There are plenty of motivations to use Social Networking Sites (SNS) and many risky ways for your privacy and security in using them. Why, then, keep using them?
SNS have profiles for their individuals, links to other people and a social graph that maps your network.
Your profile expresses and identifies, in some way, with your identity. But it’s not only what you say about you, but what your “friends” say about you: the people you befriend in a SNS is also adding up to your own identity.
People that you befriend, talk about you, comment the things you say or state, and links between users are created. Links that, all together, form a social graph where you can map your friends, the friends or your friends, etc.
Some false assumptions in SNSs
If everybody’s doing it, you do it too
There’s many people doing it, so I’ll keep unnoticed
False sense of privacy, “I’m alone here”
Feeling that everybody’s like us in the SNS
Electronic mediation makes us underestimate the impact of our actions
Distorted sense of (real) friendship and of knowing who the others are
Feeling that everything is under control and that one can “see” everything
Social harms
Disclosure: letting some intimacies known on SNS can spread quicker and broader than anywhere else
Surveillance: the mere sense of being watched all the time is by definition a limit to your own freedom (and scary and creepy to many too)
Instability: assumptions about an SNS that prove wrong along time, leading to privacy issues, e.g. seein photos you shouldn’t be allowed to see, Facebook Beacon, bugs…
Disagreement: you might not agree with some privacy issues, e.g. you can remove a tag from a photo, but not the photo itself. Or you would want to remove someone as a friend, but this someone feel hurt if you do, which leads to an embarrassing situation.
Spillovers: my decisions might have consequences to your privacy. Your decision on your profile affect who can see my information (e.g. you decide your friends list is public, hence I appear on your profile)
Denigration: defamation, attacks to persona, including how you present yourself. And this can be really subjective: how you match different groups of people (professional acquaintances, family, friends) reading the same type of information about you, without context, without filtering. And more: your profile can degenerate into an advertising platform.
Solutions?
Clearer privacy policies, but how to make simple what is complex?
Better technical controls to customize your privacy levels, better definitions, higher accuracy or detail in controlling your privacy setup
Data ownership: you should be free to take your information and move it where you want, data portability. If I’m your friend on a SNS: whose is this information (i.e. “we are friends”), yours or mine? Data portability is a solution but also a way to circumvent and decontextualize some security issues about privacy
The same motivations that drive us into SNS are the ones that lead to mistakes, and mistakes lead to harms. This makes really difficult how to solve some problems related to privacy.
Most privacy violations are produced by ourselves, we have met the enemy and he is us, it’s individual users (not anonymous big brothers) the ones that are violating privacy on a peer-to-peer basis.
Privacy violations spread as a virus: SNS are privacy viruses that spread from person to person.
Q&A
Miquel Peguera: how should default settings be set? is data portability the solution? A: default settings should be set to more privacy friendly levels. New features, for instance, are set on an opt-out basis, not an opt-in. The problem with data portability is whose is the ownership of data, specially when this “ownership” is shared?
Q: why is Facebook’s newsfeed a weapon? A: The problem is that there is a huge granularity on what you (and Facebook… and advertisers) can see and use for several purposes.
Ismael Peña-López: isn’t privacy overstated? A: Even if that might be true, the question is that people seeked some cover in SNS thinking that they privacy was assured there vs. the openness of the broad Internet. And the fact is that people got outraged when they found they search for privacy had been violated. So the point is not whether privacy is good or not, but that some people’s desire for privacy was guaranteed and then systematically violated.
Q: What happens when privacy can lead to crime? A: A big difference between SNS and typical surveillance tools is that the later are held by the power that should be having this kind of control, and opperated on a transparency basis. Instead, SNS surveillance systems are more complex, distributed and highly out of control.
Mònica Vilasau: are we more confident on the Net than offline? A: Psicologycal effects are really important in how we behave on SNSs.
Daithí Mac Sithigh: What are going to be the next steps of Facebook in the subject of privacy? A: Facebook is an extraordinary arrogant company. Dealing with privacy discussion, they would acknowledge they made a mistake, but won’t move back and, especially, won’t loose control.
