Identity Woman

Independent Advocate for the Rights and Dignity of our Digital Selves

Privacy

Facebook Changing Privacy Settings

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This past month has been interesting for Facebook – they hired Timothy Sparapani as their lobbyist in Washington:

As a prominent privacy advocate, Timothy Sparapani, former senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that Internet companies have too much control over consumers’ data. The self-described “privacy zealot” didn’t join Facebook until seven months ago because he was uneasy about revealing personal information on the site.

He joins 24-year-old Adam Coner for the last year who has had as his main job “educat[ing] members of Congress and Capitol Hill staffers about leveraging Facebook to reach constituents.”
The current Chief Privacy officer Chris Kelly will be going on a leave of absence in September to focus on running for Attorney General of California.
EPIC has a very detailed page about Facebook Privacy. It is an impressive page that will give you pause. It outlines all the major features of the service it has concerns about. It has a list of all the EPIC Actions related to Facebook too.
This week Facebook is taking some steps to improve privacy from its website:

The power to share is the cornerstone of Facebook. Privacy and the tools for tailoring what information is shared with whom are at the heart of trust. Over the past five years, Facebook has learned that effective privacy is grounded in three basic principles:

  • Control. When people can easily control the audience for their information and content, they share more and they’re able to better connect with the people who matter in their lives.
  • Simplicity. When tools are simple, people are more likely to use them and understand them.
  • Connection. With effective tools, people can successfully balance their desire to control access to information with their desire to connect – to discover and be discovered by those they care about.

That’s why in the coming days, we’ll be improving privacy on Facebook by launching a series of tests that guide people to new, simpler tools of control and connection.

I wrote about some of the issues I have with Facebook when I heard Dave Morin talk at SXSW “Am I to “old” to get Facebook – or do they not get it?”. I highlighted 3 different issues:

  • What Blane Cook describes as “being in a room with everyone you ever met all the time”: all my friends from different contexts of my life get all the same ‘status’ updates and I don’t use them cause I feel like it is social spam to speak to them with the same voice and same frequency. I also don’t like that it broadcasts everything I “do” in the network to everyone.
  • “Real Names” vs. handles online – their belief they have “everyone’s real name in facebook”
  • The difference that women experience in online space and how they manage and protect their identity and what information is online.

Here is what they are saying about how to address this issue:
They are introducing a Publisher Privacy Control so that on a per-post basis users can control who sees each post. Friends, Friends and Family etc. On the other end of the spectrum, you can also share with “everyone” now.
They are simplifying their privacy settings. Hopefully this will make it more usable.
They are figuring out how to gracefully help people transition between the old settings and the new way.
They are asking everyone to revisit their settings…because:

We think Facebook is most useful when people can find and connect with each other, which is why this tool will enable you to make available those parts of your profile that you feel comfortable sharing in order to facilitate better connection. You will have the choice of being as open or as limited in the sharing of this information as you want.

The byline on the post is cute:

Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, is glad to be offering you more control.

Read Write Web goes into their understanding of the announcement and user experience. This is a long, good piece.

FU – The Monday After, Facebook Usernames and Your Domain on the Web

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Last week it was announced that on on Friday Night at 9pm Pacific Facebook had a name space land rush. Everyone was free to pick for themselves their username that would appear in their URL. facebook.com/username

I actually found this a bit surprising – remember the big debate on the Social Web TV I had with Josh Elman about “real names.” He was against handles completely and felt that the big value facebook brought was “real names”. I argued for handles and the freedom to choose one’s “identity” on the web. I made the point that free society – having the ability freedom to have the option to have and use handles on the web NOT linked to our given/ in real life names. Another thing is that handles help us navigate namespace clash from regular names. Max from MySpace is 8bitkid not some other Max in a sea of Max’s.

I ran into Josh Elman at the Building43 party and we agreed I kinda won the debate with this latest development. It seems that having peoples pages rank higher in google is helped by having readable URL’s.

They of course “strongly encouraged” people to just pick a URL with one’s real name and did so by “suggesting” names that were derivatives of one’s name. You could override this and type in your own name choice (however defaults matter so most people will end up with names similar to their real name – rather then being asked to think up one). They give users an addressable identity.

Max Engel of MySpace became /8BitKid – his handle “everywhere”

David Recordon surprisingly didn’t go with DaveMan692 – his handle most places – he is /DavidRecordon

My friend Jennifer became /dangerangel as she had originally signed up for in Facebook but they disallowed her to have it.

I just became /Kaliya (I am hoping I can get enough fans to claim /identitywoman for that persona)

What is particularly interesting is the layers of identity in Facebook.

With a Facebook URLFacebook has the one’s username is not one’s e-mail address as it is with Google profiles and one also has a common name (or as they say “real name”) that is presented to throughout the system.

Google ironically enough they ask if you want a “contact” me button on your page that does not give away your e-mail address when the profile URL gives away your e-mail address.

Twitter has /usernames AND another display name of your choosing that is changeable (the /usernames are not). However most twitter clients display one or the other. If you are used to seeing the display name and then are on your phone that is only showing @handle /username then you don’t know who is talking.

Facebook usernames is another example Twitter feature adoption by Facebook others being activity streams becoming much more like twitter streams.

I said when I first “got” twitter about 18 months ago – a big part of the value it provided was its namespace. It gave me a cool anchor on the web that allowed communication between me and others via the web.

So how is it going so far? Inside facebook reports that over the weekend 6 million folks – 3% of their userbase gut URLs. 500,000 in the first 15 min, 1,000,000 in the first hour and 3 million in the first 14 hours.

There were several examples of FaceSquating. Mike Pence took Obiefernadez’s name.

