(no subject)
My Mom emailed me to ask if I think Spokeo, the new people-specific search engine, is a threat to people's privacy. Sites like Spokeo come and go, but the question is a big important interesting one, so here are my latest thoughts on online privacy.
Spokeo found my facebook page when I gave it my username, but couldn't find me from my real name, even when I added "austin tx", even though I am a registered voter, and googling ["will warner" austin tx] turned up my LinkedIn page, my old MySpace page, and my compliments about the Carothers dormitory from when I was a sophomore, and probably more stuff if I bothered to look past the first page of results. Maybe it's because I don't own a car or any land and haven't ever married or divorced. Certainly a far cry from "your home address, your marital status, religion, hobbies, names of friends and family members, personal photos, a satellite image of your home, even your estimated income and credit score." One little side lesson here is, when a computer program or web site tries to handle a big messy problem like tracking humans through their online data, it will always work pretty badly. That lesson has been well understood by programmers since about the 1970s or 1980s. But the main lesson is that this certainly indicates that you can find an awful lot of information about people on the internet, and that's also not very new. It's been a noteworthy truth commented upon fairly frequently in the papers since about the late 80s or early 90s, when geeks started looking up their acquaintances' credit scores online. Google's been the same way the past several years. I don't want to be snarky, and I understand that people with real jobs can't pore over the news the way I do, but Spokeo really doesn't represent anything more than a minor tweak on a longstanding phenomenon, and I think Google will prove more effective in most cases, and a professional PI much more effective as long as he or she knows his or her way around government public records databases for things like voter registration, property and auto titles, marriages and divorces, and loans and credit.
I love that Spokeo's logo is a hedgehog, symbol of all the private, prickly, solitary, and distant impulses of humans. Maybe I should build an "antisocial network" for privacy phobes, where they can set up a profile, with encouragement to use a fake name, and share photos and updates and links and stuff, and every time they want to add a friend, they have to send the friend a link through email or some other pre-existing communication channel to do so, so that no one is searchable, even if they're a friend of your friend, and no personal info is ever exposed. It'd sure be a lot less useful than facebook, though.
I will say, I'm starting to change my mind about having a single grand unified facebook profile, as I get deeper into the Burner crowd and closer to having co-workers and bosses who'll be curious. I don't really much regret anything I've posted, but I could post more cool stuff if I changed my strategy. I'm thinking about making a second Facebook profile with a fake name, moving all my burner friends and most of my other friends over to that one, basically anyone I'd tell a dirty joke to, and leaving the real name profile for my co-workers and family and old classmates I only knew a little bit and long-lost high school buddies and the like.
I am planning to keep "Bi hippie geek" on the co-worker and family profile, though. For one thing. I'm a passionate believer that you should take pains to be open and honest about things like your sexuality and politics, so when people who know you hear vicious lies about "those people," hopefully they'll think, "hey, I work with one of 'those people,' I know one of 'those people,' and he's all right." For another thing, when you meet someone very briefly as a friend of a friend, or even a new co-worker, having some basic clue about who they are without having to ask a lot of touchy questions is just flat out incredibly useful, no matter who you are or what you're doing. Knowing what topics are areas of expertise and interest for which people, and what topics to avoid with which people, and a few little details about the new people you meet, is just invaluable.
Also, the face recognition angle bears considering. Currently, even if you had access to all the profiles on facebook, the technology isn't yet good enough for you to hand it the photos of one user and have the machine find other users who are the same person using a fake name, but haven't posted any of the same photos. In fact, even if they have posted the same photo, it's possible the technology still couldn't tell if it was the same person, or if it was a photo of two people who had each posted a copy. And it might be that the technology never will be good enough, and that people change looks over time and between photos enough that even a trained human with the superhuman speed needed to look at every single photo on facebook in a single second and compare them all could not tell which profiles were of the same person using different names, and which were just of similar looking people. But, it might be possible someday for a program to link profiles if they simply have the same face, or for a program to find your profile from a fresh snapshot of you from a security camera no matter what name you use, so if you're worried about that, don't put any photos of yourself on your fake name profile, just use pictures of an actor who resembles you as closely as possible, or a cartoon or digital mockup of you. Lots of easy to use programs exist that will help a novice create a digital avatar that looks like them-- there's a site where you can make a cartoon of you in the style of the Simpsons, the Habbo Hotel gaming site is decent about letting you create some semblance of yourself in an avatar, the Nintendo Wii helps users create a little customized cartoon avatar called a "Mii" that can be somewhat recognizable, and so on.
