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Features: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet |
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A journalist attends the World Economic Forum and writes her friends an email about the experience.
Two weeks later, that email is on the Web, people she's never met are correcting her spelling, and the
journalist is vowing to go back to longhand.
Welcome to the world of accidental privacy spills. Compared with the problem of keeping personal email private, copyright and spam are easy. Full essay inside . . . .
In Which Certain Events of a Recent Historical Nature Are Related
Who is Laurie Garrett?
Laurie Garrett is a science journalist and Pulitzer prize-winner; her best-known work is The Coming Plague. She's a medical and science writer for Newsday, a daily New York City newspaper; last month, she attended the World Economic Forum in Davos.
And there her troubles began.
At the end of a week of "unfettered, class A hobnobbing," Garrett sat down to write about the experience to a "handful" of friends. She composed a chatty 2000-word email about the issues on the minds of the world's self-proclaimed movers and shakers. The email is basically a list of hot topics -- terrorism and trade, American unilateralism versus anti-Americanism, the leaders (China) and laggards (the US) in global economic growth -- bookended by some brief scene-setting and personal observations.
Her tone could hardly be called "intimate," but it's not exactly polished reporting, either. From the opening, "Hi, Guys" to the closing "Ciao, Laurie," the email is a light, informal letter. She calls Vicente Fox "sexy;" she mentions the "very cool" wireless infrastructure; she describes the prevailing sentiment geopolitical sentiments among major Islamic leaders. Scientists will recognize the email as a straightforward conference report. This is where I went; this is who was there and what I saw; this is what I think of it all.
Davos was in the last week of January. In the next week, the email apparently circulated among a growing set of Garrett's friends and their friends. By the 6th of February, a copy of the email, by then forwarded several times, stripped of its original headers, and minus her last name, had made its way onto the "PH" mailing list run by the Institute for Psychohistory. And there it crossed the bloodstream, because the PH list is archived on the Web.
We all know what happens once something is on the Web. On the 11th of February, the PH archive version of the email was linked from MetaFilter, a links-and-discussion site with strong blog community ties. The discussion in the MetaFilter thread centered on the email's authenticity. It wasn't hard to determine that "Laurie" was Laurie Garrett, but to some MeFi readers, the story had all the trappings of an obvious hoax.
After all, there wasn't a byline or a citation to a verifiable news outlet. Nor, for that matter, was the language especially polished. Surely no professional journalist would write "various insundry" for "various and sundry!" On this view, the email was just the ramblings of a "breathless teenager" with a real journalist's name attached in order to make it plausible as an actual account. The close textual readings of the fraud-detection discussion rapidly spiraled off into a discussion of economic theory.
Meanwhile, some MeFi regulars decided to go check for themselves on the email's authenticity. [MeFi tends to have an investigative spirit; the community had a major role in exposing the Kaycee Nicole hoax two years ago.] Adam Davis, who was listed as having forwarded the email to the PH list, confirmed that he had done so, but couldn't vouch for the email's authenticity as of the time it reached his inbox. And then, as the economics discussion rolled along, Garrett herself, on February 14, confirmed her attendance at Davos.
In an email to MeFi user beagle, Garrett stated that she hadn't actually read the piece supposedly written by her. Instead:
I cannot imagine that any of the close personal friends to whom I sent a
letter from Davos would visciously pas it on in such a manner.
Yes, I went to Davos.
No, I never wrote a note intended for public consumption.
As I trust my friends, I must asum, without going to these web sites, that
it is a hoax. I would rather not learn that my friends are scoundrels who
forward very personal mail to the entire world.
And so things sat for another three days, until Garrett broke her vow. She did click on the URL beagle sent her, and yes, it was genuine. Somehow, this "very personal mail" to her "close personal friends," not meant "for public consumption," had been forwarded "to the entire world." So she sat down and wrote beagle another email, which he promptly turned around and posted back to the MeFi thread. Matt Haughey, MetaFilter's creator and benevolent dictator, added a front-page link to this exciting news. And here's where things get interesting.
In Which the Problem Is Posed
Laurie Garrett was not happy to have her email shared with the world. She was even less happy that the "Internet addicts of the world" had wasted such extensive time and effort on such an "extraordinarily silly exercise." Her message to them ends with a peroration to "Be a citizen of the real world" and invokes the image of William Shatner telling a convention of Star Trek fans to get a life.
The response? She didn't get much sympathy. Perhaps bristling against her insult to their community ("liberal elitist disingenuinity," in the words of one), various MeFi-ites fired back -- on MetaFilter, that is -- with some harsh statements about dumb journalists who write emails they don't intend for public consumption. Thus:
Laurie Garrett needs to learn that you never write something you don't stand behind. And if you don't stand behind it, it was probably satire. Always make sure they know when you're serious and when you're not. Give them hints, here and there that you're toying with them. Berfore you fire off so haphazardly your one in a billion encounters with the most wealthy and powerful people on the planet.
-- crasspastor
Maintaining a free society requires an informed populace. Information is available in more places than ever before, including on the Internet. To be honest, I would worry about a democracy that did not encourage the dissemination of information using the Internet as a medium.
-- jessamyn
Let's spell this out for Ms Garrett in big fucking capital letters shall we? If your mate forwarded on a letter that you had failed to mark as privileged, read-only or with a similar disclaimer, then you've only got yourself and your friend to blame. The mail we discussed didn't have 'please don't forward on' written on it anywhere as far as I can see. Is your friend telepathic or are you making assumptions about your friends' attitude towards your privacy. Or, are your 'friends' of such quality that they'd strip such a line out of one of your emails prior to stitching you up like this?
-- dmt
But not being privy to your motivations, how are we to know why this was posted on the net? Perhaps it was posted without your permission. Perhaps you wanted it to be there, and "leaked" it. Ok, we know now that you didn't, but don't blame us for that lack of prescience, or for the fact that it made a fascinating read. Personally, I'm not sorry I read your email, but I'm sorry it was posted without your knowledge, and that some people said careless things about you. If you're looking for somewhere to shove the "blame" though, you may want to start closer to home.
-- walrus
The funny thing is, it's not as though Garrett disagrees with any of these analyses. She herself gives a quick account of the email's (presumed) spread and gradual transition from public to private and treats this spread as inevitable. She contrasts a longhand letter she wrote after attending the 1979 Carter-Brezhnev talks; casual forwarding would never have landed that letter before the eyes of thousands. But with email, she concludes, things are different:
This saddens me deeply, and I have learned a sorry lesson. I shall no longer deliver such personal musings to friends and confidantes via the Internet. No one can be trusted in this CLICK-FORWARD electronic world.
And that's a fairly stunning result, isn't it? People, serious and thoughtful people, will stop using email for certain matters, if this is what happens when they use it. What is more, this sort of letter -- a fact-filled but informal update on interesting international issues as seen from the inside -- is a paradigmatic example of what email is supposed to be for. And, after all, that instantaneous CLICK-FORWARD loop is one of the great virtues of email and digital text. When Laurie Garrett's experience with "this CLICK-FORWARD electronic world" leads her to threaten to take her ball and go back to longhand, it's hard not to feel that something has been lost.
In Which a Straw Man Is Erected
A bunch of MetaFilter regulars recently took the Political Compass test and posted their scores. The resulting distribution shows a profound libertarian tilt. And it's easy to recognize a classically techno-libertarian viewpoint in their responses from above. On this view:
- It is impossible to stop the spread of information that has hit the Net.
- Further, information that people consider interesting will spread rapidly.
- This spread is a good thing.
It can be hard to argue with these premises. Indeed, the rapid distribution of Garrett's original letter seems like a prototypical example of techno-libertarianism working perfectly. A writer with good inside access dashes off an essay, which spreads rapidly and comes to the attention of thoughtful readers who carry on an interesting discussion about the economic issues the essay raises. I feel perfectly comfortable siding with the MeFi-ites (full disclosure: of whom I am one) against Garrett's slurs to their community. She may be upset at their flippant tone, but there's serious and constructive dialogue taking place in that thread. This is what democracy looks like, as they say at protests.
