging off of the messy mix of pleasure, affinity, and risk of social media participation; and indeed the insistent bracketing off of concrete lived experiences, so we can get at the main game: Economics. The World. History. Everything. But back to Buzz. Most obviously, as the widely circulated (but now password-protected) "F**k You, Google" blog post on the Fugitivus blog so clearly demonstrated, even in the affluent West, if you have ever had a stalker, an abusive ex- or current partner, or live in a community/family where it might not be safe to be outed as gay, there are plenty of things you might not want people to know you're saying or doing. It doesn't mean you "should stop doing them" - or saying them - on the Internet. What would a social media platform look like if it listened carefully from the beginning to what users are actually doing with the platform - collectively constructing a wide and often overlapping range of uses, communities, etc., including a nuanced set of publicity/privacy settings. What if the provider provided the tools to do that, and didn't come crashing in in the middle of the night to redesign everything and randomly release 'features' that have no obvious relationship to the practices of users? To finish by returning to the subject of business if not capital-E Economics: I understand that there is actually no business case for blanket privacy in the free-to-use, advertising-supported business model that drives Google, Facebook, and Twitter (indirectly), but I'm not sure there isn't a business model (where "business model" might or might not include a profit motive) that could work quite well and treat user communities with more respect - including respect for the knowledge and expertise they have developed through their work as users. I still think Flickr had it more or less right in some ways (especially in the areas of privacy settings and community governance) - but theirs is a Freemium business model (where you have a choice of a fairly full-featured free account, or a paid 'power' account). I genuinely mean this as a devil's advocate question: given the apparent helplessness of users in a free-to-use model, are we better off as customers than we are as users? How might we ask to be addressed as citizens instead, or as well? OK, they aren't big questions to end with or anything... Best Jean http://staffprofiles.ci.qut.edu.au/jean-burgess
On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 7:44 PM, Jean Burgess <je.burgess@qut.edu.au> wrote:
I understand that there is actually no business case for blanket privacy in the free-to-use, advertising-supported business model that drives Google, Facebook, and Twitter (indirectly), but I'm not sure there isn't a business model (where "business model" might or might not include a profit motive) that could work quite well and treat user communities with more respect - including respect for the knowledge and expertise they have developed through their work as users.
Just to comment on the "business case" (especially the business case for the way they 'decided' to test audience responses): I reckon it will take a while until Google & their competitors realize HOW MUCH damage Google have done to their reputation. It's not just "normal" internet users that got concerned about the (ab)use of their data, it also includes a lot of hardcore geeks that are really pissed off. Best regards christopher -- Dr. Christopher Lueg Professor of Computing University of Tasmania Private Bag 100 Hobart TAS 7001, Australia cplueg@realworldmatters.net http://www.realworldmatters.net CRICOS Provider Code: 00586B
Hi Christopher On 16/02/10 7:57 PM, "Christopher Lueg" <cplueg@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 7:44 PM, Jean Burgess <je.burgess@qut.edu.au> wrote:
I understand that there is actually no business case for blanket privacy in the free-to-use, advertising-supported business model that drives Google, Facebook, and Twitter (indirectly), but I'm not sure there isn't a business model (where "business model" might or might not include a profit motive) that could work quite well and treat user communities with more respect - including respect for the knowledge and expertise they have developed through their work as users.
Just to comment on the "business case" (especially the business case for the way they 'decided' to test audience responses):
I reckon it will take a while until Google & their competitors realize HOW MUCH damage Google have done to their reputation. It's not just "normal" internet users that got concerned about the (ab)use of their data, it also includes a lot of hardcore geeks that are really pissed off.
Yes, indeed - unfortunate it took this huge mess to raise these issues among the geekerati, but that's how it usually works (same with the Facebook TOS controversy; whether or not that actually changed the way business is done is another matter). Jean
Christian said:
Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently remarked about Internet privacy: "If you have something that you do not want anyone to know, maybe you should not be doing it in the first place², which points towards a lack of understanding of the online surveillance threat and privacy issues.