Anil Dash has the funniest post ever about the whole thing. Highlight the point that users don’t need facebook URL’s they can just get their own domain name. He repeats this throughout the post about what these services are not telling you:

None of these posts mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

I completely agree with him – he also misses a key point the usability of facebook is vastly higher then the usability of domain name registration, cpanel management and other things involved in getting ones own personal web presence going. DiSo isn’t hear yet so we can’t link to our friends without linking capability that a facebook provides. I suppose Chi.mp was trying to

He links to a post of his from December 2002 called privacy and identity control.

I own my name. I am the first, and definitive, source of information on me.

One of the biggest benefits of that reality is that I now have control. The information I choose to reveal on my site sets the biggest boundaries for my privacy on the web. Granted, I’ll never have total control. But look at most people, especially novice Internet users, who are concerned with privacy. They’re fighting a losing battle, trying to prevent their personal information from being available on the web at all. If you recognize that it’s going to happen, your best bet is to choose how, when, and where it shows up.

That’s the future. Own your name. Buy the domain name, get yourself linked to, and put up a page. Make it a blank page, if you want. Fill it with disinformation or gibberish. Plug in other random people’s names into Googlism and paste their realities into your own. Or, just reveal the parts of your life that you feel represent you most effectively on the web. Publish things that advance your career or your love life or that document your travels around the world. But if you care about your privacy, and you care about your identity, take the steps to control it now.

In a few years, it won’t be as critical. There will be a reasonably trustworthy system of identity and authorship verification. Finding a person’s words and thoughts across different media and time periods will be relatively easy.

What people don’t quite get is that if they anchor their whole online life around someone else’s domain they are locked in. When I first started paying attention to user-centric identity online this was one of the meta-long term issues that the first identity commons folks (Drummond Reed, Fen Lebalm, Owen Davis, Andrew Nelson, Eugene Kim, Jim Fournier, Marc Le Maitre, Bill Barnhill, Nikolaj Nyholm, etc).

A few of them wrote a paper about it all – THE SOCIAL WEB – Creating an Open Social Network with XDI.

They liked the XRI/i-names architecture because it addressed the URL recycling problem with a layer of abstraction. All i-names also have linked to them a conical identifier – an i-number. This number is never reassigned in the global registry. However one could “sell” one’s i-name (mine is =kaliya) and that new person could use it but it would have a different i-number assigned to it for that person.

This past week at the Online Community Unconference we were talking about the issue of conversation tracking around blog conversations. How an one watch/track the conversation about one’s work if it is cross posted on 10 different sites OR if it is just posted in one place and one is distributing a link through 10 different channels? We never did get to an answer – I chimed in that the web was missing an abstraction layer – that if one could have a canonical identifier for a post that was up in 10 different places this would make it easier to track/see conversations about that post. What we do have now that we didn’t have 3 years ago for helping track conversations across multiple contexts is OpenID at least so you can see if someone commenting in one place is the same as someone commenting in another.

There is an additional layer of abstraction in the XRI architecture that supports several things are key to helping people integrate themselves and information about themselves on thew web.

One is cross referencing – so I could have have two different (URI) addresses for the same information (in the identifier – not just mapped over one another leaving me with one address OR the other) and also have one version of my profile be the one I controlled and a different be a version that appeared in a certain social context.

There is also a concept of much finer grained data addressability and control – so I could have my home address in one place and instead of entering this into each website/services/company portal that I want to have this information – just hand them a link to the canonical copy I manage and then I don’t have to change it everywhere. This is of course where the VRM folks are going with their architectures and services.

We shall see how it all evolves. That is what we do at the Internet Identity Workshop is keeping on working on figuring this all out.

Mashable: "privacy is just as important as openness"

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Finally someone is not just hyping about portability without also considering the flip side.

(3) Privacy is just as important as openness. Where does my data end and yours begin? If you believe that users of Web 2.0 services have some inherent “right” to control their own data but that this data is in inexorably linked to the “social graph,” what “rights” do users have to control where “shared” data goes?

"We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game."

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Sigh…
some people to have so little sense. It is like saying it would be ok to open every piece of mail before they deliver it to your door, photo copy it an put it in a file. We would never allow that – the founding fathers of the US would have never allowed this. How can people who are in a position of leadership with the US government honestly believe that this is ok. From the RawStory:

McConnell is developing a Cyber-Security Policy, still in the draft stage, which will closely police Internet activity.
“Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the autority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer or Web search,” author Lawrence Wright pens.
“Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation, he said,” Wright adds. “Giorgio warned me, ‘We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.'”
A zero-sum game is one in which gains by one side come at the expense of the other. In other words — McConnell’s aide believes greater security can only come at privacy’s expense.
McConnell has been an advocate for computer-network defense, which has previously not been the province of any intelligence agency.

Scientists must give up privacy rights

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I just found this in SlashDot – quite disturbing…

“Wired is reporting that all NASA JPL scientists must ‘voluntarily’ (or be fired) sign a document giving the government the right to investigate their personal lives and history ‘without limit’. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists this includes snooping into sexual orientation, mental & physical health as well as credit history and ‘personality conflict’. 28 senior NASA scientists and engineers, including Mars Rover team members, refused to sign by the deadline and are now subject to being fired despite a decade or more of exemplary service. None of them even work on anything classified or defense related. They are suing the government and documenting their fight for their jobs and right to personal privacy.”

