For the next few days I will be participating in a project aiming to apply the VID perspective to future Internet architecture (FIA) design eforts: the Values-In-Design Council.

The National Science Foundation has recently funded multiple projects to envision and  pursue new ways to build a “more trustworthy and robust Internet.” As described by the NSF:

The four basic research and system design projects funded under FIA explore different dimensions of the network architecture design space and emphasize different visions of future networks. NSF anticipates that the teams will explore new directions and a diverse range of research thrusts within their research agenda but also work together to enhance and possibly integrate architectural thinking, concepts and components, paving the way to a comprehensive trustworthy network architecture of the future.

The four FIA projects are described in more detail here.

Along with these technical projects, the NSF has also funded the creation of the Values-in-Design Council, a multi-disciplinary team of experts in the social analysis of digital information technologies, led by Helen Nissenbaum, who are tasked to work alongside the recipients of the FIA technical grants. As described by Nissenbaum:

Council members will serve as analysts and consultants to the FIA projects, helping to identify junctures in the design process in which values-critical technical decisions arise; locating design parameters and variations that differentially call into play relevant values; for and with respective projects, developing rich conceptual understandings of relevant values; for and with project investigators, operationalizing values to enable transition from values conceptions into design features; with FIA investigators, examining the interplay of values embodied in design with respective values embodied in law and policy; and where possible, verifying values in design through prototyping, user testing and other empirical analyses.

The full list of VID Council members is here.

At this week’s meeting, hosted by Colorado State University’s Computer Science Department, each of the four project teams will provide an update of their work, and then discussion will focus on this set of questions:

Who are the service providers in your architecture, and what is the resulting provider ecosystem? (Some of the FIA architecture seem to presume a provider ecosystem similar to today: a connected set of packet forwarders. Some presume other services related to carriage, such as storage providers. )

• What is the incentive of each of these actors to enter into their line of business? Where would your architecture require payments among actors to sustain viability?

Options for control: which actors can influence the behavior of a transfer?

• Does your architecture provide user control over aspects of service selection: routes, service qualities, or providers of support service (e.g. like DNS in today’s Internet)?
• To what extent does your architecture support or resist the goals of those who wish to control access to classes of information (e.g. governments, rights-holders). How does this position influence the balance of power in your network, and its viability? Which actors have the ability (or perhaps the easy ability) to block communication among willing end-points?
• IP addresses accidentally turned out to be scarce resources, for no good reason. What features of your architecture might turn out to be “scarce resources” or resources over which some potentially powerful actor could exercise control?
• Do you have hierarchies with single points of control at the root? Is there information you share with partners that has to be signed by a trusted third party?
• Are there policies that you have explicitly embedded in your design?

What is the range of services that the system provides to the higher layers?

• Compared to today’s Internet, would you expect the same sort of commercial entities at the higher layers?
• For example, (especially in the context of those architectures that emphasize information retrieval), would you imagine that there would be CDNs operating on top of your architecture?
• Does your architecture provide an API that defines the service interface of your system?

Interfaces among providers

• What types of information is expected to be exchanged between providers?  This goes beyond packet forwarding to include:
  • Routing information
  • Naming information (e.g. DNS zone transfers)
  • An interconnection agreement between providers in today’s Internet may have Service Level Requirements, or specify aspects of routing policies (cold potato, hot potato).  What would you expect to find in inter-provider agreements in your architecture?
  • To what extent do services provided to higher levels (see above) require negotiation or cooperation among the various actors that make up the overall network?
  • What mechanisms does your architecture provide for negotiation among service providers?
  • What range of functions are supported by the protocols and mechanisms that hook them together?
  • Operators are sometimes worried about all getting together to solve operational issues. It is hard to do and looks like anti-trust. What are the “top five” aspects of your architecture that require operational coordination?

Market forces and regulation

• To what extent does your proposal facilitate or limit the use of competition as a discipline on the market?
• If regulation were proposed to require some sort of non-discriminatory access or “network neutrality”, what might that mean in your design? Where might forms of discriminatory service emerge?

Evolvability

• How does your architecture allow innovation and the migration to new mechanisms?
• Which sorts of evolution seem to require global coordination, like the migration to IPv6 today?

