The Reputation Society: How Online Opinions Are Reshaping the Offline World
Edited by Hassan Masum and Mark Tovey
Foreword by Craig Newmark

In making decisions, we often seek advice. Online, we check Amazon recommendations, eBay vendors’ histories, TripAdvisor ratings, and even our elected representatives’ voting records. These online reputation systems serve as filters for information overload. In this book, experts discuss the benefits and risks of such online tools.

The contributors offer expert perspectives that range from philanthropy and open access to science and law, addressing reputation systems in theory and practice. Properly designed reputation systems, they argue, have the potential to create a “reputation society,” reshaping society for the better by promoting accountability through the mediated judgments of billions of people. Effective design can also steer systems away from the pitfalls of online opinion sharing by motivating truth-telling, protecting personal privacy, and discouraging digital vigilantism.

About the Editors

Hassan Masum is a policy and technology strategist and Affiliate Researcher at the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation at the University of Waterloo.

Mark Tovey is an Affiliate Researcher at the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation at the University of Waterloo. He is the editor of Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace.

This book was inspired by the “Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace” I helped organize at the Yale Information Society Project in 2007, and I’m excited to see the results of that event finally get published.

I’m also happy to note that I co-authored one the chapters in the volume with Anthony Hoffmann, a PhD student at UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies. Our contribution is titled, “Privacy, Context, and Oversharing: Reputational Challenges in a Web 2.0 World“:

When personal information is shared online, it may spread farther and faster than expected or inappropriately push intimate details to near-strangers. Zimmer and Hoffmann address the twin risks of information spreading beyond its intended context and the oversharing of personal information.

You can purchase the book at Amazon, etc. Enjoy!

Opening Standards: The Global Politics of Interoperability
Edited by Laura DeNardis
September 2011

Openness is not a given on the Internet. Technical standards–the underlying architecture that enables interoperability among hardware and software from different manufacturers–increasingly control individual freedom and the pace of innovation in technology markets. Heated battles rage over the very definition of “openness” and what constitutes an open standard in information and communication technologies. In Opening Standards, experts from industry, academia, and public policy explore just what is at stake in these controversies, considering both economic and political implications of open standards. The book examines the effect of open standards on innovation, on the relationship between interoperability and public policy (and if government has a responsibility to promote open standards), and on intellectual property rights in standardization–an issue at the heart of current global controversies. Finally, Opening Standards recommends a framework for defining openness in twenty-first-century information infrastructures.

Contributors discuss such topics as how to reflect the public interest in the private standards-setting process; why open standards have a beneficial effect on competition and Internet freedom; the effects of intellectual property rights on standards openness; and how to define standard, open standard, and software interoperability.

About the Editor

Laura DeNardis is Associate Professor in the School of Communication at American University. She is the author of Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance (MIT Press, 2009) and a Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project at Yale Law School.

You can purchase the book at Amazon, etc. Enjoy!

Interfaces on Trial 2.0
By Jonathan Band and Masanobu Katoh
March 2011
ISBN-10: 0-262-01500-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-262-01500-4

We live in an interoperable world. Computer hardware and software products from different manufacturers can exchange data within local networks and around the world using the Internet. The competition enabled by this compatibility between devices has led to fast-paced innovation and prices low enough to allow ordinary users to command extraordinary computing capacity.

In Interfaces on Trial 2.0, Jonathan Band and Masanobu Katoh investigate an often overlooked factor in the development of today’s interoperabilty: the evolution of copyright law. Because software is copyrightable, copyright law determines the rules for competition in the information technology industry. This book–a follow-up to Band and Katoh’s successful 1995 book Interfaces on Trial–examines the debates surrounding the use of copyright law to prevent competition and interoperability in the global software industry in the last fifteen years.

Band and Katoh are longtime advocates for interoperable devices but present a reasoned view of contentious issues related to interoperability issues in the United States, the European Union, and the Pacific Rim[. They discuss such topics as the protectability of interface specifications, the permissibility of reverse engineering (and legislative and executive endorsement of pro-interoperability case law), the interoperability exception to the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the interoperability cases decided under it, the enforceability of contractural restrictions on reverse engineering;] and recent legal developments affecting the future of interoperability, including those related to open source-software and software patents.

