Hacktivism

Welcome back from spring break!

For the next couple weeks, we are focusing on the idea of activism on the web - specifically a kind of activism known as hacktivism. Hacktivism is a way of advancing a cause or staging a protest by hacking into the opponents' computer systems or websites, as opposed to more traditional forms of activism like demonstrations, letter-writing, or even coups.

For this week's post, consider the ethics of this form of activism, especially in reference to the specific articles and case studies you read. Also consider that these examples are international in scope, so American ideals (and laws) of free speech don't necessarily apply.

So: choose one of the examples of hacktivism and discuss its implications. Is it an effective means of protest or achieving justice? Does it seem to violate civil or human rights? Should there be more international regulation of such acts - and is such regulation even possible? What do you think the future might hold in terms of new forms of political protest online, or what might the consequences of such acts be?

Go Ahead and Track Me

I definitely think its fair game for a company to supply you with free services. I mean, they have to get their income from somewhere; we all got to eat (lol). It is not an invasion of privacy if a company doesn’t tie your name to it. As long as they don’t get a hold of my credit card or SSN, we will be all right. This goes along with our previous blogpost about privacy and secret-ness. Nothing is private on the net and it shouldn’t be a surprise that we are being tracked in this manner either. All that information is fair game and useful for companies advertising wise sales, and potentially helping you find services you need a lot easier and many time with discounts.

The stats and information these companies collect are probably some of the most valuable information out there for businesses. We are exposed to so much on the web and we have so much at our disposal, so if a company doing its due diligence to create statistics and market research, then they should be able to make money from it. Ultimately it benefits everyone, the consumer, the vendors, large corporations and the average Joe.

Just to consider another perspective though, perhaps there should be a tradeoff. People should have a choice of being tracked. For example, if you select yes, (sort of similar to email lists for various retailers where you can opt in or out of special offers and etc), then there should be an incentive. If for example, a website charges for subscription or something, then maybe it can be free or a cheaper rate in exchange of being tracked, but the whole concept is basically the person or consumer should have a choice in being tracked.

It is kind of like television, you get to watch for free, but within the programming there are advertisements. And although the advertisers don’t see or track your viewing preferences, they air specific commercials on certain channels, also considering the program and timing. The advertising on channels is what the channel owner makes money off of.

"They" can track me all they want, and if any crucial illegal harm is brought up on me, then IT IS ON – legal action baby! Until then, let us all benefit one way or another, whether it be advertisers tracking me and giving me deals or tracking to see how to monitor websites better.

Second Blog Post: On Corporate Tracking and Privacy

Lots of good blog posts in this first round!

For your second round, due by Wednesday, January 26th, address the following question:

This week, you read quite a bit about how companies track your activity online - your search terms, your "likes," your ad-clicks - as a way of creating very targeted advertising. Do you agree with this practice? Is it an invasion of privacy, even if your name isn't directly linked to your online activity? Or do you think this information is fair game?

Consider, in particular, that the internet services you use for "free" are largely financed through advertising, and that you probably prefer ads that are most relevant to you. Is it worth it to have your online activity used in this way, or are these companies getting to close to becoming a kind of "Big Brother"?

Play Your Cards Right

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

What an interesting quote. It’s sort of like those sayings, what came first chicken or the egg?

I don’t know if I agree or disagree.

The Internet is definitely not a private place. If you are going to put something online, there is like a default disclaimer you should be aware of - all things are public, post at your own risk. But then you wonder about banking and credit card websites and bill pay online, right? How private is that? It probably isn’t that private but those companies build up their repuations and boost up their security to prove to us they are secure through certifications and spam control and such.

Webster’s dictionary defines private as something intended for or restricted to the use of a particular person, group, or class. Secret is defined as something kept from knowledge or view. Both are intangible and both essentially mean the same thing but technically they don’t. A secret is usually between two people and privacy can be a general place or group or something in that manner.

The internet is no place for secrets. There is some privacy within security options on websites, like social networking sites, you can block certain things. However, once a picture, or a status, or whatever it may be, has been uploaded on the website, it is also roaming/streaming around the world wide web.

