The rationale for both services – protection of the organization – is logical. People can and do make mistakes, and can and do engage in deliberate attempts to damage the reputations of their employers (I consider colleges and universities employers of athletes, but that’s another discussion).

I understand that what employees are doing on their own time and on their own pages, where transgressions often occur, can be problematic, but, aside from some seriously awful anecdotes about employees’ misbehavior or mistakes, I’ve not seen data on just how much employee transgressions have actually cost employers.

Personally, I would not feel comfortable knowing that I was being watched away from work. I do not surrender my personal views or friendships or history or social life to my employer when I accept a position.

I wonder whether work at some employers is going to become too much of a risk for some people – those who value their privacy, individuality, and freedom of expression (most people, I imagine). People need and want to work, which can put employers in control when it comes to privacy. If you love your work, you may forgo some freedom at the edges of your life to continue doing it but you also get paid in return for doing something you love. That is still (and I hate this phrase now that just about everyone uses it) a slippery slope. Where do you draw the line on your privacy? Do you stop posting political views? Religious views? Opinions about sports figures? Any and all photos? Do you simply start setting up private groups on social networking sites, vetting the invited friends by asking them to “sign” your own privacy agreement?

When it comes to personal social networking activities, I believe employees should be free from spying activities, regardless of how concerned an organization says it is about loss of IP or any proprietary info on processes, new products, etc. And, while I’m at it, I would view with suspicion any company argument that it’s those Gen Ys with little fear about privacy they are afraid of; I think most Gen Ys know the difference between telling everyone what they did last weekend (which, again, is another issue entirely) and posting information on Facebook about a forthcoming product or breaching confidentiality agreements.

In my opinion, spying on employees’ social networking activities and communications reveals weaknesses in the employer, specifically in its hiring and engagement skills and processes. If an employer does not trust its employees – and this, for me, is all about trust, nothing more and nothing less, regardless of the coating an employer may put on it – it will reap the deserved rewards: lower loyalty and lower engagement, both of which affect productivity and, some research suggests, are directly correlated with lower organizational performance and even lower stock price. With the job market loosening up, monitoring personal social networking activity might even something else: losing an employee or two.

The bigger fear, I fear, is a much larger can of worms. This is why I was delighted to see Tim O’Reilly’s weekend post, Putting Online Privacy in Perspective. While O’Reilly’s post itself is largely quotes from search engine expert Danny Sullivan commenting on a WSJ article, it hits on a core issue that is often left below the surface when we’re openly discussing privacy: facebook is only one company that’s collecting data on our activities, there are many others, collecting and crunching data on many other (often ‘private’) activities. One example, as Sullivan explored:

My credit card company knows everything I’ve purchased, which is a pretty personal trail. That doesn’t get “anonymized” after 9 months or 18 months. I have no idea at all what happens to it. I can’t, like at Google, push a button and make it go poof, either. I don’t think I have any rights over it at all.

Credit card companies aren’t the only organizations with access to tons and tons of data about us. Our cellphone service providers know where we are and who we’re calling and texting, and our IM providers keep our conversations for a few weeks. Even in-game behaviors in videogames can be tracked. While a lot of this data collection is justifiable to improve the customer experience, it can all just as easily be used for any number of other purposes.

I think that this is where we need to focus our public dialog about privacy and control. Facebook’s data collection is just one symptom of the direction where society as a whole is moving: to the mass collection, aggregation, and cross referencing of consumer data so that organizations can better understand, target, and market to each and every one of us. From the perspective of the the enterprises, this is where we want to go, and more technology and instrumentation means more, better data. Speaking for myself, as a consumer and citizen, it’s not where I want things to end up. This is a discussion that we need to have.

The uproar (if you want to call it that since it only seems to be happening among a relatively small cadre of people and organizations, NOT among the vast, vast majority of the 400+ million Facebook users) over privacy changes is dumb. The changes themselves are entirely Facebook self-centered and entirely beneficial only to Facebook, but let’s not forget: Facebook members do not own Facebook, Zuckerberg et al. do.

What, you say? You must have forgotten because it’s become such an integral if not important part of your life but you Facebook members are members, not owners; you are users, customers, etc. Are you important? Sure. Who touts Facebook’s growth more than Facebook? In the spirit of the collaborative web, Facebook should consult with you before doing drastic changes to default settings that let anyone from China to Russia to Trinidad & Tobago know you had a bad date last night or need a new laptop – and then make you fix them. But they did not and now they are going to feel your wrath as you leave en masse – to do what? Set up another, more private, more narrow network on a new site that ensures only those six people you really want to read your life get to do that?

My bet – no hedging either – is that this is another tempest in a laptop hard drive. I will be surprised if more than 100,000 people leave Facebook on May 31, Quit Facebook Day. Today, May 18, 2010, 5,335 people have committed to quitting Facebook on May 31. Folks, the people who use Facebook have gotten past this kind of mess before and will again.

Now, to get serious for a graph: Privacy is not a trivial matter. Most people do not yet begin to comprehend the risks and dangers in losing control of their personal digital identities; most probably have not even thought about having a personal digital identity. What’s more, stuff you put online is virtually permanent (barring an alien invasion that wipes out all stuff on the Net or something similar) and, with the Internet as we know it now having been around for awhile, I bet there is stuff out there I forgot I ever posted, searched for, or wrote.

If you don’t want to share stuff, don’t join Facebook. If you do, protect your privacy. Member caveo (that’s what the English-to-Latin online translator produced when I asked for “member beware”).

The much bigger questions are: What is your digital identity? Who has it? Who controls it?

(Click for the full/interactive chart, it should make far more sense than the clip above)

I conducted a highly informal and unscientific poll of the nGenera Insight staff here in the Toronto office. Fully 3/4 of our facebook-using colleagues have stripped their profile of information because of these privacy policy changes and tech blunders, and in some cases have chosen to walk away from the site entirely.

With each iterative change it seems like facebook inches closer to a user pain-point that drives users away from the site for good. What do you expect it would take you to walk away from the site?

