Musings of a Gora

With the release of Buzz, and the much hyped privacy disaster coming so soon after rumors that Google was talking with the NSA< one has to ask whether or not Google really is trying to kill privacy.

An unfortunate thing about privacy, in the online space, is that privacy there is directly connected with access to anonymity. There is essentially no anonymity online, without taking active measures yourself to ensure anonymity. As there is no anonymity, there is little or no true privacy.

It’s probably important to understand why there is no anonymity. A brief explanation, when you are surfing the web you have a unique IP address, whether it is one address distributed to many sub addresses connected to a home or office router, or your computer connected directly. This IP address is noticed by the website you arrive at, which can now also gather the url you arrived from and the url you depart to. Utilizing “cookies” which are small pieces of text your web browser stores locally, websites can gather more information about you and your browsing habits. When you connect these with personally identifiable data like Amazon.com or Facebook, or even iGoogle accounts, you start to see how your anonymity dissipates.

It is precisely because of the need to move from more anonymous data to less anonymous data that companies like Facebook are doing so well, and companies like Google are exploring how to get into the social media game. Unfortunately for Google, they underestimated the importance of “privacy in context.”

I’m not sure I agree with Helen Nissbaum’s thesis in overall, but I do agree with this:

The nuts-and-bolts of my theory says that privacy depends on the social context of information being shared and what’s appropriate for those contexts.

What Google forgot is that, even though any n00b privacy activist will tell you that email is not private without encryption, people feel anonymous and feel private with their email. Just as an individual might be empowered by wearing a mask, that same individual can be empowered by email to engage in activities they wouldn’t otherwise.

The question of anonymity online, full anonymity, is rarely considered by many outside of threatened human rights activists and privacyphiles. The feeling of anonymity or privacy however is taken for granted.

When first Facebook, and then Google Buzz suddenly began broadcasting information about users to the world, in Facebook’s case to everyone and in Google’s case “following” everyone you email or chat with regularly based on some unknown algorithm known only to them, these users came face to face with the latter-day Panopticon.

Some readers may think I’m at risk of drifting into histrionics here about the rise of a security state or the NSA tracking your computers location via internet latency measurements, or the FBI wanting access to your browser history. This is not what I am attempting to suggest. I see the Google Buzz accident as an event that demonstrates the desire of Google to eliminate the idea of privacy, so that we become not just happy existing in a digital panopticon, but so that we recognize its there, and then forget.

Under such a lens it makes sense that Google would ask the NSA for help, or that they would so greatly underestimate the potential backlash from Google Buzz.

According to NYT, Sergey Brin of Google said that by offering social communications, Buzz would help bridge the gap between work and leisure.

In the same article, something perhaps more blatantly reminiscent of a Panopticon comes from Facebook:

“We don’t aspire to be just a Web site where people connect and share with friends,” said Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook developer network and a former Google executive. “We want to be the underlying technology people use to connect with friends wherever they are on the Web.”

Google wants to kill anonymity. So does Facebook. Their business models depend on it. They want to kill anonymity more than privacy, but if they continue to kill privacy context, people will continue to be up in arms.

Unfortunately, you should be more worried about access to anonymity and the increasing interconnection of your everyday actions with a searchable, aggregatable, quantifiable database that is the Internet.

Jeremy Bentham could perhaps not have imagined a world where closed circuit cameras turned “public space” into its own panopticon, where shoppers and citizens alike could never know who was watching them, monitoring their movements, keeping an eye whether they were acting for good or ill. Such power could surely only be reserved for an omniscient/omnipresent being the threat of whose observations, lets be honest, were the actual precursor to the Panopticon.

The increase in sociality some have begun talking about also tends toward the potential for increasing the reach and capabilities of the State. It’s yet another reason that we should continue to push for access to anonymity online. If privacy is effectively killed, and your every online habit can be broadcast to an infinite number of “guards” sitting at their own little “observation posts” ie web browsers, it won’t be long until most of us begin to ignore the internet Panopticon as much as we do the one at Walmart, our office job, or the local shopping mall.

That’s not a future I’m anxious to see. What are your thoughts? Please comment!

I saw an interesting discussion on Twitter this morning(late night their time, remember I’m in India at GMT+5.5). A variety of #mediaagitators were discussing the term “voiceless.”

Here is a selection:

digidem “Tweets and Blogs: Social Media as a Voice for the Voiceless” @emjacobi invited to give talk at American University on community empowerment

SamGregory @DigiDem Is anyone truly voiceless? Or they are just being ignored if/when they use their voice?

audaciaray .@lksriv @SamGregory @DigiDem I really hate it when people are referred to as “voiceless” – so patronizing and disempowering

maymaym Yes! We’re not voiceless—they’re not listening. ♺ @audaciaray: Hate it when ppl are referred to as “voiceless.” Patronizing & disempowering.

emjacobi @audaciaray @lksriv @samgregory – i’ve been off twitter all day, but i agree completely that no one is “voiceless” & said so.

I fully understand that there is a distinction between being voiceless and being unheard or ignored. I am concerned that for the privileged, and lets be clear, anyone who has direct access to Twitter counts as “privileged” in my book, it can be problematic or worrisome to spend too much time discussing the semantics of our relationship to power and privilege.

Perhaps we can work toward an effective and meaningful definition of those we’d like to be collaborating with?

The primary issue I see with the term “voiceless” is that by defining someone you’d like to collaborate with as disempowered you have immediately created a power divide. You cannot help but stratify your relationship if you define your relationship as one based on their need and your support.

At Small World News we have primarily worked to see how we can use our privilege to support others to magnify their voice, to strengthen their broadcast, and, at our core, provide the skills and support that is asked for, and then get out of the way.

However, I’ve tried hard not to fetishize semantics such that I might exaggerate the capabilities of those with the least access. It can be equally difficult to help those who have never spoken for themselves to know what they have to say. How do we describe someone who does not know what they’d like to say, as a result of generations of disempowerment?

Today I am in India working on creating a loose network of Community Producers, social activists trained to be journalists who will help shed light on the disparate issues facing their communities that have, until now, never been accessible to the commons, to a wider community beyond a small geographic area. It is likely they have as much a need to be heard as to understand what they might say and how it might benefit their local community.

The willingness to listen and ability to have patience to a fault may be more important than trying to provide the tools for others to access the digital communications space.

Do you think the term “voiceless” is at all helpful?

Can we work together toward a more meaningful definition of those who lack access to the media commons, to the digital commons, who have never been listened to, and reflexively may at first appear to be “voiceless?”