Cops and Crooks

What is privacy? or Why should privacy statements become interactive and standardized ? - Part II

2009-12-22T12:51:00.000-08:00

So, in the previous post, we understood that none really want you to read their privacy policy.
It doesn't mean none cares about your information, though. In fact, everybody wants your information.
It allows them to do amazing things.
It allows a couple of PHP or Ruby scripts, a MySQL DB and some basic GUI design to become a multi-billion dollar company.
This price, of course, is that of your privacy and information.

In fact, we could think about social networking as a noisy bar owner. But this bar owner doesn't take advantage that he knows something about you to (maybe that you drive this kind of car or that you work at the near by software company) by sharing information with some other customer you don't know (usually it's - "Hey Joe, you understand computers right? See Jack here has this faulty monitor....").
Oh no, it's far worse. Because this bar owner sites around all day doing nothing and just wait for you and your friends to come in.
When you do, he sends you to sit on rather plain looking furniture, with a rather plain looking waitress, and throws in some silly games none really wants to play but, hey, some guy said he's better than you in one of them, so you gotta go for it. While you're trying to have fun (I admit that some people do have genuine good old fun from these games) the bar owner unleash an army of sale people to listen to the different discussion between your friends (even the little small talk you had with the nice blonde girl from the office).
Not only that, from time to time they offer you something to buy that relates to what you've just talked about. It's like having a commercial announcer as a friend. You can say that ad words and small commercials, are far less annoying then what I've just described. Could be, but think about this situation for a minute. What would you do if that would happen to you? You'd probably leave this bar never to return!
You would probably never buy anything from the company that employed those stokers (sorry, sale people).

Indeed, this situation is impossible in "real life", but it is now possible with social networks. No wonder that the companies that operate the servers hosting your details (it's not a lot more than that) worth so much money? They've invented a way to get access to information that wasn't available before to anyone. They also allow people to generate new information. And there are bigger players (like Google) that make money of information. Of people creating new information and digitizing it (like I'm doing as I type these very post).

And what's the practical thing I want to make out of this post? Well, I want to suggest a way, any way, to help people to be aware of what kind of details they reveal about them selfs, and to force websites to reveal exactly what they are doing with your data (at least typecast it into a given privacy category; for example, the worst category would be - "sell it to reluctant spammers" and the best one would be - "data will be deleted in a few moments").

What do you think about this little suggestion? I will of course elaborate in future posts, but I would be happy to hear what you think.

This seems to be great

2009-12-21T15:19:00.000-08:00

http://training.fogcreek.com/index.html

I especially like the fact that they address everything they believe in to the very max.

Reasons to use Merucrial

2009-12-18T04:03:00.000-08:00

Meruciral is a distributed revision control system. Here's why you should use it -

It's simple.
It's written in Python.
It encourages experiment! having a local repository allows you to test and get a good feeling when trying different kinds of ideas without worrying too much about the consequences. This may sounds trivial, but when working with other people, the last thing you want is to be blamed for committing not working code (or untested code, but that won't happen since we all use TDD, right? :).
It has a comprehensive, free ebook to guide you through.
It has the bissect feature. In wise man words - "you use the bisect command on a revision that you know did not have the bug, and the revision that you know does have the bug. It then checks out a revision and asks you whether that revision contains the bug; it repeats this until it identifies the revision where the bug first arose."
It works well over HTTPS.
It's fast on Windows (not including TortoiseHg, which like TortoiseSVN, is injected to all of your windows processes that use GUI, which could cause some performance problems and could change the behavior of processes that you're trying to debug on your development machine). Just use the command line tool.
FogCreek's Klin
What about your reasons?

What is privacy? or Why should privacy statements become interactive and standardized ? - Part I

2009-12-13T05:48:00.000-08:00

Unlike the questions in the previous posts, this is a rather easy one so I'm gonna say some basic and rather boring things trying to answer it -

Privacy is what you define as private.

