According to Born Digital, “Many Digital Natives incorrectly perceive that their conversations online are far more private than they are. In other words, there’s new incentive to post information about yourself online (social norms suggest that more information about yourself will attract more friends), but less of a check on your behavior (an innate sense of privacy, or someone telling you “don’t you dare go out dressed like that”). The result is that at no time in human history has information about a young person been more freely and publicly accessible to so many others.”

This quote indicates how DNs bring harm to themelves by disclosing information that should be private becausethey naively trust the system they are using to publish their data. In connection with privacy and safety, a great video was created to educate digital natives about the consequences of making information public through online means. This video was posted by AuntLee two weeks ago here at the DN Blog.

However, what about the issue of owning our infomation? True, Facebook enables users to control who is accessing their information, but will Facebook itself refrain from accessing our personal information?

When researching information for this post, I bumped into the Google Privacy Policy. As its publicly known, enterprises such as Google, Microsoft, AOL, etc., have access to all we do on the Internet. By reading the Google Privacy Policy, one understands that this information exists and the purpose of its use can be shifted anytime. So, again, we are obliged to trust in these enterprises to which we offer our personal information in exchange for the use of services. But what if something goes wrong either with the company or with the information?

As Palfrey and Gasser have discussed in Born Digital, DNs leave tracks, or “digital tatoos,” throughout cyberspace. Although the environments in which they do so are meant to be safe places for such procedures, creating a sense of trust between DNs and service providers, it incentivates a disclosure of personal information with no precedents. Meanwhile, means of tracking information gets more accurated, as it happens with this GPS localizer for instance. It is disturbing to observe kids who use this site accept the idea behind it, and have incorported these technologies into their daily lives.

As we can see, technology has been offering various ways of controlling and tagging people with a discourse that makes DNs understand these devices as harmless. What if this information is used differently from what we expect? What if data gets lost? What if a companny that holds your personal information is sold? Would you like to have your personal data sold with it?

The first: a new video from Micah Spear, found via Julia Roy and American Shelf Life. The video is a stop-motion photographic tour through “a day in the life of a born digital human.” I love the style and the music, and I’m always fascinated to peek into representations of individual digital lives. It’s worth noting, though, that you don’t have to own an iPod Touch, a BlackBerry, and a fancy desktop computer to be a Digital Native. If we restricted our scholarship to such young people, we’d run out of Digital Natives very quickly!

Stop Motion Day In the Life of a Born Digital Human from Undercurrent on Vimeo.

The second link: a very thorough and thought-provoking review of Born Digital from today’s Washington Post. Having read the book in its formative stages, in my role as a book intern, it’s always interesting to see how outside readers think it turned out. I particularly appreciated that the reviewer, Amanda Henry, noted how easy it would have been for John Palfrey and Urs Gasser to take shelter in alarmist prose. I also liked this line:

While Palfrey and Gasser can leave you longing for grandiloquent generalizations, or at least a buzzword or two (”semiotic democracy” lacks sexiness), their studious, empathic approach is both valid and reassuring, and their overarching point — let’s think about these things now, rather than trying to fix them later — well taken.

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

So tempting is a juicy piece of gossip. Despite assurances to the original informer to keep it on the down-low, the juiciest tidbits will always manage to slip out. But there is a tinge of a guilty conscience when one violates the trust of a friend. What happens when even this bit of accountability is entirely removed and anonymity is rule? You’ve got JuicyCampus.com

JuicyCampus is a repository of gossip and rumors; organized by school, it presents information in a way that is maximally useful to gossip-seekers. Hot topics invariably include keywords like “gay,” “sex,” and “sorority.” It prides itself on complete anonymity and even directs users to proxies to mask their IP addresses. When I last JuicyCampus here, the site had just taken off, attracting media and legal controversy. I haven’t been able to find any recent news on the legal developments, so I can only assume they haven’t made much headway.

