Last week’s security lapse that exposed personal Facebook chats was embarrassing for both the social media giant and its users, materializing  many’s most salient concerns about sharing private information over the social Web.

Personal lives are broadcasted across online social networks. Are young people more apt to act with indiscretion? Conventional wisdom says 'yes'; recent studies say 'no'.

The New York Times’ Laura M. Holson recently reports, however, that the tell-all generation (those between 18 and 29-years-old) is learning to keep things offline. Holson writes: 

The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud.

Young adults in their 20s, in fact, more frequently delete unwanted posts and more actively limit profile information, according to a soon-to-be released report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. This fact, the report suggests, is indicative of heightened diligence among young adults in exerting control over their digital reputations.

Says Mary Madden, lead researcher on the forthcoming Pew report:

“Social networking requires vigilance, not only in what you post, but what your friends post about you. Now you are responsible for everything.”

Recent academic research by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and UC Berkeley’s Center for Law and Technology attest to young adults’ online vigilance. In the UC Berkeley study, which explores how young adults differ from their elders when it comes to information privacy attitudes and policies, the sentiments are especially clear:

• 88 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds believe laws should require websites to delete their stored information;
• and 62 percent say they think laws should require that people have access to what websites know about them.

Interestingly, as Holson highlighted, this runs counter to conventional wisdom about young adults’ online behavior on social media. The Berkeley study succinctly describes the misconception, which is fueled by frequent media coverage of the risks of social networking:

“Media reports teem with stories of young people posting salacious photos online, writing about alcohol-fueled misdeeds on social networking sites, and publicizing other ill-considered escapades that may haunt them in the future. These anecdotes are interpreted as representing a generation-wide shift in attitude toward information privacy. Many commentators therefore claim that young people “are less concerned with maintaining privacy than older people are.”

According to the study, however, the apparent license with which the young behave online stems from a gap in privacy knowledge. In general, it seems, young people know very little about privacy issues:

• 42 percent of young Americans answered all five online privacy questions in the study’s survey  incorrectly;
• 88 percent answered only two or fewer correctly;
• and the problem is even more pronounced when presented with offline privacy issues – post hoc analysis showed that young Americans were more likely to answer no questions correctly than any other age group.

While many sites offer tips for maintaining one’s general online privacy, substantial guides for navigating social media privacy concerns are limited, largely due to the ever-changing privacy policies of our favorite social media giants.

As the future of privacy online is necessarily unclear, whether the ‘tell-all generation’ remains ‘jacked in’ or ‘checks out’ is now a more relevant question than ever.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to read your thoughts, comments and concerns on social media privacy in the comments section below. I’ll leave you with this relevant cartoon by The Joy of Tech by Nitrozac and Snaggy.

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Unveiled on March 16, 2010, the FCC’s National Broadband Plan outlines an ambitious vision to make broadband internet speed ubiquitous and affordable in the United States. As reported in the New York Times:

“Fewer than 27 out of every 100 Americans have broadband service, compared with 33 in South Korea and 38 in the Netherlands. The average advertised download speed is 8 megabits per second; in France, it is 51. And according to a study by the F.C.C., the average download in the United States occurs at about half the advertised speed. Meanwhile, the poor, the elderly and other vulnerable groups remain cut off from broadband technology, and therefore from such things as online government services, medical advice and jobs.”

The plan’s aims, far-reaching in scope, are as follows:

Once most known for its censorship of lurid content in media, the FCC is expanding its scope to making ubiquitous internet access a national priority.

• Goal 1: At least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and actual upload speeds of at least 50 megabits per second.
• Goal 2: The United States should lead the world in mobile innovation, with the fastest and most extensive wireless networks of any nation.
• Goal 3: Every American should have affordable access to robust broadband service, and the means and skills to subscribe if they so choose.
• Goal 4: Every community should have affordable access to at least 1 Gbps broadband service to anchor institutions such as schools, hospitals and government buildings.
• Goal 5: To ensure the safety of Americans, every first responder should have access to a nationwide public safety wireless network.
• Goal 6: To ensure that America leads in the clean energy economy, every American should be able to use broadband to track and manage their real-time energy consumption.

At roughly 7 times the speed of the internet connection I’m using to write this post (provided by my Comcast cable connection), I’m all for universal broadband. But why should it be a right, if it should be?

The Notion of Rights & The Hohfeldian Analytical System

Talk of ‘rights’ is often muddled, given the varied nature of moral history across cultures. Many, including famed philosopher Jeremy Bentham, think the notion of natural rights are nothing more than “rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.” The good news for us plebes is that most modern thinkers — and, more practically, legislators — tend to think otherwise.