The timeline that was posted showed how we basically went from government watchdogs invading our homes to check for proper MORAL conduct, to a law that allows wiretapping in which government or whomever can listen in on anything and everything we are saying or doing. That is just scary, its not about morals anymore, it's about who knows what first, no matter how dirty you got to get to get the information.

The owner of Facebook, Mark Zuckerburg, for instance, everytime there is an update to facebook, the update includes privacy control and basically he wants everything and everyone to put all their information out there, no secrets. To show the world the truths that lay underneath it all. That nothing is really private, allow people to join in. I feel his concept is to make or put all people on the same level of exposure.

So, in other words, how do you feel about some of the loosening of privacy controls and more open displays of what were once considered private behaviors on the web?

I will say that I am not surprised. As our generations grow, there are more and more things that are becoming translucent. We want everything clearly spelled out for us, we don’t want complications. And with those wants comes many other consequences that we have to deal with.

I feel the loosening of the privacy controls and open displays of material once considered private is not a bad thing, because I am one of those people that do not want to be blindsided. I already know that nothing is private anymore, and I feel as long as our personal morals are straight and we are fully aware of the consequence or repercussions of our actions, I don’t see a problem with the loosening of anything. Let people do what they want, I mean, they are going to anyway.

I will leave you with a few sentences from two of our readings that I feel says a lot and goes along with how I feel with all this.

“Most generalizably, youth focus on all that they have to gain when entering into public spaces while adults are thinking about all that they have to lose. Part of the challenge in this is figuring out where someone's at and what their expectations are.”

––––– Danah Boyd

“Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live…We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

–––– Davos, Switzerland

So basically, the choice is yours. You decide and define what you call and want private or to remain secret. I don't believe people join networks and post scandalous material without knowing what they are doing. it's all a game. Play your cards right. or wrong. what's your motive?

Week 1: Online Privacy Rights

Google CEO Eric Schmidt's comments about online privacy are disturbing. After reading through the assigned articles, a couple of key points popped into my mind. In Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think," Bush states that the human race needs to keep records of important discoveries and thoughts for future generations to benefit from. He also discusses the problem of finding those records out of the mass of other records. In order to keep and retrieve records on the internet today we need intelligent search engines. To sort and organize the results, it is necessary to gather as much relevant information about the subjects in the records.

A problem arises when an author of a record only intends for a certain audience to retrieve that record in the future. Search engines (such as Google) are designed to grab as much as possible about a subject so that the user can quickly make judgements about that subject, sometimes without even clicking on a link. For example, if someone has been charged with a crime but not convicted (not found guilty), shouldn't Google's results display that the person isn't guilty? Often it wont, potential employers might see that the person has had legal problems and immediately dismiss them as a potential employee.

Another problem with maintaining privacy (while using the internet) is that information is often sent through a maze of different companies that, unlike ARPANET, can harvest that information for their own interests without the public's knowledge or permission. Encryption has helped keep email, passwords, and financial information more secure. However, there is always someone out there with the means to defeat the encryption. Whether that's a government, business, or individual, the internet is certainly (unfortunately) not a place to communicate private matters with the expectation of totally secure transmissions.

Privacy and transparency go hand in hand

Eric Schmidt's claim that "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" demonstrates not only an ignorance toward privacy issues on the internet, but also a flippant insensitivity that's disappointing as CEO of a company who believes that you should "focus on the user and all else will follow" (not to mention their informal corporate slogan, "don't be evil"). In a speech addressing the current state of privacy on the internet, Danah Boyd implored parents to approach their children with an understanding attitude about the dangers of social media, creating a dialog rather than banning these potentially useful tools outright. Schmidt comes across as the reactionary parent who permits their child to use social media on the condition that they never make a mistake. But as Boyd also outlines, privacy issues like the need to hide one's location from an abusive father aren't simple issues of choice. Schmidt refers to things we don't want "anyone" to know, but privacy is more often an issue of controlling who can and cannot gain access to the various elements of our lives. As various writers have suggested, privacy is a manifold idea that encompasses issues like self esteem, physical protection, and the ability to uphold relationships. While it's an ever-shifting term that few can agree on, and who some insist is a useless front-end term for various other rights, it's rarely the case that people want to make their actions entirely private or entirely public. Privacy is not, as Boyd says, a binary value.