2257 Laws, Sex Workers and Privacy

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Sex on the Internet, The Realities of Porn, Sexual Privacy, and How Search Affects Them All. Google Tech Talk by Violet Blue, October 12, 2007
This is an hour long presentation by Violet Blue. It is quite interesting covering a range of issues about sex and privacy online. The most interesting one directly related to identity was 2257 laws. Go to 32:30 in the video to see her discussion of this topic.
It mandates producers of pornography document the ages of those who perform in their films and that this documentation regularly is a photo of the performer with their ‘government issued ID and Social Security Card’ thus revealing basically all the information you need to steal their identities.
The 2257 legal requirements have the potential to become a business opportunity for some enterprising identity company to meet these requirements in a privacy protecting manner.
UPDATE:
Majority on partially divided three-judge Sixth Circuit panel strikes down as facially unconstitutional the recordkeeping requirements federal criminal law places on producers of images of “actual sexually explicit conduct” to verify the ages of those depicted in the images: Describing the federal statute at issue, the majority opinion explains, “The plain text, the purpose, and the legislative history of the statute make clear that Congress was concerned with all child pornography and considered recordkeeping important in battling all of it, without respect to the creator’s motivation.” The majority proceeds to hold the statute facially overbroad and then strikes down the law as unconstitutional.

Big Brother coming to NYC

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NYC Real world Tracking one step closer:

New York City is seeking funding for a multi-million dollar surveillance system modeled on the one used in London. Police in the city already make use of the network of cameras in airports, banks, department stores and corporate offices — an arrangement used in cities across the country. This new project would augment that network with a city-wide grid. ‘The system has four components: license plate readers, surveillance cameras, a coordination center, and roadblocks that can swing into action when needed. The primary purpose of the system is deterrence, and then an investigative tool.’ But is it necessary? Steven Swain from the London Metropolitan Police states ‘I don’t know of a single incident where CCTV has actually been used to spot, apprehend or detain offenders in the act. Asked about their role in possibly stopping acts of terror, he said pointedly: “The presence of CCTV is irrelevant for those who want to sacrifice their lives to carry out a terrorist act.”

From the Article:

The implementation of the plan, called the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, will require about $90 million, New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said. It will cost about $8 million a year to maintain.
The city so far has raised about $25 million. Part of it has come from the Homeland Security Department and the rest from city coffers.
Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said she was alarmed by the prospect of government and law enforcement officials having records of a person’s daily activities.
“It wasn’t that long ago that J. Edgar Hoover was up to his dirty tricks using government spying to interfere with lawful dissent, undermine critics and pursue an unlawful agenda,” she said.
However, police officials repeatedly note there is no expectation of privacy in a public area and it is not a constitutional right.

Frontline: Spying on the home front

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I am a fan of public television. I grew up with the CBC and its wonderful documentaries and comedies (Kids in the Hall anyone). Since moving to the US I have found Frontline and since I don’t have a television I am blessed to be able to watch it online.

They recently had a great show called Spying on the Home Front that was well done and quite disturbing. Basically we are all being spied on all the time because we are all suspects in the doctrine of pre-emption. The disturbing thing about it all is the use of National Security letters that can not be discussed. This double silencing is particularly disturbing. I picked up a book called the Elephant in the Room:Silence and Denial in Everyday Life – it highlighted this phenomena.

Yet what makes conspiracies of silence even more insidious than covering it up is the fact that the silence itself is never actually discussed among conspirators. Unlike when we explicitly agree not to talk about something (“let’s not get into that”), the very fact that the conspirators avoid it remains unacknowledged and the subtle social dynamic underlying their silence are thus consealed….
the reason it is so difficult to talk about the elephant in the room is that “not only does no one want to listen, but no one wants to talk about not listening.” In other words the very act of avoiding the elephant is itself the elephant! Not only do we avoid it, we do wo without acknowledging that we are actually doing so, thereby denying our denial.
Like “rules against seeing rules against seeing,” being “forbidden to talk about the fact about the fact that we are forbidden to talk” about certain things, or the fact that “we do not see what we prefer not to, and do not see what we do not see,” such meta-denial presupposes a particular form of self-deception famously identified by Orwell as “doublethinking,” or the ability “consciously to induce unconsciousness and then to become unconscious of the act of Hypnosis you had just performed.” Thus in Nineteen Eighty-Four, when Eastasia suddenly assumes Eurasia’s traditional role as Oceania’s perpetual enemy and the Oceanians set out to immediately destroy or rectify any references ever made to their long-lasting war with Eurasia, Orwell astutely observes that “the work was overwhelming, all the more so because the process that it involved could not be called by their true names.”

I would recommend the the Frontline show and would love to discuss it with others who have seen it. Perhaps this can be another one for our Media Review Group. I hope there will be a critical mass of folks to actually talk about this next week at Burton Group.