That said, I (and, to be fair, various other MeFi-ites) do sympathize with Garrett's sense of dislocation and betrayal in seeing her "personal" thoughts spread across the Web. walrus says it best: "Personally, I'm not sorry I read your email, but I'm sorry it was posted without your knowledge, and that some people said careless things about you." That's about as close as you can get to a pure statement of the paradox: an essay that brought pleasure and enlightenment to many has become -- precisely because it was of interest to so many -- such an albatross for its author that she regrets having written it.
Which is why walrus's next statement -- "If you're looking for somewhere to shove the "blame" though, you may want to start closer to home." -- is so disturbing. Since wide distribution is so inevitable in the techno-libertarian scheme of things, authors who don't want wide distribution have only themselves to blame. Once they released that first digitized copy (or perhaps even that first copy at all, if the message was sufficiently interesting that someone else was willing to digitize it), the next step was foreordained. Every email comes with an implicit "Bcc:everyone" header set; every web page is immortal. It's easy to run off a half-dozen stories of people whose ribald emails got away from them, whose "secret" blogs were discovered by their co-workers. It's all their fault, in this brave new CLICK-FORWARD electronic world. If you're going to write something, anything at all, you'd better be prepared to share.
I suppose it's logically possible to think that a world in which that iron maxim held true would be a good one. You would have to do what David Brin does in The Transparent Society, taken several giant steps further. Given the complete dissolution of the category of the "private," you'd say, we must adjust our expectations so as not to place such high value on privacy. As long as everyone's emails to their friends are similarly discoverable, our there will be no informational inequality and no injustice. But when it comes to our fondness for speaking only into our beloved's ears, we will need to learn to let go of such sentimentality and accept that MetaFilter is listening in. Much that is now said in private will become public; the rest will never be said at all.
In theory, one could go there. I can't. Laurie Garrett doesn't want to live in that world; I don't think that the MeFi-ites quoted above would like to live there either. Having thus rejected the third premise of the caricature libertarian viewpoint, we are therefore left looking either for a way to stop the flow of information or to insist that not all information will naturally flow.
In Which Social Norms Are Weighed in the Balance
It should be obvious that not every email you send your lover will wind up on MetaFilter. It should be equally obvious that disgruntled (ex-)lovers have been going public with "personal" correspondence for centuries. Which is to say that email and the Internet are neither necessary nor sufficient preconditions for the sort of expectations meltdown involved in Laurie Garrett's experience. Your lover doesn't forward your email, well, out of love; and even afterwards, there's still a taboo on violating the confidences of that relationship. The strongest pressure on Garrett's friends not to forward that email was social pressure. She trusted them with a private email; someone among them violated that trust. There's your problem, says dmt. Either you didn't warn your friends about your expectations, or you have an untrustworthy fink for a friend.
There's something to this idea. We don't ask our friends to submit P3P policies to us before we send them email. No, instead we wrap everything we say or write in an implicit privacy policy, one grounded in the social norms of our friendship and our society's notions of friendship. These privacy policies can be remarkably intricate: teenage girls tell each other secrets that are anything but. Similarly, when was the last time you appended "please don't forward to my boss" to an email to your drinking buddies? Social norms aren't going to go away anytime soon; we can count on them to take care of a lot of the subtle negotiations surrounding the exchange of "private" information.
But social norms have never solved all our problems -- think of the jilted lover choosing whether to burn the love letters or publish them -- and, more importantly, the Internet does change things. Garrett's example of the letter she handwrote from the Vienna Summit is telling:
Now, imagine my recipient found the letter amusing or insightful and photocopied my handwritten note, posting it to ten friends. And so on. Snail mail hell? Doubtful. In those seemingly ancient days we all respected privacy, and the time and money required to photocopy and post missives prompted all of us to pause and question whether we had a right to forward a personal letter without the author’s permission.
I happen to think that her analysis of the reasons for that hesitation is wide of the mark, but her conclusion is so obviously right we often overlook it. Email and snail mail obey fundamentally different laws of propagation. Email can spread like wildfire, but unless you get a copy of your snail-mail letter into a major newspaper or can afford a massive direct-mail spam, it stops with your friends.
In crudely mechanistic terms, going from paper to bits lowers the cost of copying and forwarding. It takes a pretty important letter to be worth the bother of Xeroxing, stamping, and mailing, but even an infinitesimally small benefit is worth the minimal cost of clicking on the forward button and typing in a few addresses. People who wouldn't have forwarded a letter will forward an email -- and they'll forward it to more people. More people in each To: line, each of whom is more likely to forward the message, means a greater likelihood that any given email will escape from captivity. Or, put another way, email has a much lower critical mass of interest than pen-and-paper mail has.
Garrett attributes email's wider circulation to the passing of "those seemingly ancient days we all respected privacy" -- that is, to the collapse of a social norm. Technological determinists would emphasize instead a mechanical cost-benefit tradeoff in which social norms enter only as an afterthought. Both views are wrong, because the social norms that have grown up around email are norms that usually make sense in the context of rapid and easily replicable textual communication. On the one hand, we don't put quite as much of ourselves into any given email as we would put into a letter; on the other, we expect a certain degree of wider redistribution. The median email is less private and more public in its content than the median letter, not because our words care whether they travel by ink or by bits, but because we have evolved a set of expectations about email that are less private and more public than our expectations about traditional letters.
But even the most useful understandings break down now and again, and Garrett got caught by just such a breakdown. Her letter, although to her a "personal" note, is fairly evidently the product of a journalist. Thus, when the issue du jour was whether the letter was a hoax, many commentators started from the assumption that it was a relatively informal dispatch, rather than a relatively formal letter. It's certainly not a bad assumption -- lots of interesting modern journalism is highly informal -- and yet it turned out to be completely wrong.
What happened was that as the letter got forwarded further and further from Garrett's keyboard, the necessary cues that would have indicated a disapproval of forwarding were stripped away. By the time it hit the PH mailing list, remember, the original header information, along with her last name, had gone missing. Under those circumstances, who among us would not forward an interesting essay? (Purported attributions aren't very reliable, either; just think of the Kurt Vonnegut commencement speech). More importantly, when the email reached people who didn't know Laurie Garrett personally, it reached people who didn't know her expectations about forwarding email. When it comes to the norms of forwarding, these implicit headers are just as important as the official ones.
How did the letter wind up in its denuded state? Once again you hardly need to posit active malice. One of Garrett's friends forwards it to his wife; the wife sends it to her two sisters, one of whom sends it to a co-worker who strips the headers and sends it to three or four friends . . . and bingo. We've reached escape velocity. The funny thing is, even Laurie Garrett might well have signed off on each and every step in that chain. Given the close relationships and high trust involved, none of these individual decisions to forward feels like a major betrayal of trust.
Such are the social norms of email. And against these norms, the idea that Garrett could or should have reined in her friends starts to look more than a little cockeyed. dmt wrote, "The mail we discussed didn't have 'please don't forward on' written on it anywhere as far as I can see," but what would you do if Garrett's email, disclaimer attached, landed in your inbox? The social norms of email look upon such disclaimers with thinly-veiled contempt. People who send email from disclaimer-laden corporate accounts are roundly mocked; unless the email is obviously and intrinsically not meant for certain eyes, disclaimers are next to useless. This one forward is fine, goes the thinking -- and it is, but one plus one plus one equals many, in the exponential logic of digital communications media.
Even where the normative constraints are mostly effective, you don't need much to go critical. As long as the average number of forwards per recipient is greater than one -- no matter by how little or how much -- the laws of probability tell us to expect a nice happy power-law curve zipping up towards infinity. The Internet treats indifference as damage and routes around it. After all, if the Internet is all about empowerment, then we want the few who care to be active in getting the good word out. If you believe in affinity groups and virtual social networks and the creation of new communities online, then it's a good thing that the complaisant many can be outvoted by the interested few. Otherwise, we'd all be watching Joe Millionaire, instead of just a third of us.
Social norms won't magically save us. At the most, they tell us that Laurie Garrett misread the applicable social norms of email, as they applied to her friends, to her friends' friends, to their friends, and so on. But that leaves us back where we were at the end of the last section: she won't make that mistake again, which means she's never writing one of these dispatches and committing it to email again, which means no interesting discussion topic for MetaFilter.
