Friday morning I got a call from a CBC reporter named Laura. She had seen me tweet that I planned to turn off Facebook Places and wanted to know more for a planned piece on the Ottawa Morning radio show. My reasons boil down to the following:
Control. Although I’m a heavy user of social media, I’ve always approached it with caution. What information do I want to share, how, and with whom? When people ask me about Facebook and privacy, my answer is pretty simple – if you don’t want pictures of yourself at a keg-party on Facebook, then don’t publish them, and don’t befriend people who would publish them without your permission. It’s early going in the location game. I’d like to see how this data will be used, and how Facebook responds to the inevitable pressure to reveal more.
Benefit. I’m a pretty heavy user of location enabled applications. However, I rarely publish my location. I’m not dating, nor do I hang out in downtown clubs waiting for my friends to join me. There isn’t an obvious purpose or benefit that I can see in publishing my location at this point in time.
Privacy. Location is pretty private information. Publishing location has risks. I rarely publish my location on Twitter or Facebook today. The accuracy available with today’s GPS enabled phones simply compounds the risk.
As I said to Laura, I’m from a generation who grew up reading and internalizing Orwell’s 1984. We are rushing headlong toward Orwell’s surveillance society, if not the dystopia he wrote about. It’s fashionable to say that privacy is dead. Perhaps it is, or perhaps we simply need better tools to manage that privacy.
The last few weeks have been terrible set backs for personal privacy, and the privileges ordinary people enjoy when they buy and use music, video and other forms of media.
Today’s guest was Dr. Michael Geist, an internationally recognized expert in these areas. We discussed Bill C-61 the Canadian copyright law tabled last week, as well as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement leaked in late May which seeks to enable border searches of computers and music players, and require ISPs to cooperate to provide information about suspected copyright infringers without a warrant.
Michael gave us a brief overview of what the legislation is and how close it is to the DMCA. Bill C-61, far from being a made in Canada solution, appears to be a clone of the worst parts of the DMCA, with all kinds of negative implications for consumers, and privacy. It has generated massive amounts of commentary here as a result.
We speculated that the reason for introducing the bill now was simply to let it lie over the summer and get it out of the public consciousness.
We also talked about ACTA, which is an international treaty designed to apply the same rules between countries. Affecting the European Community, Australia, New Zealand, and North America, ACTA purportedly will have far reaching implications, including an enforcement group. Michael cautioned, however, that the treaty is still not visible to the public, and counseled the government to engage in a more transparent process.
On the call: Michael Geist, Dan York, Jim Courtney, Craik Pyke, Dave Brown, Jeb Brilliant, James Body, Peter Childs, Randall Howard and Dale Gass.
One of the current themes in the blogging world these days is how iPhone 2.0 will be the second coming of location services on handsets. I have a PILE of location enabled handsets already, with location based apps popping out the ears – maps, and navigation being the biggies. We discuss what would it take to for iPhone to really drive this forward that say, Nokia, isn’t already doing. One of the biggest issues is the time required to get a fix. Wouldn’t a network based location service be a better choice for consumers?
Secondly, one of the themes that’s on my mind these days is privacy, and individual rights. This morning we discuss two more stories around these issues:
The first is the cell phone study that secretly tracked 100K people to find out what they did during the day… anonymously, of course. And without their permission. Carriers already track this data. We ask whether there is an ethical issue around releasing it in this form. More to the point, however… what are the rules that govern the collection of this data, and how are those rules made?
The second is for Canadian listeners. Industry minister Jim Prentice is gearing up (amidst public protest) to try to introduce another copyright reform bill in Canada. Michael Geist has dubbed it the Canadian DMCA. We talk about copyright reform, the success or failure of the DMCA in the US, and what Prentice’s bill might mean to us here in the Great White North.
With any luck, the bill won’t be introduced before summer.
Paris and Lindsay’s private photos are all over Valleyway this morning. The photos were obtained via a Yahoo! hack that allowed Valleywag to access the girls private areas on MySpace. The folks at the Wag have used this as an opportunity to take a swipe at Data Portability, calling it wrongheaded. Perhaps Data Portability is [...]
It’s been a busy day for me, as I got up early in Toronto to rehearse a speech I’ve been writing for the University of Toronto MET Executive Development Program. Composed mostly of Canadian wireless carriers, this was an audience that I had been hoping to address for some time, and a market which, if [...]
Live notes from Duncan Stewart's presentation this morning: The TMT predictions are a 1 year snapshot. These are the hot areas for the next 12 months. — Internet — The rising value of digital protection: instead of "protect and serve" we are now protecting the server. My PC or smartphone is disposable – but what's [...]
Rumors are flying this morning that Microsoft will join DataPortability.org, the working group thinking through data portability issues. That would be good news, although at this point there are plenty of joiners, but only small amounts of activity in the work group forums on Google.
It boggles my mind that someone sat down and coded “Anyone who lives in the same city as me” as a privacy control and didn’t immediately smack themselves on the head for writing something so ridiculously useless and that is guaranteed to cause privacy issues. Dare Obasanjo has a point. While Facebook's privacy controls are fine [...]
Several reports emerged yesterday around three new Facebook features. Previously promised, it looks as if these will be delivered in the New Year: Fine grained privacy controls. Long demanded, it looks as Facebook users will finally be able to differentiate between business, personal, casual and other kinds of contacts. Let's hope these controls turn out [...]
Yesterday was a pretty exciting day on the privacy and data portability front. I didn't have any inkling of what was coming up next after publishing the Privacy Manifesto on GigaOm, but shortly after Plaxo, Facebook and Google all joined the Data Portability working group. That's great news, and I myself have committed to the [...]