9/11 has indelibly altered America in ways that people are now starting to earnestly question: not only perpetual orange alerts, barricades and body frisks at the airport, but greater government scrutiny of people’s records and electronic surveillance of their communications. The watershed, officials tell FRONTLINE, was the government’s shift after 9/11 to a strategy of pre-emption at home — not just prosecuting terrorists for breaking the law, but trying to find and stop them before they strike.
President Bush described his anti-terrorist measures as narrow and targeted, but a FRONTLINE investigation has found that the National Security Agency (NSA) has engaged in wiretapping and sifting Internet communications of millions of Americans; the FBI conducted a data sweep on 250,000 Las Vegas vacationers, and along with more than 50 other agencies, they are mining commercial-sector data banks to an unprecedented degree.
Even government officials with experience since 9/11 are nagged by anxiety about the jeopardy that a war without end against unseen terrorists poses to our way of life, our personal freedoms. “I always said, when I was in my position running counterterrorism operations for the FBI, ‘How much security do you want, and how many rights do you want to give up?'” Larry Mefford, former assistant FBI director, tells Smith. “I can give you more security, but I’ve got to take away some rights. … Personally, I want to live in a country where you have a common-sense, fair balance, because I’m worried about people that are untrained, unsupervised, doing things with good intentions but, at the end of the day, harm our liberties.”
Although the president told the nation that his NSA eavesdropping program was limited to known Al Qaeda agents or supporters abroad making calls into the U.S., comments of other administration officials and intelligence veterans indicate that the NSA cast its net far more widely. AT&T technician Mark Klein inadvertently discovered that the whole flow of Internet traffic in several AT&T operations centers was being regularly diverted to the NSA, a charge indirectly substantiated by John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer who wrote the official legal memos legitimizing the president’s warrantless wiretapping program. Yoo told FRONTLINE: “The government needs to have access to international communications so that it can try to find communications that are coming into the country where Al Qaeda’s trying to send messages to cell members in the country. In order to do that, it does have to have access to communication networks.”
Spying on the Home Front also looks at a massive FBI data sweep in December 2003. On a tip that Al Qaeda “might have an interest in Las Vegas” around New Year’s 2004, the FBI demanded records from all hotels, airlines, rental car agencies, casinos and other businesses on every person who visited Las Vegas in the run-up to the holiday. Stephen Sprouse and Kristin Douglas of Kansas City, Mo., object to being caught in the FBI dragnet in Las Vegas just because they happened to get married there at the wrong moment. Says Douglas, “I’m sure that the government does a lot of things that I don’t know about, and I’ve always been OK with that — until I found out that I was included.”
A check of all 250,000 Las Vegas visitors against terrorist watch lists turned up no known terrorist suspects or associates of suspects. The FBI told FRONTLINE that the records had been kept for more than two years, but have now all been destroyed.
In the broad reach of NSA eavesdropping, the massive FBI data sweep in Las Vegas, access to records gathered by private database companies that allows government agencies to avoid the limitations provided by the Privacy Act, and nearly 200 other government data-mining programs identified by the Government Accounting Office, experienced national security officials and government attorneys see a troubling and potentially dangerous collision between the strategy of pre-emption and the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
Peter Swire, a law professor and former White House privacy adviser to President Clinton, tells FRONTLINE that since 9/11 the government has been moving away from the traditional legal standard of investigations based on individual suspicion to generalized suspicion. The new standard, Swire says, is: “Check everybody. Everybody is a suspect.”

Age and Idetntity in Second life

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I just found this from someone linking to my WoW piece. It seems that Linden Lab will be doing age verification – from their blog:

We will shortly begin beta testing an age and identity verification system, which will allow Residents to provide a one-time proof of identity (such as a driver’s license, passport or ID card) and have that identity verified in a matter of moments.
Second Life has always been restricted to those over 18. All Residents personally assert their age on registration. When we receive reports of underage Residents in Second Life, we close their account until they provide us with proof of age. This system works well, but as the community grows and the attractions of Second Life become more widely known, we’ve decided to add an additional layer of protection.
Once the age verification system is in place, only those Residents with verified age will be able to access adult content in Mature areas. Any Resident wishing to access adult content will have to prove they are over 18 in real life….
Landowners are morally and legally responsible for the content displayed and the behavior taking place on their land. The identity verification system gives them new tools to ensure any adult content is only available to adults over 18 because unverified avatars will not have access to land flagged as containing adult content…..
The verification system will be run by a third party specializing in age and identity authentication. No personally identifying information will be stored by them or by Linden Lab, including date of birth, unless the Resident chooses to do so. Those who wish to be verified, but remain anonymous, are free to do so.

There is an extensive FAQ in the blog post. It seems that online life is going to get more complex. I wonder what vendor they are going to use for this. I wonder how it will work internationally.
The other thing I wonder about is how necessary is this. I kids are exposed to so much already. I am currently reading GenerationMe: Why Today’s Young American’s are more Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable Than Ever Before by Jean M. Twenge. Some of the book talks about the current attitudes about sex and the sexual practices of young people. The Monica Lewinsky was all happening when they were in elementary school. They know what sex is and many many of them are doing it – lots are having oral sex (mostly the girls giving it to the guys) in middle school and by highschool many are sleeping around with a lot of partners ‘hooking up’ without really being in boyfriend girlfriend relationships. Yes they are doing it with their peers and not other adults but it is not like it is news to them. I am not condoning this trend of hyper sexually active young people. The number and range of these surveys means it is real not imaginary. I also don’t think they should have access to adult areas of Second Life. The issue is serious and I think there is a social dialogue about sex, its meaning would be a good thing to foster. It is a disconcerting to learn how casual it is being taken by youth however as the author points out imitating the way it is portrayed in the media. So what is the big deal with Avatars in a virtual world I wonder. I hope this question is not to much to ask and that I will not be harshly judged for having asked if we should ask this question.

Personally I gave up on SL 9 months ago for other reasons. I was fed up with downloading a new massive client to wander around an aimless 3D space. Then to top it all off the were hacked and you had to call them to get a new password. I also was annoyed the first thing you had to do was pick your name with some strange last name from a list they determined. Once you picked your name you couldn’t change it….it was the one thing persistent about you. I think online 3D has potential but I am convinced there will be worlds that leapfrog SL.

Here are some of the comments about the proposal on their site

I do not wish to have my personal information – my SSN or anything else, in the hands of a 3rd party organization – or even in the hands of SL. I am very cautious about what info I put out there – and considering how easily sites can be hacked, this is a security issue. Some of us have RL clearances and do not want more info out there – and as such – we will now be unable to access adult content? Let’s face it that’s why many of us put up a credit card for premium membership – to prove our age. Further proof is a burden on the players that we should not have to bear.

First, you should be aware it is illegal to require an individual to provide his/her social security number as a means of identification to anyone but the Federal Government. Second, if driver’s license and or SSN is provided to you or your agent you may become legally liable for the misuse, loss, or theft of that information for the purposes of fraud or identity theft. Good Luck.

A third party that LL trusts and isn’t giving us who this third party is, I’m taking issue with. The moment I give them my driver’s license, they will now own my name, address, license number, AND because I live in a state that puts the Social Security number on the driver’s license, they will have that as well. I’m not impressed with this action nor do I trust LL’s belief in this third party that they will not keep this data. Prove it!

