Class notes today / Grade?! Did we get it for 2nd group work?
HEATHER.HATTON
The last two papers...
Helen Nesenbaum's paper on opaque identifiers and Rachels on privacy.
These are straightup philosophy papers.
What's going on in these two papers?
The first one is about the notion of anonymity and what anonymity is.
The ring of giges.
Back in the day people had an idea of what or how they could become anonymous and the word itself tells you about what becoming anonymous means. It means not having a name, someone without a name. Why would people become anonymous? They didn't want to be persecuted for something. People have been doing it forever in literature. When someone does something controversial, they might have a problem with hell coming down on their heads, so they would be anonymous. Pseudonym. Mark Twain was Samuel Clemens. This was alright back in the day when spreading information involved writing something by hand and sending it out somewhere or having it printed in a printing press. It was easy to become anonymous when the only thing connecting a person to a piece of writing was a name. This is a very effective way of protecting govt and other entities that might not like what you're saying from getting out you. Enter the 21st Century and there's the internet, the ring of giges. It's a way of becoming invisible. You plug in, turn on the computer, google, look at porn, no one knows. You can do anything you want, things you would otherwise be ashamed of, and you can do it all anonymously. So let's say you're a govt hating troll. All you have to do is go to a forum and say you don't like the govt and you can hide your identity by making up a username. JuicyPrincess6969 posts online that the govt sucks. Jane Doe would not do the same thing because she wouldn't want to get in trouble. Is JuicyPrincess6969 safe? How would someone get at her? IP address isn't enough to track someone down if they want to be hidden. Is there a way to be identified if you don't want to be identified? If you think about names and nicknames in the way we use them in regular conversation, there is probably no way that someone anonymous with an anonymous name can get caught. But there's another kind of name, another way of tracking people that has been developed a really long time ago - the opague identifier. It was originally a way to anonymize peoples' records. The most commonly used opague identifier in the US is the social security #. It's a unique number that's recycled. (You can look up who used to have yours!) These identifiers are used for a variety of reasons; ex: if you apply for loan, credit card, medical records, school records and transcript, etc. you're known by this identifier, your social security #. This works great and protects you against a whole lot of things, but enter databases. They store information on a server, very big computers that store infinite amounts of information. They have billions of rows of data, sometimes connected to a single ID. ID's are things that identify a particular group of data belonging to a particular entity. What are the ID's oftentimes used in databases when it comes to people? SS#'s. With this common, single opague identifier across different kinds of records, if you combine all the different things it identifies. It's very unlikely there could be a situation that two opague identifiers share the same kinds of information and rows.
Regular names however are rarely unique, many people share the same name. But if you have the right opague identifier or access to the right number of rows in the right database, you can get at people better and more easily than with just a name. Names are not the best way of uniquely identifying or finding individuals. The best and most commonly used way is data about what they do, how they spend their money, medical records, all of this put together by a single opague identifier. In some sense we're numbers. Our names don't matter, our numbers do because they identify us more uniquely than our names. Behavior on the internet - clicking around and browsing - is tracked by ISP's, but they don't have a way of identifying you. What identifies you is what you do. It fits a pattern that would match up with the pattern that's in a database that uniquely identifies you as an individual.
Google is lightyears away from Facebook technology with advertising to specific needs, ad sense.
Data mining is using statistics on databases to discover kinds of behavior and predict future behavior. You can start classing individuals into groups that behave in particular ways. Ex: His gay roommate got junk mail from a gay theatre company before she came out to her family...someone somewhere had the right algorithm for parsing the database and identifying gay women in NYC and sold the information to someone else who then could send out spam to her.
Facebook or your internet profiles, how do they make money? They make money just by tracking what you do and that is worth a lot more than whatever money they could get for a membership fee. Being able to know what you do is valuable information for them to sell.
In the paper we are asked to connect the issue of privacy and anonymity on the internet thru the discussion of opague identifiers that Nesenbaum gives us in her paper.
She tells us opague identifiers are such and such, they make it impossible to be anonymous on the internet bc it's not your name that matters, it's your behavior. How does this bear on privacy? You don't have any if there's a way to track your behavior. To be private IRL you can leave the room and shut yourself away somewhere, you can't do that online.
Anonymity in a classical sense of not being named does not function on the internet at all because it's not sufficient to prevent people from getting at you.
There area ways to prevent yourself from being tracked but you have to jump thru hoops. You are not automatically invisible on the internet, even tho it feels that way.
Opague idenifier is a key, a 'super key'.
The government doesn't care about information on you, it's all about money and advertising. If you know exactly who you need to sell to, who is in the market and interested in buying your product or service, it becomes an easier sale.
ISP's can provide IP to account info. But Time Warner says no. They don't have to provide information.
So you're not anonymous on the internet. People can get you and they will. So get paranoid.
Paper 2: Privacy
A standard response to being tracked on the internet is, "who cares, so what" when people aren't doing anything wrong. "So what that Google can advertise exactly what I'm in the market for? That's creepy but convenient and not harming me."
The paper should be about why you should care about privacy. Rachels starts with examples of simple violations of privacy - you're alone in your bedroom in your underwear in front of the mirror posing, having a private moment with your mirror image and you suddenly realize there's a peeping tom peering thru your open window. How do you feel? Embarrased. Violated. Why are you so upset?
You behave differently in your safe zone in the comfort of your own home. You behave differently with different people around.
Rachel's point is that we do this all the time. We control information about us regarding reputation at large and with individuals we may or may not know. People behave differently in different situations and environments. The way you behave in class, you don't behave at the dinner table.
You're a very different person with your friends vs your parents vs your teacher in the classroom.
What you tell people about yourself and how you say it determines your relationship with them. Relationships depend on maintaining the right balance that's necessary for the roles people take with each other.
Privacy boils down to the information you withhold from others and having explicit control over it. The control you have over this determines your relationships, if you have no control you have no control over what relationship other people will have with you. It's weird to know each others' dirty laundry.
Last part of the paper :
Explain this theory of privacy, how Rachels defines it, and bring it all the way back to the panoptocon.
1300 words total. No introductory paragraph, just answer the damn question. Not even a title.