In considering whether internet access ought to be a right, it’s helpful, I think, to understand the form of rights, which will provide a framework for looking at the issues at stake. Legal theorist Wesley Hohfeld (1879-1918) articulates four elements of rights (which are known as “The Hohfeldian incidents”) that are particularly useful for this exercise: the privilege, the claim, the power, and the immunity.

For a more technical description of these elements, check out the Stanford Enyclopedia of Philosophy, but I’ll attempt to give a quick and dirty explanation of what these terms mean for those who aren’t as familiar with the ‘φ‘ symbol. For those less theoretically-inclined, feel free to skip to the next section.

• The privilege (liberties): You have the right to do something because you have no duty not to do that thing. For example, you have the right to pick up a coin that you find on the ground because you have no duty not to pick it up.
• The claim: You have the right to claim a certain action from someone because s/he has the duty to do that action for you. An employee, for instance, has the right to be paid for her work, because of the duty the employer acknowledged in their contract.
• The power: You have the right to alter your own or another’s Hohfeldian incidents, if an agreed upon set of rules allows it. A boss, for example, can create a new duty or for her employee or lessen her authority over others, because the rules of employer-employee relationships allow it.
• The immunity: You have the right to not have your Hohfeldian incidents altered by another person, within a given set of rules. For example, US citizens have immunity from being forced to practice a religion that the government prescribes.

Broadly speaking, there are a lot of different types of rights, and it’s easier to see how rights can come into conflict when we take a look at their different characteristics.

Some Issues at Stake

Approximately 100 million Americans do not have broadband at home. The FCC aims to change that.

• Education. Both scholars and common sense tell us that internet access is one of the biggest pedagogical boons since the invention of the printing press. Beyond being the vastest free repository of information in the history of humankind, interaction with its content provides users with the skill sets needed to survive and thrive in information-based economies. Parsing through large amounts of data and navigating various conceptual categories are among the many skills frequent internet users acquire. So, if education is a right, then it certainly seems to follow that internet access should also be right–especially given the importance of learning outside the classroom.

• Public Safety & National Security. Since 9/11, the government has failed to create a functional interoperable communication network for first responders to both security threats and natural disasters. The results, as seen during 9/11, can be life-changing. PCMag’s Chloe Albinisius writes: “Police could not warn fire department officials about falling debris. Port Authority police could not tell state police to get out of a building, and so on.” Aside from interoperable communications, ubiquitous internet access would give citizens more immediate, multimedia information about important events from more sources in real-time than other communicative media –  e.g., cable TV, telephone networks.

• Taxation: While most of the National Broadband Plan is supposed to be covered by television spectrum auctions and private investment, some initiatives, such as the aforementioned public safety interoperable network, will come at the cost of additional fees for broadband users. Though FCC spokesman Rob Kenny claims the fee would be less than a dollar, many uber-libertarian types are angered by yet another tax, clamoring for immunity from such a fee.

• Private Enterprise: TV broadcasters are miffed at the thought of lost business opportunities by their auctioned spectrum space, and some telecom companies are worried by the imposition of government standards to increase their delivery speed. The equivalent of online ‘eminent domain,’ auctioning currently unused TV broadcasters’ spectrum is a prime example of sacrificing private interests for the public good.

The issue is complex, to say the least. In my opinion, the educational and national security claims are large enough to warrant internet access as a right. But what do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the comment board below.

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Pricing iPad e-magazines provides new opportunities for publishers to get it right this time.

Subject to ongoing battles over who has rights to what, one thing remains certain to both publishers and Apple–content will cost something, unlike most e-newspaper counterparts.

Certain newspapers, like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, have successfully employed partial pay or pay wall (i.e., pay after a reader has visited more than a certain number of times within a given period) models. WSJ.com boasts over a million pay subscribers for its online content. But, a million pay subscribers certainly isn’t the norm for most news content providers, and even WSJ articles can be accessed for free through backdoor sites like Google News (much to the chagrin of Rupert Murdoch).

Pulitzer Prize winner and former Chairman of Dow Jones & Co. (which publishes the WSJ) Peter R. Kann eloquently describes the decline of print newspapers, the emergence of the ‘free model‘ of online content, and the pricing challenge most newspaper publishers face:

“… by the time Internet editions arrived, the prevailing philosophy in most publishing companies already was that customers could not be expected to pay much for content, that it was easier simply to rely on advertising. The new Internet editions were merely the ultimate extension of that trend: free news to the consumer, total reliance on the advertiser.