These approaches give us new data, but require that we change how we go about doing things, usually making everything transaction based–where the transaction is constructed in such a way that a computer or sensor can understand what’s going on. This doesn’t really need to be the case anymore–computers are getting to the point where they’re smart enough to start understanding what we’re doing without being with us all the time.

Some of the big technologies that I’ve been looking into are video content analysis (VCA), facial recognition, and emotion detection–with the latter two arguably being under the umbrella of  VCA. If you walk down the street it’s hard to go a block or two without seeing a video camera keeping tabs on the ebbs and flows of people, and the camera density skyrockets when you head into a store or mall or most any private venue. If we let computers tap into the raw information generated by these surveillance infrastructures, some pretty cool/scary stuff can happen.

Consider walking into a retail store: if you’re in the field of view of multiple cameras, your position in 3D space can be tracked (PDF) and a map of where you walk around the store can be plotted. If you look at a display kiosk and smile or frown, a relatively low-resolution camera can understand your emotional reaction, and add it to the “profile” of you that seem to like or dislike. Finally, when checking out at the cash register, you’re in a prime position for facial recognition software to grab and understand a snapshot of your face (so that you can be recognized more easily next time), and link your purchasing behavior/history (and your credit/debit number) to your customer file.

When all this information is aggregated, simply going to the store to buy some milk turns into an activity that can be broken down and understood. By linking together technologies, companies with retail locations will soon be able to understand the exact paths that customers take through their stores, how often those customers come back, and whether or not they seem to be enjoying the trip–all without changing the customer-facing experience at all.

The scenario above is, so far as I know, currently hypothetical–but based on current, existing technology. You can let your imagination run wild coming up with ways to generate and link data about what people are doing, where they’re going, and what they’re saying. As consumers, we’re going to be seeing a shift where our identity is used to identify, segment, and target us like never before–and is done so as a byproduct of just leaving the house. There’s great promise for the enterprise, but great cause for concern (but also arguably great benefit) for the customer.

Noted: danah boyd, in her address to open SXSW this month, related the following story: “I met a teen whose abusive father was recently released from jail. Recognizing that a restraining order would not be enough protection, the teen and her mother moved thousands of miles away. As the teen began making friends in her new school, she begged for a Facebook account. Her mother caved and both the daughter and mother worked to make the account as private as possible; neither of them wanted to face the consequences of being found. In December, when Facebook changed its [default] privacy settings [to Everyone], this teen and her mother didn’t realize what the change in privacy settings meant until someone else pointed them out after the fact. Is putting her at-risk an acceptable bi-product of Facebook’s changes?” Facebook has 400 million-plus apparently satisfied users; it would be devastating to two of them if, unintentionally, the impact of the change in privacy policy had not been communicated to them.

Noted: Although this is, I imagine, precisely what Facebook is intended to do, I recently heard from someone in one of my classes when I was a middle school teacher some 39 years ago. (Gasps are acceptable.) We connected by phone and during a two-hour conversation, we caught each other up on our lives since then and on families and I heard a bit about some other people in the class. This example probably does not really belong under the title On Unintended Consequences, but I include it because it certainly was unintended from my perspective – but thoroughly enjoyable.

I only bring these unrelated examples up for one reason, and that’s to remind myself and perhaps you that for all the intentionally positive consequences of technology such as social networking, online banking, and blogging, etc., there are also unforeseen, unpredictable impacts. Online banking, for example, means I never have to enter the bank for anything, which also means I am a virtual customer as far as the bank is concerned. I live in a very small town so I do know the current bank official, but I see her no more than once a year and most often to replace a lost ATM card. If I wanted to borrow money, I might have a much harder time because, frankly, they do not know me. My wife knows all the people in her bank because she is a regular, physically present customer.

We recently refinanced our house, and, until closing, I never met or saw anyone I dealt with. Nearly everything was handled by email or cell phone or landline. But I really enjoyed the closing because a very nice, personable, and knowledgeable woman came to our home and walked us through it. She put a face on the transaction.

I think the one thing people really want in an online relationship, whether they are friends, friends of friends, one-time customers, or long-term customers is trust, and that is very hard to build virtually and very easily and quickly lost. One mistake – such as a misspelled name or inaccurate transaction – can diminish or terminate the relationship. For all the convenience, choice, and selection that online buying and selling create, the magic is that trust occurs at all. That it does – far more often than not – says something about people’s openness and about companies’ diligence and cleverness at establishing virtual relationships that matter.

A recent article by Nate Anderson in Ars Technica highlights professor Mayer-Schönberger book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. The message: “Technology has now made ‘remembering’ the default approach to information, and in doing so, threatens to make ‘forgetfulness’ obsolete.” This is not only a profound change from 20 years ago, it can also be detrimental to our ability to think and analyze information. The article goes on to say: “Selective forgetfulness is a boon to humanity; it keeps us from drowning in our own recorded data. It allows us to sift and sort, then to think at a higher level of abstraction instead of wallowing in detail.”

But, this may all soon change.  Perhaps, computers can learn to forget too.

Researchers led by doctoral candidate Roxana Geambasu, at the University of Washington in Seattle are working on project called Vanish. The idea is to encapsulate data such as e-mails, selected text in messages, or documents that are sent over the Internet. The system would create corresponding keys for decapsulation that are widely available online, but that would deteriorate over time so that the data in readable form would only be available for a certain period of time. The overview page of the Vanish project states, “We strongly believe that realizing Vanish’s vision would represent a significant step toward achieving privacy in today’s unforgetful age.” Mayer-Schönberger suggests a similar solution that uses metadata to tag data objects with expiration dates and cites the work of Lawrence Lessig who has proposed a broader approach to combine policy and software to force privacy compliance.

nGenera’s research project Leading in an Age of Unbounded Data is looking at new sources of data available to the enterprise and how these will lead to new insights, opportunities, and challenges, as well as change enterprise processes and decision-making. One of the assumptions we make is that data will continue to grow and companies, through analytics, will develop a type of ‘sixth sense’ or situational awareness about the organization thanks to information captured from across the business ecosystem. We have already found that the growth of personal information and digital identity data will lead to rich digital profiles containing social graph information. These rich profiles present opportunities to better engage with customers and employees, improve customization, and facilitate knowledge management by anticipating user needs and connecting them to relevant people and information.