About the Authors

Jonathan Band is an attorney who has written more than 100 articles on intellectual property and the Internet. He is an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s Law Center.

Masanobu Katoh is the former head of the Law and Intellectual Property Unit of Fujitsu Limited, a global information technology company based in Japan.

You can purchase it at Amazon and other sellers, and also download a open access copy at MIT Press.

Information Society Series: An Interdisciplinary Series on Technology, Law, and Society
Series Editors, Laura DeNardis and Michael Zimmer
MIT Press

The Information Society Series will address the social, legal, and policy implications of the Internet and new information technologies and will especially feature works from the growing global ranks of interdisciplinary scholars in information schools; communications departments; science, technology, and society programs; and programs in law, technology, and culture.

We are accepting book proposals for the series. Preference will be given to monographs rather than edited volumes and books that are interdisciplinary, normative, and global in scope. Book proposals should include:

1. a prospectus (brief description, outstanding features and uniqueness of work, audience and market considerations, status of book, and recommended reviewers);
2. a detailed table of contents;
3. sample chapters; and
4. the authors curriculum vitae.

Please submit completed proposals to denardis@american.edu and zimmerm@uwm.edu.

Current books in the series include:

• Interfaces on Trial 2.0, by Jonathan Band and Masanobu Katoh
• Opening Standards: The Global Politics of Interoperability, edited by Laura DeNardis
• The Reputation Society: How Online Opinions Are Reshaping the Offline World, edited by Hassan Masum and Mark Tovey

(via Google Blogoscoped)
Google and the Mission to Map Meaning and Make Money is the title of a new book on Google by Bart Milner.

This book is a brief history of Cyberspace and Google’s fundamental contribution – a new search method that gives almost immediate access to the contents of billions of web pages.

It covers the the rivalry with Yahoo! – once their closest partners, the competition with Microsoft and the success that made Google’s 2004 launch on NASDAQ inevitable and the struggle by the company’s founders to prevent that success from ruining their vision of how a 21st century engineering enterprise should be organised.

It traces the origins of the Internet in the work of Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee and the serendipity of the Google founders’ breakthrough discovery of a technology of hypertextual and contextual search developed at Stanford University, after the failure of dozens of earlier Search engines, and their subsequent development of targetted advertising which is already fundamentally transforming the future profits of both the Internet and printed newspapers and magazines industries.

The first chapter of the book is available to read online. Once I’ve read it, I’ll comment. I suspect it won’t sufficiently address the social implications of Google’s dual goal of “mapping meaning” and “making money” – something I hope my dissertation will rectify.

(Via Privacy Digest) The New York Times reviews Robert O’Harrow’s new book No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society:

…Mr. O’Harrow provides in these pages an authoritative and vivid account of the emergence of a “security-industrial complex” and the far-reaching consequences for ordinary Americans, who must cope not only with the uneasy sense of being watched (leading, defenders of civil liberties have argued, to a stifling of debate and dissent) but also with the very palpable dangers of having personal information (and in some cases, inaccurate information) passed from one outfit to another.

Mr. O’Harrow also charts many consumers’ willingness to trade a measure of privacy for convenience (think of the personal information happily dispensed to TiVo machines and Amazon.com in exchange for efficient service and helpful suggestions), freedom for security. He reviews the gargantuan data-gathering and data-mining operations already carried out by companies like Acxiom, ChoicePoint and LexisNexis. And he shows how their methods are being co-opted by the government…

Sounds like an important book, but I still prefer Daniel Solove’s conceptualization of modern privacy threats as most resembling Frank Kafka’s The Trial versus the Orwellian metaphor O’Harrow seems to embrace.

I just finished Daniel Solove’s The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age. Here are excerpts from my review of the book for the academic journal Ethics & Information Technology.

