Phone Hacks, Privacy, Pie-Throwing, and a Ranting Lemming

The Lemming's posted about a pillar of British journalism, upholder of the peoples' right to know, and inspiration to spunky girl reporters, before:

• "Milly Dowler, News of the World, and Old-School Journalism in the Information Age"
  (July 7, 2011)

Apparently, the Information Age equivalent of dumpster diving isn't considered quite cricket in the U.K. - and may be called skipping on the other side of the Atlantic.

Examination of this serious matter - in the land that brought Parliament, police without guns, and Monty Python's Flying Circus, to the world - has gotten to the pie-throwing stage.

Literally.

"Murdoch attacker is a 'renowned left-wing activist who had targeted Barclays and Vodafone' "
MailOnline (July 19, 2011)

Pie Throwing: Are Shape-Shifting Space Aliens Involved?

"The pie-thrower who attacked Rupert Murdoch is a renowned activist who is one of the founding members of a left-wing protest group.

"Comedian Jonnie Marbles - real name Jonathan May-Bowles - has been involved in protests in the past, it has been claimed.

"Moments before he carried out the attack he wrote on Twitter: 'It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat'...."

Oh-kay.

Pie-throwing seems to be more a matter of British culture than British governance - and is a reminder that communities with a population over one probably won't be particularly homogeneous. Which doesn't mean what you may think.

Transparency time - or, the Lemming, unmasked!

If you follow this blog - honestly, don't you have anything better to do with your time?

Where was the Lemming? Transparency. Revelations.

If you follow this blog, you're probably aware that the Lemming is - human. A middle-aged fellow, named Brian Gill, living in a small town in central Minnesota. Which is, at the moment, hot enough to melt butter. Inside. With the air conditioner going. Six months from now - and that's another topic.

The Lemming is "apathetic," in the sense of not going ballistic over whatever intellectual fad is in fashion at the moment - the Lemming's seen too many 'and we're all gonna die' predictions come and go to work up any real enthusiasm.

Although it seems that cancer may cause cell phones - and it may be a conspiracy:

• " 'Cancer Causes Cell Phones!' - or, not"
  (July 18, 2011)

And 'everyone' knows who's really behind the CIA, Wall Street, and the British Royal family: the shape-shifting, space-alien, lizard men! In fact, the Lemming's read that British royalty are those very space aliens who run the world! It's a 'conspiracy,' of course. Or something.

Not that the Lemming believes it.

It's more likely that space aliens would be fairly easy to spot. And might work openly. As reporters.

Standards, News Corp, and Transcript Highlights

"Transcript Highlights: Brooks Gives Evidence "
(July 19, 2011)

"Former News Of The World editor Rebekah Brooks follows Rupert and James Murdoch in being questioned by MPs over the phone-hacking scandal. Here are transcript highlights from the hearing.

"News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch and his son James, the News International chairman earlier faced the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.

"It is made up of chairman John Whittingdale (JV), Therese Coffey (TC), Damian Collins (DC), Philip Davies (PD), Paul Farrelly (PF), Alan Keen (AK), Louise Mensch (LM), Adrian Sanders (AS), Jim Sheridan (JS) and Tom Watson (TW).

"Rupert Murdoch is referred to as RM and his son James JM. Rebekah Brooks is referred to as RB.

"JM: It is a matter of great regret, my father's, and everybody at News Corp and these are standards that these actions do not live up to, the standards that our company tries to live up to all around the world.

"JM: It is our intention to put these things right, to make sure they don't happen again.

"RM: This is most humble day of my life.

"JM: The company relied on both the police having closed the investigation and the repeated assertions that there was no new evidence for them to reopen their investigation...."

Seriously, (allegedly) hacking into phones and (allegedly) publishing very personal, very private, information from families who had already been stressed - isn't, in the Lemming's opinion, nice. Or, more to the point, necessary.

Even if it was in the cause of selling more newspapers. Or 'the public's right to know,' or whatever.

This collision of old-school journalism, Information-Age technology, and folks who don't admire Investigative Reporters (who save the world from corruption and five o'clock shadow) quite as much as we're told we did, back in the 'Good Old Days.'