Projects like Vanish force us to think about data, not as an asset with an indefinite lifespan, but rather as something that depreciates over time, just like physical assets do. This would effectively reduce the amount of data that we need to manage and improve signal-to-noise ratio as more important facts and information would be retained while less significant information would be deleted. By eliminating the perfect memory of computers, we might also feel less pressure to maintain digital facades and manicure our online profiles. Additionally, the idea of adding expiration dates and metadata to data could accelerate the shift in power away from marketer towards consumer as it would allow individuals to dictate what personal data is used, who has access, for how long, and for what purpose.

But, self-destructing data would also diminish the value of many of the ‘big data’ opportunities that we talk about such as using large data sets to infer the truth about various situations, and using sentiment analysis to mine online customer comments and status updates for market research and product insights. It would confound companies and marketers that store petabytes of information to generate longitudinal trends and rely on usage data to drive Web analytics and build reputation and ratings, as well as improve information management through technologies such as collaborative filtering (e.g. the technology used by Amazon to recommend books to you based on the activity of people with similar behaviors). By collectively deleting our less-than-favorable digital trails, would we also be doing a disservice to future generations of anthropologists that could benefit from a complete digital history and behavior map—both good, bad, and questionable actions—of their ancestors?

The idea that all data should live on forever is a relatively new concept that many people have already taken for granted. In general, I think enterprises, governments, and individuals would benefit from more discussion on the topic instead of seeing it as a foregone conclusion. The idea of having an information lifecycle for all data is a powerful one. Personally, I would welcome more initiatives such as those by the Vanish team and professor Mayer-Schönberger that broach the topic and reintroduce a little forgetfulness into our digital lives.

Well you sure watched that quickly! For those who are busy and those who skimmed, Suarez’s argument breaks down roughly like this:

Our world is full of robots. They’re not machine assembly line robots, nor are they wheeling around shouting “Danger Will Robinson.” Instead, they’re small bits of software that each do one thing, and do it very well. The history of computing has taught us that thinking machines are good at doing things quickly and doing them over and over, and that’s generally what these bots (short for robots) do; they perform their tasks relentlessly and single-mindedly.

At first, these bots were used to augment the abilities of humans and allow them to have greater responsibility and reach, but increasingly they are replacing people themselves, often in positions that typically made decisions that affect other people. An example that Suarez uses is bots that review credit history data to decide whether or not a given person is approved for a loan: some time ago some person made the decision that people fitting x criteria would be approved, while people meeting y criteria would not. The bot then implements this decision across all records that are sent its way, and in many cases, the repercussions of its decision  has livelihood-impacting results on the lives of the credit applicant.

Bots thrive on the Internet, as they’re not penalized for not having physical, motile bodies online. As more and more of our society has machines embedded in it, there will be more and more information generated for these bots to scour and analyze. In 2010 here at nGenera Insight, two of our main research topics–Pervasive Personal Identity and the Digital Identity Revolution, and Managing in the Age of Unbounded data–are issues that can exist only because of the efforts of software robots. It’s a big issue in our minds, but for Suarez it’s even bigger, and we need to have a serious discussion about the role that these automated, unflinching, and increasingly empowered pieces of software have in our lives and society.

It’s been a couple of days now since I first watched the video, and I’ve been rolling the argument back and forth a bit looking for problems with it: I haven’t come up with much at all. There’s great potential for good to be done with the information collected by these bots, and from the analysis and distillations they perform, but as it stands, the design of the world’s information infrastructure (that is, the internet and the devices that are constantly added to it) give end users/consumers/citizens very little control over their own information and the information collected about them. Suarez is right that we need to have an open and frank discussion about these elements, but I think first we need to really define the space and make sure we’re all on the same page.

For example, it was over a decade ago that Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun, famously said “There is no privacy…get over it.” Fast forward to a headline article last year in the New York Times during the throes of the financial crisis when banks were grasping for any new way to retain or gain customers – “Banks Mine Data and Woo Troubled Borrowers” – which speaks to the vast array of personalized information available for sale.

That Times article came back to mind this week, as I was sitting in a talk this week at our Fall All Member’s meeting by one of nGenera’s researchers on the subject of “Pervasive Personal Identity.” The talk was highlighting the findings in a major new research report nGenera produced on the same subject, for members of its syndicated research program (executive summary now available to the public).

But, among the points that caught my attention was the enormous breadth and depth of information we are entrusting with various digital services. For example, in November, Google announced general availability of its dashboard for users. Assuming you have an account with one or more Google services (such as G-mail, Youtube, etc.), just sign-in to your Google account and go to the URL: www.google.com/dashboard. You’ll get a fascinating lens into a portion of what Google “knows” about you, all in one place.

Or take the online matching service, eHarmony, for example, where it is estimated that they take in 15,000 new voluntary registrants to their 250-plus question in-depth survey each day. With an estimated nearly 20 million users, this makes them quite likely the best source of deep professional, emotional, and attitudinal data available on the planet at the moment.

Combine these with other sources of data about our selves – some of which we contribute and some of which is assembled without our knowing by vendors and services behind the scenes – and it is easy to see that we are approaching a point where we might be uniquely identified by the accumulation of our digital data. Think of it as your digital DNA, just like the unique marker that your real DNA represents in the physical world.

So, I got to thinkin’ (as we say in Texas) about the following question: “What if there was a better way for people to aggregate and monetize the data about themselves?” In other words, rather than accept that others control the buying and selling of our data, what if the individual was able to get in on the action? The more I thought about it, the more little additional pieces of the puzzle began to reveal themselves, like these:

(1) Ever since Seth Godin published the bible on permission marketing, we largely accept that the best we can do is barter our private data for little online trinkets, more or less valuable at any moment in time. Sometimes it’s free use of a software product; other times, it’s a discount on a t-shirt; or occasionally, it’s just the ability to download that white paper that I really crave. Instead, why not get cold hard cash for my private data?

