Category: Third Force concerns

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Facebook violations continue

Oh, those wacky folks at Facebook just can’t help themselves can they?  The Guardian reports that after investigations by the  Information Commissioners Office, the company has been found guilty of allowing over a million users’ personal data to be harvested by third-parties. And sadly, under current UK law, they can only be fined this amount, when new regulations would enable a far more severe level of punishment. Drop in the ocean to FB though, who I am sure will sing their favorite song again about how sorry they are and intend to do better….time for a new tune Marky. Full story here

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Let’s treat information space like the environment

In my Follett Lecture at Dominican University this week I examined the true nature of our information space and introduced the argument of considering information space in the same manner we conceive of the environment. To this end, we recognize the information space in which the majority of the world resides (and all will reside in soon) to be a new ecology that should be shared and managed on a global level to serve humanity. While I realize there are many criticisms we can level against the way our species has managed the planet, there is little disagreement that the environment needs protection, monitoring and the application of standards on how we use it. Can we start to consider the world of information in the same way?

To do this does require our taking more control. Large corporations cannot continue to be allowed to act in the interests of profit over people. Regulations of the kind introduced for data privacy in Europe are a model that we would do well to apply more widely. Technology that plays purely on the natural cognitive tendency to react to movement, change and dopamine loops needs to be understood for what it is, and alternatives developed. And consumers need to make their dollars count by purchasing better, more human-centered products.

Yes, this will require a sea change in governmental regulation, a willingness on politicians’ part to take more than campaign gifts from Facebook, Google and the like, and a massive educational effort in digital literacy (in the truest sense of the term) but we need to start. Universities need to lead the way here and offer intellectual leadership in helping the world to understand the benefits and pitfalls of technology choices, to increase our understanding of how the information world is structured and shaped, and to help craft appropriate policies for managing this new ecology into the future. Most universities like to make bold claims about addressing big challenges, and among them the environment is nearly always listed. Well it’s time to treat our information space equivalently while there’s still time.

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Facebook a force for good?

As tech companies are increasingly exposed for their exploitative practices and willful abuse of users’ privacy rights, no doubt we’ll hear lots of apologies and suggestions for ‘how we will do it better’. Does anyone believe this? When you, the user, are the product, there is no really better way. Your data, your behavior, your interactions are the business and no amount of window-dressing or option boxes will change this.

But while all eyes now are on Facebook and the like, you can expect a few noises from Business schools and Engineering colleges about the need to teach ethics. Yeah right, more window-dressing by academic programs that have placed higher premiums on fundraising and PR than on doing the right thing. Education is becoming an extension of business and it’s getting harder and harder to break the profit drive.

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How our political representatives love to hear from us

After watching Paul Ryan on one of the Sunday political shows dismissing as a left-wing attack his own words from a couple of years ago on the need to properly vet bills before approving them, I started to think about the way our record of what we say and the means we enable things to be said are becoming messed up. So now, what I said last year on a topic has no relevance this year, if I say so, might be typical political discourse but when politicians are so dismissive of their own words, how likely is it that they will pay any attention to ours?

Mr Ryan’s office, I am informed, turned off their phones and fax machines last week when irate citizens started calling in large numbers to express their views on the proposed health care bill. My own representative in my gerrymandered state was even cleverer. His phone lines immediately went to voice mail, and in a pretense at listening, asked me to leave a msg. Amazingly, I had 2 seconds, after which I was told my time was up. Huh? I barely got my name out. So I called again. Same thing. So I called several times in a row, each 2 second recording continuing where I left off from the last one. Was Representative Williams listening? Of course not, but he could say he was. This is what technology has enabled. Fakery, chicanery and pretense, wrapped up in a advertising bubble of family values. Yeah, technology has made us smarter, right?

