Along with a summary of the diss, my talk included a brief meta-discussion of both the challenges of engaging in value-conscious design with technical design communities, as well as a call for help on the next steps I need to take with this research, which included these three areas:

1. Continued conceptual expansion of the values at play with the design of the perfect search engine: This includes helping arrive at a suitable answer to the common retort that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about” (Many pointed to Dan Solove’s excellent essay on this very topic). Also within this category is the need to condense these philosophical arguments into digestible sound bites to be deployed in debate settings such as FoxNews.
2. Continued technical analysis: We need to engage in what I describe as Ben Edelman-style technical analyses of how web search engines collect personal data. I’ve already performed a rough analysis of the flow of web cookies and HTTP header data when using various search products, but we need to better understand other automated processes of collecting data, evaluate interface design, default settings, accessibility of privacy policies, etc. For example, I’m curious as to how long it takes a brand-new computer hooked up to the Internet to acquire a Google tracking cookie…
3. Initiate empirical studies: I aim to collaborate with other more-empirically-minded social scientists to engage in what I describe as Eszter Hargittai-style user studies to help measure actual uses of various search engine products, and any related harms & effects that materialize.

Following my brief presentation, Jonathan Zittrain provided a very thoughtful and useful critique of my talk, focusing not so much on my substantive claims, but rather its structure and my delivery. This was extremely useful feedback as I must already re-enter the job market for 2008.

More thoughts and reactions to my talk (and Zittrain’s response) have been posted by Joris van Hoboken, Ismael Peña-López, and Daithí Mac Síthigh (who also took the photo above).

For example, given a search for “Paris Hilton,” the perfect search engine will know whether to deliver results about the celebrity heiress or a place to spend the night in the French capitol, and whether to provide advertisements for Parisian bistros or celebrity news sites. This is where the search engines benefit most: by targeting the advertising to specific searches and particular users, search engines can charge much more for the targeted placement of that advertisement.

Google recognized early on the importance of designing a perfect search engine: the company’s very first press release noted that “a perfect search engine will process and understand all the information in the world…That is where Google is headed.” Google co-founder Larry Page later reiterated the goal of achieving the perfect search: “The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.” When asked what a perfect search engine would be like, Sergey Brin once replied quite simply, “like the mind of God”

To attain such an omnipotent and omniscient ideal, Google provides results that suit the “context and intent” of the search query; it must have “perfect recall” of who the searcher is and her previous search-related activities. In order to discern the context and intent of a search for “Paris Hilton,” for example, the perfect search engine would know if the searcher has shown interest in European travel, or whether she spends time online searching for sites about celebrity gossip. Attaining such perfect recall requires search engine providers to collect as much information about their users as possible. In my dissertation I go to great lengths to describe how Google attempts to capture an incredibly large and diverse amount of a user’s online intellectual activities in order to fuel the perfect search and the personalized ads that accompany the results. I also, of course, present this as a serious threat to user privacy (it’s a longer argument than I have time for in this post).

Well, since Yahoo is doing everything possible to try to catch up with Google, they recently launched their own attempt to exploit users’ online activities in order to deliver personalized advertising: SmartAds. SmartAds promises advertisers the ability to “leverage Yahoo’s unique data and insights to deliver personalized marketing messages and drive click-thru rates.” Sounds great for marketers, but what does it mean for users? Simple: increased monitoring, collection, and aggregation of their online activities across Yahoo’s properties. Their slick demo even shows how easily Yahoo can identify a user’s home city, track his activity on Yahoo Games, and match it to his searches for “Las Vegas travel” in order to deliver the holy grail of personalized ads.

The (obvious) privacy concerns here are covered by this (surprisingly long and in-depth) report by ABC News (thanks, David Fraser). Paul Stephens of Privacy Rights Clearinghouse summarizes the privacy concerns in the story:

“I absolutely believe it is a threat to privacy,” Stephens told ABC News. “[SmartAds] is disconcerting because it’s compiling all sorts of information about you, things that you may have done a year ago on a Yahoo site, that you may have completely forgotten about.”