If only we Google were subject to the same standards. After all, corporations are people, too! Cris -- Cristina Lopez, Ph.D. Educational Technology Consultant Office of Information Technology University of Minnesota 212 Walter Library 117 Pleasant St., SE Minneapolis, MN 55455 612.626.6639 "Everything we see hides another thing we want to see." René Magritte On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 2:44 AM, Jean Burgess <je.burgess@qut.edu.au> wrote:
Mark, Christian and list members,
Christian said:
Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently remarked about Internet privacy: "If you have something that you do not want anyone to know, maybe you should not be doing it in the first place², which points towards a lack of understanding of the online surveillance threat and privacy issues.
Absolutely, and there is something more to this jaw-droppingly blasé statement as well. I don't think it's *only* a result of Google's desire to facilitate and track and cross-aggregate everything everyone does on the internet ever (which is clearly the manifest destiny of Google, and several others).
We also had this today in the WSJ:
'After taking steps to stem the public backlash against its social-networking service Buzz, Google Inc. is planning further updates and considering changing how it tests new Buzz features.
Google product manager Todd Jackson said in an interview Monday that the number of people initially uncomfortable with the service underscored that the company's approach of testing Buzz among its employees hasn't been sufficient."
"Getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn't quite the same as letting Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild," Mr. Jackson said. "We needed to launch to the public and get feedback from users." '
(Thanks to Michael Zimmer for tweeting the link)
As various commenters have pointed out elsewhere, Google's apparent "lack of understanding" of the threats to privacy has an identity politics as well. At least in my head (and tell me if I'm crazy), the ideal, undifferentiated internet user says: "I mean, I live my life online and it's fine. I don't care who knows which Starbucks I'm using my Blackberry at or which of my business contacts I compare Geek 2.0 conferences with or what Business 2.0 book I'm buying." All very obvious - assumed, unrecognised privilege that goes with a certain class position, geographically myopic worldview despite the desire for global colonisation, etc.
But this assumption of a universal 'we'; the complete carelessness about the idea that public exposure can do harm; the shrugging off of the social complexity of social media, and so on, also have a gender politics. In some of the *critique* of Googlebookspacetube, so does a similar shrugging off of the messy mix of pleasure, affinity, and risk of social media participation; and indeed the insistent bracketing off of concrete lived experiences, so we can get at the main game: Economics. The World. History. Everything.
But back to Buzz. Most obviously, as the widely circulated (but now password-protected) "F**k You, Google" blog post on the Fugitivus blog so clearly demonstrated, even in the affluent West, if you have ever had a stalker, an abusive ex- or current partner, or live in a community/family where it might not be safe to be outed as gay, there are plenty of things you might not want people to know you're saying or doing. It doesn't mean you "should stop doing them" - or saying them - on the Internet.
What would a social media platform look like if it listened carefully from the beginning to what users are actually doing with the platform - collectively constructing a wide and often overlapping range of uses, communities, etc., including a nuanced set of publicity/privacy settings. What if the provider provided the tools to do that, and didn't come crashing in in the middle of the night to redesign everything and randomly release 'features' that have no obvious relationship to the practices of users?
To finish by returning to the subject of business if not capital-E Economics:
I understand that there is actually no business case for blanket privacy in the free-to-use, advertising-supported business model that drives Google, Facebook, and Twitter (indirectly), but I'm not sure there isn't a business model (where "business model" might or might not include a profit motive) that could work quite well and treat user communities with more respect - including respect for the knowledge and expertise they have developed through their work as users. I still think Flickr had it more or less right in some ways (especially in the areas of privacy settings and community governance) - but theirs is a Freemium business model (where you have a choice of a fairly full-featured free account, or a paid 'power' account).
I genuinely mean this as a devil's advocate question: given the apparent helplessness of users in a free-to-use model, are we better off as customers than we are as users? How might we ask to be addressed as citizens instead, or as well?
OK, they aren't big questions to end with or anything...