Remember - these are the opinions of a ranting Lemming, who remembers the 'Good Old Days.,' And never wants to go back.

"Humble" - Now that the Scandal's Known - And It's Not Their Fault?

"Murdochs deny blame"
Karen Kissane, The Sydney Morning Herald (July 20, 2011) (It's 'tomorrow' there now)

"THE most powerful media mogul in the world described it as 'the most humble day' of his life. But Rupert Murdoch and his son, James, have told Britain's parliament that they had not been aware of any wrongdoing at News International.

"And when asked if he bore ultimate responsibility for the phone hacking scandal, the 80-year-old Mr Murdoch answered flatly 'no.'

"Instead he said responsibility laid with those he trusted to run the business and 'the people they trusted'...."

The Lemming's a little sympathetic with Murdoch and Murdoch. Outfits as big as News International are - big. It's possible for folks between the top and bottom of the organization chart to get - ah, creative - with journalistic integrity, strict observance of the law, and common decency.

After all, they're journalists - higher beings, beyond good and evil. Sort of like doctors. Some of them. No, wait. That's Nietzsche. And yet another topic.

Back to Murdoch and Murdoch. The Lemming thinks they may really have had no idea of what was going on in their business. Things have changed quite a bit in the last eight decades, particularly in any field that deals with information.

The Lemming's age is about midway between the Murdochs - younger and elder. Thanks in part to a remarkably checkered job history, the Lemming noticed the death of Disco, end of the Cold War, and advent of 'social media.'

Someone running a 'media empire' probably heard of those things - but may not have quite understood just how much had changed. And that's another topic, for another blog:

• "Why Your Boss Doesn't Understand the Information Age"
  Starting a Small Business Without Losing My Mind (August 9, 2010)

Back in Apathetic Lemming of the North - somewhat-related posts:

• "Citibank Card Data Hacked!! (but keep reading)"
  (June 9, 2011)
• "Lemming Tracks: Anonymity, Blogs, and Making a Point"
  (February 10, 2011)
• "The Trusted Identities in Cyberspace National ID Card Won't be a National ID Card"
  (January 8, 2011)
• "FCC, the Internet, Regulations, Freedom of Speech, and a Ranting Lemming"
  (December 23, 2010)
• "Facebook, Privacy, Small Town America and a Village of 6,830,000,000 people"
  (May 31, 2010)

Ersatz Dating Site: 250,000 Facebook Profiles Copied Without Permission

" 'Dating' Site Imports 250,000 Facebook Profiles, Without Permission"
Ryan Singel, Epicenter, Wired (February 3, 2011)

"How does a unknown dating site, with the absurd intention of destroying Facebook, launch with 250,000 member profiles on the first day?

"Simple.

"You scrape data from Facebook.

"At least, that's the approach taken by two provocateurs who launched Lovely-Faces.com this week, with profiles — names, locations and photos — scraped from publicly accessible Facebook pages. The site categorizes these unwitting volunteers into personality types, using a facial recognition algorithm, so you can search for someone in your general area who is 'easy going,' 'smug' or 'sly.'

"Or you can just search on people's real names.

"The duo behind the site say it's art, not commerce.

"In what seems to be liberal-arts-grad-schoolese, Paolo Cirio, a media artist, and Alessandro Ludovico, media critic and editor in chief of Neural magazine, explain why they made the site...."

You'll have to read the Epicenter article, to learn what the (artists?) said.

Back to the article:

"..Cirio and Ludovic say they will take down a user's profile, if a person asks and the site doesn't have any indication they are actually trying to make any money. Instead, it's part of a series of prank sites, the first two of which aimed at Google and Amazon, intended to make people think more about data in the age of internet behemoths...."

Okay: So it's a prank. A sort of joke. The Lemming's willing to believe that. Odds are that it'll do no real harm, apart from giving a few 'privacy' folks conniptions.

On the other hand, someone with - ah, issues - might not realize that Lovely-Faces.com is a sophisticated artistic prank. American 'stalker' laws got passed for a reason - and the Lemming sincerely hopes that doesn't happen to any of the quarter-million folks who got Shanghaied into this little joke.