“Driver’s license, passport or ID card” are you joking?
I think you need to come to grips with a few things. Half the residents in SL do not live in Puritanical America. Your ‘immature’ attitude toward sex and alcohol are not shared by the majority of people on Earth. There is no drinking age in most of Europe and Asia and most people look upon sex as a normal human activity.

What about those of us without passports, drivers’ licences or any form of national ID? You falsely assume that all adults have one of these things – not all of us drive, go abroad or live in countries with Big Brother-style ID card schemes.

The best bit IMO is we’re now expected to pay for the privilege of being treated like adults. Are we not mature enough to be given the responsibility of ignoring things we don’t want to see? The way I see it this system is good in theory but completely flawed in practice.

Once again, Linden Labs adopts a US-sentric attitude. US players only have to provide the last 4 digits of their Social Security numbers, while non-US residents have to provide a full National ID Number (whatever that is, and whatever countires use them) or a full passport number! What about people who have no National ID, or passport? What are they to do?

This sounds very heavy handed. It sounds like a roomful of lawyers, FBI Agents, and other law enforcement put the fear of Gawd in to Linden to have them take the extreme step of seeking partial social security numbers, and age verification via key documents. I believe the point has been raised the credit card verification is typically enough to meet age requirement guidelines.

As a UK resident, I do not feel comfortable about giving personal details to an as yet unamed data collection company, which I assume is US based.
With the current climate in the US as regards to Bush’s evesdropping on data communications to aid the War on Terror(tm), I do not want to end up on some US government database as belonging to a virtual porn-ridden community run by a bunch of subversive godless burnt-out californian commie hippies (Ann Coulter is hawt!!).

In Wired about CFP

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I just checked my visitors log and found a link from WIRED that mentions me.

While many websites do not collect names, addresses, Social Security numbers or other “personally identifiable information,” or PII, the information they do collect is extremely revealing. “They don’t need to know your name to know who you are,” Chester said.
A very different perspective came from Mike Zaneis of the Internet Advertising Bureau. Dressed in a much better suit than any other CFP participant, and sporting a John Edwards-quality quaff and a smooth manner, Zaneis faced a hostile, privacy-loving crowd.
Zaneis stressed that profiling does not capture PII. But the audience appeared to agree with Chester that browsing history and search information was nonetheless private. “My clickstream data is sensitive information,” said privacy activist Kaliya Hamlin, known as the Identity Woman, “and it belongs to me.”

I am not sure that I would describe myself as a privacy activist but rather an end-user advocate passionate about open standards.
I found the panel described in the article frustrating. It was one angry progressive anti-consumer guy vs. the super corporate marketing guy. The ‘activist types’ tend to deny that we are people who actually might want to buy things in a market place. The ‘corporate types’ tend to think that we always want to have ‘advertising’ presented to us at all times of day or night because we ‘want it.’ Neither view is really right. I pointed out that there was an option to give users back their ‘attention’ (clickstream) data from the sites that they visit. There could be ways to actually express one’s market needs/preferences and get advertising related to that specific need (this is not enabled anywhere that I know of right now). The VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) discussion is getting interesting and hopefully we can talk more about the issues raised in the space in between privacy and advertising at IIW next week.

Transgender issues with Privacy and Identity at CFP

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Mara Keisling the Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equity presented about the privacy and identity issues faced by Transgender people.

Identification Documentation
What is important for that about transpeople? – It is mportant what it says and also what it refers to. For example my passport says – ‘this passport says that this was changed for male to female’
Why does this matter because the revelation of one’s transgenderness is a risk – that we know of in the US one transgender person per month is murdered. Violence is a issue.
There are economic consequences to be outed at work or as part of a job interview and fired or not given job in the first place. In San Francisco – over 50% were unemployed or had fragile employment.
The REAL ID ACT is a problem.
It has not been implemented yet but what is very obvious consistent ID documentation is hard to get – for low income people, transgender, homeless people, immigrants. It will make it increasingly difficult.
The data is interconnected across ALL law enforcement.
It mandates certain things be on the front it.
Gender is required.
The fact of name change required – obvious that they changed name from say Mark to Mara.
Will Fact of gender change will be required? It likely will be in database. Along with surgical records – will end up in database. This means it outs transgender people every time interact with law enforcement.
It also means any time one’s ID is checked electronically to get into a bar for a drink it will out people. This is not a big deal in a big city is it s BIG deal in small towns.
Travel
It is difficult. I have friends who say “‘you travel’ – you are willing to fly?”
The TSA currently has no policy specific to transgender people and their frisking at airports.
They do have policy regarding how they are to interact with ‘helper monkeys’ (seeing eye dogs etc.) TSO’s are not aloud to touch your helper monkey’s.
At the very least they would like guidelines for searching.
It is difficult to get a passport. They almost always require you to present proof of gender change with the presentation of surgical records. However almost none have genital surgery – they estimate only 5% the reason is that there are many contra indications (HIV status, age, pulminary issues) and it is very expensive.
There is no security interest in labeling as me as a male. They are going to have a hard time finding me…(she presents as female).
It is a privacy violation to have ‘surgery letter.’
Scatterback x-ray machines “strip” naked and covers gender. This security measure is creepy for everyone – creepy and dangerous for transgender people.
Employment Verification
Mapping all these databases – to monitor so the SSN administration sends ‘no match’ letters – new employee…is this person eligable to work. This is supposed to just be for name or social security number. However there s an Optional data-field in this database and they can end up with ‘non-match’ letters because of gender basically – “you think lily is a woman – we think Lily is man”
An example she gave was heart breaking. A man was working at as a Steelworker for 20 years. The company he worked for ran all its people through the process you do with SSN administration and his supervisor came out in front of the crew that he worked with on a daily basis and said “Social Security says your a woman.”
He quit his job and wondered if he was going to have to find a new job every quarter because of this.
Employers with a large number of employees can do this via computer but small employers who do this via the phone – the operators are taught to ask for gender to enhance the match.
Health Privacy
Transgender people are turned away from hospitals all the time
A passing (not out) trasngender nursing student in florida as part of their training they were given specific information about what to do for man and women in certain situations. She asked
“What do you do with transgender people? are there any special considerations?” The trainer said “When I was in ER in New York we just let those people die.” You can be murdered because of your transgenderness in the health system.
Prescription records – many transgender people have histories that out them. Old data remnants matched with my old self with my new self (estrogen taking).
RFID
Freaked out about this passports because of information that will be shared. I don’t want this to flash on every screen when cross boarders.
Clothing that is worn or bought what if was from a credit card that I got got when male.
Data Permanence
Examples given.
Said in front of city council – I am a man with no penis. It was written up by the Philadelphia Inquirer – now when you google this person this is the first hit. it will be there forever.
Susan Stantant – Fired as city manager in Florida. Someone commented in the paper that now shows up in google “because she is taking estrogen no longer get erections”.
A woman was fired because court transcripts of parents custody battle from when she 10 years old. Someone else had fraudulently used her SSN and there for she was a ‘high security risk’ and denied her job.

