Dan Gillmor continues to hold Time’s feet to the fire for it’s reluctance to correct Joe Klein’s factual errors.

Time is giving us as good as example as we could have asked for of the down side of relying on institutions that depend on being perceived as authoritative.

[Tags: media joe_klein authority everything_is_miscellaneous dan_gillmor ]

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I’m glad Facebook decided to reverse its most egregious defaults so that not clicking “yes” will now mean “no.” Good.

But in this matter Facebok overall is showing itself not to be on its users side. There is no reason not to give users a big red opt out button — making the whole thing opt in would be even better — except that FB knows we would use it. FB is choosing its own interests over its users’.

And, no, not every company does that. Sure, there’s self-interest in all that we do and all that our organizations do. But companies choose sides. Almost all companies use their customers. A few are truly on their customers’ side. Now we know where FB stands. [Tags: facebook ]

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Pardon my self-puffery, but this means a lot to me. Howard Rheingold, who is way up on my list of Net heroes, picked his three favorite books of the year for strategy + business, the Booz Allen Hamilton magazine:

Of the three books, I believe David Weinberger’s is the standout; it is not just prescient and useful, but profound. Weinberger looks deep below the obviously lucrative business model of Internet search and sees how the ability to tag and search extends human knowledge the way mathematics and the alphabet did. Everything Is Miscellaneous is not just the best book on behavioral theory of 2007, it’s the best book I’ve read all year — a rare combination of important social science and business insight, and fun to read…

Thank you, Howard. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous howard_rheingold ]

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From the DigitalFreedom site:

EMI done paying to prosecute its customers

What happens when the people you pay to represent you, stop acting in your best interest? If you are EMI – one of the largest record labels in the world who has recently come under new ownership – you stop footing the bill. The RIAA has spent millions of dollars to alienate and even prosecute its customers and apparently at least one of its Big Four members is beginning to wonder why and at what cost.

It has been reported that British label EMI is considering a significant cut to the amount of money it provides the trade groups on an annual basis. “EMI, along with each of the Big Four record labels contributes approximately $132.3 million to fund the operations of the IFPI, RIAA, and other national recording industry trade groups. That money is used in part to fund the industry’s antipiracy efforts—including the close to 30,000 file-sharing lawsuits filed by the record labels in the US alone.”

Today’s announcement should come as no surprise to anyone, and certainly not the RIAA. EMI has been at the forefront of understanding their customer’s needs and wants – leading the way in the recent movement away from DRM locked music, and opening the door to customer choice and content flexibility for Amazon.com, Wal-Mart.com, and even Microsoft who now offers millions of DRM free songs.

The RIAA has publicly acknowledged that their strategy to ‘combat piracy’ is costing its members millions with no end in sight. Let’s hope the RIAA gets the message EMI is trying to send and puts their resources back into serving the best interest of its members instead of prosecuting their customers.

[Tags: drm copyright emi riaa marketing ]

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The Wall Street Journal did a poll of 200 Facebook users (which doesn’t sound like a very significant number). Theresults:

If Facebook could tell your friends what you do on other sites — buying movie tickets, clothes, etc. — when would you want to share that information? Of the 200 respondents, 1.5% chose always, 30.5% chose often, sometimes or rarely and 68% chose never.

[Tags: facebook privacy ]

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The Wall Street Journal did a poll of 200 Facebook users (which doesn’t sound like a very significant number). The results:

If Facebook could tell your friends what you do on other sites — buying movie tickets, clothes, etc. — when would you want to share that information? Of the 200 respondents, 1.5% chose always, 30.5% chose often, sometimes or rarely and 68% chose never.

[Tags: facebook privacy ]

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Yesterday I blogged Harold Feld’s analysis of Verizon’s pledge to open its wireless networks. Here’s David Isenberg’s take on it.

If David and Harold — two of the smartest, sharpest, and most dedicated defenders of network values — find hope here, then hope is in order.

On the other hand, Susan Crawford raises an eyebrow of suspicion… [Tags: verizon net_neutrality david_isenberg harold_feld susan_crawford ]

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Harvard Business Review online is running a brief post of mine on why Kindle may end up as an open device, and, more generally, why there’s often competitive pressure for openness.

[Tags: kindle amazon ebooks openness ]

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Harold Feld explains the what and why of Verizon’s announcement that it will open its wireless networks to any device and any application.

