A. Practical Aspects of Privacy
1. What kind of personal information needs protection?
2. Who has control over your personal information? What are the consequences?
3. What kind of personal info that was not readily available before is now made available or created by new technologies?
4. Can you remove info about yourself from Google?
http://www.google.com/webmasters/remove.html
5. We often sacrifice privacy in exchange of ________ (list 3 different answers).
6. Privacy Literacy Exercise: Have you tried any of these to protect your privacy?
http://www.privacyjournal.net/bio.htm
7. Is Big Brother in your shopping cart? RFID controversy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID
http://www.spychips.com/rfid_overview.html
8. Will Google become our Big Brother?
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/googles-photo-face-recognition-is-wow-marketing/?ref=technology#comment-31428
B. Theoretical Aspects of Privacy:
1. Why do we need privacy? Is privacy a human right?
2. A tale of two cities -- both full of surveillance cameras.
http://www.earthcam.com/
http://www.notbored.org/the-scp.html
City No. 1: All the cameras report the urban scenes to Police Central.
City No. 2: Every citizen can call up images from any camera in town.
Which is better? Why?
C. Web cam as self expression
1996 JenniCam
http://web.archive.org/web/19980514225633/jennicam.org/gallery/index8.html
Showing posts with label privacy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label privacy. Show all posts
Monday, April 13, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
UT (and Google...) restrict MY info
After reading this week's text on, well.... basically the end of privacy due to Google, it reminded me of UT's campaign to get students to restrict their information.
On the UT Web site, it reads:
The article states that "Google has quietly but unmistakably changed our expectations about what we can know about one another" and I agree. I don't remember when it started happening, but suddenly everyone is googling each other (and not eye googling...), potential employers are Facebook-ing applicants and privacy seems almost forgotten and even parents are seeing pictures through Facebook, myspace and Flikr.... that maybe they wouldn't have been shown otherwise.
On the UT Web site, it reads:
"The university keeps data about you that can be shown to the public, by federal law, without your permission. We call this 'directory information'. (The public includes your parents, friends, employers, insurers, and people checking on your degrees.)"Personal phone numbers and home addresses submitted to UT upon acceptance are available automatically online. The proactive and pro-privacy Longhorn must actively go online to change their information to private.
The article states that "Google has quietly but unmistakably changed our expectations about what we can know about one another" and I agree. I don't remember when it started happening, but suddenly everyone is googling each other (and not eye googling...), potential employers are Facebook-ing applicants and privacy seems almost forgotten and even parents are seeing pictures through Facebook, myspace and Flikr.... that maybe they wouldn't have been shown otherwise.
Should the public's right to access information surpass news stories subjects' right to privacy?
As I read "A Nation of Voyeurs," I remembered of an issue I had recently seen in the Spanish newspaper El País. I will try to explain it to the best of my ability (my sources are in Spanish).
El País' reader's advocate (that's right, it's an actual position that the newspaper has) Milagros Pérez Oliva discusses in an article the Internet's role in exposing the subjects cited in the daily's news stories.
"If you do a name search using my name on Google, you will see that the second result is a story about me, from twenty years ago, which is not nice and which I don't want my grandchildren to see. (...) I kindly aske you [El País] to remove it." This is a section of a letter written by a Buenos Aires pharmacist that was sent to El País and reproduced by Oliva in her article. In 1998, El País published a story about the Argentine man, who had been arrested for alleged connections with the separatist group ETA.
According to Oliva, El País receives on average three removal requests per week -- all urging the newspaper to remove unpleasant stories from its digital files. "The concern is understandable," she writes. "But it's not as simple as that."
Consulted by the reader's advocate, the legal department of El País said the newspaper cannot change its past. "That would distort history. The files are untouchable. The problem is the ease with which Google or any other search engine makes these stories accessible," writes Oliva, quoting the daily's legal department.
In response, Google's director of institutional relations said it is not the search engine's task to block information. "We just crawl and index Web pages for public access. When someone asks us to withdraw any sort of information, we address the person to the owner of the page, the only one that can modify it," writes Oliva.