…Solove, an associate law professor at George Washington University Law School, argues that our common conceptualization of the privacy problem as “Big Brother” – some all-knowing, constantly vigilant government entity that regulates every aspect of our lives through constant and total surveillance – fails to account for the new threats to personal privacy in our information age. It is not the all-seeing eye of “Big Brother” that most threatens personal privacy, Solove argues, but a world that is beginning to resemble Kafka’s vision in The Trial.

In Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, the character Joseph K. awakens one morning to discover that he is under arrest for an unspecified crime. Instead of being taken into custody, Joseph spends the remainder of the story in a futile attempt to discover the nature of the charges and his fate. Joseph finds no answer except that a vast, perplexing and bureaucratic court system has apparently assembled a detailed dossier on him, which remains secret and beyond his reach. In the end, Joseph is seized in the middle of the night and executed. The Trial captures the sense of helplessness, frustration, and vulnerability one experiences when a large bureaucratic organization has control over a vast dossier of details about one’s life.

Solove successfully applies this Kafkaesque vision to the emerging threats to personal privacy in the information age. He examines the problem of the growing accumulation of personal data through a wide range of sources and technologies such as grocery discount cards, medical databases, public records, credit card transactions, product registration postcards, web cookies, and computer spyware. Pervasive data mining and aggregation from these otherwise disparate and unconnected databases result in the creation of what Solove calls “digital dossiers,” extensive electronic profiles of an individual’s behavior and day-to-day activities similar to what condemned Joseph K. in Kafka’s tale. The emergence of digital dossiers has created a “new breed of privacy problems,” Solove argues. The new threats to privacy do not emerge from a centralized surveillance program recording our intimate secrets, but rather the accumulation and aggregation of our daily activities and habits – the minutiae of our public lives – by a vast, nameless and unseen network of organizations.

The problem, as Joseph K. discovered, is that we are almost entirely powerless against these vast bureaucracies amassing these digital dossiers and scrutinizing our lives. Solove’s comprehensive study of privacy law reveals that the legal system has failed to respond to the growing Kafkaesque threats to personal privacy. Tort laws, for example, are designed to respond to specific invasions by individual wrongdoers, a non-applicable standard since many privacy infringements have become diffuse and systematic, created not by a single perpetrator, but by a combination of agents, often without malicious intent. Similarly, the concern over digital dossiers spans the entire information economy, making the narrowly written federal statutes mostly ineffective to protect against the assortment of parties involved in the amassment of personal information. Overall, our legal protections against privacy infringements remain rooted in Orwellian conceptions of privacy – the surveillance of intimate secrets through overt invasions of privacy.

Solove prescribes a new architecture of legal protections to regulate the relationship between government, commerce, and individuals. Instead of pursuing more legislation following the “Big Brother” paradigm, he argues for the creation of laws that regulate what types of public and private information can be collected and processed by organizations, how the information must be secured, and how information flow between entities should be limited. “The process toward developing an appropriate architecture should begin,” he argues, “by regulating both the government’s acquisition of personal data and its downstream uses of it.” Through the establishment of such “mechanisms of oversight,” Solove’s proposed legal architecture acknowledges a Kafkaesque vision of privacy by alleviating the feelings powerlessness, uncertainty and unease many individuals share with Joseph K. in our information age.

Solove’s focus on legal prescriptions is appropriate, but not exhaustive. His call for new architecture needs to be expanded beyond the law to include the technology itself. How a technology is designed will affect the freedoms and control the system enables; technological architecture engenders threats to privacy – and our ability to protect against such threats – as much as the legal architecture surrounding it. Solove understands how changes in information technology has brought about many of the Kafkaesque threats to personal privacy, but he appears to accept our current technological environment as given and inescapable – little is said about how things could be different. Technologies which threaten privacy – such as web cookies or automated toll systems – were designed a particular way, and it is not necessary that their future design and implementation remain threatening. Calling for shifts in the technological architecture, in concert with Solove’s proposal for a more robust legal architecture, would best protect us from Kafka’s dark vision….

[See Bruce Shneier's comments]

[Thanks to Prof. Solove for correcting my use of the adjective "Kafkian" instead of the preferred "Kafkaesque."]