Session organised in collaboration with Fundación Telefónica.

WORKSHOP: Facesponge with Aymeric Mansoux and Gerald Kogler. 10h-14h

Have you ever wondered what is going on “behind the scenes” on social networks like Facebook? In this workshop we will explore our so-called social data and get a glimpse at how it is viewed by the company and third parties who access it. In order to break several myths about Facebook applications, you will be invited to take part in designing small programs that extracts and manipulate you and your friend’s online information. Nothing will be written back to Facebook at any time, we will only be reading existing data. No data will be collected or viewable by anyone else.

No programming experience is required. Basic knowledge of javascript can be useful to explore more advanced possibilities of the Facesponge sandbox.

This workshop is part of the Naked on Pluto project, a critical text adventure Facebook game concerned with issues of online privacy and control within centralized commercial social networks, designed and written by Marloes de Valk, Aymeric Mansoux and Dave Griffiths.

Facesponge is developed in collaboration with Baltan Laboratories.
All Naked on Pluto software is released under free culture licenses.

Schedule:

* Naked on Pluto presentation
* Gameplay session
* Anatomy of an FB app
* Introduction to Facesponge
* Breaking FB apps myths
* Group discussion

Practical information:

* The workshop will be taught in English.
* You will need to bring your own laptop.
* Places are limited.

DEBATE: Identity and simulation. Artificial life on the networks. With Jussi Parikka, Pau Waelder, Aymeric Mansoux and Mónica Bello. 19h-21h

Internet is changing our way of understanding the public space. The Web has become a dominant structure that covers all aspects of contemporary society. The proliferation of virtual agents, designed to stimulate non-fortuitous reactions and meetings, reconfigures the profile of individuals in dynamics that are innovative but also invasive, and generates new forms of control. In this brand new context, identity and simulation become decisive themes of behaviour on the Web.

REGISTRATION:

Workshop + Debate: 6€
Please send an email explaining the reasons for your interest to cursos@cccb.org
Limited capacity!

Debate: 3€
Tel-entrada (tel. 902 101 212 / www.telentrada.com)
CCCB page for the event

Public Lecture: Joris van Hoboken, Nicolas Malevé and Aymeric Mansoux
Date: Wednesday, 16/03/2011
Time: doors open at 18:45, lecture begins at 19:00
Location: Mauritsstraat 36, Rotterdam
Entrance free
streamed at: http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/pzwart_video.html

Bringing together artists, programmers and theorists, Sniff, Scrape, Crawl… is a series of lectures examining the porous borders of privacy in the digital age. Previous public events in this series have touched upon a wide rage of topics such as surveillance, data-mining, the function and limits of anonymity, and the profound influence of network architecture on social, political and legal issues.

The next three talks will continue to explore and expand upon these ideas from different perspectives. Joris van Hoboken will be looking at search engines, how they track queries and what impact data retention and profiling has on our civil liberties. Nicolas Malevé will be speaking about social network platforms and the evolution of national and international legal agreements, while drawing parallels between the processes of homogenization of the web and the processes of legislative harmonization within the EU. Lastly, Aymeric Mansoux will be talking about *Naked on Pluto*. The project, which is a collaboration between Mansoux, Dave Griffiths and Marloes de Valk, is a multiplayer text adventure game on Facebook that explores the perils of centralized social networks.

Joris van Hoboken (NL) is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Information Law, and his thesis focuses on regulatory aspects of search engines. He graduated cum laude in both Theoretical Mathematics (2002) and Law (2006) from the University of Amsterdam. His LL.M. thesis dealt with the new Dutch regulations on access to personal data in criminal proceedings, i.e. an analysis of how citizens’ interests are implicated in the limitation of such access. Until 1 September 2006, he worked as a paralegal at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and as a co-director of Bits of Freedom, a digital civil rights organisation.
Main site: http://www.jorisvanhoboken.nl/

Nicolas Malevé is an artist, software programmer and data activist developing multimedia projects and web applications for and with cultural organisations. His current research work is focused on cartography, information structures, metadata and the means to visually represent them. He lives and works in Barcelona and Brussels. Since 1998 Nicolas collaborates with Constant, a non-profit association, based and active in Brussels since 1997 in the fields of feminism, copyright alternatives and working through networks. Selection of works: *Copy.cult and the Original Si(g)n*, a project of investigation on the alternatives to author’s rights. www.constantvzw.com/copy.cult/home
*Yoogle!* an online game that allows users to play with the parameters of the Web 2.0 economy and the marketing of personal data. http://yoogle.be

Aymeric Mansoux (FR) is an artist, musician, media researcher and core tutor at the Piet Zwart. In 2003, he founded GOTO10 with Thomas Vriet, a non profit organization and artist collective, with the goal to promote the use and support of free software in electronic music and media art creation. Aymeric has been active in the collective until 2010 and initiated several projects such as: ‘make art’, a yearly international no nonsense festival for software artists using and writing free software; ‘Puredyne’, a popular live GNU/Linux distribution for creative media and the ‘FLOSS+Art publication’, the first collection of essays on FLOSS and digital art production.
Main site: http://su.kuri.mu/
Naked on Pluto: http://pluto.kuri.mu/

The *Sniff, Scrape, Crawl…* public lecture series has been realised with the collaboration of Research Programme (Lectoraat) Communication in a Digital Age.