(2) Ever since David Pullman rocked the investment world (literally) with Bowie bonds, there’s clearly a proven market for an individual’s capacity to produce value over their lifetime (way beyond what the insurance industry’s actuarial tables would indicate). Why let rock stars have all of the fun?

(3) And ever since Facebook started morphing towards the social operating system and Google also revealed that Personalized Search was their friendly way to let you know that – yes indeed – everything that you had ever searched for (including through their shadowy meta-services, like Doubleclick) was filed away somewhere to be mined by you or them (or maybe, who knows…?), there is a vast new, highly personalized set of data that each of us creates and incrementally refines – for free! – every time we use these services.

Any marketer worth their salt knows that the name-of-the-game in mastering profitability of initial customer acquisition and retention is understanding lifetime value. And the more they know about you – your profile, your activities, and your relationships – the more they can personalize offers and the products or services that go with them.

What if there was a new kind of social network service, where you could receive a fee for your participation in the network? Sure, you’d have to agree to be audited, as well as truthfully and accurately complete a comprehensive profile (including things like your detailed health records, down to your genetic makeup, like that available from 23andme.

You would also likely need to make a commitment to use the paid network as your primary (exclusive) social platform. But, why not? If, in effect, all of that same “private” information about you is available already for a fee, wouldn’t it be fair for you to get a cut?

It’s the ultimate form of personal information arbitrage – and you’d be the direct beneficiary. So, in the future, rather than all of these clever new gps-powered apps for the iPhone being the ones to charge advertisers for the ability to have their restaurants or coffee shops presented to you because of the free twitter stream that you generate while you are on the move, why can’t you be the one to receive the royalty fee for letting the advertiser know that you are going to be in the area and, by the way, happen to be awfully fond of lattes in the afternoon?

Don frequently says that we ought to go way beyond issuing social security numbers or inking the footprints of every newborn; additionally, he says, let’s issue everyone a website at birth. Of course, the notion of any government taking a step like that immediately brings to mind the second coming of Orwell’s “1984″ and Big Brother.

But, how about a hybrid? I envision something that is an international, public/private partnership, akin to the Internet naming authority ICANN. It would require a great deal of international cooperation, superior transparency in its operations, and the greatest security, privacy, and legal minds involved in its governance, to provide the level of credibility required to be effective. Call it www.lifetimevalue.me. (But, make sure to send me a royalty: I already registered the domain.)

The main problem is that people who contract such viruses are contagious before their symptoms become visible, making it extremely difficult to determine that a person has caught the virus before they transmit it to others. The Japanese government has recognized this issue as one of the main challenges in fighting potential pandemic and has planned an experiment to see if Japan’s advanced internet and cellular phone infrastructure can be used to help address the issue. As elementary schools are one of the main breeding grounds for contagious illness, the experiment will begin by giving each of the students at a particular elementary school a GPS-enabled cell phone and ‘infecting’ a few children with a fictitious virus. The students’ movements will then be tracked, and the parents of any children that have come in contact with infected students will be advised to take their child to a doctor so that students that do contract the virus can be diagnosed much faster, thus preventing them from spreading the virus any further. Due to the exponential nature in which viruses spread, even a small decrease in the amount of people infected by each carrier of the virus will have a major impact.

Although using GPS to track interactions can only inform people of possible infection and cannot predict the actual spreading of the virus, this strategy has the potential to be effective in slowing the spread of highly contagious viruses that warrant such extreme action. Equipped with the information that they have been exposed to such a virus, people can check with their doctors to ensure that if they have contracted the virus, they will be treated and not spread it further. Whether the health system could handle an influx of checkups in such a situation is a concern, but it is certainly better than dealing with a full-blown outbreak.

Despite the potential that this experiment has to lead to a strategy that could drastically reduce the spreading of an epidemic, the idea that the government could track people’s locations has caused great concern and cries of “Big Brother”. Privacy is a concern that many have when it comes to the internet, but most often, the discussions of privacy revolve around the danger of predators and the concern that corporations are gaining too much personal information about consumers. When it comes to fighting a serious epidemic though, the consequences of inaction are much greater and location information could be the best defence we have.

When I was about 5 years old, my school library kept track of its books using little cue cards stashed by the hundreds in tiny drawers (you all know what I’m talking about). All of my book searches since kindergarten have involved a computer. Am I to believe that our libraries did, almost 20 years ago, what our health care system is starting to do now?

The CBC article tells us that, “Digital networks help to bridge staffing gaps at Canadian hospitals.” It is true – hospitals in Ontario (and the rest of  Canada) have only recently started the move towards EMR. If the digitization of, say, written communication made headlines, people would be wondering how they ended-up back in 1994. Imagine reading the following headline today: “Canadian companies use electronic mail to cut-out time spent waiting for letters to get to Europe.”

It seems unjustifiable that our health care system has not made better use of technology. I see little downside in using technology that we’ve been using for years in countless domains, to get care to people (eg Northern Ontarions in need of a radiologist) who have been waiting far too long.

My criticism is tempered by knowing that there are political, social, and financial barriers to the widespread digitization of medical records that don’t exist for libraries, for example. But do they justify the almost 20-year technology lag? It seems unforgivable, given that our health care system could have been benefitting from increased efficiency through EMR years ago.

What the barriers along the path to EMR are exactly, I’m not sure. I can only imagine that they are significant, as they have imposed a 20-year technology lag on our health care system. Part Two of my look at the state of electronic medical records in Ontario will seek to unveil these barriers. Watch for it next week and do chip-in with any insight you have on the barriers to EMR.

My five-week-old son has had over 1,400 individual visitors to his website. Within two hours of his birth, he was Twittered because a friend got a text message announcing his birth. In a matter of days his name was indexed in Google. A friend’s five-month-old already has a Facebook page. Anecdotally, I find that a favourite pastime of many new dads in my peer group is electronic communication involving their newborns. Maybe it’s a way to connect both to the newborn and to the outside world during what is a cocooning and potentially isolating time. Maybe it helps dads become involved. Whatever the reason, most new babies these days are “born digital,” to borrow a phrase. What it will mean when they grow up, I’m not sure, but it changes something fundamental about who your little one is in the world. He has a public persona often before he can hold up his own head.