(A quick legal aside: JuicyCampus is protected by free speech and can claim immunity under Section 230(c) of the Communications Decency Act, which states “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” This means that JuicyCampus is not legally responsible for potentially libelous content on its site. What the New Jersey AG was attempted to do was sue JuicyCampus for consumer fraud in misrepresenting how it deals with content removal.)

We generally like to think that privacy is in our hands. We control the information about ourselves – Facebook has robust privacy controls, we choose what we put about ourselves online, etc. We do not, however, have any control over what others say about us. In this way, the existence a public forum like JuicyCampus allows others to invade our privacy. There are really two separate issues here, the posting of true information (invasion of privacy) and the posting of false content (libel). Let’s see how JuicyCampus deals with the former in its FAQs (my emphasis added):

How do I remove a post that someone else made?
You can’t. Only we can remove posts made by others, and generally we don’t. We do remove spam, but otherwise it’s pretty rare.

What if my contact information is posted?
If someone posts your email address, your home address, your home phone number, or other contact information (no, your full name doesn’t count), we’ll consider deleting it if you notify us. Shoot an email to us at  cs at juicycampus.com with “Contact Info” in the subject, give us as much info as you can about the post so we can find it, and we’ll see what we can do. FYI, we may or may not read your complaint, and we may or may not respond to it. The decision of what action to take, if any, is at the sole discretion of JuicyCampus.

JuicyCampus’s FAQs and privacy policy are remarkably cavalier. I personally find it a little upsetting to see a site flaunt its CDA immunity with such blatant disregard for privacy. So how to deal with something like JuicyCampus? The Colonialist at George Washington University has come up with one strategy to combat JuicyCampus: spam. With spam the downfall of many message boards in the past, there is some poetic justice in fighting the malefactors of the Internet with their own weapons. But the strategy requires a corps of volunteers dedicating their time to….posting spam, not a particularly sustainable enterprise.

Or we can just ignore it. Every controversy surrounding it elevates its profile; every attempt to ban brings more curious visitors. I’m probably doing a disservice by mentioning JuicyCampus here. But there is a distinction I’d like to make. Posting on JuicyCampus is actually quite different from exchanging gossip with friends and acquaintances. Gossip is a kind of social currency – it’s showing off your exclusive knowledge and bringing a select circle into your confidence. These anonymous postings on the Internet, however, have no benefit to the poster, except perhaps the satisfaction of personal retribution. It’s the digital equivalent of nasty messages scrawled in the bathroom, only worse because the potential audience is the entire world. But as any smart student would realize, JuicyCampus really just an outlet for the spiteful and the bored. I’d like to think, anyways, that the site has only limited utility and thus limited appeal. That’s not to say terrible consequences can’t come out of its limited user base, but it’s never going to be the center of our online social live. Or am I being too optimistic?
-Sarah Zhang

Listen here:
Download

It’s true: once upon a time, Facebook’s privacy controls could only be adjusted very coarsely. Over the past two years, though, Facebook has steadily improved its privacy controls—to the point that there’s very little that can’t be adjusted, now. These controls, though, aren’t worth much if Digital Natives don’t use them to fine-tune their online environments. Since this week’s theme is privacy, I wanted to kick things off with an exploration of Facebook’s privacy controls.

(Though Facebook is hardly the only place on the internet where privacy matters for Digital Natives, its popularity makes it a good test case. If Digital Natives take hold of their privacy on Facebook—a place where they likely already spend a great deal of time—they will be more aware of protecting their privacy elsewhere on the internet, as well.)

So, off we go! Let’s start with the entry point: the “Settings” button in the upper right corner of the front page:

Clicking “Privacy Settings” will take you to the next page, a portal to the various dimensions of privacy on Facebook, the “Privacy Overview”:

Profile Privacy affects what items of personal information are visible to which people:

On the Profile Privacy page, it’s possible to go line-by-line and fine-tune the accessibility of each piece of information. For instance, I can decide that posts on my Wall will be seen only by my friends, or that my work info will be visible only to people in the Harvard network. (The Harvard network is limited to people who have email addresses ending in -harvard.edu. I might feel comfortable sharing the details of my work history with those people, but not with out-of-state acquaintances.) I’m especially fascinated by the search box at the top of this page: “see how a friend sees your profile.” This feature handily illustrates the ways that Facebook now allows users to compose faceted identities.

