I blog about tech stuff only very rarely, but this is something I really want to share. If you’re at all concerned about online privacy, you will want to know about the Network Advertising Initiative’s “Behavioral Advertising Opt Out Tool.” Go to it, and it will show you which advertising networks have installed tracking cookies on your computer. You can check the boxes and click through at the bottom to instruct all of those networks to opt you out of their spying, which they are legally obligated to do. Now, it is also possible to block specific sites from setting cookies on your computer using complicated settings in your browser, but this tool is easier, and lets you opt out of networks that have not found you yet.

To say something general, I would say that it is a good thing that so far we have been able to get national policies set up that allow us to opt out of privacy-compromising systems, and we have to keep doing that, but our right to opt out is meaningless unless we are actually able to figure out how to do the opting-out process, and then go and do it.

Personally, I find it hard to take seriously the claim of some that they “want to see more relevant advertising served up on [their] browsers [or wherever else].” Advertisers never know us as well as they think they do, and when they do hit close to home, it’s just spooky. I am not comfortable when the opaque networked computer that is everywhere with the soft synthetic voice knows what I had for breakfast. There is too much of a potential for power without accountability when we lose our privacy in that way.

There are other useful tech tools for privacy that readers might tell us about in the comments. This is one I like because it is so quick and easy and doesn’t require me to go through ten proxy servers, etc. Some readers may also be able to provide information about the limitations of this tool.

(Be sure to read the comments below if this interests you – Commenters have some important things to add here.)

I just bought a Motorola Droid, which is Verizon’s Android-based smart phone, Android being Google’s OS for mobile devices. Its integration with Google gives me a lot of “power” to integrate my online tools with my mobile device, which is very satisfying. I experience it as empowering, and my attention is focused on learning what it can do and then on using it. My attention is not focused on Google itself and what its growing ubiquity may mean.

I am paranoid by nature, but I don’t have a vision of what Google’s growing power is going to mean decades from now. I know, however, that power corrupts. So I think I should be more scared than I am about the fact that:

• Google records my search data
• Google data-mines my email
• Google tracks my visits to sites that use Google Analytics
• Google is buying more and more websites and services and integrating the data it collects on them
• Google maintains a database of my contacts
• My Droid has a GPS that tells Google my location (I have the option to share it or not share it with friends – thanks for the privacy feature)
• The usability and power of Google’s services compel me to share more and more of my own information with them – calendar, finance, shopping, documents, email
• Google is exploring a service to manage our health records; I think it’s already available in beta
• I can see my house on Google, from the street and from the sky
• Google is becoming hungrier for financial returns. Its ad service is becoming more profitable, but if they can think of more ways of making money from their data, they will.

As I said, I don’t have a vision of the shape that all of this power will take. But it unquestionably adds up to power. Technologically, there is an economy to data integration that lends itself to Google growing larger and making competition more difficult. It is not like a dot com that can disappear when the fickle public notices a different one, because its strength lies in its huge database of user information. It is not so easy to migrate away from Google at this point.

Something to notice when Facebook, Myspace, and other social networking sites address concerns about privacy is the way they focus on users’ ability to control other users’ access to their information, but neglect to mention their own use of that information. When they enable users to set up different levels of access to parts of profiles and sets of photos for different groups of friends, categories of users, and the like, this is supposed to mean that they are progressive in terms of privacy issues, and that we should view them as our friends and see them as concerned about our interest in privacy.

It reminds me of something I overheard when I was temping at a software company in the Silicon Valley during library school. I was in the marketing department of a major software company that had just started adding a web services component to their main product. One of their tasks as marketing people was to make their customers feel secure about the privacy of their data (financial data). The inside joke was, “Oh, don’t worry! We will keep your private data safe; we won’t share it with anyone!” The joke being that they had a lot of uses for it themselves, but didn’t exactly want to highlight it. They laughed about this.