Trust, isolation and availability

• What sorts of trust assumptions does your design make about the various actors that make up the ecosystem?
• Does your architecture provide means for instrumentation or data-gathering? What sorts of data? Internal structure of the network, usage, routes, outages, etc?
• To what extent does your architecture include tools to detect that actors are not functioning properly? Which actors have access to these tools?
• How do your options for control allow different actors to respond to actors that are not trustworthy or mis-functioning?
• Availability often implies “extra” or “diverse” resources. Does your architecture depend on resources that are otherwise under-utilized to achieve high availability. Is economics a barrier to a high-availability network? Both within a region and across regions, does your design allow the operator to trade off explicitly between cost and availability/resilience?

Implicit in these questions are various ethical concerns, including: autonomy, access, freedom from bias, control, and trust. I’m excited about the conversations that will unfold over the next couple of days, and will provide public reflections here as appropriate.

Call for Papers

Internet Research 13.0: Technologies

The 13th Annual International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)

October 18-21, 2012

MediaCity:UK – University of Salford
Salford – Greater Manchester – UK

Internet Research 13.0 will focus on the theme of technologies, understood in the broadest sense as crafts, techniques, and systems. The conference will examine the place of the Internet in the contemporary world and in relation to a range of existing and emerging technologies, considering its impact in a context where life is entangled with technologies of all kinds as never before. The conference will bring together scholars, researchers, students and practitioners from many disciplines to map and situate the development of the Internet as part of the history of human technology.

To this end, we call for papers, panel and pre-conference workshop proposals from any discipline, methodology, community or a combination of them that address the conference themes, including, but not limited to, papers that intersect and/or interconnect with the following:

• the speed and acceleration of technological change
• 
the past, present and future of technology
• emerging and converging technologies
• educational technology
• cultures of crafting
• connectivity and access
• space, location and mobile technologies
• technology, networks and attachments
• 
technology and the body
• 
technologies of the self
• technology, regulation and ethics

Sessions at the conference will be established that specifically address the conference themes, and we welcome innovative, exciting, and unexpected takes on those themes. We also welcome submissions on topics that address social, cultural, political, legal, aesthetic, economic, and/or philosophical aspects of the internet beyond the conference themes. In all cases, we welcome disciplinary and interdisciplinary submissions as well as international collaborations from both AoIR and non-AoIR members.

Submissions

We seek proposals for several different kinds of contributions. As in the past, we welcome proposals for traditional academic conference PAPERS, organized PANEL PROPOSALS that present a coherent group of papers on a single theme, as well as PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS which focus on a particular topic. We also invite proposals that will focus on discussion and interaction among conference delegates. A common form of this type is the ROUNDTABLE SESSION, but we would also like to encourage other formats, such as OPEN FISHBOWL SESSIONS. (See the Wikipedia entry under “Fishbowl (conversation)” for a description of this format. Fishbowl sessions should cover broad topics of interest to a wide segment of the AoIR community.) Finally, we invite short 5-minute talks on topics of interest to the community as part of our Ignite-IR panels. Please see below for more information on this format.

Deadlines

• 

Submissions Due: 1 March 2012 (Papers, Panels and Pre-Workshops. Details below.)
  NOTE: The submission deadline is a HARD DEADLINE; there will be NO extensions to this date.
• Notification: 1 May 2012
• Full Papers Submissions Due for inclusion in Selected Papers of IR: 1 July 2012
• Ignite-IR Final Proposal Deadline: 1 August 2012
• Ignite-IR Slides Due: 15 September 2012

Submission Requirements

• All papers and presentations will be evaluated in a standard blind peer review.
• PAPERS (individual or multi-author) – submit abstract of 600-800 words
• PANEL PROPOSALS – submit a description of 600-800 words on the panel theme, plus a 250-500 word abstract for each paper or presentation. The panel organizer must assemble these materials for submission
• ROUNDTABLE and FISHBOWL PROPOSALS – submit a statement indicating the nature of the discussion and form of interaction, and listing initial participants. (In the case of a fishbowl proposal, this will include the name of the moderator, and the names of the first four speakers for the fishbowl.)
• PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS – please submit all workshop proposals via email to atwood@aoir.org. Workshop proposals should include names of presenters and a 1,000-word description.
• IGNITE-IR – please submit a one-paragraph abstract and other information. Details at http://ir13.aoir.org/ignite-ir

Papers, presentations and panels will be selected from the submitted proposals on the basis of multiple blind peer review, coordinated and overseen by the Program Chair. Each individual may present only one paper during the conference, though they may be listed as a co-author on multiple papers. In addition to this one presentation, they may also appear on a panel, roundtable, or performance. The exception is the Ignite-IR lightening talk, which may be in addition to any other presentations.