Next up: the Search Privacy page.

It’s actually possible to circumscribe your presence on Facebook such that strangers searching for you won’t even be able to see that you’re on Facebook at all. A search for your name, if you chose to limit your search availability, would turn up nothing. Also notable on the Search Privacy page is the option to remove your public search listing—the link to Facebook that’s indexed on search engines under an individual’s name. One of the most common concerns I hear from parents is “Will anybody be able to find my child’s Facebook page on Google?” The Search Privacy page on Facebook actually gives a definitive answer: the Facebook pages of minors are automatically not submitted to search engine indexes. If your child is a minor, then a Google search will not turn up a link to your child’s Facebook presence. And even if your child isn’t a minor, the Search Privacy page offers a way to opt out of search engine indexing for non-minors. This is a very simple and effective step to take in protecting online privacy, though it’s worth noting that the Facebook page that shows up in Google results is vastly limited; in fact, it only shows a headshot, the headshots of a few of that person’s friends, and the ability to log in to Facebook itself.

Next comes the News Feed and Wall Privacy page:

This page is interesting in that it allows you control what’s reported to your friends on Facebook. If a person removes a relationship status, and has unchecked the box such that relationship removals aren’t reported, then no part of Facebook will actively tell your friends about your breakup. They’ll still be able to take a look at your profile and notice the absence of the breakup, if you’ve elected to make that information visible. But if you don’t want the breakup shouted from the rooftops, and don’t want to cause a fuss, it’s possible to just gently change the state of the profile page without it being a huge deal.

The Applications Privacy page offers good information on how Facebook’s platform interacts with developers’ applications, but I’m actually more interested in what comes below the link to the Applications Page: the “Block People” field.

This is Facebook’s strongest tool for dealing with unpleasant interlopers. Blocking someone means that they cannot “find you in a Facebook search, see your profile, or interact with you through Facebook channels (such as Wall posts, Poke, etc.).” Though the text of the field reminds the user that this blocking “does not extend to elsewhere on the Internet,” it remains a powerful tool for severing communications with people on Facebook, should such a need ever arise.

Facebook’s privacy controls have grown more and more powerful. Having not adjusted my own privacy controls in a while, I was excited to see how far they’ve come. Facebook has long allowed Digital Natives to publish unprecedented volumes of personal information. Though this can have some great consequences—friends being able to find your phone number when they need it, the instant sharing of photographs, a way to effortlessly message contacts—it can also have some unintended ones. Facebook’s success depends on its ability to keep those who use it feeling comfortable. Their privacy controls have gone a long way towards allowing every Facebook user to determine exactly what levels of information sharing they are and aren’t comfortable with.

Ultimately, privacy on the internet isn’t about keeping all personal information under wraps all of the time. It’s about making sure that the right information is available to the right people at the right times. Facebook’s privacy controls go a long way toward putting this capability in the hands of Digital Natives. Many Digital Natives, sadly, never seize this opportunity because they don’t know it’s there. My hope is that this post will start more parents, teachers, and Digital Natives thinking about the ways in which they can seize control of their personal information—safeguarding their privacy in the process.

When I think of dossiers, however, nothing positive seems to come to mind. I did a lot of research before deciding on how to write this post, trying to find arguments that could point to the benefits of having an extensive Digital Dossier. However, the search was not successful.

The first idea that came to my mind referred to a conversation I had once with a friend. By then, I was mentioning to her the fact that I always get bugged when I go buy something on Amazon.com. The website knows exactly what I might buy and how to make me spend money on things I didn’t even need. Interestingly, this friend of mine said that this was exactly what she loved about it. She didn’t have to keep searching for information on books: the website would offer her all she needed.