Q: Can we increase control on existing or new SNSs? A: What we’ve been seeing so far is that this is a major challenge, that what people look for in networks is exactly the opposite of what would be needed to make these networks more privacy compliant.
More Information
Grimmelmann, J. (forthcoming 2009) Saving Facebook In Iowa Law Review, #94
As the presentation shows, the speech is made up of four parts or general ideas:
The industrial era — or the industrial economy — is based (among many other things) on two main issues: scarcity and transaction costs. These two limitations have shaped the world as we know it, especially institutions: schools, parties and governments, firms, civic associations… When shifting towards a knowledge based economy, both issues of scarcity and transaction costs fall down into pieces. Will institutions, and intermediation in general, follow?
Second part is an overview on some of these institutions, and how their models and, sometimes, their sheer survival is threatened by these radical changes on costs and scarcity. Some will violently disappear, some will just fade, some will suffer adaptations along the following years. All in all, it’s about the risk of exclusion from society — not digital exclusion —, the risk of becoming worthless.
Thus, there might be a need for new (digital) competences to face the present and the nearest future. These competences (to be acquired both by individuals and institutions) will be necessary to interact with each other and rebuild how we learn, work, or engage in politics or everyday life.
I want to heartily thank Jordi Graells for giving me the excuse — actually, to push me — to sit down and put together some ideas that had been rambling on my mind for some time. The title is his and it was great inspiration that helped me in weaving those ideas together. Not surprisingly, his work with the Catalan e-Justice Community (Compartim) is a most inspiring one too.
The next 5th Internet, Law and Political Science Congress has been scheduled for 6th and 7th July 2009. Organized by the School of Law and Political Science at the Open University of Catalonia (Barcelona, Spain), the event has evolved into an interesting forum where it is highlighted what’s happening nowadays in the fields of law and cyberlaw, intellectual property rights, privacy, data protection, freedom, political engagement, politics 2.0, empowerment, etc.
Aimed to both researchers and practitioners, during the four editions that we’ve been running the congress, we’ve had here people the like of Jonathan Zittrain, John Palfrey, Eben Moglen, Helen Margetts, Lillian Edwards, Yves Poullet, Erick Iriarte, Stefano Rodotà or Benjamin Barber, among others.
The main topic this year is social networking sites (SNSs, in a broad sense). We want to have sessions were at least two speakers present opposite points of view (pros and cons). The programme (almost closed, though some changes might apply) is as follows:
Keynote speech with James Grimmelmann, providing an analysis of the law and policy of privacy on social network sites, and an evaluation of some possible policy interventions.
Daithí Mac Sithigh will be the official reporter of the event, providing, at the end of each day, a summary of the main subjects dealt in that day’s sessions.
Kevin Macdonald’s State of Play is not a (good) film about the end of print newspapers and way not about democracy in the age of the Information Society. But watched under these points of view, it does (totally accidentally) provide some materials for reflection worth mentioning them.
A print paper story
The plot can be summarized as old-school investigative journalism star teams up with junior on-line journalist/blogger to uncover case of political corruption, murder, criminal lobbying, bribery and other US Congress political sphere related issues.
When the whole set of conspiracies are about to be discovered, some things happen (caution: simplifications, biases and spoilers ahead):
These news are too good to be published in a blog, they well deserve being printed on paper (approximate quote)
As some details lack to complete the news, rotary presses are hold on stand by for hours and the edition is not closed
In the meanwhile, some criminals die or almost die
In the meanwhile, some witnesses die or almost die
In the meanwhile, some reporters die or almost die, risking the loss of absolutely all the relevant information
At the end, the pieces of news are written, edited, prepared for printing
Newspapers are printed, cut, folded, packed and put on trucks to be distributed… the day after
On-time democracy
It is under the light of some recent news that we have to interpret the preceding list of events. For instance:
During the Night of the short text messages, March 13th, 2004, after the Madrid (Spain) bombings of March 11th, 2004, people gathered in front of the headquarters of the party of the then Primer Minister to ask for transparency in the reports of the government (see also ¡Pásalo! Relatos y análisis sobre el 11-M y los días que le siguieron, 619 KB). Millions of SMS where sent and thousands of people literally took the streets angry with the news they where getting.