Constant is a non-profit association, an interdisciplinary arts-lab based and active in Brussels since 1997. Constant works in-between media and art and is interested in the culture and ethics of the World Wide Web. The artistic practice of Constant is inspired by the way that technological infrastructures, data-exchange and software determine our daily life. Free software, copyright alternatives and (cyber)feminism are important threads running through the activities of Constant. Constant organizes workshops, print-parties, walks and ‘Verbindingen/Jonctions’-meetings on a regular basis for a public that’s into experiments, discussions and all kinds of exchanges.

Michel Cleempoel, graduated at the national superior art school of la Cambre – Brussels. Author of numerous digital art works and exhibitions, in collaboration with Nicolas Malevé. http://www.deshabillez-vous.be

Nicolas Malevé, a multimedia artist since 1998, has been an active member of the association Constant. As such, he has taken part in organizing various activities to do with alternatives to copyrights, such as Copy.cult & The Original Si(g)n, held in 2000. He has been developing multimedia projects and web applications for cultural organisations. His research work is currently focused on information structures, metadata and the semantic web and the means to visually represent them.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Essentially because of their scale. Facebook reports having more than 500 million active users.[1] This, of course, inspires all kinds of commercial dreams. Social networks barely brought something new to the web. For personal pages, Friendster predates largely Facebook and the other social networks. And the functionalities they offer barely innovate. It is their momentum though since a large portion of the online population happily subscribes and uses these services. In our view, social networks are an internet in miniature, what the bourgeois garden is to nature: a domestic version, with fences, controllable, reassuring, narrow-minded. They have their own version of email, chat, links, search, page but everything in redux. As they are powered by social pressure, they are an endless source of anecdotes fueling the media.

It is important to remark that we hear a lot about proprietary social networks and too rarely about free social networks in the mainstream media. They exist though and are used by governments, businesses or academic institutions: ie, elgg[2], a social network releasing its code under the GPL powers various important platforms like Oxfam, Federal Canadian Government, Johns Hopkins University or Université Lille 1.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
Internet offers the possibility of a more decentralized media ecology. The Peer-to-Peer exchange networks are a wonderful example of this. Proprietary social media (although sometimes built with free software never release their source code) are based on a centralized architecture. A company owns the server where the users connect and therefore can monitor their behaviour easily. It is barely new though. Centralized and decentralized technologies have always been co-present on the network.Think about the intial MSN Classic, the first attempt of Microsoft to capture its users in a mini-internet, not so far from Facebook.

MSN was originally conceived as a dial-up online content provider like America Online, supplying proprietary content through an artificial folder-like interface integrated into Windows 95’s Windows Explorer file management program. Categories on MSN appeared like folders in the file system Then officially known as ‘The Microsoft Network,’ the service launched along with Windows 95 on August 24, 1995. MSN was included with Windows 95 installations and promoted through Windows and other Microsoft software released at the time. Product support and discussion was offered through the MSN service, as well as information such as news and weather, basic e-mail capabilities, chat rooms, and message boards similar to newsgroups (from Wikipedia).[3]

At the time, users much prefered the possibilities of the internet. It seems today that an important part of them embrace a return to MSN-like technologies.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
You have to distinguish two things: the data you upload consciously and the traces that you leave. The first ones are covered by the way you handle copyright, the second ones are the property of the platform.

For the uploaded data, the Flickr terms of use (now Yahoo’s) used to state “What’s yours is yours”. But most of the time, this is nuanced by a series of conditions that change the meaning of the statement: for instance, you grant the company (and its affiliates) the right to use your data for advertising its services. For the traces, your privacy rights are the only way to regain control, but it is extremely difficult since you are barely aware of what kind of data is collected. The matter is further complicated by the fact that, when signing up, you grant the company the right to host your data in other countries, therefore possibly under different legislations (usually more favorable to them).

Now if we consider the aspect of responsibility for what is being said or shown, the platform denies all responsibility.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
As we read them, we don’t subscribe to proprietary social networks. We are huge fans of the Goodiff project, a service for automated tracking of semantic changes in web service policies created by Alexandre Dulaunoy and Michael Noll. They clearly prove the point that these terms of services are constantly re-written, one tiny modification after the other.[4]

Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
As we don’t subscribe, we have no idea.