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PPR talks now online

I greatly enjoyed this year’s Patient Privacy Rights Summit in DC. I usually do not get to attend the same conferences as physicians, policymakers, lawyers etc but this annual summit brings them all together, along with varied invited speakers, to discuss the emerging health information infrastructure. The organizers asked me to provide a closing address and while we had some technical set up difficulties, you can find it here. We need more people to speak up and agitate for our rights in the coming information world, and health is one area where we can all recognize the importance of privacy.

while here, check out the opening address from Deanna Fei, who provide an account of being on the wrong end of health privacy concerns that might shock you.

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When blogging is life and death

Most comments on the dangers of social media and blogging tend toward warnings about off-the-cuff comments or presenting a public face that you will not be ashamed of in a year’s time when meeting someone new or applying for a job. Jon Ronson’s new book ‘So you’ve been publicly shamed‘ is bringing back and shedding some new light on the well known examples such as the woman tweeting before getting on a flight from UK to South Africa and disembarking hours later to find she’d created a maelstrom of hate by her supposedly off the cuff comment about AIDS. People really do use the tools to humiliate other and the cost, Ronson argues, can be to make others unwilling to speak freely as we collectively get sucked into groupthink. All true and bad, one imagines, but it can be even worse.

The mainstream media have given more attention to this new book than they have the fact that once again, a blogger who espouses atheism has been murdered because of their words they use. In Bangladesh, a blogger was hacked to death this week. Washiqur Rahman was attacked in the street, in daylight. His ‘crime’ was writing about the dangers of religious fundamentalism. He was right. But he was not alone. Earlier this year another blogger, American Avijit Roy was murdered by what are described as machete-wielding assailants while returning from a book fair with his wife (who lost a finger in the attack). Three bloggers have been so murdered in the last two years in that country. And of course, this is on top of the case in Saudi Arabia where public flogging of a blogger for ‘insulting Islam’ actually brought a murmur or two of disapproval from international allies.

One of the less known aspects of free speech suppression (which is everywhere) is that aethesists are among the most suppressed groups. It is estimated that espousing atheism is a crime punishable by death in 13 countries:Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates and Yemen. And that’s just the list of countries where it is enacted as law. There are many more where crimes against atheists are largely ignored and rarely persecuted. And yet religious groups continually campaign that they are the ones who feel persecuted and need laws protecting them. Protect one, protect all surely — is not that a fundamental of all major religions? Those who speak out and pay the ultimate price deserve more than a small column in the euphemistically titled ‘free press’.

The real point here is that I believe shaming others for ignorant tweets is likely a lower point on the same continuum of crowd-hysteria that leads to machete murder of bloggers. This is a concern for people who use social media to chastise but never imagine themselves as fanatics or bad people. The technologies underlying rapid shaming and the behaviors they enable should be studied as more than a curiosity of our age or as a marketing vehicle for corporate identity and personal image making. But I guess there’s less money or fame in that type of work. Come in Information Science……there’s a research question to answer.

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The new world order is scarily familiar

Two somewhat unrelated news items caught my eye this week and suggested there is a long way to go before we understand what the new technologies of information mean for our world, and, more importantly, how to leverage their benefits.  News of the death of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia will dominate news now from that country, perhaps deflecting the rather more terrifying coverage of Raid Badawi’s treatment at the hands of authorities. In case you missed it, he’s been sentenced to 1000 lashes, 10 years of imprisonment and fined close to $250,000 for blogging. Yes, you read that right – for blogging. Not hate crimes, not some imagined insult to a god, not murder, just blogging. And if you read his blog, you will note that the writings are generally smart, insightful and aimed at encouraging intelligent discussion.   Oh, and don’t forget, Saudi Arabia is one of our allies.

Now, looking at that link above, think about this. A federal judge in Dallas yesterday sentenced journalist  Barrett Brown to jail for another five years (he’s served more than one already) for  providing a link to hacked material. You can add almost a $1m fine to that too. But at least he did not get any lashes, right?

