digitally numb

What comes after the Privacy Parenthesis?

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 10:45:56 -0400

Last Friday, I watched a live stream of a fascinating discussion between Danah Boyd and Jeff Jarvis at the Supernova conference. The conversation touched upon several interesting issues related to the tension between private and public data in the Internet age. Boyd (as always) did a great job of articulating what people are concerned about when they talk about losing privacy online. Jarvis on the other hand made an excellent point that all the recent frenzy around privacy runs the risk of alarmism. By focusing too much on privacy, we risk enjoying the benefits of publicness and transparency that the Internet makes possible. But who decides whether private or public should be the default on the Internet? Jarvis put it well, “the social Web is (triggering) Gutenberg-like changes here, so we don’t know where this is all headed.” Or do we?

Jeff Jarvis’ comments got me thinking about Professor Thomas Petit’s “Gutenberg Parenthesis” theory. At a high level, the Gutenberg Parenthesis is a very simple idea (but a big one). According to this theory, the Gutenberg era gave rise to a media culture dominated by text and the printed word, where books sat at the top of the media hierarchy and rumors heard on the street became the least reliable source of information. According to Professor Petit, this period was an interruption (or a mere parenthesis) in the broader context of media history. In the 21st century, the democratization of media creation and distribution (fueled by Web 2.0) is slowly returning us to a media culture where conversation and gossip reigns supreme. In other words, the Internet age is reversing the changes caused by the Gutenberg revolution and this can help us predict what may happen in the future of media culture. We are essentially “going forward to the past” and the nature of media in today’s digital age has a lot in common with the pre-Gutenberg era. In medieval times, because of the absence of books and a media hierarchy, sorting out the truth was left largely up to individuals. Doesn’t seem too different from today, where we often first learn about things from social media feeds or blogs rather than newspapers, books or media conglomerates. We may be progressing, but from a media culture and media cognition standpoint we could be becoming more like medieval societies. The Gutenberg Parenthesis theory owes a lot to the work of Marshall McLuhan. He famously coined the term “Global Village” in the 60’s and predicted that electronic technology was contracting the world into an interconnected electronic nervous system. This was years before the world wide web, but we are now actually living in the Global Village that is broadening our social spheres, breaking down geographic and cultural barriers and bringing us all closer.

So what does the Gutenberg Parenthesis and the Global Village have to do with privacy? To understand the connection, you have to go back to the origin of privacy. We spend so much time lamenting the loss of our cherished value of privacy without realizing that information privacy is essentially a modern invention. Medieval societies had absolutely no concept of privacy. It was only in the Gutenberg age that information privacy emerged in response to the dangers of photographs and newspapers invading the “sacred precincts of private and domestic life”. If we are entering an age that is after the Gutenberg Parenthesis, where the dissemination of knowledge is communal and shared rather than centralized and controlled, we may also come to appreciate the benefits of publicness in an interconnected Global Village. What if the age of information privacy (as we know it) was the real anomaly and not the digital age of social networks and YouTube videos? What if the Internet is not morphing us into narcissistic over-sharers, but actually making us more like our medieval ancestors (with the added benefits of literacy and democracy)? The challenge is our new village is the entire planet and privacy (like other Gutenberg-era inventions like literacy and democracy) has done a lot of good for mankind.

I don’t think the age of privacy is nearing its end, but I do think we may have to shed our old notions of privacy. As Laurent Haug put it so well in a blog post last year, “Privacy is here and doing well. It is just different, and not something that is granted at birth anymore. You have to create it, using the tools that were supposedly taking it away from you.” The question shouldn’t be whether private or public is better in the digital age or whether additional regulation is the solution. Instead, we need to focus on developing tools that help people effectively reconcile the opposing notions of private and public and control the flow of information. We need to get past scare stories like this one, which will only whip privacy advocates into a frenzy and eventually lead to policy decisions that could stifle innovation and the benefits that the social web can bring.

