Yet

The book closest to me is “Libraries, National Security, Freedom of Information Laws and Social Responsibilities,” an amazing report published by the IFLA/FAIFE detailing how libraries around the world are tackling barriers to freedom of access to information and freedom of expression, especially in relation to anti-terror legislation, freedom of information laws, and the social responsibilities of libraries such as raising awareness of HIV/AIDS and increasing women’s access to information.

Page 123 is a table, so we’ll use 124 instead, which is the opening section on the Czech Republic. Sentences 6-8 are as follows:

Internet user numbers in the Czech Republic are increasing and there is encouraging government support for public libraries. Levels of access in libraries have stayed the same since 2003, with 21-40% of public libraries offering access and 81-100% of research. Despite a shift in the national association’s position on filtering (from not in favour to in favour to a certain degree), the use of filtering software is not widespread in libraries.

I’m supposed to continue the meme by tagging five new blogs to participate. Here goes:

• Siva Vaidhyanathan at The Googlization of Everything
• Fred Stutzman at Unit Structures
• Joris van Hoboken
• Jeremy Hunsinger
• Alex Halavais

For more than a year, the anonymous blogger slandered three Shaarei Tikva councilmen: local council chairman Gideon Idan, Shaarei Tikva director general Haim Blumenfeld and council member Avi Yokobovich. The blogger accused the men of criminal acts, such as pretending to be handicapped in order to receive discounts on local property taxes, receiving bribes from a contractor, and having ties to criminal gangs.

The three councilmen filed a NIS 300,000 lawsuit against the blogger, who was named “anonymous” in the statement of claim. They also asked for a court order ordering Google to disclose the blogger’s IP address, which would enable the court to contact the blogger’s Internet services provider and order it to disclose the blogger’s identity.

Google initially said that disclosing the blogger’s identity violated rulings on the balance between freedom of expression and a person’s right to his reputation.

However, in a pre-ruling, Judge Oren Schwartz said that the blog’s content raised suspicions of criminal conduct, and Google took the hint. Judge Schwartz applied the strict position of Tel Aviv District Court Judge Michal Agmon that the details of a surfer may be disclosed only if the slander was tantamount to criminal defamation.

Following Judge Schwartz’s ruling, Google and the councilmen reached a settlement in their dispute.

The chilling part of this story is that Google was not forced to turn over the IP address. There was a pre-ruling that made it sound like the court would order them to provide the address, but that wasn’t certain, and Google could have decided to push the fight further. Instead, without a subpoena or any other legal requirement, they voluntarily agreed to provide the IP address to the court, allowing the blogger’s identity to be revealed.

Google’s settlement and subsequent handing over of a blogger’s IP address without being legally forced to has the potential to set a dangerous precedent for the thousands of bloggers reporting on controversial topics who previously felt protected that their ISP or blogging provider (such as Google) would fight to preserve their anonymity.

UPDATE: Declan McCullagh has received a response from Google spokesman Steve Langdon on this issue, who states that Google as indeed forced to turn over the IP address: “we handed over the IP address of the Blogger after an Israeli court order required us to do so” (emphasis added). So, there seems to be a discrepancy between the how the above linked article describes the legal situation (where a pre-ruling hinted that the court would order Google to hand over the IP address), and Google’s claim that a court order was issued requiring their compliance. Unless the court documents themselves are released, I guess we won’t know what really happened.

This post is an attempt to collect and organize some thoughts on how the rise of so-called Web 2.0 technologies bear on privacy and surveillance studies. After presenting a few examples of unintended consequences of Web 2.0 that bear on privacy and surveillance, I will introduce the term “netaveillance,” which might provide a useful concept around which a more robust theory of surveillance about the Web 2.0 phenomena might be built.

The rhetoric surrounding the Web 2.0 movement presents certain cultural claims about media, identity, and technology. It suggests that everyone can and should use new Internet technologies to organize and share information, to interact within communities, and to express oneself. It promises to empower creativity, to democratize media production, and to celebrate the individual while also relishing the power of collaboration and social networks. Websites such as Flickr, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, MySpace, and YouTube are all part of this apparent second-generation Internet phenomenon, which has spurred a variety of new services and communities – and venture capitalist dollars.