Publication of Papers

Full papers submitted by the 1 July 2012 deadline will undergo review to be published in an open-access, online collection, Selected Papers of Internet Research (ISSN 2162-3317). A template and guidelines for preparing your final paper are available on the conference website (http://ir13.aoir.org/papers)

Selected papers from the conference will alternatively be published in a special issue of the journal Information, Communication & Society. Authors selected for submission for this issue will be contacted prior to the conference.

Pre-conference Workshops

On 18 October 2012, there will be a limited number of pre-conference workshops and symposia that will provide participants with in-depth, hands-on and/or creative opportunities. We invite proposals for these pre-conference workshops. Local presenters are encouraged to propose workshops that will invite visiting researchers into their labs or studios or locales. Proposals should be no more than 1,000 words, and should clearly outline the purpose, methodology, structure, costs, equipment and minimal attendance required, as well as explaining its relevance to the conference as a whole. Proposals will be accepted if they demonstrate that the workshop will add significantly to the overall program in terms of thematic depth, hands on experience, or local opportunities for scholarly or artistic connections. These proposals and all inquiries regarding pre-conference proposals should be submitted as soon as possible to both the program chair (atwood@aoir.org) and no later than 1 March 2012.

Contact Information

Program Chair: Feona Attwood, Communication, Sheffield Hallam University, UK. email: attwood@aoir.org

Local Conference Chair: Ben Light, School of Media, Music, and Performance, University of Salford, UK. email: light@aoir.org

I feel privileged to have my own essay, “Privacy Protection in the Next Digital Decade: ‘Trading Up’ or a ‘Race to the Bottom?”, published within the same pages as Tim Wu, Hal Varian, the Hon. Alex Kozinski, Stewart Baker, Jonathan Zittrain, Milton Mueller, Eric Goldman, and Yochai Benkler.

To learn more about the book, check out the foreword and introduction, or the table of contents. The book is available as a free PDF and the hardcover can purchased online. A free eBook will be available soon.

A free book launch symposium will follow the State of the Net Conference in Washington, DC the afternoon of January 19. Space is limited so RSVP here. (Unfortunately I cannot attend.)

This year, I participated in three main events: a pre-conference workshop on “Ethics and Internet Research Commons:  Building a sustainable future”, a session on “Networking and Social Sites” where I presented a paper on “The Laws of Social Networking, or, How Facebook Feigns Privacy”, and a panel discussion titled “On the Philosophy of Facebook“. Details below…

:::

Ethics and Internet Research Commons:  Building a sustainable future

This pre-conference was organized primarily by Elizabeth Buchanan, and featured brief talks by Charles Ess, Alex Halavais, Annette Markham, Malin Svenningson, and myself. We presented case studies that revealed key ethical challenges and identified important components of ethical decision making for Internet researchers, including:

• How does cultural specificity define research ethics and regulation?
• What constitutes a public text online and in what ways can and should they be used in research?
• Why do we consider firewalls and passwords to be the “gold standard” for determining if something was meant to be kept public or private?
• How do researchers work towards the imperative of sharing data while adhering to human subjects regulations?
• What ethical guidelines should be applied to trace data?
• How do researchers handle “closeness” in ethnography in ethical ways?
• What oscillations take place when a researcher is first known as a member of a group and then as a researcher?
• How is “empirical imperialism” affecting research ethics?
• What are the virtues of deception?

An excellent summary of the entire day is over at the Internet Research Ethics project website, which includes links to my slides.

:::

The Laws of Social Networking, or, How Facebook Feigns Privacy

I participated on an excellent session titled “Networking and Social Sites”, which also featured Robert Bodle and Christian Thorsten Callisen.