The author notes that when friends and families live far apart, the immediacy of online communication is a powerful way to share in the birth. But will these “born digital” children grow up to regret their parents enthusiasm to chronicle the early stages of their lives online? Or, will this level of personal transparency be seen as completely natural by the time they are old enough to voice an opinion? Perhaps it already is.

Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review, where I capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout the past week.

This week in the roundup:

• Jeff DeChambeau discussed privacy and digital surveillance
• Dan Herman introduced us to ‘vote swapping’ and identified how this Web 2.0 technology now has the potential to influence elections
• Don Tapscott highlighted some new research findings in order address a common misconception about video games and gamers
• Denis Hancock reviewed some of the pitfalls of the traditional crowdsourcing model and introduced us to Poptent

This is Gloucester, a UK based blog, is reporting that the Government Communications Headquarters is pitching a plan that would allow it to monitor all SMS and email messages sent and recieved in the UK. The plan, slated to cost English taxpayers a potential $12bn, would be the country’s largest surveillance program, and adds another data point to the security vs. privacy debate.

As Michael Geist wrote last week, the Internet has become a system that never forgets anything, and there are more and more tools that allow people to mine information from the darkest corners of the Internet.
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So, are email and sms messages, like public discussions, simply part of a technology that is inherently tracable, or given the targeted nature of email and sms, are they granted a special class of privacy from the rest of the bits that float bout the ‘tubes?

Weigh in on the privacy debate @
Hey England, time to learn about PGP!

A few months ago University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist wrote that 27 MP’s across Canada (9% of all MPs) had won their ridings by less than 1000 votes.  The potential impact of vote swap is thus rather significant.

The second example is www.voteforenvironment.ca . Like the former example, it takes aim at the Conservative government, this time for their environmental record. Their strategy is similar to Vote Swap as it highlights closely contested swing ridings and recommends to would-be voters which of the opposition parties in those ridings would be best positioned to win the riding in the Oct. 14 election.

What do you think of vote swapping and the technology behind it? Share your thoughts @
More on voting and technology…

In my new book, Grown up Digital (a sequel to my 1997 intro to the Net Generation: Growing up Digital) I make the argument that this exposure to gaming and technology has helped enable a truly global and inter-connected generation that sees civic action as a part of their regular routine.

Amanda Lenhart, author of a report on the survey and a Senior Research Specialist with the Pew Internet & American Life Project, notes, “The stereotype that gaming is a solitary, violent, anti-social activity just doesn’t hold up. The average teen plays all different kinds of games and generally plays them with friends and family both online and offline.”

The survey certainly supports this view:

• 52% of gamers report playing games where they think about moral and ethical issues.
• 43% report playing games where they help make decisions about how a community, city or nation should be run.

Are you a videogame player, gamer alumni, or know someone who plays games?
Discuss their impact @ Kids, videogames and social activity

What I particularly like about this “modified crowdsourcing” model is that it deals with some of the inequities inherent in more traditional platforms – too much power being given to the buyers, at the expense of the sellers.
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Poptent has at least three elements that help deal with this. they are targeting the creation of a community of top-notch videographers with great skills, not the public at large. In order to participate on the site companies need to pony up $25 K in cash – which should be enough to limit “speculative requests”. Advertisers than pay something in the $5K – $7.5 K range to purchase ads they like. They are also upfront in noting (see Mark Schoneveld’s comment on October 8th at 11:19) that the contest model is not sustainable – they’ll have to evolve it over time, but you have to walk before you run.

Discuss your views, for and against, the Poptent model @
Poptent: A new community for crowdsourced advertising

Check back next week for more original Wikinomics insight. Until next week…

With that background, I present The Google Goggles. Most of us have been on the receiving-end of a drunk-dialed phonecall, drunk-mailed email, or worse, a drunk-posted blog post. Mail Goggles aims to save us from sending drunk-mails of our own. The application is set to be active at certain times, like between midnight and 6am on Saturday and Sunday mornings. While active, any emails you try to send are held until you successfully answer some simple math questions. If you’re too loaded to answer, the email is stored until you have a chance to re-read it later, and maybe change your mind about sending it.

This application is real. Just to prove it to you, here’s a screenshot I took from my Gmail:

This is pretty funny, but I think it hints at something pretty significant: as we invest more and more of our lives in digital systems — systems that never forget and allow for easy duplication of content — what kinds of safeguards should we have to protect us from ourselves? Should these safeguards be optional or mandatory? And what about the people who just don’t get it?

I’ve seen some pretty scandalous stuff posted to facebook, often without the courtesey of tagging the incriminated person in the photo so that they are aware that they’ve had “that picture” posted online. It will eventually be easy enough for the software that we use to recognize that certain behaviours (or pictures, continuing with the facebook example) are outside of the norm, and should be screened (like what is currently done with abnormal credit card transactions) — but will people accept (or embrace, or reject) similar “safety features” in other areas of their lives?

As Michael Geist wrote last week, the Internet has become a system that never forgets anything, and there are more and more tools that allow people to mine information from the darkest corners of the Internet. That’s become a fact of life, but it’s to be expected: people are participating in a digital medium, with full understanding that data storage is cheap and archives are plentiful, so chances are good that the things they say will be on hand, somewhere, for the foreseeable life of the Internet.

So, are email and sms messages, like public discussions, simply part of a technology that is inherently tracable, or given the targeted nature of email and sms, are they granted a special class of privacy from the rest of the bits that float bout the ‘tubes?

I’m not sure how the average citizen in the UK would feel about their own tax dollars being used to breach their privacy, but it could be a concession that people are prepared to make for their “national security.” This paricular instance aside, it seems as though the reliability and security of connections is becoming less and less trustworthy, so the honus for protection of data is being placed on end users — maybe it’s time for us all to generate some PGP private keys!