This cartoon of a room full of people arguing at a cocktail party after someone mentioned the provocative theories of Marshall McLuhan reminds me of today’s emotional debates over the relative impact – and even the very existence – of Web 2.0. Many hail Web 2.0 as the “new wisdom of the web,” and “a new cultural force based on mass collaboration,” while others deride it as merely a marketing jingo, “amoral,” and even an extension of Marxist ideology.

This last notion, the relationship between Web 2.0 and Marxism, was suggested by Andrew Keen, one of the loudest provocateurs of the Web 2.0 ideology. Keen has received considerable criticism for making comparisons between the Web 2.0 meme and Marxism, but, between the vitriol, he does make some valid points about the utopianism and solipsism that seems to underlie much of the Web 2.0 discourse. In particular, he criticizes the fervent commitment to technological progress:

The ideology of the Web 2.0 movement was perfectly summarized at the Technology Education and Design (TED) show in Monterey, last year, when Kevin Kelly, Silicon Valley’s über-idealist and author of the Web 1.0 Internet utopia Ten Rules for The New Economy, said:“Imagine Mozart before the technology of the piano. Imagine Van Gogh before the technology of affordable oil paints. Imagine Hitchcock before the technology of film. We have a moral obligation to develop technology.”

But where Kelly sees a moral obligation to develop technology, we should actually have–if we really care about Mozart, Van Gogh and Hitchcock–a moral obligation to question the development of technology. [emphasis added]

This moral obligation to question the development of technology compels Keen to identify some of the unintended consequences of the emergence of Web 2.0 infrastructures, including the flattening of culture, the overabundance of amateur authors and producers, and narcissism run wild.

As I begin to study the Web 2.0 meme from the perspective of privacy and surveillance theory, a different set of unintended consequences emerges, including shifts in the flow of personal information that might threaten personal privacy in ways much more damaging than Keen’s concern that content is now made and distributed by mere amateurs instead of honed professionals.

For example, Web 2.0 applications often rely on rich metadata to create value in information, such as the geotagging of images uploaded to Flickr. While it might be useful and fun to have locational data automatically associated with your images, considerable privacy concerns emerge as an externality. For instance, law enforcement officials can simply search for all photos online matching the location & timing of a certain political rally in order to broaden their ability to keep records of who was present. Or, combined with the development of facial recognition technologies with shared online photos, stalkers (or other annoying folks) might soon be able to search for a certain person’s face, and discover the GPS coordinates of the coffee shop they seem to be pictured in every Tuesday morning. Someone even developed a tool, FlickerInspector, to facilitate this kind of mining of the datastreams users leave behind on Flickr.

Of course, one doesn’t need a fancy application like FlickerInspector to reap the benefits of the new datastreams facilitated by Web 2.0 applications. Inherent in Web 2.0 evangelism is an overall faith in the network to be the processing platform: users are encouraged to put as much of their lives as possible online, to divulge and share their personal lives, their professional development, their favorite websites, their music, their friendships, their appointments, and even where they’ve connected to wi-fi. If you know a person’s “handle” on one Web 2.0 site (“michaelzimmer” at del.icio.us), you probably can find them on many more (Plazes, LibraryThing).

The prevalence of sharing so many details of one’s life through various Web 2.0 and social networking sites, and the relative ease of finding users across these services, leads to a second key externality: the rise of amateur data-mining. Fueled by the power and reach of Web search engines, it seems anyone can now engage in the kind of tracking and data-mining of user’s online activities that was once possibly only by the most powerful of computer systems.

An interesting case of amateur data mining made possible through Web 2.0 involves “Don, the camera thief.” The blog BoingBoing posted a story of a woman who lost her camera while on vacation, but was contacted by the family who happened to find it. Unfortunately – and oddly – the family who found it refused to return the camera because their child liked it so much. BoingBoing thought the actions by the finders of the camera were “shameful.” A few days after posting this, BoingBoing received an e-mail from someone who claimed his name was “Don Deveny,” purportedly a Canadian lawyer, who implied that the post was illegal and that BoingBoing was liable for making it. The folks at BoingBoing doubted the legitimacy of the email (the word “lawyer” was misspelled, for example), and decided to see what he could find out about “Don.”