Perhaps one day we might bring her out of this self-imposed shell. Perhaps our understanding of email will change. Perhaps we'll have headers that "suggest" limited distribution. X-Do-Not-Forward-Unless-You-Know-The-Author, X-Do-Not-Remove-Authors-Name, and X-Do-Not-Forward-This-Means-You-Yes-You come to mind. Or perhaps we'll have a mind-your-own-business norm and will delete anything not personally written expressly for us. These prospects strike me as unlikely, at best. Some of them require us to turn our backs on the nature of email, to forgo the very possibilities it opens up. Others feel like crude attempts to turn legal or technical rules into standards of conduct. None of them seem workable -- especially since these norms will require near-universal adherence if privacy is the name of the game.
To repeat, there is something here. Well-understood norms do -- and will -- prevent many privacy accidents. But they have never been a complete solution, and the advent of the Internet has rendered them strikingly less effective. More people, more anonymity, fewer non-verbal cues, greater individual autonomy . . . the list goes on and on. Today, more so that at any time in history, we can interact with people whose values are not our own, and we can do so under highly fluid and ambiguous conditions. Quasi-private emails leak out all the time now, not because we want what is private to become public, but because it has become so hard to tell private from public in the context of email. Social norms will not rebottle this genie.
In Which Absurdity Is Made Manifest
This leaves us with one remaining response: that perhaps the Laurie Garretts of the world could prevent their private emails from becoming public. I mentioned P3P for comic effect, but the idea of technological controls can't be dismissed out of hand. Technological self-help is an appealing idea; it seems to square with our ideas about autonomy and the decentralized nature of the Internet. As dmt asked, "Using encryption are we Ms Garrett?"
Well, no. She wasn't. No one uses encryption, not least because encryption wouldn't have solved the problem, as dmt goes on to admit. "She's been betrayed by a friend" may be a strong way of putting things -- see above -- but it's technically impossible to give someone a piece of information without also empowering them to redistribute that information. If you could, it wouldn't be information. Encryption is fine for the digital connection, but the digital connection was already the secure part of the link. Garrett's expectations of privacy were compromised between the seat and the keyboard; the same place every technically foolproof scheme fails.
P3P has been an abject flop for the same reasons. Technology will encrypt your credit card number and send your passport data only to sites that promise full privacy, but technology will never be able to stop the unscrupulous merchant at the other end of the wire from doing whatever he wants. The only technologically-meaningful bright line is the one between the author and the entire rest of the world; the first disclosure contains the prospect of all the others. No privacy policy in this or any other world is or can be self-enforcing.
True, strong privacy-protection technology might make it annoying or difficult to CLICK-FORWARD that email. It might require a more conscious effort to violate the author's expectations of non-disclosure. This would be a case in which the privacy technology was useful for its effect on social norms; I think this is the idea Garrett had in mind when she talked about the loss of "respect" for privacy that she sees as part and parcel of the exchange of email. As with disclaimers, it's not unreasonable to think that a more nuanced set of default forward permissions -- your choice of no forwards, one forward, forwards by author's automated approval, or unlimited forwards, say -- might take care of many of these accidental privacy leaks.
That said, any such scheme will face severe limits. No set of rules or permissions will ever be sufficiently granular to handle the infinite variety of human social relations. After all, didn't Garrett want her email to go only to "people who will say nice things about it and/or quote it in a positive context" (in the words of davidfg)? Go ahead, try expressing "positive context" in a way enforceable by a computer. Moreover, however effective such technical restrictions are at honoring the author's wishes, they will be exactly that effective in overriding the wishes of her correspondents and would-be forwarders. Technical schemes make this conflict explicit: I want to do this but I can't because someone else says I can't. And where would this adversarial relationship be most destructive? In contexts characterized by informal interactions based on personal trust. Keeping private emails private is just about the least likely place for a technical solution to work.
Even more damningly, a fundamental precondition of technological solutions is the ability to force the other guy or gal to play by your technological rules. Setting the do-not-forward bit on your email is useless unless email clients respect that bit. Therefore: Palladium. Therefore: the broadcast flag. Therefore: certificate authorities. Therefore: the IPv6 Forum. Therefore: the DVD Content Control Association. All of these institutions are devoted to the widespread distribution of compliance. They encourage and/or coerce the adoption of their preferred technologies in many different ways, but the underlying idea is always the same: create a forum within which certain rules of behavior are enforced at the architectural level.
Enforcing Laurie Garrett's wishes about the distribution of her thoughts on Davos, then, would require the deployment of some serious technical infrastructure. The kicker is that this technical infrastructure needs to be backed up by an equally serious institutional infrastructure. The broadcast flag won't just find its way into HDTV sets; someone powerful needs to put it there. There aren't so many open mail relays any more because the people who run them get blackballed by the spam-hating vigilantes of the Net. Cracking open your TiVo will void your warranty. Trusted systems are trusted for the same reason money is trusted: because of the strength of the institution behind them.
And if there is one thing that these huge and powerful institutions are supremely ill-adapted to do, it would have to be preserving the ambiguous privacy of quasi-personal emails. Privacy itself is an institutional non-starter. TRUSTe has suffered from massive enforcement problems; P3P doesn't even have an enforcement policy. It's hard to define offenses against information privacy, harder to detect them, and harder still to translate issues of "privacy" into universally-applicable standards. Indeed, the very act of formulating a privacy policy at the technical level has the unfortunate side effect of standardizing a data format for the information supposedly to be kept private, making it that much easier to merge and mine personal information from multiple sources.
And that's not the half of it. You see, however hard technical protections on personal information may be, it's at least possible to formulate the question in a meaningful way. Medical records, for example, are fairly well-defined things, with a reasonably clear trust model: medical professionals involved in the treatment of a patient have access. But email? Email is squishy and contextual. The "personal" part of a 2000-word email may consist of two sentences. Two emails may be completely innocent independently but damning if they meet. The set of "approved" readers may be hideously ill-defined; when we fire off an email, most of us never give any thought to deciding whether we'd be upset if Jesse Ventura read it. It's okay to forward this message, but not if it makes its way back to Jim or Flora before next Thursday, unless they already know.
The list goes on and on. Institutions may be able to step in and sort through the smoking wreckage after an email privacy disaster, but they will never be able to promulgate a comprehensive set of policies in advance of such disasters. Such a set of policies are precisely what would be required for a technical solution to the CLICK-FORWARD problem of private emails turning public. Otherwise, we'll be left with the situation we're left with here: a great many almost-entirely innocent people glad they forwarded a letter and one almost-entirely innocent person very upset that her letter was so widely forwarded.
Faced with this choice, it's not hard to see which way people will jump. I doubt that even Laurie Garrett would give up her ability to forward at will in exchange for a complex and confusing anti-forwarding email client that will perhaps keep her musings on Davos from becoming public.
We're back at one of the great truisms of computer security: people make secure systems insecure. Not out of malice, or even out of laziness. People make secure systems insecure because insecure systems do what people want and secure systems don't. In this case, an insecure email system that does what "people" want does something Garrett doesn't want. What will she do? She'll move her mouse from "send" to "cancel," click to confirm, and go back to her day job. She may have been a silly goose not to expect that her letter would wind up on MetaFilter, but she won't be laying any more golden eggs, either.
In Which Certain More Theoretical Notions Are Advanced
So Laurie Garrett and MetaFilter are mutually peeved. So? Well, there's
something more at stake here than hurt feelings and email forwards.
Remember, Laurie Garrett didn't just write some random email about her cats and her day at work. She wrote a long and reasonably detailed inside account of one of the most Zeitgeisty events on the planet. You may or may not think that the World Economic Forum invitees are quite as important as they think they are, but they're hardly insignificant players on the world stage. You may or may not think that Garrett's account was useful and thoughtful, but you have to admit that it's sparked some decent discussion. I can't think of a better journalistic account of what goes on inside the WEF. Can you?
To quote jessamyn again:
To be honest, I would worry about a democracy that did not encourage the dissemination of information using the Internet as a medium.
Now this is a real problem. Laurie Garrett's writing to her friends is the sort of thing democracies like to encourage. Journalism, analysis, deliberative discourse, you know. MetaFilter's discussion, as fueled by the Internet distribution of her writing, is also the sort of thing democracies like to encourage. Citizen involvement, intermediate institutions, deliberative discourse, you know. But her democracy and their democracy seem to have some trouble playing nice. Such trouble isn't the sort of thing that squares very well with our ideas about how democracy ought to work.
