There has been a lot about Facebook and privacy in the tech press over the past few weeks – making live chats public, the ABC bug, criminalising violations of their terms of service, etc.

Facebook has a clear habit of leaking data, and a general disdain for their user’s privacy. As we can see by the changes to their Terms of Service and default privacy settings over time this is a deliberate strategy, which makes perfect sense since Facebook’s entire business model depends on their users sharing everything.

There’s a problem here of course, because even if you delete your account or were never on Facebook to begin with, the chances are you still are on Facebook.

Crowd sourced surveillance

Facebook crowd sources its intelligence gathering by encouraging your friends to continually update it with fairly sizable amounts of information about you, even if you are not a member. The simplest example of this would be the invite system… Facebook user Alice uses the Facebook interface to invite Bob, who is outside of Facebook, to a party… innocuous at first glance, until you consider that Alice has just told Facebook (and by extension: advertisers, government agencies, application developers etc) that Alice knows Bob (expanding the social graph) and has informed them of Bobs email address.

Image tagging presents another interesting problem. Facial recognition has reached a stage where by a machine can tell whether a face belongs too the same person from picture to picture. This feature was included in the latest version of iPhoto for example, but even without facial recognition, a tagged photo provides confirmation that a group of people were together at a certain time – and with geotagging enabled – in a certain place.

Facial recogniton is on Facebook now (via a third party app – although I would imagine Facebook will be developing their own version), Google is also following similar lines of research.

Of course, the algorithm can’t know who you are…

… until someone helpfully tags you of course. At which point you can be identified in any image on Facebook and the wider internet.

Governments have access to this technology as well of course (biometric passports anyone?), and we have already seen moves to incorporate this sort of face tracking and recognition technology in the next generation of CCTV cameras allowing automated tracking of people throughout our cities.

Anyone considering wearing a mask or similar as an obvious countermeasure should take note that the wording of the “burka ban” law recently passed in Belgium… which does not specifically ban the burka, rather bans any clothing that conceals the wearers identity. French and German MEPs are pushing for similar laws throughout the EU.

… first they came for the hoodies, then they came for the Muslims…

Question of ownership

I could easily be accused of being paranoid, but all this is perfectly possible and is an extrapolation of current trends.  It also serves to underline two central problems; first, that information is collected and added about you regardless of you do, and second, that this data is not considered to be yours - leading to unintended outcomes should the people holding the data change how they use it.

So much data is collected about you through the usage of online systems. Facebook in particular has extended this intelligence gathering capability out into the wider internet with its seemingly innocuous “like” button, or by secretly installing applications (which have full access to your profile) when you visit Facebook enabled websites (decidedly less innocuous).

Each bit of information gathered is fairly harmless on its own, but when aggregated over time present an incredibly detailed picture of your life – online and offline.

This information is packaged and sold.

That this data doesn’t belong to the person its about – even if it is of a deeply personal nature – is, I think, a rather corrosive assumption. Unfortunately we see this assumption at work all over the place both in government and the private sector, and although I’ve focussed particularly on Facebook in this post, it is only one part of a much wider problem.

Question of control

Fundamentally if you don’t own your data, you can’t possibly control what is done with it. Privacy controls and the like are at best a comforting placebo.

For this reason, I am suspicious of “free” services as money must be being made somewhere, and if it is not a direct fee then where?

So how can you keep control?

This is actually a very hard problem, because the obvious solution – not using the services in the first place – increasingly handicaps you.

Facebook has made a push to become the social architecture of the web with their “like” button, which isn’t the end of the world. However, more and more sites are using Facebook, Twitter etc for logon. Linking sites around the internet together and forming a more complete picture of your online habits.

If I want to use Microsoft’s online word processor Docs.com, my only option is to sign in with Facebook. Google docs needs a google account etc..

As Twitter, Facebook and Google etc all compete to be “You” on the internet you will see this kind of thing happening more and more.

Can I live without these services? Possibly. But what if a client uses them to share a specification document, can I refuse to view it? I guess it depends on how understanding your client is.

Is privacy dead?

Privacy is important, and anyone who says that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” should be encouraged to read Anne Frank’s diary.

However, we now live in a world were both online and offline we are encouraged to give away more and more of our private information. What information we don’t give away is obtained by monitoring our actions or provided by others – “Marcus was so wasted at Dave’s party last week, look here’s a picture of him passed out on the floor! LOL”

So much of this is out of your control, and what data is generated is not yours, but at the moment you still have a little wiggle room – if only because all these systems are still rather fragmented.