So if Facebook eventually allows users to set up concentric circles of friends with different privacy settings for each circle, remember that Facebook (meaning Facebook employees and perhaps key investors) is everyone’s most intimate confidante, and is open about “monetizing” user’s information, but not about how they go about doing it. (We don’t get to know any of its secrets – it’s not a reciprocal “friendship.”)

I would say that it’s worth pointing out this smoke-and-mirrors game whenever there is new PR from social networking companies about their privacy features….

There is a common assumption that trends should be identified quickly so that we can more quickly and more fully adapt to them, in order to stay competitively ahead-of-the-curve and relevant.

But trends are not all the same. Let me give you an analogy. I have heard of two primary policy themes in response to global warming, which is of course a major current trend. The first, and most common theme, is to reduce our own contribution to global warming as much as possible in order to slow it down or reverse it. This is the Global Warming Must Be Stopped! theme. The other major policy direction, which I have heard advocated only occasionally, is to accept global warming as an inevitable fact, even though we can understand our own contribution to it as a process, and plan to adapt our economies to it as it progresses. So in response to global warming there are people who say Resist! and people who say Adapt!, despite agreement on both sides that it is a process that we have thrown into motion ourselves as industrialized nations.

Other trends are like this, though the balance between the Resisters and the Adapters may be reversed, and the threat to us less acute and less easily understandable.

I point this out in order to counter any assumptions people might have that “trends” are different from “problems,” in that “trends” are good, or at least should be regarded simply as “what is,” while “problems” are bad. We ought to decide for ourselves, thoughtfully, what trends are problems and what trends are blessings, and what trends are, shall we say, mixed blessings.

Among current social trends it is possible to focus on certain aspects, and draw out patterns, relations, and consequences.

So, If we consider as trends:

• The increasingly rapid pace of life
• The shift away from print media towards more interactive, sensory-stimulating aural and visual media
• The tendency to share our lives online, by choice
• The loss of personal privacy, not by choice
• The decline in educational standards, at least in terms of traditionally-valued skills having to do with written texts
• The shift from individualized to collective thinking
• The new ubiquity of communication technology and the 24/7 connectedness that it brings
• The decline in literary reading as a pastime (as noted by the NEA a few years ago)

…then I think it is possible to find a broader, emergent trend that ties these trends together. That trend concerns the interior space of a person.

Interior space.

As we lose our privacy, as our lives speed up and fill with signals, and as we lose time set aside for contemplation, the interior space that belongs to each person is progressively being diminished: shrunk down, grayed out, eroded away, and rendered exterior surface by exposure to the social world.

Interior space is something that people can cultivate. It is cultivated through time spent in sustained, imaginative reading; time spent meditating for greater mindfulness or higher consciousness; time spent reflecting on a problem, on an idea, or on past events; or time spent in another way, as long as it involves a degree of solitude and freedom from external demands. What interior space requires for its maintenance is time, solitude, autonomy, quiet, and a freedom from external sources of stimulation.

Interior space is something that the value of which is by nature difficult to explain, since it cannot be imagined in order to be understood without possessing a share of it. Making it harder to explain is that it is not an object, and descriptions imply objects. Attention focused on an object tends to distract one from apprehending its context, and interior space is more of a context-a place or a way-than a thing, and therefore apprehended differently. The attractions of external stimulation and highly dynamic connection to others are attention-diverting, perhaps in an essential way, and distract us from sensing the space we occupy internally. The difficulty of explaining what interior space is makes it difficult to say what is at stake in its loss or potential recovery. I tend to believe that we will miss it and will put concerted effort into recreating it when it is gone. This is my hope.

We know with certainty, however, that libraries, in being quiet spaces with books, are natural allies of interior space. Few other places are socially-sanctioned as allies of interior space. Religious buildings (temples, churches, synagogues, mosques) and nature preserves are two that come to mind. Museums are arguably another, depending on how one thinks about art.

My point, obviously, is that we, as librarians, should not overlook the value of libraries in their traditional sense, and should not be so quick to treat every social trend as inevitable, unquestionably good, or something that we Resist at the peril of a final loss of relevance.