The future of lifelogging, reputation management and privacy

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 22:40:00 -0400

Singularity Hub had a great post today about the ‘lifelogging’ trend and what we can expect to see in the years ahead. Here’s the bottom line – it all sounds like bad news for people who worry about their privacy. Keith Kleiner does an excellent job of highlighting the potential benefits of having a detailed recorded memory, coupled with the tools to access and retrieve the data efficiently. He also briefly touches upon the fact that lifelogging is a double edged sword (who hasn’t done a thing or two that they’d rather not be reminded of?). Ultimately, Keith arrives at the conclusion that he has to embrace the idea, because as he boldly puts it “The trend is unstoppable”. Unfortunately, he’s right. But there are two key challenges (a.k.a. great business opportunities) that will need to be overcome before we see widespread adoption of lifelogging.

Lifelog analytics tools: No matter how extreme/ridiculous the idea of lifelogging in its strictest sense (recording every single minute of your life) may seem, we’re rapidly heading in that direction. We may all not know what a lifelogging camera is yet, but most of us already choose to create a record of (and in many cases broadcast) our daily activities and whereabouts via social media platforms, location-aware applications and by using the web in general. Just read Jeffrey Rosen’s excellent article “The Web means the end of forgetting” that was published in the New York Times Magazine. The difference is, we presently don’t think about what we do in terms of creating a recording our lives for the purposes of retrieving information from it in the future. This is because most of the current web-based services are not designed/marketed for this purpose and lack tools that provide its users with meaningful insights into their recorded activity (whether intentionally or not). I’ve previously written about how location-based social media services can potentially enhance their consumer value proposition by developing personalized analytics dashboards. The purpose would be to provide users with insights into the data that is gathered about their daily lives (For example, Fred Wilson got people pretty excited today with his Foursquare Google Maps Mashup). If existing social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc. don’t do this, third parties will eventually step in to fulfill the need for search and analytics features on such platforms. This will unintentionally lead us another step closer to lifelogging nirvana.

Reputation Management: Another potential roadblock facing widespread adoption of lifelogging is that the privacy-sensitive amongst us won’t easily warm up to the idea of maintaining a detailed record of their lives. However, as mediums to create, store and transmit media become more efficient with each passing day, no one will truly be able to escape this trend. You may choose to not use Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or may even go to the extreme of living life without the web, but unless you give up information technology entirely and live alone in a log cabin in the woods (and avoid any social contact), there is likely going to be a some digital record of you created by others. This is obviously going to lead to several interesting policy questions related to surreptitious data collection and respecting the rights of those that unwittingly get dragged into the lifelogs of others. In an earlier blog post, I wrote about how this impending loss of anonymity caused by social media and the web in general has its benefits and drawbacks. We will all struggle to manage our reputation by curtailing certain thoughts and actions and will eventually have to pay corporations for reputation management services (to help us enforce limits on what others record, say and share about us).

But what about privacy?

Although everything I’ve written so far may sound like privacy dystopia is inevitable, let’s first consider what people are worried about when they lament the loss of privacy in the digital age. The key issue that concerns most people is the loss of control over their data –- specifically, how it is collected, analyzed, used and shared. All the recent attention around privacy issues in the mainstream media can largely be attributed to the fact that people are not entirely sure who has their data, what they know, and how they plan to use. Panic inevitably ensues and a day doesn’t go by without someone discussing the end of privacy as we know it.

The little beacon of hope I noticed rising above all the despair was a recent New York Times article about a start up called Bynamite. They’re trying to develop a product that will give consumers control over their own information. The idea seems to be focused around giving consumers tools that empower them to extract value from their own profiles and preferences. What if this basic idea gains momentum and can be expanded beyond just one’s web surfing activities? Further, what if something along these lines can eventually be combined with sophisticated lifelog analytics tools and reputation management systems? The end result could be a single platform that not only helps us record, retrieve and analyze the most minute and mundane pieces of our online and offline lives, but also manage what is recorded about ourselves by others. Theoretically, consumers could also control their own ‘life’ profiles and (if you really want to get creative) use their own data as currency.

Is this concept too far fetched? Do consumers really want this much control? If Esther Dyson thinks that the time may have finally come for user-managed privacy tools, perhaps this could really happen down the line. I can’t be certain, but it sure beats looking into the future and proclaiming that privacy is dying!

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P.S. No post about lifelogging can be considered complete without mentioning Gordon Bell, co-author of Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything. Here’s a short video that accompanied a 2009 BusinessWeek article about his effort to build a searchable digital memory.