How do you value your private information now ? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
We usually lack scenarios to imagine what can be done with electronic information. Apparently innocent data can be used to produce critical knowledge. A good example is France Telecom offering to the French trade-unions active in its company to use a shared intranet. On the intranet’s homepage, you can see the number of connections: 5000 connections per month for 120 000 workers. An easy way to monitor in real-time the power of the trade-union in the company. Data which is initially gathered to monitor the technical status of the platform ends up being a statement about the penetration (or lack thereof) of the unions in the company.[5]

Additionally, if you leave information in a system, this information can be correlated with other sources of information to produce new knowledge about you. Even if this information is apparently innocent at first. The problem with proprietary social networks is that they tend to centralize so much about your internet life that they can correlate a lot of information about who you connect to, what are your interests, at what time you do what or when. This information is available to third-parties (advertisers) and constitutes valuable consumer profiles to them. Or they can be a means to check other information: an insurance company comparing profile information with a health insurance request, a tax officer comparing your spending habits in your declaration form and your social network profile, etc. In this respect, private data is the oil of the new century. And this only covers what we can expect under relatively democratic regimes. The web 2.0 companies do not resist very much the pressures of the Chinese government to give access to user data. And we do not need to go so far anyways, you only need a slightly authoritarian state to see that information easily finds it’s way to the police.[6]

How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
We chose our alliances. If we need online services, we prefer to pay a small amount of money to trustworthy organisations committed to free software and serious about privacy rather than use the free online services. We prefer supporting Domaine Public or all2all in Belgium rather than using a free GMail account.

However alternatives are not always easy or available. When there is no trustworthy alternative, we try to use these online services as cautiously and as less as possible.

What do you think the information gathered is used for?
Commercial use through customer behaviour analysis, mainly. We are not only watching the banner, the banner is also gathering information from what one does, what one writes and to whom, from status to age and sex preferences. In this respect, it is quite similar to Google adds following you from page to page, site to site.

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
At the moment, we know that ex-students made a club about Michel in Facebook. The club is closed to the public and it is a student’s joke. In itself it is not a big deal, but the fact that it is closed doesn’t allow to respond and nevertheless the information about its existence has leaked out of the social network. Used in a more delicate situation, this combination of closed group and leaks can be explosive. This illustrates the point that the use of privacy-preserving technologies for one person is pointless if others happily enjoy disseminating information about him/her in environments he/she can’t access.

By collecting information on other users, tagging them on pictures, sending them email invitations, social networks users are doing the profiling for the platform they contribute to.

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
The worst case scenario is usually described in terms of the ‘personal little secret’ being revealed. Husband cheating on wife, homosexuality revealed, etc. Most of these stories one can find in the newspapers have an amibiguous moral tone: on the one hand the platform is blamed for the breach of privacy, on the other hand, more subtly, the victims are stygmatized as they had indeed something to hide. Names are published and photos (often coming from the social network) are printed. The consequences can be serious, they include cases of suicide. But as painful as it is, we think this part of the problem is relatively easy to understand.

There are, in our opinion, other damaging effects of the social networks that can prove virulent on the longer term. One is the epistemic violence used against a core element constituting the social: friendship. Everyone knows a Facebook friend is not a friend as in “real life”, that a “friend” on the platform has a different meaning, it means two nodes connected in a graph. But the more it goes, this cognitive failure that doesn’t capture the complexity of social binding and intimacies gets internalized by the users. They don’t dare to exclude or refuse requests, they feel obligations, and more importantly they internalize the idea that friendship is an instrument to quantify another fraudulous concept: reputation. On a daily basis, they perform a successful cognitive failure as they know the terms are wrong but they nevertheless act according to their logic.

The other damaging effect is the increasing loss of collective organisational skills related to the digital infrastructure. Every time a group chooses a proprietary social network to get organized, it looses the occasion of finding ways to create its digital habitat or its communication platform, its working environment. When Indymedia users go to MySpace, independant video-makers to YouTube, writers and philosophers to Facebook, we all loose a beautiful opportunity to reinvent our relationship to music, film or literature, critical thinking and meditation.

Nowadays, most of the “reading” of what is written online is done by machines. Does this impact your idea of what is anonymity and privacy?
First about privacy.
Privacy in itself is a complex notion. For instance, to make one’s coming out is a very crucial step for a homosexual. It is to take the decision of moving an affirmation about one’s sexuality from the private to the public sphere. Taking care of privacy in this respect doesn’t mean to burry one’s sexual preference in the closet, but to give the freedom to keep it private or to take a public stand. Additionally the division between the private sphere and the public one is extremely political. A partner molested in a couple may need that we don’t consider the home private and intervene. Privacy depends on contexts and strategies. In the digital world, it is not privacy in itself the problem but why some humans put machines to work so hard on virtual relationships. Why such an urge to diminish the importance of privacy? Why now? Why do we have now, immediately, to leave it in the name of progress? A better world, etc.[7]. We agree that privacy must not be reified and is a dynamic concept. But the reason why we must accept immediately its devaluation is rather unclear. And is decided unilateraly by the tech-industry moguls. This is what triggers our curiousity and suspicion. Privacy is an obstacle in the deployment of the social graph. The epistemic holdup on sociality cannot happen if relationships can escape the graph. But don’t think the same industry is not interested in privacy. It is very aware that it can be monetized and sold back through the privacy business. As they want to impose their own version of networked sociality, they want to impose their own version of privacy. What we are suposed to do is to let go of privacy and buy it back through privacy enabling/preserving technologies or services.