[Tags: harold_feld verizon net_neutrality ]

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Michael Anti was a NY Times correspondent in Beijing and was a well-known Chinese blogger until the government shut the blog down. He is now a Niemann Fellow at Harvard. He’s giving a Berkman lunchtime talk. (As always, I’m typing quickly, paraphrasing, and missing stuff. You can hear the entire talk at MediaBerkman.)

Michael speaks informally. What happens when decentralized, open blogging meets the centralized, closed Chinese society? From 2004-2005, most dissenting news of China came through blogs. After that, it comes through chat rooms. Chat rooms started in Chinese in around 1998. Now China has gone back to that — very Web 1.0, Michael says. Email and mailing lists are also important for sharing dissenting news about politics, religion, etc. “We don’t use Web 2.0. Why not?” Web 2.0 is democratizing and decentralizing. But blogs aren’t really decentralized because they need centralized servers, which make them easy for the government to control. It is much harder for the government to find chat rooms and shut them down.

Before the Internet, the media were propaganda. With the Internet, people can do the job of traditional media in providing another voice. Michael finds this a more useful way of thinking about the Internet than considering it to be new media.

Sina.com aggregates Chinese newspapers for free. In 2005, they set up their own blog service. The bloggers are VIPs: journalists, professors, celebrities. Blogging has become very mainstream. Like the HuffingtonPost, it’s invited and not really the voice of the people. Bloggers there are like traditional columnists. The bloggers don’t serve as a check on the media; the media are the bloggers.

Michael was a hotel receptionist. He began writing on the Net about the Net. He got hired in 1999 as a journalist on the basis of that. H Thousands of netizens were hired as journalists. Journalism therefore “has an Internet heart.” Journalists welcomed bloggers during the “golden years” of 2004-2005. After that, bloggers and journalists couldn’t post anything sensitive.

The Chinese blogosphere is about recruiting people into the old media, not about new media.

“The guy who censored my blog… we’re close friends.” They talk frequently. “Sorry I have to close down your blog.” “I understand. How about if this weekend we go kayaking?” It’s his job to shut down blogs, but inside he is very liberal.

If you want to find citizen journalism in China, turn to the geeks. And they have “copycats” of the services on the Web that are easier to censor. (Michael says that gmail is popular and very important to the Chinese. It’s too important to government and business to block it.)

There is a network of elite blogs and there are chat rooms. These are the two faces of the social Internet in China. The dark side is that the government has successfully controlled the Internet. Everything is free to talk about except politics.

He doesn’t see any immediate change. China is becoming Singapore, not the US. He hopes that social networking and chatrooms will eventually steer the country towards freedom.

Q: What percentage of the Chinese people are involved in social movements and social networking?
A: Only the middle class and those committed to social change. That’s why I say “elite networking.”

Q: Is most blogging urban or rural?
A: I think blogging happens only in the cities.

Q: What’s the government doing to try to monitor and control chat rooms?
A: Conservatives like chat rooms, as well as liberals do. (In 2005, the anti-Japanese movement spread via chat rooms.) Anonymity is easy in chat rooms.

Q: (doc) Is Red Flag a knockoff of RedHat?
A: Yes. The government doesn’t trust RedHat. It only uses Red Flag. Microsoft gave much of the Windows source code to the government so the government verify there are no back doors.

Q: (ethanz) What percent of Chinese people do you think are aware of the levels of restriction and censorship, and are inclined to find a way around them?
A:The personal life of Chinese is so free that the first time I came to Europe and America I found it so conservative. In China we have sex before marriage, are more tolerant of homosexuality, we have no conservative party, we have no God, it’s very easy to create new companies. The Chinese government allows the people to have so much freedom about sex and business so they’ll accept the political restrictions. The new generation accepts this exchange. Only very weird people care. At least 95% of people don’t care about censorship. I don’t see any hope to change this. In the US, the Internet is Che Guevara. In China, it’s an harmonic ship.

Q: What do you mean by making China into a “big Singapore”?
A: Happy citizens without any political ideas.

Q: (colin) What’s next?
A: Forget anything centralized. E.g., Twitter won’t work. The elites will get further networked. If the political situation changes, China will become liberal very quickly because the media is already liberal on the inside. And if there’s an organizational collapse, the social networks on the Internet will come to the fore. I’m very confident about the future of China because of the Internet.