Billboards with eyes: smart ads invade the real world

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 14:00:00 -0400

Image Source: http://distilennui.com/photos/space-Subway-10.jpg

A consortium of 11 Japanese railway companies and their advertising partners recently launched a one year trial of digital billboards that use cameras and facial recognition technology to distinguish a person’s sex and approximate age. The data gathered will be analyzed so companies can provide interactive ads which meet the interest of people who may use the station at a certain time (the ads do not instantly update based on who is passing by). In addition, the cameras apparently do not save recorded images, but only collect and analyze data about groups of people at an aggregate level.

This should come as no surprise to people who have followed the digital signage industry and their attempts to implement smart ads in billboards. Three years ago, Mini Cooper launched an ad campaign aimed at MINI owners who chose to ‘opt-in’ to a pilot program called Motorby and share some information about themselves. The result was personal messages displayed on roadside billboards (featuring MINI ads) every time a MINI owner that opted in drove by.

The idea of embedding cameras in billboards and using facial recognition technology to identify who is in fact looking at the ad was first introduced a couple of years ago. Here’s a New York Times article from 2008 that discusses how technology may help address audience measurement limitations of billboards. Quividi (mentioned in the NYT piece) and CognoVision are two companies in this space that are actively trying to solve this problem by offering video sensors (i.e. cameras) and facial recognition technology to count viewers, the length of impressions, dwell time (the time spent near the displays), potential audience size and demographics (age + gender of the audience). Both Quividi and CognoVision appear fairly up-front about their commitment to privacy and not identifying individual viewers using their technology. However, one can imagine that as facial recognition technology advances and advertisers figure out ways to craft attractive consumer incentives using an opt-in framework; the Minority Report personalized billboards could be a real possibility in the near future. For a deeper look at the privacy issues associated with digital billboards, read this Center of Democracy and Technology’s report on building a privacy infrastructure for the digital signage industry.

For now, at least, it appears that subway commuters in Japan don’t need to be too worried about privacy. Besides, judging form this video, they’re probably too busy grappling with bigger concerns (i.e. the invasion of personal space and getting into the train) to even think about a billboard watching them.

The Twitter Mood Map

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:49:17 -0400

The Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University has been doing some interesting work on what data from social platforms like Twitter tell us about our collective state of mind. Here’s a video they have created, which displays a 24-hour Twitter Mood cycle in the United States.

Visit the Complexity and Social Networks Blog to read more about their work and how to interpret the mood map.

Paper meets pixels

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:31:00 -0400

Image Source: les éditions volumiques

When one thinks about the future of books, magazines and other paper-based media products in general, it’s easy to imagine a world of digital screens dominating. It’s inevitable and will happen in spite of romantic ideas about the sensory experience associated with reading a real book or the joys of collecting and displaying physical media objects made of paper. However, this doesn’t mean that paper-based media storage devices will go extinct in the evolutionary battle to survive in a digital future. Paper based books, magazines, games, etc. will most likely adapt by finding new ways to engage users by exemplifying the unique qualities that only a tangible medium can bring.

One such promising example I recently came across is the research being done by Etienne Mineur and Bertrand Duplat, which focuses on the relationship between reading, the physical handling of books and new technologies. Their work tries to bridge the gap between tangible paper-based media objects and digital media; demonstrating creative (and harmonious) new uses of paper and pixels.

Here’s a great example of one of their projects (a Board game with an iPhone). Visit this link for videos of some of their other prototypes in this area.

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 15:47:02 -0400

Checking out (of) location-based social networking

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 11:57:00 -0400

After reading some glowing reviews, a group of friends walk into a new restaurant. Prior to being seated, the first thing they do is pull out their Smartphones and “check-in” their location. 5 minutes later, they’re seated and the menus arrive. Not a word is exchanged but the Smartphones are in action again (checking recommendations on what’s good on the menu). I’m not even going to bother getting into all the updates and photo taking that follows during the meal. I hope you get the picture. Do you see anything wrong with it? Depending on whether you’re a social media bee that’s perpetually buzzing (and loves the addition of geo-location, check-ins and mayorships to the mix) or whether you’re not so eager to broadcast your daily whereabouts, your answer may range from “nothing” to “everything”. I personally am intrigued by the location-based social networking trend, but not impressed enough. In fact, I’ve thought long and hard about the present and future data capabilities of location-based social networks, as well as the privacy implications and potential benefits of social media in general. I do understand why people use and love these services, but I just see no value in it for me yet.

