Gordan Savicic (AT/NL) is an artist playing with software algorithms, experimental media and fine art. His project “Suicide Machine 2.0”, where you can kill your virtual identity on social media sites, attracted lots of media attention. His work includes game art, interactive/passive installations and speculative hardware. His participation in collaborative projects and performances have been shown in several countries, such as Japan (dis-locate), Germany (Transmediale), Spain (Arco Madrid), France (IRCAM) and the Netherlands (V2_), among others. Savicic lives and works in Rotterdam and Vienna.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Part of their numerous news coverage is due to the reason that the old dream of silicon valley is again revived. Any little startup company could all of a sudden become the next big thing; romanticizing the emergence of accidental billionaires. The recent movie “The Social Network” is another example where “nerdy” startups are being portrayed through mass media channels as a part of a larger picture. This basically shows how ubiquitous social networks became to our society. People actually want to see and hear about those hypes (mostly aggregated through information channels and opinion leaders). However, social network companies are paying lots of money to their public relation departments to spread the news of an ever-growing user-(fan)base. Especially Facebook is proud of its 500 million users (October 2010), simply ignoring that at least half of them are inactive, fake or accounts used for spamming and stalking.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
At first glance social networks seem more practical rather than aesthetic. This design paradigm is characteristic for recent web applications which are (what I would call) based on the principle of NUI (Network User Interfaces), rather than having a fancy looking graphical user interface (GUI).

First, the elementary thing about them is the potential use of network nodes. Each user is a dynamic buoy shifting within a melting social sea which makes them so attractive to use. They can specify their own content or share photos and movies with their friends, show off with their entourage and even work collaboratively on texts, while all accumulated data can be easily made accessible to a considerable wide range of people. Andres Manniste brings in a good comparison when he bridges the incorporated function of social network sites to cell phones. In his view cell phones became multi-purpose tools (game console, still and video camera, mail client, mobile network node), while their GUI is being kept rather practical. In proliferating social platforms like Hyves, Facebook, Myspace etc. the GUI acts like a cellphone. The trajectory from sluggishly slow loaded html pages and bulky three hours lasting battery time cellphones in the 90s over to powerful multi-purpose AJAX applications and the iPhone might be even more evident in that comparison. The webpage appears as an easy-to-adapt interface to a social tool, a NUI with potential applications which are modularly expandable by many features. Like the cellphone it has a very simple intuitive interface, but a much more complex social impact.

Second, they are not simply objects, but processes. These processes can trigger social interactions which are served and performed on external servers and rendered into social environments. In terms of a standard hardware/software schema, one could ascribe the NUI the role of Hardware by rendering all computations remotely on (mostly) proprietary systems whereas the human interaction (cultivation of profiles and avatars) can be referred to as Software. More precisely, software that is being executed and generated only through user participation.

Finally, social networks became a ubiquitous tool for augmented information within urban environments when accessed through a smart-phone. You can find your peers through your geophysical location and update your status-messages on-the-go. Social networks aren’t so much about point-to-point communication (like email or SMS for instance), but rather became hybrids of one-to-many communication models (retweets, un/like, check-in/out). Nonetheless we already had most of the “Facebook-like” features more than 20 years ago (IRC chat, status updates, file sharing, etc.) but the interface design made them inaccessible for the „standard“ user. With the implementation of all those functions into a single web-site, it became possible for any person to share, like, comment, etc. and be part of a larger social networking group. Additionally, prices for broadband services and UMTS significantly dropped in recent years.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
After all it’s always the user and his free will to devote himself to those sites. Once you upload some of your data to any online service, you pretty much lost control of it. What most social networks have in common (except for diaspora p2p et al) is that they are totally centralized. Everything is being stored outside of the user’s hard disk; hence, even if you delete content it might be available to other users for an undetermined amount of time. On top of that Mr. Eric Schmid (CEO Google) is shamelessly suggesting that every young person will one day be allowed to change their name to distance themselves from embarrassing photographs and material stored on their friends’ social media sites.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
I do read them from time to time, but I am not really tracing their changes. Terms of Use are written by lawyers in the interest of their respective clients which means that they are pretty much “unreadable” for standard users. In most cases friends and peers are keeping me up to date with changes that seriously affect privacy issues on various platforms.

Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
About 22,700 web results (0.16 seconds).

How do you value your private information now? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
I keep most of my private information on servers where I have full access on their permissions and availability. Hence, their future is pretty much in my own hands ;). Nonetheless, with the rise of user-generated content the general question is whether we can keep track of the information other people are posting and sharing about us. Thus, even if you try to stay outside of the whole web2.0 shebang, other people will voluntarily drag your name into social networking sites and (for example) tag pictures with your name.

How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
I do have very controversial feelings while using my Android-based smart-phone which repeatedly asks me to re-connect to my associated Google account! Even though I am rarely using my Gmail account, it does feel a bit awkward to carry a Google firmware-flashed phone in my pocket. The crux of using online services owned by private companies remains always the same. On one hand they are very handy, easy-to-setup and quite reliable to use. Many people like the fact that they can practically control most of their digital identity from mail to sharing documents via a standard web-browser. On the other hand these online services are claiming more and more of/for our personal information; directly making us depend on then more and more. Since the advent of smartphones and 3G networks, both business and consumer people are carrying the information about their geographical movements and habits in their pocket day-by-day.

What do you think the information gathered is used for?
It’s pretty obvious that most of the gathered information is used to generate targeted advertising and is subsequently sold to 3rd party companies. If people decide to curtail their information sharing, Facebook will have a hard time to maintain their business model which depends on the ‘social graph’ and information sharing. There has been a growth in the technology for information sharing but not a commensurate education in what information we should share. Then there is the conspirative fact that we don’t know how much personal information from social networks is being handed over to governments and secret agencies.

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
No.

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
We will reach the worst case scenario when people and organizations will stop fighting for their privacy rights. Imagine that insurance companies will soon rate your fees by gathering data from your health record, we could easily portrait ourselves already within the “worst case”. We depend on critical thinkers, activists and artists who challenge the way of how future technologies will affect our society.

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?
Machines are perhaps reading most of the online stuff, but they are definitely far away from understanding any meaning. Given that it’s quite error-prone, semantic interpretation isn’t really what it’s made up to be because most of it is based on an interpretation of massive piles of statistical information (obtained through huge databases).

Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
I was trying to raise issues related to online privacy with one of my projects, called PlaySureVeillance. The project should stress a conflation of playsure and surveillance. Play/sure subdivided into play and sure, the latter underling the increasing ubiquitous use of play and games in our society. In PlaySureVeillance the idea was to generate a twisted parallelism between decisions made within a game and the creation of a virtual “doppelgänger” which is then publicly profiled on Facebook. Back in 2008, I was fascinated by the amount of games offered on Facebook and their massive usage. By installing a third party game, you pretty much give full access to your whole profile. Games have one basic criteria. The player’s free will to devote himself to he game. PlaySureVeillance was an attempt to profile a new subject out of (game) data. This subject is what Matthew Fuller calls Flecks of identity.

I’ve programmed two games for the Nintendo DS which deal with topics such as Terrorism and Nudity. The games have been put back into their capitalistic enclosure, into an innocent-looking game cartridge. The program code made use of one of the key features from the DS, namely the built-in WIFI function. The games themselves were casual games where each player bypasses certain levels of interaction. During the game-play critical questions about sexual, political and personal preferences are being asked and automatically uploaded to an external server. All the information gathered is then being used to create an automatized Facebook profile of the player. Social interaction is always a game of control, as all of David Lyon’s work on surveillance has shown. It is therefore always the question how far the player can break the code of the game.

Regardless of that, I envision our latest project (the web2.0 suicidemachine) as a sort of game!