But that didn’t quite work out as expected. Online advertising, given virtually unlimited supply and also given clever new competitors like search sites, has been nothing like publishers posited. Online edition ad rates and online edition ad revenues are only small fractions of those in traditional print. And as print advertising continues its steady decline, online advertising cannot come close to compensating.

The print editions still have customers willing to pay for at least a discounted subscription, but there are fewer of the customers as free online editions peel them away from print. And so the publishers are left to juggle their twin products—the old one in inexorable decline and the new one in commercial denial—and pray the future may be somehow different.”

Sadly, many print newspapers seem to be going the way of the dodo, drawing cries of death of the medium, at least as we knew it, from many.

Unlike their faster-moving counterparts, books — in all forms — are doing quite well, financially-speaking. According to the Association of American Publishers, book sales increased year-over-year by roughly 4 percent at $11.2bn for the year. Of those, about $170m were e-book sales, marking roughly 177 percent growth over last year. While not insignificant, e-books grabbed only a little over 3 percent of the total book sales.

Beyond the cost of e-readers, some, like PC World’s Tony Bradley, criticize what they perceive to be e-books’ bloated pricing model. Bradley writes,

“Media businesses–whether music, movies, books, magazines, or newspapers–seem to cling to a pricing model that fails to account for the significantly lower overhead of digital distribution. These entities seem hung up on pricing narcissism, rather than realizing that production costs are different and distribution is almost universal–changing the economics entirely from traditional models.”

Bradley suggests a revenue-focused model, which (to me) makes sense:

“Basically, publishers should be pricing digital distribution based on what it would expect in net revenue from the traditional distribution method, not based on some calculated percentage of the traditional retail price. I don’t know the exact numbers, but If Wiley is only going to net eight dollars when it sells a printed version of my book, then it should create a digital pricing scheme that nets the same.”

Some, like BNET's Eric Sherman, predict that the iPad will 'kill publishing.'

Unsurprisingly, many publishers like Murdoch seem more prone to employ beefier pricing models that hinge on how much people are willing to pay. Can you blame them for wanting a bigger margin?

That said, e-magazines provide a whole new opportunity to find a happy pricing medium that pleases both publishers and readers. Needless to say, the removal of frequent, full-glossy print production costs will reduce publishers’ overhead significantly, allowing them to price e-magazines lower than their costly print counterparts. Better content and more innovative design — enabled by the iPad’s functionality — will allow for the creation of quality multimedia experiences that readers/viewers are willing to pay for.

Central to paid e-magazines working is leaving old models behind–from both a production and consumer standpoint.

Content and design worthy of pay

In many ways, the term ‘e-magazine’ is too antiquated to encapsulate the multimedia, dynamic possibilities of content production and distribution through the iPad. It’s a given that video and audio should be integrated among text, but navigation through content should move beyond a page-by-page linear progression.

The navigational structure of each issue could take on unique properties, linking different portions of content to one another and external sources. Typefaces, sizing and layout could vary dependent on the content and what would be most aesthetically gripping to readers/viewers/listeners — much like magazines are now. To do this, however, developers would play an increasingly important role, taking on tasks akin to layout and design editors of magazines–but with more design elements at their disposal. It’s not just a matter of positioning text, pictures and headlines anymore. It’s creating a dynamic, multimedia experience with which readers and viewers can interact and experience with multiple senses.

In other words, publishers need to envision a medium that consumers are willing to pay for. If publishers utilize the technology to its fullest and give readers/viewers great content in a way they have never experienced it, I predict they will not only make good money, but they will also reverse magazines’ downward trend in recent years. Granted, that’s easier said than done. It may be the case that old magazine houses are too entrenched in their old ways to look into the future, and it may take a disruptive innovator in their industry to catalyze forward motion.

Shifting consumer focus: from price to value and cost

Most good sales people will agree that it is key to shift clients’ focus onto value, as opposed to price. A closer examination of  this notion and  re-reading Kann’s article in WSJ casts some light on how this is relevant to publishers’ making money with their content.

Entrepreneur.com’s Barry Farber writes,

“…there are customers worth working with, whom you can help understand the difference between price and cost. Price is what they pay for the product or service; cost is what the investment is over the lifetime of doing business. Can you help your customers grow their business in a way they never thought possible?”

In the case of publications, readers and viewers are in the ‘business’ of personal edification. And if publishers can convince their audiences that they convey quality content in a quality way, the cost of an e-magazine becomes an investment in personal edification.