Bodle’s presentation, “Opening the social media ecosystem: the tenuous nature of interoperability, crossposting, and sharing among dominant social media sites, services and devices”, explored the values, characteristics, and conditions of interoperability between Facebook and its third party developer ecosystem. He found that while Facebook’s APIs provide new ways to share and participate, they also provide Facebook a new means to achieve market dominance, as well as undermine privacy, data security, contextual integrity, user autonomy and freedom.

Callisen’s talk, “The Old Face of ‘New’ Social Networks: The Republic of Letters”, was a historical contextualization of the so-called digital revolution within the longer history of “the virtual”. He showed how the Republic of Letters was essentially a networked virtual community for the reciprocal sharing of information, complete with its own techniques for simulating co-presence, protocols for information transfer and interaction, and varying levels of transparency and encryption.

My presentation, “The Laws of Social Networking, or, How Facebook Feigns Privacy”, was an expanded thought piece inspired by this blog post, where I suggest three natural laws that thwart attempts to provide users of social networking sites sufficient means to control their information flows:

• The first law is somewhat obvious: Social networking sites are incentivized to promote the open and unfettered flow of mountains of personal information.
• The second law, perhaps more of a corollary, follows naturally from this: Providing users robust and easy-to-use tools to control their personal information flows is counter to this profit maximization motive.
• Thus, the third law: Provide users privacy controls only when you must, and position them as both a great a sacrifice, as well as something users probably shouldn’t bother with; make privacy hard.

To support this argument, I discuss various public comments by Facebook’s management team, and show how the laws become encoded within the design of Facebook’s architecture and recent privacy “upgrades”. I concluded that the existence of the laws of social networking create — and perpetuate — a great power imbalance where users lack robust privacy controls, leaving them with limited ability to manage their personal information flows.

The rough text of my remarks can be downloaded here, and my slides are available here.

As an aside: I found it amusing that the most tweeted comment from my talk was a completely off-the-cuff remark criticizing Facebook’s claim that users have control over their information simply due to the existence of privacy controls. I noted that all the controls to fly  a 747 are in the cockpit too, but that doesn’t mean anyone can fly a 747.

:::

On the Philosophy of Facebook

Recognizing that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has built his social networking empire on the belief that “information wants to be shared“, a particular philosophy of information that directly impacts the values built into the design of Facebook, ranging from its user interface, privacy policies, terms of service, and method of governance, I organized a panel to explore the philosophy of Facebook and its broader implications for norms of privacy, identity, governance, sociability, and online life generally.

I was lucky to welcome the following speakers to IR.11 to discuss this important topic:

• Kate Raynes-Goldie, Curtin University of Technology, Australia
• Anthony Hoffmann, UW-Milwaukee, USA
• Korinna Patelis, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus
• Trebor Scholz, New School University, USA
• Dylan Wittkower, Coastal Carolina University, USA

Unfortunately, we only had 1 hour (!!) for the panel discussion, but it was a very good 60 minutes; one of the few times I’ve heard Marx, Hegel, Kant, Rawls, Deleuze and Guattari, etc discussed at length at AoIR. We concluded that perhaps an entire pre-conference on the topic is in order for IR.12 (in Seattle in 2011).

The conference program is fantastic, featuring keynote addresses by Siva Vaidhyanathan, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Megan Boler. I’ll be presenting an updated version of my paper, “But the Data is Already Public”: On the Ethics of Research in Facebook, based on my critique of the “Tastes, Ties, and Time” Facebook data release.

I’ll also be participating in a pre-conference workshop on Critical Issues and Perspectives in Internet Research Methods and Ethics, where the focus will be on raising awareness of and sensitivity by researchers around critical methodological and ethical issues working particularly in online or Internet-mediated realms.

There already is a great tweet stream at #ir10, so please follow us if you can’t make it.

UPDATE: By most measures, the conference was a great success. As an organizer, I was only able to sit in on a handful of sessions (including my own), but others have blogged about here and here.

There are quite a few images up on Flickr, and I’ve created a Wordle from all the individual paper titles. Matt Allen blogged the AoIR general meeting, where the locations of the next two conferences were announced: Gothenburg, Sweden (2010) & Seattle, Washington (2011). See you there!