Mez Breeze creates code poetry and is a Futurist. She explores environments that involve online socializations or encounters. Such encounters involves the modification of online gaming environments such as World of Warcraft, EVE Online, and Second Life. Some other online encounters involve social networking and alternate gaming software such as Facebook, Passively Multimedia Online Game (PMOG), and Twitter. The texts or jargon produced during these encounters are what drove Mez to create her type of net poetry. She has won several awards including the “JavaArtist of the Year 2001”, the Newcastle Digital Poetry Prize and an Honorary Mention in the read_me 1.2 Software Art Award.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
straight away i find myself side-tilt>head-turn-questioning the phrase “in the news”: r u reffing the old skool>1-way monothreaded>tradition “broadcast” sense of “news”? if yes, then soc[ial]_net[work]s r often reffed>dissected there via a combination of novelty factoids [including the obligatory derogatory slant on any comm platform that threatens the longevity of the older>”traditional” news dissemination strains] + intrigue as 2 how they will impact the future of communication patterns generally. + let’s not 4get the [jump on the trundling-in2-the-relevancy-distance]bandwagon factor.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
soc_nets offer engagement with[in] a constant>immediacy state: variables include application-skewed + momentarily-dependent S[tream]o[f]C[onsciousness]-like dispersal with recursively [in relation to standard_concentration lvls] disruptive twists. as i’ve asserted previously [2007]: “Web 2.0 is based on a collusive tapestry of adjoining social nodes. Social Networks such as MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Orkut, Liveleak, YouTube, Twitter and Pownce aren’t prefaced on pre-set connotative connections maintained through historicized emotional depth or satisfied by biological drives. Friends aren’t friends as we have come to know them: there is no establishment of shared geophysical experiences, no cathartic or chronologically defined friendship markers evident. What’s important is [inter]action and the quantity of it – the residual volume of contact and the fact of shared connection minus a meatbody context. Identity is constructed in these friendship pathways via the idea of notations; of naming labels, of icon attribution, and of clustered info-snippets streamlined through an interface designed for momentary persona snapshots.”

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
that’s a doozy of a qs. intuitively i’m drawn 2 type “the user”, as it seems obvious users r the the ultimate end_node in a responsibility chain that stretches thru various skeins of corporatist red tapesville. wot’s problematic with this “users-should-b-exclusively-responsible-4-wot happens 2-their-data-post-uploading” is the the way T[erms] & C[ondition]s alter rapidly>inconsistently + often without substantial notification>transparency: u may own the data u upload 2 a particular platform>app 1 day + don’t the next.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
i attempt 2 + am a complete scanhead when it comes 2 absorbing specific EULA changes on a macro_lvl. 4eg, take W[orld]o[f]W[arcraft]’s constantly changing EULA during each patch/expansion: i’ll absorb notifications regarding changes via various trusted sources [forums>individuals>groups] + if it’s been flagged as dangerous>gutted beyond recognition, i’ll respond accordingly.

Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
“realistic?” as in actual? i have a fairly comprehensive sense of the long_tailed leanings of my projected>creative>fragmented identity sets [+ that’s mostly due 2 fine_honed crafting of my public(ally accessible digital) profile(s) since the mid 90s]. i also have systems in place that allow a type of monitoring via “digital shearing” [think digital scraping but of an individualistic>deliberately projected identity mold]. i don’t however, have any “real” sense of just how much comprehensive data there is “out there” [think: darknets/deepwebbing>”black_app”ed (aggre)gated datasets] in regards 2 my geophysical details>existence [as i suspect most don’t].

How do you value your private information now? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
by private i’m inferring you’re reffing any information i haven’t been keen 2 make explicitly public? if so, then i *do* value certain limits on variables i’m keen 2 keep isolated from general public consumption + i do actively regulate them [as much as i am able]. anything’s possible in relation 2 revaluing my info’s_worth according 2 fluctuating definitions of personal>private>public: especially as i actively encourage traditional_personality> ID_divide blurriness [collapsing professional>hierarchical distinctions such as i practice in my @netwurker Twitter stream].