The Lemming isn't too worried about hordes of adoring, lovesick admirers flocking toward the snowbound central Minnesota town the Lemming calls home. That's a photo of the Lemming, taken recently.

It's anyone's guess, what that "facial recognition algorithm" would come up with as a short-phrase character description, given that face. The Lemming put a photo like that in a 'what celebrity do you look like' website once - and Vivian Hsu was in my list of lookalikes. (April 24, 2008) It's the eyes that did it, most likely. Which is an almost entirely different topic.

The Lemming has no plans to see if that pushing-60 fellow made it into Alessandro and Paolo's ersatz dating site. There are more important things on the Lemming's to-do list. Like washing dishes.

Web Cookies: About 500 Words of Common Sense and Peanut Butter

"Web Cookies: the good, the bad and the ugly."
Information Carnivore (August 4, 2010)

"As a person who helps a lot of individuals with their personal computer problems
I seem to run into a familiar line of thinking on a regular basis, and that is many people seem to think web cookies (also known as browser cookies or an HTTP cookie) are a bad thing. Some I’ve talked with even seem to think that having a cookie is akin to having a virus, and that web cookies are a very bad thing.

First off, what exactly is a web cookie? Simply put, web cookies are nothing more than a piece of text that your web browser (firefox, internet explorer etc.) stores. It is not an executable file and doesn’t have any ability to run scripts or other potentially malicious software on your computer, all it ever stores is information in text format...."

This is one of the best - and quite possibly the shortest - discussions of cookies I've read. Just over 500 words - including a digression about peanut butter cookies - it explains how cookies

• Will not take over your computer
• Will save you the trouble of re-entering your preferences every time you return to a place like amazon.com
• Might be embarrassing
  • Particularly if you like to visit websites you're supposed to loathe

I think it's the "privacy" aspect of one class of cookies - tracking cookies - that gave them an unsavory reputation.

---

A tip of the hat to , on Twitter for the heads-up on his post.

"Multiple E-dentity Disorder" - Or, Welcome to the Real World

"Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn: Multiple e-dentity Disorder"
Austin Carr, Fast Company (July 1, 2010)

"How many times have you heard a horror story of how debaucherous Facebook photos have ended the chances of a job candidate?

"Most of us have numerous online personalities, from multiple email usernames and messenger logins, to private Twitter feeds and social network profiles. It seems every online tool calls for different behavior. Speaking recently at our Most Creative People in Business event, Soraya Darabi, product lead at Drop.io and #53 on our list, called this syndrome 'multiple e-dentity disorder.'

" 'I'm very different on Twitter than on Facebook,' Darabi told audiences. 'I have a professional self on LinkedIn, and a personal self on Tumblr.'

" 'I'm very different on Twitter than on Facebook,' Darabi told audiences. 'I have a professional self on LinkedIn, and a personal self on Tumblr.'

"According to Darabi, all these professional and personal Internet services create a chasm between our true selves and our online identity. 'What social media presents really is an issue of Web literacy,' she explained. 'We have to first understand what it means to be social online before we can accurately and authentically represent ourselves on each individual platform.'..."

There's a video embedded in the article, so you can listen to what Darabi said. It's pretty much what the article highlights:


video, 1:13

I think I understand what's being discussed here - and agree that it's an important issue. Particularly since so many people seem profoundly clueless about cause and effect.

Decades ago, when I started doing time in American academia, we had a similar issue. Then, it was college kids doing stupid things because they didn't see the connection between their college years and the "real world."

One of my kids told me that I was "born 40." She could be right. I remember, then, wondering how anybody could not realize that they'd take the same body they had in college with them into the "real world." And that it really mattered how much booze and drugs they poured into it - and how many diseases they exposed it to.

These days, it looks like we've got the same general situation with a tech edge. Folks - some folks, anyway - don't seem to realize that acting one way at the office and another online may not be a good idea.

I rather wonder if the same people would be astounded when they realized that starting a fight at the corner bar had an effect on their job as, say, a bank teller.

---

A tip of the hat to TweetSmarter, on Twitter, for the heads-up on this article.

