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| DATE | 2014-02-22 |
| FROM | Ruben
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Monday and the spying is good
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Privacy? What privacy?
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Category: Life
21 *Feb* *2014*
Written by Lisa Krieger / San Jose Mercury News
WE?RE no longer just strangers in a crowd.
Imagine any street corner in any town where, let?s say, four
people?Alexandria, Larry, Cory and Cameron?are lost in private thought.
Without a single conversation, without even knowing their names, we
could learn that Alexandria?s angry ex-boyfriend posted her photo on a
?revenge porn? web site. That Larry is mourning the death of his
daughter. That Cory is trying to scrub her image from friends? social
networks. That Cameron picked the wrong place to hide from police.
In each case, a simple photograph of the four strangers, combined with
the power of data, opens the door to deeply personal details. That?s one
of the many ways digital technologies are turning our once-personal
lives into a global show-and-tell and redefining our expectations of
privacy.
Almost every day brings new revelations about how Big Brother snoops on
us and Big Data mines our online activities for profit. Even so, we are
only beginning to understand the power of these incursions. In a few
years, our faces alone, snapped on a street, in a crowd, or posted by a
friend on the Internet, will be the key for a search engine to reveal
the stories of our lives.
There may be nothing that technology is changing more dramatically than
privacy. What is happening with our images online is just one example of
our digital reality: We?re living life out loud?secrets and all.
To be sure, gossip is as old as our species. It spread through villages
in whispers or over our grandparents? ?party line? phones. And the
impulse to share photos of ourselves started the moment Louis Daguerre
first fixed images onto sheets of silver-plated copper.
But information moved at a human pace?eventually forgiven, forgotten.
Now this information travels across continents with just a click. And it
can remain virtually forever in the data stream. There is no ?erase? key.
People like Alexandria discover that in new and shocking ways every day.
?I am flabbergasted. It is crazy,? she said after a reporter discovered
a topless photo of her on a pornographic web site that her ex-fiance had
posted more than two years after their breakup.
He has remarried and has a child; she is engaged. Yet the photo
persists?and the Netherlands-based web site demands $500 to remove it.
We?re not publishing her name to avoid a further invasion of her
privacy. She had no idea her bare-chested image was out there?with her
name, hometown and age attached?until the reporter called. ?It was a
personal thing between me and him,?? she said. ?It happened one time,
and I didn?t think he?d hold onto them.??
(A similar California case led to criminal charges recently when the
attorney general announced the arrest of a San Diego man accused of
asking women for up to $350 each to remove illicit photos from another
revenge site.)
Here is the simple math behind our brave new digital world, with its
blurry boundaries between private and public: Photos+name=information.
Photos?a snapshot at a party or a ?selfie? shot in the bedroom?can
reveal names, using tools like Google Plus?s ?Find My Face? and
Facebook?s facial-recognition software. And geo-tagged posts on social
networks can reveal the precise location of your whereabouts.
Then our names become a pipeline to once-private information, such as
home address, age, employment, taxes paid, political affiliations and
campaign contributions.
Where is this headed? For better or worse, we?re becoming one vast
Neighborhood Watch. And the surveillance doesn?t stop at front doors,
but follows us inside.
We?re not just living with Big Brother peering over our electronic
shoulders. We?re also a more tightly connected world, with many fiercely
committed busybodies.
There was a time when explicit or offensive images never made it out of
the darkroom. ?Back in the film days, it was never an issue.... We just
wouldn?t make the print? if it crossed a line, said longtime photo
processor Bill Graham of the Palo Alto, California, camera shop Keeble &
Shucat.
Just the idea of a stranger at a film processing lab looking at our
images filtered our photo impulses.
Now, millions every day rush to reveal pictures and more rush to view
them and pass them along, sometimes with tragic results.
?You can do the stupidest thing, and pretty soon the whole world knows,?
said privacy expert Frank Ahern.
When Saratoga, California, teenagers shared their cellphone photograph
of student Audrie Pott after an alleged assault, the humiliation led to
the 15-year-old?s suicide, her parents say.
?These cellphones or other electronic devices that can take photos or
send e-mails are, in essence, loaded guns,? said her father, Larry Pott.
?They are unchecked and completely open for any sort of unchecked
transmission,? he said. ?There is no accountability. They are completely
anonymous.?
It used to be expensive to make things public and cheap to keep them
private, notes Internet scholar and New York University professor Clay
Shirky. Now it?s expensive and time-consuming to make things private.
But it?s cheap?and easy?to be public. About 2.5 billion people worldwide
have a digital camera in their pockets, often attached to a smartphone,
according to Hong Kong-based mobile-technology consultant Tomi Ahonen.
If each person snaps 150 photos a year, that adds up to a staggering 375
billion images annually.
San Francisco Bay Area resident Cory Colligan knows the challenge of
protecting her privacy. When a friend tags her in a Facebook photo, she
?untags? it, or politely e-mails a request to delete it. If feelings are
hurt, she explains her concern to friends over lunch.
?I love social media, but I don?t post photos. I don?t want to be out
there that way. Period. I?m a private person,? Colligan said. So she
decorates her Facebook page with inspirational messages and landscapes;
only her professional LinkedIn profile has a photo.
But sharing photos through social media will escalate, experts say,
because it fills a human need for connection and intimacy. They help us
stitch together our communities, keeping us in closer touch with the
people we love.
?Tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity?transforming
?gather, then share? into ?share, then gather,?? Shirky writes in Here
Comes Everybody, his book about the Internet and group dynamics.
