[governance] Social networking and privacy

[Dan Krimm]

Veni,

While I agree that no one should expect that anything they publish on the
Internet should be considered private (in some sense, that's simply not the
point, is it) there is still a completely different privacy issue when it
comes to personal identification data that people use to transact private
business, whether over the Internet or through other pathways that lead to
inclusion in large databases.

This is the real cyber-privacy issue: things like social security numbers,
financial account numbers, drivers license and passport IDs, and even more
mundane info like home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and
especially cross-references between these items.  ID theft is a real
problem, because economic and political dynamics require personal
certification, and most people who are not celebrities of some sort become
vulnerable to systematic harassment from a variety of sources if they can
easily be identified and located by people who hide their own identity or
leverage political authority or the resources of great wealth.  Especially
when those using the information keep that use hidden from the subjects, it
can be a powerful tool for harassment, manipulation and oppression.

The question is who controls information in the Information Society,
because that control constitutes real and often profound power.  Knowledge
is power, and knowledge about an individual is power over that individual.
When knowledge is not symmetrical, it creates a power imbalance, and that
is often a structural problem for societies trying to reach a goal of
broadly collective empowerment.

It is easy to conflate these issues (public expression and personal
identification), but they are really two very different privacy concerns.

And of course, it is true that on social networks these two things may be
conflated by the participants themselves if they are not paying attention
(Karl's point is very pertinent that parents need to teach their children
the cyberspace equivalents of looking both ways before crossing the street
-- this is the big change: there used to be anonymity in a crowd in
physical space, but with databasing and datamining this is no longer the
case online).

Just because public *speech* can now be expected to be *globally and
enduringly* public once it hits the Internet doesn't mean that *personal
information privacy* is a non-issue.  Just the opposite, personal privacy
on the Internet has become a red-hot issue with regard to individual human
rights and civil liberties, because it is now so much easier to abuse the
use of personal data in the age of huge databases and sophisticated data
mining.

There remains a gray area of overlap between speech and identification
created by info-comm technology that is the hot zone here.  I don't think
we've figured it out at all, and we still have a lot of work to do to
clarify how to address this new zone.

Dan



At 9:08 PM -0400 10/11/07, veni markovski wrote:
>Paul,
>This should be written with big letters in every Internet-related
>book: there's no real privacy on the Internet. If you write
>something, keep in mind it will be published on the first page of the
>New York Times. So, better be ready. The future is here, today.
>
>veni
>
>At 10:08 10/12/2007  +1000, you wrote:
>>For the interest of those of us who use these social networking services:
>>
>><http://albumoftheday.com/facebook/>
>>
>>
>>I'm personally curious to know how accurate are the claims which are
>>made here; but in any case this is a good illustration of possible
>>concerns about privacy and the use of information posted on sites.
>>
>>Paul.
>>
>>
>>________________________________________________________________________
>>Paul Wilson, Director-General, APNIC                      <dg at apnic.net>
>>http://www.apnic.net                            ph/fx +61 7 3858 3100/99
>>
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