Privacy Commissioner of Canada opens CFP

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Computers Freedom and Privacy opened with the Privacy Commissioner of Canada Jennifer Stoddart. It was a great talk and here is what I captured from it –

We are endanger of loosing our rights.

She gave an introduction to the state of privacy in Canada. There has been a Privacy Act since 1983 that gives the privacy commissioner authority under the act.

  • Fixed Term for independence from the government of the day.
  • Reports directly to parliament.
  • Advocacy through parliament.
  • People who have been denied privacy in some way can complain
  • Oversight of 150 federal government agencies including – RCMP (National Police), CSIS (Canadian CIA), Communications Security Establishment (surveys foreign communication)

She highlighted the case of Maher Aror an innocent Canadian citizen deported to Syria from the US and part of the reason for this was that the Canaidan government provided misleading information.
Canada more recently passed the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act – PIPEDA which was Introduced in response to the EU Data Protection Directive requirements.
Canada one of few countries out side of the EU that has ‘adequate’ privacy protections and is a place were EU data can be exported here.
Privacy Commissioner of Canada responsible for the application PIPEDA and has the power to:

  • Investigate complaints
  • Go to Court
  • Conduct audits
  • Produce reports
  • Liaise with industry, consumer groups and parliament.

This is a good law because there is:

  • No requirement to register databases (as in Europe).
  • No yearly fees to remit.
  • No reports to files to data commissioner.
  • No authorization to export data.

There is no named constitutional right of privacy however the canadian courts have interpreted Canadian charter of rights and freedoms to provide this.
There is a tangle and it is a challenge to address privacy.
Country only legislation is not enough International cooperation is needed. She is involved in the OECD where she is the chair volunteer group on transboarder privacy enforcement.
Canada’s response to Anti-Terro Legislation-
Trying to find the right balance between privacy and security
Anti-terrorism Act of 2001 has impacted privacy rights through:

  • Broadened surveilance powers
  • Weekened constraints on use of powers
  • Reduced accountability and transparancy of governmnet

Lack of facts and evidence to suggest that the measures in the Act are necessary
Parliament has not acted on the expressed concerns.
She highlighted the UK information Commissioner talking about Working Together

  • Too many different privacy controls in different parts of the world.
  • Inconsistency cause complexity, increased costs, and reduced consumer trust and confidence.
  • Consistency reduces the trans-boarder data flow and protects information.
  • The US and EU should work together.

Substantive agreement on privacy recognized rather then details about how it happens.
We need to question government policies that encroach on freedoms
Is surveillance a long term solution?

We must look at how these threats to us come about. Are we just perpetuating anamosity that leads to people wanting to cause harm to us?

How do these threats to our security come about and what are alternatives do we have to massive surveillance.?
We must explore new contours for privacy.
Oh yes…she also pointed out the US had prohibited entry of a Canadian researcher who had in the 60’s taken LSD as part of experiments at Stanford that he found out when he ‘googled’ the guy when he was crossing the boarder and reading the article that came up describing this. It was covered in TheTyee just last week.
SHE DIDN’T talk about the Canadian Government doing the same thing to US Citizens with minor criminal records. Covered in the San Francisco Chronicle in February. She is coming back and we can ask her questions hopefully she will also turn the spotlight on her own countries behavior with regard to this. It is all happening because of the sharing of criminal records cross boarder.

Take the case of 55-year-old Lake Tahoe resident Greg Felsch. Stopped at the border in Vancouver this month at the start of a planned five-day ski trip, he was sent back to the United States because of a DUI conviction seven years ago. Not that he had any idea what was going on when he was told at customs: “Your next stop is immigration.”
Felsch was ushered into a room. “There must have been 75 people in line,” he says. “We were there for three hours. One woman was in tears. A guy was sent back for having a medical marijuana card. I felt like a felon with an ankle bracelet.”
Or ask the well-to-do East Bay couple who flew to British Columbia this month for an eight-day ski vacation at the famed Whistler Chateau, where rooms run to $500 a night. They’d made the trip many times, but were surprised at the border to be told that the husband would have to report to “secondary” immigration.
There, in a room he estimates was filled with 60 other concerned travelers, he was told he was “a person who was inadmissible to Canada.” The problem? A conviction for marijuana possession.
In 1975.
Welcome to the new world of border security. Unsuspecting Americans are turning up at the Canadian border expecting clear sailing, only to find that their past — sometimes their distant past — is suddenly an issue.

Credit Checks by the Government 'legal'

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More privacy invasion by the Executive Branch:

Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday the Pentagon and CIA are not violating people’s rights by examining the banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage in the United States.
Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, the new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said his panel will be the judge of that.
National security letters permit the executive branch to seek records about people in terrorism and spy investigations without a judge’s approval or grand jury subpoena.