Call for Papers

Internet Research 10.0 – Internet: Critical

The 10th Annual International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)

October 7-11, 2009
Hilton Milwaukee City Center
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
http://ir10.aoir.org

As the Internet has become an increasingly ubiquitous and mundane medium, the analytical shortcomings of the division between the online and the offline have become evident. Shifting the focus to the fundamental intermeshing of online and offline spaces, networks, economies, politics, locations, agencies, and ethics, Internet: Critical invites scholars to consider material frameworks, infrastructures, and exchanges as enabling constraints in terms of online phenomena.

Furthermore, the conference invites considerations of Internet research as a critical practice and theory, its intellectual histories, investments, and social reverberations. How do we, as Internet researchers, connect our work to social concerns or cultural developments both local and global, and what kinds of agency may we exercise in the process? What kinds of redefinitions of the political (in terms of networks, micropolitics, participation, lifestyles, resistant or critical practices) are necessary when conceptualizing Internet cultures within the current geopolitical and geotechnological climate?

To this end, we call for papers, panel proposals, and presentations from any discipline, methodology, and community, and from conjunctions of multiple disciplines, methodologies and academic communities that address the conference themes, including papers that intersect and/or interconnect the following:

• critical moments, elements, practices
• critical theories, methods, constructs
• critical voices, histories, texts
• critical networks, junctures, spaces
• critical technologies, artifacts, failures
• critical ethics, interventions, alternatives.

Sessions at the conference will be established that specifically address the conference themes, and we welcome innovative, exciting, and unexpected takes on those themes. We also welcome submissions on topics that address social, cultural, political, legal, aesthetic, economic, and/or philosophical aspects of the Internet beyond the conference themes. In all cases, we welcome disciplinary and interdisciplinary submissions as well as international collaborations from both AoIR and non-AoIR members.

SUBMISSIONS
We seek proposals for several different kinds of contributions. We welcome proposals for traditional academic conference PAPERS and we also welcome proposals for ROUNDTABLE SESSIONS that will focus on discussion and interaction among conference delegates, as well as organized PANEL PROPOSALS that present a coherent group of papers on a single theme.

DEADLINES
Call for Papers Released: 17 November 2008
Submissions Due: 1 February 2009
Notification: 15 March 2009

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS
All papers and presentations in this session will be evaluated in a standard blind peer review.
Format

• PAPERS (individual or multi-author) – submit abstract of 600-800 words
• FULL PAPERS (OPTIONAL): For submitters requiring peer review of full papers, manuscripts of up to 8,000 words will be accepted for review. These will be reviewed and judged separately from abstract submissions
• PANEL PROPOSALS – submit a 600-800 word description of the panel theme, plus 250-500 word abstract for each paper or presentation
• ROUNDTABLE PROPOSALS – submit a statement indicating the nature of the roundtable discussion and interaction

Papers, presentations and panels will be selected from the submitted proposals on the basis of multiple blind peer review, coordinated and overseen by the Program Chair. Each individual is invited to submit a proposal for 1 paper or 1 presentation. A person may also propose a panel session, which may include a second paper that they are presenting. An individual may also submit a roundtable proposal. You may be listed as co-author on additional papers as long as you are not presenting them.

PUBLICATION OF PAPERS
Selected papers from the conference will be published in a special issue of the journal Information, Communication & Society, edited by Caroline Haythornwaite and Lori Kendall. Authors selected for submission for this issue will be contacted prior to the conference.

All papers submitted to the conference system will be available to AoIR members after the conference.

PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS
On October 7, 2009, there will be a limited number of pre-conference workshops which will provide participants with in-depth, hands-on and/or creative opportunities. We invite proposals for these pre-conference workshops. Local presenters are encouraged to propose workshops that will invite visiting researchers into their labs or studios or locales. Proposals should be no more than 1000 words, and should clearly outline the purpose, methodology, structure, costs, equipment and minimal attendance required, as well as explaining its relevance to the conference as a whole. Proposals will be accepted if they demonstrate that the workshop will add significantly to the overall program in terms of thematic depth, hands on experience, or local opportunities for scholarly or artistic connections. These proposals and all inquiries regarding pre-conference proposals should be submitted as soon as possible to both the Conference Chair and Program Chair and no later than March 31, 2009.

CONTACT INFORMATION

• Program Chair: Susanna Paasonen, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
• Conference Co-Chairs and Coordinators: Elizabeth Buchanan, Michael Zimmer, UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies and Center for Information Policy Research; Steve Jones, University of Illinois-Chicago

From the announcement:

In an effort to protect and advance the human rights of freedom of expression and privacy, a diverse coalition of leading information and communications companies, major human rights organizations, academics, investors and technology leaders today launched the Global Network Initiative.