Facebook, Privacy, Small Town America, and a Village of 6,830,000,000 people

"What if the Facebook (Un)Privacy Revolution Is a Good Thing?"
Epicenter, Wired (May 29, 2010)

" 'How could Mark Zuckerberg run such an important company like Facebook and be such a screw up?' That's effectively the question I've gotten almost non-stop for the past few weeks. 'Is this going to blow up the company?' 'Are Zuckerberg's apologies genuine?' And on and on.

"The questions are rooted in this: Facebook revised its privacy settings a few weeks ago and made them mind-numbingly complicated. With so much personal information on their pages, users freaked out. They worried that the default settings were wrong, but that changing them risked making things worse.

"Zuckerberg was forced to apologize; and earlier this week, in an effort to calm the furor, Zuckerberg said he was changing Facebook to make its privacy settings easier to use. That perennial question is starting to make the rounds again — Is Zuckerberg, at 26, too young to run such a big company?

"The truth is that the events of the past few weeks have been no accident. I've interviewed Zuckerberg and/or members of his team more than a dozen times in the last three years, and I believe they all completely understood the company's new privacy settings would be controversial. Indeed, I think they intended them to be controversial. Look back at the history of Facebook's privacy firestorms — they happen roughly every 18 months — and you'll see they all fit the same pattern. In order for Facebook to succeed, it needs to keep challenging existing conventions about online privacy. This isn't a secret. Zuckerberg has said it many times. What he hasn't said – but which he and anyone else with a brain knows – is that there is no way to do that without making some users angry...."

The rest of the article gives an interesting - and possibly accurate - view of why Facebook acts the way it does. I don't know enough about the workings of the company to have an opinion about the author's assertions.

I do, however, have a Facebook account - and a somewhat counter-cultural view of "privacy."

First, I think that when many people say "privacy," what they mean is closer to "anonymity:" being in contact with other people, without their ever knowing quite who - or what - they're communicating with. I think I can understand why someone would want to be an anonymous, faceless, semi-entity in a vast throng of other almost-people. Can't say that's a condition I'd want, though.

Then there's the sort of "privacy" I enjoy here in the small town in central Minnesota where I live. Maybe you've heard the gag about life in a small town: 'if you can't remember what you've done during the day, ask someone. They'll know.'

The downside of living like that is that you can't have a bizarrely unconventional lifestyle without the rest of the town knowing about it. The upside is that this isn't one of those places where a moving van can back up to your house, pack all your possessions inside, and leave - without someone starting to ask questions.

Then there's the time some hapless fool robbed a bank in a small North Dakota town. In winter. But I'm getting off-topic.

The point is that, even here in small town America, I've got "privacy." In the sense that I can go about my business without interference: providing that I keep the yard mowed, and wear seasonally-appropriate attire when outside, of course. But my identity and to some extent my actions are known to anybody in town who's interested.

It's not like living in a city - but I've gotten used to it.

Facebook? I've applied the same principle there, that I've applied in every other online community - never mind their TOS or privacy policy. I have never put something about myself online, that I wouldn't mind all 6,830,000,000 or so of the people I share this world with knowing about it.

Barring a few details like credit card numbers. Again with the small-town analogy: Everybody in town known me, but only my wife and some bank employees can get at our financial data. And only members of the family have keys to the house and vehicles.

'Lack of privacy' doesn't bother me - not in the town of about 4,000 where I live, or in the community of some fraction of 6,830,000,000 that I'm virtually a part of.

Blippy: Credit Card Numbers Shared - or - Hey, World! Wanna Watch Me Buy Dental Floss?!

"The Blippy Leak: How Credit Card Numbers Got In Google"
PCWorld (April 23, 2010)

"I don't know if you've heard, but social shopping site Blippy made a little slippy.

"Blippy, a four-month-old startup funded partially by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, lets you create a 'social stream' of all your credit card purchases. You set up an account, punch in your credit card number, and then Blippy automatically posts all of your purchases (including their prices) to your profile.

"It's basically a massive privacy invasion, only it's voluntary -- and, for whatever reason, people like it. Today, however, a few of Blippy's users realized the service was inadvertently sharing far more than they realized...."