Government intrusion isn't the only threat to privacy these days. The architecture of the internet has a huge effect. Web 2.0, as defined by O'Reilly, includes the concept of the "perpetual beta." This means the prevalence of sites that are constantly evolving and improving with user feedback. Privacy is also a shifting and dynamic idea that (according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) may even depend on concepts as tenuous as culture. These sites are better equipped to handle privacy settings in a way that accommodates changing individualized needs. And since the sites that listen to their users tend to be the most successful, we can be assured more privacy. Yet the stakes are higher than ever, as these Web 2.0 sites also rely on crowd sourcing and leveraging their user base to expand. This means users are giving away more data, and the competition for that data is getting fiercer. Some have emphatically stated the need to keep external bodies like government out of our internet, but I think internal sources - the companies keeping our data - should be of equal concern. The problem is largely an issue of transparency. Many users are deeply unaware of what's done with their data once it gets entered. Controls may be overcomplicated, leading to mistakes. Sites like YourOpenBook expose data that people may not know is public (try typing in "my social security number is" for a fun surprise).

With so much of our data out there, things can get confusing.

It's an exciting time for communication, and there's no doubt that sharing our information through the internet has enhanced our lives in some ways. Josh Harris' prediction, as seen in the 2009 documentary We Live in Public, was that people's craving for exposure and recognition would lead to an online information society where the key mode of validation is the most page hits or friend requests. His experiments are fascinating, but he fails in his extremity to realize that even exhibitionists control their image to some degree, and our public version of ourselves is often a different and more finely tuned one than our private version. I think nearly everyone behaves differently in different groups, even among the closest of friends; I would argue everyone has many versions of themselves, each of which has been carefully refined to match the interests of who they are interacting with. Being genuine doesn't mean acting the same around everyone; adapting is human nature, and it's to our best advantage. This is the nature of privacy. This is also the nature of secrecy. Both describe the same intent, whether for malicious reasons or not. Regardless, there are so many benign reasons for privacy that we can't let its protection be outweighed by the need to expose people who are hiding malicious secrets. The stakes may not seem high now, but how long before people start managing really sensitive information - like their finances - on Facebook?

Overall, Vannevar Bush certainly predicted one of the chief uses of the internet in his 1945 piece As We May Think in saying: "man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems." Yet it's that permanence of data (which, it turns out, is hard to get rid of) that makes it a danger for privacy. Something we may feel totally comfortable sharing with the world now could become embarrassing or threatening to our livelihood (such as the ability to get a job) later on. The original purpose of the internet as envisioned by the RAND corporation was to create a decentralized, rugged network that could survive even nuclear attack. The internet we know now certainly follows that principle, and our data too is getting spread around and made all the more permanent because there's no single point of removal should we want it removed. What we need moving forward is more transparency from corporations storing our data. We need to foster a corporate culture of communication and openness with users, allowing them control over what is done with their information. That's not enough, though. As evidenced by the Facebook privacy settings bait-and-switch described by Boyd, a lot of users have control over their privacy, but they're not aware of it. User education also needs to be a high priority task. We need to ask ourselves: how can we educate users better? How can we make data storage more transparent without inundating users with details? As services that use our information continue to expand, let's remember to keep a wary eye on the corporations that are managing it.

First blog post: On privacy

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been quoted as saying, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

Now that you've read quite a bit about the origins of the Internet and definitions of "privacy," do you agree with this statement? Why or why not? Is there a difference between "private" and "secret"? After all, there are lots of things that aren't secret - going to the bathroom, for example - that usually we still would like to be private.

So, in other words, how do you feel about some of the loosening of privacy controls and more open displays of what were once considered private behaviors on the web? 

The best posts will specifically reference the readings in your reply.

DUE: Wednesday,  January 19th