Following Eric Schmidt’s latest take on privacy, I am getting some link “love” from the big guys, with Techcrunch and Cnet both pointing to an early 2009 article I wrote on my take on privacy, something I believe you are not getting at birth anymore, but need to build around the concept of a “plausible me”. Publicy is a space you can control and where you can regain your privacy by publishing fake information - like 50% of social networks users aged 13-21 who claim they falsified information (see page 28).

Almost one year has passed since that post, and this important topic deserves a few more thoughts:

• More logging planned
  One year later, laws like Hadopi are popping up all around the world, which means every single act you do online is being monitored and logged. In France again, several databases are in the works, some storing information like philosophical, religious and sexual orientation, and other strangely irrelevant information when it comes to something the government should know on you. All this to say that the situation got worse, and definitely, privacy is not a choice anymore. Nobody can shut down all the video cameras capturing our movements in the streets.
• Privacy in the old sense of the word is dead
  Saying this does not make me agree with that development. But whether we like it or not (and I mostly don’t), there are many files on each of us, and we need to find a way to limit their impact. Privacy in the 19th century sense of the word does not exist anymore. Reversing the trend will demand a lot of catastrophes and abuses for public opinion to realize the pitfalls of such systems, and start making the legal, social, and technological changes. It is like the financial system, one government, person or company can not change this alone. It is a global issue.
• Privacy is not something we are granted at birth anymore
  It is not the default setting of our lives. In developed countries babies get their first database entry a couple of minutes after birth. The first data given up is weight, height, gender, name. Trivial and revealing at the same time. What is at stakes here is to find balance between the usefulness of data - tracking babies allows for better public health, and hopefully helps avoid confusions - and their nuisance potential. In the case of babies, it is pretty clear that the positive out gains the negative. But what happens for criminal databases? When they allow the capture of a recidivist, pretty good. When they prevent someone who has changed to get a new job and work himself back into society, they are a negative force. Where the balance point is depends on your political view, on whether you had such a case in your family, on the history of your country, etc.
• Not to mention lost data…
  And I am not even talking about the worrying number of hacked/leaked data making it to the open. There is storing data, then there is securing it. And every time I call my insurance company and witness their global incompetency in handling event the most basic process, I am terrified to think that the same people are managing servers with a lot of my personal data on it.
• The loss of the right to be forgotten is a terrible thing
  Because it prevents one from getting recognized as having gotten over any past mistake. Shrinks (they are put to contribution in the pre-cited CNET article) will tell you that a people can change radically through the long process of therapy. But as the recent Roman Polanski saga shows, there is no need for Facebook or Twitter to have things catch up with you 30 years later. Again, not a new problem, and probably more of a social than technological problem. 21st century is very bad at giving second chances it seems, despite the many stories of former convicts turning into positive forces. It is like, implicitly, society has accepted the total futility of the jail/punishment system. It does not work, criminals will strike again so we need a record on them. It is a shame there is no debate on how to regain trust in the correction system. If it was working 95% of the time we might not need databases.
• The search for fame is not the only driver of online existence
  There are many reasons for us to go online, and therefore try to control our identity. The distance with friends (I’m in touch with my childhood friends now living in Reims, Paris, L.A, Lisbon, etc. It can only happen online), participation in an online community (and something like Lift is only possible through online communities), launching a business (which means having a website with your name on it), etc. There is much more than pursuing an elusive fifteen minutes of fame. For a lateral view on this, take five minutes and read Howard S. Becker on studying new media. He mentions the many reasons why people are active online.
• We are not the only source of negative information on us
  Where I disagree with Eric Schmidt is when he seems to imply that one is the source of all negative information about him/herself. Yes, “if you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place“, but many exceptions should be taken into account there. I am not sure 14 years old Joseph Ratzinger (a man for whom I don’t have any special sympathy whatsoever) voluntarily engaged in the Hitler Youth, yet this was held back against him when he became Benedict XVI. A disease can also be a source of information you want to rightfully hide from the public, and this should be possible. People do not chose to have cancer, yet a few cases of people fired after searching for data on this condition have surfaced. Some information can hurt us, and we might have nothing to do about them.
• Privacy needs a serious framework
  Trying to find a definitive rule to guarantee an even privacy to all citizens is probably a lost cause, because we all need to solve a different equation. Some of us need total privacy, others need to be semi or fully public figures because of their business, personal or political activities. Being totally transparent can even protect you from government abuse! What we need is more of a framework where anybody can position the cursor as he wants, and more importantly, change its position over time. As the founder of Lift, I have to communicate online as I am the first node of a global community. Whatever my next job is, I might want to reverse the trend and become more secret. This is not really possible right now, and if you have a solution in mind you will be very rich and you should contact me, I will invest whatever I have in your company :)
• Self regulation is already underway
  This kind of larger than life issues tends to self regulate. And I think that in the end, Google and the advertisers - often cited as the ones asking for less privacy - are the ones who have an interest in it. Why? I already mentionned earlier a study showing that 50% of users among the 13-21 age range falsify information. You want to spy on me? I will feed you with fake data to push the envelope to where I want it to be. And I will make your profiling efforts much more complicated in the process. In the contrary, if you give users a system they can trust, one where they can control what is controllable, then they will share the data advertisers need. I am sure Google [Disclaimer: a partner of Lift] understands this, as their recent Data Liberation Front initiative shows. Facebook does not seem to be that far in terms of thinking, but it will inevitably come. This reminds me of the click fraud controversy: you can hardly identify them so the solution is to acknowledge them directly in your bidding for AdWords.For more on the lying habits of online users, be sure to check Genevieve Bell’s talk at Lift08:
  

