Privacy Erosion and Organics

There has been a recent avalanche of publicity surrounding Facebook's rapidly deteriorating attitude toward privacy. Articles pointing out the changes in policy over the years, a series of unnerving privacy-related bugs, insider insight into founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's opinion of privacy, and the new "Instant Personalization" that shares your secret info with whatever websites Facebook decides to "trust", all point in the same direction. Facebook thinks privacy is no longer important, and therefore has no qualms in throwing yours out the window.

There is the undeniable fact that Facebook has an incentive to publicize as much as they possibly can about your life: the more I can learn about you through Facebook, the more I'm going to use Facebook, since that's kind of the whole point of it. And furthermore, the more they share with their app developers, Instant Personalization partners, and advertisers, the more that those partners are going to get out of the deal. This is why, not only are the directions that information can travel being multiplied, but the default settings for those channels are made more and more permissive. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that if you create a new Facebook account today, your photos, friends, email address, phone number, and wall would all be visible to the world by default. Instant Personalization was enabled without asking you beforehand, which meant that if you visited Facebook even once after I.P. was rolled out without paying too much attention, and then went to Yelp, Yelp now knows everything there is to know about you. Remember, The Cloud never forgets.

This increasing permissiveness comes as a nasty surprise for those of us who have been members since the service was closed to the public. Back in 2004, only people at your school could see some of your information by default, though you'd show up in other schools' search results. People are so riled up that even Congress has started getting up in arms about it. So what can humble you and me do?

Now, I've been thinking about this problem for a little while. At the same time, I've recently become convinced that, as an environmentalist, I shouldn't buy conventional food. This swing comes after watching Food, Inc., along with incessant pestering by Annie, who's recently read The Omnivore's Dilemma. But I'm not here to proselytize – this has something to do with privacy.

Ever since the USDA decided on a formal definition of "organic," a whole industry has popped up to certify organic foods. I can look at the label of an organic food box and see that such-and-such a company applied their standards to such-and-such a producer. But it's not just organic foods: if a particular group of people decides that it's important that coffee be "fair trade," or "shade grown," or whatever, they can start a certification agency to verify that certain coffee holds up to their standards. Though there are shortcomings, this system has worked in the food industry fairly well.

A similar certification system could be applied to sites that have a user account infrastructure. If I navigate to Orkut, and I see "Privacy Protected by Alex Certification" in the bottom right corner, I can be sure that whatever "Alex Certified" means applies to this site. They could lift the image from another site, but there are ways to deal with that as well, such as a verifier on the real Alex Certification site.

Therefore I propose a certification agency for privacy on the internet. It would guarantee several things:

1. Whenever a new feature shares information about you, by default it can't share that information with people you aren't connected to already,


2. No information is shared with other entities (websites, corporations, advertisers, etc.) without your explicit consent,


3. No information is collected about your behavior on unrelated sites without your explicit consent (see this terrifying bit about the Facebook "Like" button you see everywhere, and which sees you too),


4. Any changes in the privacy policy would be publicized,


5. You always have the option to delete your account, and all information about you will be deleted from any servers they control within 90 days.

Feel free to let me know if you have other ideas to add to this list.

Meanwhile, I think I'll be transitioning over to Flickr, this blog, and my personal website over the next few weeks, and off of Facebook. Google has had their own set of issues, but unlike Facebook I feel that the people working at Google are truly well-intentioned about most of the important aspects of privacy. And if things get too hairy here, I can just move to a Wordpress install I control.

Lit class for the indie kid

I just had this brilliant idea. Think lit class for snobbish music dorks. Every week, a bunch of music nerds, hipsters, and people with beards get together, have snacks, talk about whatever, and then listen to three or four songs from a music player device. Then everyone talks about what they just listened to. Each track gets one or two plays. The focus would be on carefully analyzing each song in detail, championing it or tearing it apart, looking for influences, etc. Alternatively, the model could instead be a book club for music. Everyone listens to a specific album on their own each week or month or whatever, and comes together for dinner or wine or both, and talks about that album in detail.

I feel like much of the modern music experience is so passive, very personal, and perhaps underdeveloped. Like the best authors, there's a lot that music writers put into the songs they make, and you can easily miss it if you're not really informed about the music. A critical discussion can tease out the details you'd miss otherwise. Plus it could help figure out what music is actually worth spending time and money on.

I don't think I'm the only one who misses high school world lit. Right? Right?

Stuff the Internet forgot, issue 1

Every now and again I stumble across something on the Internet I'd forgotten about for a long time. Sometimes it's alive and well, but all too often I have to wave away the cobwebs, and the signs of bit rot are impossible to ignore. I want to remember these things, and I want you to see how cool they are too, so I'll be posting them here occasionally.

Today I unearthed the Internet leftovers of famed supercheerful-electronic group Lemon Jelly. Whenever I need a cheerful melody, their first two albums can't be beat, and the third features some pretty excellent tracks as well. The dynamic duo of Nick Franglen and Fred Deakin were well-known for having zany shows awash in balloons. Sadly, though, the group is on indefinite hiatus, and their site hasn't been updated in a while, though the forum is still hopping.

I decided to do some more excavating and found that Franglen is still making new music, though his most recent colab Blacksand (with one C.J. Casey of Akasha) stands in stark contrast to his Lemony work. Listen for yourself and you will see what I mean -- real dark and echoey and atmospheric.

Deakin, at first glance, seems to have left the Internet limelight circa 2007 rather thoroughly, though glimpses peak through if you know where to look. Then you realize he's just been busy working at his graphic design studio, Airside. They do all sorts of neat things like these funky creatures for Japanese TV station NTV, and these ultracute ultraugly stitch creatures among plenty of others.

So there you go. The Lemons Jelly are twain but do not grieve; for they are doing Good Things and have not forgotten this world.

Professional name

One of my co-conspirators on the project is putting together a tech report, and he asked me whether I wanted to go by Alex or Alexander. This is an important question, since this choice will probably determine my professional name for the rest of my career. I know I'm not the only one who has pondered this question: a prof in my lab changed his name from Michael to Mike about eight years after his first publication, and now is so adamant about being called Mike that he will go out of his way to cross out "Michael" on a nametag and write "MIKE" underneath.

I'm going with Alexander, mostly because my webpage is the number one result when you search for my full name (my single Amazon product review is surprisingly high, somewhere around 19...). I had to think about it a while, though.

The crash

People are dumb. Anarchy is certainly not the answer to the shortcomings of capitalism, and hanging effigies of the only people who understand the system is not a way to solve the problems we're facing. Killing the fools who understood enough to get us into this mess sure would make it hard to get out of the mess after the dust has cleared. There is no way that we can simply legislate the banking system into working again: we need the people who know how to make the gears turn. Furthermore, not all bankers are evil, and I seriously doubt anyone who constructed the complicated financial instruments that imploded with the housing crash did it knowing how hard things could fall.

Anyways, those are my thoughts on that.

Livejournal is for wusses

I felt like a change of pace so I've decided to transition to a new weblog service (blog is so 2006). I occasionally have ideas I want to share with the world so if I'm feeling particularly motivated I'll post them here.