Now on the machines.
A recently published study[8] on the people who monitor the images of surveillance cameras reveals that 15% of the time is spent in pure voyeurism, and a good part of the remaining time is spent to track people and movements on the base of racial and social bias. One could think a machine could be more neutral, but the machines are programmed by humans, so the problem is simply displaced. An interesting example has showed up recently[9]. Yasir Afifi, who lives in Silicon Valley, discovered a GPS tracking device on his car. Uncertain wether this was a tracking device or a bomb, he posts the pictures on the internet and, reassured it was a GPS device, he intends to sell it. Soon after, the doorbell rings with FBI agents asking to have the device back. When they interrogate him, they show him a printout of a blogpost made by a friend of him. The blogpost indeed speaks about bombs in a mall, but is a general comment about security and terrorism. Typically the FBI software that monitors popular sites on the internet must have a predilection for certain keywords (bombs, mall) and their presence is likely to trigger a chain of events. But what is interesting is that not only the person who wrote the post is under surveillance but also the ones attached to him through the social graph, his ‘friend’. And that this surveillance itself implies more data tracking (GPS data) correlated to places that themselves have their own classification (airport, mall, etc).

Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
Yes, absolutely. We developped through different workshops a game called Yoogle!.[10] Yoogle! is an online game allowing users to play with the parameters of the web 2.0 and to exchange roles between the different actors of its economy. It presents itself as a game of the Goose with a track of 63 consecutively numbered spaces. The players navigate through stories, traps, challenges and riddles about the web 2.0. They can choose to play the game as a simple user, a technical administrator, a company or a State. The game at the moment is only in French, it connects to the database of information collected in the project e-traces[11] It received a fair amount of press in Belgium and France, and we use it during workshops and meetings
to give a concrete example of the functioning of web 2.0 and the issues at stake. We are really curious and interested in the development of games tackling the problems embedded in social networks, but we have a request: please, don’t force us to subscribe to facebook to play it :-)

[1] http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
[2] http://elgg.com/powered.php
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Network#MSN_Classic
[4] http://www.goodiff.org/
[5] http://etraces.constantvzw.org/informations/spip.php?article6
[6] http://cryptome.org/isp-spy/yahoo-spy.pdf
[7] http://fr.readwriteweb.com/2010/08/02/a-la-une/tim-oreilly-amliorer-monde-vaut-bien-peu-de-vie-prive/
[8] http://www.internetactu.net/2009/08/31/technologies-de-surveillance-ou-de-discrimination/
[9] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101013/14344011415/how-is-it-that-a-random-comment-on-reddit-leads-to-your-friend-getting-tracked-by-the-fbi.shtml
[10] http://www.yoogle.be
[11] http://etraces.constantvzw.org

Plutonian Striptease is a series of interviews with experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media, to map the different views on this topic, outside the existing discussions surrounding privacy.

Florian Cramer‘s background is comparative literature and art history with a focus on experimental arts, media, poetics and aesthetics. From 2006 to 2010, he was responsible for the Networked Media Master programme of the Piet Zwart Institute. Since 2008, he works as an applied research professor (Dutch: “lector”) supervising the research programme Communication in a Digital Age of the Piet Zwart Institute.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
I see two major reasons: One, social networks have popularized classical Internet communication with accessible interfaces. So finally, everyone – including journalists – understands Internet as more than just an electronic distribution channel, and has also been cured from the “cyberspace”, “hypermedia” and “virtual reality” memes. But as a result, functionality and communication culture that has always been a core feature of the Internet is falsely being perceived as new, as a “social media revolution”.

The second reason is widespread job anxiety among the makers of the traditional news media, and those who indirectly live on the food chain of classical mass media production. Research suggests that younger people devote most of their media attention to social networks and “Web 2.0” services. At the same time, nobody except Google and, to a lesser degree, Facebook has figured out a revenue model for them. They help making traditional media marginal, but don’t create equivalent work opportunities for ‘creatives’ – designers, writers, etc. Contrary to the common belief that “social media” brought a shift from centralized one-to-many communication to a decentralized and self-organized model, just the opposite is true in regards to media ownership. A culture of countless local newspapers and TV stations, for example, is being replaced with a few global players in the Internet. The days where filmmakers could live from making MTV video clips, where critics could survive outside academia as newspaper and magazine writers and artists lived from jobs in the advertising industry are almost over. The strong news media coverage of social network mirrors the respective anxiety of the editors.

To explain this a little bit more: On one of our conferences, the German advertiser Marc Schwieger quoted Henry Ford saying that fifty percent of the money he spent for advertising was money flushed down the toilet. Social networks and other Google Ads help people like Ford reaching only the 50% which are the real target group of his company. Since all traditional news and broadcast media economically depend on advertising, the whole industry is shrinking to half its original size as an effect. This streamlining and economic efficiency gain might even justify the dotcom and new economy stock market craze of the late 1990s retroactively. One heavily invests into a new technology only when expecting breakthrough productivity gains, productivity in the economic sense of generated value divided by labor costs. If users create most of your content, if you need designers only once in a while for a template overhaul, and most of your staff consists of software developers and system administrators, this means a radical shift in media professions.