They first contacted many of the law societies in Canada, none of whom had any record of a “Don Deveny” licensed to practice law in Canada. (by the way, it is illegal to pretend to be a lawyer). From their e-mail exchange, they were able to isolate the writer’s real e-mail address from the message headers, and through a Google search, located other pages that contain that address. That led them to a profile page for a user of the website called “Canada Kick A**” who shared the very same e-mail address. That profile page had a different person’s name (perhaps “Don’s” real name?), and also listed a location and profession for the user (he’s not a lawyer). It didn’t take much to figure out (or at least get a better clue) as to who this e-mailer was, and his profile page on a Web 2.0-inspired discussion board made it much easier.

Readers of BoingBoing did some amateur data mining of their own: a commenter at the original camera owner’s blog seemed to share many of the same sentiments of “Don,” along with many of the same spelling errors. This commenter used a different screen name, but when asked to identify himself, also said he was a lawyer. Another reader then discovered that a user with that same screen name recently bid on memory cards at eBay that would have been used in the stolen camera. More amateur data mining ensued, and discovered another user profile at a different discussion forum with the same user name and same “favorite sites” listed in the signature file. And this page included a photo of the user: Is this “Don” our camera thief?

Another example of the ease of amateur data mining with the help of Web 2.0 services is the outing of Lonelygirl15. Lonelygirl15 was the mysterious girl leaving video confessions on YouTube, garnering a huge following of devoted fans, yet know one knew who she was or if they were really just a kid’s video diary or perhaps a large hoax or advertising campaign. After some amateur data mining, the truth came out:
A reader was surfing an article on Lonelygirl15 at a random website when he came across a comment that linked to a private MySpace page that was allegedly that of the actress who plays Lonelygirl15. Since the profile was set to “private,” very little information one could glean from the page. However, when he queried Google for that particular MySpace user name, “jeessss426,” he was able to access Google’s cache from the page a few months ago when it was still public. A lot of the details of the girl’s background quickly emerged: She was an actress from a small city in New Zealand who had moved to Burbank recently to act. The name on the profile was “Jessica Rose.” When he happened to query Google image search for “Jessica Rose New Zealand” he was instantly rewarded with two cached thumbnail photos of Lonelygirl15, a.k.a. Jessica Rose, from a New Zealand talent agency that had since removed the full size versions. A search on Yahoo for “jeessss426” also turned up various pictures from her (probably forgotten) ImageShack photo sharing account. Lonelygirl15 was revealed.

Little effort was needed to link up the various e-mails, user names, personal data flows, and photos shared across blogs, discussion forums and other Web 2.0-style sites to track down “Don the camera thief” or “LoneyGirl15”. Moving more and more of our activities to Web 2.0 makes it harder to remain anonymous, and the myth of “security through obscurity” seems to be disappearing as various crumbs of our true identity are being scattered across the Web 2.0 landscape.

A final externality of Web 2.0 relates to a new form of informational voyeurism that these platforms enable. While Web 2.0 sites have enjoyed incredible growth and heavy viral participation, only a small fraction of overall users actually use the services to upload content – the vast majority just likes to lurk and watch. According to one report, only 0.16 percent of YouTube’s total traffic is made up of users who upload videos. Similarly, only 0.2 percent of Flickr’s regular users are there to upload photos. And slick new tools emerge daily to facilitate the surveillance and voyeurism of people’s daily activities. For example, “feeds” on Facebook allow users to be notified immediately when a friend updates their profile (changing their mood, their friend list, their relationship status, etc), dodgeball helps users find friends (and unknown friends of friends) within a 10 block radius of their present location, DiggSpy allows real-time monitoring of user’s activities on the popular news ranking site Digg, and Twitter has quickly emerged as the hottest new voyeuristic service, allowing users to share text snippets of their day-to-day activities, and monitor others’ streams of the mundane details of their lives (such as “a whole gang of women with dogs just walked past my window”).

What seems to be emerging is a new form of voyeuristic surveillance of people’s everyday lives, fueled by Web 2.0. This has been referred to varyingly as “peer-to-peer surveillance” or even as a new kind of “participatory panopticon.” Yet these terms – and the theories embedded within them – seem insufficient to fully grasp the significance of the emergence of this new voyeurism of the mundane. Surveillance, of course, implies the “watching over” of subjects from above, with an explicit power relationship between the watchers and those placed under its gaze. Trying to describe surveillance as “peer-to-peer” suggests a flattening of the power relationship that is counter to its very definition. Similarly, the notion of a “participatory panopticon” is at the same time redundant and contradictory. Foucault revealed how panoptic power becomes internalized by the subjects, thus, they necessarily “participate” in their own subjugation. Yet the top-down power relationship within the panoptic structure remains. The participation by the subjects does not make them equal with the watchers. Yet the informational voyeurism associated with Web 2.0 seems to imply a balance between the users: one shares their data streams in order to improve the overall worth of the network, coupled with the presumption that they’ll be able to observe and leverage others’ streams as well.