Looking at the difference between e-books and e-newspapers (and WSJ’s content contrasted with many e-newspapers), the difference is quality. Books take a significantly longer time to write, and readers are thus willing to pay extra for the value of the writer’s labor. The WSJ has unique, quality reporting and a distinct brand, and hence people are willing to pay for the content over free content available on Joe Schmoe’s blog. Admittedly, this is an oversimplification of the issue at stake, and free content isn’t necessarily bad (achem…this blog).

To end, here’s a video demonstration of Wired’s iPad e-magazine, in current form. It’s looking pay-worthy, in my opinion.

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A graphic provided to convey differing opinions on privacy by the The New York Times in its 'Week in Review' Section on February26, 2010.

Contrary to most contemporary intuitions about media treatment of stars like Tiger Woods, the court ruled, as related in an article by MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan, that:

“…posing for the photographs did not mean Dumas and Menken had surrendered their rights to privacy and dignity, even if they consented to do just that during a heady romantic moment. These rights trumped any commercial property rights the photographer might have claimed, the court said.”

For most Americans, this ruling, along with the recent ruling against three Google executives in Italy for passively allowing ‘privacy-infringing’ videos to be posted on YoutTube, is troubling.

Beyond the need to fine-tune Google’s passive distribution policies for offensive content, this case highlights a deeper ideological divide, which Dumas’ case also exemplified. As The New York Times‘ Adam Liptak writes,

“… it called attention to the profound European commitment to privacy, one that threatens the American conception of free expression and could restrict the flow of information on the Internet to everyone.”

In the  abstract (no, I didn’t read the entire paper) of Yale law professor James Whitman’s paper ‘The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty,’ Whitman (or, more likely, some editor of the Yale Law Journal) clearly describes the issues and implications at stake:

Privacy advocates often like to claim that all modern societies feel the same intuitive need to protect privacy. Yet it is clear that intuitive sensibilities about privacy differ from society to society, even as between the closely kindred societies of the United States and continental Europe. Some of the differences involve questions of everyday behavior, such as whether or not one may appear nude in public. But many involve the law. In fact, we are in the midst of major legal conflicts between the countries on either side of the Atlantic–conflicts over questions like the protection of consumer data, the use of discovery in civil procedure, the public exposure of criminal offenders, and more. Clearly the idea that there are universal human sensibilities about privacy, which ought to serve as the basis of a universal law of privacy, cannot be right.

The article (achem…abstract) later argues:

European privacy norms are founded on French and German ideas of “personal honor.” Continental “privacy,” like continental sexual harassment law, prison law, and many other bodies of law, aims to protect the “personal honor” of ordinary French and German folk. American law takes a very different approach, protecting primarily a liberty interest. The Article traces the roots of French and German attitudes over the last couple of centuries, highlighting the French experience of sexual license in the nineteenth century and the German experience of Nazism…

Throughout, the Article argues, American law shows a far greater sensitivity to intrusions on the part of the state, while continental law shows a far greater sensitivity to the protection of one’s public face. These are not differences that we can understand unless we abandon the approach taken by most privacy advocates, since such differences have little to do with the supposedly universal intuitive needs of “personhood.” Instead, they are differences that reflect the contrasting political and social ideals of American and continental law. Indeed, we should broadly reject intuitionism in our legal scholarship, focusing instead on social and political ideals.

For those of you still reading the post after reading through that quote (it might be a bit dry for some), I tend to disagree with Whitman’s rejection of the notion of some universal concept of ‘personhood’, though I also (unsurprisingly) lean toward sympathizing with American ideological and, hence, policy decisions.

The differing opinion lies in what I believe to be a false dichotomy that Whitman presents: between ‘dignity’ and ‘liberty.’ The value of ‘liberty,’ I think, draws its compellent force, like ‘privacy,’ from an intuitive notion of ‘personhood’ or ‘human dignity.’ And so, the dichotomy instead lies between ‘liberty’ and ‘privacy.’

Like most talk of ‘rights,’ however, these discussions are muddled by differing foundational concepts, not to mention differing laws (premised on those differing concepts) across national boundaries.

Nevertheless, in my opinion, we must weigh the value of ‘liberty’ against ‘privacy,’ knowing that that the results will vary by situation. I wouldn’t, for example, value a voyeur’s autonomous choice to spy on someone through a window over the watched person’s desire not to be watched while changing. More broadly, it’s understandable, too, that there should a sliding scale for the threshold of what constitutes tolerable infringements of either value across different cultures and national boundaries.