Update: welcome to the Techcrunch and Cnet readers, please be sure to check the 2010 follow-up post on the matter.

Privacy is not dead. It just went global and public, which doesn’t mean you can’t control what people know about you. Actually, it is now the other way around. Let me explain.

Every time I hear someone alarmed about “the death of privacy”, I remember my grandmother telling me her childhood stories, memories dating back to the beginning of the 20th century. Only a few decades ago, life was very different. You were part of a small community, spent all your life basically surrounded by the same people who ended up knowing almost everything about you.

Peoples’ horizon was family. Families, those constructions who often end up trapping human beings into roles. There was the one who’s successful, the one who’s rich, the one who’s cheating, the one who’s funny. Every person was tagged by the group, and everybody knew everything about everybody else. Any information would end up circulating, then become an eventual chip on one’s shoulder for all his or her life. There was much less privacy than today.

Is that what we are missing? Is what we have today really worse than that?

What happens with social networks is they publish information about you to the world. Two kinds of information: the ones you control, and the ones you don’t control.

The solution to fight the ones you don’t control has been known for years. If you can’t control the conversation improve it! Become the one stop source of info about yourself. Have a profile, more active than any other profile for all matters related to you. This way your content will always beat others’ content, and you get your control back. Then it’s up to you to not being photographed while drunk at that Spring break party. But that was a good ideas (not being photographed) well before Facebook right?

Now that you are back in the driver seat, you have your privacy back. Just of a different kind. You have built a space that could be called “publicy”, or “the plausible me”. It is a credible space where people expect to see information about you. Whatever credible information you say in there will be taken as true by the world.

That is your new privacy. A space that is public but that you control, where you can say anything you want and have it taken as true.

I love doing one thing on Facebook: using my status to say what I am NOT doing. I sometimes write “Laurent is in the train to Zurich” while I am sitting at my desk in Geneva. It’s just a way to prevent last minute calls for lunch on a busy day. I do it sometimes and mostly for fun, but I could also be lying on my relationship status, telling the world I am working on a project I want my competitors to think I am working on, saying I am at one place to cover the fact I am going to another. Your privacy is the fact that, through computers and distance, nobody can really cross check information anymore.

Privacy is here and doing well. It is just different, and not something that is granted at birth anymore. You have to create it, using the tools that were supposedly taking it away from you. You used to have to build your public image, now you have to build the private one. It’s a small change if you know how to do it.

Identity is one of the web’s next big problem, so the Identity Mash-up conference should be a very interesting place to be on June 19 and 20.

The goal of the conference is to explore the role of identity systems in furthering or inhibiting privacy, civil liberties and new forms of civic participation and commerce.

We touched on these issues at LIFT, with Marc Besson talking about securing identities, and Bruno Giussani explaining that we enter an era where you can’t control your identity anymore (video here).

Via David Galipeau)

Privacy chiefs from 40 countries have called upon the United Nations to prepare a legally binding instrument which clearly sets out in detail the rights to data protection and privacy as enforceable human rights.

Link

I missed that. Let’s hope the message will be heard.

Privacy chiefs from 40 countries have called upon the United Nations to prepare a legally binding instrument which clearly sets out in detail the rights to data protection and privacy as enforceable human rights.

Lien

Michel Jaccard m’a parlé de cette conférence qui s’est tenue il y a trois semaines à Montreux. Espérons que cette déclaration, demandant que la protection de la vie privée devienne un droit fondamental, sera entendue.