This should be as easy to understand as the next thing. Everybody also seems to agree on this.

Only, they forget that this statement surely dictates the next statement -

Until explicitly defined otherwise, everything is private.

This statement is also something that is within consensus. What isn't, is how each of us defines the "explicitly defined otherwise" (in accordance with our direct relation to the data, i.e can I benefit from knowing who will write comments to this post?).

Let's break this short term -

"explicitly" - That is, explicitly to one is not explicitly to other.

Moreover, explicitly to one at a given time X isn't what he would consider explicit at another given time Y.

But normally he wouldn't be able to step back from a decision one took at that given time. This, of course, can cause many problems to people which there privacy meter changes over time as they're own life change. And, as we all know from the times of the great Heraclitus to the times of Philip K. Dick, change is the vivid force that runs through the veins of any system, from the ecosystem to one's own personal relationships. Confronting change with digital tracks (made into concrete by those who can benefit from those very same tracks) of one's past self, is a major problem. If it was a Hollywood star, none of us would have any problem with that kind of track, we would consider it a legacy. But not all of your social networking data is something you would consider "your legacy" 20 years from now, would you ?

Those concrete tracks could have major affects on the development of young people, and let me suggest, without digging in further, that this will stick them deep into they're existing connections networks, making them far less connected to old-school social networks - Because, hey, we have a "legacy = really old message posts here from 2 years ago", we have a group site = home/club, we have "family/school/unit photo albums = uploaded images", "everybody seems to be generally happy = none wants to be documented as sad in fear of being portrayed as far worse", so why bother with making all of this stuff in "the real world"? What is this "real world" anyways? (italic is for off subject from now on!)

This raises some serious questions that need some serious pondering, but back to the subject-

"defined" - Should be simple enough right? But where do I define something? Is there a main entity that we can define privacy to and it will node at us with statue-of-liberty-grace and store it forever and ever?

"otherwise" - It means that it should be noted somewhere that

Surely, all of this could be answered with simple legalization. Right? well, let's give it the benefit of the doubt and agree. BUT, the main problem is that we, the people, sign a contract without even noticing. And even if we notice, we just want to get over this minor setback. I'm talking of course about privacy statements that we all sign for using "our" new shiny Web 2/3.0 services.

Those privacy statements are exactly like those old FBI warnings before movies or video arcade machines. Who read them? The people leaning over some other non-active machine and waiting for there turn next to the guy that is already playing the popular machine (anyone said Gold Axe?).

Of course the FBI itself had nothing with those actual statements, but was put there so that you'll remember that the FBI are coming (in fact their scary logo is already here) if you'll try to reproduce the digital content.

But, unlike those warnings,

None has any real interest that you'll read their privacy statements.

Or any privacy statements what so ever (Oh no Gina, if you'll read one in another, perhaps competing, website, they'll seek for our privacy statements!). None has any interest that you'll read them after you've been using the product for some time now and suddenly the statement change (and your details are now transfered to X,Y,Z to provide "better service" to, of course, yourself).

So what should we do? (the hint is within the title, and I'll try to elaborate in the coming post)

What could this blog be ?

2009-12-12T10:41:00.000-08:00

Following my promise to try and develop this blog (by first answering) what should I blog about, here's a quick list about the different possibilities -

Digital Security
Guerrilla Marketing
Python Programming
Design Patterns
Foreign Affairs
Operating Systems Internals
History for the masses
Design
Entrepreneurship
Life
Death
Rebirth
Stock Exchange
Idea Exchange
Common Culture
Old cartoon shoes (like C.O.P.S, which kinda includes of all of the above in it's episodes :)

What is this blog about?

2009-12-12T10:33:00.000-08:00

This question is far from being a trivial one and so, of course, is the answer.
It seems to me that I want it to be something more than this.
In future posts, so I hope, we will develop this wish.

Good luck!

Starter's quote

2009-12-12T10:01:00.001-08:00

Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.