Spokeo found my facebook page when I gave it my username, but couldn't find me from my real name, even when I added "austin tx", even though I am a registered voter, and googling ["will warner" austin tx] turned up my LinkedIn page, my old MySpace page, and my compliments about the Carothers dormitory from when I was a sophomore, and probably more stuff if I bothered to look past the first page of results. Maybe it's because I don't own a car or any land and haven't ever married or divorced. Certainly a far cry from "your home address, your marital status, religion, hobbies, names of friends and family members, personal photos, a satellite image of your home, even your estimated income and credit score." One little side lesson here is, when a computer program or web site tries to handle a big messy problem like tracking humans through their online data, it will always work pretty badly. That lesson has been well understood by programmers since about the 1970s or 1980s. But the main lesson is that this certainly indicates that you can find an awful lot of information about people on the internet, and that's also not very new. It's been a noteworthy truth commented upon fairly frequently in the papers since about the late 80s or early 90s, when geeks started looking up their acquaintances' credit scores online. Google's been the same way the past several years. I don't want to be snarky, and I understand that people with real jobs can't pore over the news the way I do, but Spokeo really doesn't represent anything more than a minor tweak on a longstanding phenomenon, and I think Google will prove more effective in most cases, and a professional PI much more effective as long as he or she knows his or her way around government public records databases for things like voter registration, property and auto titles, marriages and divorces, and loans and credit.
I love that Spokeo's logo is a hedgehog, symbol of all the private, prickly, solitary, and distant impulses of humans. Maybe I should build an "antisocial network" for privacy phobes, where they can set up a profile, with encouragement to use a fake name, and share photos and updates and links and stuff, and every time they want to add a friend, they have to send the friend a link through email or some other pre-existing communication channel to do so, so that no one is searchable, even if they're a friend of your friend, and no personal info is ever exposed. It'd sure be a lot less useful than facebook, though.
I will say, I'm starting to change my mind about having a single grand unified facebook profile, as I get deeper into the Burner crowd and closer to having co-workers and bosses who'll be curious. I don't really much regret anything I've posted, but I could post more cool stuff if I changed my strategy. I'm thinking about making a second Facebook profile with a fake name, moving all my burner friends and most of my other friends over to that one, basically anyone I'd tell a dirty joke to, and leaving the real name profile for my co-workers and family and old classmates I only knew a little bit and long-lost high school buddies and the like.
I am planning to keep "Bi hippie geek" on the co-worker and family profile, though. For one thing. I'm a passionate believer that you should take pains to be open and honest about things like your sexuality and politics, so when people who know you hear vicious lies about "those people," hopefully they'll think, "hey, I work with one of 'those people,' I know one of 'those people,' and he's all right." For another thing, when you meet someone very briefly as a friend of a friend, or even a new co-worker, having some basic clue about who they are without having to ask a lot of touchy questions is just flat out incredibly useful, no matter who you are or what you're doing. Knowing what topics are areas of expertise and interest for which people, and what topics to avoid with which people, and a few little details about the new people you meet, is just invaluable.
Also, the face recognition angle bears considering. Currently, even if you had access to all the profiles on facebook, the technology isn't yet good enough for you to hand it the photos of one user and have the machine find other users who are the same person using a fake name, but haven't posted any of the same photos. In fact, even if they have posted the same photo, it's possible the technology still couldn't tell if it was the same person, or if it was a photo of two people who had each posted a copy. And it might be that the technology never will be good enough, and that people change looks over time and between photos enough that even a trained human with the superhuman speed needed to look at every single photo on facebook in a single second and compare them all could not tell which profiles were of the same person using different names, and which were just of similar looking people. But, it might be possible someday for a program to link profiles if they simply have the same face, or for a program to find your profile from a fresh snapshot of you from a security camera no matter what name you use, so if you're worried about that, don't put any photos of yourself on your fake name profile, just use pictures of an actor who resembles you as closely as possible, or a cartoon or digital mockup of you. Lots of easy to use programs exist that will help a novice create a digital avatar that looks like them-- there's a site where you can make a cartoon of you in the style of the Simpsons, the Habbo Hotel gaming site is decent about letting you create some semblance of yourself in an avatar, the Nintendo Wii helps users create a little customized cartoon avatar called a "Mii" that can be somewhat recognizable, and so on.