This conversely explains why Apple has become a news media darling, with Steve Job’s press conferences being broadcast as breaking news. Apple’s consumer devices and services successfully sell (and thus finance) traditional mass media industry content: music, movies, TV series, now also magazines. I wouldn’t be surprised if these two competing models, user-generated social media and mass media content sold over online services, will continue to coexist, and if social networks will partly have been a hype of the early 2010s. They will probably continue to be the media for younger people in school and college, but even those may move towards paid editorial media with age. It boils down, after all, to a question of having no income and a lot of time for Facebook versus having an income but no time. A Facebooker/Twitterer/blogger lifestyle is simply unsustainable for anyone with a life, a job, or both. If my scenario is right, then social media will continue to be socially powerful but economically marginal.

(2) In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
As said, mostly in interface design and accessibility. If you analyze a service such as Facebook, you can see that practically all its social communication functions already existed, and were commonly used, in the multiuser terminal operating systems of the 1970s and 1980s – Unix, Vax, VM/CMS and others: commands to see which other users were online at the same time, mail messages and chats (‘talk’ in Unix), user status messages (‘finger’), sharing files (via setting file permissions) etc. etc. This, however, required physical access to a university or company server and expert knowledge of terminal-based operating systems. So only a very small elite of people knew and used these technologies. Dial-up BBSes, which provided similar functions for anyone with a home computer and a telephone line, had a similar user experience. In the 1990s, the classical World Wide Web primarily provided an interface for reading pages, but was harder to use for publishing stuff yourself. Pages needed to be coded in HTML and uploaded using external services like FTP, group communication needed to resort to other services like E-Mail mailing lists, newsgroups and IRC chat.

With the availability of always-on broadband Internet, newer generation web browsers and more complex HTML features, it became possible to integrate all these functions into web sites and use the browser as a one-stop interface. This way, the web was effectively turned from an electronic library into a user-friendly operating system. The earliest manifestations were web forums, auction sites, blogs and Wikis. If there’s genius in Facebook, then in the absorption of all these media into one with a relatively clean and straightforward user interface.

The idea of the online community as a social medium, on the other hand, is anything but new. Classical examples include The Well in the late 1980s, AOL, Compuserve and Digitale Stad Amsterdam in the early 1990s. Facebook for sure has taken this idea to a new level – but in the end it simply is what AOL would have morphed into if it had been run by more competent managers and developers. Data-mining was not yet as advanced in the 1990s, and privacy issues were less debated, but structurally everything was already in place back then.

(3) Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
It is your responsibility because it is your own stupidity if you share information that you do not want everyone to know. In this respect, posting something in a “social medium” is no different from, for example, publishing something in a newspaper or in a book. “Social media” services can only be blamed for the illusions of intimacy and privacy they create, making people falsely believe that they are only talking to their friends. But the same problem exists with E-Mail since unencrypted E-Mail can be read by anyone with access to the network nodes in between the sender and the recipient, and by the provider of your web mail service if you use one.

(4) Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
I avoid services and software for which I need to click an EULA as much as possible. – Good news is that in most juridictions, these EULAs are legally void. Unfortunately, there has not been enough effort to actively bring them down in court.

(5) Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
No, because others are aggregating information about me that I can neither control nor revoke. I have not been amused in the past, for example, that pictures of me and my partner taken in a private social context ended up on Flickr and Facebook, marked up with my name, and posted by people who falsely think of themselves as critical media activists. I had a full-fledged social relations profile on Facebook before I ever became a member because people had been careless enough to upload their gmail or Hotmail address books to the site, feeding Facebook’s social graph algorithm. And these examples do not even include hidden corporate and governmental information gathering. It would be naive to assume that company and government databases don’t routinely leak, with information being traded to third parties. The interesting perversity of the so-called social networks is that intelligence gathering has turned from high-paid agency work into volunteer self-surveillance. It was rather naive by the Chaos Computer Club to call the German government “Stasi 2.0” given that Facebook’s database and social graph really is the user-generated, Web 2.0 version of an intelligence database.

(6) How do you value your private information now? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
A good example of an information collection that was at first harmless but soon gained entirely new significance were European public censuses in the 1920s and early 1930s which tracked people’s religious affiliations.

(7) How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
I only use online services for public information.

(8) What do you think the information gathered is used for?
First of all marketing, secondly governmental intelligence, thirdly for a black market of insurance companies, banks and corporate employers to assess the contract risks of an individual or a group, plus foreign intelligence services and employer’s competitors seeking clues for bribing or blackmailing individuals or finding out trade secrets; and finally, to criminals for finding profitable targets. For this, one doesn’t necessarily need data leaks, but can work very well with public data. Thanks to camera manufacturer tags and no also geo location tags in digital photographs, Flickr, for example, is an excellent resource for spotting homes of people who own expensive photography equipment.

(9) Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
If I describe it here, I would provide more online clues and links to the respective information.

(10) What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
The answer to question (6) hints to the historical worst case so far.

(11) Nowadays, most of the “reading” of what is written online is done by machines. Does this impact your idea of what is anonymity and privacy?
Given how rudimentary and error-prone semantic pattern recognition algorithms and other artificial intelligence algorithms are, the above is rather good news.