From the Americas to Europe to the Middle East to Africa and Asia, companies in the information and communications industries face increasing government pressure to comply with domestic laws and policies that require censorship and disclosure of personal information in ways that conflict with internationally recognized human rights laws and standards.

The Initiative is founded upon new Principles on Freedom of Expression and Privacy – supported by specific implementation commitments and a framework for accountability and learning – that provide a systematic approach for companies, NGOs, investors, academics and others to work together in resisting efforts by governments that seek to enlist companies in acts of censorship and surveillance that violate international standards.

The Initiative’s website includes a full list of participants and three core documents that describe the Initiative’s objectives and key commitments, including a statement of Principles, Implementation Guidelines, and a Governance, Accountability & Learning Framework.

There is a lot to parse here, but I’ll provide some initial reactions below.

Participants

The list of participants includes the usual suspects in initiatives like these, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Center for Democracy & Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, etc. It also includes a variety of (sociall-minded) investment firms, like Domini Social Investments, F&C Asset Management, and Trillium Asset Management, perhaps indicating a new focus on brining the financial sector of the ICT industry into the fold on these vital issues.

Noticeably absent from the list of partners are other major tech companies who commonly confront issues of privacy and freedom of expression, such as Facebook (ahem), AT&T (ahem), Cisco (ahem), or Skype (ahem). Also absent are other major advocacy groups like EPIC or Amnesty International. It is unkown whether these groups we asked to join and declined, or haven’t been approached to contribute to these efforts.

Principles

The GNI’s Principles outline its commitment to the protection and advancement of freedom of expression and privacy online, largely based on international human rights laws and standards including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

The Principles statement opens with a strong endorsement of protecting human rights:

All human rights are indivisible, interdependent, and interrelated: the improvement of one right facilitates advancement of the others; the deprivation of one right adversely affects others. Freedom of expression and privacy are an explicit part of this international framework of human rights and are enabling rights that facilitate the meaningful realization of other human rights.

And then continues to outline how freedom of expression and privacy fit into that human rights perspective. Notably, it defines “privacy” as:

Privacy is a human right and guarantor of human dignity. Privacy is important to maintaining personal security, protecting identity and promoting freedom of expression in the digital age.

Right on. Unfortunately, however, it frames the threat to privacy solely in terms of government interference:

The right to privacy should not be restricted by governments, except in narrowly defined circumstances based on internationally recognized laws and standards.

…

Participating companies will respect and protect the privacy rights of users when confronted with government demands, laws or regulations that compromise privacy in a manner inconsistent with internationally recognized laws and standards.

Given this language, it appears these principles are meant to provide guidelines to prevent unwarranted government access to personal information, but does little to address how the companies themselves might be impacting users’ privacy rights through their own collection and use of personal information.

Implementation Guidelines

The Implementation Guidelines provide more details on how the partners plan to put the Principles into practice. Notably, it calls for the boards of the participating companies to “incorporate the impact of company operations on freedom of expression and privacy into the Board’s review of the business”, as well as “employ human rights impact assessments to identify circumstances when freedom of expression and privacy may be jeopardized or advanced, and develop appropriate risk mitigation strategies”. This is to be achieved through the “creation of a senior-directed human rights team, including the active participation of senior management, to design, coordinate and lead the implementation of the Principles.”

This is incredibly similar to a recent shareholder proposal that Google’s board rejected (twice). What made them change their mind? Perhaps they wanted to make it appear as an inernal & altruistic move, rather than “giving in” to shareholder demands? One wonders…

With regard to privacy, the Implementation Guidelines outlines numerous steps for the Partners to follow, including some key items related to transparency:

Participating companies will seek to operate in a transparent manner when required to provide personal information to governments. To achieve this, participating companies will:

• Disclose to users in clear language what generally applicable government laws and policies require the participating company to provide personal information to government authorities, unless such disclosure is unlawful.
• Disclose to users in clear language what personal information the participating company collects, and the participating company’s policies and procedures for responding to government demands for personal information.
• Assess on an ongoing basis measures to support user transparency, in an effective manner, regarding the company’s data collection, storage, and retention practices.