By targeting ads not only to a particular search term, as Google’s AdSense program does, but also incorporating a user’s history and profile information with Yahoo, SmartAds goes a dangerous step further than its competition in creating that complete user profile, Stephens said.

ABC’s report also provides a retort by Solveig Singleton:

But according to Solveig Singleton, a senior adjunct fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a market-based tech policy think tank, these privacy concerns are overblown. So long as companies like Yahoo and Google continue to keep financial records private, internet users can only benefit from the advance of technology.

“There’s no reason that this would create any additional security concern,” Singleton said. She disagrees with privacy advocates like Stephens who, she said, “often overlook that advertising and marketing really do serve consumers. It’s not some kind of trickery.”

The belief that “users can only benefit from the advance of technology” is fraught with problems, not the least of which is her faith that “keeping financial records private” is the primary concern here. I’m not at all worried about Yahoo (or Google for that matter) keeping insecure files. This isn’t about hackers being able to gain access to my personal information. It’s about whether it is right for a single company to capture and possess all the information in the first place. And it is about the ease at which such a single company could voluntarily turn that information over to law enforcement or other government agencies, both foreign and domestic.

Singleton also tries to cast aside any legitimate privacy concerns with her presumption that any benefit users might gain by having a targeted ad appear on their computer screen is necessarily a greater good than any harm caused by the collection of the personal information necessary to place that ad. As privacy advocates, we’re not stating there is some kind of “trickery” – but rather that the presumed trade-off in favor of consumers is at best unproven, and at worst invalid.

Here’s a final exchange of perspectives by Stephens and Singleton:

“In the aggregate all these innocuous pieces of information [compiled by SmartAds] paint a picture of you as a consumer that is so complete that nobody could possibly have all this information about yourself other than you and perhaps your spouse,” Stephens said.

But Singleton dismissed many of these concerns, saying that in the long run users will take the onus for protecting their privacy into their own hands by devising new ways to protect their identity — or, if they care enough, by switching over to another, more secure Web host.

Again, I side with Stephens. Singleton’s stance makes the collection of personal information by sites such as Yahoo the default and accepted position, and forces users to take action on their own in order to “protect their identity.” That is not an acceptable set of conditions in a free society (today is Independence Day, after all) where citizens should be able to enjoy intellectual exploration and web-based communication free from widespread surveillance. The default setting should not be for the wholesale monitoring and aggregation of one’s online activities. Rather, if a user wants personalized ads, let her opt-in for the service. Make it the users choice to be monitored; don’t force the user to take action to prevent from being monitored.

There’s much more for me to say on this, but it’s time to watch the fireworks celebrating our liberty…

Thanks to everyone for their help and support.

(blogging will be light for the next week…)

Excellent starting points for these arguments include:

• American Library Association. (2006). Intellectual freedom manual (7th ed.). Chicago: American Library Association. (link)
• Foerstel, H. N. (1991). Surveillance in the stacks: The FBI’s library awareness program. New York: Greenwood Press. (link)
• Foerstel, H. (2004). Refuge of a scoundrel: The Patriot Act in libraries. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited. (link)

Library Juice’s “Library Paradigm” sums up the importance of libraries best:

Libraries are special because they are at once communitarian, libertarian, and models for sustainability.

They are communitarian in the economic sense because they are built on solidarity. A community pools its resources in order to share them.

Libraries are libertarian in the social/intellectual sense (civil libertarian) because of the ethic of intellectual freedom, which says that all ideas should be included and nothing censored.

This combination of economic communitarianism and social/intellectual libertarianism creates the ideal support system for a democratic society, because the library provides everyone with access to ideas and provides access to every idea.

In addition, libraries are models for sustainable systems. By following the “borrow, don’t buy” ethic, libraries provide an alternative to consumerism, an alternative to environmentally unsound overproduction and spiritually unsound overconsumption.