(12) Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
The game could succeed in this goal if it works as a simulation of the whole within the constrained, user-visible realm of a social Internet service. It could demand from its players to create data mining schemes under the guise of friendly services that affect the other players. Whoever succeeds in extracting the most valuable information wins the game, just like in real life.

Plutonian Striptease is a series of interviews with experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media, to map the different views on this topic, outside the existing discussions surrounding privacy.

Marc Garrett is Co-director and co-founder, with artist Ruth Catlow of the Internet arts collectives and communities – furtherfield.org, furthernoise.org, netbehaviour.org, also co-founder and co-curator/director of the gallery space HTTP Gallery in London, UK. Co-curating various contemporary Media Arts exhibitions, projects nationally and internationally.

Net artist, media artist, curator, writer, street artist, activist, educationalist and musician. Emerging in the late 80’s from the streets exploring creativity via agit-art tactics. Using unofficial, experimental platforms such as the streets, pirate radio such as the locally popular ‘Savage Yet Tender’ alternative broadcasting 1980’s group, net broadcasts, BBS systems, performance, intervention, events, pamphlets, warehouses and gallery spaces. In the early nineties, was co-sysop (systems operator) for a while with Heath Bunting on Cybercafe BBS, dedicated to arts, technology and hacking.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
I find this quite a complex question. There are a few reasons why social networks are often reported more readily and regularly represented by traditional media news outlets. The main reason can be put down to social media’s popularity in everyday culture, connecting with people’s everyday habits and behaviours through different forms of networked, communication gadgets and tools. The massification of easy interaction, demanding hardly any thought in how to use the technologically, on-line networked and mobile interfaces, makes them perfect conduits for distributed information and communication.

There has been much media noise about activists getting recognition for their causes using social networks.
In June 2009, the Iranian government tried to halt (and succeeded in the end) on-line and off-line dissent, whilst protesters exploited every avenue of communication to get their immediate situations seen by the world outside. Many posted videos taken by mobile phones of the violence taking place, to different social networking platforms such as YouTube. Then traditional news corporations took these videos as part of their news packages and reported on the troubles occurring in Tehran, Iran. The most visited tweets for regular updates was ‘persiankiwi’, whose tweets were displayed on the official website of Mirhossein Mousavi, the former prime minister who declared that his election victory had been stolen from him. “we must go – dont know when we can get Internet – they take 1 of us, they will torture and get names – now we must move fast”, was one of the many comments posted on this Twitter site. Also many images of Iran’s street demonstrations were uploaded to the photographic network of Flickr.

The artist Deena DeNaro, created an interesting ‘short’ video piece in the style of ‘Ad-Busters’ Magazine and ‘the Yes Men’, called ‘Reversing the Wave’. As a critique of Nokia’s decision to offer Iran the technological ability to monitor its own citizens during the protests. DeNaro’s ‘Subvertisement’ film proposes a “Brand Identity Correction” by bringing “Nokia’s brand identity closer in alignment to its actions…”. DeNaro’s piece questions Nokia’s unethical stance placing “profits above privacy and basic human rights.” It was selected for the MoFilm competition for the Cannes Lions TV Advertising Festival 2010, where the brief was to produce an innovative 60 second advertisement for Nokia. In the end, it was withdrawn from the competition.[1]

The powerful human stories told from the streets, governmental and corporate attempts to restrict their freedoms and artists and activists cultural hacks naturally draw attention to these social networks.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
With the emergence of what is now called web 2.0 we saw the dying off of user created web-pages and self-built platforms for sharing information and interacting with each other. This led to a simplification and homogenization of interfaces and in turn limited the ways in which people could communicate and collaborate with each other. Instead of creating their own social spaces they played those created by others (most commonly corporations who stand to profit from harvesting their data).

Mobile technologies are now starting to dominate the experience of networked interaction and some fear that the Internet (as an open and free public space) will be left behind. Since the iPhone the consumer class and business class has incorporated as part of their habitual everyday experience, a new form of receiving and sharing information whether it be from their social or business networks or the latest national and international news sources. At the same time information and social interactions are scaled down; more detailed and contextual information is not as accessible within these more limiting interfaces.

Let’s face it, it’s all about business and as we have learned over and over again, this is what really matters over humane, social values. How human content with deeper engagement survives this depends on the imaginations of those out there and how they challenge, critique and develop technologies in the future.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
Furtherfield has a policy where subscribers/users/collaborators are in total control of their own data, they can delete it all if they wish. We do not own their content – they do.

There are (of course) various issues relating to the uploading of data to social networks. Firstly, communication by everyday people on the Internet with blogs and popular social networks has created a social shift in that there is now less distance between work and leisure. Our sense of privacy is changing fast too. We hear of employers checking up on what their workers are saying about them on-line. I personally know of one individual who was taken to task at an interview because the interviewers noted that they had openly called their x-boss a twat on Facebook. Organizations now ask their workers to act with caution when using these platforms. Reminding them what they say or share about themselves, the company or the people they work with; can have an effect on the reputation of an organization, its public image and status.