I’m obviously no Luddite. I work for an Internet company, I blog, use Twitter, Facebook, etc. and I love my iPhone (probably a little too much). But I’m also very conscious of the big role these services and devices like the iPhone are beginning to play in my daily life. It’s getting to the point where it sometimes feels like my iPhone is a portable life support system that’s there to feed my insatiable need for real-time information. The more apps I use, the more active I get on social networks, the more irresistible is the urge to pull out my iPhone and check in on my digital life and the ever-expanding ocean of information on the Internet (while checking out of my real world surroundings). Currently, the only saving grace is I can still choose where to draw the line between my daily life and my online participation — I can disconnect or “slow down”. The problem with location-based social networking is that disconnecting is not really a viable option when the very purpose of these services is to ~~blur~~ erase the lines between our offline and online lives.

Another problem with location-based social networking is that all the apparent benefits of a data-driven life could easily turn into a burden, where instead of ever living in the moment, we’re constantly attempting to construct the perfect moment or busy “planning serendipity”. As Aldus Huxley put it so well “Even the best cookery book is no substitute for a bad dinner”. Now Huxley was obviously not talking about location-based social networks and their impact on our perception, but he was right about the fact that we tend to put too much weight on symbols, information and knowledge to the point where we start to believe they are somehow more real than what they stand for. Huxley wasn’t the only one who was concerned about the problem of being overtly influenced by words, knowledge and concepts already established. Jiddu Krishnamurti (a close friend of Huxley) said “Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity”. Krishnamurti’s core philosophy was all about liberating the mind from the burdens of memory and allowing it to appreciate spontaneously of the present moment. We’re quickly moving further away from this concept of freedom because not only do we have complete access to our own memories via the Internet and geo-location based services, but we can also tap into the collective memory and knowledge of our friends and social networks. This is obviously a double-edged sword, because the more you know about the everyone’s thoughts, experiences and whereabouts, the more you are influenced to act based on the information rather than follow your instincts.

This is not only about location-based social networks. Unfortunately, we’re marching towards a world where absolute dependence on data will be commonplace and eventually, we will come to accept that there won’t be a clear separation between the “real” world and the virtual universe of information. The price we will pay is having to manage the impact of knowledge becoming an unnecessary weight on our experiences.

It’s probably a futile effort, but I’d rather stick with spontaneity, live in every moment, experience real coincidences and actually discover new things. A discounted latte is somehow not a compelling enough incentive for me to give that up just yet.

Photo

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 11:04:26 -0400

What's Next? Ad-supported Apps in Cars?

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:35:29 -0400

Read the New York Times Article: Despite Risks, Internet Creeps Onto Car Dashboards

Your Brain on Computers

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 13:00:00 -0400

Interesting series of articles in the New York Times about the price of being attached to technology:

If you want to try life without your cellphone, your online social networks or e-mail, the New York Times is also starting a video project asking readers to see what happens when they give up technology (Unplugged: Take the Challenge).

The Answer is "Yes"

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 21:50:00 -0400

Does the Internet Make You Smarter?

Vs.

Does the Internet Make You Dumber?

Living in a Game

Wed, 19 May 2010 16:39:00 -0400

Yes, Game Mechanics is the new black.

Here’s a fascinating talk by Jesse Schell (@ DICE 2010) about t~~he role that games will play in our daily lives~~ the future of advertising.

Related Post: The Social Data Balancing Act

Crowdsourcing change

Thu, 13 May 2010 15:07:00 -0400

We’re living in interesting times, where media and communications technologies, driven by the Internet, smartphones and social media are bringing about monumental transformations in our lives. Computing power and web-based services continue to grow at a pace that’s practically impossible to keep up with. In the midst of all this innovation (and hype), its great to see platforms and services emerge that are using some of the most talked about technologies to explicitly instrument some good.

Ushahidi (which means “testimony” in Swahili) is one such open-source platform that brings together the power of mobile technology, location-based social media and mapping to crowdsource citizen reporting and response. Ushahidi was built in 2007 with the intention of serving as a website that could collate eyewitness reports during the aftermath of the disputed elections in Kenya. The platform received reports about violence, riots and deaths via e-mail, SMS and Twitter and visualized the data on a map, using the location provided by individuals. The information gathered proved to be timely and incredibly useful to the organizations engaged in crisis response.