Best Jean
http://staffprofiles.ci.qut.edu.au/jean-burgess
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Thanks to Jean for this post, which opens up the big questions, in particular: "How might we ask to be addressed as citizens instead or as well?" One of the things that has struck me about Google for some time now is its ambition to take over functions that I think of as being appropriate for public utility providers or public service providers rather than commercial entities. Its ambition, for example, to serve as a global digital library, or as a high-speed broadband provider for the US or as the (e)mail service and document storage service for educational institutions, and so on. In its own upbeat way Google is the uber-privatizer of the neoliberal era. And in some ways its provision of "free" services makes it come to feel more like a public utility than a cutthroat commercial entity -- it's not (directly) selling us anything, but providing us with seemingly free services the way other public service entities do. When I see it functioning this way, it just becomes so tempting to fantasize about taking it over and turning it into a public utility or a public service corporation. I understand the shortcomings of doing this with respect to competition-fueled innovation (and the fact that utilities tend not to operate at the transnational level). But there would be certain advantages in terms of transparency, accountability, and cross-subsidization (depending on the kind of tax or fee system that could be used to support it). Not to mention that it wouldn't need to store and capture all the data it now collects for commercial purposes or to experiment with ways to use this information to promote consumption of various kinds. I think freely available broadband should be constructed along the lines of a public utility -- but Google is ahead of the game, already considering how it might provide "free" (commercially supported) broadband, thereby not only increasing its audience, but claiming the tremendous amounts of data that it will thereby be able to collect. It's hard to imagine that the payoff for collecting and using this info would offset the costs of storing it, but that, of course, is the wager of the emerging commercial model. It seems to have worked out for Google so far. In any case, the internet itself suggests that our imagined possibilities for the provision of digital services needn't be limited to the horizons of the commercial marketplace. It seems worth resisting critiques that take this horizon as a given.
Mark, thanks for this - a bit in haste, but I want to dash off a reply anyway. It won't surprise you that I have a kind of inverse but complementary view - first up, I want to suggest this: the fact that commercial motivations drive the development of platforms for cultural participation and public communication does not in itself negate their public, social and cultural value. However, the commercial imperatives of platform providers introduce genuinely new and difficult questions, precisely because their ways of engaging us as users, their regulatory mechanisms, their governance structures etc etc take little or no account of their role in producing public good. Where you say Google's "provision of "free" services makes it come to feel more like a public utility than a cutthroat commercial entity", I say it in some ways actually *is* a public utility. And in fact our participation via these platforms already includes the practices of citizenship. We have seen this with acute examples like Buzz, but also people (including me and Joshua Green) have written about issues like public archives - when YouTube is in some ways a more comprehensive repository of popular memory than many publicly funded cultural institutions, without any public responsibility (other than complying with corporate regulation), where does that leave us? I struggle to imagine how something like a public service charter could be imposed on a global giant that has already run away with the whole game; however it's useful to think through the role of state-based regulation in terms other than "Censorship!". I also think your fantasy/plan is a great thought experiment - especially thinking through what transnational service provision might look like; how publicly funded enterprises can innovate, and so on. As you say, kind of big questions! But then thirdly, just because I want to say it (and not necessarily to you personally), I must say as a cultural studies scholar I can't accept the false consciousness explanation for how Googlespacebooktube have come to be popular in the first place (we are seduced by the tools of our own enslavement which we misrecognise as agency - by which one must mean, *other* people suffer from this misrecognition). If we want to dream of alternatives, then we need to understand this too, not as seduction/manipulation, but in terms of an invitation to participate. Although replicating the scale of Google is impossible and possibly undesirable, how can not-for-profit, open source platforms, public service providers etc create the same popular warmth of invitation and insistence on usability above all that make Google, facebook, youtube, the iphone etc etc commercially successful? [With the proviso that we obviously agree that Google's recent behaviour has been anything but warm and gentle]. Jean On 17/02/10 12:56 PM, "Andrejevic, Mark" <mark-andrejevic@uiowa.edu> wrote:
Thanks to Jean for this post, which opens up the big questions, in particular: "How might we ask to be addressed as citizens instead or as well?" One of the things that has struck me about Google for some time now is its ambition to take over functions that I think of as being appropriate for public utility providers or public service providers rather than commercial entities. Its ambition, for example, to serve as a global digital library, or as a high-speed broadband provider for the US or as the (e)mail service and document storage service for educational institutions, and so on. In its own upbeat way Google is the uber-privatizer of the neoliberal era. And in some ways its provision of "free" services makes it come to feel more like a public utility than a cutthroat commercial entity -- it's not (directly) selling us anything, but providing us with seemingly free services the way other public service entities do. When I see it functioning this way, it just becomes so temp ting to fantasize about taking it over and turning it into a public utility or a public service corporation. I understand the shortcomings of doing this with respect to competition-fueled innovation (and the fact that utilities tend not to operate at the transnational level). But there would be certain advantages in terms of transparency, accountability, and cross-subsidization (depending on the kind of tax or fee system that could be used to support it). Not to mention that it wouldn't need to store and capture all the data it now collects for commercial purposes or to experiment with ways to use this information to promote consumption of various kinds. I think freely available broadband should be constructed along the lines of a public utility -- but Google is ahead of the game, already considering how it might provide "free" (commercially supported) broadband, thereby not only increasing its audience, but claiming the tremendous amounts of data that it will thereby be abl e to collect. It's hard to imagine that the payoff for collecting and using this info would offset the costs of storing it, but that, of course, is the wager of the emerging commercial model. It seems to have worked out for Google so far.