If you like, you can read this whole brouhaha as a culture clash. On the one hand, you have Laurie Garrett and her circle of close friends, who apparently exchange long and factual letters by email and discuss the prevailing mood among world leaders. On the other hand, you have MetaFilter, in which bloggers and netizens from around the world offer rapid-fire commentary and snide remarks in response to a steady procession of links. Both seem an awful lot like communities involved in worthwhile civic engagement. But when you look at how they address each other, it's obvious that neither regards the other as a serious participant in the democratic exercise.
Thus, Garrett writes:
Do you imagine for a moment that the participants in the WEF—whether they be the CEOs of Amoco an IBM of the leaders of Amnesty International and OXFAM—waste their time with Internet chat rooms and discussions such as this? Do you actually believe, as you type your random thoughts in such Internet settings, that you are participating in Civilization? In Democracy? In changing your world?
Whereas rcade says:
The world doesn't need to wait around for professional journalists to carefully predigest the news for us any more. We're capable of collecting and analyzing information from a thousand different sources and directions, even an injudicious e-mail by a chatty Pulitzer Prize winner to at least one loose-lipped friend.
To these two feuding flamers and their dueling versions of democratic discussion, it seems to me, the only sensible response is "Do we have to choose?"
Unfortunately, I'm afraid this a question whose answer, increasingly, may be "yes." What happened here was that Garrett's group, with its version of discourse and its rules about forwarding, ran up against the MetaFilter gang, with its own very different notions of discourse and very different ethic of forwarding. Who brought them together? The Internet, better known the very same communications tool both of them were using to engage in their local forms of democratic activity.
Remember how everyone keeps saying that distance is irrelevant on the Internet? Well, this is what happens when distance disappears. You wind up right next to the damndest people. The problem isn't that you can hear your loud neighbors; the problem is that they can hear you. These communities are having some serious boundary issues. When you speak in one, it's no longer so clear which community you're addressing. Theorists of democracy are all over the map on the nature of interest groups and whether intra-group conversations are good or bad. But Laurie Garrett's experience is especially striking, because it suggests both that the Internet encourages the formation of virtual communities with divergent norms and interests and that it brings these groups into contact -- and conflict.
Remember how everyone keeps saying that the Internet blurs the line between private and public? Well, here you go. Case study. A letter meant to be "private" is interpreted as "public;" it then becomes public because people think of it as such. When the author complains, her status as a journalist becomes a reason for claiming that she should expect her "personal" writings to be held to the same standards as her "public" ones (quote from dmt):
Your humiliation is right and deserved. Stand by what you've written or don't write it - as writer you should know better than to commit falsehoods (i.e. factual inaccuracies) to paper, regardless of their recipient.
At the same time, note that Garrett's original email was a "private" letter about the World Economic Forum, a "private" organization of "public" figures. Her attendance was part of the WEF's carefully-calculated media strategy. Her email spread so widely, in part, because it reflected information that the WEF was willing, presumably eager, to have distributed. Her email was able to cross the bloodstream precisely because it was never wholly "private" or "public" to begin with. Put another way, social norms fell down on the job here because it was highly ambiguous which set of norms ought to govern.
Remember how everyone keeps saying that the Internet gives every author an unlimited audience? Well, perhaps not every author wants an unlimited audience. There are some things Laurie Garrett would rather not write than let the Internet read.
Actually, that's not strictly true. Laurie Garrett may still write letters of this sort, but she won't commit them to email. And as I said at the outset, when Garrett refuses to use email for a letter perfectly suited to email, something has been lost.
In Which the Nature of the Aforementioned Loss is Made Clear
But that's not strictly true, either. The situation is even worse than Garrett realizes, or will be soon. She would like to go back to 1979 longhand, but she can't. She can only go back to 2003 longhand, which is a very different animal. Anyone with enough time could transcribe her letter and fire off hundreds of copies by email. Or they could just shove it in a fax machine. Or they could scan it and post the images on the web. Or they could wait a few years and run some impending generation of OCR software on the letter. Same result.
As these digitizations become easier, the same CLICK-FORWARD social regime that governs email will make ever-greater inroads into the paper world. How long until we see a tablet PC with a built-in full-page scanner? Ten years? Less? Who then will object to scanning a letter? Even just so I can show my sisters? SCAN-FORWARD is coming; when it arrives, where then will the Laurie Garretts of the world turn? The problem isn't just that the Internet is leaky; the Internet makes everything leaky.
In the face of this prediction, Garrett's choice becomes much starker. She can write for the world, or not at all. There is no middle ground. Perhaps she will write for the world -- spell-check every how-are-you and organize her holiday greetings as inverted pyramids. Perhaps she'll write as she's always written, knowing full well that the world will make fun of her grammar. Or perhaps she will decide the game isn't worth the candle and keep her thoughts to herself. I can see her, or people in her shoes, trying all of these options. Any which way, someone loses.
When Laurie Garrett modifies her style to be MetaFilter-friendly, her intended readers lose, because these unwanted interlopers have come between her and the words she would have chosen for her true audience. When she shrugs and lets her personal thoughts leak to the world, she loses, because the connection and trust involved in private communications have been burnt away. In both of these cases, the sphere of the "private" has suffered from its Internet-induced collision with the "public."
But when Laurie Garrett stops writing entirely, we all lose, because it is the "public" realm that has suffered from the collision. Something interesting and useful has gone unsaid. Not something useful to us individually. Something useful to us as a society, grist for the democratic mill. In jessamyn's words:
Maintaining a free society requires an informed populace.
It's easy to claim that the "problem" is an author who doesn't believe in democracy, or a community that doesn't value privacy. But I don't think every of these claims is the case. There's something deeper and more troubling at work. The populace, by the very act of informing itself, has cut off a source of its information.
I don't know about you, but I'm worried.
Epilogue: In Which the Presence of a Pachyderm and a Predatory Feline Are Acknowledged
It's time for me to come clean. There's an elephant in this room. I've been avoiding mentioning it because once you point out the elephant in the corner, nobody can talk about anything else. I want this discussion to end with the elephant, not begin with it. But now the time has come to deal with the elephant that is copyright.
Laurie Garrett, after all, has a copyright in her written works. One can argue about the terms on which she licensed her email -- she did, after all, send it, without disclaimer, to an undisclosed list of friends -- but the baseline assumption would still be that she retains copyright to her words. Every subsequent forward was a prima facie infringement on her copyright. And by the familiar copyright legal logic of the last few years, she should -- in theory -- be able to cease-and-desist her way into having that letter redacted from every web site, deleted from every errant inbox.
To state this possibility is to refute it. From Garrett's perspective, the damage is already done. None of the unkind comments will be retracted, no one who has read the letter will unread it. Cease-and-desist letters are a great way to lose old friends and make new enemies. An email is so small, so easy to encode and disguise, so close to a pure meme, that she doesn't stand a chance even of identifying all the copies out there, let alone of enjoining them out of existence. Copyright law is not about to solve Laurie Garrett's problems. It's just the wrong tool for the job.
But that's not to say that copyright isn't relevant. This whole microdrama has played itself out in the elephant's shadow. Laurie Garrett is in the position of the music labels; the PH discussion list was her Napster. She wants to restrict distribution of her words to certain people -- close friends -- and what's so wrong with that? But you might equally well say that novelists want to restrict distribution of their words to certain people -- paying customers -- and what's so wrong with that? Any solution you cook up to help Laurie Garrett out of her jam is going to help some other people out of a jam, too. The RIAA, for instance.
I think many MetaFiltrians were aware of this similarity. The hostility some expressed towards Garrett reminds me of nothing so much as anti-RIAA rants. Even those who were more personally sympathetic towards her share in the ideological commitment to free distribution of information. Hard cases make bad law, goes the saying; one author's hardship, says MetaFilter, is no reason to abandon a principled stance. Information wants to be free, will be free, and this is good.
I'm not so sure. For all her lack of tact, Laurie Garrett is a much more sympathetic poster child than the Universal Music Group. She's in the self-censorship game to preserve her sense of privacy, not for the money. If we say "no" to her, we're saying "no" to the lovers and the dreamers. I don't want to go there unless we really really have to. Do we? Like I said, I'm not sure.