This notion resembles that of “equiveillance,” a state of equilibrium between the top-down power of surveillance, and the resistant bottom-up watching of sousveillance. Yet, this notion implies merely a balance in access to surveillance information, and is focused more on how to reach some kind of harmonious relationship with our rising surveillance society. With the informational voyeurism of Web 2.0, however, the goal isn’t to resist or come to terms with the power yielded by traditional surveillance, but rather to participate in a widespread and open sharing of the mundane details of one’s daily life. To give one’s peers a glimpse into one’s own personal universe.

These snapshots of the minutia of people’s lives have been compared to the Japanese concept of “neta”, the tidbits of people’s lives that are shared with family and friends as a kind of social currency. The Japan Media Review (an affiliate of Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review) recently made an insightful connection between “neta” and Web 2.0 voyeurism:

In Japanese, “material” for news and stories is called “neta.” The term has strong journalistic associations, but also gets used to describe material that can become the topic of conversation among friends or family: a new store seen on the way to work; a cousin who just dropped out of high school; a funny story heard on the radio. Camera phones provide a new tool for making these everyday neta not just verbally but also visually shareable.

As the mundane is elevated to a photographic object, the everyday is now the site of potential news and visual archiving. Sending camera-phone photos to major news outlets and moblogging are one end of a broad spectrum of everyday and mass photojournalism using camera phones. What counts as newsworthy, noteworthy and photo-worthy spans a broad spectrum from personally noteworthy moments that are never shared (a scene from an escalator) to intimately newsworthy moments to be shared with a spouse or lover (a new haircut, a child riding a bike). It also includes neta to be shared among family or peers (a friend captured in an embarrassing moment, a cute pet shot) and microcontent uploaded to blogs and online journals. The transformation of journalism through camera phones is as much about these everyday exchanges as it is about the latest headline.

Building on this Japanese concept of “neta,” I propose a new kind of “veillance” has emerged with Web 2.0 infrastructures: “netaveillance”. Netaveillance can be defined as the process of openly and purposefully providing an almost continual stream of the details of one’s daily life – the mundane, the profane, and the vain – through Web-based technologies, coupled with the ability to capture similar data streams from one’s peers. Netaveillance constitutes an emerging ecosystem of personal data flows – not the exceptional information meant to be protected from state or commercial surveillance, but the free and open sharing of the minutiae of our lives.

My conceptualization of netaveillance is, to be sure, in its most nascent of stages. Much work needs to be done to contemplate how it relates to existing theories of privacy and surveillance, how power relations between and among participants might still exist, how such data flows could be captured by state or commercial interests, and so on. Theorizing and understanding netaveillance is no small task, but it might provide a new language and framework from which to understand the informational voyeurism and related unintended consequences of the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

Whether you want to bring it up at a cocktail party is up to you.

Here are 5 (mostly random) blogs from my blogroll that really get me thinking on a daily basis:

1. Sivacracy.net: Siva Vaidhyanathan & friends on media and culture
   
2. Schneier on Security: Bruce Schneier on security and security technology
3. Infothought: Seth Finkelstein on censorware, search, Wikipedia, and much more
4. Rough Type: Nicholas Carr on the business and cultural implications of information technology & the Web
5. Balkinization: Jack Balkin, et al, on liberty and the law

Congratulations folks, you’ve now won a

If you choose to participate, please make sure you pass along this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).

… Well, thank you, Time, for hyping me, overvaluing me, using me to sell my image back to me, profiling me, flattering me, and failing to pay me. As soon as I saw myself on my local newsstand, I had to buy a copy of Time.

Notice that Time framed the Person of the Year as “you.” That should sound familiar. Almost every major marketing campaign these days is about empowering “you.”