Q: (me) If there were anonymous blogging, would more people do it?
A: No, because in China it’s all about the name. If you don’t have a recognized name, who cares what you say? Tom Freidman without that name would be no one.
Q: Pseudonyms that gain traction by getting links, etc.?
A: Sometimes a blogger will break news, but after the media picks it up, the blogger is out of the picture.

Q: (colin) Anything that international companies can do?
A: If Congress banned Google from doing business with China, what would happen to gmail? If Microsoft left China, what about Messenger? For Congress, it’s easy to be black and white. But the Chinese people depend on these tools to communicate about freedom and rights. The real cost is Chinese freedom. (Yahoo is different. It’s “a real bad thing.” It “didn’t do any good to China.”) The Chinese authorities want to embrace the Internet, to be part of the international community, not like North Korea. So we should encourage them to do more with the Internet and to continue to say that the Internet is good. The outside world should encourage as well as blame the Chinese government. The Chinese people don’t like blame and don’t like being told what to do. [Tags: michael_anti china blogs censorship berkman ]

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I’m watching the tivo’ed version of episode #9 of Heroes. And because so many of us have the audacity to watch programs when we want to and not when the network says we should, the network has posted in-place ads over the episode as if it were a Nascar race car.

Wow. How customer-hostile can you get? [Tags: advertising marketing cluetrain heroes ]

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Alan Patrick of the Broadstuff blog wagers 3:2 that now that the “A List” has weighed in against Facebook’s new ad program, Facebook will drop it.

I’d like to think so (see my post here), but I’d wager 100:1 that Facebook will continue. Of course, I’m neither a bettor nor much of a predictor (remember the glorious eight years of the President Howard Dean administration?), but here’s my thinking:

1. The A-List ain’t what once people thought it was. The folks Alan mentions are influential within the tech community, but they are not the head of the long tail and thus don’t have much direct influence over the broad base of Facebook users. (Alan has me on the list, which makes little sense in terms of readership or influence. But, what the heck. I’m just happy to be on a list.)

2. There has been no great uporoar from Facebook users.

3. Facebook has justifications — rationalizations, in my view — for their decisions. For example, Facebook says if you don’t click on any buttons on the popup that invites you to share news of your purchase, it defaults to “yes” because Facebook wants to encourage users to try the program. Besides, Facebook says with some justice, you have to explicitly click on a “yes” button once you log into Facebook before the news is shared. (Sorry this is confusing. See Ethanz for a clear explanation.) True enough. Nevertheless, this strikes me as an anti-user decision that Facebook wouldn’t have made if it weren’t going to make a gazillion dollars from their ad program.

4. Facebook will make a gazillion dollars from their ad program. [Tags: facebook privacy advertising marketing alan_patrick ]

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Slashdot quotes New York Country Lawyer:

“According to a report on p2pnet.net, the RIAA’s latest anti-college round of “early settlement” letters targets 7 out of 8 Ivy League schools, but continues to give Harvard University a wide berth. This is perhaps the most astonishing display of cowardice exhibited to date by the multinational cartel of SONY BMG, Warner Bros. Records, EMI, and Vivendi/Universal (the “Big Four” record companies, which are rapidly become less “big”). The lesson to be drawn by other colleges and universities: “All bullies are cowards. Appeasement of bullies doesn’t work. Standing up to bullies and fighting back has a much higher success rate.”"

While it’s true that Berkman founder Charles Nesson has called on Harvard to fight the RIAA (yay, Charlie!), I don’t find Fear of Harvard Law sufficient explanation. There are some other pretty good (!) law schools around, and the RIAA is happily suing those universities. I don’t get it.

(See NY Country Lawyer’s comment at Slashdot for some useful links.) [Tags: riaa harvard copyright]

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There are times when you don’t want to do something ,and you know it’s ok not to but you can’t think of an excuse.

That’s when we could really use a crowd-sourced excuse. Or an online excuse exchange. Oh, where are the Internets when you need them?!

(This arose in a conversation with Paul Hartzog.)[Tags: crowds crowd-sourcing excuses ]

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MyCokeRewards.com requires you to register with them before you can check the code under the cap. Is that even legal? Well, yeah, it probably is since Coke can probably afford to hire a lawyer or two. But it’s bad marketing. Well, it’s probably good marketing since Coke can probably afford to hire a marketer or two, but it annoys me.