On a technical level, privacy and copyright are isomorphic problems. Information is to be shared with certain people and not with others. From this observation have come some interesting ideas. (For example, Jonathan Zittrain's essay on "Trusted Privication" suggests using digital rights management to keep electronic medical records private. But this overlap has unfortunate consequences, as well, because many people's ethical intuitions cut very differently across these two problems. A technically consistent pair of responses to them may feel wildly inconsistent as a matter of right and wrong. If credit-card databases were widely available on KaZaA, how many people who now believe in file-sharing would demand KaZaA's immediate shutdown?
The conventional distinction between privacy and copyright is that the information is used in different ways. Copyright violations tend to involve many individuals violating the rights of a few large entities; privacy violations tend to reverse this picture. This asymmetry makes it possible to enforce privacy protections. You can stop John Poindexter in his tracks by prohibiting him from maintaining a big database. You can go out, find major commercial violators, and slap them with big fines. (This is the idea behind Larry Lessig's spam bounties.) The traditional privacy violator invades privacy wholeseale; "copyright infringement" today connotes something much more individualistic.
Modern, Internet-enabled, peer-to-peer privacy violators break down this convenient distinction. There is only one Laurie Garrett, but a great many people have seen a letter she never meant them to see. There was no central chokepoint, no privacy-intrusion clearinghouse. Our legal system can handle (or could, if it tried harder) the big boys who want to be big brothers, too; it's not so well-equipped to stop people from hitting the "forward" button. Indeed, for all the reasons above, privacy spills like Garrett's are much harder to conceptualize, contain, and prevent than copyright leaks. Ten years down the road, we could have a system in which music-traders go to jail but personal emails are never safe from public eyes. It's hard to hide an elephant, after all.
But enough with the doom and gloom. For now, at least, most private emails stay private; most expectations are honored. Laurie Garrett's plight is striking because it is not yet the norm. We trust email, not because it promises us anything in trade for our trust, but because it hasn't burned us. Too badly. Yet. As long as the spills and leaks are rare, we are likely to cross our fingers and hope for the best.
Stupid? Perhaps not. I'm reminded of form contracts. You know, the interminable pages of small print you pretend to read, the shrinkwrap software licenses you click through without hesitation, the bank documents you sign in the belief that the dread soul-forfeit clause will never be turned against you. As Karl Llewellyn, the great scholar of contracts, wrote:
But power, like greed, if it does not always corrupt, goes easily to the head. So that the form-agreements tend either at once or over the years, and often by whole lines of trade, into a massive and terrifying jug-handled character; the one party lays his head into the mouth of a lion -- either, and mostly, without reading the fine print, or occasionally in hope and expectation (not infrequently solid) that it will be a sweet and gentle lion.
Who is Laurie Garrett? She's the one who got bit.
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Ever heard of Palladium? (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Thursday, February 20 @ 00:44:26 EST | it's technically impossible to give someone a piece of information without also empowering them to redistribute that information.
Actually, making this possible is the whole point of Palladium and similar initiatives.
Of course, you could take advantage of the analog hole and copy it letter-for-letter by hand onto paper. (If you used a computer it could ask Palladium Central if the text looked familiar.) But this makes it far more difficult than the CLICK-FORWARD world your piece discusses. |
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 1) by fam on Thursday, February 20 @ 10:27:53 EST (User Info | Send a Message) | What do you think is the distinction between Laurie’s problem and that posed by unauthorized peer-to-peer file swapping? They seem to be isomorphic on a technical level as well. While Laurie’s problem has elements of privacy and copyright, do you think that p2p swapping is strictly a copyright problem? Or, perhaps, there are unique social norms associated with e-mail that are absent from KaZaA, etc.? Or is crossing the “bloodstream” or reaching escape velocity easier with e-mail because it is far more widespread and mainstream? I think the distinction, if one really exists, is more of a push-pull problem. P2P swapping is active by nature – you seek material out. E-mail, however, is passive – material seeks you out. |
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The issue, as always, is the mismatch between capability and culture. (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Thursday, February 20 @ 12:51:24 EST | The problem is that it is impossible to legislate away possibilities.
Consider our current problems with nuclear weapons proliferation. Because is it possible to construct nuclear weapons, many countries do. International law makes little difference. We're faced with a choice: rearguard action (essentially policing proliferation) or accepting a world in which dozens of small, unstable nations have nukes.
I can imagine a multi-valent society in which complex networks of treaties stabilize a fifty-nuclear-power world. What I can't imagine is our path to such a world, and I think this is the balance we struggle for: accepting the inevitability of social conformance to technological capability, but trying to hold the process up long enough to survive the transition.
It took most of three hundred years to stabilize society after the invention of the printing press broke the absolute power of the Vatican. I think our main purpose at this juncture has to focus on slowing change: not trying to fix the problem for keeps but rather making time for people to learn how the new world works and gradually evolve solutions.
It's tough to accept that we face problems insoluble by any single individual or agency, and insoluble within the span of our lifetimes. Simply living with the problem and muddling through is contrary to our nature, but it's how human culture handles anything too big to be finished in a single generation.
Our imperative is not to screw things up too badly with shortsited interventions, so our much-more-capable children have a shot at the problem. What's the right solution to this? Right now, sleeping with your friend's wife is (usually) considered a Heinous Social Offense - no legislation exists or is required to sanction such an action. It's seen as a betrayal of trust and widely socially enforeced. One who does such a thing is persona-non-grata for years in many circles.
That's a social convention which evolved a long, long time ago, and it addresses infidelity better than any law could hope to do (although, of course, for the married party the law takes a hand). Given time, perhaps forwarding a private email will take on a similar miasma, marking the person who does it as "one not to be trusted". That's an effective approach, and probably results in a much more pleasant world than the crypto-fascism of Palladium.
Vinay |
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 1) by Ernest_Miller on Thursday, February 20 @ 12:51:46 EST (User Info | Send a Message) http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/ | You mention several times that if Garrett no longer writes informal missives that is a loss. But a loss to whom? Not being part of Garrett's social circles, her decision to no longer send email to her friends is no loss to me. |
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- Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet by Anonymous on Friday, February 28 @ 17:35:59 EST
- Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet by Anonymous on Friday, February 28 @ 18:33:31 EST
- Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet by Anonymous on Friday, February 28 @ 21:01:22 EST
- Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet by Anonymous on Saturday, March 01 @ 09:41:28 EST
- Her 'surprise' seems a little disingenuous... by Anonymous on Saturday, March 01 @ 18:18:31 EST
- Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet by Anonymous on Saturday, March 08 @ 23:27:30 EST
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 1) by mathowie on Thursday, February 20 @ 13:07:10 EST (User Info | Send a Message) http://a.wholelottanothing.org/ | This was a fantastic, thorough analysis of the situation. There is definitely some shaky middle ground between a total techno-libertarian world that treats all information as free and a luddite pen-and-paper-only world where all information is privileged, and I agree that social norms between circles of friends and various levels of technology are fast changing.
While my kneejerk response was to defend MetaFilter as a place where people should be able to discuss things they find online freely, I am sympathetic to the embarrassment of an accidental leak via email forward. Her original letter is great, and I agree that if she no longer sent similar stuff out, it'd potentially be a loss for all of us.
Of course, this discussion brings up something I've wondered about since it began: How on earth does InternalMemos.com survive? Not only is private business information treated as public to anyone who visits the site, access to much of it is charged to the reader by a third party with no relation to the original writer. |
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 1) by walrus on Thursday, February 20 @ 14:20:20 EST (User Info | Send a Message) http://www.d-log.net | This was a deep and thought-provoking article. Lots to think and talk about. Since I was quoted here, I wrote a response to some of the issues you raise on my own site. |
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Mandatory Public Disclosure (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Thursday, February 20 @ 17:42:33 EST | While I agree with much of what the MeFi people are saying, I have to assume that they wouldn't take my request for a copy of each of their personal mailboxes seriously.
To take their arguments to the extreme, do they support mandatory public disclosure of all communications? That's government interference! Sure, in some cases. So what if MS decided to incorporate that into Palladium. Now it's a company forcing the issue. Does that make it better? Oh, you want privacy. Oh, you are afraid that the government will track everything you say. I have to agree.