Apparently it didn't affect everybody on Blippy, but some folks wound up with their credit card numbers in the HTML code or their profiles. A casual look at the page with a browser wouldn't show them - but a targeted Google search would 'see' the credit card numbers.

From what PCWorld said, anybody with a text editor should be able to get at the things.

Good news: Blippy says they've fixed the glitch; and it wasn't all that bad, anyway.

Blippy could be right.

What floors me is that there are enough people interested in sharing what they buy with credit cards to make Blippy a viable business.

I could see the fascination, if a vapid celebrity had a running data stream of their credit card activity. Folks buy those 'Hollywood gossip' magazines, after all. And I suppose there is a certain fascination in knowing just what Fifi VaVoom or Dirk Broadchin does each day.

Maybe most folks live more exciting lives than I do.

Big Billboard is Watching You?

Billboards with smart cameras are helping startup businesses figure out who is interested in the products and services they offer.

(The Lemming starts a rare rant.)

'Obviously,' This is an Invasion of Privacy

When many people say "privacy" these days, they apparently mean "anonymity." They're one more unit in a faceless mass, and they like it that way.

If they go into a store, they don't want anyone to recognize them, and certainly don't want the clerk to remember what they've ordered before, and which shelves piqued their interest.

If they're on the street, they don't want to be recognized, don't want to be noticed, and certainly don't want to be remembered.

If you think that sounds odd, I'll agree. But the response to security cameras and online stores that remember a customer's buying habits, suggest that this is what a great many people want.

I don't. But then, I'm not a typical urbanite. I was born and grew up in Fargo-Moorhead, mostly before the two towns' combined population hit 100,000. The closest I've come to living in a large city is San Francisco (beautiful city, boring climate - that's another story). With fewer than 800,000 people, San Francisco is practically a small town - compared to 'real' cities like Bangkok, Los Angeles, or Tokyo.

Today, I live in a town with about 4,000 other people. It's the sort of place where 'if you don't remember what you did today, ask someone. They'll know.' My father lives in an even smaller town. I got a phone call from one of his neighbors recently, who'd noticed something odd about my father's place, and was concerned.

"Privacy?" In what seems to be the urbanite sense of the word, it doesn't exist here. And, I love it.

About those 'intrusive' billboards: people, get a grip. In my world, billboards are like shop windows. They're there to bring in customers.

And, it would be a brain-dead shopkeeper who didn't pay attention to what sort of people stopped to look at the front window. It really does make a difference: particularly if you're trying to decide where to advertise, and how to present your services or products.

I've wondered if this craze for "privacy" will eventually lead to people walking around with bags over their heads, and capacious gowns to hide their identity.


(from The New York Times, used w/o permission)
Person having their privacy violated by intrusive billboard?


(from The New York Times, used w/o permission)
Military inspection of disturbing billboard.

(The Lemming's calmer now. )

Here's what got the Lemming started this morning:

"Billboards That Look Back"
The New York Times (May 31, 2008)

"In advertising these days, the brass ring goes to those who can measure everything — how many people see a particular advertisement, when they see it, who they are. All of that is easy on the Internet, and getting easier in television and print.

"Billboards are a different story. For the most part, they are still a relic of old-world media, and the best guesses about viewership numbers come from foot traffic counts or highway reports, neither of which guarantees that the people passing by were really looking at the billboard, or that they were the ones sought out.

"Now, some entrepreneurs have introduced technology to solve that problem. They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by — their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database.

"Behind the technology are small start-ups that say they are not storing actual images of the passers-by, so privacy should not be a concern. The cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon...."

" 'I didn’t see that at all, to be honest,' said Sam Cocks, a 26-year-old lawyer, when the camera was pointed out to him by a reporter. 'That’s disturbing. I would say it’s arguably an invasion of one’s privacy.'

"Organized privacy groups agree, though so far the practice of monitoring billboards is too new and minimal to have drawn much opposition. But the placement of surreptitious cameras in public places has been a flashpoint in London, where cameras are used to look for terrorists, as well as in Lower Manhattan, where there is a similar initiative...."

Online Privacy Tips

"Tips For The Privacy Minded"

Some of these actually make sense.