The time I spent at the Yale ISP was amazing. You are surrounded by world-class colleagues, brilliant & motivated students, and rarely go a day without learning new things and having what you thought you knew rightly challenged.

Information about applying is available here.  Applications for 2009-10 ISP fellowships must be postmarked no later than Feb. 1, 2009.

Educators often use (or want to use) copyrighted materials from mass media and popular culture in building students’ critical thinking and communication skills. For example, I often have students analyze a particular website or a television ad to identify bias and source credibility. Or, we watch popular movies depicting high-tech surveillance (Enemy of the State, Eagle Eye, etc), hoping to unpack both the technology itself, and how such films might desensitize our general concerns with such privacy invasions.

Yet, despite the rise of digital media tools for learning and sharing, fear and confusion over copyright and fair use have kept teachers and students from using this valuable material, including portions of films, TV coverage, photos, songs, articles, and audio, in the classroom.

Luckily, American University’s Center for Social Media has released a handbook to help clear the air: “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education”. (This is the same group who brought us the “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video”.)

The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education outlines five principles, each with limitations:

Educators can, under some circumstances:

1. Make copies of newspaper articles, TV shows, and other copyrighted works, and use them and keep them for educational use.

2. Create curriculum materials and scholarship with copyrighted materials embedded.

3. Share, sell and distribute curriculum materials with copyrighted materials embedded.

Learners can, under some circumstances:

4. Use copyrighted works in creating new material

5. Distribute their works digitally if they meet the transformativeness standard.

The full document can be downloaded here.

Information-Seeking

My son has an ear infection, so I decided to see how Cuil might help me with treatment, so I searched for treat toddler ear infection. While the results bar said there were 100,322 results, Cuil decided to only show me 2. The first was for “Eddy Ear Sprinkles,” some kind of herbal remedy promoted by the Manataka American Indian Council. The second link was for a short article about ear infections, written by a purported “professional broadcaster.” Obviously, neither of these are satisfying to a concerned parent.

Google, on the other hand, provides links to much more helpful (and trustworthy, IMO) links to such sites as BabyCenter, the pediatrics section of About.com, and iVillage.

Navigational

My second test of Cuil was for a navigational search, where one is just looking for a particular website. I tried a search for “Wisconsin State Bar Association,” using quotes since I wanted to be specific about the site I was trying to find. The results were similarly less than ideal.

The first was a link to the Internet Archive’s record of an address delivered to the Wisconsin State Bar Association in 1915 about “Lincoln and the Convention of 1860.” Interesting, but not at all what I was looking for.

The second link was to a page on the website for the law firm Weitz & Luxenberg, a personal injury firm that appears to specialize in asbestos claims. Luckily, they happen to provide links to all the state bar associations, so I was able to clickthrough there and get to where I was going. Lucky Cuil.

(FWIW, removing the quotes doesn’t help things.)

As one might expect, Google’s first result was the site I was searching for.

Vanity Search

My final test was the (necessary) vanity search for michael zimmer. Here the results were promising, but the presentation (screenshot) was utterly confusing.

The first result is this blog, but the image Cuil grabbed was of one of the random badges I have under the “Campaigns” section. I’ll chalk that up to just poor automated Web crawling.

The second result is someone else’s LinkedIn profile placeholder, with a photo I presume includes that person (one wonders, however, where that image came from, as I don’t recall LinkeIn allowing photos).

The third result is also for this blog (the biography page, to be specific), but the image provided is the title graphic for a special issue of First Monday I co-edited about 18 months ago. Not sure why this was deemed representative of my biography, especially since it isn’t linked to from my bio page. (Also, the summary is of a previous version of my bio, so I’m not sure how often they’re indexing pages).

The fourth and fifth links are to Yale Daily News articles written by a Michael Zimmer (not me). But corresponding images are of the Seton Hall Law professor and of a montage of Farrand Field from a presentation hosted on my website, neither of which have anything to do with the links provided.

The next two results are similar: links and text regarding someone else, but images of me giving a presentation at the Forum on Quaero at the Jan van Eyck Acadamie in Maastricht. (I think the images are from a Flickr stream, but I can’t seem to find them.)

In all, these results reveal Cuil has much work to do in order to win over users from the big 3 search providers.

The problem is that these technical features only offer the illusion of privacy with the content uploaded to the Web.

Many cases have emerged where holes (some small, some gaping) have been found in these “private” settings: “private” Facebook albums could be accessed simply with the right URL, the same with Google’s Picasa image sharing platform, just to name a few examples.