How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
depends entirely on the lvl of data mining>divulgence involved: i’m happy 2 hand ova base personality facts>aspects that [in a holistic sense] make data_scrapers info_salivate + who then create pointless baselines via which 2 pitch useless consumer crap my way [i’ve cultivated fairly resistent ad_blindess + have various mechanism that block content of that nature]. in terms of personal information: i think there’s enormous change in_the_futuroidal_wings regarding wot’s ultimately considered personal + wot’s not [cf the latest furor over leaky Facebook info].

What do you think the information gathered is used for?
anything from: Your Facebook ‘friend’ may be a federal agent +
Police serve intervention order through Facebook 2 Twitter mood predicts the stock market?

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
signing up 2 as yet verified early-adopter-type services [+ the associated info_disclosure required] is always a tad hairy: my way of dealing with this is 2 make sure my gatekeeper account/details act as a [marginally] suitable screen. other situs include how Google implemented Buzz [ie that followers could b algorithmically/social-graphed-derived + automagically added without permission] + the Streetview debacle/associated privacy cockups. also, anything Apple does/produces [DRM any1? – such a closed-2-the-hilt ethically unsound business mentality + treating users/developers as unitary cash cows].

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
Forced ARTificial Scarcity as opposed 2 Social Tesseracting.

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?
wot impacts>[in]forms my ideas on anonymity>privacy is more centred on insidious corporate+[in tandem]government influence + rapid>rampant censorship/dictatorial intervention?

Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
given the geolocative gamification trend [think: Foursquare or Gowalla], i’d say it can indeed effect privacy issues. + there r such games [@ least 4 kids] such as The First Adventure of the Three Cyberpigs.

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

Owen Mundy is an artist and programmer who investigates public space and its relationship to data. He makes images, sculpture, and software that highlights inconspicuous trends and offers tools to make hackers out of everyday users. A former photographer in the US Navy, he co-founded Your Art Here, a non-profit organization in Bloomington, Indiana that puts art in public commercial spaces. In 2010 he created Give Me My Data, an application that helps users export their data out of Facebook. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at Florida State University and is currently based in Berlin funded by the DAAD.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Assuming “social networks” refers to the online software, application programming interfaces (APIs), and the data that constitutes sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, I feel its popular to discuss them in the news for many reasons.

Online applications that enable enhanced connectivity for individuals and other entities are relatively new and there is an apparent potential for wealth through their creation and the connections they enable. News organizations are businesses, so they naturally follow the money, “reporting” on topics which are considered worthwhile to advertisers who buy space in their pages, pop-ups, and commercial breaks.

Additionally, the public is still grappling with the ability for online software to collect and distribute data about them, both with their permission and through clandestine means at once. Most users of social networking software don’t understand the methods or potential for behavior manipulation in these user interfaces and therefore are wary of what they share. Other users seem to be more care-free, making many private details from their lives public.

Finally, online social networking software is still evolving, so it’s difficult for users to establish a consensus about best practices. I believe the accelerating functionality of web 2.0 software will continue to complicate how we feel about online social networks for much longer.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
If web 1.0 consisted of static pages, web 2.0 is made-up of dynamic information, generated by the millions of users accessing the web through personal computers and mobile devices. This rapid rise in user-generated content has been made possible by the development of online applications using a myriad of open source programming languages. Sites like YouTube (launched 2005 and written primarily in Python) and Facebook (2004, PHP) which consist entirely of content contributed by users, store information in databases allowing for fast searching, sorting, and re-representation. Initially, the web consisted of information and we had to sift through it manually. Web 2.0 allows for the growth of a semantic web and possibilities for machines to help us describe, understand, and share exponential amounts of data through tags, feeds, and social networks.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
Obviously users are responsible for deciding what information they publish online. Still, Facebook’s “Recommended Privacy Settings” should emphasize more not less. While their privacy settings always seem to be a work in progress. One thing they do consistently is default to less privacy overall, thus more sharing of your information on their site. For a website that depends on user-generated content the motivation to encourage sharing is clear enough. Still, why do they use the word “privacy” if they’re not actually embracing the idea?