There has to be room for privacy in our future even if the Internet makes it easy to not have privacy.
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Friday, February 21 @ 01:16:41 EST | How timely!
You mentioned medical records? A hospital in Ottawa is trying to find out how some of its medical test results ended up on the back of a real estate flyer in Toronto this week.
http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/02/20/flyers_mamm030220 |
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Friday, February 21 @ 14:51:25 EST | I find one thing to be very interesting by its omission. Email is not just information; it is communication. This means that the explicit information included in the email is wrapped in a context that includes the sender and the receiver. This context ALWAYS exists; no communication occurs without it. Here we have a case in which a communication attempted in one context has landed in another.
How important is this? It is very important. The author of a message writes with a specific context in mind and chooses idioms and norms that rely on a given context to be understood. One of the clashes that I see here is that a message composed for a small circle of friends relies on the mutual understanding, background, and history to be properly understood.
The same thought expressed in private journal, a whispered confidence to a friend, a written letter to a family member, an email to a select group of friends, a posting on a web site or a remark in a chat room will be phrased differently. Doctors speak to other doctors, lawyers speak to other lawyers, engineers speak to other engineers and accountants speak to other accountants in ways that are specific to the group that they are in. This is not surprising - it is human.
So where does that get us in this discussion? I fear that, as messages are spread widely and indicriminantly, communication will NOT increase. Instead it will decrease because a context that an author expected no longer exists. |
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 1) by NiceProblem on Saturday, February 22 @ 01:08:28 EST (User Info | Send a Message) | This is way too much hand-waving over a basic problem: Dead-tree journos hate and misunderstand most aspects of the dynamic Net because the Net threatens their status. Instead of slaving away in a discredited college major, clawing their way to the top of a spavined pecking order and then perching atop the heap and submitting sheets of approved wisdom to editors who polish the results, Netheads and webloggers just write. Readers decide what they want to read/ignore, value/devalue. It's all horrifying. No wonder most "real" journos turn into clumsily patronizing hypocrites when they confront the Net. What else could they do, admit they're no better than some kid on Blogger? |
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odo'ital (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Saturday, February 22 @ 17:37:14 EST | it's kind of like we're all odo, changelings in a pre-"great link" state of island solid(itude :)s before leaving shore to rejoin the ocean! |
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Saturday, February 22 @ 18:10:09 EST | This is an excellent article written by Grimmelman. Just a few points I'd like to address.
First, although Grimmelman mentions technological determinism, he does not specifically mention the concept of binary DEFAULT. If you surf a number of weblogs you will come across a notice on some of them along the following lines: E-mail is welcome; please note that any e-mail is presumed to be publishable here UNLESS you specify otherwise. Unless a person is new to the internet, it is presumed that they would know this. Someone like a journalist is presumed to know this.
I think that designating public/private is an overly simplistic classification. There have always been various 'zones.' Clearly, the MetaFilter habituees repurposed this document from the PH zone for their own pursuit of iconoclasm. Their focus on the issue of mediation is a disingenuous denial of their repurposing of the letter.
Lastly, I was not able to read the original letter; perhaps it was pulled off the net or I just couldn't access it. I form the impression from the adjective 'chatty' that it had a Warm Narrative VOICE. I would suggest that Garrett might want to revisit the issue of Voice; how much control does she exercise over the voice she uses in her professional writing and whether she might want to incorporate more warmth in her professional voice. This issue is a biggy and too complex to explore here, but when she calms down, it's just something she might want to think about a little. |
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 1) by ArnoldKling on Sunday, February 23 @ 22:16:42 EST (User Info | Send a Message) http://corante.com/bottomline | This is a great essay, and the issue of privacy spills of email is important. Another example I heard of recently was a trade association which was trying internally to draft a response to a hostile constituent group, and someone accidentally cc'ed the constituent group in the course of the email discussion. The trade association head was surprised that there is no email program with the technical capabilities to keep this from happening.
This is probably not relevant to any of the points in the essay, but my sense is that the attendees of Davos come back with a major self-importance hard-on (or the female equivalent). The theme song at the WEF must be "We know something that ordinary peons don't, and that makes us special." I sense that attitude coming from Laurie Garrett, and so I happen to think that she got exactly what she deserved.
I realize that does not mitigate the generic issue.
I think that en passant this essay skewers Creative Commons. See this post |
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Friday, February 28 @ 17:30:55 EST | The proposed Microsoft Digital Rights Management software policies and User rights will allow the original author of documents to limit its distribution to the intended recipients. Perhaps this unfortunate incident is an example of how the dreaded MS DRM technology may actually be beneficial to individuals as well as companies.
PS: /. RULZ!!
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An similar previous transition; Intentional migration of form (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Friday, February 28 @ 17:41:51 EST | Two thoughts I did not see in my brief scan of this page:
(1) Usenet news and mailinglists went through a privacy transition much like the one being discussed for email. The transition is now quite mature, and thus might be a source of insight. I'll leave that for others. For those unfamiliar with it - usenet news groups and mailinglists were largely an ephemeral media only a decade or so ago. Some lists had archives, but one generally was aware of this when composing notes. Most groups and lists did not. Then along came the web, and 15-year-old late-night notes to a small "private" (as in, known familiar membership) communities... were now turning up on google searches for one's name. There was a bit of short term "taken a back"ness and consternation, but archiving is now pervasive, and it's not clear the style of participation has changed a great deal.
(2) The described disappearance of last name and email header may have been intentional, principled, and an example of how all this issue can be dealt with. I will sometimes forward a mailinglist email after stripping list and/or author identifying information, because while the email's content seems appropriate to forward further, the existence of the list, or the author's association with the content, seems inappropriate for a larger audience not part of the lists's community. In the case discussed, perhaps the error lay in insufficient stripping of information? Imagine a continuum from full email forwarding, to forwarding without identifiers, through increasingly intense rewriting or paraphrasing, to expression of the ideas largely divorced from their original form. Various documents will tend to have a transition at different points in the spectrum, a transition from the author "objecting greatly" to propagation, to "objecting", to "feeling it's not a big deal". Some will mind even the ideas themselves becoming available (eg, confidential information). But mostly, at some point the problem goes away. As an aside, the copyright "elephant" only extends part way across the continuum, and thus can only be part of such a solution.
Bottom line, changes in privacy expectation may be more significant than changes in authorial practice, and more nuanced sharing/propagation of information seems likely to be part of how these issues are addressed.
Note that spoken conversation and visible day-to-day behavior will go through similar transitions as wearable computing makes individual audio and video capture more prevalent. |
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Friday, February 28 @ 17:55:18 EST | Sorry, I have no sympathy for Garrett.
Intellectual property is what's in your head. Once it's outside your head and outside your physical control, it is no longer property and no longer yours. Sure, you can encrypt it and retain control - as long as someone who can decrypt it allows you to. Or you can require a contract not to disclose - as long as the second party to the contract agrees to obey the contract. Both of these aspects are only "delaying tactics".
But once you've been betrayed by a decryptor or a breach of contract, now do you go back and blame all of technology because you didn't use a quill pen and the Pony Express?
That does not make sense....
And if you react irrationally and stop using the Net, how is that supposed to overcome the entire history and economic impact of email technology such that we should be worried about it?
That, too, does not make sense.
No, what we have here is a journalist who did not understand either her friends or the dynamics of the Net. What I am more interested in is this: compared to any "official" report she made on the WEF, what were the differences to her "unofficial" report? What was left out? What was censored? What did she drop because she was concerned that it would reflect poorly on her journalism or her personal biases vis-a-vis the WEF?
In other words, is this a problem with "privacy" or is this a problem with her perception of her social or economic or professional status as a journalist? That she was caught out uttering words that weren't edited by editors with a political axe to grind of their own?
Did anyone see a report on the WEF that agreed with her perceptions that everyone there was freaked out, anti-American, anti-Iraq-war, etc.? Or were those other reports edited to be vague and banal and bland like most reports of such conferences?
Is it possible that her off-the-cuff report was MORE accurate and valuable than any official report she made - or anyone else made?
Is the heat she might be taking for that possibly related to her complaint?
All interesting questions of more relevance I think than whether email is "baaad"...