We can now add MySpace to this list: Wired reports that a backdoor in MySpace’s architecture allows anyone who’s interested to see the photographs of some users with private profiles — including those under 16 — despite assurances from MySpace that those pictures can only be seen by people on a user’s friends list. Not surprisingly, large datasets of these “private” images have been assembled and distributed online to anyone who would like to peek at the private images.

Fred Stutzman comments on the severity of this particular breach of illusory privacy:

The scope of this breach is staggering, especially when one considers the method of distribution. Like in other data breaches, once the data hits a torrent network, there’s simply no way to recover or erase the leakage. Individuals who had their data compromised can hope for security through obscurity, but they can never hope to reclaim their images from the hard drives they now inhabit.

This episode is frightening on a number of levels. As a system can’t be hacker-proof, there will always be individuals seeking to exploit and gain access to private information. In this attack, we see a basic crawling/caching – but what if it had been deployed as an open proxy, where individuals interested in seeing private pictures fed the system with id’s, and the proxy simply cached and shared everything? Social network sites seem especially vulnerable to the proxy attack, and I shudder to think what might have happened if this attack was the work of more than one determined individual.

This also reinforces the false, trivial nature of privacy on these sites (as Valleywag says, “your privacy is an illusion”). The only thing separating one’s private content from public content is an if/else loop, and if it fails once, that’s enough for a massive incident. Of course, this doesn’t apply only to social network sites – think of anywhere you’ve stored mass amounts of private information: your web-based email, your friends-only journal, your photo-sharing account. Any and all of it may be public one day, all it takes is a vulnerability and determined screen-scraper.

I’d like to repeat one of Stutzman’s observations: “The only thing separating one’s private content from public content is an if/else loop, and if it fails once, that’s enough for a massive incident.”

Indeed, unless we can compel the designers of these new information systems to truly and fully protect user privacy, we’ll have little more than the illusion of “private” Web content, and we’ll always be one “if/else loop” away from the continued erosion of the ability to manage the flow of our personal information online.

UPDATE: Terrell Russell has also reflected on this, providing a wise observation:

We sometimes forget we’re in uncharted territory. We are playing with the new shiny toys of the internet and not necessarily understanding the implications. These tools provide great power across the board. Users gain abilities to connect, find, sort, and publish in ways never before available. Conversely, companies gain abilities to monitor, gather, and sell more personal information than ever before. Additionally, third party observers gain the ability to observe at a distance and in numbers never possible in the physical world.

And we don’t yet know all the rules.

With all these new powers, our nuanced understanding of how we interact and the ramifications of our various ‘digital’ actions have not kept up with our abilities. We don’t know how these things “break” yet.

• Transparency – Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.
• Collaboration – Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community focus.
• Quality – Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the searching experience.
• Privacy – “Pursuing the Holy Grail of Privacy Protection”

Principle #4, of course, is dear to my heart, but it is not clear what is actually meant by “the holy grail of privacy protection.”

When Wales made the major announcement of this project at NYU earlier this year, Helen Nissenbaum (then my adviser) probed him about the privacy implications of current search engine design and whether he envisions Wikia Search doing something different that might help mitigate these privacy concerns. (The exchange begins at about 26:12 in this video, but the audio of the question isn’t very clear.)

Nissenbaum indirectly referenced my example of how when seeking information at the library, no one necessarily knows what books your look for in the card catalog or which you page through in the stacks; the library simply has created a very robust and navigable organizational structure to help people find information relatively anonymously. But given the drive for the “perfect search engine,” search providers increasingly want to know exactly who a particular searcher is so they can provide the most “personalized” and “relevant” results (and advertising — I’ll get back to that in a minute). Thus, when using a search engine to seek the same information, all of your searches and clicks are automatically recorded by the search engine provider in order to help them build a dossier of your personal and intellectual interests, resulting in significant privacy concerns. Her question boiled down to whether Wikia Search would follow a similar path and try to know everything possible about the user in order to deliver the quality results it seeks.

Wales almost seemed to be thrown off-guard by the question, and didn’t appear to have a canned answer at the ready (which is surprising, given how privacy is one of Wikia Search’s core principles). He did state, with the caveat that it was an uninformed opinion, that he doubts whether knowing everything about a person really can help with search results. He did, however, recognize there might be a benefit of reviewing search histories for “short term patters,” so if I was just looking at hotels in London and Berlin, and then search for “Paris Hilton” it is a safe guess that I’m looking for a hotel, and the celebrity (similar tracking of immediately-previous search strings by way of the referer field is already happening). Wales goes on to say that the goals/benefits of monitoring a user’s search activity has less to do with improving the quality of the search results and more to do with the advertising, and he admits that he doesn’t have too much of a problem with personalization of ads since he’d rather see an ad on a topic he cares about rather than some random ad. All that said, Wales acknowledged an increasing anxiety about how companies like Google are “watching everything I’m doing.”