However, I believe that privacy is going to be one of the main societal battle grounds of the 21st century, and the first salvos have already been fired.

Privacy may not be quite dead yet, but it is certainly missing in action.

Image from ICanHasCheezburger

To my mind, few things could have illustrated this clearer than yesterday’s vote on the Digital Economy bill, where – as the vote was finally called – the room quickly filled with MPs who had completely missed out on the debate of the last two days.

Faster than you could say “Stitch-up” or “Democratic deficit” the vote was overwhelmingly passed thanks to a reported 3 line whip and a back room deal with the Conservatives. Only the Liberal Democrats and one awesome Labour back bencher did the right thing.

It should be noted as well that the Labour back bencher in question was actively tweeting during the proceedings.

So that’s pretty much that. The bill as passed will pretty much regulate away the UK technology industry and provide a quick and cost effective mechanism to curtail free speech and governmental scrutiny, leaving only big business and a gagged population.

Someone much more cynical than me may suggest that this was the idea. Afterall, it is in both big business and government’s interest that you are unquestioning ignorant consumers – simple economic units that work, buy stuff and pay taxes.

So, with this and other laws worthy of East Germany making the UK feel less like a country and more like a cage, I and many others are left looking about for a free country to live in.

While I do that, I will just point out that Labour and the Conservatives are the same people – so please remember this when it comes to the ballot box.

On the 27th of March next year all UK households will be compelled by law to fill in a Census.

I admit that I get more worked up about this sort of thing more than most people. The arrogant presumption that we are somehow state property, the compulsion to complete it & the sheer impertinence of the questions being asked are all things that stick in my craw.

With all else that’s going on – ID cards, mass surveillance, not to mention badly written laws made to put minority interests ahead of the citizenry – it seems that the census hasn’t yet appeared on the radar of most civil liberty campaigners.

However, as with previous years the number of questions has increased (34 in 1991, 41 in 2001). This year, there will be 56 questions prying into every aspect of your life.

Ostensibly a census is about resource allocation, but if that was the case the only question the government can legitimately ask is “How many people live in your house?“.

Gender is irrelevant as this is more or less going to be an even split. Birth rate isn’t going to suddenly shoot up so there’s also need to ask about the number of children.

I’d argue that even this one question isn’t really required as any areas which have resource problems can be identified more readily (and I’d argue more accurately) by deriving the information from other sources – class sizes, waiting times at hospital etc.

Some of the questions being asked

Further details of the census can be found here.

Many of the questions being asked certainly do not have anything to do with resource allocation.

For the first time you will be compelled to disclose any other passports you may have. Also, if you’ve previously lived out of the country you will also have to say when you came into the country and for how long you intend to stay.

You will also be compelled to give the names and addresses of any guests you have staying over on the evening of the census, as well as their sex and date of birth – which has led some to call this the “Snooper’s census“.

Compulsion

You are required by law to answer these questions, and if you choose not to answer these questions – questions which in my opinion the government has no business asking – you will have committed a criminal offence and receive a stiff penalty.

Worse still, the contract for processing the data has been handed to the arms manufacturer and surveillance company Lockheed Martin, which has already raised some eyebrows.

It is the government’s hope that MPs will not exercise their right to debate this bill further, and if the debate doesn’t happen the bill will be made law.

I can not express how bad this authoritarian and protectionist bill is or how much damage it will do to the UK economy.

It will increase the already disastrous brain drain, as well as losing any party which supports this bill the sizeable UK technical vote.

Please write to your MP now and ask that the bill is debated in full!

Image “closed” by Gill Holgate

Yesterday there was a little bit of excitement in the digital rights world caused by an amendment to the Digital Economy bill proposed by a Tory and Liberal peer.

The justification of the amendment does make some good points – particularly about bringing any action under the control of the courts rather than just requiring the secretary of state’s say so.

As Lord Clement-Jones points out, the de-politicising of the process is important.

None of this matters of course, because the writing is on the wall for the rights industry. Unfortunately for us its clear they’re going to make a fight of it, which will likely leave us saddled with some very damaging and poorly written laws which will make it increasingly difficult to run a UK based buisiness.

The only thing that is left is to learn from the mistakes they made. Here are some harsh truths…

If your business model relies on digital things being hard to copy, it’s doomed.