Journalists rightly point to the chilling effect Brown’s sentence has on investigative reporting, arguing that if one accidentally linked to hacked data, such as some of those leaked customer files so many companies seem to have a hard time securing, you would likely be similarly prosecuted. Showing distinctly more sangfroid at the news than I would in his shoes, Brown stated :

“Good news! — The U.S. government decided today that because I did such a good job investigating the cyber-industrial complex, they’re now going to send me to investigate the prison-industrial complex. For the next 35 months, I’ll be provided with free food, clothes, and housing as I seek to expose wrongdoing by Bureau of Prisons officials and staff and otherwise report on news and culture in the world’s greatest prison system. I want to thank the Department of Justice for having put so much time and energy into advocating on my behalf; rather than holding a grudge against me for the two years of work I put into in bringing attention to a DOJ-linked campaign to harass and discredit journalists like Glenn Greenwald, the agency instead labored tirelessly to ensure that I received this very prestigious assignment. — Wish me luck!”

He won’t be the only one who needs it!

 

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Hijacking conferences by any other name

In our field, the HICSS conference is rather well known, not least for its choice location (Hawaii) at a time of year (January) when most US folks want a break from the weather. I’m not a huge fan of the work there but some folks try to convince me it’s the real deal (usually the folks who go!). The acronym HICSS stands for Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. So successful is this conference that another has emerged, totally unrelated, also in Hawaii and also going by the acronym HICSS. Only this time, the SS stands for Social Sciences. Their call for papers is suitably all-embracing so that most disciplines could find a home here (and they organize island tours too!). It is not clear that any papers are reviewed which you think might put some providers of funding off the event but the conference certainly gets attendees.

The idea of two almost identically named conferences existing in the same location might be a coincidence but I don’t imagine so. The newer version makes little effort to disambiguate itself from the original and an email to the organizers just brought a curt reply that they were not in any way related to the original HICCS. They certainly don’t mention who the organizers or the reviewers might be either. Suspicious yet?

The emergence of bogus conferences has been documented in New Scientist and shows no signs of letting up. I heard colleagues mention it at the Council of Scientific Society Presidents’ meeting as a growing challenge in some fields. The most blatant efforts actually run shadow conferences at the same time or a week adjacent to the target conference, with a similar name, and lure people into believing it is a legitimate venue, charging them handsomely for attendance. Since many associations and hotels rely on the profit from conferences, you can see the challenge. You’d think scholars would not fall for it but then, how many folks opened that email call from the ‘other’ HICSS and thought a trip to Hawaii might be nice?

It’s not just conferences. I get an email every other day from some dubious publisher inviting my paper submissions. Follow the trail and you’ll find an editorial board of nobodies from far-flung universities that may or may not exist and then the real kicker, the page fees that you will be liable for when your paper is accepted (and it will be accepted). Open source publishing efforts have a real battle on their hands to demonstrate legitimacy and the frightening prospect of both the cowboy publishers and the traditional, conservative corporate publishers benefiting from this muddying of the waters is very real. Here’s another challenge for information science.

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Information as power zone in customer relations

We are reminded constantly of the power of interconnected tools to allow all of us to share information in real time, improving efficiency and enabling companies to connect with customers. In some ways this is undeniable but the ability to network also creates a new category of information, which when considered from a user’s perpsective, is partially useless, aggravating and even misleading.

UPS provide a great example of this at the moment. Currently struggling to move packages backlogged in Dallas (again) they provide numersous ways for customers to track and receive updates on the status of their items. Similarly, they usually allow sellers like Amazon to directly link into their tracking system so customers can access information at the point of purchase. So, no longer just waiting, shoppers can ostensibly track the progress of their packages acriss the country from source to destination. The trouble here is that UPS, once it has issued initial tracking info, does not actually update this information reliably and predictably, and makes it quite difficult to ask further questions.