In his text “Surveillance in cyberspace: the Internet, personal data, and social control,” David Lyon writes: “The Internet was born in (and for) an era in which two cultures found themselves in tension – the culture of the free consumer and the culture of control, … consumption has become a central way of organizing society around the idea of free choice. But consumer management, in a delicioux paradox, attempts assiduously to guide our choices!”

When thinking of all the personal information I have spread on the Internet, all I can think of are security or privacy issues. For me to use services on the Internet, as I said before, I give free access to my personal information in exchange. This personal information is then used for different purposes: I receive credit cards I did not order from different banks, my personal data is sold to companies trying to sell me something (they keep calling me), people have access to personal information made available against my will, etc. None of these uses seem to have any benefit for me!

It seems Digital Dossiers have become a fact of life. Everything from the message I send on my cell phone, to the channels I watch on my digital TV, to the pictures I upload on my Flickr account: everything is tagged, creating a diffused map of who I am. What I ask, is for you to help me find a positive aspect on it. How can Digital Dossiers be used in a positive way, enhancing social relations and all the possible connections that may come out of it?

- André Valle

Before launching any deeper into this discussion, I’d like to link back to a great video produced by Kanupriya Tewari, one the summer interns here at Digital Natives. I didn’t fully appreciate the meaning of “digital dossier” until I watched this video, which follows the digital life of Andy from before birth to after death. Andy’s digital dossier includes all the usual suspects such as his Facebook profile and email archive, but it also includes his online credit card statement, the GPS tracking device on his cell phone, the surveillance cameras around his college buildings, etc. At the end, Kanu says that Andy probably never knew how large his digital dossier was. Neither did I.

Even given fluid nature of the Internet, we have a fair degree of control over our digital identities. Digital dossiers, on the other hand, are by definition the accumulation of all digital information, most of which is out of our hands. This quote from the Digital Dossiers chapter of Born Digital linked sums up the key issues surrounding dossiers:

The problem with the rapid growth of digital dossiers is that the decisions about what to do about personal information are made by those who hold the information. The person who contributes the information to a digital dossier may have a modicum of control up front, but he or she rarely exercises it. The person to whom the information relates — sometimes the person who contributed it, sometimes not — often has no control whatsoever about what happens to the data. The existence of these dossiers may not itself be problematic. But these many, daily, individual acts result in a rich, deep dataset associated with an individual that can be aggregated and searched. The process, start to finish, is only lightly regulated.

Those who are vigilant about privacy may find the lack of control over our digital dossiers quite unsettling. Although most of the information is gated, there is no one or no central location to go to for our digital dossiers. Information is strewn across the Internet, with or without our knowledge.
Sometime last year, I had posted a short comment relating an anecdote about Facebook in Slate.com’s The Fray. (For non-Slate readers, The Fray is their discussion board and comments section rolled into one.) There were a few more comments back and forth before the discussion, as most threads do, eventually died out. I forgot about this exchange until I recently Googled one of my frequent Internet handles and found many of the results to be Chinese. Perplexed, I investigated further. What happened? Someone had taken the original Slate article by Christopher Hitchens along with several reader comments (including mine), translated it into Chinese (it was a very good translation, no Babelfish there) and posted it on a Chinese website. Several Chinese forums then picked up the article and discussions ensued. That my comment had sparked an entire conversation in a different language halfway across the world was something I only became aware of when I was vain enough to Google myself. My name, or my pseudonym, was attached to something that I didn’t know existed — another piece of my digital dossier I wasn’t aware of.

-Sarah Zhang

This story is not new. Two years later, the anecdote is already a classic case study in the fraught user dynamics that can plague social networks. In fact, I’m pretty sure I heard this very story outlined at one of Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It book talks. The story usually ends with the News Feed prevailing against the apparent odds. And that’s a fine ending. But given this week’s topic—which I’ll get to in a minute—it’s worth going back to the beginning, and asking: what dissonance provoked the uproar in the first place?