In any case, the internet itself suggests that our imagined possibilities for the provision of digital services needn't be limited to the horizons of the commercial marketplace. It seems worth resisting critiques that take this horizon as a given.
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On Feb 16, 2010, at 22:37 , Jean Burgess wrote:
However, the commercial imperatives of platform providers introduce genuinely new and difficult questions, precisely because their ways of engaging us as users, their regulatory mechanisms, their governance structures etc etc take little or no account of their role in producing public good.
Let's take that a step farther and look at how these new technologies are received and embraced by the masses. At times I really think humans are like magpies -- we are attracted to shiny objects and shall, after a cursory examination, incorporate said shiny objects into our daily life, families, communities, industries, and societies. Then -- and only then -- might we realize there may be any consequences we might not like. But by then, it's too late, we've grown accustomed to it, and so we shrug those concerns off (either intentionally or otherwise) as the "price of living in the Internet age" and carry on with our lives. Actually that's an interesting thing to ponder, come to think of it.....I see this within the information security realm all the time.
Where you say Google's "provision of "free" services makes it come to feel more like a public utility than a cutthroat commercial entity", I say it in some ways actually *is* a public utility. And in fact our participation via these platforms already includes the practices of citizenship.
I've had this thought for a while now. At what point does a Google or Akamai become a public utility? If Akamai goes down, what are the consequences for not only informaiton distribution for companies *and* government?
But then thirdly, just because I want to say it (and not necessarily to you personally), I must say as a cultural studies scholar I can't accept the false consciousness explanation for how Googlespacebooktube have come to be popular in the first place (we are seduced by the tools of our own enslavement which we misrecognise as agency - by which one must mean, *other* people suffer from this misrecognition). If we want to dream of alternatives, then we need to understand this too, not as seduction/manipulation, but in terms of an invitation to participate.
The invitation is made by making it free, fun, and viral. So folks flock like magpies toward it and then, as I said above, maybe realize too late they can't easily 'disconnect' without breaking their social ties in cyberspace, or at least making it more incovenient for others to include them in interaction via such services. As I said the other day, I have friends who would love me to be on Facebook because they end up emailing me photos of events and reunions. Sure, it's a PITA for them at times, and they may stop sending me updates......but since I've chosen not to participate, I will deal with the consequences of my decision. My social network is built, sustained, and coordinated on my terms, not through any one company. Ergo I am beholden to nobody's service. licensing, DRM, or proprietary API.[1] :) Christian makes some good points. Embracing the shiny is not a bad thing, we just need to recognize the potential consequences and not just the convenience. A common maxim in the commodities futures trading world is that "amateurs focus on how much they can make per trade; responsible professionals focus on what they might lose per trade." The same applies here on a variety of levels, I think. -rick [1] Though if the rumors of free Kindles for Amazon Prime customers is true, I'll let 'em send me one and will download a few books to play with the device. That said, I still prefer hard-copy that I 'own' and ones where nobody can observe from afar how many pages I read, when I read them, or if I skip a chapter. *g*
I'd like to add that I think opt-in versus opt-out is only part of the picture. (I am agreeing with many of the points made above and just spelling things out as I see them -- a little more detail at http://technosociology.org/?p=102). What we are witnessing is a tragedy-of-commons for privacy and surveillance. Four points: 1- Our social commons have moved online; it does not make sense to tell people to avoid these services as they essential to participating fully in the life of the 21st century. 2- Many of these are natural monopolies; due to network externalities, it makes sense that there will be one big online auction space (Ebay), one big search engine (Google), one big social directory (Facebook), one big encyclopedia (Wikipedia), etc. 3- These are corporate-controlled environments where it makes sense for those who control the design to maximize visibility. Design online is what space is to offline; it shapes and structures behavior. 4- Most people most of the time will go with the flow. Availability of opt-out will let those for whom this is a problem at the individual level to avoid negative consequences but that does not get around the societal level consequence. And that consequence is micro-level behavior that is searchable, permanent and public. That is the world we are slowly but surely creeping into. -z ----- Zeynep Tufekci, Ph.D. Department of Sociology and Anthropology University of Maryland, Baltimore County zeynep at umbc.edu or @techsoc http://userpages.umbc.edu/~zeynep/ http://www.technosociology.org
Quoth Zeynep Tufekci:
2- Many of these are natural monopolies; due to network externalities, it makes sense that there will be one big online auction space (Ebay), one big search engine (Google), one big social directory (Facebook), one big encyclopedia (Wikipedia), etc.