There is a danger as people negotiate this change in public/private identity that they will become too self-conscious in sharing their own ideas and life experience. There are serious issues concerning how mentally vapid and shallow our societies will become if everyone self-censors according both to the lowest common denominator of peer-pressure and according to their career orientated sensibilities – some feel that we are already there. Self-censorship happens a lot in specialized and academic fields, and if this behaviour bleeds across into peoples’ everyday lives, it will become even harder for society to develop authentic dialogue and debate around important social and political issues.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
Yes I do read them, sometimes. Most of my interaction on-line or when receiving software has a focus usually relating to my practice. There is always an inner dialogue at work asking myself what the compromise is and what I can get out of it, if agreeing with the terms put forward. Many EULA’s are so pretentious and dictatorial when they lay out their specifications, sometimes one feels that they need to be taught a lesson every now and then. It also depends on the context and whether certain EULA’s have been built or discussed, peer-created by a collaborative group or a community in the first place. It would be interesting to see some imaginative productions involving groups actively and imaginatively going against EULA’s, as a critique.

Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
A rough idea.

How do you value your private information now? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
This relates to a set of really interesting philosophical questions that arose recently in an interview with Heath Bunting on Furtherfield called ‘The Status Project: Data-Mining Our Identities’[2]. “Way back in 1995, there were already various groups and individuals … who were critiquing human relationships whilst exploiting networked technology. Creative people who were not only hacking technology but also hacking into and around everyday life, expanding their skills by changing the materiality, the physical and immaterial through their practice. It was Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) who in 1995 said “Each one of us has files that rest at the state’s fingertips. Education files, medical files, employment files, financial files, communication files, travel files, and for some, criminal files. Each strand in the trajectory of each person’s life is recorded and maintained. The total collection of records on an individual is his or her data body – a state-and-corporate-controlled doppelganger. What is most unfortunate about this development is that the data body not only claims to have ontological privilege, but actually has it. What your data body says about you is more real than what you say about yourself. The data body is the body by which you are judged in society, and the body which dictates your status in the world. What we are witnessing at this point in time is the triumph of representation over being. The electronic file has conquered self-aware consciousness.”

I have been using the Internet since the mid-nineties, have done and said so much that another identity has fully emerged. A different version of me is out there for all to observe, a ‘data body’. A life which can be observed and studied as being deeply involved in networked art, activism and digital communities. If particular individuals see this information and feel uncomfortable about it due to their own socially constructed and limited, conservative perceptions – that’s their problem, not mine. If it goes against me, so be it.

Heath’s own position on this matter is that “Technology is becoming more advanced and the administration of this technology is becoming more sophisticated and soon, every car in the street will be considered and treated as persons, with human rights. This is not a conspiracy to enslave human beings, it is a result of having to develop usable administration systems for complex relationships. Slaves were not liberated because their owners felt sorry for them, slaves were given more rights as a way to manage them more productively in a more technologically advanced society.”

Perhaps we are willing slaves for data-production.

How do you feel about trading your personal information for on-line services, and what do you think the information gathered is used for?
I always feel uneasy when giving out personal information to on-line services. The fact that content posted by people remains on the servers of Murdoch’s MySpace.com and Facebook.com, even after when one has removed the content, is disturbing. Facebook, MySpace and several other social networking websites send data to advertising companies to find consumers’ names and other personal details.

Berlin’s European privacy regulators recently declared their concerns with Google systematically collecting vast amounts of data about its users and their on-line habits. Increasing fears that Google could become a threat to consumer privacy. Although I agree with the privacy regulator’s intentions; I do worry that us humans are always termed under the ‘singular’ and limiting category of being ‘consumers’. What about if you are not a consumer, does this make you less valid for civil rights – what if you happen to be a Roma?

Anyway, this data-munching by corporations is the tip of the iceberg. A UK site I have been visiting recently called TH!NK PRIVACY[3], offers free down-loadable materials for individuals and organizations so that they understand the issues around such mass collection of our data more, and what to do about it. I have issues about the site, but it’s a start, “data protection and electronic communications to freedom of information and environmental regulations … independent public body set up to uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals.”

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information on-line made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
Whether it is on Facebook or any other social network. I am always suspicious when asked to give details about my age or if I am married or not, and religious or political views. Not because I am worried with what they will do to me personally, but because it is none of their business.

Ironically, most of my real objections have been with situations where I have not been allowed to share relevant information on public platforms. I remember putting up information linking to some of my own earlier works of net art made from 95-96, on Wikipedia. And a certain individual kept deleting my details from the media art and net.art history section. In the end I just gave up. They did not want my information to contradict their more ‘official’, and historically accepted version of net.art. We also had difficulties creating pages about Furtherfield on Wikipedia, which in the end was resolved by various individuals on Furtherfield’s behalf continuously rewriting links and information on there. Because we are from a grass roots background, our information was deemed less valid than someone or a group who was from an institution or a corporate entity, quite frustrating really.

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
The Internet being owned and controlled by corporate interests and the gradual eroding of self-made and community made spaces. A shift from active co-creation of social space to passive consumption of culture. Net Neutrality is under imminent threat.