And libraries are further exciting because they need to be changed. They tend to leave out alternative or street-level materials; there is presently a tendency toward privatization of services and functions (with attendant barriers to access); libraries and library organizations need their decision-making processes democratized; access to local community information in libraries needs to be improved; in general, libraries tend to depart routinely from their founding principles as they struggle for a handhold in the environment of an increasingly neoliberal political economy and an increasingly reactionary social climate. We need to advance the Library Paradigm of information organization, preservation and access, to freshly propagate the idea of the library in society in terms of its underlying principles.

Notwithstanding their imperfections, libraries serve as a rare example of beautiful ideals actually functioning successfully in the world. This means that libraries should serve as a model for other institutions and endeavors. We need to spread the Library Spirit across society and teach it, as a model for positive change beyond the walls of libraries and throughout all contexts of information, communication, and learning. This is the Library Paradigm, and we can make it grow.

Assuming the defense goes well (/knocking on wood), I’m also thrilled to announce that I will be joining the Information Society Project at Yale Law School as the Microsoft Fellow for the 2007-2008 academic year. While at ISP, I hope to continue to explore the social, cultural, and ethical implications of web search engines, as well as support ISP’s larger efforts in the crucial Access to Knowledge initiative (there is an A2K conference next weekend, for those interested).

Exciting times ahead.

I look around my desktop and I see Google Reader, Google Mail, Google Talk, Google Toolbar, Google Maps, Google Calendar, Google News, Google Analytics, Google Earth, and of course Google Google. Google WiFi was a pleasant surprise when I was in Mt View a few weeks ago, and last night I found pizza…using mobile Google on my phone. All of these things are becoming indispensable tools for me, and I really like using them because they work well and play well, and every few weeks they magically get better.

However, Gene is starting to worry:

I’m feeling increasingly uneasy about my dependence on Google services.

…

I think I need a new Google product to drop into beta. That would be, let’s see, Google Data Privacy. GDP would allow me to review all of the information that Google retains on me across all services, from all devices, and from all sources. GDP would allow me to determine the maximum data retention period for each of my services. GDP would allow me to selectively opt out of cross-service data mining & correlation, even if it reduced the quality of the services I receive. GDP would allow me to correct any inaccurate data in my profile. And GDP would log and alert me when my data was queried by other services.

I want my Google Data Privacy.

Gene is right – we need Google Data Privacy.

Now, some commenters at Lifehacker think this concern is silly. RickyF, for example, says:

We all use banks who have our financial information. Our doctors have our health records. Telephone companies know what numbers you called and called you. Our credit information is out there… So being paranoid about just Google is pointless.

RickyF is wrong.

Correcting this view is the goal of my dissertation. Yes, my bank knows some of my financial information, and my library knows some of the books I check out, and my grocer knows some of the products I buy, and the NYTimes.com knows some of the articles I read online, and so on. But within each of these contexts there are norms/laws that dictacte what information they can know about me, and to whom they can share it.

But if I start using Google’s tantalizing suite of products to engage in these various personal and intellectual activities, all such activities, and the information flows they entail, become centralized with one provider. One entity – Google – has access to all these disparate bits of data about my everyday activities. That is the concern. That is the problem. That is why Google should take a leadership role and give users the control of their data that Gene suggests.
A large part of my talk at the Web 2.0 conference at Aalborg last week summarizes this concern: “The Panoptic Gaze of Web 2.0: How Web 2.0 Platforms Act as Infrastructures of Dataveillance” (PDF). Much more to come….

(fake logo via Lifehacker)

Regarding the diss, I’ve been writing on how web search engine providers have relied upon what I refers to as infrastructures of dataveillance to collect and aggregate data about users across services:

These infrastructures rely on the interconnections between various search engine products and services, including general web searches, e-mail, personalized news delivery, special interest groups, and shopping services. Increasingly, search engine providers are also providing interfaces between the searchable web and our social lives through the integration of calendars, social networks, and blogging and publishing platforms. All these systems, through the use of persistent web cookies and universal logins, provide the ability for search engine providers to collect and aggregate a much wider array of personal information about their users than just their web search queries.