Items backlogged this week are sitting in what UPS euphamistically term ‘exception’ status, and are tagged with the stock message that the anticipated delay is ‘one business day’. This day comes and goes and the update never changes. Some reports online indicated delays of more than 10 business days without this message ever being updated, and there is speculation that once in ‘exception’ status, your package is the lowest priority as the company tries to maintain its on-time record up with fresher shipments that have not yet hit a lag. UPS allows you to request updates but all this does (after asking for your email address again) is send you that same old message, nothing new. So yes, they provide online tracking but it is not real-time, not useful, and allows you little chance of estimating reliably when you may actually receive an item. One might consider this an information gap.

Of course, the beauty of the web is that one need not just accept this. The aptly named ‘pissed off consumer‘ contains numerous postings about the problems of UPS and their rather poor customer relations, including numbers to call. Some of the stories here are excrutiating. I tried contacting the company who sold me the item I am waiting for and they at least managed to get more info from UPS than I could. Most distressing for many online was that UPS knew days ago that anything entering the Dallas area was just going to pile up but they still accepted the orders, even with expedited shipping fees from late Xmas shoppers.This much one could determine with a little exploration online. Unfortunately, despite the supposed democratization of the web, too few sellers allow the buyer to choose preferred carriers, or else I suspect UPS would be in real difficulty in Texas and its serviced areas.

All this information power is potentially impressive for the companies perhaps but from a consumer side the black hole of holding patterns one ends up in quickly after the initial update is a guaranteed source of frustration. It may even be that the lack of tracking info from the start would be better than what is on offer here. Suddenly, the idea of network tracking seems less informative than it might be and the old power differential between informed and uninformed is magnified. Real world information and real world people seem mismatched. Unintended consequences of IT, again?

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The economy and technology axis

Steven Landsburgh, author of More Sex is Safer Sex – The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics, wrote a piece in the WSJ on June 9th entitled “A Brief History of Economic Time”. You have to forgive the rather dismissive tone of his reading of human history but he sums up his main argument neatly in a final pragraph: “Engineers figure out how to harness the power of technology; economists figure out how to harness the power of incentives. Our prosperity depends on both”. Oh dear, here we go again. The push to see the world only as advancing through economic and technological forces (with culture presumably lagging behind as the by-product) is relentless. No only does this reading push human endeavor into distinct (but imaginary) competing categories but it elevates economics (a social science, lest we forget) to unprecedented heights of insight and application. Funny, I remember my undergrad economics classes as being rather less than precise, despite all the mathematical jiggery-pokery, when it came to predicting human behavior. All this I could forgive but the reduction of human endeavor and culture to the purely technological and economic realms does little to help us understand some of the real problems we face or even the real joys of life.

This is, of course, rather typical of discourse on human development. But all ideas, (and ultimately our evolution and development, yes even our economic development is about ideas), are not the product of engineering or economic initiatives. Humans problem solve; it’s how we are wired. That we can solve some problems for the long-term and move onto new problems without having to rely only on our genetic transfer is another very human attribute. This is where the human record of knowledge plays a fundamental role. Through it we have accelerated the problem solving process. We have refined our knowledge into a transferable form and enabled a human to survey the world and its development through time. Does it make sense to consider libraries, museums, writings, and the internet as just engineering proposals enabled through economics? Perhaps one could distort their meanings to this interpretation but I am certain this is not the sense in which Steven Landsburg is using the terms – he seems to actually believe it’s all about engineering and economics as typically practiced. More likely this is again the reduction of culture to simple forces. Economics does matter, but economics is having a devilishly hard time figuring out information. And just what sort of economic argument can you make for works of art (other than their retail value to some collectors) that truly reflects what art means in human existence. Information is about meaning, and human meaning-making is complicated, nuanced and driven by more than concerns with costs and incentives. This is not to understate the value of incentives to our understanding of behavior but there are many studies of humans that reveal the a priori identification of incentives is problemmatic and one risks circularity by invoking the likely incentive only after the fact. There are few voices for this, and it complicates the simple reduction, so it is no wonder that economists get the ears of politicians and the newspaper editors. Too complicated? Well just think about HMO’s — the perfect marriage of incentives and medical engineering.

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