So, in a nutshell, Wales helped identify the Faustian bargain inherent in the quest for the perfect search engine: we can (perhaps) get better results and more relevant ads, but they end up monitoring and capturing all kinds of personal and intellectual information about us. Unfortunately, given the current structure of the search engine marketplace which is overwhelmingly dependent on advertising dollars for their revenue, the drive for more personalized advertising (more bucks if they can offer more targeted ads) will mean the continued collection of user search histories and related personal information.

Nissenbaum’s question implied hope that Wikia Search might be different, that it might hold the pursuit of principle #4 above the need to provide personalized results or advertising. That exchange with Wales was 6 months ago, and nothing has really progressed since then to shed new light on how Wikia Search might strive to achieve the “holy grail” of privacy protection, or whether it will be just as threatening to user privacy as the other players in the search industry.

Recently, however, Wikia announced a new partnership with LookSmart, an online advertising and technology company. Wikia will use LookSmart’s ad platform to manage display and text-based advertising across its wide-ranging collection of projects and sites (there are quite a few). What this meant in terms of Wikia Search remained unclear until this press release a few days ago announcing that Wikia purchased the Web crawler Grub — a very interesting distributed crawling technology — to help jump-start the Wikia Search project. Alas, a connection between the advertising deal and the search engine project becomes clear. As reported here:

Specifics of the deal were not revealed, though it is part of a larger advertising deal between Wikia and LookSmart which was announced last week. Under the deal, LookSmart will provide text and display ads in Wikia’s freely hosted wiki communities, and eventually on the Search Wikia site, Wales said.” (emphasis added)

It appears, now, that Wikia Search will be an advertising supported service, powered by LookSmart (Wales confirmed that for me here). And since Wikia is a for-profit company (unlike the related Wikipedia project), my concern is that the allure to earn more dollars and cents for each of those “contextual ads” will be too powerful, and that Wikia Search will indeed resort to creating vast server logs of users search histories in order to provide “better quality” results — and more profitable ads. (Seth Finkelstein has already commented on the troubles of having a for-profit company benefit from the free labor of others.)

So, some open questions for Wikia Search remain:

1. What kind of server logs will Wikia Search maintain of user activity?
2. If so, what will the data retention policy be?
3. Will Wikia Search offer (and encourage) the creation of user accounts (enabling easier tracking of user activity)?
4. Will attempts be made to personalize advertising on the Wikia Search based on a user’s past search activity?
5. If so, can users opt-out of such personalization to prevent their search histories from being tracked?

Answers to these questions will not only help us determine what steps Wikia Search intends to take to protect the “holy grail” of privacy, but also the extent to which they will be transparent (another of their core principles) as to the collection and use of user data.

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]

…advocates of geotagging, like Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of the photo-sharing Web site Flickr, contend that linking pictures to maps can lend a new dimension to photography. For one thing, it can help people make some sense of the mounds of photos accumulating on their hard drives.

”The value may not be immediately apparent. But 10 years from now, nobody who’s geotagging their photos is going to regret it,” Mr. Butterfield said. ”Most people have just one or two or three iconic photos of their grandparents. Now people are going to have tens of thousands of photos, and when that happens, every little bit of context helps.”

Abstent from the discussion, however, are concerns over privacy, data-mining and the levels of surveillance enabled by these tools. My next project…

From the Interesting People mailing list:

A search for an SSN shaped regex on the full AOL search data returns a 191 results including repeat searches. Many of these have full names, and at least a dozen include either an addresses, drivers license number, date of birth or some combination of the three in the same query. There’s no telling how much more information an aggregation of other queries by those same user ID would yield.

I don’t know what AOL was thinking…

1. Young people should stop putting content online.
2. Recruiters and employers shouldn’t use Google or Facebook to research potential candidates (don’t hear this one very often, although you’d think in a country where it’s illegal to ask people to include a snapshot with their resume, there might be potential room for legislation here).
3. We just have to wait until there’s no longer a divide between your “work” persona and your “life” persona. I know this sounds stupid, but I heard it from the CEO of Facebook.

Then she offers what really is happening, and what might be the best (or only) solution:

People are obfuscating personal data by using pseudonyms that can only be identified within situated, contextual networks, or by using services which allow them to restrict who can view their personal information. This is really the only one of these solutions which makes any sense.