University of Michigan Internet law professor Susan Crawford also cautions against cagetorical thinking in the aforementioned NYTimes article:

Privacy is a broad enough concept, and Europe and America are varied enough, that it is easy to find counterexamples. Britain, for one, is only slowly moving toward the Continental model.

Something tells me, however, that the ideological divide will continue and deepen as online media continues to proliferate. I wonder how French courts would feel about the sale of copies of of Dumas’ and Mencken’s photos on this NY state-based site.

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An MQ-1 Predator drone returned from a mission to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan with a new paintjob, courtesy of StevenDuque.com.

In his book Wikinomics, business strategist Don Tapscott writes:

“Employees drive performance by collaborating with peers across organizational boundaries, creating what we call a ‘wiki workplace.’ Customers become ‘prosumers’ by cocreating goods and services rather than simply consuming the end-product. So called-supply chains work more effectively when the risk, reward, and capability to compete major projects—including massively complex products like cars, motorcycles, and airplanes—are distributed across planetary networks of partners who work as peers (1).”

According to a recent article in The New York Times, unmanned surveillance drones are currently collecting more video intelligence than analysts are able to handle. The volume of footage taken from last year’s surveillance efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan nearly triple what it was only a few years ago–a grand total of roughly 24 years’ worth of footage, if watched without break. As operations in Afghanistan will certainly escalate in the near future and U.S. troops are withdrawn from both countries over time, the problem of excess, unmanned surveillance will only compound.

What if, as customers of national security, citizens aided the government’s counterterrorism surveillance efforts through mass collaborative online efforts? The government could post snippets of video on a centralized media hub, and citizens could review videos, comment on them, and flag them (if they see something suspicious). The government might even provide incentives for quality interactions — say, a fiscal or honorary rewards for good citizenship. Perhaps other citizens could rate others’ interactions, providing an element of peer evaluation and competition. Government intelligence officers could use the number of unique flags and/or comments to make triage decisions, and users could help screen the verity of flags by giving them a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down.’

Citizens would become ‘prosumers’ of national security, adding value to the end product of counterterrorist intelligence because of their vested interest in U.S. national security.

There are undeniably both interesting and disconcerting aspects of this proposition. I’ll address what I see to be the most immediate issues at stake.

The Big Brother Effect & and Society of Distrust. If implemented, social surveillance should be limited to foreign threats, most would agree. Mass collaborative surveillance of faraway lands would foster national antagonism (in addition to a sense of social responsbility) toward threats external to a nation’s society. If focused inward, however, our trust in one another might suffer from fear of Red Scare-like accusations, akin to how many around the world distrust police. Separately, dislike for Americans in the international community may be exacerbated by citizens’ participation in military surveillance efforts.

Securispam and Poor Intelligence. For those of you familiar with the comment boards of YouTube, you’ll find that some of the comments are sometimes, well, pretty crummy and downright idiotic at times, even on serious videos. Inviting open commentary on quasi-sensitive information could result in a deluge of crappy ‘intelligence,’ not to mention create PR-nightmares that may result from less-than-politically correct commentary that media outlets — both domestic and overseas — catch wind of. Additionally, opening up participation to the online world could create security windows for foreign intelligence operatives to spam video surveillance posting boards with faulty intelligence. Imagine how many times you’ve watched a crummy video or read a stupid article because of how many diggs it received.

Needless to say, there are plenty of holes in my half-baked plan for wikicounterterrorism. But, the problem remains: as our government is increasingly inundated with an endless streams of surveillanc edata, a better system of reviewing what could be important information is needed. While creating an open wiki-hub for commenting and flagging video may not be the right answer, I tend to think there is something right in the proposition to incorporate mass collaborative techniques, at least structurally, into the processes for reviewing large amounts of sensitive data. Whether that means opening up the surveillance data to the American general public or limiting who can access the information — e.g., to government officials and/or outsourced private military companies — the excuse that there’s simply too much surveillance out there will not suffice, if national security threats pass under the radar.

To end this post, I’ll leave you with a  comment from then-Senator Barack Obama on citizen participation in national security efforts:

“”To succeed [in the War on Terrorism], we must improve our civilian capacity. The finest military in the world is adapting to the challenges of the 21st century. But it cannot counter insurgent and terrorist threats without civilian counterparts who can carry out economic and political reconstruction missions – sometimes in dangerous places. As President, I will strengthen these civilian capacities, recruiting our best and brightest to take on this challenge. I will increase both the numbers and capabilities of our diplomats, development experts, and other civilians who can work alongside our military. We can’t just say there is no military solution to these problems. We need to integrate all aspects of American might.”

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