[Tags: coke coca_cola marketing ]

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Mario Cuomo has called upon lawyers to speak up for the rule of law and, in particular, the fact that the president is not entitled to declare war. (Thanks to Jon Husband for the link.) [Tags: mario_cuomo politics lawyers ]

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Just a reminder: Saddam Hussein was not behind 9/11 and the theft of 25 million personal records in Britain does not bolster the case that the Internet is rife with identity theft. The data were on two computer disks that were stolen.

[Tags: identity_theft hmrc security ]

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Gene Koo of the Berkman Center blogs about a paper by Danielle Citron titled Technological Due Process, a topic Gene has been studying for a while. Writes Gene:

Professor Citron describes how software code increasingly executes our public laws. Decision support systems, she convincingly argues, quickly become decision making systems. And invariably, the vagaries of the legislative and administrative processes leave large gaps in the specifics of how a given law should be executed. Without firmer guidance from proper governmental bodies, the programmers charged with translating legal code into software code essentially wind up creating law to fill the gaps. (I describe this as “shoving analog pegs into digital slots”). From a procedural – even a Constitutional – perspective, this is a grievously inappropriate delegation of governmental functions to the private sector, not unlike the hiring of Blackwater mercenaries to achieve military objectives. Professor Citron finds, therefore, the need for “technological due process”: safeguards to ensure that software is literally up to code.

Gene adds his own example of how letting software administer law can go wrong: the distribution of food stamps.

This is a big deal…all part of the squeezing out of human judgment and the leeway it enables in the name of efficiency.

[Tags: gene_koo danielle_citron law lawrence_lessig ]

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Here’s a poem, via Ethan Zuckerman.

The Icelandic Language

In this language, no industrial revolution;
no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone;
only sheep, fish, horses, water falling.
The middle class can hardly speak it.

In this language, no flush toilet; you stumble
through dark and rain with a handful of rags.
The door groans; the old smell comes
up from under the earth to meet you.

But this language believes in ghosts;
chairs rock by themselves under the lamp; horses
neigh inside an empty gully, nothing
at the bottom but moonlight and black rocks.

The woman with marble hands whispers
this language to you in your sleep; faces
come to the window and sing rhymes; old ladies
wind long hair, hum, tat, fold jam inside pancakes.

In this language, you can’t chit-chat
holding a highball in your hand, can’t
even be polite. Once the sentence starts its course,
all your grief and failure come clear at last.

Old inflections move from case to case,
gender to gender, softening consonants, darkening
vowels, till they sound like the sea moving
icebergs back and forth in its mouth.

— Bill Holm

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Jessamyn West, who has been putting the rarin back in Librarian since 1999, posts about the fact that someone she respects has started doing pay-per-post postings. And then she goes all meta on the topic. Quite amusing. As she concludes: “Ten dollars well spent, I think. Don’t you?” [Tags: jessamyn_west, mat_honan pay_per_post, blogging, blogosphere libraries -berkman]

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Kathy Gould at The Palos Verdes Library District blog has a very interesting post (which I’m proud to say was kicked off by something in my book) on the role of librarians as catalogs are enabled to sort themselves based on why someone is searching for something. The post grew out of a conversation with Betth Jefferson at Bibliocommons.

“So what happens when this role of helping people find the information that meets their particular needs is transferred from the librarian to the user community at large?” Kathy asks. The answer she gives presents librarians as creators and maintainers of the systems (an information architecture role, as I’d call it), as guides to and through the system, as voices in the system, and as facilitators of the library’s role in the community. But she puts it better than I just did.

Sounds right to me.

[Tags: libraries kathy_gould bibliocommons librarians pvld everything_is_miscellaneous information_architeture ]

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The switch from Movable Type to WordPress has gone pretty well, but some of you have pointed out a huge bug in my implementation. If you know CSS well, you’ll probably be able to spot it quickly. I don’t and I can’t. So, I’m asking for your help…

in IE 6, the page is loading some style other than the default, making the left column appear blank. If you click on a comments link, the text is centered, even if you click on the “default” style in the “Hard to Read?” list of links.

I don’t know why it’s not loading the default style in IE. I don’t know where it’s getting the center alignment. Do you?

Thanks!

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Jeneane writes:

The Award for the best tagline goes to Skype for “take a deep breath.” Why? Because it’s the only tagline I’ve seen that ISN’T about the company at all, but about ME. It’s something that’s good for me. Has nada to do with chatting or videofoning or the internet. It’s about: hey, we’re people too. Let’s all take a deep breath. Wait. Don’t jump into the next thing. Stop clicking. Wshew. Ok. There. Good.