On Tuesday, April 7th, 2009, people gathered at the Piata Marii Adunari Nationale, in Chisinau (Moldova), in a demonstration against a possible election rigged by the Communist party. Despite the lack of consensus (see Unpacking “The Twitter Revolution” in Moldova and Studying Twitter and the Moldovan protests) on whether Twitter played an important role in organizing the demonstration, it is beyond doubt that Twitter did create an international debate around it. In a matter of hours.
This is not about news, this is about information. This is not about just being “notified” of happenings, but about being informed to debate, create oneself a state of opinion and act. This is not about journalism, this is about government and democracy and freedom.
In the age of the digital revolution, denouncing the Spanish Primer Minister’s lies or the presumably rigged Moldovan election cannot wait until the following day. And, most important indeed, these facts cannot risk not being made public at all because of lack or loss of intermediaries.
In matters of hours — especially in a Globalized and Network Society — governments change hands, people get imprisoned and executed, or citizens lose all their savings.
To me, the last sequence of Kevin Macdonald’s film — a trip through the whole process of printing a newspaper — is not the intended elegy to print newspapers, but a visit to the Jurassic Park of journalism. If newspapers are the guarantors of transparency and accountability, if newspapers do serve the citizenry, they have to do it at the pace of times, at the pace of that citizenry they claim to be pretending to serve.
To me, the first quotation — These news are too good to be published in a blog, they well deserve being printed on paper — should be understood in terms of comfort (paper for the couch and the weekend, online for the mobile Internet and immediacy) rather than in terms of importance (though time will tell what the evolution of e-ink/e-paper will bring).
In the age of crossmedia, McLuhan’s the medium is the message is over. There are no media. No more. As true that there are no Internet users (as an ontology), but people, sheer people that are increasingly adopting yet another device to do what the zoon politikon does best: to communicate and to engage in conversations.
There’s more in P2P than file sharing — and way more than music or movie “piracy” —. Can P2P networks change citizenry, engagement or governance? Is it a new way of thought? Is it citizenship empowerment?
Relevant questions to pose to ourselves:
Can we create culture together?
Is self-management and self-government possible?
Are the commons or public ownership possible?
P2P is shared resources in the digital era. Can it be translated into the analogue world?
Olivier Schulbaum presents the Bank of Common Knowledge, a project that applies P2P tools in the “analogue” world to work with and create communities that share knowledge. Tools emanate from the free software movement, enacted by a network of volunteers.
The Bank of Common Knowledge (BCK) works at two levels: cells, that cluster interests and experts in long-term exchange experiences; and microtasks, aimed to quick exchange of knowledge. Besides these two main axes, other models apply: consultancy, handbooks, etc.
One of the main goals of the BCK is to replicate it elsewhere or to apply it to different environments (the University, the corporation…), as though as benchmarking other experiences like banks of time, etc.
Liberty, equality and P2P Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation
How do we change the society? We come from a tradition where “there is no alternative” to the economic and social system we’re living in. It was believed that only power could bring change in. But the end of slavery at the end of the Roman Empire was a matter of a social change that emerged bottom-up, not top down from the power. The Industrial Revolution was also a grassroots approach to disclose new patterns of doing things, in this case moving from land to capital.
We now see new patterns emerging, new forms of property and new ways of producing and of social practices. We are building a new society which sees new ways of disaggregation, highly decentralized organizations. People aggregate to create added value.
Three new things emerging today:
The ability to create in common
The ability of participants to manage the processes, to govern themselves
The ability to protect the resulting value from private appropriation
P2P is a third mode of production, governance and property.
Centralization is no more needed: we can broadcast our needs and people will aggregate around tasks according to their profiles and the described needs. Indeed, we have design from inclusion, where design itself is collaboration based.
No more division of labor, but distribution
No exclusivity, but inclusivity
No composite tasks, but granular
No finished products, but unfinished artifacts
If we lower costs of access and transaction, motivation will enable the emergence of common interests and cluster communities together.
If a traditional for profit company faces an open community, it is likely to loose: Britannica vs. Wikipedia, Explorer vs. Firefox, etc.