Since the Kenyan elections, this innovative platform has been deployed in a number of instances (across the globe), ranging from mapping violence in Eastern Congo, aiding in disaster response and relief efforts associated with the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, to helping with the Snowmageddon clean up effort in D.C.

The technology is now being used to track the aftermath of the Oil Spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. An environmental group called the Louisiana Bucket Brigade is using the Ushahidi’s platform to collect user-generated reports on odors in the air, sightings of oil-covered birds that are impacted, damage to property and pleas from fisherman who are losing their livelihood. This real-time reporting is helping aid organizations offer timely assistance to areas that need it the most and is helping paint a grim, yet important long-term picture of the environmental and economic impact of this crisis.

Ushahidi isn’t the only recent example of Crowdsourcing using the Internet being used to actually bring about change in the real world. San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newsom recently announced the city’s tree census project called the Urban Forest Map. It’s a crowdsourcing effort to help cities identify how many and what types of trees they have. As the website explains, this information will then help urban foresters and city planners to better manage trees in specific areas, track and combat tree pests and diseases, and plan future tree plantings.

Crowdrise is another interesting new celebrity-backed platform that’s using aspects of crowd-sourcing and social networking to allow people to build personalized online fundraising campaigns, using interactive features, points and rewards. The idea seems to be to encourage people to do something meaningful, but stay engaged and have some fun while their at it.

Or consider Every Day One Thing, a brand new Seattle-based startup that uses basic game mechanics to encourage its users to do good. You can “check-in” good deeds and earn points for things like volunteering, gardening, recycling, buying green, etc.

These are just some of the examples I came across. Let’s hope its a sign of a growing trend towards harnessing the power of new technology to not only engage and distract, but also encourage us to participate and act. As Anne Frank famously put it, “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world”. These words ring even truer in the digital age.

Related Post: Social Media for Social Good

Brave New World?

Sun, 09 May 2010 23:48:00 -0400

“You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter. And with iPods and iPads, and Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it’s putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy.”

~President Barack Obama
Commencement Speech at Hampton University (May 9, 2010).

Related Post: Social networking ourselves to death

The Social Data Balancing Act

Fri, 07 May 2010 17:32:00 -0400

Is life so boring that you need to turn it into a game? Millions of people seem to think so and that’s why companies like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt and others are the new start up darlings. To the uninformed, these services appear to be similar to Facebook or Twitter, but only scarier, because you pretty much broadcast your precise geo-location every time you “check-in” somewhere in the offline world. Facebook may be busy spreading its social graph around the Internet, but foursquare and others are actually building a social graph in the real world (which probably explains why Facebook is also jumping onto the location/check-in bandwagon sometime soon).

Of course, none of these services are only about boasting about your active social life by broadcasting every place you visit. The gaming mechanics aspect of it turns routine visits to your gym of local coffee shop into a competition with others (and a marketer’s wet dream). The game encourages you to visit new places, add tips to places you visit, learn more about your friends and yourself. Users seem willing to share more data as they get more engaged with the services. This isn’t all about fun and businesses are seeing real value here. Just ask foursquare and their recent partners like the Wall Street Journal, Bravo, Pepsi, Time Out or the Financial Times. The loyalty and location-based marketing opportunities here seem endless. But where is all this heading?

Data!

Continuously improving the gaming mechanics involved (adding new badges, rewards, etc.) is going to be an important part of keeping users engaged and attracting new ones, but as the user base of companies like Foursquare grows (they recently crossed 1 million users), the real success of these businesses will hinge on their ability to mine the rich data that is being assembled by the minute.

A lot of people tend to think that the privacy issues here are less important because users proactively choose to broadcast their location by participating in such services. However, it all really depends upon what these services do with the data (or the social graph) they assemble. At this point they can pretty much do what they want, but as we’ve seen from recent examples, those actions are not without its consequences.

What companies like Foursquare decide to do with the data can either:

directly benefit their users: improve their understanding of their city, friends and themselves;
indirectly benefit their users: great marketing offers, discounts, freebies etc.; or
offer what appears to be zero user benefit: share it with third parties who may in turn do whatever they please (whether good or bad).

Is this a privacy issue? Yes and no. It’s what I prefer to call the social data balancing act. On one end of the scale is the value proposition for the user/consumer and on the other end is the value proposition for the business. Of course, the two value propositions are not mutually exclusive, but achieving the right balance is the hardest part.