Many of the partner companies have been working hard to make their data collection practices more transparent, and this is good stop towards codifying these efforts. In particular, I hope the first point above means that privacy policies will be more explicit when they state a company will disclose personal information to “satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.”

Finally, the Guidelines also call for the creation of a “confidential multi-stakeholder Advisory Forum [to] provide guidance to participating companies on emerging challenges and opportunities for the advancement of freedom of expression and privacy.” Why must this be confidential? I have no idea, and contradicts the efforts towards transparency stressed above.

Governance, Accountability & Learning Framework

The Governance, Accountability & Learning Framework outlines a multi-stakeholder governance structure, goals for collaboration and a system of company accountability to support the Principles, maximize opportunities for learning and ensure the integrity and efficacy of the Initiative.

Essentially, each of the Partners will contribute to the formation of an Organization to oversee the Initiative, “with equal representation from company and non-company participants that will strive to operate on a consensus basis.” A key task of this Organization will be to conduct “independent assessments” of the participating companies to ensure compliance with the Principles. Note, however, that the companies get to choose their independent assessor (“in close consultation with the Organization”). Hopefully the independence criteria to become an accredited assessor are sufficient to ensure fair assessments of the companies’ actions.

Summary

To summarize, this is an important (perhaps unprecedented?) step by members of the tech industry to recognize how their products and actions impact human rights, and I am thrilled that they are willing to sign on to such an initiative. I know many of the people who have been working on this (I’ve been hearing rumors of its creation), and I know they are committed to protecting both freedom of expression and privacy rights across the globe.

While there are gaps, this is an important step, and I hope momentum builds and real action emerges as a result.

critical moments, elements, practices
critical theories, methods, constructs
critical voices, histories, texts
critical networks, junctures, spaces
critical technologies, artifacts, failures
critical ethics, interventions, alternatives

The program chair is Susanna Paasonen, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. The local organizing committee is comprised of Elizabeth Buchanan, UW-Milwaukee, Michael Zimmer, UW-Milwaukee, and Steve Jones, UI-Chicago.

The hosting institutions include the School of Information Studies (UW-Milwaukee), the Center for Information Policy Research (UW-Milwaukee), and the Department of Communication Studies at UI-Chicago).

More details to come…we hope to see you next year in Milwaukee!

• 72% are concerned that their online behaviors were being tracked and profiled by companies
• 53% are uncomfortable with internet companies using their email content or browsing history to send relevant ads
• 54% are uncomfortable with third parties collecting information about their online behavior
• 93% of Americans think internet companies should always ask for permission before using personal information
• 72% want the right to opt out when companies track their online behavior

Further, the poll reveals that some Americans are taking steps to resist widespread online surveillance:

• 35% use alternate email addresses to avoid providing real information
• 26% have used software that hides their identity [perhaps like Tor]
• 25% have provided fake information to access a website

Meanwhile, the poll revealed large misconceptions about the actions of online companies and the (lack of) protections afforded consumers

• 61% are confident that what they do online is private and not shared without their permission
• 57% incorrectly believe that companies must identify themselves and indicate why they are collecting data and whether they intend to share it with other organizations
• 48% incorrectly believe their consent is required for companies to use the personal information they collect from online activities
• 43% incorrectly believe a court order is required to monitor activities online

We have a lot of work to do.

From the abstract:

This document examines a broad range of issues the next President and Congress must address in order to keep the Internet a powerful engine for innovation, economic growth and democratization. The policies outlined in this paper describe current threats to the Internet and then proposes policies and actions that the next President and Congress should take to protect innovation, privacy, consumer choice, and freedom of expression.

Subject areas include:

• Preserving Free Speech and Protecting Children Online
• Protecting Consumer Privacy in the Digital Age
• Restoring the Balance between Security and Liberty
• Promoting Global Internet Freedom
• Keeping the Internet Open to Innovation
• Promoting Open Government

I recently had the privilege to join colleagues at a working dinner with the CDT’s Ari Schwartz and Jim Dempsey to discuss the document, and they welcome additional feedback (what’s missing, what should be brought into more focus, etc).

They’ve set it up online for people to be able to add their own comments, etc, so I encourage everyone to check it out.