To some, losing privacy is a small price for exchanged memories of
high-school pranks or photos of cherished newborns.
Los Angeles actor and director Justin Baldoni proposed to his girlfriend
Emily Foxler in an online video montage of proposal parodies, an ?N Sync
lip sync, a flash mob and a visit to her father?s grave to ask
permission to marry her.
By November, more than 7 million people had clicked on his YouTube
public proposal.
Until recently, if we wanted to stay anonymous, photos were no real
threat. But improving computer programs and a proliferation of
surveillance cameras is changing that. Facial identification becomes
easier as improved cameras create higher quality images. And cameras are
getting cheaper?and smaller.
Facial recognition is already in some TVs. Passwords and PINs are giving
way to faceprints in our mobile devices.
When you knock on a door, shop or drive down the street, chances are
good that you?re on camera.
The Boston Marathon bombers would famously discover that. And so did
Cameron Conley of Oakland, California. He vanished, Palo Alto police
said, after leading them on a wild chase through downtown, hitting six
cars and allegedly attempting to carjack a truck. But a homeowner?s
surveillance camera revealed his location.
?It showed that the guy had entered our property, and never left.... He
was huddled underneath the house, in a crawlspace,? said homeowner
Roberta Chew. ?Without the camera, he would have totally gotten away
with it.?
Cameras increasingly serve as protective eyes and ears when we?re not
present. A camera in an Oklahoma City nursing home recorded an aide
stuffing gloves into a 96-year-old dementia patient?s mouth. Police who
use cameras have fewer complaints against them and fewer false
allegations of brutality.
But technology has moved up a notch to search out faces. No longer is it
necessary to watch hours of surveillance video for a suspect or car. A
computer program developed by the San Francisco company 3VR can quickly
search huge quantities of video to find a specific face?matching gender,
age and facial characteristics. It also can detect suspicious
behavior?such as lingering?that the human eye might not notice.
But our images can turn up in ways never intended. Google Maps?s
satellite camera captured the body of Kevin Barrera, a 14-year-old
Richmond homicide victim, haunting his family. The face of suicide
victim Rehtaeh Parsons, 17, was featured in an ad on Facebook for a
dating site, Ionechat.com, advertising ?Find Love In Canada!?
Alexandria and other women suffer when X-rated photos, e-mails or texts
are posted on niche web sites?sometimes with the victim?s personal
information. Alexandria had puzzled over why she was receiving
suggestive Facebook messages from strange men?and now she knows why.
Our faces can lead strangers to our names.
The US State Department uses facial-recognition software to link
passport photos and names, stopping fraud and fleeing criminals. The FBI
runs the world?s largest biometric database, housing not just
fingerprints but also mug shots, tattoos and other identifying
information for tens of millions of criminals, and more than 34 million
civil fingerprints.
But police cameras can?t compete with the vast social net that we
unwittingly are weaving with our mug shots and names posted on Facebook,
Instagram, LinkedIn and ordinary corporate and organizational rosters.
Facebook alone holds an estimated 90 billion digital photos. Profile
pictures and names have no privacy settings. Neither do LinkedIn?s
profiles; its photos are associated with real first and last names
available to casual visitors without logging on.
Facial-recognition software finds us on Facebook every time it suggests
?tags? for your face found in others? photos. Google offers Picasa users
facial-recognition tools to organize photos; Apple offers a similar tool
to iPhoto users.
One researcher used photos to identify anonymous students?some down to
the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. Alessandro
Acquisti, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, used
just a consumer-grade digital camera, off-the-shelf facial-recognition
software and social-network information to sift through Facebook
profiles and other web sites. He was able to identify many of them
instantly and also obtain their personal data.
Learning our names opens the gate to a vast store of publicly available
information?such as home addresses, voting records, campaign
contributions, mortgages, liens and birth, marriage, divorce and death
records. Some businesses, such as Intelius and Spokeo, sell this
information. Linked with consumer information?such as air miles, loyalty
cards, magazine subscriptions and other purchases?our names gain added
value. Companies like Datalogix, Epsilon and Acxiom auction off to
advertisers access to us.
The day may be coming, experts say, when your phone?s facial-recognition
software recognizes and identifies a long-forgotten friend, and also
reveals your location to a stalker. A hotel will greet you by name, but
a car salesperson may infer your credit score and download your
psychological profile. A database will find missing children?but also
identify the people attending a peaceful protest.
A fledgling but impassioned movement has risen to strengthen
online-privacy protections, using browsers like Mozilla Firefox,
social-network platforms like Ravetree, the search engine DuckDuckGo and
photo-sharing services like Snapchat, which allows photos to quickly vanish.
Without changes, Acquisti foresees a ?post-private? world where we?ll no
longer take risks and learn from mistakes. It will be a less creative
and more cautious society, he predicts, ?a very sad and creepy place.?
But others argue that we are entering a new Age of Transparency, where
increasing openness is healthy.
?Privacy is dead,? said Nova Spivack, a technology futurist. ?In fact,
it has been dying a rather operatic death for over a decade.?
We?re building a more moral and perhaps even more forgiving world, he
believes. ?When you know that you can?t hide, you become more responsible.?
It is possible to find a middle ground between either extreme of
disclosure, balancing the risks and benefits, said San Francisco social
media expert Trish Chan.
?We assume privacy is the most important need. But there are other needs
to be satisfied, not just privacy?such as connecting with friends,? she
said.
?When I think about privacy, I don?t quite know what it means exactly
these days. Everybody is so out there.?
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