Ten days after mailing the physical copy of the report to Carleton, Moufid emailed the 32 students whose accounts had been completely compromised, and informed them that the school had been made aware of the attack on security, and had decided to ignore it. One of the students happened to be an intern at a CBC newsroom, and her supervisor found the story to be interesting — it grew from there. Carleton said that they only received the package the same day that Moufid emailed the 32 students, leaving them with no time to do anything at all.

Moufid’s attack came from recognizing a substantial logical flaw in Carleton’s user authentication system: that once someone has access to a compromised email account, they have direct access to just about everything else. After seeing this design flaw, Moufid worked backwards, using what he knew about the Carleton systems, to figure out his point of attack, which turned out to relate to the Campus ID cards.

Once word was out that Carleton was looking for the hacker, Moufid promptly turned himself in. Carleton did not elect to expell him, but instead made it a condition of his continued presence at school that he claim to have lied about alerting the school to the security issue, among several other punishments.

While my heart goes out to Mouffid, I think he could have handled the situation in a much more delicate manner, Universities are built on reputation, and don’t respond well to students taking direct, public attacks on their reputations.

Since I’m still a student, this story hits home for me. Not because I intend to break into my school’s security system, but because someone else may have already, and my school could be sweeping it under the carpet. As the two links to wikileaks above point out, once the information is out there, it’s out there, and there won’t be a broom large enough to clean up the mess so that no one finds out.

As for how a university expects to have a population comprised almost entirely of the leaders of tomorrow, and be able to repress information that that population has access to, I’m not sure — I don’t see it happening. By ignoring Moufid, and then trying to discredit him (assuming that Moufid had given them plenty of notice), Carleton has set a precedent that will deter future students from bringing forth security issues: it paints their options as either allowing the insecurities to remain (by being ignored when hilighted), or receiving harsh penalties for trying to bring those security flaws to light.

I don’t mean to be hard on Carleton, it just happens to be the school where this incident happened, but it could just have easily been anywhere else. Universities need to make sure that they’re properly prepared for, or at least open to the idea of, uncomfortable situations such as these when the powers that be aren’t the ones with all of the answers.

Members of the net generation will scrutinize everything to make sure that it meets their standards, including especially the security systems that their universities provide. When you’ve got the architects of the security systems of tomorrow on hand, and they’re happy to find the holes in your current security system for you, it seems only prudent to seriously entertain their suggestions.

When speaking with a few other GenX/Boomer parents this week it was interesting to hear that they were all aware of the dangers of letting their 12-15 year old children…especially their daughters on social networks, however not one of them could talk about the different security options on the sites. I was amazed that people that claimed to be very involved parents had not even visited the sites to see what they’re all about. Even if you “ban” a site from your home computer, do you think your kids aren’t logging on from their friends’ computers, or other places?

Look, I know there are crazies out there that take advantage of children online, but kids will get online one way or another so parents need to get involved sooner rather than later. As many internet safety sites state, in the end it all comes down to the time tested policy of open and honest communication with our children. Speaking to them about how the internet works, what is and is not appropriate behavior online and what concerns you have. Simply cutting off access or “spying” on your kids is not the answer. So, put away the PDAs and cell phones and have a straight forward talk to your kids. Am I preaching to the choir here? How do we reach those parents that are not electronically connected?

To those readers with pre-teen or teenage children please share your thoughts. What has worked/not worked for you?

For those interested, below is a small sample of the many internet safety sites available for both kids and parents:

The US Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA,  posts a list of safety rules for kids. Other sites include:

Safe Kids.com

Kids Health

For other info. an interesting UK Study was discussed by Andrew Keen

Like Photosynth, Photo Tourism assembles its 3d models from photos on flickr. Photo Tourism, however, allows you to not only add your own photos to a 3d set, but “walk” between the locations where your pictures were taken, virtually. Photo Tourism also allows a user to rotate their point of view around a landmark or object, and can even determine if photos of that landmark/object were taken during the day or at night, grouping them accordingly. This results in a very high “feels like you’re there” experience, but what’s the next step?

This isn’t a fatal blow for Photosynth, though. Microsoft, in what I consider to be a very smart move, has merged the Photosynth (also known as Seadragon) team into the Microsoft Virtual Earth team. Here is how I see this playing out: Photosynth is able to infer 3d structures from photographs and (should soon be able to) skin these structures dynamically from the very same photographs. If there was a large enough set photos, Photosynth could infer the shapes, sizes and positions of objects all over the world. Then, with Virtual earth, geotagging data, and the relations between photos, these 3d structures could be mapped into their Virtual Earth platform. Essentially, it should be possible to make a virtual copy of the earth, passively, by processing photos that already exist.

The user experience that this could provide would be even more mindblowing than the tech demos we’ve seen before. Imagine being able to “walk” through foreign locations that are always as current and up to date as the lmost recent picture uploaded to the master data set. With version control and date-tagging of photos, you could even watch how an arbitrarity bit of the planet changes over time, watching changes in season, volume of visitors, and even cleanliness and litter. We’ll have the world at our fingertips, and be free to peel back its layers and inspect it as deeply as we like.

Scary tangent: I see another application for this technology: people. If this technology can be used to infer 3d structures of buildings, why can’t the same be done for people? I have friends on facebook that are present in upwards of 1000 photos. That’s a lot of data from which to infer a model — very scary, especially given how realistic simulated facial animations have gotten. It’s pretty easy to foresee video-conferecing identity-theft for people who neglected to set their facebook photo privacy settings sufficiently high.

Edit: it already exists!

One rainy day earlier this summer, nGenera’s Gov 2.0 Program Director, Dan Herman, locked three summer interns in a room (Ben and Jude, and I) and asked us to think about what life – and government – would be like ten years from now. One of the results was the following short story about a day in the life of a man named Donald, in the year 2018. Hope you enjoy.

7:00 AM. The alarm rang, and Donald pressed the confirm button to silence it. His bedroom monitor switched on and began playing his morning video feeds.