Here are some of the data choices that lay ahead:

Enhance the consumer value proposition: Use the social graph data to generate a personalized analytics dashboard that provides rich insight and context into each users offline activities based on what they share on such services (places they visit, people they hang around with, emotions they feel). I’m not talking about the simple statistics and history they report now, but layering context and insights to identify patterns and make recommendations on how users can act on the data to improve their lives (e.g. recommended things to do or people to spend time with to make their day more enjoyable, based on previous behaviors). Think of it as a secure, user-specific performance dashboard that can help people optimize their lives based on data! Read this fascinating article from the New York Times about the potential value of a data-driven life.

Enhance the business value proposition: Mine the social graph data in the manner outlined above and assemble detailed psychological and behavioral profiles of all the users of such services with the goal of segmenting them into categories that can be packaged with data assembled from other sources (online and offline) to build rich profiles and insights that can ultimately be shared with marketers and other third parties for a price.

To be honest, it’s probably not even a question of choice. The real question is how all (or some) of the above will get done in a manner that balances competing interests, while ensuring the growth of the location-based social media business model. No matter how ridiculous the location trend appears to non-users, if you think about where all this is heading, you will realize that there could be some social value here. The bad news is that extracting that value will require some careful maneuvering through the murky and often stormy waters of privacy, consumer rights, responsible data use, the role of advertising, etc.

Let’s get this right

Social data will continue to grow no matter what, but we can use it to either enhance or disrupt our lives. If we somehow get this right, location-based social media businesses can not only be profitable, but can also create amazing consumer experiences that help their users live happier and better lives.

Ultimately, let’s hope we all come to realize that turning life into a game may not be that bad an idea after all.

Say hello to the Zettabyte!

Wed, 05 May 2010 15:13:00 -0400

So, how rapidly is the Digital Universe expanding?

Last year, despite the global recession, the Digital Universe set a record. It grew 62% to nearly 800,000 petabytes (a petabyte is a million gigabytes). Picture a stack of DVDs reaching from the earth to the moon and back.
This year, the Digital Universe will grow almost as fast to 1.2 million petabytes, or 1.2 zettabytes.
This explosive growth means that by 2020 our Digital Universe will be nearly 50 TIMES AS BIG as it was in 2009. Our stack of DVDs would now reach halfway to Mars.**

What will your job, business, social life, privacy and security look like in a world where all media, knowledge and culture is digital, online, semantically interlinked and in the hands of various data custodians?

THINK ABOUT IT.

**For more information, check out this interesting video by market intelligence firm IDC.

Beyond Privacy – the need for value sensitive design in social media

Tue, 04 May 2010 13:39:00 -0400

I’ve written previously about the need for a simple volume know-like control panel for controlling information we choose to share via various social platforms on the internet. The basic idea behind this approach is that notions of privacy vary and continue to evolve as personal and social norms and attitudes change. Therefore, it’s important to let individuals manage their own expectations of privacy. Responsible use of data is an empty promise if your users don’t feel confident about the ability to control the flow of their information in an easy and efficient manner. But privacy and control of data is not the only issue that’s causing consumer confusion and drawing the ire of advocates and lawmakers. It’s part of a much bigger issue that’s the source of a lot of the widespread concern about social media.

This core issue is the development and release of social platforms and new features that have the potential of impacting millions of individuals across the world with what appears to be little or no consideration paid to human values. Yes, new technologies are not necessarily value neutral. Batya Friedman and Peter H. Kahn, Jr. first shed light on this important issue in The human-computer interaction handbook.

According to Friedman and Kahn, there are three basic theories about biases in technology:

The Embodied Theory — technologies reflect the biases of their inventors.
The Exogenous Theory — biases emerge because of the way society shapes the use of such technologies (beyond the influence or control of the original designer).
The Interactional Theory — biases in technology are partly caused by the original design (embodied theory) and the social impact (exogenous theory). Therefore, according this theory, biases in technology emerge because of the biases of the designer and those of the people using it. In addition, technologies themselves have the ability to shape individual and social behavior.

Value Sensitive design uses the Interactional theory, a tripartite methodology, and emphasis on direct and indirect stakeholders as an approach to designing technology that accounts for human values in a principled and comprehensive manner.