The key issue here is one of basic economics. When it is just as easy to make a million copies of something than it is to make one, then the supply of that resource essentially becomes infinite and the unit price of the resource that the market is prepared to support drops to zero.

I’m not making any moral commentary here, but when something is no longer scarce it will be seen as free by the majority of people. Technical and legal restrictions put in place in an attempt to introduce scarcity artificially are going to be resented and are doomed to fail.

Theft is a meaningless concept in such a context, because how can you steal something which is infinitely available?

The only way to handle this situation is to innovate and add value somewhere else – people are still willing to pay for quality, novelty and convenience for example.

The black market is still the market.

Worse still, it is much more competitive (thanks to its lack of regulation) and responsive to consumer demand.

Lets look at Russia as an example:

In Russia, outside of the major cities, it is actually impossible to buy a legal copy of a CD or DVD – due in part to Russia’s perceived reputation on piracy creating an unwillingness for rights holders to provide their product there. There is still the demand of course, which the black market has stepped in to fill, and as a result you can go into a store on the high street and buy pirated CDs, DVDs and software just as you would buy legal copies here.

Not only does the black market provide a product where the traditional market refuses to, it actually provides a better product.

You can buy box set DVDs of films and TV series where none are normally available, entire back catalogues of an artist on a single CD in MP3 format, multiple DVD quality films on a Blueray disk and more.

Worse still for the rights holders, the price point is competitive enough to make it more attractive than downloading and certainly more attractive than importing a legal version, even after you factor in the relative earning power of the average Russian consumer.

This is similar to the current online situation – if I want to watch Caprica for example, I can either wait and hope it becomes available on DVD or shown on TV some time in the future, or I can watch it on channel Bittorrent. There is no legal way for me to get access.

Even when legal online access is provided, it’s product is often substandard when compared to the pirated version – low quality, DRM locked or with a built in expiry date. It is also, in many cases, harder to get hold of – requiring special software, registration and only offer a limited selection of products.

Which brings us to the real rub…

If the customer’s path of least resistance is not the one that gives you money, your business model is doomed.

Human nature is to follow the path of least resistance and this is something you’re not going to change, ignore this at your peril!

Do I click a button and have access to the latest episode of my favourite show in a few minutes? Or do I wait – perhaps forever – for it to be available on TV or in the stores?

Do I buy and re-buy a DRM locked version of my music for each device I own, or do I bittorrent a pirated version which will always work?

Do I go out in the rain to stand in a crowded store in order to get a single album, or do I bittorrent an artist’s entire back catalogue?

When I like some of my friends music, do I write down the name and go to the store, or do I give my friend a pen drive and get a copy right there?

Until a simple and convenient way to provide access to an equivalent or better quality product legally is available, the pirated version will always win.

So in conclusion..

As I said before I’m not making a moral statement here, and I am not calling for copyright to be abolished. Neither am I necessarily stating what should come next.

What I will say is that the current problems besetting the creative industry are not to do with the industry itself – people will always listen to music, watch films, use software and view great works of art - it is a problem with the current business models being used, combined with a lack of will to innovate.

The often bizarre legislation put forward as a solution all seem to be trying to retain the intellectual property status quo, but that isn’t to say that the concept of copyright is flawed – copyright is still a useful tool once certain realities are realised.

We should be encouraging business to embrace the new landscape and innovate, because while people are still wanting to listen to music, watch films and use software, there is still money to be made.

However, no amount of legislation will prop up a failing business model indefinitely, no matter what lobbyists will have you believe – just ask the French button makers. In a free market, business models are not something society or government should be in the business of protecting and they should be permitted to fail.

This is not the first time a technical innovation has rendered an entrenched business obsolete, and I’m sure it will not be the last.

There was a small ripple around the internet this morning caused by the Home office opening up the Beta terrorist reporting tool.

To what extent the reports from this tool are monitored is unclear, but I suspect this will cause more problems that it solves.

Even before we consider the rather broad definition the government has for illegal material (which on the face of it could cover a number of science and religious texts), I can see the tool quickly becoming buried under false positives – whether through over sensitive citizens or through plain vindictiveness – which would need to be investigated.

Even if no further action is taken after the investigation, the cost in both time and resources must surely represent a significant risk that things that are actually a threat will be missed.

Although it is clearly aimed at developers, it is my hope that innovative and genuinely useful tools will quickly start popping up as entrepreneurs get to grips with this new wealth of information.