One case scenario which springs to mind is the equivalent of Kafka’s ‘The Trial’. “Kafka thus illustrates a human tendency to submit to authority, even when that authority is dubious. Joseph K. doesn’t question the legitimacy of the case, the courts, or the law system that he has allegedly violated. And it’s important to remember that at no time during the novel does Joseph – or the reader – learn what he is accused of. However, this detail gradually loses importance as the story progresses – a fact that should provoke outrage in both characters and readers, but which ultimately fails to do so.”[4]

For me, it also extends to concerns linking to DNA patenting of life and everything. Fostering biopiracy of indigenous resources, turning life forms into commodities to be used for profit and destroying economic sustainability of developing nations. “We’ve been very concerned about the whole concept that companies can patent life-forms,” says Glenn Wiser of the Center for International Environmental Law. “That’s really troubling, and when it’s done without the informed prior consent of people, it’s much more troubling.”[5]

The world we live in, including ourselves is in danger of becoming nothing more important than data-products. The plants, our land, our food, the air we breath, our ideas, our affections, our (supposed) freedoms, our names, the sky, and of course – everything we are and what we do. It’s all up for grabs…

Nowadays, most of the “reading” of what is written on-line is done by machines. Does this impact your idea of what is anonymity and privacy?
We have had a continuing relationship with machines for a long time now, and they have been extremely useful in offering different possibilities, whether we use them for supporting or killing each other. it’s not machines that worry me. It’s humans, especially those who sacrifice other people’s well being for their own greed and self-interest and imposed lame ideologies.

Can a game raise issues such as on-line privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
Yes, I think a game can raise issues about on-line privacy. It would be great to see a game that hacks the very infrastructure of these social networks. Not just a game but an intervention. Not exploiting on-line, everyday users’ activities, but still offering them the choice to be aware of it taking place and if interested, allowed to be a part of it somehow. Imagine a game that in its activity broke down the monetary value of user-based information, giving the data less credibility, changing its ecology. Offering alternative, constructive avenues to move beyond the interface.

References:
[1]Deena DeNaro, Reverse The Wave.
[2]The Status Project: Data-Mining Our Identities, an interview with Heath Bunting.
[3]TH!NK PRIVACY – The Information Commissioner’s Office.
[4]The Trial, by Franz Kafka: Understanding Joseph K.’s Failed Case. Maria Luisa Antonaya.
[5]Lust for Life – ethics of bioprospecting by pharmaceutical companies. Barbara J. Fraser.

In “Autonomy and Control in the Era of Post-privacy”, Felix Stalder argues for Privacy 2.0: new strategies for connective opacity that should make clear what people outside a network can see of what goes on inside, and what providers of those infrastructures can see of the inside as well, and all of that using mandatory transparency of the protocols they use to provide their services, so that discrimination can be contested.

When asked in a survey, people claim to care about their privacy, but their actions indicate otherwise. Stalder points to two causes of this paradox. The notion of subjectivity changed: new forms of sociability have arisen, and in order to be social in the networked society, you must first make yourself visible. You must, in other words, “express yourself”. Subjectivity moved from introspection to interaction. In this context privacy is not a positive right, but a possible threat to disconnect. The second cause he mentions is the changed relationship between individuals and large institutions. Nowadays everything is about customized and personalized services, which require vast amounts of personal data. The deal “personal info in exchange for personalised services” is commonly accepted, even though all the knowledge ends up on the side of the corporations, who use it on their own terms and in their own interest. If at some point the interest of consumer and company no longer align, personalization turns into (automated) discrimination. Consumers have no access to the decision-making mechanisms (data mining algorithms) and there is no standard against which these processes can be measured.

“Our privacy is under assault”, thus starts the article “The Meaning and Value of Privacy, Appeal for a Pluralistic Definition of the Concept of Privacy” by Daniel Solove. Solove wants to get rid of the narrow and individualistic way privacy is often framed, because it leads to an undervaluing of the concept. In the public versus private interest battle (for instance national security versus privacy of the individual), the public interest usually wins. But privacy is not a one dimensional concept that determines our right to have secrets or not. Solove refers to philosopher John Dewey when explaining how privacy, as part of our individual rights, furthers the common good. It creates a space for people to breathe, protecting against excessive intrusion (of state, companies, others) into our lives. Privacy is social.

Currently, when privacy is under debate, the law handles a very narrow definition of it, often focussing only on whether privacy was expected in a certain situation or not. Solove explains the law should protect privacy because we desire privacy, not because we expect it. I really like the example he gives to illustrate this. Wire-tapping became illegal only after people started wishing for more privacy. Before that, during the early years of telephony, nobody was expecting privacy, it was very normal to share lines with other households. Our privacy should be protected, because we experience a lack of it. In this article, and in his book “Understanding Privacy”, he redefines it following a pluralistic method and taxonomy based on real problems, instead of abstract concepts, hoping to contribute to a better protection of our rights.

Other contributions from Rudi Laermans, Maurizio Lazzarato, Martijn de Waal, Armin Medosh, Rob van Kranenburg and Mark Shepard. Open – Cahier on Art and the Public Domain, issue 19, Beyond Privacy (Nai Publishers).