Key factors of success:
Motivation, based on self-interest — not extrinsic, enforced, monitorized motivation
P2P brings externalities into the system
P2P makes it possible to create things that the market cannot commoditize and/or set prices in exchange of it
Innovation stays within the system and is added up to the process — it is not taken away from an external owner
Open design and open innovation as the core of the evolution forward of P2P production.
The crisis of value: “making things is not more interesting”, as added value in manufactures is dropping. Marketing information does not make any much sense any more, as information is abundant, the information economy just will not work. Only open design will work.
Business models move along two axes: open vs. close and paid vs. free. Traditional business models work on a paid+closed basis. The free software business model works on an open+paid model: you charge not on the product, but on services around it. Closed+free is based on a portfolio approach. Last, open+free is based on common value.
The role of capital has changed: to innovate, in many cases you don’t need capital any more. There is a divorce between entrepreneurism and capitalism.
The core value of the whole system will be the P2P process, based on a gift economy, on values, and away from a market based core paradigm, where everything is a commodity.
To enable a P2P society we need distributed institutions.
Q & A
Enric Senabre: Isn’t it fragile to have everything distributed, dis-allocated, in remote places? A: Opennes creates value, and closeness captures it. Communities can create the necessary social struggles to avoid fragilities to break. On the other hand, struggles of control are needless if everyone gets its benefit/profit from the community.
Enric Senabre: sharing and helping as way of living isn’t an ancient concept, religiously talking? A: It is scarcity that creates hierarchies. It is very different being a teacher or a facilitator than being a guru or a priest. There’s an ethic or moral difference there.
Oliver Schulbaum: do we need a state of the commons? A: We need an enabling authority, an institution that fosters social innovation so that the community becomes more competitive. If you loose your job, the Welfare State will pay you to do nothing (which is better than starving). But if you can keep on contributing in an open system, you can do things, create value, get a reputation, continue to be active and productive. We need institutes of the commons, incubators and we have to create mechanisms, new ways of patronage so that people can contribute in projects.
Q: What are the risks of losing net neutrality? What other freedoms are in danger? A: The good news are that people have been able to create organized decentralized coalitions to efficiently fight for their rights.
Ismael Peña-López: we’ve talked about engaging and enabling motivation. What do we do with the failures of the P2P model, e.g. free-riders or people that objectively add little or no value? A: P2P processes (1) getting people (2) selection and (3) defending from your enemies or infections. Free-riding might not be an issue in a world of abundance, where there is no scarcity and no competition or for consumption. So, free-riding does not destroy P2P, to say the least. And it can even be a learning process. Of course P2P is not perfect, but it’s better than the existing system.
Q: How do we create social networks owned by the citizens, how do we gain autonomy from proprietary and closed platforms? A: sharing and commons modes are different, and we have to decide what model do we want. The P2P model can be based on both modes. And, indeed, communities have to be conscious that enablers (e.g. YouTube or FaceBook) do have to get support (funding) for their job.
Maria Jesús Salido: how far do have to go until the P2P model is fully sustainable? can it be applied in a mixed model where traditional capitalist systems live together with P2P initiatives? Can e.g. intellectual property rights, backing systems, etc. allow for P2P initiatives? A: It is possible to create P2P communities compatible with a non-P2P framework.
I have been invited to provide a very brief framework about the subject, so that Bauwens can go straight to the core of the issue and deal with the revolutions that P2P can bring to the creation of culture, political and civic engagement and participation or the producing economy.
So, in 10 minutes I will present the main lines of the following statements:
Digital tools have reduced marginal costs of transactions nearly to zero, making necessary a redefinition of concepts such as firm, group, distance, original & copy, send, time, etc.
The most important commodity in the Information Society is information. It acts as input, output and capital at the same time and it is not scarce, but abundant. Value is not embedded in itself (as, say, food) but in being able to convert it into knowledge.
P2P is free circulation of information, based on two assumptions: information is abundant (valueless) and transactions are costless.
There is a huge potential in P2P to foster many advancements in society — way beyond file sharing — like government and politics (goverati, citizen mashups), education (casual and distributed education, deschooled society), science (open science, eScience, eResearch, grids) or production (design & fabs, networking), just to name a few.
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619 KB). Millions of SMS where sent and thousands of people literally took the streets angry with the news they where getting.