I like it, too, but I’ve never quite understood it. Are they saying we should take a deep breath because what’s about to happen is breathtaking? Because we’ll need the breath for all the talking we’re about to do? Or is Jeneane right, that Skype is reminding us to pause in the hyper-flurry of life on the Web? I’m not sure, which is the main reason I like Skype’s tag line.

Jeneane suggests tag lines for other Web sites. Here are some more, assuming Skype’s tries to remind us of the bigger picture:

Wikipedia: Go outside. Engage. Come back neutral.

eBay: The best things in life are free aren’t for sale.

slashdot: 6 – Moving

[Tags: marketing jeneane_sessum ]

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John Edwards answers Mike Arrington’s tech policy questions, and some questions from readers, at TechCrunch. Edwards has been aggressively pro open Internet. Yay! (Disclosure: I sometimes get to talk with the Edwards policy folks about tech policy.) [Tags: john_edwards politics net_neutrality ]

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Amazon’s ebook, Kindle, looks great. But as far as I can tell, it doesn’t browse. You can only receive the materials Amazon chooses to provide.

Too bad. I was about to buy one.

If I’m wrong, please let me know…

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I just published a new issue of my free newsletter. The main article is, entirely by coincidence, about ebooks and libraries — a coincidence because Amazon just announced Kindle, its ebook hardware.

November 19, 2007

By the way, Everything Is Miscellaneous is available for Kindle. Cluetrain is not.
Also by the way, I just got a link from Urs Gasser to his contribution to a recent conference on the future of books.

[Tags: books ebooks kindle amazon libraries everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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This site is now officially under construction as I switch it from Movable Type to WordPress. So, pardon the glitches, and, no, I haven’t finished moving my blogroll over yet.

Why am I switching? It comes down to no good reason. I like MT as software and admire it as a company. But, I have it configured for maximum host churn. So, I could work on configuring it better or I could try something new. I’ve been using WP for my Everything Is Miscellaneous blog, and have been enjoying it. I’m also fairly comfortable with it now. So, I opted to try something new.

My only regret comes from mt sense of loyalty to MT. The company is a good contributor to the community and I recommend MT wholeheartedly. In fact, if bradsucks weren’t doing the WP install for me, I’d absolutely fail at it; WP is easy to get up in its default state, but much harder to configure and personalize than MT, at least in my experience.

So, now for the tweaks, the fixes, the general annoyance, and the post-installation regrets…

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Aargh. Steven Levy’s excellent article on the new Amazon e-reading device came out a day before I was about to send out the new issue of my newsletter, the main article of which is about the future of books. I hate when that happens!

Well, I’ll send it out anyway, and will link to it here tomorrow. Damn the pace of human events! [Tags: books libraries steven_levy amazon ]

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The Times They Aren’t a-Changin’ explains itself this way:

It is the conceit of newspapers that each morning there are new stories to tell. Using the New York Times’s own archives, unchangingtimes.com sets out to prove that everything news is old.

So the blog takes a current story from The Times and finds stories on the same theme in its archive. The result is a list of the mythic narratives of our culture.

This so reminds me of the feature that Spy magazine (I believe) used to run that rounded up all the tiny filler-ish NY Times stories headlined “Bus Plunge.” [Tags: media newspapers narrative nytimes ]

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Dave’s convinced me. I’m going to ask for my family to contribute toward buying me a Chumby for Chanukah. Using it simply as a (rather small) digital picture frame practically justifies the price by itself. Add in its openness and general coolness, and I want one! [Tags: chumby dave_winer gadgets ]

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The Berkman Center has received a $4 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (for four million, we spell out the entire name) to support the Center’s tenth anniversary and beyond.

This is fantastic news. The Berkman Center is part of Harvard Law but relies on the kindness of others for financial support. From the Berkman posting about the MacArthur grant:

Over the past decade, through a series of grants, as well as substantive involvement in the center’s work, MacArthur has been instrumental in the success of numerous Berkman efforts, such as: OpenNet Initiative, the Digital Media Exchange, Digital Natives, Global Voices, and the study of citizen media. These have led to numerous policy changes, two books, and two spin-off organizations — one non-profit, the other for-profit.