In a recent resolution of a lawsuit brought against Google and El País, the Spanish Agency for Data Protection concluded that the ability to freely access a certain news story "directly affects the personal situation of the victim in a justified and legitimate way." The agency ordered that Google removed the information about the lawsuit author from its search index and blocked any access to it. In the name of freedom of expression, the agency rejected the complaint against El País, but noted that the need to publish the identity of story subjects must be better balanced.
What do you think about this? How can we, as (future) reporters, better balance the identity of the subjects in our stories? Is that possible at all?
Should the public's right to access information surpass news stories subjects' right to privacy? I guess most of us would say yes: after all, the information is true and accurate, it did happen, and it's not our fault that those people did what they did (the pharmacist was arrested for alleged connections with ETA; Michael was arrested for DUI). Therefore, all news stories ever published should be open and accessible to the public. But... what if WE were one of those subjects?
El País' reader's advocate (that's right, it's an actual position that the newspaper has) Milagros Pérez Oliva discusses in an article the Internet's role in exposing the subjects cited in the daily's news stories.
"If you do a name search using my name on Google, you will see that the second result is a story about me, from twenty years ago, which is not nice and which I don't want my grandchildren to see. (...) I kindly aske you [El País] to remove it." This is a section of a letter written by a Buenos Aires pharmacist that was sent to El País and reproduced by Oliva in her article. In 1998, El País published a story about the Argentine man, who had been arrested for alleged connections with the separatist group ETA.
According to Oliva, El País receives on average three removal requests per week -- all urging the newspaper to remove unpleasant stories from its digital files. "The concern is understandable," she writes. "But it's not as simple as that."
Consulted by the reader's advocate, the legal department of El País said the newspaper cannot change its past. "That would distort history. The files are untouchable. The problem is the ease with which Google or any other search engine makes these stories accessible," writes Oliva, quoting the daily's legal department.
In response, Google's director of institutional relations said it is not the search engine's task to block information. "We just crawl and index Web pages for public access. When someone asks us to withdraw any sort of information, we address the person to the owner of the page, the only one that can modify it," writes Oliva.
In a recent resolution of a lawsuit brought against Google and El País, the Spanish Agency for Data Protection concluded that the ability to freely access a certain news story "directly affects the personal situation of the victim in a justified and legitimate way." The agency ordered that Google removed the information about the lawsuit author from its search index and blocked any access to it. In the name of freedom of expression, the agency rejected the complaint against El País, but noted that the need to publish the identity of story subjects must be better balanced.
What do you think about this? How can we, as (future) reporters, better balance the identity of the subjects in our stories? Is that possible at all?
Should the public's right to access information surpass news stories subjects' right to privacy? I guess most of us would say yes: after all, the information is true and accurate, it did happen, and it's not our fault that those people did what they did (the pharmacist was arrested for alleged connections with ETA; Michael was arrested for DUI). Therefore, all news stories ever published should be open and accessible to the public. But... what if WE were one of those subjects?
Thursday, April 9, 2009
The Future of Reputation: when poop goes primetime
This post is more questions than answers or opinions, so please bear with the incessant questions. I'm usually not like this. So let me start this off with a question: Remember the Dog Poop Girl from South Korea? Like in her case, there have been several cases where people have become vigilantes/voyeurs online.
On Facebook, 'I keep an eye' on my friends, update my status so they can do the same with me. Like danah boyd said (with regard to social networking sites), “Many began participating (in social networking sites) because of the available social voyeurism and the opportunity to craft a personal representation in an increasingly popular online community.” In that case, how much privacy can you have online? Are people deliberately taking social interactions between friends to the public sphere for others to witness? Like in the offline world, are people judged with regard to their online associations; a group identity that is 'reinforced by the collective tastes and attitudes of those in the group?' Then, to what extent does privacy play a part in reputation?
Most people feel that the current laws regarding privacy are not adequate to protect people’s reputations. Daniel J Solove's book, The Future of Reputation, takes this issue further and talks about how the Internet is changing the publishing industry. And this time, it’s not just celebrities – blogs’ egalitarian nature ensures that it’s everybody. It’s taking our reputations and private lives online, making it hard to understand the legal issues of privacy.