I honestly feel that all software that accepts user input, credit cards and phone companies, should be bound by strict written rules preventing them from sharing my information with advertising companies or the government. It seems like a basic human right to me. If there are laws preventing me from downloading and sharing copywritten music then there should be laws protecting my intellectual property as well.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
Only when curious or suspicious. They’re usually intentionally full of so much legalese that I don’t bother torturing myself. But as an artist and programmer, I have an interest in sharing my information in public space because I benefit from its appreciation. Perhaps a more accurate answer to this question would come from someone who doesn’t have this interest.

Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
Yes I do. I am definitely conscious of the information I share. In addition I also research methods of surveillance and incorporate that knowledge into my art practice. So while I haven’t seen the visualization that determines the likelihood that my grandmother is a terrorist threat, it’s guaranteed that one is possible with a few clicks and some multi-million dollar defense contractor dataveillance tool. This is true for any human being through aggregation of credit card records, travel information, political contributions, and what we publish online.

How do you value your private information now? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
It’s important to me to situate my art practice in public space where it can provoke discussion for all audiences. But yes, I do intentionally avoid distributing dorky pictures of my mountain bike adventures. Seriously though, I’ve been watching the news. I can say that I’m definitely alarmed by the post-911 surveillance on U.S. citizens.

How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
It depends on the service. We all have to give up something in order to use these tools. For example, without telling Google Maps that I’m interested in Mexican restaurants in Williamsburg, I might never find Taco Chulo. This continual paradox in making private information public is somewhat rendered void if the sites we use actually protect our information, but it is more likely that everything we say and do online is used to some degree to enhance and direct advertisements. Here’s another example, 97% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising, which should suggest that while they produce software, their ultimate goal is to appeal to advertisers. [1]

What do you think the information gathered is used for?
I have a background in interface design and development so I know how great it is to use web stats to see where users are clicking. If traffic is not moving in the direction that you want then you can make specific buttons more prevalent.

I can only imagine what a company like Google does with the data they gather through their analytics tools. The fact that a government could access this information is scary when you think of the actions of past fascist states. The amount of control a government could levy through a combination of deep packet searching and outrightly ignoring human rights is staggering.

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
Definitely. Sharing financial information online always causes a little anxiety. One of my credit cards has been re-issued three times now due to “merchant databases being hacked.”

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
I just moved to Berlin so I’m looking at the history of this place quite a bit. This is relevant because, during the Cold War, before Germany was reunited, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) Ministry for State Security (MfS) or ‘Stasi’ is believed to have hired, between spies and full- and part-time informants, one in every 6.5 East German citizens to report suspicious activities.[2] That’s millions of people. At this moment, the ratio of people entering data on Facebook to non-members is one in fourteen for the entire world.[3]We have probably the most effective surveillance machine in the history of mankind.

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?
Well, it’s not surprising the interview has come to this point, since I keep referrencing the multitude of methods of computer-controlled digital surveillance. It’s true that machines have replaced humans for remedial work. For example: searching text strings for suspicious statements. But the ultimate danger to my privacy is only enhanced by machines. The real problem is when companies that I trust with my data decide to share it with corporations or governments that engage in behavior control.

Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
I find this question to be intentionally leading. Perhaps its because I’m generally optimistic and come from farmers, so I assume anything is possible? Not being a gamer though, I can tell you honestly that yes, it is possible, but you will have some challenges if you intend to reach an audience that doesn’t already agree with you. Reaching non-gamers who don’t already feel the same will be even tougher.

Games are generally immersive; you are either playing or your not. The biggest challenge you may have is reaching non-gamers, because they don’t generally invest large amounts of time in games for enjoyment. Try to find ways to highlight complexity and prompt discussion regardless of how long users play, and make this clear from the outset.