In terms of relevance, it seems to me that what is making us less relevant is our feverish attempt to duplicate what other people are already doing better: social media, pop culture, and dumbed-down information via the web. We don’t become more relevant by making our identity more vague, occupying others’ shadows. It seems to me that what gives us continuing relevance is that what we offer above all – the means for creating and maintaining interior space – is in increasingly short supply, and is even becoming rare. That is a source of, not a threat to, our relevance.

If people have lost interest in interior space, then we should consider that if in a few years they come around wanting to regenerate it (and things tend to come back around), it would be a bad thing if there were no quiet places with books available to help them do it. The more quickly things change, the more disoriented people become. If anything ought to serve as a source of continuity, as something to come back to, a point of reference and a site for recovery of the self, I think it should be libraries.

You may have seen this already, but I have to share it:

Bound to the Word: Guardians of truth and knowledge, librarians must be thanked for their role as champions of privacy, literacy, independent thinking, and most of all reading.

“President -Elect Barack Obama keynoted the opening general session at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, June 23–29, 2005, while a U.S. senator from Illinois. This article, published in the August 2005 issue of American Libraries, is an adaptation of that speech, which drew record crowds and garnered a standing ovation.”

Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission

International Conference
April 24-26, 2009
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

CALL FOR PAPERS (MIT site)

In his seminal essay “The Bias of Communication” Harold Innis distinguishes between time-based and space-based media. Time-based media such as stone or clay, Innis agues, can be seen as durable, while space-based media such as paper or papyrus can be understood as portable, more fragile than stone but more powerful because capable of transmission, diffusion, connections across space. Speculating on this distinction, Innis develops an account of civilization grounded in the ways in which media forms shape trade, religion, government, economic and social structures, and the arts.

Our current era of prolonged and profound transition is surely as media-driven as the historical cultures Innis describes. His division between the durable and the portable is perhaps problematic in the age of the computer, but similar tensions define our contemporary situation. Digital communications have increased exponentially the speed with which information circulates. Moore’s Law continues to hold, and with it a doubling of memory capacity every two years; we are poised to reach transmission speeds of 100 terabits per second, or something akin to transmitting the entire printed contents of the Library of Congress in under five seconds.

Such developments are simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. They profoundly challenge efforts to maintain access to the vast printed and audio-visual inheritance of analog culture as well as efforts to understand and preserve the immense, enlarging universe of text, image and sound available in cyberspace.

What are the implications of these trends for historians who seek to understand the place of media in our own culture?

What challenges confront librarians and archivists who must supervise the migration of print culture to digital formats and who must also find ways to preserve and catalogue the vast and increasing range of words and images generated by new technologies?

How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we construct?

What are the implications of this tension between storage and transmission for education, for individual and national identities, for notions of what is public and what is private?

We invite papers from scholars, journalists, media creators, teachers, writers and visual artists on these broad themes. Potential topics might include:

* The digital archive
* The future of libraries and museums
* The past and future of the book
* Mobile media
* Historical systems of communication
* Media in the developing world
* Social networks
* Mapping media flows
* Approaches to media history
* Education and the changing media environment
* New forms of storytelling and expression
* Location-based entertainment
* Hyperlocal media and civic engagement
* New modes of circulation and distribution
* The transformation of television — from broadcast to download
* Cosmopolitanism backlashes against media change
* Virtual worlds and digital tourism
* The continuity principle: what endures or resists digital transformation?
* The fate of reading

Submissions

Abstracts of no more than 500 words or full papers should be sent to Brad Seawell at seawell@mit.edu no later than Friday, Jan. 9, 2009. We will evaluate abstracts and full papers on a rolling basis and early submission is highly encouraged. All submissions should be sent as attachments in a Word format. Submitted material will be subject to editing by conference organizers.