Thank you, John D. and Catherine T.! [Tags: berkman macarthur ]

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My Berkman colleagues Ethan Zuckerman and Wendy Seltzer both have great posts up about the Facebook ad infrastructure that I blogged about yesterday. [Tags: facebook berkman wendy_seltzer ethan_zuckerman privacy advertising ]

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Andrew Sullivan on how Hillary could come in third in Iowa:

One wrinkle pointed out by a reader is that when you examine the second-choices of Democrats in Iowa in the NYT/CBS poll, you find that Clinton is significantly behind both Edwards and Obama. Edwards gets 25 percent of the second choice voters; Obama 24 percent; and Clinton only 16 percent. I get the feeling that many Edwards and Obama supporters like each other more than they care for the Clinton machine. In caucuses, that can make a difference. Maybe she’ll finish third.

[Tags: politics clinton iowa andrew_sullivan ]

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Yesterday, my ISP required me to choose two “security questions” from a drop-down list of dumb choices: the name of my first pet or my favorite book, movie, food, or place to visit.

Why dumb? First, these questions assume I don’t have an Evil Sibling who knows these things; the same is true, of course, of common questions such as where you were born and your mother’s maiden name.

Second, they are guessable. Type in The Bible” and “Harry Potter” as favorite book and you’ve probably covered 95% of Americans.

Third, I don’t have a favorite book, movie, food or place to visit. I don’t even have a favorite non-fiction book, sf novel or funny book. As for favorite places to visit, I had a really good time in Italy, but I also had a really good time in Leiden before that, and I don’t really know how to rank my sister’s house on Thanksgiving versus that place fifteen feet in front of the Monet water lilies in the basement of the Musée de l’Orangerie versus Heaven if the Lord is willing to overlook certain transgressions (which, by the way, are also some of my favorite places to visit).

So, here is a list of similarly dumb security questions, although they are dumb in a variety of ways:

If asked to list US states, which would you remember last?

Who is your sixth-favorite novelist?

What word does the final scene in “Madame Butterfly” bring to mind?

Where exactly did you get the most lost?

Name the teacher who had the least influence on you.

What is your preferred way of organizing items? (Note: Do not choose “alphabetically.”)

Who is your favorite child?

Guess a number from 1 to 1,000.

Elf is to wipes as happenstance is to ______.

if your house were on fire, what is the last thing you would remove from it?

What would be the trade-in value of your new car, you know, if you cleaned it up real good, got the empties out of the trunk, etc.?

Who is the next of your high school friends you are going to forget?

What is the answer to this question?

[Tags: humor security passwords ]

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[This post is also running at HuffingtonPost.]

With its new advertising infrastructure, Facebook is being careful
to protect privacy of information. But they are bucking — and
perhaps helping to transform — the norms of privacy. At
its most basic, Facebook is getting the defaults wrong.

The new ad infrastructure enables Facebook to extend their reach onto
other companies’ sites. For example, if you rent a copy of “Biodome”
from Blockbuster.com, Blockbuster will look for a Facebook cookie on
your computer. If it finds one, it will send a ping to Facebook. The
Blockbuster site will pop up a “toast” (= popup) asking if you want to
let your friends at Facebook know that you rented “Biodome.” If you say yes, next time you
log into Facebook, Facebook will ask you to confirm that you want to
let your friends know of your recent rental. If you say yes, that
becomes an event that’s propagated in the news feed going to your
friends.

Facebook has also created a new type of entity to allow non-people
to have a presence in the system. So, a company or a character can
now get a “page,” but not a profile. It can have “fans” but not
“friends.” And the fact that you decided to become a fan of Cap’n
Crunch is yet more information advertisers can use against you.

Facebook makes an astounding array of information available to its
advertisers so that they can precisely “target” likely suspects. This
is great for advertisers, and — given that the ad space is going
to be filled up one way or another — it’s arguably better for
users to see ads that are relevant than are irrelevant. (The
counter-argument is that targeting makes ads more successfully
manipulative, not just more relevant.) Facebook is scrupulous,
however, about not letting advertisers know the identity of those to
whom it’s advertising. So, Blockbuster might buy ads for all men aged
18-24 who have joined the Pauly Shore fan club, but Blockbuster
doesn’t know who those people are.