“You” have freedom of choice. “You” can let yourself be profiled so that “you” only receive solicitations from companies that interest “you.” “You” could customize “your” mobile phone with the “Hollaback Girl” ringtone, but “you” would not because that’s so 2004. So you choose Ne-Yo’s “Sexy Love” instead. “You” go to the Nike Store to get your own design of shoes. Because “you” roll like that. After all, “you” are an “Army of One.”

But to quote the Who, “Who are You?” Are you the sum of your consumer preferences and MySpace personae? What is your contribution worth? It’s worth money to someone, if only as part of a whole.

Google, for instance, only makes money because it harvests, copies, aggregates, and ranks billions of Web contributions by millions of authors who unknowingly grant Google the right to capitalize, or “free ride,” on their work. Who are you to Google? To Amazon? Do “you” really deserve an award for allowing yourself to be rendered so flatly and cravenly? Do you deserve an award because media mogul Rupert Murdoch can make money capturing your creativity via his new toy, MySpace?

The important movement online is not about “you.” It’s about “us.” It’s about our profound need to connect and share. It’s about our remarkable ability to create among circles — each person contributing a little bit to a poem, a song, a quilt, or a conversation.

So it’s not about your reviews on Amazon. It’s about how we as a community of Web users choose to exercise our collective wills and forge collective consciousnesses. So far, we have declined to do so. We have not harnessed this communicative power to force the rich and powerful to stop polluting our air and water or to stop the spread of AIDS or malaria. We have not brought down any tyrants. We have simply let a handful of new corporations aggregate and exercise their own will on us. And we have perfected online dating. …

There’s more, and I recommend everyone think hard about Siva’s conclusion:

User-generated content, whether via low-power radio or community blogs, only goes so far to fill the void. And if the subject of that content is “you,” instead of “us,” we gain nothing from the new medium.

We do ourselves a major disservice when we exaggerate the revolutionary power of ourselves as individuals. Narcissism may be good marketing. But it’s not good for humanity.

1. About 8 years ago, before I returned to academia (and, eventually, privacy advocacy), I worked for an electronic payment processing company (we made the credit card machines at stores & restaurants work). While there, I developed an Age Verification system (similar to this) where liquor stores and bars could swipe mag-stripe equipped drivers licenses through their credit card terminal in order to easily calculate the age, fight fraudulent IDs, and retain a record of the swipe for law enforcement purposes. An important part of my sales pitch with this product was that the bar/liquor store could collect the customer’s demographic data stored on mag stripe for marketing purposes. Today, I shudder at the memory that I helped conceive and develop such a privacy-invading system…
2. My junior high school was a bit rough (for Wisconsin standards – this wasn’t the South Bronx). In the spirit of self-preservation, I bought “protection” by doing the bullies’ algebra homework.
   
3. I am an administrator at Wikipedia, and a recovering wikiholic.
4. I’ve seen both Barry Manilow and Neil Diamond in concert…multiple times…
5. My wife and I are expecting our first baby in just over 9 weeks.

My turn to pass it on: Siva Vaidhyanathan, Chris Hoofnagle, Alice Marwick, Joseph Reagle, and Jeremy Hunsinger

While I am committed to keeping the blog ad-free (no Ads by Goooooogle, thank you), I have decided to add some buttons for a few campaigns that I believe in:

• Individual-i:
  Today, the rights of individuals are being eroded: by government, by corporations, by society itself. This icon — the Individual-i — represents the rights of the individual.It represents the right to privacy and anonymity in the information age. It represents the rights to an open government, due process, and equal protection under the law. It represents the right to live surveillance free, and not to be marked as “suspicious” for wanting these other rights.It recognizes that a free society is a safe society, and that freedom is founded upon individual rights.
• Data Retention is No Solution:
  We believe that:- Data retention is an invasive tool that interferes with the private lives of everyone;
  - Retaining personal data on everyone is an illegal practice in terms of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, as it is disproportionate;
  - Security gained from retention may be illusory, as it is likely that traffic data that is associated to one individual may actually be linked to activity taken by another, or by a process that is unrelated to the activities of that user;
  - The means through which this policy is being pursued is illegitimate, as some member states who have failed to pass this policy through their own Parliaments are now trying to push it through the EU instead in the name of harmonisation and international cooperation.We call upon the European Commission and the European Parliament to examine the proposal for data retention very critically and uphold the protection of human rights, including privacy, in these difficult times.
• Hard Bloggin’ Scientist:
  I am a hard bloggin’ scientist.This means in particular:
  1. I believe that science is about freedom of speech.
  2. I can identify myself with the science I do.
  3. I am able to communicate my thoughts and ideas to the public.
  4. I use a blog as a research tool. That means in particular, that I
  - express my thoughts,
  - get in contact with others,
  - have a sketch of my process online,
  - get feedback and new ideas from others.
  5. I trust myself.
  6. I surf a lot and I read a lot.
  7. I blog once in a day/week/month.
  8. I give comments once in a day/week/month on other blogs.
  9. I am self-aware and critical.
  10. I refer to the people who done the work first.
  11. I give love and respect to the people.