Obviously, much more to say about this when I have more time. For now, see these two related posts over at Google Operating System: Are You Logged In? and Google Persistent Memory

This grant will support my dissertation research of the value implications of two emerging technologies of everyday life: networked vehicle systems and web search engines. Networked vehicle systems (GPS-based navigational tools, automated toll collection, automobile black boxes, and vehicle safety communication systems) rely on the transmission, collection and aggregation of a particular vehicle’s location and telemetry data. The drive towards the “perfect” web search engine (providing personalized results and delivering only relevant advertising) depends on the profiling of users’ online activities and interests. Taken together, these technologies represent emerging threats to one’s “privacy on the roads”: on the one hand, networked vehicle systems enable the widespread surveillance of drivers traveling on the public highways, and on the other, a perfect search engine facilitates the monitoring and aggregation of one’s intellectual activities on the information superhighway.

Specifically, this grant will allow me to travel to three specialized research sites that will make theoretical, material, and pragmatic contributions to my project:

• Center for Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Science, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands, where I will study with Prof. Philip Brey to enrich my investigation of the relationship between values and technology, and work alongside both philosophers and engineers sensitive to the value implications of technology
• Department of Philosophy and the History of Technology, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, where I will work alongside Prof. Sven Ove Hansson and other scholars dedicated to the ethics of traffic technology, and observe pragmatic interventions within Swedish automotive and technical communities
• Culturally Embedded Computing Group, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, where I will study with Prof. Phoebe Sengers to help gain a critical understanding of the relationship between technology and culture, and witness the application of critical technical practice to real design situations

I am very excited about this opportunity, which wouldn’t be possible without the guidance of my dissertation chair, Prof. Helen Nissenbaum, and my other committee members, Profs Siva Vaidhyanathan and Alex Galloway.

Alejandro Diaz, a grad student at Stanford University in Communications (with a BA in Computer Science), has written an excellent (and nearly 200-page) honors thesis entitled “Through the Google Goggles: The Sociopolitics of Search Engine Design” [pdf]. Here is the abstract:

As much of our knowledge, news, and discourse moves online and to the Web in particular, search engines are increasingly becoming the “gatekeepers” of cyberspace. What’s more, a single search engine—Google—now handles the majority of Web queries. Google directs hundreds of millions of users towards some content and not others, towards some sources and not others. As with all gatekeepers (e.g., television networks), if we believe in the principles of deliberative democracy—and especially if we believe that the Web is an open, “democratic” medium—then we should expect our search engines to disseminate a broad spectrum of information on any given topic. But unlike most other gatekeepers, the information disseminated through modern search engines is not explicitly chosen and written by journalists, editors, and producers. It is instead largely determined by a complex system of algorithms, hardware, and software. The varied designs for search technologies encode certain values about what sort of content is “important,” “relevant,” or “authoritative.” In this thesis, following a hybrid approach that incorporates both media studies and STS theories, we will look at the biases of, motivations for, use of, and resistance to the Google search engine. It is hoped that through this analysis, we might start to uncover the sociopolitics of search.

Alex does an excellent job bringing the disciplines of science and technology studies, political theory, and the political economy of the media together to better understand the ways in which Google might (or might not) support a robust deliberative democracy through the delivery of diverse news and information.

This thesis, of course, is closely related to my own dissertation research which challenges the popular discourses which embrace the Google paradigm for organizing, distributing and accessing information, and make apparent the value implications of such a wholesale commitment. While Alex focuses primarily on whether Google can adequately provide diverse information to support democratic deliberation, my work will broaden the analysis to situate search engines as technologies of power, complicating the view of search engines as free and egalitarian gatekeepers of information by revealing how the design of these knowledge tools shape the information they aim to present and set the very limits of knowledge. Additionally, I will explore whether future designs of search engines can ensure not only Alex’s concern for diverse information, but also embody political and ethical values, including the protection of privacy, autonomy and freedom from bias.