Freedom of Speech Seriously Threatened.

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Some highlights from this Blog speak for itself. (I didn’t have time to do all the linking from the quotes so click through to get them.

The U.S. Government wants to force bloggers and online grassroots activists to register and regularly report their activities to Congress in the latest astounding attack on the internet and the First Amendment.
Richard A. Viguerie, Chairman of GrassrootsFreedom.com, a website dedicated to fighting efforts to silence grassroots movements, states:
Section 220 of S. 1, the lobbying reform bill currently before the Senate, would require grassroots causes, even bloggers, who communicate to 500 or more members of the public on policy matters, to register and report quarterly to Congress the same as the big K Street lobbyists. Section 220 would amend existing lobbying reporting law by creating the most expansive intrusion on First Amendment rights ever. For the first time in history, critics of Congress will need to register and report with Congress itself.


During an appearance with his wife Barbara on Fox News last November, George Bush senior slammed Internet bloggers for creating an “adversarial and ugly climate.”
– The White House’s own recently de-classified strategy for “winning the war on terror” targets Internet conspiracy theories as a recruiting ground for terrorists and threatens to “diminish” their influence.
– The Pentagon recently announced its effort to infiltrate the Internet and propagandize for the war on terror.
– In a speech last month, Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff identified the web as a “terror training camp,” through which “disaffected people living in the United States” are developing “radical ideologies and potentially violent skills.” Chertoff pledged to dispatch Homeland Security agents to local police departments in order to aid in the apprehension of domestic terrorists who use the Internet as a political tool.

Make no mistake, the internet, one of the greatest outposts of free speech ever created is under constant attack by powerful people who cannot operate within a society where information flows freely and unhindered. All these moves mimic stories we hear every week out of State Controlled Communist China, where the internet is strictly regulated and virtually exists as its own entity away from the rest of the web.

Profile Linker – is the time right for open standards…?

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Tech Crunch has a review of Profile Linker.
They have one partnership sealed already, with Photobucket, and hope to do more. But for sites where they are unable to get a partnership they’ll have to gather information using the user’s credentials. There’s a risk that networks will simply cut them off.
They have portable profiles:
Portable Profiles allow you to take your content with you anywhere on the web. Mobilize your bio, share your photos.
Best of all, you only need to make updates in ONE place and all your portable profiles will be automatically updated all over the web.
one way they do this is...Don’t feel like entering ALL your profile content again?Well we can do all the work for you. Just tell us your Facebook login or MySpace URL and we’ll get your photo and more . .
All this proves the time is really right for open standards to do this.

Security Theater and 'real' threats – inhuman conditions

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In two days I am travelling to Canada for a little vacation and a leadership workshop. The thing is I have to fly there and what I am hearing about the whole ‘no liquids’ thing makes me mad. Can I take a tamale for lunch? Please let it be so cause now they don’t feed you on planes what are you supposed to do starve?
Bruce Schnier is a great communicator when it comes to security issues. I saw him twice at RSA this year and found his talks to be informative and entertaining.
We have a ‘security theater‘ situation happening and I hope the performance can end soon. What was most awful was reading all the streeter quotes from people in the paper saying things like…well “I had to through out my $150 box of contact lenses but I am so happy they are making us safer”. Like someone actually said that!What a mind control thing they got going it makes me really worried for the future.

Hours-long waits in the security line. Ridiculous prohibitions on what you can carry onboard. Last week’s foiling of a major terrorist plot and the subsequent airport security graphically illustrates the difference between effective security and security theater.
None of the airplane security measures implemented because of 9/11 — no-fly lists, secondary screening, prohibitions against pocket knives and corkscrews — had anything to do with last week’s arrests. And they wouldn’t have prevented the planned attacks, had the terrorists not been arrested. A national ID card wouldn’t have made a difference, either.
Instead, the arrests are a victory for old-fashioned intelligence and investigation. Details are still secret, but police in at least two countries were watching the terrorists for a long time. They followed leads, figured out who was talking to whom, and slowly pieced together both the network and the plot.