Prior to September, 2006, Facebook was largely static. Students would update their profiles with their latest favorite bands, or change their relationship status after a bad breakup, or switch their profile picture to something a little more flattering. But no one would know about those changes unless they visited your page. The changes, in fact, weren’t even indicated as such. (I’m fairly confident that the yellow highlights on new information were only introduced later.) In order to glean what was new—literally, what was newsworthy—from a friend’s profile page, you would need to visit the page frequently enough to remember what used to be there. And visiting someone’s page frequently enough for that became affectionately known as “Facebook stalking.” You might admit to your friends that you were “Facebook stalking” your crush, but you would think long and hard before admitting to your crush that you were Facebook stalking him. It was a cloaked world. News still traveled fast, and still reached the people who mattered…as long as they were checking your Facebook profile regularly enough. But it was hard to acknowledge that newfound knowledge in any sort of meaningful way: to do so, to introduce its content to a conversation, would be to admit that you were a little too interested.

Enter the News Feed. It’s been compared to 19th-century society pages, and I think there’s something to that. A reporter circulates through town, picking up on shards of gossip and announcing marriages. Announcing, even, who went to high tea at whose house. Except it’s the 21st century, and it’s Facebook, and instead of marriages, there are “It’s Complicateds.” And instead of high teas, there are hectic parties, documented via grainy cell phone pictures. And the silent reporter, slipping through town? She’s a bot. A bot who knows everything.

From this sidelong sketch, some concerns emerge. If Facebook’s News Feed algorithm is the silent reporter, then where’s her tact? You never told a reporter your secrets, after all. They just came to light (when you posted them to your Facebook profile, or someone else posted a picture of the previous night’s revelry), and the reporter relentlessly found them. Distressing, to say the least.

And now, finally, this week’s topic: dossiers. I wanted to lead off with a discussion of Facebook, since of all the repositories on the Internet, Facebook is the single destination that most resembles a comprehensive dossier for many Digital Natives. As I approached this week’s theme, though, I realized that I wasn’t 100% clear on what, exactly, a dossier was. I knew it referred to a collection of personal information, but I wasn’t sure what other connotations the term “dossier” had. Fortunately, Wikipedia came to the rescue, with the following definition:

A dossier is typically a briefing paper based on an individual of interest in police or intelligence circles. They generally contain a relevant biography, most current information on activities and any special information of interest to the agency, such as having training in various specialized fields i.e. (assassination techniques or money laundering contacts). When the target in question has retired or died, or is of no further interest, the dossier is generally filed away for reference. If the information contained inside, or the identity of the person is too sensitive, the dossier is destroyed along with all records of it.

I found this definition both illuminating and troubling. The term “dossier,” far from being neutral, actually implies some sort of surveillance—a suspicion of future wrongdoing, documentation in support of future prosecution. Is “dossier,” then, even an appropriate term for the collections of personal information amassed on Facebook?

It is and it isn’t. It isn’t true, for instance, that every Facebook profile is the object of suspicion and active surveillance. Moreover, these “briefing papers”—profiles plus Mini-Feeds—are constructed not by secret agents, but by the subjects of the briefings themselves.

There is, however, an element of apparent surveillance in play. And it is that element, I would argue, that provoked the Facebook uproar in the first place. The silent, algorithmic reporter—who, until September 2006, had been hiding in the shadows—finally announced her presence. Students felt exposed. Worse: they felt surveilled.

So what changed? Where did the uproar go? Students realized, I think, that they could take this algorithmic reporter into their confidences, and feed her headlines. With such an intermediary at their disposal, they no longer had to take responsibility for their own self-promotion. They acquired, as I wrote elsewhere in a piece on the differences between Facebook and Twitter, the “illusion of absolution”:

I think what’s so striking about this social signaling in Twitter is that it’s imbued with intentionality. On Facebook, when you do something or friend someone or post on someone’s wall, Facebook just reports it; the “hey, look at me” is automated. Therefore, the person who wants to be looked at is absolved of responsibility, vanity, or attention-seeking. Twitter is all about self-reporting, and so that all-important illusion of absolution is whisked away.