“Luke Smith,” said the newscaster on the monitor, “who only yesterday controlled more proxy votes than any other advisor, has been reduced to irrelevance. Almost all of Smith’s supporters abandoned him last night after he tried to use their proxy votes to pass a bill that would have allowed him to collect millions of dollars through a dummy public service provider.” The country’s voting platform gave all citizens the ability to vote on every bill. But many gave their votes by proxy to advisors.

“I wonder how Smith thought he could get away with it,” thought Donald. Open Collaboration Platforms (OCP) were now mandatory for any agency that received government funds. They gave citizens access to all of an organization’s internal activities, including documents and meeting. Not only had these allowed greater collaboration between governments, businesses, citizens, and civil society; they had greatly enhanced oversight, and made it difficult for anyone to get away with corruption.

After the newscast, an ad played. These ads helped pay for the other content Donald watched. His friend Ralph had forwarded this ad to him. “I just signed up. Its great,” said a message from Ralph. The ad was for a new bank account from UniBank. It had low credit rates and high savings rates. Donald thought it sounded good, especially since profits were being used to support internet access for children in the developing world.

Donald decided to follow the link from the ad to the bank’s website. He clicked on Open a New Account and was taken to the government’s Central ID Management System (CIDMS). CIDMS linked all private and public sector databases that contain personal information, both to facilitate data sharing across databases, and to give individuals the ability to manage their privacy.

Donald confirmed that he would like to allow UniBank to create a record of him in their database. He then received a request from UniBank for access to his credit history. He allowed it. He was then asked if we would like to share his name and contact information with UniBank. Donald declined. Because all of his information is shared over the CIDMS, UniBank didn’t need any personal information about Donald to confirm the information he had shared. Providing his name and contact information might have allowed them to give him a more personalized service, but Donald didn’t trust them not to share his information with other companies.

After the account was setup, Donald electronically transferred all of his money and information from his old bank account. He saw that he had a bill from the Hospital of New Delhi. Donald was getting surgery there the following week. He was originally going to go to the local hospital, but there was less of a wait at New Delhi, and besides, it was supposed to be much better. The bill had already been automatically forwarded to, and paid by, the government’s Health Fund. He had also just received his latest electronic paycheck. It outlined exactly where his taxes went: ten percent to education, five percent to the police …

Looking at the clock, Donald realized it was already 7:30. He had to get going. He rolled out of bed, got ready for work, and headed out the door, remembering to take the trash to the curb. In his car, Donald logged into the Car Pool System (CPS). People who wanted a ride could enter a request into the CPS. Car owners were then notified of people they could pickup along their route. In return, the car owner got paid a portion of each passenger’s daily transit allowance.

One of the passengers Donald picked up that morning was Sarah Johnson, the president of the neighborhood council. The council had been formed early in the year, when over half of the neighborhood agreed to create one in an e-vote. Neighborhood councils had authority to improve neighborhood roads and parks, put-up stop signs, and run community programs. In order to pay for their work, neighborhood councils were given money from the city on a per-capita basis.

“You guys really need to improve that park,” Donald said, referring to the park across from his house.

“We’re working on it. You should check out the design proposals on the OCP,” said Sarah.

“I will.”

After dropping off his passengers, Donald went to work at the city planning commission. He logged on to the commission’s online planning map. In addition to displaying current and proposed by-laws, the map provided an interactive, 3D model of the city, including 3D mock-ups of current and proposed buildings. The map was available to all citizens, who could use it to comment on and suggest modifications to proposals.

The Transit Commission had recently uploaded plans for a new subway line. Emergency Services was concerned that the design would make their response difficult in the case of an emergency. They were using the platform to work with the transit commission to solve the problem.

At the same time, citizens had been asked to help design the outside of the new subway stations. Donald’s job was to lead this group of volunteers, and make sure their design stayed within budget.

Before he left work for the day, Donald logged on to the central government’s voter platform and reviewed a list of “upcoming votes and issues that may concern you.” One of the big issues of the day was a bill to ban designer genes. It had actually been drafted by the janitor in Donald’s office. Donald gave his votes by proxy to the New World Party. But the party had not made a decision on this bill. Donald voted against the ban, as the voting system had predicted based on his past voting history. This system of tracking voting behavior had previously suggested Donald transfer his proxy vote from the popular Conservative party to the niche New World party, which he had found was much more in line with his views. Donald donated his monthly allowance for political financing to the party so that it could grow, and garner more influence.

When Donald got home from work, he saw his garbage still sitting on the curb. Donald had switched to a new, environmentally conscious garbage company, but it never picked up his garbage. He logged into his garbage collection account, run by the city government, and switched back to his old company. Now his weekly garbage pickup allowance would be given to a company that actually did their job.

It was getting late, and Donald had a date that night. After a quick shower and a change of clothes, Donald hopped back in the car.

“Would you like to pickup passengers?” the CPS prompted him. Donald declined.

“Probably not the best way to impress the ladies,” he said to himself.

He likens this to a post i9/11 future, one where our online rights and privacy will face unprecendented scrutiny by government. You can watch part of his talk at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in California where he made the comments below.

This message mirrors part of the thesis proposed by author and Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain in his new book “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.” In it, Zittrain argues that we’re on the path to Internet lockdown thanks to a combination of proprietary devices and malicious intent. You can read my colleague Naumi’s review here.

There’s some great discussions and ranting taking place about this pretty much everywhere so I’ll pass on the summary of what’s being said and instead pose two questions: what constitutes an i-9/11 attack, and what would such an act allow that isn’t already being done today?

Thoughts?

I say all of this to preface the fact that I am not really a stalker even though I just spent the last hour on criminalsearches.com, where anyone can enter in someone’s name and get a whole list of criminal offenses ( if any) for free. Most criminal records are public information and anyone can search individual state databases for free. The cool thing about CriminalSearches is that it aggregates all of these disjointed databases and delivers a more comprehensive result with much less time and effort. Launched just last month, CriminalSearches is garnering serious attention.