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- Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet by Anonymous on Friday, February 28 @ 19:32:00 EST
- Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet by Anonymous on Friday, February 28 @ 19:46:49 EST
- Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet by Anonymous on Friday, February 28 @ 20:11:25 EST
- Shame the leaker didnt wait until her report was 'in print'... by Anonymous on Friday, February 28 @ 20:35:28 EST
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interesting, but you people read too much into things (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Friday, February 28 @ 18:47:11 EST | All that text argueing that the only thing that keeps private emails private is social pressure, and then go on to say that its disapearing and there is no good way to solve it. Wrong. I say that is the way it should be. People judge you by the people you are friends with, and when you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas. When I send a private email to a close circle of friends, they know that I sent that email to the people I wanted to see it. If they really want their sister to see it, they ask me. If I grab a few jokes and write a humorous and fairly anonymous email to my friends, well then they can paper their bathroom with it for all I care. The distinction is in the context. A private email is meant to be kept private, a friendly email is just that. Just a friendly email, and anything done with it is implied as fine. So her problem is in her choice of friends. When they forewarded that, just to Aunt Merle, if they did it without her permission, they violated the trust they had. I mean really, everybody has that one friend that cannot keep a secret if their life depended on it, and you learn to not tell them things you dont want the free world to know. She decided she could trust them, and then was proven wrong. The real tragedy here? That a large reasonably well written article on LawMeme was given front page views on slashdot, and it basically amounts to cries of the sky falling for the worlds sense of privacy. |
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Friday, February 28 @ 19:22:48 EST | osiris@urbanna.net ...
Very good food for thought. I can see that the lady who wrote the letter might be embarrassed by its publication. I can not see why she does not now realize what a powerful tool is available at her disposal, indeed at the disposal of any of us.
This ability to publish ones opinion so widely with so little effort is enabeling, not disableing.
There will always be those who would correct your grammar, check your spelling, and make trite little comments about word usage. So what? Those are the people who wish they could write *content* as she has written content and it really is content that matters.
Her letter was an excellent and informative read, that she did not just publish it in some forum and be done with it, is the larger loss.
It is a new world now. Information will escape its bounds. It always has, hasn't it? We won't know "who shot John" for some while but even that will be published before I become too old to care.
She, and everyone else, it seems, over reacts. If you want privacy, understand your medium and ensure that privacy. If that means choosing another medium, so be it.
She may think she is going to escew this technology, but she won't. She will just be more circumspect about her handling of information in the future. No matter what she may believe she will do today, tomorrow she will be back at that keyboard typing another E-Mail. Why? Because it is the easiest way to communicate.
Two technologies made the Internet interesting to the lay person, E-Mail and Web services. Both are information content providers. Both are trivially easy to use.
Privacy is achievable but it is also encumbering. It always has been. Security is about slowing (or stopping) the free flow of information. Privacy and security are synonymous in this context.
Yes Ms. Garrett got bit, who hasn't been? She said absolutely nothing which will upset or offend any reasoning person in that group of billionairs. She had a pleasurable time, and her leaked mail will have done nothing more than bring them a few smiles.
Ms. Garrett, ya done jus fine. Don't let a few folks who wish they could have such an experience drag you down. They can't speel ether.
LOL
:)
-m- |
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Friday, February 28 @ 20:36:00 EST | People, serious and thoughtful people, will stop using email for certain matters, if this is what happens when they use it. What is more, this sort of letter -- a fact-filled but informal update on interesting international issues as seen from the inside -- is a paradigmatic example of what email is supposed to be for.
Remember that our President stopped using email the day he took office? He wanted so much to control who saw his comments that he stopped emailing. |
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IPv6?? (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Friday, February 28 @ 21:24:32 EST | Setting the do-not-forward bit on your email is useless unless email clients respect that bit. Therefore: Palladium. Therefore: the broadcast flag. Therefore: certificate authorities. Therefore: the IPv6 Forum. Therefore: the DVD Content Control Association. All of these institutions are devoted to the widespread distribution of compliance. They encourage and/or coerce the adoption of their preferred technologies in many different ways, but the underlying idea is always the same: create a forum within which certain rules of behavior are enforced at the architectural level.
Can someone fill me in here? Why is the IPv6 Forum lumped in with these other loathsome authotitarian groups? I mean, what does IPv6 do that changes people's behavior? This makes no sense to me. Its not as if people or IP addresses will be more easily trackable with IPv6. Its not as if there's DRM or crypto built in. You can do everything with IPv6 that you can do today with IPv4. Whats the deal, what am I missing?
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- Re: IPv6?? by Anonymous on Friday, February 28 @ 21:34:26 EST
- Re: IPv6?? by Anonymous on Friday, February 28 @ 22:30:57 EST
- Re: IPv6?? by Anonymous on Wednesday, March 05 @ 04:09:14 EST
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Friday, February 28 @ 22:09:11 EST | Take a deep breath. Now exhale. There, doesn't that feel better. Relax. Nothing has happened. nothing has changed.
My great-grandfather lived in a little village in eastern europe. It was isolated. There was no technology. Not even running water. Everyone knew everyone and all of their kin. Secrets were things that you did not tell to anyone, everything else everbody knew.
If somebody did something really unusual, went to the provincial capital and meet an official, and he wrote a letter to a friend in town; It would be all over town in hours. If he wanted it to be a secret, he would keep his mouth shut.
See nothing has changed. Nothing. Ms. Garrett has learned this lesson the hard way, but it is not a new one.
There are no technological fixes. The "analog hole" cannot be pluged. Political fixes are as old as time and just as predictable. Tyrants have always tried to control information flows. Is that what you want?
Try the breathing exercise again. Now, inhale. |
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Is there so little respect for privacy? (Score: 1) by kbad (carch@carch.com) on Friday, February 28 @ 22:41:01 EST (User Info | Send a Message) | I'm frankly shocked at a lot of the comments here. Perhaps I shouldn't be, considering this place was just slashdotted...
You know, not everyone is a techno-libertarian "information wants to be free" 21st century hippie. When Garrett was talking in her response about paper mail and 1979, she wasn't talking about the technological difference between then and now, but rather the ideological difference.
To me, the line was crossed at a very specific point. The first person who forwarded her email to a publicly available mailing list did so with complete disrespect for the author. Since when does anyone have the right to expose to the world, without the author's permission, information which was sent to them privately?
Are things really so wild-west in the information frontier that there are no more walls or doors or whispers?
The thing about this discussion I don't understand is the intellectual voyeurism everyone seems to be asserting as their right. Because the internet allows us to covertly sniff packets and intercept transmissions and forward emails that we have no right to forward, does that mean all those things are now our rights?
I also wanted to respond to one specific point in the thread here ...
"If you surf a number of weblogs you will come across a notice on some of them along the following lines: E-mail is welcome; please note that any e-mail is presumed to be publishable here UNLESS you specify otherwise. Unless a person is new to the internet, it is presumed that they would know this. Someone like a journalist is presumed to know this."
This is the default case for those weblogs. It is most certainly not the default case when sending private correspondence that the recipient should presume that they can publish the contents. Someone like a journalist, or even someone entirely different than a journalist, expects their privacy to be respected. |
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Everyone here is missing the point. (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Friday, February 28 @ 23:22:11 EST | I find it astounding that so many people are missing the true crux of the disagreement. Laurie wrote a private e-mail and sent it to a small number of friends. It ended up on a public mailing list. These are not in the same category! Private e-mails are private in that they are meant for their named recipients. If those recipients choose to share those words with a few more of their friends, that is still a private exchange. It can be worked out between friends. However, when someone chooses to post that private e-mail to a public mailing or message board, that person has crossed the boundary between private and public. It is that person who has violated the author's trust. That person is the traitor.
So many people here seem to see the issue as if she wrote it, the world can read it. That viewpoint betrays an incredible lack of both wisdom and social skills. To put this in perspective, think of the private e-mail as a letter. If you receive a letter, you assume that the letter is meant for you. You might repeat portions of it in one of your own letters; that is up to you. But a mailing list/discussion group is not analogous to a letter. It is a poster hung up on a wall. No one considered socially apt would ever post a letter on a wall in public.