Finally, in politically-motivated cultural production it’s important to appeal to an audience first, and let them come to the issues on their own. Who would sit through a film knowing the twist at the end? Especially a conclusion intended to spur critical thinking and action, which is of course the goal.

[1] “Google Financial Tables for Quarter ending June 30, 2009” Retrieved October 13, 2010
[2] Koehler, John O. (2000). Stasi: the untold story of the East German secret police. Westview Press. ISBN 0813337445.
[3] “Facebook Statistics” Retrieved October 14, 2010

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.

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

Geoff Cox is currently a Researcher in Digital Aesthetics as part of the Digital Urban Living Research Center, Aarhus University (DK). He is also an occasional artist, and Associate Curator of Online Projects, Arnolfini, Bristol (UK), adjunct faculty, Transart Institute, Berlin/New York (DE/US) and editor for the DATA Browser book series (published by Autonomedia).

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Social networks, or more specifically the social web, are bound up with vested interests and the social imaginary. They have become key sites for entertainment, making business and even doing politics. Along with this, and as communications technologies become key sites for various forms of contestation, there are bound to be some juicy stories. In addition, social networks are becoming the apparatus of the news. On the one hand, there is the use of platforms for various kinds of social movements and alternative news gathering, and on the other, the old news apparatus is adapting itself to new kinds of distribution channels – rather like selling any other product.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
In some ways not much, or not as much as the hype would lead us to believe. This is an important point, and one that many commentators would stress in that the Net is more than the Web, and that the Net has always been a sharing platform – BBS and UseNet, etc – what some refer to as extreme sharing networks. Even with Web 1.0 there were plenty of examples of social activities and file sharing making the notion of a new release little more than a marketing exercise. The distinction is that sharing now has become subject to centralizing and privatizing controls. I love the uncompromising way Dimitri Kleiner explains this: “Web 2.0 is capitalism’s preemptive attack on P2P systems”. Sociality and sharing have become enhanced but at the same time ever more commodified.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
Strictly, if you agree to the terms of service, I guess the person who uploads it is responsible – as no doubt they are the ones who are signing away various rights to their data. In many ways this is the key issue, not the content as such but the ownership of the data. The data becomes capital and you decide whether or not to trade it.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
Despite what I say above, no, not really although clearly I should. There’s simply not enough time in the day to read pages and pages of text – often many thousands of words and written in inaccessible legal jargon. To read the detail would make most services untenable on ethical grounds so I guess people are far more pragmatic and again trade ethical principles for use value (even those related to commercial exploitation). I personally don’t do that much trading along these lines.

Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
No, probably not, but I’m not too paranoid, but in general try not to upload much information about myself. I also am reluctant to use social networks as I prefer to have very few (real) friends. As expected, I try to be mindful of the various strategies being developed to encourage me to upload data. As we hear from the news, it doesn’t take much to be able to assemble a whole profile for someone from very little information as a starting point. The artist Heath Bunting has also demonstrated how easy it is to construct a profile of a “real” person (as part of his “Status Project”).

How do you value your private information now? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
I’m old school. Mostly I would like to demolish the whole notion of private property, as this relates to information too. As you can tell, I do not value it much at all in itself but the difficulty is that others do. A change of the prevailing logic around property would change the ways in which value is negotiated but this is rather idealistic on my part I admit.

How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
As I mentioned already, and it’s not something I do much. However, it seems clear that this is what people do, and often quite knowingly. They sign away rights to platform owners in exchange for sharing services and are willing to live with the compromises this necessitates. It seems like these are for free, but clearly they are not. I have tried to avoid such compromises where possible.

What do you think the information gathered is used for?
Ultimately this is for the accumulation of capital, or in other words profit or surplus value, and even if it is not altogether clear how profit or value can be extracted. Data on people is clearly a crucial aspect of this if not the prime commodity in itself – such are the conditions of informational capitalism and what people refer to as the attention economy.