When Facebook talks about preserving user privacy, that’s what they
have in mind: They do not let advertisers tie the information
about you in a profile (your age, interests, etc.) to the
information that identifies you in your profile (your name,
email address, etc.). That is the informational view of privacy, and
Facebook is likely to continue to get that right, if only because so
many governmental agencies are watching them. I also think that the
Facebook folks understand and support the value of maintaining privacy
in this sense.

Yet, I find myself creeped out by this system because Facebook gets
the defaults wrong in two very significant areas.

When Blockbuster gives you the popup asking if you want to let your
Facebook friends know about your rental, if you do not respond in
fifteen seconds, the popup goes away … and a “yes” is sent to
Facebook. Wow, is that not what should happen! Not responding far
more likely indicates confusion or dismissal-through-inaction than
someone thinking “I’ll save myself the click.”

Further, we are not allowed to opt out of the system. At your Facebook
profile, you can review a list of all the sites you’ve been to that
have presented you with the Facebook spam-your-friends option, and you
can opt out of the sites one at a time. But you cannot press a big red
button that will take you out of the system entirely. So, if you’ve
deselected Blockbuster and the Manly Sexual Inadequacy Clinic from the
list, if you go to a new site that’s done the deal with Facebook,
you’ll get the popup again there. We should be allowed to Just Say No,
once and for all.

Why? Because privacy is not just about information. It’s all about
the defaults.

If a couple is walking down the street, engaged in deep and quiet
conversation, it certainly would violate their privacy to focus
listening devices on them, record their conversation, and post it on
the Internet. The couple wold feel violated not only because their
“information” — their conversation — was published but
because they had the expectation that even though their sound waves
were physically available to anyone walking on the street who cared to
listen, norms prevent us from doing so. These norms are social
defaults, and they are carefully calibrated to our social
circumstances: The default for sidewalks is that you are not allowed
to intercede in private conversations except in special circumstances.
The default for showing up at a wedding party is that they can ask
whether you’re with the bride or groom’s party, but they can’t ask you
to show a drivers license. The default at some schools is that your
grades will be posted on a public bulletin board and at others that
they will not. When we violate these norms, various forms of social
opprobrium ensue. We even have special words for different types of
violations: eavesdropping, being nosy, being a blabbermouth, etc.

Facebook is getting privacy right where privacy is taken as a matter
of information transfer. But it is getting privacy wrong as a norm. Our expectation is that our
transactions at one site are neither to be made known to other sites
nor made known to our friends. We may well want to let our friends
know what we’ve bought, but the norm and expectation is that we will
not. Software defaults generally ought to reflect the social defaults. And
when you’re as important as Facebook — two billion page views a
day — your software’s defaults can nudge the social defaults.

Our privacy norms are changing rapidly. They have to because we’ve now
invented so many new ways to be in public. That’s why Facebook’s move
is especially disappointing. Although they are rigorously supporting
informational privacy, they are setting the defaults based not on
what’s best for their users but on what’s best for them. It’s clearly
and inarguably better for users to be able to opt out of the entire
third-party system, but it’s clearly more lucrative for Facebook to
make it hard to opt out (not to mention making it an opt in system).

Businesses always choose sides, implicitly or explicitly. Facebook has
been notable for being on its users’ side. Not in this case. In fact,
because this new ad plan invokes Facebook on other companies’ sites,
it feels like we’re being ganged up on. Even worse, in this case the
gang is so strong, it could reshape privacy’s norms.

[Tags: facebook social_networking_sites privacy advertising marketing ]

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Obama has released his tech policy. It’s terrific, and squishy only in the difficult places where politicians always get squishy: How exactly are you going to enforce Net neutrality and get the telcos to behave? etc. (Disclosure: I am a volunteer advisor to the Edwards’ campaign on Net policies. Edwards’ stance is also really good. And I’m glad to have candidates trying to out-open-Internet each other.)

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Chris Lydon’s Radio Open Source has found a home at Brown University’s Watson Center. Yay! [Tags: radio_open_source christopher_lydon media radio ]

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Jay Rosen has another initiative launching today: Enabling a dozen beat reporters to have a social network comprised of people who know the topic and have an interest in having the coverage be thorough, accurate, and deep. Very cool experiment.

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Jay Rosen has another initiative launching today: Enabling a dozen beat reporters to have a social network composed of people who know the topic and have an interest in having the coverage be thorough, accurate, and deep. Very cool experiment. [Tags: media journalism jay_rosen everything_is_miscellaneous ]

1 Comment »