So what did I turn up in an hour’s time? I found my black sheep cousin and all six of his quite impressive drug and alcohol convictions. I even found an old high school teacher (who was fired the year after I graduated) who now has a conviction for assault. Nice.

In my last blog I pondered my personal brand and how to manage my information. While I am fortunate—or maybe just law abiding—enough to not have any dubious offenses tarnishing my online identity, there are likely thousands more who find themselves struggling to move past a youthful indiscretion or other similarly embarrassing-but-not-as-bad-as-it-sounds offense in a society that highly stigmatizes criminal activity.

In theory, a judge decides how much time and effort it will cost a convict to repay their debt to society. After that period is over, the ex-convict’s debt is considered paid and the ex-convict moves on with their life. But now, with such data so readily available, a convict’s debt to society will now be decided by the court of public opinion for better or worse.

CriminalSearches may become a powerful law enforcement tool. One blog about CriminalSearches describes how a family researched the criminal record of the person suspected of killing their son. The blogger claims that the site’s alias information helped investigators find missing records that put the suspect behind bars.

While that may be a rare case, it benefits society to be able to thoroughly screen people they come in contact with and in whom they place their trust. While some people may be upset to find themselves listed as a criminal for a traffic offense, others will highly value this information when hiring drivers and nannies and babysitters. Parents could even look up their kids’ friends’ parents to see if they are safe drivers and trustworthy people before letting their kids hop in the backseat or attend a sleepover.

But there is a fine balance between society’s right to know and the individual’s right to move on with their lives. How will society adapt to such pervasive and powerful information in an increasingly voyeuristic world?

In any case, better look yourself up and see what dirt there is on you. It’s all a part of curating that ever-expanding online identity. If you find incorrect information, such as a ticket that was supposed to be dismissed or expunged, contact the authority that issued the citation and clean up your image. It’s the only one you get.

Ongoing, a blog focused on truth, technology, and business, wrote a profile of one OSCON talk in particular, one given by Christine L. Peterson, on the topic of open source security in elections. Peterson argues that the US Government thinks that the best way to safeguard rights is to accumulate as much data as possible through numerous types of surveillance, and that the issue of transparency versus privacy is not even on their radar. Furthermore, Peterson thinks that this approach is fundamentally misguided, as terrorism is a bottom-up problem, and “they’re trying to solve a bottom-up problem with top-down tools.” This leads her to suggest that we need bottom-up physical security — and that the open source community is best tasked to develop this new breed of security systems.

Ongoing, however, runs with a point that Peterson makes about 10 minutes in: that all government initiatives using data collected from the public should be implemented with software that is not closed/secret-sourced. This means no private contracts, like what was done for e-voting. E-voting has not gone well, and Peterson thinks that the geeks bear some responsibility for this; she implies that the geeks (especially the open source community geeks) foresaw the issues with e-voting and did nothing, something that is especially bad because no one but the geeks even knew (or cared about) what was going on. So, there’s a call to arms for geeks to unite to ensure technology is problem designed and implemented by (technically inept) political well-wishers in DC.

Issues like privacy, transparency, and the open sourcing of software that plays out in the public domain are tremendously important subjects, but they’re equally tremendously unsexy. People don’t seem to want to learn about them, let alone fight for them. So, has it fallen to tech savvy citizens to step up, and lead society away from the potential pitfalls and abuses of new technology? Or have citizens got an obligation to educate themselves, and just pay the price if they don’t?

From the article:

In a legal ruling likely to send a chill through the -global social networking phenomenon of Facebook, a British businessman has been awarded £22,000 ($44,000) in damages from a former school friend who created a fake profile of him on the website.

Mathew Firsht brought the landmark libel action after coming across a Facebook group titled “Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?” as well as a profile containing false claims about his sexuality, religion and political views.

It is significant because: a) the defendent is a private citizen, not a newspaper or other entity that is typically held to a higher standard and b) there are thousands of groups like this on Facebook. Some are in good fun (see here for one about a childhood friend of mine), others get a little nasty (no example provided…see title of blog).

Is this a one time event? Will it vary by jurisdiction? How many lawsuits are currently underway?

Please provide your thoughts.

Google, already owning two-thirds of the search market, has an advertising relationship with many businesses. These businesses only pay Google when their ads get clicked. So far the system has been beneficial and lucrative for both Google and their advertisers. By integrating past search data with current contextual advertisements, Google is greatly
expanding the context within which they can display ads. Google can therefore improve the relevance of ads, increasing the chance that users will click them.

If this model is successful, users become more than one-time search results; they could develop robust profiles of interests to allow very specific, tailored selection of advertisements. But does such a collection of user-interest data pose privacy concerns?

The argument in favor of new advertising approaches like this is that this data can be used to display advertisements that, far from being annoying or distracting, actually offer useful solutions and products to consumers at exactly the right time in exactly the right place.  Personally, I don’t even notice a lot of ads on websites that I view just because I’m so used to seeing ads for products that don’t interest me at all.  I’ve grown immune to ads but if they are going to be tailored to my interests, I may actually start noticing and clicking these ads now.

Is Google the right company to implement this? Already, people seem very quick to trust Google, but it seems to me that there should be limits on how much information any one company can have about their users, and those limits should be set by the users themselves.  I get the feeling that many users just don’t comprehend or realize how much information of theirs can be tracked via programs like these.

What level of transparency are you prepared to offer up to Google?

Amongst the discussions at our Government 2.0 meeting at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government was a debate over the merits of data sharing, and whether the collection of citizen data in the name of public safety and service delivery outweighed the risks of abuse and the potential for infringement of personal freedoms and privacy.

To kickstart the discussion, one of our colleagues shared this video from the American Civil Liberties Union that highlights a perhaps perverse or perhaps not-so-perverse future:

And while we’re probably a ways off from having our local pizza place advising on health care, the question remains as to how much of our personal data we’re willing to share in order to ensure public safety and perhaps enable better, i.e. more customized, service delivery.

And how does that equation change as the facilitator of that data use alternates between a private sector provider and a government agency? Do we trust government agencies more or less with our data? Why?