The launch has triggered a fair amount of buzz, and a flurry of blog posts elsewhere which do a much better job at explaining the ins and outs of the site than I have time to.

Personally, I think this is a good step in the right direction. It is also good to see that they have opted to go ugly early – publishing the raw data so we can begin hacking straight away – rather than wait until their cathedral-like semantic web interface is perfect.

True, while the data is in this state it is not so useful to the wider world – yet. Projects such as Scores on the doors have proven that turning raw data into something useful can be a useful and profitable undertaking, so I’ve no doubt that this will change.

The biggest disappointment is the choice to release much of the data under crown copyright. While this was almost certainly a compromise to get anything to happen at all, it would have been nice if the government had taken the bolder step and released it unencumbered and let the economy profit from it.

I would also like to see more local authorities opening up their data, moving away from the idea that everything has to be centralised.

Still, the new site follows a general positive trend of data glasnost which has already seen the promise to open up the postcode database, and in that spirit I welcome it.

Image “New, Improved *Semantic* Web!” by Duncan Hull

Estimates of the death toll vary from 30,000-100,000 casualties, with most news agencies picking the figure of 50,000 casualties on the first day.

To put this figure into some kind of context, that’s:

• 10 times the number of coalition deaths in Iraq from the start of the war to present.
• 17 times the number of people who died in the September 11th attacks in New York.
• 66 times the total number of people killed or injured in the 7/7 London tube bombings.
• Or the death of one person in every three in the City of Oxford (where I live – population ~151,000 living within the district boundary)

This figure is certain to rise as many have been left without shelter, food, water or basic healthcare.

Aid charities and NGOs from around the world are mobilising, and I encourage you to help if you can.

Here are just a few:

1. The British Red Cross
2. Oxfam
3. Medecins Sans Frontieres

Image from the BBC world service.

The thing that really irritates me about the Liberal democrats is that when you dig you discover that their policies are actually pretty reasonable. You have their standard policies, but you also have things like the Freedom Bill (which I have just re-read and my only complaint is that it doesn’t go far enough) and the new Take back power campaign.

Unfortunately it seems to be that they drop the ball when it comes to pushing this message out to people who aren’t necessarily actually looking for it – i.e. those who really need to know.

It also seems to be somewhat uncoordinated – lots of disparate messages with no coherent strategy or label making it obvious that it is the Liberal democrats who are responsible.

There is a marketing truism which goes something like you have to see a message through several different mediums for it to stick. The Obama campaign shows what you can do if you try – high exposure using free or near free media which turned their message into a coherent brand which connected with people on an emotional level.

The Libdems do some things reasonably well. Their web site is comprehensive and they’re using twitter (albeit primarily as a press release mechanism), they have an image gallery (which is hard to find and has no mention of copyright).  Unfortunately they seem to fail when getting the basics right – for example I attempted to find a web button for the take back power campaign, and when I eventually found a link for the page it returned a 404.

It seems as though all the pieces are there, but it hasn’t been put together into a coherent and easily accessible message.

What is more, they really need to be pushing their message our in print and on TV. Going out and talking people… in other words, campaigning. The internet isn’t all that there is.

With only a few months left until the election we have precious little time to change this country’s direction. So assuming that the Libdems are the true to their word (and even if they are fibbing about half of it, they certainly seem to be better than the alternatives), what can we do to help them?

Both Labour and Tory seem to be indistinguishable at this point, making the choice at the ballet paper a choice of which way you want to be screwed. It seems clear that both Tory and Labour seem to want to lock us into an authoritarian statist and high tax agenda for another 5 years at least.

David Cameron is so sure of his position that instead of engaging on issues or attacking Gordon Brown on his  policy failures (of which there are many) that he resorts to childish name-calling rather than entering into a real debate.

The Tories started making some good noises early in the campaign about individual liberty and transparency, and they have pledged to scrap the ID card. However, they intend to continue Labour’s authoritarian policies and (among many other things) plan to scrap the human rights act and further centralise powers into the executive.

Labour’s record on the other hand is well known – did ok in the first term, but chronic overspending on insane projects has left us with a shattered economy which tax payers are going to be working hard to repair for years to come (and there’s the small matter of that pesky illegal war).

With (politically inclined) voters crying out for an alternative, and while we still have a system of party politics, my question is simple – where on earth are the Liberal Democrats and what do they stand for?

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