What do you mean by network externalities here? For some things like search, I'd tend to agree that centralisation is a simpler fit, but most applications I can think of, a good example being facebook-style 'social networking,' could work much better in a decentralised distributed way. Of course facebook is here now, and good P2P tools using for example FOAF & SSL & RSS aren't so much, but I certainly don't think it's the case that centralisation is inevitable for most things. Indeed the model of the web that Zuckerberg envisages (with a few tweaks, such as removing facebook as intermediary), in which people use their extended online network more than eg google / ebay / craigslist to find information / products / services, makes decentralis[ed/able] networks more central (excuse the pun) still. By virtue of its copyright licensing, wikipedia also somewhat avoids the problems of monopoly. The 'freedom to fork,' while far from perfect, significantly mitigates a lot of the problems with other centralised services. It's relevant to note that yesterday I listened to the recording of Eben Moglen's recent talk on freedom & the cloud ( http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2010/feb/08/audio-and-video-eben-moglens... ) and as always he's heavily influenced my thinking. As opposed to an earlier comment which suggested that many people were just apathetic about various sorts of personal data being aggregated and sold, I think the scope of what's possible and being done is largely just poorly understood. So the problem isn't so much apathy as ignorance. Nick White -- GPG : 0x04E4653F | 9732 D7C7 A441 D79E FDF0 94F6 1F48 5674 04E4 653F
I like Mark's idea that Google on the one hand has aspects of publicness and the commons that are overshadowed by its advertising-related surveillance activities that serve private profit interests. Let's try to put this into theoretical terms: I have argued in my book "Internet and Society" that in the digital economy, we find an antagonism between the networked productive forces and the class-based relations of production that are based on private ownership. We can observe this very well in the case of Google: At the level of the technological productive forces, we can observe how Google advances socialization, the co-operative and common character of the online-productive forces: Google tools are available for free, Google Documents allows the collaborative creation of documents; GMail, Blogger, and Buzz enable social networking and communication, YouTube supports sharing videos, Google Scholar and Google Books help better access worldwide academic knowledge, etc. These are all applications that can give great benefits to humans. But at the level of the relations of production, Google is a profit-oriented, advertising-financed money-making machine that turns users and their personal data into a commodity. And the result is, as Mark has stressed, large-scale surveillance and, as Charles has pointed out, the undermining of liberal democracy's intrinsic privacy value. So on the level of the productive forces, Google anticipates a commons-based public Internet from which all benefit, whereas the freedom (free service access) that it provides is now enabled by online surveillance and user commodification that threatens privacy. Google is a nice prototypical example for the antagonisms between networked productive forces and capitalist relations of production of the information economy. Cheers, Christian Andrejevic, Mark schrieb:
Thanks to Jean for this post, which opens up the big questions, in particular: "How might we ask to be addressed as citizens instead or as well?" One of the things that has struck me about Google for some time now is its ambition to take over functions that I think of as being appropriate for public utility providers or public service providers rather than commercial entities. Its ambition, for example, to serve as a global digital library, or as a high-speed broadband provider for the US or as the (e)mail service and document storage service for educational institutions, and so on. In its own upbeat way Google is the uber-privatizer of the neoliberal era. And in some ways its provision of "free" services makes it come to feel more like a public utility than a cutthroat commercial entity -- it's not (directly) selling us anything, but providing us with seemingly free services the way other public service entities do. When I see it functioning this way, it just becomes so te mp ting to fantasize about taking it over and turning it into a public utility or a public service corporation. I understand the shortcomings of doing this with respect to competition-fueled innovation (and the fact that utilities tend not to operate at the transnational level). But there would be certain advantages in terms of transparency, accountability, and cross-subsidization (depending on the kind of tax or fee system that could be used to support it). Not to mention that it wouldn't need to store and capture all the data it now collects for commercial purposes or to experiment with ways to use this information to promote consumption of various kinds. I think freely available broadband should be constructed along the lines of a public utility -- but Google is ahead of the game, already considering how it might provide "free" (commercially supported) broadband, thereby not only increasing its audience, but claiming the tremendous amounts of data that it will thereby be a bl e to collect. It's hard to imagine that the payoff for collecting and using this info would offset the costs of storing it, but that, of course, is the wager of the emerging commercial model. It seems to have worked out for Google so far.
In any case, the internet itself suggests that our imagined possibilities for the provision of digital services needn't be limited to the horizons of the commercial marketplace. It seems worth resisting critiques that take this horizon as a given.
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-- - - - Priv.-Doz. Dr. Christian Fuchs Associate Professor Unified Theory of Information Research Group ICT&S Center University of Salzburg Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18 5020 Salzburg Austria christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at Phone +43 662 8044 4823 Personal Website: http://fuchs.uti.at Research Group: http;//www.uti.at Editor of tripleC - Cognition, Communication, Co-Operation | Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society http://www.triple-c.at Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge. http://fuchs.uti.at/?page_id=40
following up a bit - I found this remark so intriguing because it is so wonderfully consistent with the sense of the relational self predominant in many indigenous societies as well as Buddhist and Confucian ones. In contrast with the modern Western sense of the individual as a core point of freedom (which justifies the rights ostensibly to be protected by the liberal-democratic state) and thereby of individual privacy as a _positive_ good (e.g., as a core space protecting development of self, choice, expression, etc.) - in indigenous/Confucian/Buddhist societies, the only reason one would want privacy is - precisely because someone has something to hide, e.g., the Chinese word close to "privacy" (until 1985 or so) translates into something dirty, hidden. Ironically, so far as I can find in cross-cultural perspectives on the sense of self and related privacy expectations - Japanese, Chinese, and Thai youth (perhaps overly influenced by too much Western media, and certainly dependent upon a growing material prosperity that affords them their own rooms) are insisting more and more on Western-style individual privacy. By the same token, a new word has been introduced in Chinese to refer to privacy in a more positive sense. Meanwhile, we in the West - whether Google or McNealy - seem to be heading in the opposite direction. McLuhan wasn't right about everything, but I think he and Harley Parker got this one about right - though, apparently, far more sanguinely than I: To an ancient Greek the discovery of private identity was a terrifying and horrible thing that came about with the discovery of visual space and fragmentary classification. Twentieth-century man is travelling the reverse course, from an extreme individual fragmentary state back into a condition of corporate involvement with all mankind. Paradoxically, this new involvement is experienced as alienation and loss of private selfhood. -- Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Counterblast (1969) and, or so I worry, the foundations of liberal democracy. or maybe not. cheers, - charles On 2/16/10 3:06 AM, "Christian Fuchs" <christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at> wrote:
Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently remarked about Internet privacy: "If you have something that you do not want anyone to know, maybe you should not be doing it in the first place², which points towards a lack of understanding of the online surveillance threat and privacy issues.
participants (12)
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Alejandro Tortolini -
Andrejevic, Mark -
Charles Ess -
Christian Fuchs -
Christopher Lueg -
Cristina Lopez -
Jean Burgess -
Nick -
Peter Timusk -
Richard Forno -
Sharon Haleva Amir -
Zeynep Tufekci