Clunky Flow

People misunderstand privacy all the time. Sinead O’Cochrane seemed to experience the recent symposium as scaremongering. While I experienced it as low key and leavened with humour.

I’d love to think it rose to the energy levels fit for a scaremongering label but it just doesn’t stick for me. I was first of the panel to speak and my first words were a reminder that its important not to focus on the negative side and to remember there is much that is positive in online interaction.

I then said that “Whatever goes on the internet stays on the internet” Mostly because there’s a story in the paper everyday of people being surprised at some outcome of this reality. Even though it would seem naive for anyone to think otherwise, people continue to be shocked. Everyday.

Also Daniel’s keynote talk focused on stories that had humurous connotations as opposed to the many more numerous stories that have tragic endings.

Damien Mulley quickly opened the talk up to the audience and it was clear that this was the stuff that was on their collective minds. As I said in this post, talks on privacy have a habit of going round in circles with nobody getting much satisfaction.

Ask someone if they care about privacy by using that abstract term and they will shrug. Ask them how they feel about someone tracking their every move and they’ll admit that it makes them feel a little bit
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You go to a party. Meet a girl. Photos are taken. They end up on Facebook. Girl’s brothers issue Fatwa.
Suddenly you’ve got £20,000 bounty on your head.

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I was asked to speak at a Darklight symposium. I must admit I wasn’t sure if I could afford the time. I’m at a sensitive time with my business, you see. I was told the talk was on privacy. I was like. Oh in that case. I should. Then I heard that the keynote was by Daniel Solove. And I was like “Are you kidding!?” “Why didn’t you say that in the first place!”

The thing is there’s a load of old rubbish talked about privacy. Its nobody fault really. Its just that people often find they are talking at cross purposes. The problem is that we all think we know what privacy is. That is until we are asked to define it. It then it turns out that nobody can. And that everyone has a half-baked opinion.

The situation always reminds me of the story of the blind men and the elephant

Six blind men were asked to determine what an elephant looked like by feeling different parts of the elephant’s body. The blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope; the one who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a tree branch; the one who feels the ear says the elephant is like a hand fan; the one who feels the belly says the elephant is like a wall; and the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a solid pipe. Discussions begin but each man is so sure that his own experience is definitive that the discussion goes nowhere or devolves into an argument of almost religious proportions.

A wise man steps forward and explains to them: All of you are right. The reason every one of you is telling it differently is because each one of you touched the different part of the elephant. So, actually the elephant has all the features you mentioned.

In discussions on Privacy, Daniel J. Solove is your wise man. He has stepped back and taken on the task of defining what privacy is and why it is important. Its a huge task. A task of heroic proportions. But he has succeeded in creating the definitive work on the subject.

So what happened at the talk?
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“Amity Island had everything. Clear skies. Gentle surf. Warm water. People flocked there every summer. It was the perfect feeding ground.”

As we all know. MySpace, Bebo and Facebook draw predators of their own.

“The police chief of Amity Island tries to protect beachgoers from a great white shark by closing the beach. Tourism is the town’s major source of income. The town council must decide whether it is better to protect the livelihoods of their townsfolk. Or the actual lives of a very small percentage of those visiting tourists. The decision to close the beach is overruled. ”

Tired of waiting for the social networks to do anything to protect users that might compromise their business, New York state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s bill Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act (e-STOP) was introduced in February 2008.

“As the attacks continued, the police chief enlists the help of a marine biologist and a professional shark hunter.”

Bebo has been keen to push its credentials in online safety, including the high-profile appointment of Rachel O’Connell, a forensic psychologist, and her work on a number of industry and government councils.

Perverted-Justice volunteers put profiles on social networking sites as decoys order to collect incriminating evidence against the predators.

“We’re going to need a bigger boat”

The sheer scale and complexity of social networks makes it impossible for policing activity to have much of an impact on the problem overall.

The dramas of Amity Island and Social networks both pivot on a conflict of interest. Amity Island and social networks depend on public confidence to ensure profitability. In the absence of any real solutions to defend against predators, their businesses depends on their ability to play down the risks. Policing initiatives and warnings to be careful will never solve the actual problem. But they can help lull users into a sense of security that is good for the business. The real effect of policing initiatives and warnings is to confuse the issue of who is responsible when trouble arises.

To cut through the confusion again we only have to ask. Is the individual to blame for attracting the predator? When predators are known to be active, is it okay to promote destinations such as Amity Island or Facebook as safe?