I’m not advocating a detailed research project before developing and launching every new social media system or feature, but here’s an illustrative list of 10 basic questions that should be asked:

What is the intended business purpose of the system/ feature?
What is the intended user-focused purpose of the system/feature?
Are the current and potential business purposes made clear to the user?
What are the potential uses of the system/feature?
What is the potential impact (negative and positive) on direct stakeholders (the users) ?
What is the potential impact (negative and positive) on indirect stakeholders (other parties that may be affected by the use of the system or feature)?
What are the key issues involved? In other words, what human values are impacted (e.g. ownership and property, physical welfare, freedom from bias, universal usability, autonomy, privacy, security, etc.)?
How can the system/feature balance competing values (e.g. cooperation vs. privacy)?
How do users behave when using the system/feature?
What information is provided by design and performance tests?

If you’re not prepared to ask and answer the above questions before finalizing the design of a social media system or feature (or for that matter any consumer-facing Internet-based product), you better at least have a good communications plan to deal with the PR backlash that will inevitably follow.

Gripe, grumble, whine and vent at BLAHtherapy.com

Sun, 02 May 2010 18:29:00 -0400

Random chat sites don’t seem to be going away any time soon. BLAH Therapy is the latest entrant that’s trying to put its own unique twist to the Chatroulette model. The easiest way to describe BLAH Therapy is that its like Chatroulette, with a specific purpose and no video (for now). You can either choose to be a “Listener” and help another user or be a “Venter” and chat your problems away. The service randomly connects you to a stranger for an anonymous therapy session.

Psychcentral.com tested BLAH Therapy and has a detailed review (with pros and cons).

I’m not sure if this is actually going to turn out to be a useful (and popular) social media site. As the review on Psychcentral points out, you can’t be sure that your chat logs will remain private. Further, BLAH Therapy doesn’t seem to make it clear what they plan to do with the chat logs. Of course, this is probably not going to stop people from using it. But a bigger problem may be that the specific purpose is too limiting and that BLAH Therapy may need to add more features to make it entertaining enough for users to stay engaged.

Time will tell, but for now it seems to be averaging around 300 active users online, which pales in comparison to Chatroulette’s supposed 20,000 active users.

Looks like shrinks don’t have much to worry about. Not yet, anyway

Digital Air and Digital Oil – why privacy matters

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 13:12:00 -0400

“Data is digital air”, proclaimed Danah Boyd in her riveting keynote at the WWW2010 conference. She makes some excellent points about Big Data, privacy and the importance of context in this highly recommended read.

So if data is digital air, what does it mean for the future of media? We’ve seen some monumental shifts in the industry during the last few years and we’re currently in the midst of an epic struggle between media and technology companies for control over a fragmented digital media universe. No one has a true monopoly over user attention on the Internet. In fact, content is now abundant and attention is scarce, so how do you find an audience in a media landscape in which no one is truly only consuming, but also creating, sharing and interacting?

By filtering the digital air supply — by aggregating and curating digital media and building better tools for consumers to create, access and share the media they want. That’s how you can attempt to capture audiences. And in a world where consumers have more choices than every before, the only way you can hope to keep their attention is by building trust.

As Danah Boyd points out. “Privacy is not about control over data nor is it a property of data. It’s about a collective understanding of a social situation’s boundaries and knowing how to operate within them”. In other words, privacy is all about trust and not violating user expectations around their data.

If Data is Digital Air, User Data is Digital Oil. It’s the data that fuels the Internet economy, but it’s also a scarce natural resource that is dependent on the ability to build and maintain user trust. Like oil, user data needs to be managed in a responsible, sustainable manner. If you violate user trust, you run the risk of turning away users and the data that comes with it.

Let’s prevent a digital oil crisis.

Can you disappear in the digital age?

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:13:40 -0400

Erasing David trailer from Green Lions on Vimeo.

A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT PRIVACY, SURVEILLANCE AND THE DATABASE STATE

David Bond lives in one of the most intrusive surveillance states in the world. He decides to find out how much private companies and the government know about him by putting himself under surveillance and attempting to disappear, a decision that changes his life forever. Leaving his pregnant wife and young child behind, he is tracked across the database state on a chilling joi urney that forces him to contemplate the meaning of privacy and the loss of it.

In cinemas from April 29th