Like the dog poop girl's story, information spreads like a wildfire on the Internet. And many times, it affects peoples reputation and privacy. In the offline world, the law would come into effect; but online law has its shortcomings in protecting people. Like the media has its own rules, media such as blogs and social networking sites do not have any modes of censorship in most countries.
Just because something is available on the Interenet, does not necessarily mean it is public in theory; and just because something is not does not mean it is private. If someone is having a private conversation in a public place, does that automatically give you the right to be a part of that conversation just because you happen to be there?
User-created content like wikis and blogs create a conflict with regard to the freedom of speech. Like people establish norms, can they also police what people do/write online? The fact that there are defamation law suits based on blogs, is testimony to the fact that privacy and reputation is something that needs to be looked at. Can the rules and freedom of the press also apply to the Internet?
I wonder as we get further into the digital age if there’s going to be any repercussions for not participating in the online cultures. What happens if employers or schools search for your profile and don’t find one? Can that say something negatively about who you are? Instead of searching to find out the negatives can’t the profiles be used as a positive (the potential employee is social and has friends).
I was commenting on a friends blog when this showed up:
The picture is my profile picture on Facebook. This was when I was reading someones blog - for the first time! Remember those annoying IQ test ads? When it was celebrities, I didn't care much. But when they pull up a random picture of me and challenge others to an IQ test, I don't take very kindly to that.
So I guess my question really is: What is private and why it should be? If nothing is black and white; and we live in the gray, the question really is: can there be a gray online? And is getting peoples personal information from whats available ethical?
On Facebook, 'I keep an eye' on my friends, update my status so they can do the same with me. Like danah boyd said (with regard to social networking sites), “Many began participating (in social networking sites) because of the available social voyeurism and the opportunity to craft a personal representation in an increasingly popular online community.” In that case, how much privacy can you have online? Are people deliberately taking social interactions between friends to the public sphere for others to witness? Like in the offline world, are people judged with regard to their online associations; a group identity that is 'reinforced by the collective tastes and attitudes of those in the group?' Then, to what extent does privacy play a part in reputation?
Most people feel that the current laws regarding privacy are not adequate to protect people’s reputations. Daniel J Solove's book, The Future of Reputation, takes this issue further and talks about how the Internet is changing the publishing industry. And this time, it’s not just celebrities – blogs’ egalitarian nature ensures that it’s everybody. It’s taking our reputations and private lives online, making it hard to understand the legal issues of privacy.
Like the dog poop girl's story, information spreads like a wildfire on the Internet. And many times, it affects peoples reputation and privacy. In the offline world, the law would come into effect; but online law has its shortcomings in protecting people. Like the media has its own rules, media such as blogs and social networking sites do not have any modes of censorship in most countries.
Just because something is available on the Interenet, does not necessarily mean it is public in theory; and just because something is not does not mean it is private. If someone is having a private conversation in a public place, does that automatically give you the right to be a part of that conversation just because you happen to be there?
User-created content like wikis and blogs create a conflict with regard to the freedom of speech. Like people establish norms, can they also police what people do/write online? The fact that there are defamation law suits based on blogs, is testimony to the fact that privacy and reputation is something that needs to be looked at. Can the rules and freedom of the press also apply to the Internet?
I wonder as we get further into the digital age if there’s going to be any repercussions for not participating in the online cultures. What happens if employers or schools search for your profile and don’t find one? Can that say something negatively about who you are? Instead of searching to find out the negatives can’t the profiles be used as a positive (the potential employee is social and has friends).
I was commenting on a friends blog when this showed up:
The picture is my profile picture on Facebook. This was when I was reading someones blog - for the first time! Remember those annoying IQ test ads? When it was celebrities, I didn't care much. But when they pull up a random picture of me and challenge others to an IQ test, I don't take very kindly to that.So I guess my question really is: What is private and why it should be? If nothing is black and white; and we live in the gray, the question really is: can there be a gray online? And is getting peoples personal information from whats available ethical?
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