Enabling this new cozy relationship with the algorithmic reporter on Facebook, of course, was the introduction of fine-grained privacy controls on Facebook. Privacy controls—to mute relationship changes, or friend additions, or comments on other people’s Walls—allowed each student to whisper certain things “off the record.” The reporter, in these situations, might kiss. But she would never, ever tell.

And so, Facebook users turned the police blotter into the society pages. One thing I hope this sketch makes clear, though, is that the opportunities were there from the very beginning. What could you do with publicly acknowledged social omniscience? How many small-talk-athons could you skip if you already knew all the relevant news, and your friends knew you knew it, too? With all of its dangers, pleasures, and opportunities: this is the world that many Digital Natives live in today.

This definition made me wonder how this concept can be applied to the practices that are taking place on the Internet. How do online tools enable users to represent themselves through different types of discourses? More than that, how can DNs’ interactions on the Internet be affected by these new possibilities?

One important topic of Born Digital refers to identity and issues related to the way the Internet is being used to propagate small bits of personal information in the form of videos, blog posts, pictures, etc. So, if Fairclough states that through the practice of discourse we are constructing our world in meaning, the Internet offers new channels of discourse through which new types of manifestations will emerge. What seems like just a few years ago, if you wanted to learn anything about me, you had to rely on a simple ID with my photo and basic information. Now, if you want to learn more about me, all you need to do is google my name. From this, you can learn about activities I have partaken in such as university projects and jobs, and you can even access pictures of me, especially if you are part of a shared social network such as Facebook, Orkut, or LinkedIn.

These different online tools allow me to propagate specific discourses about myself depending on their use, whether as social, professional, or any other kind of network. For example, I use Orkut to connect with friends as a fellow Brazilian, I use Facebook to connect with friends internationally. Alternate to a social network, LinkedIn allows me to expose my professional side, defined by my work experience, education, and the conferences I have attended. Ultimately, the Internet allows new types of channels through which we are signifying ourselves, our identities.

So, what are the consequences of these new ways of signifying ourselves, of fragmenting our identities in small portions and publishing it throughout the Internet? In Born Digital, Palfrey and Gasser refer to the importance of social identity, which is “undergoing a makeover at the hands of Digital Natives”. They note:

(…) the disclosure of personal information – say, for instance, posting your hobbies online, or disclosing where you are living, or sharing information about your tastes in music – is intended to achieve certain goals. Those goals might include, for example, social approval, intimacy, or relief of distress, among other things. In the economic and business literature, other motivations have been explored. Benefits of online information disclosure might include saving money or time (as examples of extrinsic benefits when, for instance, ordering a book online and paying by credit card), or pleasure or altruism (as examples of intrinsic benefits). According to the disclosure decision models, individuals examine – as rational actors – whether the disclosure of information would indeed be a good strategy to achieve the respective goals in a given situation, and whether the expected benefits would outweigh the risks.

Blogs, social networks, home pages, etc “can be understood as means to develop and evolve their notions and levels of “self” and personal identity, respectively. On the other hand, the revelation of personal data on the Internet is closely connected with establishing group membership.

All that raises issues of privacy, security and control of information which sometimes seem to be suppressed by the euphoria surrouding the digital era.

It is important to take into consideration that although online tools are enabling Digital Natives to do more creative things based on their connections to a larger, more diverse network of the online sphere, other issues arise including that of privacy and security. It worries me to see that all this information, might always be floating somewhere around the Internet; and that it can be accessed some other time in our lives when that self representation is no longer convenient, funny, or desired.

- André Valle

Such “flash mob” happenings have picked up in popularity over the last few years thanks to the publicity they have gained through blogs, online event pages, and most especially Facebook. Of the event in Boston, one site wrote, this “silent dance party involves a large group of people assembling at a given area on a pre-decided time. They mill around inconspicuously, and at the signal (in this case, an airhorn), insert their headphones into their ears, hit play on their portable music player and start dancing as passersbys confusingly look on as a swarm of people dance in silence.”

You can check out this hilarious, spontaneous production below:

Enjoyed this video? Look out for more Reporters-in-the-Field productions every week.