By the way, Jaws, the movie and book was inspired by this true story of the Jersey Shore attacks of 1916:

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Just got the news through Slashdot.

Facebook’s been talking about their breakthrough in privacy controls for quite some time. They have an elite team working on it and they are highly motivated to resolve the issue. Its pure business logic. A sense of privacy encourages the free expression and authenticity needed for Facebook to become more effective at targeting ads.

So I suppose it was inevitable. And Zuckerberg has been filing patents to beat the band.

Here’s most of the excerpt from Slashdot:

…but take a gander at the Facebook founder’s patent application for Dynamically Generating a Privacy Summary to get an idea of what’s in the works. After you check boxes on a form to indicate that ‘Everyone from San Francisco, CA, Social Network Provider, and Harvard’ can see your profile, Zuckerberg’s ‘invention’ will miraculously display: ‘People from San Francisco, CA, Social Network Provider, and Harvard can see your profile.’ How dare Rolling Stone question his inventiveness!”

Ahem. Not exactly the earth shattering advance we’ve been primed to expect. All kidding aside. I imagine its really only a matter of time.

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I was just reading about how good it is for Dial2Do and twitterfone now that California is banning phone use in cars from July 1st via Pat Phelan

There’s got to be loads of fun news worthy little services here. I mean a Californian’s identity is so strongly tied to their vehicle. There’s got to be a way to leverage this even further. Twitterfone could become a really cool new channel for mediating new forms of social expression between drivers.

Say you get ‘cut off’ in the highway by the driver of a private vehicle. They don’t have a “800-HOW’S-MY-DRIVING” sticker on their bumper. You could show your appreciation by honking you horn but what good does that really do? Alternatively you could use twitterfone and call out a ‘#bad driver’ tag followed by their license plate number. Such twitterfone tweets could be collected, collated and remixed in all sorts of interesting and socially useful ways.

Or say you are stopped in traffic. You keep catching the eye of someone. And there’s clearly a mutual attraction. You might want to twitterfone #tag their license plates and just put some light appreciative message out there and see if they take up on it.

There’s got to be loads of fun and interesting things that you could do.

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All social systems are based on trust. That truism scales from groups of friends to distributed economies. It is trust that lubricates commerce, whether that is the social commerce at an informal social gathering or the market commerce in a stock market.

If you position yourself to own the future of trust, you are well placed to put yourself at the heart of all commerce.

That’s why this recent patent application interests me. It taps back into the natural form of social trust. That is, the trust rating that is natrually socially assigned within a community as opposed to the trust rating assigned by some institution. And uses that as a more reliable rating of creditworthiness.

Sociofinancial systems and methods

Lenders (including peers, financial institutions, merchants, and the like) in the more developed areas the world typically use a credit score as a measure of an individual’s or entity’s creditworthiness. Roughly speaking, a credit score categorizes or assigns a probability to the likelihood that an individual or entity will honor a debt.

Credit scores were developed to accommodate merchants and banks that needed to extend credit to individuals and entities that were not personally known to them.

Credit scores are a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of credit. For centuries if not millennia before the emergence of credit scores, lending decisions were made on the basis of trust relationships and codes of conduct between individuals or groups within communities. In many offline communities, and especially in offline communities that are in less developed areas of the world, this is still the predominant form of lending.

Recently, online communities such as Facebook have emerged. A major function of online communities is to capture and encode relationships between people, groups of people, entities, groups of entities, and so on. Based upon these relationships, it is possible for members of the online community to share applications and content with one another. Also, in some cases it is possible for computing applications to access these encoded relationships and use them for some purpose.

There exists a need to capture and encode financial trust relationships in online communities, and to enable borrowing, lending, repayment, collections, and related actions based upon such relationships.

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Launched in beta with Microsoft today Zignals is an Irish startup that gives ordinary investors the tools and information to trade stocks as intelligently as more sophisticated investors. For free.

The company is based in Dublin. Has so far raised €2.5m in private equity finance and has 10 employees. The substantial brains behind the information engine at the heart of the service belong to one Scott Tattersall. A man who knows a thing or two about neural networks. And how to automate the collection of all the detailed information you need to power up your online trading strategy. He’s also a guy that helped me out once or twice in a crisis.

Microsoft has taken a 15% stake in Zignals and are helping to launch the service. Sign up for the beta today.

Extensive coverage of the launch Venture Beat, Silicon Republic, The Independent, RTE,

Congratulations Scott.

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