Email is preferred, but submissions can be mailed to:

Brad Seawell
MIT 14N-430
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139

Please include a biographical statement of no more than 100 words. If your paper is accepted, this statement will be used on the conference Web site.

Please monitor the conference Web site at http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6 for registration information, travel information and conference updates.

Abstracts will be accepted on a rolling basis until Jan. 9, 2009.
The full text of your paper must be submitted no later than Friday, April 17. Conference papers will be posted to the conference Web site and made available to all conferees.

Nanette Perez of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom sent out a link to this AOL study on web users’ behavior and statements regarding data privacy. The study finds, unsurprisingly, that most web users say they highly value privacy online but routinely give it up in exchange for convenience or small rewards.

This study illustrates a problem that libertarians pose all the time, and one which deserves an articulate answer. If people say they want one thing but show they want another by their behavior in the marketplace, does that mean we should ignore their expressed values and let the market make our decisions as a society? For example, if people say they don’t want to support sweatshops but keep buying cheap clothes at Target, a libertarian might say, don’t their decisions in the marketplace show their real priorities?

This is why critics call free-market policy directions a “race to the bottom.” People are complex and multilayered. We tend to be at our worst when faced with temptation, which is what we’re asking for when we don’t use democracy to turn our values into regulatory policies. We want free choice, but we recognize that all choices are made in a certain environment and under certain conditions. We want to shape our environment in order to help us make the choices that on reflection we want to make.

I’m with the subjects in this study who want more privacy online but routinely give it up in exchange for the web-based services that I have come to expect as normal. I don’t want to give up these services in exchange for my privacy. I would prefer to regulate industry properly so that my privacy is protected prior to my web transactions. Free-marketers who think that people’s economic decisions reflect their real values are ignoring the complexity of the human psyche. Choices are shaped by the conditions under which they are made, and people want the ability to shape those conditions based on their values. Clarifying our values requires time for reflection that is not usually available at the moment of market transactions, a moment when the value that is immediately present is the good or service and the way it is marketed. If the conditions under which we make economic choices are part of a public market, then the policies we set in order to control those conditions are necessarily social and shared.

So there’s my rebuttal to the libertarians out there, whose party is over right about now…

ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom is engaged in a research project about privacy and libraries. There is a survey to fill out at privacyrevolution.org. I’m not sure where they’re going to go with it, but it’s the OIF and it’s privacy so I support what they’re doing…

On this May Day I want to link you to a book (online) that I’m putting out there as a symbol of Library Juice’s opposition within librarianship and the blogosphere: Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. This book, originally published in 1896, was an important early work in social psychology, and established in a fairly scientific way that people become irrational in a crowd.

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed (and other important journalistic books and essays about how workers get the shaft in American society), came out with a book last year about crowds, about her love of crowds as a site of joy and protest: Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. I have to admit to feeling a bit chilled when I read about it, and a bit alienated from certain Left traditions of public protest (I prefer the traditions of literature, voting, protest songs, and organized, nonviolent civil disobedience). To me, the word “crowd” brings to mind an angry mob in front of the house of the lone liberal in the village, with torches, ready to kill him because they don’t understand him. (He could be a liberal, a Jew, an unbeliever, a scientist, or left-handed.) And to me, the psychology of crowds is what has led to history’s unspeakable genocides (including the present one). And let’s not forget lynchings. I do not trust crowds.

I don’t trust crowds, because I think crowd psychology leads to irrationality and violence, and turns otherwise suppressed fears and superstitions into mass action. I think that in order to protect society from the madness of crowds (the phrase is part of the title of another early book on mass psychology: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay) we need to cultivate and encourage individual critical thought and the development of the individual mind, and as a part of that, to encourage opposition. So, based on that foundation I am suspicious and wary of certain popular trends: cooperative user-generated content or the collaborative side of Web 2.0, and the emphasis on group work in higher education, both of which (in my view) de-emphasize and undervalue critical individual thought. It is the same reason that I think the transition from print culture to television culture, as described by Marshall McLuhan, has a lot about it that should make us all worried.