Please believe me I am the last person I would imagine saying yes to more spying and investigation but after seeing Syriana, reading Bob Bears book and the article in the New Yorker (based on this guys story [God I hate old media. I want an real article to link to not an interview and an option to buy a DVD]). I am convinced that our government for its own internal political conveniences cut back on real human intelligence gathering and investigation. This systemic failure is why the ‘terror’ network are functioning so well and why we have a threat today. If we had invested in understanding and infiltrating these islamic networks as they formed instead of ignoring them… (Seeing no Evil) things would be different.
Systemic surveillance of our electronic systems is not going to make us safer. It brings us closer to the possibility fascist state. I do hope more of us working in this industry can speak up publicly about this danger and not just watch in silence as it forms around us. A state that is highly invasive into all our personal activities to make us safer. Meanwhile off somewhere in the middle east “they” are making plans in real human face to face networks that we can not spy into using these new electro gadgets.
Speaking of ‘they’ – who are they? I just watched a film from Netflicks – Death in Gaza. It was of two documentary film makers one of whom died while shooting the film. I spent the summer of 2000 in Jerusalem for 10 weeks I lived and worked there and did what I call “NGO tourism”. I worked at one of the worlds foremost human rights organizations – BTselem the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories and then also worked at the PCATI the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (while there I got my education in what torture is going on and how it affects people – really awful). My fellow international interns and I would spend our weekends traveling about going through the Westbank and up to Nazareth, and Haifa over to Televiv down to Hebron. One time we got to go to Gaza for 2 days. One of the interviewers for B’Tselem was traveling there so the two of us got to go with him. We got hooked up with two guys who worked in an NGO in Gaza and went on a tour for a day… from one end to the other … inside the camps and everything. It was amazingly powerful. Just like in the movie I saw the little kids the ones who are 5 and 6 happily playing away not really knowing there life circumstances yet. Then the older boys would glare glints of anger in there eyes. They are 10-13 years old knowing what they don’t have. The get that it is not normal to have open sewers in the streets. It is not normal to have 10 people living in one room. It is not normal to be growing bunnies up stairs that you kill to have food or a donkey living in your living room. Why do they know this…there are satalite dishes…basically everyone has a TV and can see what life is like in Isreal, and America and the rest of the normal arab world. When you think about that maybe some of this makes a bit more sense. It is not normal to feel like going to school you could get killed (as they young girl in Death in Gaza talks about). It is not normal to have your school playmates killed by gunfire (like the little boys have happen to them in the movie). Or bulldozers coming to plow your house down in the middle of the night (like threatens to happen in the movie ) How can you feel peaceful in this kind of environment?
I know after witnessing what I did that day I was shaken. I really felt my soul had been shaken up like my body was still and it was moving. It was eerily like the feeling I had after exiting the memorial museum at Hiroshima. The thing was…what I had witnessed that day was happening to real people ‘now’ not a historical event from 60 years ago. The depth of suffering is quite intense and the failure to connect with people as people and to really resolve the conflict continues to cause suffering. More bombs and planes and threats of nuclear weapons going off doesn’t make the situation better. It makes it worse. Send in armies of compassionate empathetic listeners. Make public peoples family stories and histories. Find some way through. There are some amazing stories of reconciliation that have happened in Israel/Palestine. They prove it is possible. I do have hope but not if everyone just sees an enemy instead of people, families and societies with real human and community needs.
I was sorting through my stuff over the weekend and found something from B’Tselem. They still send me the reports the write. It was a 11×17 fold over about the wall situation in Jerusalem. Just really disruptive to normal peoples lives. The whole of the Westbank is oriented around the trade flows through main cities. The most main one being East Jerusalem. The fact that they want to cut the Palestinians off from their main economic hub is just mean. People don’t like people who do mean things. Why is this so hard to understand!

Our Privacy SERIOUSLY THREATENED

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I think honestly we need to leverage the power of the web and our network as knowledge workers and ‘march on congress’…Maybe that is not it but something … PLEASE SILICON VALLEY SHOW YOUR POLITICAL MIGHT!!!
From CNET:

It didn’t take long for the idea of forcing Internet providers to retain records of their users’ activities to gain traction in the U.S. Congress.

Last week, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a Republican, gave a speech saying that data retention by Internet service providers is an “issue that must be addressed.” Child pornography investigations have been “hampered” because data may be routinely deleted, Gonzales warned.
Now, in a demonstration of bipartisan unity, a Democratic member of the Congressional Internet Caucus is preparing to introduce an amendment–perhaps during a U.S. House of Representatives floor vote next week–that would make such data deletion illegal.

Cashless French Town

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From Silicon.com

The tourist city of Caen in Normandy is hosting a major European trial of the use of NFC (near field communication) – a mobile technology that can be used for anything from paying for groceries to finding out about your home town.
By placing an NFC chip near a reader, up to a distance of a centimetre or two away, data can be transmitted to and from the chip. But the Caen project has a more far-reaching use of NFC in mind, with residents now packing NFC-enabled mobiles to see if using the technology could catch on beyond public transport.
In an experiment involving companies including Orange and Philips and the town’s mayor’s office, Caen’s citizens have been road testing the technology since late last year at a number of locations.

What I wonder about is who keeps all the data? How is privacy protected?

Free Phone but only if you use the number we give you????

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I just got a pitch from the Spring Ambassador program for a free phone and free calling and data for 6 months. I am like cool (some how I have landed as a tech somebody cause only those folks get free phone offers). I can transfer the number that is only good in the bay area to this new phone and get out of the MetroPCS getto that I am in. All of you who know I have 2 cel phone (one for the bay area one for outside) will be happy to have me be integrated back on to one phone.
I write them asking that I have a phone number I have be used. They write back and say:

Because of the way the Ambassador phones are set up, you are unable to change the phone number of the phone for the duration of the 6 months. However, you are able to transfer your existing number to the phone after the 6 month period, if you wish.
Thank you,
The Sprint Ambassador Team

Notice they didn’t even sign their names…so much for having a real market conversation between people. I am just talking to their “team.”
It proves how dumb the phone system is. If these guys can’t figure out how to technically give me my phone number to use it doesn’t do me a whole lot of good. In terms of identifier management it just adds to the complexity – not decreasing it.
Hopefully they will figure this out and let me use my own number.

Law and Order SVU: Identity Use Case

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Last night I was on JetBlue from NYC to Vegas. I don’t watch TV normally but JetBlue I get to 🙂 last night I – mostly watched Law and Order. In one of the episodes an interesting use case comes up. They are investigating a murder. The victim has a stamp on his arm from a gay club. They go an investigate the club and who was there. Turns out that the club scans everyones drivers licenses and keeps a log of all the people who go in. I wonder how prevalent these identity scanning systems are – does anyone know or know where to find out. What are the regulations about their use and what is the ‘agreement’ that people who are scanned. The Club owners say that the system cost $11,000 and the reason they got it was because they were busted for serving alcohol to a 15 year old girl. The police investigators look through list of people who were at the club that night. It turns out that the cop’s son is on the list.

MyAPI we need it now

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So, right now they only way to verify that I own an account online “that I am who I am” is giving a third party the login to my account.
I want myAPI a secondary login for making assertions of ownership of an account as well as access to data in that account – like the books that I have bought, my linked in contacts, my budy list etc..
We need standard ways to access (via MyAPI) and share this information (putting information in standards formats (xri perhaps?) so that it can be integrated and aggregated by me and services that I want to use).
MyAPI has a different password then my ‘primary’ account and perhaps there are a few different levels of privileges.

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