[Thanks to Ralf for telling me about these]

What we tell ourselves about the blogosphere – that it’s open and democratic and egalitarian, that it stands in contrast and in opposition to the controlled and controlling mass media – is an innocent fraud.

It’s an excellent read, and has generated some good comments as well.

Last month, an alert reader informed Beth that her blog was being plagiarized. Dozens of Beth’s blog entries had been stolen, word-for-word, over six months. Names of people in her life were changed to the names of people whom the plagiarist apparently knew, creating the impression that she had lived Beth’s experiences and had thought her thoughts.

…Jonathan Bailey, the author of Plagiarism Today, a blog dedicated to the issue of plagiarism online, said this type of cut-and-paste plagiarism is widespread. At any given moment, Bailey said, he’s helping up to 25 bloggers who have been plagiarized — people like Jennifer Woodard Maderazo, whose Latino blog has been regularly plagiarized. There’s even a sex blogger who found that entries were being pilfered.

The Globe contacted me to try to offer some kind of perspective on this odd practice:

Michael Zimmer, a doctoral candidate and blogger at New York University, said that ”social network” sites like MySpace, which measure popularity by the number of page views or friends within a social network, may unintentionally contribute to the problem.

”The desire to fabricate content to attract people’s attention is a possible result,” Zimmer said, ”like a 6-year-old who exaggerates about something on the playground to impress and gain friends.”

Furthermore, the relative anonymity of blogs ”may create both protection from being found out, as well as a form of escapism from their actual life experiences.”

One of the solutions offered by the story to protect one’s content from plagiarism is to include a copyright notice on the blog. Instead As an alternative, I would suggest a Creative Commons license, which can encourage readers to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, while requiring proper attribution and other conditions.

Clearly, such practice amounts to plagiarism and is unethical. While the blogging medium certainly makes it easy to cut & paste & post to your own site, as if the words were your own, proper attribution is always required. Even for blogs that don’t add any new commentary to the original posts (see, for example, Ed Felton’s Freedom to Tinker DashLog), they provide a service of aggregating relevant posts from across the web, while providing a by-line and link to the original post.

Some are angered further, however, by the fact that blogs who steal content are also stealing their potential advertising revenue. This, too, is a valid claim, but only to a point. Repurposing of content seems to be a standard practice among blogs, and while I might say “this is cool” when pointing and quoting someone else’s text, is it unethical for me to make money if a reader happens to click on an advertisement on my site rather than the originator’s? I’m not so sure.

Jeff Jarvis goes further by arguing that this is tantamount to click fraud and that blog providers, like Google’s Blogger should be held responsible. In the comments of Jeff’s original post, I questioned how this is actually click fraud, wondering if it is any different than iFilm posting the Jon Stewart Crossfire clip on their site (presumably without permission from the copyright holder) and making money off of their own on-site advertising. Jeff’s reply is that the key difference is that blogiarism “takes any content with the sole purpose of defrauding Google Adsense and the people who pay for ads there. It is clickfraud.”

I simply don’t follow this logic. While I find blogiarism highly unethical, I don’t think it inherently “defrauds Adsense and the people who pay for ads.” If blog XYZ steals content from ABC, that is wrong. If a reader sees the content on XYZ and clicks on an ad for company 123, that still is a valid click – no click fraud has occurred. Company 123 paid to have an ad placed alongside certain content, and whether that content was read at XYZ or ABC, company 123 still received a valid click from a reader who is genuinely interested in its products.

Blogiarism is unethical. But I don’t see how it necessarily leads to click fraud.