That’s my very contrary May Day declaration, which I offer to clarify a bit about where I am coming from.

I’d like to tag Kathleen de la Peña McCook for comments…

Google and Microsoft have both been working on new services to provide access to medical records. Pretty exciting huh? Microsoft’s thing is HealthVault and Google’s is Google Health. I’m sure it’s all very secure and only accessible to Microsoft and Google employees for serious purposes, as governed by those always-changeable privacy policies.

What I’m wondering though is whether there’s a Facebook app in the works. How neat it would be to have my medical test results show up on my mini-feed.

Michael Zimmer is the guest editor for the just released special issue of the open access journal First Monday: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0. Here is the table of contents:

Volume 13, Number 3 – 3 March 2008

Special issue: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0
edited by Michael Zimmer

Preface: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0
by Michael Zimmer

Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0
by Trebor Scholz

Web 2.0: An argument against convergence
by Matthew Allen

Interactivity is Evil! A critical investigation of Web 2.0
by Kylie Jarrett

Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation
by S??ren M??rk Petersen

The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0
by Michael Zimmer

Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance
by Anders Albrechtslund

History, Hype, and Hope: An Afterward
by David Silver

All of those articles are available online. Occasionally I link to single articles in First Monday, but this issue is a rare one that I think deserves highlighting in its entirety.

In a purported effort to identify counterfeiters, the US government has succeeded in persuading some color laser printer manufacturers to encode each page with identifying information. That means that without your knowledge or consent, an act you assume is private could become public. A communication tool you’re using in everyday life could become a tool for government surveillance. And what’s worse, there are no laws to prevent abuse.

Potentially a privacy issue for libraries. Thanks to John Gehner for forwarding this to lists.

Privacy in Peril: How We are Sacrificing a Fundamental Right in Exchange for Security and Convenience is an important new book by James B. Rule, who also wrote an influential book on privacy in the 1970s: Private Lives and Public Surveillance: Social Control in the Computer Age. Just noting it as a book of interest. I learned about it in Siva Vaidhyanathan’s review article on privacy in the latest Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), “Naked in the ‘Nonopticon’: Surveillance and marketing combine to strip away our privacy.”

First, Jeffrey Chester’s Google and Data-Seizure, about the significance of Google’s acquisition of Doubleclick, the internet marketing and company whose business is based on showing banner ads and tracking users’ web surfing. The article is primarily about privacy and what Google’s continuing acquisition of websites means for it (as the data is conglomerated).

Second, Tom Englehardt’s The Draconian Becomes the Norm, which is also about privacy, but in terms of how we are discarding it in the interest of post9/11 “safety.” Our loss of privacy is partly driven, the article asserts, by the clout of the surveillance industry, which is big business.

Is our society gradually forgetting the value of privacy, in libraries and elsewhere?

Michael Zimmer, who writes on media ecology, technology, and privacy, gives some attention to online privacy in libraries in a post from yesterday. He links to a blog entry from an anonymous blog called Chronicles of Dissent, comments, and links to some ALA docs on privacy.

The two main factors working against privacy are fear of crime or terrorism (or the threat of personal disruption and social disorder) and the power of information technology. Zimmer talks about both of these in his post.

What can we do to remind ourselves why privacy matters? Three things I suggest…

1. Recall specific occasions in your life when you realized you needed to make some information about yourself more private, or when you realized that your power to control your own life was diminished by your lack of privacy.
2. Imagine how life would be different if personal information about you and people you know were radically more available to businesses, government, and strangers, because of fear-based policies combined with a more technologically-mediated life.
3. Think about the way that fear leads not only to more surveillance but to an expansion of what is considered suspicious, and how this problem answers the common objection, “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.”

If you think of a future where growing fear leads to expanded suspicions and technological progress leads to intimate, networked surveillance of our lives, I think you will recall the importance of privacy, and think twice about consenting to let go of it little by little.