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
No, not really. As I said, as a skeptic (or luddite!), I don’t share that much information over online networks so remain fairly comfortable.

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
Individuals could be seen to be selling themselves to the network in a perverse reversal of usual relations (as users and their data become ever more entangled). To put it differently, the worry is that through social networks, new kinds of subjectivities are being constituted that are market-driven and that engage sociality in restrictive ways. This is the case already to some extent but the worst case scenario relates to the extreme degree to which this is happening.

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?
No, not really, as social relations already involve the interplay of humans and machines, for better or worse – in strange combinations of human and non-human actions. Even radical networks have to take this logic on board.

Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
Of course, why not, especially given that social networking is game-like anyway. I guess I’d like to see this as an opportunity to emphasize the rule sets that are at work, and to suggest that if social networking can be considered to be a game, that there are cheats/hacks that can disrupt the rules. I think my answers to some of the other questions also indicate this way of thinking and how the issue of privacy might be engaged or made contradictory.

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.

Dmytri Kleiner is a USSR-born, Canadian software developer and cultural producer. He is a co-founder of Telekommunisten, a worker’s collective that provides telephone and Internet services, and an independent researcher investigating the role of telecommunications, cultural production and migration in class conflict.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Several reasons, on one hand social platforms like Facebook have gotten many new users into online communications, on the other hand, unlike older platforms like email and usenet, Social networks are run by capital financed companies, and thus have PR and marketing budgets.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
The primary difference is that they are centralized, proprietary platforms, each controlled by a single commercial organization.

Perhaps the slides from my rectent talk may be helpful: http://docs.telekommunisten.org/paraflows

The difference that is significant to me is that decentralized common platforms are not controlled by any single entity. For instance no one owns email, you can send email to me even when we have different email providers, if I change email providers, I can still send you email from my new provider. However, I can only send you a message on Facebook by way of an account provided by Facebook.

The classic Internet communications platforms, Email, Usenet, IRC, Finger, etc, where all based upon decentralized systems interoperating based on standard protocols, the new social platforms are not like that, they are centrally controlled, proprietary systems.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
Not sure what is being asked here. The law would make both user and platform operator responsible.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
Somewhat.

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

How do you value your private information now? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
I don’t worry about my private data, but believe in the right to.

How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
That is not my primary concern, rather I’m more concerned with economic models that require centralization and control of services.

To me the core of the problem is that these platforms are created with finance capital, and thus are financed in order to capture profit, thus profit-capturing must be engineered into the system, if a system can not capture profit, it will not be funded. Thus features like exchanging services for personal information become a possible business model for getting online ventures funded. The only way around this is to create other means of financing the development of communication technologies. Ways that do not require future profit, decentralized systems do not need to earn profit, because they have no expensive central infrastructure, they do, however, have development costs, and that is the problem, how to fund these costs without venture capital.

What do you think the information gathered is used for?
Ultimately it is sold to those that want to control the behaviour of people, i.e. advertisers, lobbyists, etc.

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
No.

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
Identify theft, prosecution, relationship crisis, etc.

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?
Not sure of what is being asked here again. The impact that it makes is that this machine readable information can be processed more systematically.

Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
Sure it can. I would like to see the game help the players understand the competing interests involved, and why their interests are often contradictory. i.e. the contradictory interests between the investors and the users, developers, etc.

First in 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.

Rob Myers is an artist, writer and hacker based in Peterborough, England. He is part of the GNU Social team. GNU social is a decentralized social network that you can install on your own server. Project catchphrase:

What if you could authorize your server to reveal as much, or as little information about you to other sites, as you wish… one time, one day, or forever?.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Often it’s moral panics of the sort that accompany the spread of any new technology. But there’s a growing awareness in old media that social networking software sites are starting to gain the kind of hold on human communication that postal, telegraph, and telephone networks have had in the past. That kind of power is always abused. Old media used to and still does where it can.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
Scale. A community site like The WELL, which predates the web, has only a few thousand users. Facebook has 500 million.