Why do people so often lose all sense of perspective as soon as the Internet becomes involved in the issue? This is not some new social dynamic never before seen. This is merely people not seeing the difference between public and private discussion forums. |
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Privacy in the global village (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Saturday, March 01 @ 01:01:24 EST | I grew up in a small town. Privacy does not exist in a small town. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing, if not immediately then at the speed of gossip. This is what happened to Laurie. She said something to someone, they repeated it to someone else, and the next thing you know everyone in the village knew about it.
This is the natural state of humanity. It's only recently that cities were invented, where I define a city to be a group of people large enought that the "everybody knows your name" property fails. Privacy doesn't exist in villages, but then again neither does crime. In this sense, cities are a temporary aberation, because mass communications is making the world into a global village. Soon, we will be able to identify everyone we casually pass on the street, maybe by wearable webcams and facial identification algorithms, maybe by bluetooth-enabled id badges, quite possibly by a combination of both of these and more.
If you see someone on the street corner selling drugs, you'll be able to identify them. Ditto if you see them entering an adult book store or an abortion clinic. And just as quickly, you'll be able to pass the information along to people whom you think would be interested, be they the police, a spouse, or a faith-based group. At that point, crime and privacy will again cease to exist, and the "good old days" will return. |
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Saturday, March 01 @ 06:30:37 EST | I happened to see the story at /. The privacy/public issues notwithstanding, I think Laurie's story was very good to read and as a World citizen (netizen?) I have the right to know what is going on. The story served that purpose very well. Even more so, because it has a kind of unpolished frankness. However, I understand Laurie's disappointment. I surely wouldn't like to see my private emails in public.
I woud like to see Laurie have a weblog. |
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: A possible technical solution (Score: 1) by mbone on Saturday, March 01 @ 10:14:44 EST (User Info | Send a Message) http://www.multicasttech.com | It seems to me that a possible technical solution here would be to digitally sign all e-mail. A digitial signature is a cryptographic hash of a message with a private key, so that
- No one but the sender can replicate the signature and
- If even one bit of the message is changed, the signature is invalid.
Now, this breaks the problem into two parts :
If a message - say the Garrett e-mail - is sent around with headers stripped, etc., she can just deny it. ("That looks like a message of mine, but it has been changed by someone else, so I can take no responsibility for its contents.")
If the message "escapes" with the signature, then I cannot deny it, but who to blame is pretty clear (or at least limited). If I send "Joe Blow" a message with text saying "This message is for Joe Blow only and is not for retransmission", and that text is part of the signature, then Joe can distribute it signed, but only at the cost of exposing himself to shame and ridicule.
If I want to send a "deniable" message in this scheme, I just don't sign it.
Of course, _nothing_ will stop certain messages from being dynamite, but this is not really a technological problem. A married man who is worried about disclosure should no more send a
X-rated e-mail to his mistress than he should get out a goose quill pen and write one out long hand... |
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Sunday, March 02 @ 14:03:11 EST | I would have posted this over on MetaFilter but a thing comes up to say that all new people can't post.
I would like to say, however, that some people need to get some manners. The elephant in the room thing is a bunch of crap. And the Karl Llewellyn, great scholar that he was or wasn't, as far as I'm concerned doesn't really apply here at all.
You all can quote all the scholars you want, be as pompous and arrogant as you want, stroke your big egos as much as you want but it all comes down to being just nice and kind sometimes and frankly, I don't think the Almighty Internet lends itself to that. And furthermore, if being nice and kind is supposed to be sacrificed now that we're all in the "community" and we're all going to be so much "smarter" who give a flying you know what?
Give me a break you all sound like a bunch of pompous idiots. |
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Monday, March 03 @ 10:02:46 EST | When she send the first Email non PGP or otherwise encrypted she made a fault. Looks like she cant admit that. Now she tried and put the blame on everybody else. Doesnt work for me. Private messages which are not encrypted are no private messages. Even the damn NSA can read them, so what? |
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Tuesday, March 04 @ 17:00:08 EST | Perhaps Laurie would find the utility snowdrop helpful in the future. |
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Friday, March 07 @ 16:17:36 EST | I think one of the key differences between a handwritten letter and email is the exactness with which e-mail get forwarded. With a hand written letter (unless it is copied as the author suggests) another one gets written and original message gets retold. Much like the spoken word, the input message and output as it runs through string people get translated and revised. In this way the message that gets public (if it were to do so) would be a paraphrase of a paraphrase of a paraphrase.
On the other hand, clicking the forward-button creates an exact duplication of the original message (unless someone edits it), which means that there is no translation and no paraphrasing. I believe this to be an important distinction. With a hand written letter, the information may still have propagated, just not by replication but by retelling.
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Saturday, March 08 @ 13:50:29 EST | I think a point has been missed in all of this. Ego. What really upsets Ms. Garrett is that she was treated exactly as reporters treat other people. If she was doing a story on X Corp. and someone sent her the personal emails of the CEO she wouldn't have any problem with looking through them or using them.
Reporters have the world view that anything you communicate with them is automatically on the record, unless you specify otherwise. But anything they say (or do, or write) is to be considered off the record unless otherwise noted. |
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Re: Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Tuesday, March 11 @ 06:14:15 EST | I wonder if Ms Garrett cares as much about the discussion that (perhaps) follows the publication of one of her articles in Newsday? I doubt that any of them have generated as much interest and feedback as this. I for one found the original e-mail to be a fascinating and informative look at an event which I am unlikely to ever attend. The ensuing furore over privacy, copyright and the whys and wherefores of communication in this brave new world is even more compelling. As a writer, Ms Garrett has already crossed the barrier of private communication between friends - her post 911 missives bear witness to this. She is already being paid to tell the world what she sees at events like Davos and the fact she is getting so uptight about the distribution of her private thoughts on the matter suggests she has been getting some behind the scenes flak from her editors because they missed out on a piece of real, informative journalism. The rest of us, who increasingly garner our news information from alternative sources, should consider ourselves lucky to get the scoop. |
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All this boils down to... (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Wednesday, March 12 @ 14:14:18 EST | All this boils down to is whether the author has, and should have, the ability to select their audience. Many of the deliberations on here seem to force this out of context; the issue is not 'public' information being kept hidden from the masses. It is whether Laurie, as the author, should have the ability to decide who reads her writing.
Do I feel sorry for Laurie? A little. Though she likely contributed to forming the general the 'social norm' for her group that approved of forwarding of articles by likely forwarding many other public articles and other information on to these same individuals. After all this is a 'CLICK-FORWARD' world we are living in. This article however comes across as trying to point to some infringement or collision between groups such as Laurie's friends and the MeFi community. There was no such collision; it was a willingly shared document. The issue for Laurie is that, as the author, she did not wish that this article leave her intended audience. Her intended audience though, having been freely supplied with this information, chose to pass it along freely. There is no issue with e-mail technology, copyrights, freedom of speech, or p2p file transferring. This is simply another issue of miscommunication and human blunders. Such things have been happening since the very beginning of beings communicating and making decisions.
Also I must wonder how it can be considered that multiple recipient mail is truly private or personal? Does not a communication lose is privacy the larger the audience becomes? Based on what I've read it's easy to assume there were more than 2 recipients of the original message. Would you consider a written letter private if you made photocopies and sent it to multiple people? Does that not encourage the spreading of the message rather than encouraging it be kept private?
Will I feel any more worried when sending off an e-mail to my friends now than before reading these articles and posts on this issue? No, because I still have confidence in my friends and the 'social norms' we have established in our communications. Personally I don't forward lots of stuff on to friends, I don't send full news articles, long written articles of my own, pages of jokes and other information in e-mails. Should I feel the need to make them aware of some article, some joke etc. I will give them a link, or tell them where to get it in some other way. Therefore it is not my information they will forward should they decide, so they are used to not forwarding and receiving forwards from me. I do *not* contribute to his 'CLICK-FORWARD' mentality. Laurie as she proves my sending a somewhat private letter to multiple recipients and at least implying this is regular does indeed contribute to the very thing she is currently railing against. You can have it one way or the other, likely not both. And even then thanks to human error there's going to be cases that go wrong. If you don't want your group of contacts forwarding on your messages, than stop forwarding on mass mail messages to the group. That is not how you would establish the norm you are looking for.
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