Regularity. Email and homepages were free-form. Facebook imposes a standard style and content on every page.

Reification. Rather than enabling people to play with different identities or interests in different forums, a social networking sit eimposes a single fixed identity on each unique individual.

Completeness. A social network now supports profiles, messaging, calendars, photo and video uploading, and many other services that previously had their own websites.

Business model. Social networks have given up on pretending they are going to try and make money directly from their users, it’s all advertising and data services for third parties now.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks
At the moment nobody is responsible for it, they just have power over it. Your data is controlled by the corporation running the social networking site you use. They are in turn beholden to their investors and to anyone who will pay to access your data, from marketing companies to government agencies.

We can take back control of our data by taking responsibility, socially and economically, for services that have so far been offered to us at no monetary cost but at an increasingly unacceptable social cost. Projects like GNU social (which I’m involved with) give us the software resources to do that. Projects like autonomo.us give us conceptual frameworks to evaluate our efforts against.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
I don’t read EULAs. The EFF have a service that allows you to track changes to EULAs but I don’t follow that. I really should.

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

I try not to think about it. I spend most of the day online. I email, I use instant messaging services, I use microblogging services like StatusNet and Twitter, I blog, I use Facebook, I search on Google, I browse through web sites, I purchase goods and services, I vote on or rate things, I watch videos and listen to music, I download files varying from a few bytes to a few gigabytes in size. Over time the volume of explicit and implicit data about what I am doing must run into terabytes.

How do you value your private information now? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
I suppose there are personal emails I wouldn’t want too many people to read, but for the most part private information for me is things like passwords and PINs. If I don’t want it to be public, I don’t put it on the net. I don’t think that will change; it isn’t technically possible or ethically desireable to break other people’s computers so that they cannot just copy and paste something you’ve written to them.

How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
The promise of web services at no monetary cost to us really distorts social relationships. We aren’t Facebook’s customer, we are its product. The customers are whoever will pay for access to our data and attention. This always makes me think of Burroughs’ introduction to “Naked Lunch” where he talks about selling the customer to the product.

I’d rather pay with money and involvement than with privacy and power. That’s why I’m a member of The Well, and that’s why I’ve bought a GNU/Linux plug server to run my own GNU social instance on (there’s a picture of it here).

What do you think the information gathered is used for?
Online social networks are a reified model of social relations. You could see this in the Google Buzz debacle: unlike a sociologist’s model of a social network it had no conception of negative social relationships and so made everyone people had ever had contact with a “Friend”, including people’s enemies. This fits well with neoliberalism/managerialism’s need for authentic individual identities to exploit. The data gathered about these individuals is highly prized for corporate marketing and for government spying.

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
I carefully self-censor censor what I write online. That makes me uncomfortable. There are jokes I don’t make, issues I don’t speak about, words I don’t use.

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
People will be persecuted and killed for their beliefs discovered through social networks. 4chan and China’s Human Flesh Search Engine are the precursor to this.

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?
People have told the machines what to do, which is generally to more effectively intrude on our privacy on their behalf. I don’t care whether it’s a bored employee or a computer cluster forwarding interesting keywords from my webmail to the intelligence services except in so far as the computer cluster can do so much more efficiently. The intrusion has the same potential for harm.

Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?

It can. The relationship between games, social networks, privacy and human behaviour is already quite complex. Foursquare uses game mechanisms to encourage people to give up their privacy, for example.

I’d like to see a game that shows the footprint of every little action you take online, how much data is generated, in a visual way and then allows you to capture it as power-ups. Or a game where you play a marketing or intelligence agent trying to get more and more private data on people, to illustrate what goes on behind the smiley face of micromessaging your “Friends”.

But online community used to involve play, especially identity play, and I think that restoring that element of play into the social networks themselves is one of the best ways of resisting their reifying, limiting, exploitative identity politics. On the internet, Facebook knows damn well you’re not a dog. It’s time to fix that.